“Where did you come from? How did I summon you? Why,whyhave you done all this?”
“Sybil, please.” He moves closer to me on the sofa and reaches out, his big hand hovering over mine like he wants tosettle it against my twitching fingers and comfort me. But he thinks better of the gesture and withdraws.
“The Barrow-Man is an entity called a wight,” he continues quietly. “I do not know his true name, but I know he has existed for centuries, perhaps millennia. Wights have no souls. They are utterly devoid of true emotion, driven by vicious instinct or pure intellect. They are invulnerable, immortal, and extremely powerful. This particular wight takes great pleasure in magical experimentation—the fusing of one species with another, the alteration of existing creatures into something else. I was his prisoner for decades. He would drain my blood and my spinal fluid often, keeping me constantly on the brink of death.”
“Why?” I whisper.
“Because of my particular gifts, my fluids were a key ingredient in his experiments, enabling him to fuse parts of various creatures seamlessly to others. My blood ensured that they would survive the changes he wrought upon them, no matter how agonizing those changes were, no matter how fervently his victims longed for freedom or for death.”
“The demons, the creatures I’ve been summoning—”
He nods, finishing my sentence. “They were all prisoners of the Barrow-Man, like me. You’ve been connected to him and his work since your birth, in a way he did not expect and could not understand. I didn’t understand it myself until you summoned me.”
Beresford rises abruptly from the couch and walks to the sideboard, lifting a crystal decanter and pouring a little of the brown liquor it contains into two glasses. When he returns, he hands one of the drinks to me. I sip it gratefully. I’ve never needed a drink more in my life.
“Over the past couple of decades, the Barrow-Man’s test subjects would disappear randomly,” Beresford continues. “Sometimes they would vanish from their cages or cells. Other times they would disappear while he was in the middle ofexperimenting on them. He grew increasingly frustrated and confused. He couldn’t figure out where they were going, or why.
“I watched it happen, wishing I could be one of those who escaped, even if escape meant annihilation. I hated my existence, Sybil. It was endlessnothing, punctuated by pain, with no hope of any future.”
The agony in his tone strikes deep into my heart, but I don’t answer or give any sign of softening. I can’t allow myself to pity him until I understand everything.
“The sorcerer became even more cruel. He was starving me, and yet because of what I am, I could not die. I could only hunger and dream of death, fantasize about it like a lover. One day I felt a channel open, a sort of pathway inside myself, connected to something powerful and new. I responded to it—more of an impulse than an answer—and suddenly I was out of my cage. I was…elsewhere.I had been transported to a strange place that I did not understand. Mad with hunger and fear, I could barely comprehend what had happened. But I saw you, and I knew you were the gate that opened, the door that let me out. You spoke kindly to me. You guided me from your house into the bitter cold of the winter night, and I fled into the forest.”
“The forest?” I exclaim. “But the Barrow is there. Couldn’t the Barrow-Man have recaptured you and the others?”
“There was a presence in Wormsloe that kept him from using the Barrow as a path into this world. An old woman, last daughter of a powerful line of mages, with no magic of her own except the ability to cast her protective aura over an entire region and suppress any magical evil within her sphere of influence. When she was alive and well, the wight could not step into this realm unless he was called.” Beresford makes a regretful grimace. “I didn’t understand the influence that she wielded until it was too late… until I had already swallowed her soul.”
“Grandmother Riquet.” I cover my hand with my mouth. “Wait… all the people in that room… youatethem? Ate their souls?”
“My kind needs two forms of sustenance—food and souls,” he replies. “We need food daily, like other living creatures, and we require a soul or two each year, though most of us devour more than we need because we enjoy the influx of knowledge that accompanies the absorption of a fresh soul. We also like being able to take on new forms. At our core, we are collectors.”
“How…” I struggle to form the question, but he knows what I’m trying to ask.
“You want to know how it works,” he says quietly. “When I bite a subject and taste their blood, I’m able to swallow their soul. In doing so I consume their memories and skills, and I gain the ability to take their shape.”
I’m trying to listen, trying to absorb the information he’s giving me, but my mind is still stuck on one terrible fact. “You ate Grandmother Riquet’s soul.”
“When you summoned me, I was a twisted shadow,” he says desperately. “I was on the verge of perishing into nothingness. My species doesn’t remain in our native state for long, because in that form we are exposed, fragile, unprotected. We are vulnerable, so we prefer to remain in alternate forms.”
“Stolen faces,” I whisper.
Beresford flinches, but he nods. “When the wight first captured me, he stripped me of all the shapes I could once assume, so when I escaped from him, I had nothing. I needed to start over, and I was starving for both food and souls. My first meal was a she-wolf, pregnant with a malformed cub, who had recently devoured part of a diseased cow. I swallowed both her meat and her spirit. Because of the state she was in, and because my powers were still acclimating to this world, the absorption process did not go well. The first form I could take was that of a giant, two-headed wolf with bovine hooves.”
At the mention of the wolf, a sound like a broken sob escapes me. I sensed the impending revelation, but it hurts all the same. And yet it is satisfying, too, like the lost piece of a wooden puzzle snapping neatly into place.
He is the gaunt, graceful monster, the split-headed wolf I met in the forest. The one who searched for me, sniffed me, and did not harm me.
“Are you able to hear the rest?” Beresford asks, a pleading note in his deep voice.
I wipe my eyes and nod.
“At the time, I didn’t know what to expect from this world, or how my powers would behave,” he continues. “Since this isn’t my birth realm, my powers of transformation are somewhat altered. In my world, each shape I take is an exact replica of the original. Here, in your world, when I take a new form, it mimics the source in all respects, with one notable difference.”
“Grandmother’s teeth,” I cut in, unable to resist. “Herron’s eyes. Your blue beard.”
“Yes.” He sips his drink, then cups his hands around the glass like the feel of its smoothness fortifies him. “After eating the she-wolf, I was still starving for souls, for substance. That’s when I came across the old woman… Grandmother Riquet. She must have become confused and wandered out of her cottage, because I found her unconscious in the snow, on the brink of death. She felt no fear when I took her soul.”
My cheeks are wet, my chin trembling. “You appeared to me as her, more than once. You tricked me. I should have known it wasn’t her, because she behaved so strangely.”
