He gazed up at the branches above and immediately spied a green scar where the bark had been worn away. It looked as though someone had tried to hang the man. A lynching, perhaps?
Lenoir knelt over the body and moved the man’s collar to take a look at his neck. He had expected to find rope burns, but what he saw there instead caused him to cry out and stumble backward onto his rump.
Impossible!
He scrambled to his feet, but then his body failed him, refusing to obey his command to flee. Instead he stood rooted to the spot, staring. His mind buzzed uselessly. He could not be sure how long he stood there. A minute? An hour? Whatever the case, he was thoroughly lost in his own world when he heard the voice.
“What’s this?”
Lenoir jolted so badly that his knees nearly gave way. Even so, he had never been so glad to see Kody. The sergeant, for his part, appeared not to notice Lenoir’s state of shock, his gaze fixed instead on the corpse lying broken among the roots. He knelt before the body for a closer look. “Neck snapped, looks like, as though he fell out of the tree. . . .”
Lenoir scarcely heard him. There was a strange roaring in his ears, a sound distantly and unpleasantly familiar, like a bad dream. A dream about a night spent huddled in the shadows, listening to the blood rushing through his veins, praying for daylight. Nowhere to hide, no one to come to his aid . . . and then the burning on his arm, the burning and the chill, the horrible sense that the warmth of his life was being sucked out through his flesh. . . .
“That’s odd,” Kody said. He pulled back the man’s collar just as Lenoir had done. “Have you ever seen marks like this, Inspector?”
Lenoir could not answer him. Kody waited for a response; when none was forthcoming, he frowned and turned back to the corpse. “It looks like his neck has been . . . I don’t know. The skin is gray, as if he’s been dead for weeks, but the rest of him looks . . . Well, I’d say he’s only been dead a few hours.”
Lenoir understood the sergeant’s confusion. He understood that it should not be possible for some of the body’s flesh to be necrotic while the rest was not. Not unless the man had had some sort of terrible infection. . . . Lenoir experienced a brief twinge of hope at this thought, but it disappeared immediately. There was no infection, he knew. There was only one possibility.
Like judgment, like death, the green-eyed man had caught up with him at last.
CHAPTER 12
He couldn’t breathe. He had been running for too long; every part of his body protested. His thighs trembled as he doubled over to catch his breath, and his heart thundered so that he could feel it in his temples. He glanced up at the sky, but it was obscured by a cataract of cloud, making it impossible to tell the hour. How long did he have until sunrise? Unless it came soon, there was no chance of him escaping. Not this time.
Mustering what strength he could, Lenoir loped to the end of the alley, but was dismayed to find that it opened into a courtyard. A dead end. The alley was short—perhaps he could retrace his steps in time to find another way. But when he turned he saw them again: eyes in the darkness, eyes that flashed like a cat’s, yet stood too far off the ground to be anything but a man’s.
He whirled back to the courtyard, praying to find an escape route that he had missed before. Perhaps he could climb a balcony, or find a place to hide? But he knew better: he was not a climber, and there was no hiding from his pursuer. Those green eyes could pierce stone.
He ran to a doorway at the far end of the courtyard and pounded on the heavy wood, the blows reverberating within the enclosed space. But the door did not open. No lamp was lit; no one was coming to Lenoir’s aid. And now the green-eyed man had stepped into the courtyard. He moved with uncanny grace, his step liquid. Raven black hair framed a youthful face so pale and beautiful it could have been shaped from marble. And like a sculpture, his expression was fixed, showing no pity, nor any hint of human feeling. His eyes were the color of absinthe, burning with a light that was unmistakably fey.
The green-eyed man loosed the scourge from his belt, that many-tongued whip that sought Lenoir’s flesh. And with a flourish of his wrist that seemed no effort at all, he sent its barbed lashes forth.
The scourge gripped Lenoir’s forearm near the elbow, jerking him to his knees. At first his terror was such that he could make no sound. When finally he screamed, it was with a violence that seemed to tear the inside of his throat. The barbs pierced his arm, but the pain was nothing, nothing compared to the sickening sensation of his flesh dying. There was something wrong with the whip, something terrible, a malevolence so potent that it made him nauseous. A chill rushed up his arm, filled his chest. . . . Now he could feel his consciousness ebbing, as though the barbs piercing his flesh were tiny vampiric fangs, draining his lifeblood. . . .
Lenoir woke to the sound of his own screaming. His frantic gaze took in the room around him, and at first he was wildly disoriented. After a moment his mind sparked to life and he knew he was in his own apartment. Yet the nightmare had been so real, so visceral, that he clutched at his arm, his fingers seeking proof that the scourge was no longer constricted around him like a snake. He felt the familiar numbness below his elbow, cold skin stretched over dead flesh that his blood never warmed. He was used to the morbid sensation by now, but for the first time in ten years, he half fancied that his flesh prickled somehow, like a limb gone to sleep that was slowly regaining circulation.
Lenoir heaved himself out of bed and went to the washbasin to splash water on his face. It was cold and bracing, for he had left his window ajar the previous afternoon and had been too out of sorts to bother closing it when he returned home from Berryvine. He stared at his reflection in the looking glass, willing himself to gain some mastery over his still-fluttering heart. It would do no good to panic, he told himself. If the green-eyed man was really here in the Five Villages, there would be no escaping him. Luck had saved Lenoir the last time, such luck as never visited the same man twice. The nightmare had been vividly accurate in every detail save one: it had been early morning when Lenoir found himself cornered in that courtyard ten years ago—not night as it had been in the dream. Dawn had broken at the far end of the alley, sending a lance of sunlight into the courtyard, and somehow that had saved Lenoir’s life. He could not remember what happened, for he had been virtually unconscious by that time. But he remembered seeing the light, remembered wondering if it was a sliver of Eternity peeking through as the door to Heaven closed, barring his entry. And when he woke, the green-eyed man was gone, along with the terrible scourge he wielded. The only sign that he had ever been there was the scar on Lenoir’s arm, that hideous patch of gray skin that would never again feel warmth, nor any other sensation at all. Forevermore it would feel as though someone else’s flesh had been grafted onto his own, thick and foreign. Forevermore Lenoir would carry that reminder of his brush with death, of his cheating the avenging angel that hunted him.
Yes, an angel, or a demon, perhaps. Either way, Lenoir knew with absolute certainty that although he thought of his attacker as “the green-eyed man,” he was nothing of the kind. Men did not carry cursed weapons that sap human life with a mere touch. Men did not vanish from one shadow only to reappear in another. And no man alive had ever had such eyes—that violent, uncanny green that glimmered as though lit from within. Not a man, but a spirit—a vengeful spirit that sought Lenoir’s blood in payment for his sins.