The Descent Read Online Free PDF Page A

That was what we called ourselves in our more discreet moments; we’d also used “captives” and “concubines,” but mostly “others,” because, by taking our mortality away from us, Adair had made us something apart from humanity. We were the others, no longer human and not like Adair, either.
    “I have no need for any more companions. I only let them stay because, well . . .”
    I raised an eyebrow. “I’ve seen them. I can imagine why you let them stay.”
    He looked at me with mild annoyance. “Don’t tell me that you’re jealous. You have no reason to be— you were the one to leave me, as I remember. You didn’t expect me to be celibate after you left and went back to that man, did you?”
    I turned into the breeze to cool my cheeks. “Of course I’m not jealous. Look, we haven’t seen each other in four years—let’s not start off with an argument, okay?”
    He let his hands hang in the pockets of his greatcoat as he,too, turned into the wind. The loose strands of his long dark hair whipped behind him. “Of course. I don’t want to argue with you, Lanore.”
    I longed to tuck my arm under his as we used to do when we walked along the streets of Boston many, many years ago, but I knew it was one of those crazy urges I had to guard against. It wouldn’t do to get too close to Adair; I could lose my perspective, and it would be that much harder to do what I’d come to do. Instead, I asked, with forced cheer, “How did you end up here, anyway, after Garda? I would’ve thought you would’ve gone to see the world.”
    He nodded at the endless horizon. “Don’t you think it’s lovely here?”
    “Lovely in its way, I suppose . . . but so isolated, stuck out here in the middle of the ocean. Tell me you haven’t been here alone the entire time since I last saw you.”
    He shrugged, a little bit embarrassed by my pity. “Yes, for the most part. After you left, I stayed at the castle at Garda with Pendleton, but I couldn’t stand living there. Your ghost was everywhere: in the mezzanine where we sat in the evenings and you told me about your life, in the bed we had shared. You must admit, when you left I had a lot to think about. I wasn’t going to continue living the way I had before. . . . So I sent Pendleton on his way and came here to be by myself, and every day I circle the stone path and stare at the ocean to clear my head.”
    That meant he’d been on his own on the island for nearly four years, if the girls had joined him only recently. “Weren’t you lonely?”
    “No, not really. I needed the solitude. I needed to understandmyself better and I wouldn’t have been able to do that surrounded by others.” He turned back to the fortress and we started to wander inland again. “What about you?” he asked. “What did you do after you left Garda?”
    The wind was at our backs now and blew my hair over my shoulders and into my face and I had to brush strands out of my eyes. “Do you remember, when you’d finally caught up with me, the man who came to my rescue?”
    “The doctor. Of course I remember him. I almost killed him.”
    “His name was Luke. You made me try to send him away so we would be together, you and I. But I’d already told him about you, and he didn’t believe that I’d stay with you freely and refused to go. So you made him forget me, took away all his memories of me.” Adair had made that part of my punishment for betraying him, for walling him up and leaving him entombed for two hundred years. He’d meant to strip me of everything, property, freedom—but especially love, the love of the man who had given up everything for me.
    In the end, however, Adair couldn’t go through with it. When he saw that I’d never come to love him as his prisoner, he set me free and told me to go after Luke. To find him and tell him who I was and what we had meant to each other. “I knew he’d go back to be near his daughters,” I said, “and that’s where I found