Page 16 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

“Percy…” Joe sighed, yet before he knew it, one foot then another was ascending the stairs in pursuit. The staircase turned around and around, thinner, dizzying, until it took a final narrow twist towards a worryingly small and apparently disused door.

Without showing a speck of his apprehension that the door wouldn’t open, Percy pulled the clasp back, and they were hit full force by a sharp snap of wind.

“Tell me this isn’t the roof,” Joe muttered.

“Dracula!” came the shout from below, accompanied by a bullet breaking a chunk of stone off the wall by Percy’s arm.

“Shit!” Percy said again, and ushered Joe ahead of him, slamming the door shut behind them.

The calm and balmy spring evening had whipped itself into a frenzy of storm clouds, a moon dancing chaotically in fast, fleeting flashes, and a punishing wind that snapped the letters of the gothic weathervane to and fro on its sharply pointed axis.

Then it began to rain.

“Fuck! The painting!” cried Percy.

“Yes!” Joe called back, searching for something to block the door. “Fuck that painting! If we’d just burned it, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“No, I said— Oh, never mind.” He ripped off his cape to wrap the wooden box.

“Now he takes off his disguise,” Joe grumbled under his breath, pulling at a terracotta tile that wouldn’t give.

“It’s a very important work of ar?—”

“Argh!” Joe yelled, arms flailing about the place in frustration. “Stop saying that! We are going to burn it!”

The door flung open, and the very first shot, let off with no direction but chance, knocked Percy straight to the ground. In a series of stills that blended together so fast Joe could never quite rearrange them properly in his mind again, Philippe Dubois, of all people, got the drop on Percy Ashdown.

One ugly shoe in front of another, he trod directly over the darkening ochre rooftop, the steam from the warm day greeting them with the scent and heaviness of ozone, a flash of lightning behind his black silhouette. He stopped, he turned the gun downward, and Joe lunged.

The second bullet found Percy’s chest just as Joe wrenched Dubois back by the neck. The sound of the shot hitting Percy, his cry of pain, propelled Joe. He simultaneously clamped a hand down on Dubois’s pelvis, slammed the other down on his chest, and brought his knee up hard. He smashed Dubois’sspine in half with one enormous burst of anger and fear and grief. The scream echoed deep into the night, throughout the party, throughout the woods, and came to a halt with stomach-churning efficacy when Joe picked him up, and impaled him, gut first, on the sharp spear of the weathervane. A foul vermilion foam choked the sound out of him, spilling disgustingly down the five-hundred-year-old walls of the château as its most recent owner commenced his slow, torturous death.

Joe saw none of it.

He was on the tiles in a second, pulling Percy into him, though Percy had already been half way up without his help.

“Nice murder, darling.” Percy grinned, with a nod at the twitching Belgian.

“Percy, you’re…” Joe brushed a hand over Percy’s chest, feeling the two small breaks in his corset. He looked up at Percy in shock, then slapped a hand down on him. “Percy! You’re fine!”

“Ouch!” Percy yelled. “No, I’m not fine. It hurts getting shot.”

“How did you not tell me you had a bullet-proof corset?”

“Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it?”

“No, that wasn’t obvious!”

“I mean, if you’re going to have a corset made?—”

“That wasnotobvious!”

“Have we even met? Do you even know me at all?—”

His speech was cut short by a long, punishing kiss. Joe kissed Percy with every ounce of anger, terror, and relief that was wound up tight in his chest and his soul until the fervent, vital flesh and blood that met him with equal ardour convinced him Percy was viscerally alive. He fell, still catching his breath, into Percy’s arms, to be held and loved in the warm, stormy night air, on the windy roof of the ancient palace.

Percy stroked Joe’s hair in the moonlight, watching Dubois’s body twitch, and thinking on the best way to broach the subject.

As illogical as it all was, Joe’s actions made perfect sense to Percy. Joe didn’t routinely kill people, and Percy could only guess at the worries now undoubtedly running around his mind as he hid his face against Percy’s shoulder. Percy tried to cast his mind back to a time he didn’t routinely kill people, but it’s difficult for a grown man with so much life experience to remember the thoughts and feelings of his fifteen-year-old self. He probably felt bad.

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