Dove Keeper

  DOVE KEEPER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Except when it’s not, but again, these people are used in a fictitious manner and emerged only slightly scarred from the experience.

  Copyright © 2018 by Emily Deibler

  Cover art by Victoria Davies.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, without prior permission of the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  2018.

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is for the victims.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Prologue

  The Boy

  The boy swallowed a scream when he stepped on a nail. It couldn’t matter. He had to keep running. His throat was raw, and the thunder of steps behind him faded. He only recognized his feet slapping against stone. All he tasted was bitterness from where he bit one of the monsters at the gate. Copper and smoke. Only what was before him mattered. With his remaining strength, he pushed himself over a short wall of crumbling bricks, remnants of a house abandoned before its foundation was complete. He stumbled down a slight incline and fled into the forest. The leering canopies cut up the horned moon, and the boy limped as far as he could without tripping over unearthed roots.

  The veil of night shadows, the sweat, and the tears obscured the branched labyrinth. Even if the boy found himself lost forever in the woods, it’d be better than where he’d been an hour before. As his limp worsened, the forest’s thorns and low oak claws clamped around him like a wolf on a girl’s shawl. Briars snatched off the fabric of his coat sleeve. His blood fell on the leaves, the forest sticking to his skin.

  The boy hobbled to a tree with bulbous joints and a dark split up its skirt. When he touched the rough, unyielding bark, all he could see were the half-ring on his wrist where teeth cut his skin, the black crust under what fingernails he had left, and the bruising blue-yellow of cold moonlight against the tree.

  Falling to his knees, the boy crawled as far into the hollow as he could. The bark scraped his exposed elbow. He made himself small like he did when he and Papa played hide-and-seek before the war. He did his best with his broken body. It had been such a long run out of the pit, out of Hell. Without help, he couldn’t have made the steep climb out of the place, with its howling and decay and lanterns. With its stench of sulfur and something worse than burning trash, worse than a slab of forgotten lamb meat. It hurt leaving the others who’d been dragged and flung into the pit.

  The boy’s mind was clear, if only for a small shard of time. The pounding in his ears faded. If he could, he would sleep, stay lost forever, but a realization soured in him. No, he couldn’t, not when he survived an ordeal others could die from. He had a duty graced by God to help those who preserved him.

  Not only that. Maman was preparing for his birthday before the monsters took him. Maybe she still had the cake and its eleven candles ready. She would’ve spoken to the police by now, the boy knew it, and Papa would be pacing and worrying his hands, crumpling his hat between his fingers like he always did.

  The boy could only pray he would find help before anyone else died. But that meant moving after his prayers.

  God help me, God help me. Mother Mary, please. He needed to get the Lord’s prayer out quick like Maman. Father in Heaven, hollowed be Thy name. What was it, again? Give us our day bread. Your king dumb comes. Your wheel be spun. He clutched the silver crucifix at his neck. Forgive us our deaths, as we’ve forgiven our deaders. His thoughts fractured into webs of half-forgotten Latin litanies Maman had taught him, and they went on until he couldn’t tell if he was praying or cursing.

  He needed to move, but he didn’t.

  Something growled. God, his stomach hurt. The woods had the stink of rain settling on dirt. When he was in the pit, he heaved, but nothing came out after a few days. The filth had wrung him clean. He’d heave and cough and sob now, but he couldn’t.

  The devils had been stupid to keep his hands free. After one found him alone at the park, they liked chasing him in the dark tunnels with their hard fists as black as wet ash, reaching, tearing, groping. No, it did no good to dwell. He had lives to save, a birthday to prepare for.

  When the boy exhaled, it came out as a snort. He froze, and his world was the forest rustlings and the violent throom doom throom doom against his ribs. He was both present and away, as if his soul scrabbled up the tree trunk and peered above him like a horned owl.

  Something crunched like bone to the left of him. The boy couldn’t tremble. Sensation drained from him, and he’d never been closer to God before his eyes snapped up.

  Only then did he find his screams when he stared at two fanged slants of light, a pair of grinning eyes.

  1

  Rosalie

  When her husband returned home from work, Rosalie asked who he killed. They had agreed before they married on the acceptable amount of details, and Anatole allowed her to read his little black diary chronicling every execution. His lists were absent of pomp, and, like most else, they shared those notes, those names and dates and prayers and final glasses of rum. Anatole scraped the pages, burdened them with whatever stains he carried in from work, and left those black feathers on the desk.

  Before he left for his work, Rosalie kissed his carnation and placed it in his breast pocket. Beyond that, she could do little but send her husband off and hope he returned home unscathed. At five in the morning, before he slipped away to fetch the guillotine parts from the barn, he’d lean down and kiss Rosalie, and she’d tell him she loved him if she wasn’t too sleep-heavy to move her lips.

  This wasn’t one of those mornings. She shook her head and straightened the fabric pooling in her lap. The living room smelled of citrus and pine potpourri, a strange combination for the first of October. The hearth warmed the room, though Rosalie couldn’t suppress a chill. The light from the fire did little to brighten the burgundy walls and mahogany bookcases. She folded the newspaper and laid it on the cushion beside her. It sickened her, the story of the butcher’s boy who disappeared along the town outskirts. Rennes, never much for news, buzzed with fear for numerous missing children. With the war, split families were nothing fresh, but not this. Rosalie hated reading the news, but she did it anyway with daggered curiosity and wished her family could escape. She loathed the pictures the most, the new, hulking monstrosities, the tanks and the improved Gatling guns. The sickly men in gray uniforms and rounded beetle hats studded with hobnails, the earth clawed open, oozing clay and blood.

  The past few months, she checked the windows and doorknobs often. She was Bartleby in the dead letter office, and to survive, she made herself focus on smaller fragments of life that seemed trivial in the vastness of God’s creation. A moment ago, while peering outside the study, she had seen Anatole and their daughter Marcy in the rose garden, and the tightness in her heart lessened only a fraction. Rosalie cast a baleful eye on
the pitiful molting birch by the fence. Marcy leaned against her papa’s arm, and they both patted Jolie, the graying cocker spaniel with coils as black as Rosalie’s.

  Rosalie didn’t mind mornings. She couldn’t help but admire how, whether the day was bright or gray, the songbirds sang with full-throated ease as daylight drifted between the curtains. That was why she had left the study and sat on the couch and read the paper Anatole had brought in, to listen to the chirping. The birds were one of few consolations when the dead swelled the banks of the Somme and children went missing. Throughout the day, the trains’ cries and the church knells mourned the war’s fallen, and Rosalie discreetly grieved with them, but it was the morning tree chorus that kept her by the living room window, which was wider and had less of a golden hue. It was only when Rosalie set the paper down and lifted her head that the birdsong faded, and she saw a man she first mistook for Anatole because of his dark clothes.

  Outside of the window, it wasn’t Anatole standing out on the front path with a resting frown. Leaner, no beard, no gray beyond his ruffled waistcoat. It was their nephew, André, with hair as dark as his mother’s, her sister’s, that same shade of magpie. Just as well, she needed to speak with him, but before that, his hair caught her attention again. There was something in the way it was parted.

  Juliette. Rosalie inhaled and kept the breath until she felt warm again. Sister. The space behind her eyes tightened when a shadow met André on the path. Marcy. The girl’s dress scuffed the dirt, her face and bright, blue eyes as round as Anatole’s, her hair the same red as his before his hair lost its vibrancy.

  Rosalie leaned closer to the window, keeping half her face obscured by the curtain she clutched with an ache.

  Their mouths moved, and though Rosalie could read the I’s and me’s, the conversation wasn’t clear. Marcy bent forward and clasped her hands together as if praying to Mary. André shook his head, his brow low as Marcy brushed his sleeve and stood on her toes.

  He cast his gaze to the side, and Marcy shot up, her lips meeting his. Shock iced Rosalie’s veins, and while she watched, André pulled away, setting his hands briefly on Marcy’s shoulders. Marcy bowed her head, shoulders heaving once and eyes shrinking. Then, as quickly as she had cast her gaze down, Marcy straightened and broke into an uneasy smile. She said three words.

  Sorry about that. Her face was red as one of Anatole’s flowers, and when she darted to the front door, André ambled toward the porch at a slower pace.

  Rosalie quickly adjusted herself so she looked as if she had sat pondering on the couch and not spying.

  When the front door opened, Marcy whispered something like an apology and averted her gaze after flashing Rosalie a forced grin, and Rosalie’s brow furrowed in pity, but it was gone before Marcy could turn around.

  André came in and gave a start when he saw Rosalie on the couch. “I didn’t see you. How are you doing?”

  She struck him with a cold stare. “Please come with me.” When Marcy took a step, Rosalie raised a hand to halt her. “No, poupée, just him. Go back to your papa.”

  Rosalie led André to the study, which smelled of Anatole’s roses and the yellowed pages of decades-old books.

  She closed the door. “Sit.”

  André was a man, a man who wandered and went to war, both with mixed results, but he knew better than to disobey. He settled in the oak chair with its sharp edges and wicked gleam in the yellow lamplight.

  Rosalie crossed her arms. “Where were you last night?” She knew André’s habits by the strange, cloying perfume the nights gave him.

  “What does it matter? I haven’t killed anyone, so it’s of no concern.”

  “So you say.”

  He gave her a white smile. “I was just going about the town.”

  Rosalie sniffed. “All right, then explain to me what I saw out there.”

  Her nephew took a new interest in the shine of the study desk. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t pretend.”

  He raised his hands, as if offering a sacrifice. “Am I on trial?”

  “You aren’t so fortunate.” André’s jaw twitched, and he stared at his aunt with shadowed eyes. “Marcy proposed to me and gave me a kiss.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know?”

  Rosalie kneaded her knuckles. “Are you two . . .”

  “No!” André paused. “She’s too young for that.”

  He was right. Rosalie didn’t care if Marcy’s age, thirteen, meant she could marry. Most women waited until late adolescence to start a family, at the very least, if they married at all. Damn the law in this instance. If Marcy were to fall pregnant now, she and the baby might not survive.

  “Is that the only reason?”

  “No, no, of course not! I would never! She’s practically a sister to me.”

  Rosalie’s fingers lingered on her neck. The hairs rising below her collar gave the distinct impression of something or someone lurking outside the study door. These premonitions could last from seconds to weeks. “You weren’t going to tell me about Marcy.”

  “I was in shock.” André stood and paced. “It’s not every day you learn your cousin wants to marry you.”

  Rosalie checked the window. Anatole was still out there, checking the roses as Jolie wagged her tail and nudged his palm.

  She muttered, “I don’t know if I can believe you, you and your secrets.”

  André stopped, and his ice equaled her own. “You’re the least open of us.”

  “I have decorum.”

  André tilted his head and cocked a brow. “You have your reasons, I know, and I have mine. I don’t see what makes any secrets I have different than anyone else’s.”

  “Oh, really?” Rosalie narrowed her eyes. “You never explained to us why you were discharged from service in Strasbourg, what you did, what you went through.”

  “I didn’t perform well because I was distracted. I don’t know what else to say. It’s really nothing, and it’s in the past.”

  “By what? Women? How can that be? You can’t be the only soldier who spends your time in such a way.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why?”

  Rosalie opened the desk drawer and pulled out an opened envelope. She postured it like Judas before flinging his bag of silver. “André, what is this?”

  Dryly, André said, “It seems to be an envelope.” However, he lost his humor when he judged her expression. When provoked, Rosalie excelled at not blinking until her nephew and daughter acquiesced.

  She offered the envelope, and André snatched it and examined it like a curious trinket.

  “You never go to the mailbox,” he said, unfolding the letter from the open envelope and looking down.

  “I’m adapting.”

  As he read on, André flushed. He looked so fully like the boy he was not that long ago.

  “Explain this to me. Tell me this is somehow wrong. Tell me you didn’t make a woman pregnant. Tell me she’s lying or mistaken. Tell me she and her parents aren’t caring for your bast—your child and that you didn’t keep this from us.”

  “You read a letter addressed to me. Wonderful, at least we trust one another.” As if affronted, André added, “My daughter’s name is Guylaine.”

  You fool. “We cannot afford this. Have you told your uncle?”

  “Yes, earlier. I’m sure you’ll have words on it. I didn’t intend for it to happen. It’s not as if I calculate how to inconvenience you.”

  Rosalie flicked a finger on the letter. “She’s asking you for help.”

  “Yes, so I read.” She grit her teeth. That mouth of his. “But I’m working on a solution so I can help you, Oncle, and them.” André motioned to the letter in his hand. “It was a mistake, I know, but—Tante, I’d never marry Marcy, but if I did, I’d do my best to care for her. I’ll prove to you I can help.”

  Thorns stung Rosalie’s throat like she was a nightingale. “I’d rather see her dead than with you.�
� Than with a future executioner.

  Rosalie swore footsteps padded close to them. She looked out the window for Marcy, but it was only Anatole again, alone except for the dog. A twinge of dread skittered across her heart like spider legs.

  André scowled, but his eyes were off somewhere far behind Rosalie. The letter was balled in his whitening hands. “I see.”

  “I only want what’s best for you and Marcy.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Rosalie clenched her jaw. “I do.”

  “What is it about me that perturbs you? What would make you say such a thing, that you’d rather Marcy die than marry me? I’d never hurt her.”

  “I thought you said you don’t plan to be with her, so this shouldn’t be an issue.” She arched a brow. “Should it?”

  André smoothed out the letter, but it was permanently wrinkled. “There’s something, something about me.”

  Rosalie replied, “You’re reckless.”

  “What else? I’m doing all I know I to do to prepare myself to help you and Oncle with money, as well as this.” André slapped his knuckles on the letter, which still hadn’t recovered from its crumpling. “Oncle teaches me as best he can. He’s good, and I’ll be the best.”

  “Ending a life isn’t like slicing through a bale of hay.” With or without Anatole’s company, practicing with the Widow’s blade in the barn wasn’t the same as suffocating under a circle of crows’ eyes, multiplying like coupling spiders. One day he’d learn.

  “You don’t think I know that? I’m fast, fast and efficient. Oncle said so himself.”

  “And there’s nothing else you could do? Your mother wouldn’t want this for you.”

  “It’s a shame she has no say.”

  “How could you say something like that?”

  “What else is there? What would make you happy? What would make my mother happy when her father was an executioner, and his father before him?”

  “Would your uncle’s job make you happy? Would you enjoy it?” Voice soft, Rosalie said, “You’ll kill men. You’ll come home with specks of blood on your boots.” Blood in the house, blood in the bed, blood on the sheets. “That blood will spray your coat, and it’ll be on your hands, and you’ll try to scrub it even when it’s not there. You, your wife, you’ll both try to scrub it away, and people will hate you, people you’ve never met.”