The Reckoning Read online

  True love can last an eternity . . . but immortality comes at a price.

  Praise for ALMA KATSU and THE TAKER

  Chosen as one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels (2011)

  “A wicked, sensuous, shattering love story. . . . As irresistible as the hauntingly beautiful, pleasure-seeking immortals who scorch its pages.”

  —KRESLEY COLE, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lothaire

  “Readers won’t be able to tear their eyes away from Katsu’s mesmerizing tale.”

  —BOOKLIST (starred review)

  “Seductive, daring, soaring, and gut-wrenching.”

  —JAMIE FORD, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

  “Spellbinding. . . . A rare and addictive treat.”

  —DANIELLE TRU SSONI, New York Times bestselling author of Angelology

  “A sweeping story that transcends time.”

  —M. J. ROSE, internationally bestselling author of The Hypnotist

  “Marvelous. . . . A thinking person’s guilty pleasure. . . . The Taker will keep you turning pages all night.”

  —SCOTT WESTERFELD, New York Times bestselling author of Leviathan

  “Addictive. . . . Astonishing. . . . Brutal, wrenching, and ultimately moving.”

  —MEG WAITE CLAYTON, bestselling author of The Wednesday Sisters

  “A frighteningly compelling story about those most human monsters—desire and obsession. It will curl your hair and keep you up late at night.”

  —KEITH DONOHUE, author of The Stolen Child

  SECOND IN ALMA KATSU’S GRIPPING SUPERNATURAL TRILOGY THAT BEGAN WITH THE TAKER . . .

  Lanore McIlvrae is the kind of woman who will do anything for love. Including imprisoning the man who loves her behind a wall of brick and stone.

  She had no choice but to entomb Adair, her nemesis, to save Jonathan, the boy she grew up with in a remote Maine town in the early 1800s and the man she thought she would be with forever. But Adair had other plans for her. He used his mysterious, otherworldly powers to give her eternal life, but Lanore learned too late that there was a price for this gift: to spend eternity with him. And though he is handsome and charming, behind Adair's seductive façade is the stuff of nightmares. He is a monster in the flesh, and he wants Lanore to love him for all of time.

  Now, two hundred years after imprisoning Adair, Lanore is trying to atone for her sins. She has given away the treasures she's collected over her many lifetimes in order to purge her past and clear the way for a future with her new lover, Luke Findley. But, while viewing these items at an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Lanore suddenly is aware that the thing she's been dreading for two hundred years has caught up to her: Adair has escaped from his prison. He's free—and he will come looking for her. And she has no idea how she will save herself.

  With the stunningly imaginative storytelling and rich characterizations that fascinated readers worldwide and made The Taker a singular and memorable literary debut and an international sensation, Alma Katsu once again delivers “a powerful evocation of the dark side of romantic love” (Publishers Weekly) in her breathtaking new novel.

  ALMA KATSU is the author of The Taker, which has been sold in ten countries. Born in Alaska and raised near Concord, Massachusetts, she holds a B.A. from Brandeis University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins writing program. She lives with her husband in Virginia and is at work on the third novel in this acclaimed trilogy. Visit her online at www.almakatsu.com or follow her on Twitter.

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  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY ELISABETH ANSLEY/ARCANGEL

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY TIM COBURN

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  THE

  RECKONING

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Alma Katsu

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery Books hardcover edition June 2012

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Katsu, Alma.

  The reckoning / by Alma Katsu.—1st Gallery Books hardcover ed.

  p. cm.—(The Taker trilogy; 2)

  1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Immortalism—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.A7886R43 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2011052763

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5180-5

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5184-3 (ebook)

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  For my mother and siblings, Linda, Diana and John

  “You’ll always be dear to me, Beast. I’m truly your friend. But I don’t think I shall ever be able to marry you.”

  “You’re my only joy,” said Beast. “I’d die without you. Promise, at least, that you’ll never leave.”

  —Beauty and the Beast, Madame Leprince de Beaumont

  PART ONE

  ONE

  LONDON

  We were nearly at the Victoria and Albert Museum when we saw the crowds spilling out of the entrance and across Cromwell Street, forcing our taxi to stop in the middle of the road. The driver turned to shrug at me and Luke as though to say we could go no farther as hundreds of people streamed toward the arched entry in a blur of
color and movement like a school of fish. All there to see my exhibit.

  I stepped from the cab, unable to wait a second more, and my eye was drawn immediately to the tall banner hanging overhead. Lost Treasures of the Nineteenth Century, it read, the dark print striking against the shimmering orange background. Beneath the words was an image of a lady’s fan, extended to show the white satin stretched over whalebone ribs, its leash made of silk cord with a tassel curved upward like a tiger’s tail. More treasured than the painted lilies and golden roses on the front of the fan were these words scrawled by hand on its lining:

  Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’tis woman’s whole existence.

  —Byron

  The museum had singled out this rather small and intimate object as the crown jewel of the collection and featured it on the banner and in advertisements, bypassing works by master craftsmen and artists, and rare ethnic antiques from the Silk Road. I could well imagine the excitement of the museum worker who found the words and signature of George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron on the back of this obscure little fan.

  The fan was precious to me, and I’d never meant to part with it. But when we were packing up boxes to send anonymously to the V&A (shipped through my lawyer to make them untraceable back to me), I’d set it aside to return to its place on the mantel, and Luke boxed it up, thinking it a straggler from the dusty stacks of hoarded mementos to be cleared out. I wanted to get it back, but it was too late: we couldn’t think of a way to ask the museum to return it without opening the door to questions.

  That fan was one of the few gifts that Jonathan, my love of a lifetime, had ever given to me. After fleeing Boston, we wound up in Pisa. It was so hot that summer that Jonathan, tired of hearing me complain about the heat in our airless room at the inn, bought me the fan to cool myself. It was very fancy, meant for formal occasions, and not really suitable for my humble circumstances. But he had no idea about ladies’ fashions and no experience courting, as he’d always been the one who was pursued, and so I treasured his gift all the more for being proof that he really did love me, for he had tried to please me.

  As for the inscription on the back, Byron had written these words as secret solace to me, for the many times I had to hide behind my fan and say nothing as Italian ladies threw themselves at Jonathan right before my eyes. But that was in 1822, a long time ago. He was gone now and had been for three months.

  I was still looking up at the banner when Luke finished paying and stepped from the cab. “Ready to go, Lanny?” he asked, sliding a hand confidently to the small of my back to steer me through the crowd. His eyes were glazed with excitement. “It’s an amazing turnout. Who would’ve thought so many people would be interested in the stuff from your living room?” he joked, for he knew full well what marvels I’d kept to myself for so long.

  We maneuvered our way through the crowd toward the first gallery, the hall reverberating with the buzz of many conversations. I wasn’t entirely surprised that the exhibit, nicknamed “the mystery exhibit” by the press, was popular; there had been excitement in the city since the anonymous gift was announced in the papers. The Victoria and Albert wasn’t the only museum to receive mysterious donations—museums in France, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and China also received shipments of mystery treasure—but the British institution had received the most, over three hundred pieces in all. The story, splashed on news programs around the world, had generated so much curiosity that the directors at the V&A decided to quickly assemble a small show to meet public demand.

  Never before on public display, read the banner to our left as the queue shuffled forward. That was true: these items had spent the past century stockpiled in storage, having come into my possession as gifts or tributes or stolen outright in the case of pieces that were particularly tempting, the ones I hadn’t been able to resist.

  The entire divestment had come about due to Luke, really, because through him I saw my house with new eyes and realized that it had become a graveyard of keepsakes from my former lives, rooms filled to bursting with things that I’d been unable to let go. I’d accumulated and held on to these things with an irrational passion, but told myself that’s what collectors did. I see now that I lied to myself to avoid the truth, which was that I collected madly to make up for the one thing I wanted and couldn’t have: Jonathan.

  We turned the corner into the exhibition hall, and the very first item on display, set on its own in a box on a pedestal, was the fan. It seemed to glow in the intense spotlight shining down on it, luminous as a ghost. People crowded around the pedestal, gently buffeting me as I stared at the once familiar object.

  “Did Lord Byron really write that?” Luke asked me, forgetting for a moment that the people surrounding us did not know my secret.

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Apparently. At least, that’s what the description here says.”

  We were trapped in the crush of people shuffling through the gallery, forcing me to share a long, silent moment with each piece. It almost seemed as though the objects were reproaching me for upending our private life and casting them out into the world. I even felt guilt at the sight of some pieces, the most intimate ones, for having let them go like this. Mostly what I felt was panic, however, at seeing my life—a life spent entirely in secrecy—put on public display. Nothing good can come of this betrayal, the pieces seemed to warn me.

  First was the urn that used to hold umbrellas in the entry hall of my Paris house, which my friend Savva had won from a pair of British explorers in a card game and turned out to be an Egyptian funerary urn they’d stolen from an archaeological site. Next was an Empire chair that occupied a spot on the third-floor landing: it had come from a little apartment in Helsinki where, for a brief time, I had been kept by a British officer as his mistress. As I gazed on each piece I recalled its provenance, and I should’ve been content with memories of my rich life, but I was not. I could not stop thinking about Jonathan. It was as though he were here beside me and not insensate and cold, buried in an unmarked grave in a faraway cemetery.

  Jonathan had been absent from my life before, but this time was different, and I felt it to the marrow. Before, I had known he was out in the world somewhere, alive but happier without me, his choice for whatever hurtful reasons he felt were justified. Now his absence was permanent. I’d loved Jonathan my entire life, all 220-odd years of it. And I was just coming to terms with the immutable fact that I would never see him again.

  When Jonathan returned to me, briefly, at the end, I saw that he had changed in ways I’d never have guessed. He’d stopped being the self-absorbed adolescent I had known and had gone to work in aid camps, tending to the sick and displaced, whereas I, if I were to be honest, hadn’t changed much at all. There was a part of me that believed I deserved my incurable immortal condition, a punishment meted out to me by an unspeakably cruel man. Adair had seen the bad in me, too, and known that I deserved punishment. I could only hope that I had been redeemed when I gave Jonathan oblivion, as he wished. I suspected, however, that whatever had attracted Adair had not been completely exorcised and was still inside me. I needed no more evidence than the fact that at the hospital I’d preyed on Luke, a man who’d been recently devastated by loss, to help me escape.

  And, of course, there was the pain of being the one who took Jonathan’s life, even if he had asked for it. That pain, I knew, would never go away. I shook my head to drive out the thought; today was about saying good-bye to the past and embracing the present.

  “Are you okay?” Luke asked suddenly, snapping me out of my thoughts.

  “I am. It’s just . . .”

  “Overwhelming. I understand.” He touched my cheek; perhaps I looked flushed. “Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to come. . . . Do you want to leave?”

  “No, not yet.” I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

  We continued to inch along, and while Luke focused on the exhibit, I studied his features in profile. He was oblivious to my eyes on him, fixat
ed instead on the pieces in the display cases. Luke didn’t think of himself as good-looking, particularly in comparison to the perfect physical specimen that was Jonathan, whom Luke had seen for himself in the morgue. I tried to make him understand that he had his own kind of appeal.

  We made a handsome couple, Luke and I, if lopsided in age. In public, he was likely taken for the father figure while I was cast as the infatuated girl. No one who saw us would suspect it was the other way around—that I was his senior by an impossibly wide margin. The truth was I was comfortable with a man at this stage of his life. So what if gray hairs had begun to mingle with the sandy-brown ones: young men were tiresome. I didn’t want to endure the fits of impatience, jealousy, rage. I’d borne witness to a young man’s maturation enough times to know that they’d resist any guidance from the women in their lives. No, I preferred Luke’s steadiness, his good judgment.

  Not only that, but I owed him. By helping me to escape, he had spared me the difficulty of standing trial for murder. A lesser man would’ve blinked when confronted with the impossible, would’ve pretended not to see the proof I’d given him that I could not die, would’ve handed me over to the sheriff and not thought twice. But Luke smuggled me out of Maine and across the border into Canada and wound up leaving his life behind and coming all the way to Paris, and now London, with me. How could I not love him, given everything he’d done for me?

  It wasn’t just the courage he’d shown that day that drew me to him. I needed Luke. He was my solace and support; he kept me from turning completely inward, crushed by the weight of what I had done. For the first time in a long while, I was with someone who took care of me, who cherished and protected me. It was incredibly appealing to be the object of his affection, to be foremost in his thoughts, and to be so desired that he couldn’t keep his hands off me. His strong touch made me feel safe, and there was something about his manner—perhaps it was his physician’s confidence—that made me feel capable of getting on with my life. Without him, I might have solidified into a pillar of grief.