A Discovery of Witches(144)
In the forest Matthew made sure the crop was still in my boot.
“Your right stirrup needs shortening,” he pointed out after we had the horses trotting. He wanted my tack in racing trim in case I needed to make a run for it. I pulled Rakasa in with a scowl and adjusted the stirrup leathers.
The now-familiar field opened up in front of me, and Matthew sniffed the air. He grabbed Rakasa’s reins and brought me to a halt. He was still black with anger.
“There’s a rabbit over there.” Matthew nodded to the western section of the field.
“I’ve done rabbit,” I said calmly. “And marmot, and goat, and a doe.”
Matthew swore. It was concise and comprehensive, and I hoped we were out of the range of Ysabeau’s keen ears.
“The phrase is ‘cut to the chase,’ is it not?”
“I don’t hunt deer like my mother does, by frightening it to death and pouncing on it. I can kill a rabbit for you, or even a goat. But I’m not stalking a deer while you’re with me.” Matthew’s jaw was set in an obstinate line.
“Stop pretending and trust me.” I gestured at my saddlebag. “I’m prepared for the wait.”
He shook his head. “Not with you at my side.”
“Since I’ve met you,” I said quietly, “you’ve shown me all the pleasant parts of being a vampire. You taste things I can’t even imagine. You remember events and people that I can only read about in books. You smell when I change my mind or want to kiss you. You’ve woken me to a world of sensory possibilities I never dreamed existed.”
I paused for a moment, hoping I was making progress. I wasn’t.
“At the same time, you’ve seen me throw up, set fire to your rug, and come completely unglued when I received something unexpected in the mail. You missed the waterworks, but they weren’t pretty. In return I’m asking you to let me watch you feed yourself. It’s a basic thing, Matthew. If you can’t bear it, then we can make the Congregation happy and call it off.”
“Dieu. Will you never stop surprising me?” Matthew’s head lifted, and he stared into the distance. His attention was caught by a young stag on the crest of the hill. The stag was cropping the grass, and the wind was blowing toward us, so he hadn’t yet picked up our scent.
Thank you, I breathed silently. It was a gift from the gods for the stag to appear like that. Matthew’s eyes locked on his prey, and the anger left him to make room for a preternatural awareness of his environment. I fixed my eyes on the vampire, watching for slight changes that signaled what he was thinking or feeling, but there were precious few clues.
Don’t you dare move, I warned when Rakasa tensed in preparation for a fidget. She rooted her hooves into the earth and stood at attention.
Matthew smelled the wind change and took Rakasa’s reins. He slowly moved both horses to the right, keeping them within the path of the downward breezes. The stag raised his head and looked down the hill, then resumed his quiet clipping of the grass. Matthew’s eyes darted over the terrain, lingering momentarily on a rabbit and widening when a fox stuck his head out of a hole. A falcon swooped overhead, riding the breezes like a surfer rides the waves, and he took that in as well. I began to appreciate how he’d managed the creatures in the Bodleian. There was not a living thing in this field that he had not located, identified, and been prepared to kill after only a few minutes of observation. Matthew inched the horses toward the trees, camouflaging my presence by putting me in the midst of other animal scents and sounds.
While we moved, Matthew noted when the falcon was joined by another bird or when one rabbit disappeared down a hole and another popped up to take its place. We startled a spotted animal that looked like a cat, with a long striped tail. From the pitch of Matthew’s body, it was clear he wanted to chase it, and had he been alone he would have hunted it down before turning to the stag. With difficulty he drew his eyes away from the animal’s leaping form.
It took us almost an hour to make our way from the bottom of the field around the forest’s edge. When we were near the top, Matthew performed his face-forward dismount. He smacked Dahr on the rump, and the horse obediently turned and headed for home.
Matthew hadn’t let go of Rakasa’s reins during these maneuvers, and he didn’t release them now. He led her to the edge of the forest and drew in a deep breath, taking in every trace of scent. Without a sound he put us inside a small thicket of low-growing birch.
The vampire crouched, both knees bent in a position that would have been excruciating to a human after about four minutes. Matthew held it for nearly two hours. My feet fell asleep, and I woke them up by flexing my ankles in the stirrups.
Matthew had not exaggerated the difference between his way of hunting and his mother’s. For Ysabeau it was primarily about filling a biological need. She needed blood, the animals had it, and she took it from them as efficiently as possible without feeling remorse that her survival required the death of another creature. For her son, however, it was clearly more complicated. He, too, needed the physical nourishment that their blood provided. But Matthew felt a kinship with his prey that reminded me of the tone of respect I’d detected in his articles about the wolves. For Matthew, hunting was primarily about strategy, about pitting his feral intelligence against something that thought and sensed the world as he did.
Remembering our play in bed that morning, my eyes closed against a sudden jolt of desire. I wanted him as badly here in the forest when he was about to kill something as I had this morning, and I began to understand what worried Matthew about hunting with me. Survival and sexuality were linked in ways I’d never appreciated until now.