The Fallen Read Online Free Page B

another brutal killing of a Catholic Priest, this time Father Andreas in Arras Cathedral. With Sister Isabella at his side, sent to test his faith and see if he had fallen from his faith’s vows, Tacit had quickly focused his enquiries regarding the murder on a local woman named Sandrine Prideux. Even though she managed to elude him herself, she was not able to keep the plot from him, devised by traitors within the Catholic faith and Hombre Lobo, werewolves, on the western front. A wolf pelt, taken from Sandrine’s wolf father, had been sneaked into the coven of traitorous Cardinals by Cardinal Poré, part of a plot to unleash carnage at the Mass for Peace in Notre Dame in an attempt to bring an end to the world war and grant revenge to the wolves after centuries of persecution and torment. They were the Catholic Church’s darkest secret, excommunicated for daring to defy the Church and cursed forever to walk as men during the day while transforming into wolves at night.
    In a world fuelled by hate, at the end it was a love Tacit thought he never could feel again, this time for Isabella, which brought salvation for him and saved Isabella. Making sure she was out of harm’s way, Tacit had bounded alone into the Mass for Peace and blasted Cardinal Monteria from the pulpit just moments before he had slipped the stinking wolf’s pelt over his head and transformed into a bloodthirsty werewolf. Tacit wondered if he could have done anything differently to save himself, to avoid arrest. He had been over it in his mind time and time again, particularly when conditions within the prison were particularly bad. To have done so would have meant never being able to voice his true feelings for Isabella. Every time he asked himself the question, the same answer came back to him. No, he would have changed nothing.
    Tacit sighed heavily, a shiver running down his spine. During the biting cold of that first winter, when the dungeon had grown so bitter that thewalls froze and fingers and toes went dead to the touch, he had for a little while questioned if even he would survive it. But there was now the hint of summer in the air, a subtle warming of the cell. Not that Tacit could see it. There were no windows in his deeply buried chamber, but the ice on the walls had begun to thaw, the glistening stalactites dripping from the ceiling onto him and the piss-covered floor below. Tacit imagined the sun’s warm tendrils reaching across and embracing the land, ripening the crops long dormant during the winter months. And he remembered another time, a happy time, when he worked the lands of Mila’s farm, long ago, when life had seemed less dark, less troubled.
    With this thought his mind turned back to Isabella, as it so often did in the darkest moments of his imprisonment, the soft feel of her skin on his fingertips, the light fragrance of her scent, her radiant beauty filling his mind. A tonic. A light in the blackness that had surrounded him since the death of Mila, his first love. A relief from his now intolerable life.
    Despite the cold and dark, the memory of her could still easily be retrieved, like a hidden drawer within his mind to which he forever held the key. He thought of Isabella, of what she might be doing at this very moment, of whether her life had changed since the Mass for Peace, the event after which everything had changed for Tacit. A warmth blossomed within him and with it he dared to wonder if she still thought of him, or if he had now become nothing more than a vague memory, withered and shrunken. A weight grew in his chest, a feeling both aching and foreign, and he took hold of it and crushed it out of him with anger and spite.
    Almost immediately something took the dying emotion’s place within him, a pervading darkness, a shrieking, mocking thing, dripping with wickedness and alarm. This ancient evil, full of rage and remorse, attacked his mind when he was vulnerable, when he was in the darkest