to one another, but they were far too clever for that.
"Finally a crisis in Belgrade forced them to move. Sergei had discovered us. He put pressure. And then in their haste they made their fatal mistake. They brought us together, without heavily narcotizing us, for transport in one van."
"They thought we were quite thoroughly demoralized by that time," said Thibault, "that we were far weaker than we were."
"We worked the change simultaneously with one another," said Felix, "which is relatively simple for us to do. We broke the bonds and slaughtered the entire crew, including Durrell and all the other doctors, except, that is, for Klopov and her assistant Jaska who managed to escape. We burned the laboratory to the ground."
Both men went quiet for a moment, as though lost in their reminiscence. Then Thibault, with a dreamy faraway look in his eyes, smiled. "Well, we escaped into Belgrade where Sergei had everything waiting for us. We thought we,d take care of Klopov and Jaska in a matter of days."
"And it didn,t happen," Laura affirmed.
"No, it didn,t," said Thibault. "We were never able to locate them again. I suspect they used other names. But when a doctor,s credentials depend upon the birth name, well, he or she is likely to return to it, for obvious advantages." His smile became faintly bitter. "And that is what inevitably happened. Of course the pair has found new backing, and we must eventually worry about that backing, but not just now."
He cleared his throat and went on.
"Then came the news from America that Felix,s beloved Marchent had been murdered by her own brothers and a Morphenkind had dispatched the killers in the age-old way of the beast."
For a long time they were silent.
"I was certain I would be united with Marchent someday," Felix said in a small defeated voice. "I was so foolish, not to have contacted her, not to have simply come home." He looked off, and then at the table in front of him, as though intrigued by the satin finish of the wood. But he was not seeing that at all. "I had come here often enough when she was traveling. And once or twice spied on her from the woods. You see - ." He broke off.
"You didn,t want to tell her who had betrayed you," suggested Laura.
"No, I didn,t," said Felix. His voice was low, tentative. "And I didn,t want to tell her that I had paid them both - her father and mother - in kind. How would she have ever understood unless I,d revealed everything to her, and that I did not want to do."
A silence fell over them all.
"When the news broke about the attacks in San Francisco ...," Felix started, then his voice just trailed away.
"You knew that Marrok had passed the Chrism," Laura suggested. "And you suspected that the good doctors would be unable to resist."
Felix nodded.
Another interval of silence fell. The only sounds were the rain pattering on the windowsills, and the fire spitting and crackling in the huge grate.
"Would you have come here," Reuben asked, "if there had been no question of Klopov or Jaska?"
"Yes," said Felix. "Most definitely yes. I would not have left you to face this alone. I wanted to come on account of Marchent. I wanted the things I,d left in the house. But I wanted to know you. I wanted to discover who you really were. I wasn,t going to abandon you to all this. We never do that. That,s why I arranged that awkward meeting at the lawyers, offices.
"And if I,d been unreachable for any reason, Thibault would have come to seek you out. Or Vandover or Sergei. As it was, we were together when the news broke. We knew it was Marrok. We knew that the assaults in San Francisco had been carried out by you."
"Then whenever the Chrism,s passed, you go to help that individual?" asked Reuben.
"My dear boy," said Felix. "It does not happen all that often, really, and seldom in such a spectacular way."
They were both looking fondly at Reuben now, and the old warmth came back into Felix,s face.
"So you were never angry," asked Reuben, "that I put the Man Wolf in the public eye."
Felix laughed under his breath, and so did Thibault, as they exchanged glances.
"Were we angry?" he asked Thibault with a sly smile, nudging him with his elbow. "What do you think?"
Thibault shook his head.
Reuben couldn,t figure out what this actually meant, only that it did seem the