Forty-eight hours had passed since the bloodbath beneath Saint-Eustache, and Faust had not closed his eyes for a single second.
He was drowning in paranoia.
Every shifting shadow along the dark European highways looked like a crouching Tarasque; every snap of a twigs beneath the horses' hooves sounded like the rhythmic stride of Inquisition or Church pursuit.
Under normal circumstances, the unique, heightened qualities of his supernatural physiology would have brushed off two days of sleeplessness with ease. His multiple heartbeats usually provided a tireless reservoir of vitality. But these two days were entirely different. They were an agonizing, exhausting drag.
The physical fatigue was nothing compared to the violent, foreign tides warring inside his own skull. Ever since Baphomet's shadow-claw had violated his abdomen, Faust had been forced into a perpetual, suffocating mental siege. He was hyper-conscious of a dark, malicious urge clawing at the edges of his mind—a sinister thirst for raw violence that was entirely antithetical to the logical, refined scholar he knew himself to be.
Worse, the voices were getting louder. They scraped against the inside of his temples in a dozen of languages he had never heard, though fully aware of the meanings, whispering promises of blood and iron, trying to pull the red curtain back over his sanity.
For only the second time in his long life, the cynical professor felt a desperate, sincere urge to pray to a God he usually viewed through a lens of cold anatomy.
The first time he had ever prayed like this was decades ago, kneeling by a tear-stained bed in the dead of winter when his beloved wife, Elena, had fallen fatally ill.
Huddled in the pitch-black corner of the moving wagon, Faust's trembling fingers reached beneath his shirt, tightly clenching the silver necklace resting against his chest. With a soft, metallic click, he popped open the secret latch of the pendant. In the weak sliver of moonlight filtering through the carriage drapes, he stared intensely at the tiny, painted miniature portrait of Elena.
Her painted eyes looked back at him with a gentle, timeless warmth. Staring at her face was a painful, grounding ritual. It was the only anchor he had left, a shield that pushed the whispering maws back into the dark and helped him remain conscious of who he truly was.
"I am Faust," he whispered into the cloth bandaging his left eye, his knuckles white around the silver. "I am a man of science. I am a husband," he chuckled and remembered, "I am also Mephisto, a magician-clown-fool of El Gloriosa... more like a wandering magician now."
He snapped the pendant shut, letting the silver piece drop back against his racing chest.
The carriage lurched violently as the iron-shod wheels struck a deep rut in the road. Faust was currently hiding inside one of the heavy cargo wagons belonging to a Swabian merchant guild. Stripped of his Mephisto finery and dressed in the plain, nondescript wool of a traveling clerk, he had purchased passage across the borders of France and into the fractured territories of the Holy Roman Empire.
The only thing that distinguished Faust from the others was a white patch on his left eye.
The Swabians were loud, practical men, completely oblivious to the fact that they were transporting a half-naked, gold-eyed fugitive with a forbidden demonology tome shoved into his pack. They were heading straight toward the neighboring Bavarian region.
Faust leaned his head back against a crate of grain, his jaw set in a hard line. Paris was dead to him. El Gloriosa was gone. He was entirely cut off from the world he had built, but he had a destination.
In the heart of München, within the frosted spires of Munich, lived one of the only true friends he had left alive in the Old World. If anyone had the knowledge, the resources, or the sanctuary to help him decipher the madness creeping into his blood, it was them.
He needed to reach the Frost family, and he needed to do it before the voices in his head finally broke through the gates.