Free Renegade by Amy Carol Reeves

Julian Bartlett planned to establish in East End London. He once showed her pictures of their large and sprawling house on Montgomery Street, as well as their other homes in the Alps, in Scotland, and in the wilderness of the American West. Then, after the astronomer John Herschel described his discovery of photography to the Royal Society in London, the Conclave directed Max to take up the art, to document their life and work: their houses, Robert Buck’s specimens, places around the world that they visited. Max would often practice his photography at the island, taking pictures of the sea, the rocky paths. He often photographed her body, both in its nude human form and its monstrous one. He arranged all the photographs neatly in books, and Seraphina looked through them obsessively in his absences. For her, the photographs of the Conclave’s activities were nothing less than rows and rows of glimpses into the outside world.
    On the evening of that day that she killed the boy, long after dinner while Max was out securing his boat from the impending storm, Seraphina stayed in the library and flipped through his latest photographs: the beaches, jungles, one of Julian Bartlett with midwives in Africa. Then she stopped at a photograph of a red-headed woman.
    The photograph was out of place—this was not a picture documenting the Conclave’s travels. Rather, it was of a woman with long hair, loose down her back, painting in a garden. The woman appeared to have no idea that she was being photographed; she was biting her lip in intense concentration, and the image was fuzzied from her movement.
    Seraphina knew that Max had other lovers, but he was thoughtless, ruthless, and had never cared at all for them. Why had this picture been taken with such apparent care, and been made part of the Conclave’s documented history?
    At that moment, Max had entered the library. His black curls were wet, tousled from the wind and rain, and he brought with him the smell of salt, of wood.
    “Who is she?” she had asked sharply, pointing to the photograph.
    Max lit a cigar and considered Seraphina through a cloud of smoke.
    “Caroline Westfield.”
    “Is she one of your … conquests?”
    Max smiled brilliantly. “Not yet.” He sat on the sofa near Seraphina and gazed distractedly at the ceiling. “She means more than that to us. To Julian.”
    Seraphina cocked her head. Perplexed.
    “Does she know?” She held her breath. “About the Conclave … ”
    “We are planning to tell her.”
    Seraphina’s heart stopped. “You are offering her the elixir, then?”
    “Yes,” Max said, peering carefully at Seraphina. He looked at her steadily: “We need another physician this time, a female one. And she has many talents … ” His voice dwindled a bit.
    Seraphina laughed, bitterly.
    “After four hundred years, a woman in your ranks.”
    “You are in our ranks,” Max said.
    “As a pet.”
    “You are invaluable,” he said, with a strange mixture of affection and irritation.
    “Take me with you,” she begged suddenly. She felt desperate this time, as she had been so many times in the past.
    His green eyes flashed at her. They could go from blue to the exact color of the seagreen ocean that she swam in, and then back to blue. Wearily he answered her plea: “We have talked of this already. You know that is impossible. You could expose us all. You nearly did at one point, remember.”
    She always tried not to remember that time. “But I am better at controlling it,” she said weakly.
    “Seriously, love?” Max smiled widely in the candlelight. A mere few hours earlier he had been cleaning up the blood and gore from the French boy.
    She chuckled in spite of herself.
    “Robert is working on a cure, Effie.”
    He has been for over half a century , she thought bitterly. With every passing decade, she despaired that she would always be like this. And though she never said anything to Max, she questioned how hard, truly, Robert Buck was