American Gothic by Michael Romkey Page A

you. The cause of the Confederacy is as lost as you are, and what do I care for any of that? My allegiance, such as it is, belongs to France. You will atone for the death of your family a thousand times over, my beloved. You shall drink your fill of revenge. You will find the taste very sweet indeed.”
    “Revenge,” Peregrine said, but that was all he had time to say before Madame Allard’s teeth sank deep into his throat.

11
    The Killing Field
    T HE LONELY COUNTRY road crossed the Pennsylvania countryside, rising and falling with the landscape, dividing silent fields of shoulder-high corn, running past farmhouses dark in the first hour after midnight on a July night. The sound of an approaching horseman could be heard from a great distance on the still night, hooves pounding the road, the dirt baked hard by the summer sun. The rider’s speed seemed to increase as he drew nearer, a clatter exploding when the horse took the covered bridge at full gallop, the pounding reverberating across the sleeping countryside like a sudden volley of rifle shots.
    Nathaniel Peregrine leaned forward in his saddle, his cape streaming behind as if with dark wings partly unfurled. The road passed through a grove of cottonwoods on the far side of the stream, then up an incline, an undulating rise that followed the bend in the watercourse, formed by years of spring floods carrying away earth from the bank. At the top, the rider pulled sharply back on the sweat-flecked beast’s reins. The stallion cried in protest and rose up on its hind legs, but the rider remained firmly seated in the saddle.
    In the far distance, he saw a flickering line of lights from well-spaced fires. This was the rear guard—the train, the hospital tents, the nether end of the immense community an army drags behind as it hauls itself ponderously over the earth, depleting the countryside of forage, leaving in its wake smoldering foundations of houses and barns, ruined towns, poisoned wells, and the dead. Peregrine had ridden around the flanks of two entire armies to come up on the rebel force from its rear. The underbelly that the army dragged with it across the land was its weakest spot, especially to a lone rider, approaching the assembled Confederate host from where it least expected attack.
    Peregrine tied the horse to a cottonwood sapling and headed toward the nearest bonfire with preternatural speed, moving impossibly fast in a low, wolfish crouch, cutting with fierce purpose through the growing corn rows.
    The picket stood leaning against his rifle, eyes closed. The firelight illuminated his figure so that Peregrine could see the soldier perfectly. The private’s youthfulness was partly disguised beneath a misshapen slouch hat and an untrimmed brown beard. He had a smallish nose, thin lips, his sunburned skin pulled taut over the cheekbones from forced marches on short rations over great stretches of terrain as the rebel army moved north. The picket’s uniform was homespun cloth, his boots gone beyond hope of repair. The only thing of value the soldier seemed to possess was his weapon. The picket must have brought his Kentucky squirrel rifle with him when he joined the rebellion.
    Peregrine noted all of this from a distance that rapidly diminished as he approached unseen. The picket sensed something at the last, but Peregrine was already upon him, dragging his head back by the long, dirty hair. He sank his teeth into the soldier’s neck with a single, swift, savage motion. The man’s neck tasted of dried sweat and dust from long months of marching without anything more than a splash in a creek to serve for bathing. The vileness made Peregine want to retch, but instead he bit down harder, ripping muscles and tendons with his razor teeth before the natural sweetness of living blood began to carry him away on its hot tide of delirium.
    He had not fed the Hunger in a long while, so he stayed with the man longer than he had intended. He greedily swallowed gulps