A Taste of Blood and Roses

by David Niall Wilson

  Oh – and Sebastian? Don’t buy any more of my books – I can live without one sale.”

  She hit send before she could change her mine, not bothering to sign it. Her e-mail address was author@ her own website – not too difficult to figure out. She thought momentarily about changing it. It was a hassle, re-connecting all the broken lines of communication that accompanied a new e-mail address. She decided to let it slide. He might just forget about her and go on to pestering someone else.

  Heaving a heavy sigh, she stared at the coffee cup next to her keyboard. The coffee was already cold, and suddenly the thought of a caffeine buzz was not appealing. She cut off the monitor screen, grabbed the cup, and headed to the kitchen to replace it with a wine glass.

  Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t just quit this crap and move on to romance novels, or a nice western or two. She wasn’t really familiar with western fans, but she was fairly sure they wouldn’t accuse her of giving away arcane cowboy wisdom.

  It was a couple of hours, and three glasses of wine, before she gave it all up and slipped into bed. Time enough to recover from the e-mail, and the wine, in the morning.

  * * *

  Sebastian sat and stared at the monitor for a long time. He knew night had fallen. He knew he needed to get out. He was hungry, and now the need for a smoke burned in him like fire. His hands rested on the edge of the apartment’s small desk, and he willed himself calm. He wanted very much to break something, but he knew that if he caused any more disturbances, then he would have to move on, and he wasn’t quite ready for that. Not quite.

  So he sat, and he read, and then re-read the words of the e-mail, though he had long since committed them to memory. He repeated them to himself, like a mantra, drawing his emotions under control. He had to act. That much was certain. The only real question remaining was how, and when, to do so. She left him no choice.

  When he could trust himself not to damage the equipment, he began to type, and to read, gathering the information as quickly and efficiently as he knew how. She wasn’t that far away – and his best bet was to move quickly.

  When he had what he needed it was already past two in the morning. He grabbed the long silver dagger from the drawer in his nightstand and strapped it around his leg, dropping the hem of his pants over it to hide it from sight. Then, without a glance back at the computer, or the room, he slipped out the door and into the darkness.

  * * *

  The window was not locked. Sebastian smiled and lifted it slowly. No sound. One thing she’d always written was the myth of invitation. It was one of the things that had kept him from contacting her sooner and confronting her with the madness of her indiscretion. Sebastian didn’t need to be invited, and though he could easily have broken in through the front door, it was preferable, to him, to slip in this way, quietly and unannounced.

  The window slid up quietly, but after he’d lifted it, he waited a few moments to be certain. There was no sound from the house, and after a moment he hefted himself up carefully, slid one knee over the window like a hurdler, and dropped through as quickly and silently as possible. He could be very quiet when he wanted to be.

  Once inside, he closed the window carefully behind himself, and then pulled the drapes. He wasn’t sure how dense they were, so he took an extra moment to pull the blinds. The dawn was uncomfortably close, and if he wasn’t able to deal with her swiftly enough, he might have to wait out the daylight hours in the apartment. It was a risk, but it was a necessary risk. She had to be silenced.

  He still heard no sound. Turning from the window, he glanced around the darkened room. There was a desk in one corner with a computer and monitor. The green power light was on, but the monitor was dark. Sebastian stared at it for a moment, considering. Then he turned away. There would be time enough to destroy whatever secrets she’d been about to reveal. He could destroy all of it. If he had time, maybe he could finish whatever she’d started and lead her readers astray. A last message to the world, posthumously published. It was something to think about – once she was gone.

  It didn’t take long to orient himself; it wasn’t a large home. The room he stood in was a den, or a study, and it was located at the far end of a short hall from the kitchen. From where he stood he could see at least three doors leading off of that hall, and he knew she’d be behind one of them. He wished he’d had longer to study the place – might have been able to figure out from the outside of the windows which was her bedroom.

  It didn’t matter. He would find her, and he had to make it soon. Already he felt the touch of dawn on the horizon. It ached behind his eyes, like the memory of a sinus headache.

  “No aspirin for the wicked,” he muttered.

  Then, without further thought, he stared slowly down the hall, careful not to kick anything over, or trip on the rug. He needed silence and surprise to make this clean. If he burst in on her, he’d have to subdue her, and she would scream, and he would scream back and it would become a THING that he had not time nor energy for. And so, he moved with stealth and purpose into the small hallway and approached the first doorway.

  The first thing he noticed was that all three of the doors were closed. The first, on his right, was slightly smaller than the other two doorways, and he guessed it was the bathroom. That made it a fifty-fifty proposition. He stepped down between the remaining doors. On the right, beside the bathroom, the door was dark, heavy wood. The door across from it was a larger, pale version of the bathroom door. Sebastian thought about it for a moment, and then smiled.

  She would be in the room that was different. There would be a reason for it, probably a reason he would not know until he’d entered. He placed a hand on the doorknob and twisted gently. It moved smoothly, and his smile widened. Not locked. If she’d turned out to be the paranoid type he might have had a problem on his hands. His biggest fear was that he wasn’t the first of his kind to try and silence her. If she were prepared for him, there was no way to know what she might have laying in wait.

  He spun the knob fully and pressed lightly on the doorframe. It swung silently inward, and he carefully released the knob, letting it rotate slowly until he could release it without a sound. He stood very still, but there as no sound, and, encouraged, he entered the room. It was very dark inside. Sebastian was surprised. He had expected to see the light from streetlamps beyond the window, or a nightlight. Anything but this.

  He glanced to the window. He saw that it was a solid black panel, and he frowned. There was some sort of heavy shade in place, as heavy as the one in his apartment. In that instant, he knew that the sun had slipped up over the horizon. He felt it and he shivered, but the shade blocked it as completely as if the hated orb had been snuffed out for good.

  Sebastian closed the door behind himself as quietly as he’d opened it, and moved toward the bed. He slipped around to one side and stood, staring down at her. Despite the pitch darkness, she wore a blindfold. Her breathing was light and easy, and he saw that the photograph on the back cover of her novels was accurate. He smiled. Some part of him had expected the woman on the books to be a hired model, and the one in the bed a troll.

  Sebastian glanced at the clock and noted that it was after five. No way out for him until nightfall, so he needed to make this as quick and quiet as possible. With luck she would not be expected anywhere during the day and no heroes would show up to find out what was wrong.

  He glanced a final time at the window, smiled at the irony of the heavy shade and the protection it afforded, and then turned to the bed. He stepped closer, leaned down and reached out a hand toward her long, dark hair.

  It happened so quickly that he barely had time to stumble back. A loud ringing filled the air, bells ringing, ringing, ringing and then another sound, starting as a rumble, and then a quick WHOOSH as the blinds rolled up into the wall.

  Sunlight flashed in the window, bathing the floor beside the bed, falling dead on his back, and as he stumbled, his face. There was no time for thought, no time t
o cry out, or run. There was another thing she had gotten wrong – another false trail. The sun could kill him, but it took no time. No time at all.

  He was dust before his body had a chance to make a sound in falling.

  * * *

  She sat up in her bed and stretched. The alarm was obnoxious, as usual, but she smiled all the same. She could feel the warmth of the sunlight pouring in through the window. The automatic blinds had been a wonderful addition, a present to herself from the advance of her last book.

  The sleep had refreshed her. She pulled off her blindfold, laid it on the bed, and sat up. She slid her feet into her slippers and stood. Something caught on her toe as she stepped toward the window, and she glanced down.

  “That odd,” she thought. There was a large pile of dust on the floor, spread out as if it had been blown toward the window. Had it been there the night before?

  “I’ll have to get on that cleaning lady,” she told herself, frowning. “I told her that old vacuum sucks, and it’s not like I can’t afford a new one.”

  She shook her head, turned and headed toward the kitchen and coffee. She had three thousand words of the new book to get done if she wanted to stay on schedule, and that meant she needed an early start.

  The new book was titled “Dust to Dust.”

  Bloodstained Glass

  Ice chip stars glittered brightly. A single strip of clouds, silver-lined and glowing with frustrated brilliance, obscured the moon. Wilhelm glared at them, as though they sparkled in the sky to mock his vision. He stepped forward, brushed the curtains aside, and entered a darkened hall. He studied the stained walls, and the ratty carpet. He sensed the age beyond the tacky exterior, and the elegance of the hall’s origin. No light marred the perfection of shadow except for the low, mellow glow of flickering firelight at the far end of the hall, and around a corner.

  He had walked this hall before. Silently. Alone. He knew what waited around that corner, and he knew that he must hold his silence. Anything less – or more – and the magic might pass. He would walk empty corridors to forgotten lives. Alone.

  Too many years had passed in solitary hunger. He slipped down the hall like a dark shadow. If anything broke the spell of this night, it would not be his lack of attention to detail. He knew every crack in the walls, every shadow, as intimately as he knew his own grave. The irony of this was not lost on him.

  He smelled the heat from the fires, sensed the white heat of the glass. Beyond this he sensed her as well, her gentle perfume, the intoxicating, heady rhythm of her pulse.

  He stopped for a moment, closed his eyes and let her image form. He knew she stood before the fire, whirling the long tube slowly, molten glass beading and forming on the end, white-hot and gleaming with possibilities. Wilhelm shivered, feeling each drip through the medium of his heart. Melting away to nothing.

  He paced silently to the end of the hall and slipped past the half-open door, registering as no more than a shadow on a backdrop of deeper shadow. As he passed, he caught site of her, silhouetted against the flames.

  So graceful. Her arms and shoulders flowed with the rolling motion as she whirled the molten glass and watched it carefully. Wilhelm sensed her concentration, the effort to will her vision to the glass. He ached to share that vision. He froze, silent, grateful to have no breath that he might exhale at the wrong moment. He needed to see her vision come to life. Her breath would give it life – something he could never do.

  Memories haunted him. He saw darker chambers and hanging tapestries, flames that glowed from heated stone-oven depths. He smelled the molten glass – so much the same, so different. Blended with the scents of a new century. The sounds – flame licking at the smooth surface and the crackle as it hardened.

  Wilhelm closed his eyes and remembered.

  “It’s for you,” she said softly.

  He stared at the tiny figurine, every bright glitter shifting his gaze to another detail. It was a goblet, slender and fluted. From the base it rose, twisting and spiraling into the figure of a woman. At her feet, demons writhed, groping up slender calves toward generous curves, their eyes yearning toward the woman’s uplifted arms, which held the bowl of the goblet. This shimmered, silver-tinted and iridescent. It glimmered with a metallic sheen reminiscent of silver.

  Wilhelm stared down at it in awe. He felt as if he closed his fingers around that perfection, it would shatter. It was as if he couldn’t comprehend sharing the same universe with such beauty.

  She was watching him, and he knew she expected – something. He could barely breathe. “It is...breathtaking,” he said. The words were inadequate, but he could not continue. There were no words, and silently he cursed his mind, his heart, and his language for that fault.

  She snatched the totality of his thought and emotion from his eyes with a smile.

  Wilhelm shook his head. The cobwebs and dust of the past shook free in a silver cloud. He stared at the slender shoulders of the woman in the next room as she worked, bringing the glass-blowing apparatus to her lips and closing her eyes. With a soft pulse of her breast she breathed life into the glowing, pulsing ball of light.

  The tip glowed, and she lifted, her fingers nimbly swirling the handle, never slowing. The constant motion was the magic, the clever rhythm of her wrists and the motion of long, slender fingers, teasing the molten glass into a tight ball, even and smooth, and then the lips, those red, luscious lips pressed to the stem, the breath, sweet and fragrant and magical in the process of creation.

  So perfect, so fragile. Like the life flowing through her veins, throbbing gently against the soft skin of her throat with each heartbeat. Gossamer lines of light stretched from her to each corner of the room, to the ceiling and into the fire, cutting through and around the molten glass as it swirled. The heat didn’t cut it, only blended it to the soft glow of coals and the white-hot burn of art.

  Slowly it took shape, cupping into a globe and further, tools tending the shape, fingers flying and teasing, touching and molding. The stem took the longest, rolling and rolling, shaped just right, and stretching toward the base. Wilhelm stepped back a pace, his mind whirling.

  “No,” he whispered. The word dispersed like dust in the wind. Silent, yet spoken.

  The years spun and shifted. He stepped back again, but the wall prevented further retreat. He stood, pressing tight to that strong, hard surface, watching. He couldn’t drag his gaze from the tableaux in the next room. Oblivious to his presence, she worked. Steam hissed from the fire, and the coals glowed brightly. The goblet shimmered into shape, very quickly – yet the moment hung, a dead-space in time.

  Wilhelm knew the shape. He knew the slender figure and the groping demons. He could have traced the image in the air or drawn it in his own borrowed blood. He could have breathed it to life, had he the breath. Slowly the woman in the next room drew his past from a glowing pool of glass and set it to cool, glittering brightly. Still hot.

  Like her blood.

  Again, he whispered. “No.”

  The soft hiss of steam. Glass cooling. Hardening.

  Wilhelm must have shifted too quickly. He wanted to run, to be gone and away and erase the images of that tiny, delicate, glittering form from his mind. As well to erase his life. His death. She gasped and turned, nearly toppling the goblet in her haste, and Wilhelm grew still and cold as a chip of ice.

  “Who is it?” she asked, her voice high, brittle as the glass and tainted by the sudden, sour stench of fear. “Who is there?”

  Defining moment. He had to move, but away – or forward? And was moving forward nothing more than an attempt to drop back through the years? He stared at the goblet. How had she done it? So perfect. So much as it had been - so long ago. Had he impressed the image into her mind?

  Then all choices melted away and she stepped out of the light and closer. His form, which had been nothing more than slender shadows to her, stood out stark and angled against the wall. She didn’t flinch away, but he felt the speeding of her heartbeat
as an excruciating ache. She stepped closer, not speaking. Wilhelm crushed himself to the wall. His bones ground, threatening to burst from the pressure, preternatural strength focused on retreat through an immovable object.

  She reached out, fingers long, slender and tapered, and let her nails trace the air just above the skin of his cheek. Not quite touching. Wilhelm tried to close his eyes. He fought against the hunger, fought like a tethered beast. Somehow he knew she would touch him, so he defended himself.

  “How?” he asked her, his voice barely a whisper, dry and rasping through a throat parched and aching for sustenance. “How did you...”

  “You’ve come,” she whispered in answer.

  “I have been here all along,” he replied, not daring to believe she recognized a face she’d never seen. “I have watched you . . . for a very long time.”

  “I have spoken to you in my dreams,” she continued, her voice still a deep, gravelly whisper. I have . . . known you.”

  “You could not know me,” Wilhelm growled, turning away with a superhuman effort and pressing from the wall violently. The motion left him facing her from the opposite side of the room, so quickly her senses only registered the motion once it was complete. He turned to glare at her, his eyes softening as the moments passed – as she returned his gaze.

  Her expression was quizzical at first, dreamy. She watched him as though she believed she walked in one of her nightscape worlds, not in the reality that surrounded them so completely. A reality Wilhelm’s presence should have violated.