by Sarah Hoyt
“Oh,” Grimaud said.
And for a moment, meeting his servant’s gaze, Athos understood as clearly as if the servant had announced it, that Grimaud had believed that Athos had sucked the blood out of the meat. Despite the dryness in his mouth and the fact that all his companions smelled like appetizing meals, he felt a chuckle bubble between his lips. “I did not suck the mutton, Grimaud,” he said softly. “It should still do well for broth.”
Grimaud bowed and left, and Aramis said, in a pensive voice, “Animal blood will work as well. Dead animal blood. I’m not proposing you should go feed from live animals. But there are plenty of abattoirs in this city and I should be able to procure . . . It won’t stop you wanting . . . that is . . . you’ll always . . .”
“I’ll always crave human blood,” Athos said, the realization of his fate settling over him like night falling over the landscape, and just as inevitable.
“But not as you crave it now,” Aramis said, in a rallying tone, “Not as you do while you’re starving. You won’t crave it for your sustenance only . . . But . . . but the sustenance part we can supply.”
Athos nodded and said nothing. If Aramis was the only one who knew what else vampires craved blood for—the exquisite pleasure that came with having your life sucked or—Athos presumed—sucking someone else’s blood, he was not about to explain it for Porthos’ and d’Artagnan’s benefit. Besides, while he was almost sure Porthos knew, it. d’Artagnan surely wouldn’t need to. Not yet. Let the boy preserve what innocence he still had while he could. In this damned world it wouldn’t be much or for very long.
He closed his eyes and tried intently to avoid thinking of attacking his friends, or of the pain-pleasure from the bite site, or of Charlotte. The last was the hardest of all. He was engaged in the struggle of not recalling her scent as she bent over him to kill him, nor the exquisite silky texture of her skin as her hands rested on him, when Grimaud returned carrying a tray with a small pot and a porcelain cup.
“I’m afraid the mutton was not usable,” he said. “I have made some beef broth.”
Athos believed it was beef broth, because Grimaud told him so. To his altered senses, it smelled and tasted like foul ditch water. But he forced himself to take a mouthful of it, and then another. Medicine, he told himself, medicine that would prevent his tearing open the living veins of some innocent and doing to them what had been done to him.
“Thank you, Grimaud,” he said, as soon as his mouth felt slightly less parched.
“You might feel quite nauseated. You might need to . . . retch,” Aramis said, as soon as Grimaud retreated.
Athos did feel quite nauseated, but he’d be damned if he was going to allow himself to vomit and provide such a show of weakness before his friends. Besides, he could feel the liquid doing him good, and he presumed he needed all that he could keep down.
All the same, the broth, though warm, hit his stomach like cold lead, and made him gag more than once, as he forced himself to swallow. He drank three cups, and then had to pause. He noticed Aramis’ gaze was transfixed on Athos’ right arm and the sleeve of his doublet. Following his stare, Athos saw that drops of blood showed against the dark fabric. “Ah,” he said. Of course, even this little moisture circulating through his veins would seep out. Particularly there and at the cut in his chest.
The Gascon, who had remained standing, took a step forward and then one back, and fished in his sleeve like a child who had lost his handkerchief. What he pulled out was a small cured leather pouch, which he extended to Athos, on a shaking hand. “It is an ointment, Monsieur,” he said,. “that my mother gave me the secret of. If no vital organ was hit, it will heal the wound utterly in three days and leave no scar.”
Athos didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Most such ointments were blessed. He looked up at the boy. “And usable on vampires?”
The boy blushed, as if the very mention of Athos’ condition embarrassed him. “It should be, Monsieur. It’s nothing but herbs boiled together.”
“And at that,” Aramis said, tartly. “I’ve noticed you don’t look away from our crosses, Athos, so a blessed ointment might not hurt you.”
The thought hit Athos with something like a punch. It wasn’t just that it was common knowledge vampires saw crosses as foci of light so bright they hurt—particularly blessed crosses. Athos had heard the same was true of other sacred symbols. But Athos saw them as crosses—Aramis’ polished; d’Artagnan’s dark, perhaps made of forged iron; and Porthos’ . . . well, Porthos’ did glitter, but not in that way. His mouth fell open in surprise, and he could not find words for a good while. When he did, it was no more than a whisper. “But . . . I’m a vampire.”
“Clearly not . . . a vampire as we know them,” Aramis said. “I mean, you are not . . . ” He paused, considering. “Can you hear them?” he asked. “In your mind?”
“Them?” Athos asked. He had known before—perhaps he’d always known but without giving it any thought — that Aramis of all of the musketeers knew the most about vampires and their constitution. It made a certain sense for Aramis, as they were spiritual enemies and not merely physical ones. And when at court he did, perforce, to study them mingle with both sides, he was more of a court creature than the others. But they’d never before discussed it. Not aloud. Not explicitly.
“The vampires,” Aramis said. “It is as though . . . There is a reason they know everything, that they . . . They are not like us. They do not have the privacy of the mind. Do you have the privacy of your mind?”
“I . . . ” Athos cleared his throat, and reached into his mind, trying to feel even the distant echoes of a presence. Charlotte’s presence? But there was nothing. The only thing she’d left him, was that pleasure-pain on the site of the fang marks. “Yes. They are not in my mind. My mind is as it was.” He allowed himself a wry smile. “Save for the craving for . . . blood.”
There was a silence, broken by the Gascon stepping forward, waving the little leather sack, “Sir?” he said.
If he should deny the ointment, he would be upsetting the boy. He inclined his head. Given his new state, it appeared he should try to tread as carefully as possible and not upset anyone, if it could be managed.
Sighing, he started to unfasten his doublet. As both Grimaud and Aramis darted forward to help, he said, “No, please. No . . . living touch.”
Grimaud froze in bewilderment, but Aramis stepped back, letting Athos know he understood all too well. Athos didn’t know which reaction stung more.
He pulled off his doublet and his ruined shirt and flung both from him, as though they’d offended him. A thought passed through his mind, fleeting as a lightening bolt on a darkened sky: only a day ago he would have been embarrassed to be seen half-naked. Only a day ago, he would have held onto the remnants of his frayed dignity as though they meant something. Now, there seemed to be scarcely any point. He was no longer human; no longer a creature as such that deserved dignity.
From the youth’s extended hand, he took the bag of ointment. Dipping out as little as he dared he rubbed it on his wounds, while looking at them dispassionately. He’d been in such a state this morning—half dreaming, as it were, though the dream was a nightmare—that he’d cut himself rather deeper than he meant to over his lowest pair of ribs. Nothing had seemed to hurt then.
Like the sword thrust through his arm, given in the heat of duel, he’d hardly felt the cut. He’d thought at the time he would soon be beyond all mortal cares. Now, with his wounds paining him, he wondered about the healing rate of vampires. He thought it was very rapid, but he’d never had any other involvement with vampires but to kill them, and quickly too.
As he looked up from his task, he found Grimaud standing by his side holding out a bundle of linen strips. As the servant of a musketeer, he always had these handy and prepared. “I thought,” he said. “If you should bleed, you’d need bandages to bind your wounds.”
Athos looked up and into his servant’s clear eyes. He read concer
n and worry there, but no fear. What were they all made of? His friends, his servant, the young Gascon boy he’d just met? Why would they all trust him? And Grimaud most of all, who was proposing to live alone with a vampire. What sort of man was he?
Athos took the bandages and started wrapping them about his torso. Suddenly Aramis was there, helping, careful not to touch him. As if Athos couldn’t feel the heat of the living body and smell the coursing blood in the veins. As though a little distance would put him off. But Athos thought if Aramis hadn’t known how things were, he would not be the one to show it to him.
Clamping his teeth on the inside of his lip, telling himself he would not allow his fangs to extrude, he accepted Aramis’ help, gravely.
“I wonder . . .,” he said, more to distract himself than because he wished to know. “Why can’t they penetrate my mind. And what that has to do with my not seeing sacred symbols as light, or not feeling them as a burn.”
Aramis shrugged. “Do you want me to tell you the theology of it, truly, Athos? There was a Portuguese monk, Matos da Silva, who wrote a treatise about vampires and consent. That was before . . . ”
Athos inclined his head. That was before the king of Portugal himself had become a vampire during an ill-fated expedition to the north of Africa. Now no treatises came out of Portugal—or at least no holy ones. “But, my friend, there are so many vampires who are made without consenting.”
Aramis nodded intently, without looking up, his features pinched. Knowing his friend, Athos thought Aramis must be considering how much Athos needed to know, and how much he didn’t. Aramis—perhaps because of his profession and its dangers—never gave away more than he needed to. “Most vampires are made without their consent, true,” he said. “But then they consent . . . afterwards. It is much, in that, like the sin of . . . of rape compared to seduction.” He had the grace to blush. “If a man should take advantage of a maiden in a lone place, and should she call for help in vain, the sin is only his, and in God’s eyes she retains that virginal virtue with which she was born. But if the maiden is assailed with praise and compliments, and she yields to the seduction without protest, then she’s guilty of the sin the same as the man. Does that make sense?”
“No one assailed me with compliments,” Athos said baffled and guilty, remembering the pleasure in Charlotte’s taking his life. Was that not consent, that transport of pleasure?
“No,” Aramis said. Having tied the bandage neatly around Athos’ middle, he started winding another piece about Athos’ arm. “But . . . With vampirism, the consent, I think, happens in stages. At least Matos da Silva thought so. If, having been made a vampire one kills oneself, one clearly negates the consent.”
“But I tried and—”
“One denies the consent,” Aramis said. “But there is some doubt whether one loses one’s soul, nonetheless.”
D’Artagnan gasped and Athos looked at him quickly. “But that question is not settled,” he said, guessing a whole tale in the young man’s face, and speaking rapidly to Aramis, trying to soothe the Gascon. “Not settled for sure that one loses one’s soul, is it? Because if one is dead, then how can the sin of taking one’s life count?”
“There is debate,” Aramis said, and pressed his lips together. “Though it is generally held it is better to take one’s life than to live on as a vampire if one cannot resist the urge to feed on humans and will, therefore, inevitably, commit the sin of taking human life.”
“So it is like that famous philosophical debate on if one were fated to be a murderer, would it not be best to die at one’s own hand?” Athos asked, dredging the theological quandary from his school days. He remembered it explained—in Latin—in his aged tutor’s calm voice.
This was not a good thought, bringing with it memories of his parents’ grave in the little cemetery by the family chapel outside the manor. He didn’t want to think of them sleeping there, on hallowed ground, not knowing their only son was worse than dead.
He blinked up at Aramis, who was tying the bandage around his arm.
“Something like that,” Aramis said. “But barring death—and that not a sure escape for your soul—your . . . it’s more a matter of . . . ” He shrugged. “You have been introduced to the sin, but not through your fault. In fact, if there are degrees of repulsion, I’d say yours was very high indeed, because you seem to be all but untainted. Some effects remain—the craving of blood, the fear of the sun . . . but . . . not the rest.”
Athos took a deep breath. “And feeding on living blood would destroy it all.” He said, more thinking than asking.
“Feeding on living blood would be your assent to being a vampire, Athos, but there are other . . . other ways to allow them into your . . . into your mind. As a collective entity.”
He darted a startled look one way and then the other, as though afraid to speak in front of the others. But he didn’t need to explain what was on his mind to Athos. Oh, he didn’t know for sure. He had never experienced vampirism before and, unlike Aramis, he had not made it his life’s study. But he knew what could bring him into intimate contact with the vampires; what could break his resistance; what could make his mind theirs and lose him his soul.
He knew what else came with vampirism, besides the craving for blood. He knew it in that deep pleasure that frayed his nerves at the memory of Charlotte’s teeth in his neck; in the whole-body joy at the memory of her smell, of her soft skin, of her touch . . . To give himself to a vampire, to make love to her would be consent.
He knew to do so would make him lose his mind and his soul. It was the same desire that had made him lose his domain: the craving for Charlotte’s body and her touch that had led him to marry her, to make her his countess, without so much as investigating her; without caring where she’d come from.
But now, unlike his young and inexperienced self, he was weak, pulled by a craving deep within that seemed to be tied to his very being. He didn’t know if he could avoid that hunger as well as his thirst for living blood.
He groaned, deeply.
Aramis, straightening, after finishing Athos’ bandage, gave him a sharp look. The carnal pleasures,” he said, “that binds two as one is such a moment, it’s almost impossible to hold your mind whole and inviolate against the thrust of the vampire.” He spoke so softly the others might not have heard it at all, and in the tone of one answering a question. “That craving too can cause you to consent. The two are deeply linked.”
Revenge and Fear
THEY’d left Athos’ home—d’Artagnan and Porthos and Aramis, the older musketeers escorting the newcomer. “D’Artagnan, we must,” Aramis had said, “find you a place to lodge. A safe place to lodge.”
That had started a walk through the streets of Paris. When d’Artagnan had arrived, the night before, he’d seen very little of the city and all of it seemed to him shabby and almost as abandoned as the villages he’d passed on the way here. But now in the full light of day it looked almost like the city that d’Artagnan’s father had described living in thirty years ago.
The narrow alleys were lined with merchandise and the sound of heavy bargaining echoed off the tall buildings. Families and housewives, servants and chaises made the streets impassible at some points. If you squinted a little and didn’t look at the shabby clothes and the haunted look on people’s faces, you might think the vampires had never come to France.
But then a dark carriage, heavily curtained against the light, would rush down the street, pulled by black horses whose impetuous careen didn’t take mortals into account. The daylight crowd would scurry out of the way of the vampire’s carriage, and then—in its awake—a silence fell deep with memory, as though they were remembering a day when humans were their own masters.
They went from the Île de la Cité—where Athos lived—along the nearest bridge, and to other neighborhoods where lodging would be less expensive. The fact the only money d’Artagnan had came from the sale of his old horse should have deterred the musketeers but it
hadn’t. “In these days,” Aramis had said, “Knowing there is a man in the house who can use a sword and is not afraid of vampires might be enticement enough.”
But it hadn’t been. The neighborhoods that Aramis and Porthos deemed safe—those with few windows shuttered against the full light of day, and given over mostly to the housing of the living—were not affordable. Those that were affordable were not safe.
As night approached, they’d come by degrees to the rue des Fossoyeurs, a bourgeois neighborhood that looked well enough until they noticed the blackened ruins of a chapel at the very end of it. “It’s been taken by vampires,” Aramis said. “Like almost all churches in Paris. It would be good if you do not go near it.”
But the owner of the bakery located two blocks down the street had upstairs lodgings to rent and the musketeers managed to convince him to rent it to d’Artagnan for a price the young man could afford.
They’d inspected the three spacious rooms and found them more than sufficient for d’Artagnan’s non-existent possessions.
Aramis wrinkled his nose with distaste at the dusty floors, the unfashionable furniture, but Porthos seemed bent on praising the qualities of the abode. It came with a bed he noted, but it seemed to d’Artagnan that Aramis just stopped himself from noting that it might be infested with vermin.
The width of the street, Porthos had said, would prevent his having any problems with vampires during the day. There was no access from the alley. And during the night . . . ah, during the night, the windows had thick shutters that could be closed from within. It had, too, an earth closet accessible from the inside, and quite private. Something that had only entered the architecture of Paris abodes since the arrival of vampires, it was nevertheless indispensable. A necessity, if one wished to avoid chamber pots—and the dangers of opening a window in the night to empty them—and didn’t want to expose himself to an attack on the way to an outdoor privy.
Only as the two of them were leaving, did d’Artagnan speak. “But,” he said. “Monsieur Athos cannot visit, if he can’t come through the street entrance—the street is too wide. Too much sun. And at night . . . ”