by Sarah Hoyt
So they were outside the city and speeding . . . where? It felt like torture to d’Artagnan to be hurrying to a destination not his own, at someone else’s command. But there was nothing he could do immediately, and he wasn’t stupid enough to court another kick to the head. No. He must nurse his head and calm himself, so he would be ready to escape should an opportunity present itself. There were always opportunities, after all.
He’d resigned himself to this, and was disciplining himself to quiet, even breathing when the carriage lurched to a stop with the suddenness of a vehicle whose path is obstructed.
A sudden pounding against what sounded like a glass window, and the door opened. A current of cold air, tinged with the smell of pine trees caressed d’Artagnan’s face.
“What is it, then?” The male voice d’Artagnan had heard earlier spoke again, strangely with more peevishness than it had first displayed to the young Gascon. “Why have we stopped?”
“There are vampires, Monsieur Rochefort!” The voice had a cringing tone that implied its owner was bowing as completely as was humanly possible to bow, and would have fallen on his knees if he thought it might help. “Blocking the road.”
The first man made a clicking sound and exhaled with a sound of great annoyance, “Alors, we do not have the time for this. Tell them to move by orders of the cardinal.”
“I cannot, Monsieur. They do not listen. They are all peasants and most likely have never even known the cardinal is their rightful lord. They’re too far from Paris to feel the force of the master’s mind. They are hungry, too. Starving. I think they want us and the horses.”
The click of annoyance again. “And the two of you know not how to deal with this? It would serve you well if I gave you to these wild vamps to feast on. It would be no more than your just deserts.”
“But who would then tool the coach by day, M’sieur?” another man asked, in a voice that implied he knew very well the title wasn’t real, but hoped that by conferring a noble honorific on the man—vampire?— he would, perhaps, receive the benefit of indulgence.
“It is your very great luck that I don’t know where I can find replacements,” Rochefort said. “Not here in the middle of nowhere. Very well then, come, my minions. Come, my pets.”
From either side of d’Artagnan there were rustling sounds. Of people? Creatures? He heard them rise, then feet—or perhaps talons—clicking past his head. The smell, slightly rancid, heavy, as if tainted with grave dirt, made him recognize what these were: ancient vampires. And they’d been sitting on either side of him—evidently so still their fetor was not stirred. But now their stench and the remembrance of what the creatures looked like—knowing he had been penned in so closely with them—made d’Artagnan feel nauseated again. He tried to discipline his mind and told himself that perhaps there would be a chance of escaping once Rochefort left the carriage.
But as he heard Rochefort’s booted footsteps go past him, Rochefort said, “Mind the cub there. He’s tied up tightly enough, even the two of you shouldn’t be able to lose track of him. But stop him if he manages to get fanciful.”
The carriage bounced as Rochefort disembarked, but d’Artagnan still heard breathing near him. He heard the vampires scuttle away, and pleaded, in a half whisper to the man—men?—left in the carriage, “Untie me and let me go. Then we can escape. We can be back to safety by daybreak.”
Nothing but heavy breathing answered his plea.
From outside the carriage came the sounds of fighting, of swords clashing, of men—vampires—screaming. D’Artagnan resigned himself to waiting once more.
Whoever won that battle out there made little difference to him. He would be the trophy of the victors. Whether that meant more traveling in the dark, or a quick merciless death delivered by aged vampires, it was out of his hands.
He was no more than a pawn in a game he did not begin to understand.
Trading In Spirits
ATHOS found the tavern, though it wasn’t marked. No taverns were these days. It would amount to hanging out a sign promising any passing vamp plenty of victuals within. But he remembered the places where he and his friends used to drink till two days ago—places that looked just like the other houses from the outside, from their cross-marked doors to only the slightest glimmer of light escaping through cracks in the shutters.
He knocked on the door, and a voice from within said, “Qui vive?”
“A friend of the king,” Athos answered, hoping the password hadn’t changed. He waited, his heart hammering wildly in his chest, almost making him laugh because a dead heart should not beat so strongly.
But slowly the door opened. A small pale face, only slightly higher than Athos’ waist, peeked up at him. The first time he’d seen it, he’d thought it was a child, but he knew it belonged to an old woman, the mother of the tavern owner.
“Madame Marie,” he said.
She lowered her eyes and then looked up at him, taking in his hat, his face, the sword. Then she inclined her head again, “Monsieur Athos,” she said, and stepped away, pulling the door open. Athos stepped in, ducking his head to get through the squat doorway. The tavern was kept dark—deliberately so to prevent too much light escaping through the shutters—for which he was grateful, lest someone should notice his unusual pallor.
He felt his way cautiously in the gloom with his foot, to find the three worn steps that allowed him onto the broad, flagstone-paved tavern proper.
There were no tables. Granted, there had once been, but any tavern that could be proven to still operate now, would be brought up on charges of inducing men to be out of doors after dark, and thereby giving an advantage to the vampires. Under the king’s law, taverns, like churches, were forbidden, even if for completely different reasons.
Groups of men, stood huddled together, many of them wrapped in their cloaks, drinking grimly whatever there was to be had in this land in which vineyards were left untended and no grain was grown for bread nor brewing.
He wound his way among the groups, careful not to touch them, both to avoid bringing upon himself the craving for human blood and to avoid their feeling his icy nature. He could feel the heat of their bodies as he walked past. It was as though he were a cold void and they were warmth and life. He desperately craved blood—so desperately he could taste it in his mouth: the warmth of fresh baked bread, the joy of healing after a long illness.
He kept rigid control of his movements, rigid control of his thoughts. Life for him was death for others. And it meant losing his soul. It meant becoming . . . He did not know what it meant becoming. It was as if he were staring at a curtain that obscured a portion of the room. If he went beyond that curtain there would be something on the other side, but it would not be Athos. It would not be Raphael Comte de la Fère either.
Moving his feet by dint of will alone, he made himself traverse the dimly lit, uneven floor with the same determination and blind urgency with which a traveler will face an unknown desert. Of one thing only he was sure. He could not face Charlotte sober. There were cravings he could not withstand.
In the past, alcohol had served as a barrier, a means to dull his senses and forget his guilt. Now he hoped it would serve to stop him losing what remained of his humanity.
Seeing him advancing, the host—standing behind a polished walnut table, rather than a bar—reached for a bottle, which Athos knew would contain red wine. Athos’ drink of choice. Athos shook his head. “No. Armagnac,” he said between teeth he’d clenched to forestall the instinct to attack the drinkers around him. He indicated how much he wanted with his fingers held apart, and tossed a Louis on the counter, where it sparkled briefly before being taken up by the disbelieving host. He looked up at Athos halfway between awe and fear and said, “Monsieur, that much . . . ”
Athos shook his head. “Drink, not advice.”
The man inclined his head—the bald spot atop it shining briefly in the light of the candles—and reached for the bottle from under the table, exposing his
neck just long enough display a large pulsing vein. Athos imagined tearing into it, imagined blood pouring into his mouth. He gripped the edge of the table hard and willed his mind to blankness. The host poured the liquid into a glass.
To Athos’ surprise, unlike wine, which smelled as repulsive as water, the brandy smelled good. Almost too good. Like the blood coursing through the veins of the living, it gave off a sense of warmth and of the sun.
He reached for it with a trembling hand, clutching at the glass as though it were his hope of salvation and bringing it up to his lips, his hand shaking all the way. In the eyes of the host, Athos read a suspicion that the musketeer had already had a few too many.
The glass was at his lips, and Athos threw back the liquid, drinking it all, in a single swallow.
He set the glass down, quickly, and for just a moment thought nothing had happened—nothing would happen. Alcohol—even the finest Armagnac brandy—would now have no effect upon him.
And then the drink exploded within him. Or at least, that was the effect. As though he’d swallowed a seed of the sun, entire, and it had burst into flame and heat within him, singing along his veins, taking possession of his mind, overwhelming him with pleasure and horrible pain, the two together and intermixed like twins conceived jointly and born entwined.
He knew he screamed only because, through his tear-filled eyes, he could see everyone turn to stare at him.
Explanations tried to throng to his mind, but were evaporated by the bright light shining everywhere on his brain and by the pain coursing like fire through his veins.
Someone here, he thought, might know what this meant. Or perhaps not. How many vampires went drinking in common taverns? But they’d be curious. He must get out of this place fast.
Surprised he didn’t trip on his own feet, feeling like his whole body was very far away from his burning mind, he almost ran out of the tavern and into the street outside, where the cold night air failed to sober him—perhaps because he wasn’t drunk—but brought him to a consciousness of his problem.
He needed to get d’Artagnan’s location—and predicament—out of Charlotte, and to manage, in some way, to tell it to his friends so that they might rescue the young man.
And he, himself, might be dying from ingesting alcohol, which would be yet a different way for a vampire to kill himself.
Alcohol buzzing through his body, clouding his mind, he walked as fast and determinedly as he could down the street, toward the house Charlotte had commandeered.
Getting drunk might turn out not to have been his best idea.
La Belle Dame
BY the time he got to the house, his panic and the pain in his veins had mutated into a soft confusion that edged his vision in misty tendrils of pale-yellow fog. He tried not to think this probably meant his brain was dying—or whatever it was vampire brains did instead of dying.
At the foot of the stairs, in front of his wife’s palatial abode, he considered her guards. He’d had some vague idea—in so far as he’d thought about it at all—of returning to his perch on the garden wall and from there, with some jumping and a little care, to make it through the open window into Charlotte’s sitting room.
But now staring up at the house, it occurred to him that her guards would attack him as quickly if he vaulted in through the high window as they would if he came in through the front door.
Or would they attack him at all? He did not know.
What Athos had learned of vampires, through the years of his life devoted to killing them, was that they were not fraternal or convivial or likely to hold friendship—or love—sacred.
Oh, they had rulers. In France, at this time, the cardinal was their ruler, and capturing him had been the greatest victory the vampires had won in this kingdom. But in another sense, they had no rulers and lived like wild animals, every one of them against all others. Even if they shared—or could share—their mind, it didn’t make them love each other. And there was no way to guess how Charlotte truly felt about her errant husband. Her seduction attempts notwithstanding, he had, after all, ten years ago done his best to kill her.
But if he were going to be attacked, then he might as well go through the front door. And if he were going to be received with open arms, whatever that might mean in this case, he’d still rather go in through the front door.
He squared his shoulders and walked up the steps, or rather, he stumbled up them, at ever increasing speed. His legs felt liquid and as though they shouldn’t be able to carry him; his mind was still suffused by what seemed to be mingled heat and light, pain and pleasure.
The vampire at the top of the stairs looked like he’d been a military man, veteran of a hundred campaigns before being turned. His hair was black, going gray at the temples, his eyes a bright, sparkling blue, his features crisscrossed by myriad scars.
He looked human and friendly, until you got close enough to catch, in his blue eyes, the hint of coldness, of detachment that marked him for a vampire.
But even that coldness was overlaid with something like amusement as Athos managed to grasp one of the columns on the side of the doorway, in time to stop himself from falling, and then had to spin around to look at the vampire guard in the eye. “I,” he said. And then realizing he had no idea what Charlotte called herself these days, he cleared his throat and said, in a voice as assured and full of his own importance as he could muster, “I am here to speak to Charlotte, Comtesse de la Fère.” And then realizing again how odd that might sound, added with a thunderous frown. “My wife!”
The vampire smiled, a smile that would have been friendly without the tips of his fangs protruding just beneath his upper lip. “Certainly,” he said. “Milady is expecting you.”
“Mil . . . ” Athos said, momentarily puzzled by the word which was pronounced in English.
“Certainly,” the guard said, and opened the heavy oak door, and stood aside, gesturing with his hand to welcome Athos within. “It is what Milady prefers to be called.”
This idea put an uneasy twinge of discomfort in Athos’ confused mind, a pang that grew into a finger of cold fear running down his spine, as he entered into a corridor that he vaguely remembered from his former visits to the De Montebelliards.
It didn’t look that much different now. Unlike other places he’d seen that had been taken over by vampires, the house hadn’t changed much. It was perhaps even cleaner and better furnished than when the De Montbelliards had lived in it.
A deep carpet covered the floor of the hallway—its dark, jewel tones flashed in the light of the many candles burning in the wall sconces. Heavy, dark furniture loomed at every corner, reminding Athos of nothing so much as of his own furniture in his own home at La Fère. But the tapestries on the walls, and the paintings—floor to ceiling paintings, showing shadowy glades and half-naked maidens languishing under the whip of the merciless mid-day sun—were things he had never owned, nor could ever have owned, provincial lord that he was.
Everywhere, too, gold and silver glinted from pedestals that supported winged marble cherubs, twinkled in the threads of a tapestry that showed a waterfall, dazzled from the silver-plated form of a statue of a Greek maiden and her jar of water.
He walked past these splendors, dazed, looking only for his wife.
As it happened, he smelled her before he saw her, a smell of lilacs at full bloom that seemed to encompass him and pull him forward with near-physical tendrils through two archways, down a set of steps into a vast salon tiled in pink and white marble, past a virginal left unattended, a flimsy silk wrap draped across the carved stool next to it.
Charlotte’s scent came from that silk wrap. Athos picked it up almost without noticing what he was doing, marveling at its translucence, at its intense peach-skin color, at the golden threads shining in it, which did not detract from its softness as it touched his face.
This wrap had enveloped Charlotte. It had touched her soft, scented skin, sliding around her. Her skin—he could feel as if he touche
d it now, silky soft, and as smooth as the wrap.
He stumbled, half-blind through an arched doorway, and into the room he’d first seen through the window from outside.
It had, in the De Montbelliards day, been a vast receiving room filled with tables, chaise lounges and the sort of mannered, gilded furniture that had been fashionable when France still had great wealth and refinement of life. A time when no one would have believed that a grave opened in the far Eastern reaches of Europe, would have such dire consequences for all of Europe, indeed, for all of the world.
Now the room contained only one chaise and no tables. On the couch Charlotte lay, gracefully resting. She wore a simple shift, white, covering from shoulder to ankle and leaving her arms bare. Made of silk so fine as to be translucent, it let her body glimmer through here and there: the rounded shapes of her breasts, crowned with pinkish-cream nipples, the narrow waist, the curve of her hip.
Athos knew there were other vampires—and perhaps other humans—in the room. He could sense them around him, half-see one of them playing a harp, and half-hear breath and music and movement. It didn’t matter. For all his mind or body cared, he might have been floating out amid the stars, in the desolate loneliness of the eternal spheres with none but Charlotte. Charlotte, lying on her couch, white and gold against the blue upholstery.
“Raphael!” she said, as a command and, looking up, he saw her smiling at him, knowingly. She extended a hand, and he fell to his knees and took it. It felt warmer than his, and much softer than any velvet. He dropped his face toward it and kissed along each finger, then along the back of it and to the wrist, where he’d swear he could feel her pounding pulse beneath the delicate skin. He kissed there too, worshipfully.