by Faith Hunter
The stone bier held no coffin, but was padded and lined with tufted white silk. There were boxes inside and I pulled three of them out the narrow crack I had made. With a callous disregard for vampire history, I opened each, exposing in one a bit of parchment from a scroll. It was so old it was crumbling, bits of brown flaking away. I closed the box and lifted the next one. There was a name burned into the top, Ioudas Issachar. Which meant exactly nothing to me. Opening it, I found a velvet-lined interior, cradling the cross the priestess had used to dispel the liver-eater when it attacked her.
“That’s the cross in the picture,” Rick said. “The one the burning vampire was carrying.”
I pulled it from its velvet bed and Rick moved the candle closer. She had called it the Blood Cross. The wood was unshaped, tightly grained, the pieces like rough stakes, the splintered ends smoothed and oiled. The wire that wrapped the two pieces, shaping them into a cross, was brass, green with verdigris. The cross was weighty, much heavier than it appeared, and it was old. Ancient. I held it to my nose and smelled no smoke, no flames, and the wood was discolored only by time, not fire.
“You would dare to steal from me?” Before I could turn, Sabina was on me. Her eyes were vamped out. Her fangs snapped down. Faster than I could draw a breath, she bent me back across her knee. Claws pierced through my leathers and chain mail, her fingertips drawing my blood. “Thief,” she hissed.
Sabina’s hinged fangs slowly swung down, three inches long, white in the candlelight, touching my throat above my collar. My throat was barely healed from Leo’s mauling; I might not survive this one. A harsh schnick sounded and Rick held the barrel of his gun to her temple. She didn’t react. But Rick no longer moved. The taint of fear poured from his pores. She had immobilized him with her mind. He couldn’t even breathe. I knew what it felt like to be held like that. The adrenaline-spiked terror.
I swallowed. A bead of cold sweat trickled from under my arm and touched a pricked spot on my side, stinging. “No. Not steal. Borrow. Whatever this is, it works like a weapon on vampires. I just need it to save three witches, two of them children, who will be sacrificed in the next few hours or days.” I felt her tighten, a near-human reaction, to my words. “I need to use it like you did, when you raised the flaming cross and chased the vampires away from the blood magic they tried.” Her body reacted again, easing, softening. I heard Rick take a strangled breath. “Let me use the Blood Cross,” I whispered. Her head snake-tilted, the motion eerie. “Do you claim to be our savior, then?”
“I don’t think it’s likely,” I said.
“Yet you dare to touch the Blood Cross. The cross of the curse. The cross of Ioudas Issachar.”
“Ioudas Issachar,” Rick forced out, the Ss sibilant with his straining. “Judas Iscariot.”
The priestess and I looked at Rick. His face was grayish, his eyes fighting panic. I felt Sabina release him enough for him to draw a full breath. “Ioudas Issachar,” he breathed again. “Judas Iscariot.” His eyes tilted to me. “Catholic school. Latin 101.”
“You know the history of sin and shame that is our birthright?”
Rick’s expression said he had nothing else to offer. I took a shot and said, “The Sons of Darkness. And the Blood Cross.”
Sabina’s expression didn’t change, but when she opened her mouth she laughed. The sound was lonely as a wolf howl, the power in it thudding into the walls and making the window glass ring. The candle flames wavered with its vibration. A desolate humor, bitter as wormwood, slicked my skin with its desperation. “The Sons of Darkness.”
Just as she had taken us over, she released us. Faster than I could follow, she was gone; the candle flames fluttered, nearly guttering in the small whirlwind of her movement. She was across the chapel in an eyeblink. She stared at the cross in my hands. It was glowing faintly now, a curious phosphorescence. Rick took several gasping breaths, loud in the silence, his knuckles white on his weapon. We shared a glance, and he blinked, breathing hard, deciding. Something moved deep in his black eyes, like the trail of an alligator in dark water.
Carefully, he slid the 9 mm into his shoulder holster. His hand was shaking, a fine tremor as if an electric current flowed through him. The gun wouldn’t have killed Sabina fast enough to do us any good anyway, even if it was loaded with silver shot and he emptied the clip at her. She was too old. She would have killed us both as she died. Rick controlled his breathing, and moved, standing at my side, our shoulders touching, facing the priestess.
“Who were they?” I asked. “The Sons of Darkness? What is the Blood Cross?”
Sabina stood, white in the disturbed candle flames, wavering with the shadows. Resignation and something more intense than relief flashed over her. An emotion so sharp it left a residue on her flesh like a scar, like a battle ended, and then it was gone.
She took a breath she didn’t need and sighed. Her eyes bled back to near-human, her fangs clicked back into the roof of her mouth. When she spoke, it was with the formal cant of an oft-repeated quote. “ ‘Ioudas Issachar, son of Simeon, then one of the twelve, went to the chief priests, and said to them: What will you give me, and I will deliver him unto you? Hearing it, they were glad, and they promised they would give him money. And they gave unto him thirty pieces of silver.’ You know this story?”
“The story of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of the Christ.”
“The thief,” she said. “The murderer. The bringer of evil.”
I nodded.
“ ‘And the thief betrayed his master with a kiss of love. And the great teacher and healer, he who was without sin, was killed upon a cross. And Ioudas hanged himself. His body was buried.’ All know this. And though all believed that he was dead, the tomb was empty, and the teacher walked among his followers. They claimed he rose from the dead. But what the Christian scriptures do not say is what happened on the fourth day.
“When the sons of Ioudas heard that the master had risen, they went to the mount of the skull to find the cross where he died, to steal the wood bathed in his blood, to work arcane magics with the blood and the cross. But the crosses of the thief, the murderer, and the rabbi had been pulled down, broken up, and piled together, the wood confused and mixed.”
A frisson of presentiment washed over me, chilling my skin, slowing my blood. My hands clenched on the Blood Cross. I looked at it, at the wood that was glowing with a strange, steady warmth.
“ ‘They took it all. By dark of night they pulled their father’s body from the grave, and with their witch power and arcane rites they laid his body on the pile of bloody, broken wood. Some say they sacrificed the life of their small sister on the wooden pile. Some say not. But whatever rite they used, they sought by their magic to raise their father from the dead. And he rose, though he was yet dead, his soul given over to the night and the dark. Soulless, he walked for two nights, a ravening beast. And he could not be killed, though he rotted and the flesh fell from his bones to writhe upon the ground. And thinking that some benefit might yet be gleaned from their sin, his sons drank the blood and ate the flesh of their father. And they were changed.’ ” Her eyes focused, coming back as if chased, returning to the now from the story she told, the history she recounted. Sabina looked back and forth between us. A bloody tear trailed down her pale cheek though her face was empty, hard and cold as a carved stone.
“ ‘They rose, but not as they had hoped. Because of this abomination of evil magic, they were cursed to live only in the night, Sons of Darkness, they and their descendants. They craved blood ever after, rising each night, feeding and killing. And after a time they made others of their kind. But the progeny rose as ravening beasts, bloody murderers. The devoveo.’ ” Her face was almost pensive. Almost, but the difference, the . . . lack . . . was unsettling.
“As we inherited the curse, so we inherited the wood of the Blood Cross. Though it often kills the bearer, burning her unto true-death, with it we can bring much power against blood rites and evil. It is our only salvation.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. Not quite. Not . . . really. “The cross.” I lifted it, stared at it. The soft phosphorescent glow brightened under my gaze. Prickles moved across my shoulders like my pelt rising. Rick took a half step away, brought himself up short with a visible effort. Staring at the cross I held. “The Blood Cross. It’s wood. Wood from the cross of . . .”—I took a breath that ached, cold and dry, like breathing down ashes—“Christ?”
“Or the wood from the cross of the thief or murderer,” Rick said, his voice cool and dry.
Sabina didn’t answer. I set the glowing cross in the box. In the velvet bed shaped for it. And pulled my hands away. As I did, the phosphorescence died, leaving only wood. I closed the box and set it behind me on the stone bier.
Had I held part of the cross of Christ? Or only bespelled wood? Could I believe anything Sabina had said? Could it possibly be true? The important thing, I realized, was that she believed it. Whatever this cross was made of, it had real power over her. A shiver raced through me. I wavered on my feet and Rick caught me one handed, steadying me. He was moving fast, faster than a normal human, still touched by vamp blood from Leo’s healing, perhaps.
I pulled the parts of my scattered mind, of myself, back in, breathed deeply to cement them for this moment. I found my voice. “You stopped a blood rite with the cross once before. If I can find where it will be done, will you bring it and stop this rite?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Her answer shocked me. After seeing her in the painting, the cross flaming in her hands, I had expected that she would help stop the Damours. I felt the adrenaline seep out of my system. I had no place else to go now. I knew she wouldn’t let me take the Blood Cross. She would kill me and Rick and a hundred others to keep it safe with her.
To Rick, she said, “The foolish human who draws a useless gun on a Mithran Elder will wait outside.”
I looked at Rick, his eyes black in the night, though he didn’t look at me. He was staring at the box that might hold part of the Holy Cross. Or might not. He’d been a Catholic schoolboy. The hidden relics of the true cross were part of Catholic lore for two thousand years. He swallowed, the sound loud in the silent chapel, but when he spoke it was with his usual insouciance. “If you aren’t out in fifteen minutes, I’ll come drag your cold dead body out and give it proper burial.”
I laughed softly through my nose. Reached up and pushed the Elvis curl back across his head, letting my fingertips scrape gently over his forehead, my touch demanding his attention. He dragged his eyes to mine. Something blinked back into them.
“Thanks,” I said. “But you better get help first. I have a feeling she’d be hard to kill.”
“You think?” He touched his throat, straightened his shoulders, and left the chapel, his boots tapping on the stairs leading to the graveyard of the vamps.
“I cannot help you to defeat this evil,” Sabina said. “I cannot lift the Blood Cross again so soon. I would not survive a second immolation in a decade.” I remembered the painting of Sabina, racing downhill, her arms on fire. Had she nearly died from using it? And again when she chased away the liver-eater? She moved with that lightning speed, leaning over the open stone casket. Close to me. My body reacted, but far too late, with a small spurt of fear and power. She caught my eyes and held me, her mind strong as steel chains, standing so close I smelled the vamp scent of her, dry and heated, like wind over a desert, arid and barren, and beneath the desert scent, oddly, faintly, like dried rose petals. “But I will give you a sliver of it.”
My mind went blank like a snow-blown night, no thought, no emotion, nothing. Sabina was giving me . . . what? I had a moment of disconnect. Of being lost in the snow of my own thoughts, cold and confused and disoriented. For a moment that seemed to last longer than it should.
A warning whispered deep in my mind. Not prey. Will not be caught in predator’s stare. A silent weight of claws against my brain, pressed down. Slicing.
Surprise flashed across Sabina’s face. She broke her stare and turned away, bent and rose and pivoted again, all in one motion, her eyes again holding me in the dim light. “It is priceless. It has left my hands only once before, in all the long years it has been in my safekeeping. You will return it to me when the threat of blood rites is shattered.”
I nodded like a toy doll, agreeing to anything, everything, without thought. She had rolled me. My hands went sweaty and clumsy. “With this you are invincible over anything not of the Light. It will destroy the descendants of the Sons of Darkness, even the eldest of the Mithrans. To prick the skin of a vampire with a sliver of the Blood Cross will cause him to burn, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. True-death. All others of the cursed will sicken and likely die.
“But you must use care. It is possible that your kind are cursed of the Dark as well, though from a time long before the cross. If the wood of the Blood Cross pricks your skin, you may fall violently ill. You may die.”
My heart shuddered in my chest. “My kind? You know what I am?” My words were only a whisper in the dark of the vampire chapel.
“You are she who walks in the skins of the beasts.” She looked down into the bier, as if she would inventory the contents. Or as if she wouldn’t look me in the eye. Beast, who had withdrawn into the deeps of my mind, looked out again through my eyes. “The owl . . . It came to me, at a time of gathering and blood, when we put Katherine to earth to heal. It cried out its lonely call to me, a bird of the night, a bird of a different place and time. The owl has long been a harbinger of change, of danger, of loss. You are that beast of change and loss. That harbinger of bitter defeat. Of true-death.”
Beast’s pelt roiled under my skin, uneasy. I had no idea what to say to Sabina. I hadn’t intended anything when I chose the Bubo bubo form to skinwalk in the first time I came here. I’d just needed to be a large bird to conceal my scent, so I could fly here and spy on the vamps, back when Katie had been put to earth to heal. I hadn’t known owls meant something to vamps.
Sabina held out a small drawstring bag, destroying the moment when I should have spoken, should have asked her more. I took the bag and it was much lighter than I expected, silk velvet outside, padded within. I felt something inside it, long and slender, the length and shape of a ballpoint pen. Or a hair stick. Or a small stake.
Understanding came to me all at once, all the old lore, all the deeper meaning of the curse of the vampires. “This is why wood stakes kill vamps, isn’t it? Because you were made through magic and blood and wood, from long-lost earth magic, knotted with evil.” I stared at the velvet bag in my pale hands. Shadows and candlelight moved across my flesh as if searching for my twined soul. “This is why you have to drink blood to stay alive. And it has something to do with why so many of you don’t survive being turned, don’t survive the chained years. Right?”
“It is the curse we bear.” She turned away and sat in her chair, rocking, the wood creaking quietly. She said, “Two Mithrans mind-joined tonight. I felt the joining, I felt their intent.” She tilted her head in that reptilian manner, staring across the room at her broken door, hanging skewed on its twisted hinges. “It is little known that I am open for a moment to any of my flock who choose the anamchara way. As they join, they open, and I am part of them, part of their mind and their purpose. Tonight Rafael of Mearkanis and Adrianna, scion to St. Martin, banded together and killed her sire and his heir. Then they joined their minds into one, and made alliance against their enemies. In that moment, I knew their minds as I know my own.
“They intend to move against the master of the city after the full moon, taking him in personal combat. Then they will kill all the witches in the city, claiming this territory as their own. And they will kill the Rogue Hunter, she who hunts their kind, for they fear you.” She smiled slightly, her head still tilted as if her neck were broken. “You do not seem so fearful to me. I hope my trust is well placed, my weapon truly given.”
“I hope so too.”
“The heaven
s move with both order and chaos,” she said, as if searching for meaning, for the words to explain the unexplainable, “with light and dark, energy and matter, emptiness and fullness. This is a time of change, when many tides rush together.” She raised her head to its proper position. “When the old ways return, when the old darkness fights for supremacy against that which is new, against the light of the world.” She touched her lips with her tongue, and it made a dry raspy sound, inhuman and cold, like snakes slithering against one another.
Visibly, she gathered herself. “It is not within my duties or power to interfere in a legal challenge against the master of the city, but it would be dangerous for the humans should the allied challenge of St. Martin, Mearkanis, and Rousseau defeat Pellissier. Without an heir, such a challenge is a great danger to him.” She looked at me. “Pellissier is like a rock in the confluence of many streams, attacked on all sides, buffeted.”
The old vamp had been awfully agreeable about helping this time, when she had been so obfuscatory before. It must have been some freaky vision she saw in the midst of the vamps’ mind-joining. It made me suspicious, but I had no one else to turn to. “I can let him know about the attack,” I said. “Without mentioning your name.”
Sabina inclined her head and I figured I had been maneuvered into doing her bidding. Before I could respond, she said, “There will be no more blood rites in the forest near this place. I have seen to it. The three Damours will not be allowed to enter this holy ground again. If they have another place for the rites, they will go there, forced there for the light of the moon.”
I couldn’t help the grin that split my face. I knew where the children and Bliss would be. I knew!