by J. F. Lewis
“Where the hell are we?” Ice formed in my belly. “We’re not in one of the hells, are we?” My voice cracked on the second sentence. I suppressed a shiver. This was Infernatti magic. Lady Scrytha! I knelt down, touching the field. Hot and cold at the same time. Very powerful. Extremely old. “No. Not a hell.” I let out a long breath without realizing I’d been holding it.
“You’re cute when you’re freaking out. We need to get you some bad acid.” Irene waggled her eyebrows, but the gesture was odd. “I’d like to watch that.”
Thin lines of power thrummed beneath the palm of her right hand. It matched the power signature of the field around us, as recognizable as the brushstrokes of a master painter.
“You’ve taken an oath.”
Irene followed my gaze and rubbed her palm selfconsciously. “You can see that?”
“Who are you working for?”
“Oh, chill out, would you?” Her eyes were closed, then open again. Cords of magic unraveled, twisting and flailing as they receded back through her palm like one of those retractable leashes. “Every supernatural citizen in Europe has taken that oath. You can’t use Vales of Scrythax without joining the Treaty of Secrets.”
Old France faded and new modern wonderful France returned, the whole airport and all the beautiful city lights, along with my cell phone’s power. Back in the real world, Irene forced herself to move at normal speed. Waves of irritation radiated from her. We took an escalator down to a well-lit open parking level in the iris framed by Terminals 2A and 2B.
“Tell me about this treaty.”
“No. You tell me what we’re going to be doing to Eric to keep him in Paris for seven days and why it’s so important to Winter.” A thin sheen of blood sweat began to form on her skin, and she jumped like another bad movie cut and was clean again. “You noticed?”
I nodded.
“I was tripping on X when Eric turned me.” She paused, a bittersweet smile on her face. “The way I feel isn’t the way I felt then. It isn’t the same kind of trip, but in a way it’s like I never came all the way down.”
“You still remember what it was like?”
“Yes. Good times.”
“Then you may like what I have in mind for Eric.” I explained the details and Irene broke down into fits of hysterical laughter. She ran the plan back to make sure she’d understood and I assured her that she did.
“That’s perfect.” Her breath came in unusual spurts, not quite the way a human catches her breath. Vampires don’t need to breathe, so I guessed she was actually trying to talk around the convulsions of laughter. Getting the air in to get the words out was the issue. “Winter used up a favor to get me to do that? Honey, I’d do that to Eric as a wedding present!”
Another round of laughter took her as we neared a yellow sports car. She gestured for me to get in. “Eric gave it to me back when we first got together. It’s an Alpine A110. Roger made him buy it because he wanted Eric to get used to trading in cars.”
“It’s nice.”
She shrugged. “I’m used to it. Now you have to tell me, before we get all this started. How did Eric finally get Marilyn to marry him? How tacky do they look together? She’s what, eighty-something now?”
I climbed into the car which sped out of the parking space even as I buckled my seat belt. “Yeah, about Marilyn . . .”
16
ERIC:
DÉJÀ VU
I would never have seen this if I hadn’t become your thrall.” Beatrice kissed me on the cheek. “This kind of thing is exactly why I chose you over Gabriella.” She kissed me again. “I just—”
“Yeah, all right.” I held up my hand, blocking the next outpouring of affection and gratitude. A quickly masked smile flickered across Tabitha’s lips. She might be less jealous of Bea than any of my other thralls, but she pays attention to stuff like kissing. Still, I guess this counted as a special occasion.
We stood before a castle. A fortress. We stood within the walls of history.
“The donjon is beautiful!” Beatrice pointed at a stone keep that towered above the courtyard a good hundred and fifty feet or more. I wondered if the stone was naturally that pale or if it had been whitewashed. From where I stood the donjon seemed to consist of two circular towers connected by a wall the same length as if one of the towers were unrolled, but that wasn’t the whole of it. A hint of another tower peeked over the rear, and the whole structure was surrounded by a wide wall, a moat, and other medieval castle-y shit.
“Dungeon?” Tabitha looked stricken. “I thought dungeons were underground.”
“It’s French for ‘keep.’”
“We have no time for you to see sights.” Aarika was getting on my damn nerves. “You are expected before the Council.”
“In a minute.”
The keep was set off center into the four walls protecting the courtyard, yet it was also held apart, separated from the courtyard by the same moat that surrounded the structure, a single bridge from the interior courtyard granting access. Smallish buildings were clustered around the base of the keep. Nine stone towers lined the walls and I only saw two entrances into the courtyard. We’d come in from the south and had a good view of a palace within the enclosure and a large chapel beyond it.
Bea was like a schoolgirl on a field trip overseas. She and Tabitha ran hand in hand about the enclosure, studying the façades, the gargoyles, the crenellations, all that architectural ostentatious crap. Luc put a hand on my shoulder and I shook free of him.
“Fuck off a second.” Behind me, I heard James attempting to appease the other two immortals as I walked toward the chapel.
It was huge, like one of those gigantic Catholic churches back home. Children played tag atop my grave as I drew closer to the western façade. Windows ran along the sides of the chapel, broken up by little flat-sided pillars. I hadn’t recognized anything else, but that chapel . . . it looked . . . so familiar. I stopped in front of it to examine the steps, the archway, and the patterned window over the archway, a rosace. Aarika pulled free of the other two immortals, crossed the courtyard, and spun me around to face her.
“You are wasting our time, vampire.”
I turned into a revenant, my body going cold as the details washed out of everything but the people around me, rendering the world in impression very much like watercolor or . . .
“Stained glass.” My memory works better in my spirit form. I’m not using my physical brain to think, and whatever’s wrong with my underwhelming powers of recall is tied to the meat body. “It happened here.”
In Void City there is an apartment building for vampires called the Highland Towers. Only the richest and most powerful bloodsuckers in the city can live there. I have some suites there I don’t use, largely because the whole thing belongs to Lord Phillip. Among his possessions there, he has a magic stained-glass window, one of his many objets d’art. The story it tells is a piece of my family history.
It goes like this:
Once upon a time there was a dumbass among dumbasses, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather or something like that. Dumbass the First was a moron from way back. He and the other heroic morons of his age were members of some stupid secret order that had nothing better to do than hunt supernatural what’s-its . . . or that’s what I assume they did. I know for sure that they wanted one particular vampire bad, and I mean write-her-name-on-a-bullet bad. They wanted this one vamp so bad they named their order after her. She called herself Lisette, le Coeur-Démone, the Demon Heart, so they called themselves le Coeur de la Demone, the Heart of the Demon.
So as the story goes, Dumbass and his homeys hunted Lisette all over the damn place and when they finally caught her, they wished they hadn’t. I don’t know exactly what happened, but that motion-picture-magic window of Phil’s is all about their big showdown, really epic stuff.
Under the cover of darkness, a lone knight rides in on an injured steed and leaves his horse dying on the steps up to the chapel. He hesitate
s, tears off his helmet, and cowers before an immense cross above the door. Whoever did the stained glass got that part a little wrong. Here on the real church there was no cross, but the rosace behind the cross was unmistakably, though crudely, rendered on the stained glass.
Then again, maybe the cross depicted on the stained glass was intentionally symbolic, representing the power of God or holiness. Either way, the knight, baring small fangs to show that he’d become a vampire, gathers his courage and charges into the church.
Time passes, a stylized sun rises over the church, and the white clouds transform into a churning horde of black bats, blocking out the sun. A female vampire dressed in medieval finery flies into the image from the left-hand side. Thirty vampires on horseback follow her on the ground. She lands before the steps of the great stone church and French writing flies past on the scroll. I had Beatrice translate it for me once, but I don’t remember exactly what it says . . . typical nyah-nyah-you’re-one-of-us-now vampire crap. Periodically the stained-glass figure’s lips part and she seems to laugh. Mwahaha.
A priest in brown robes comes out of the church. He holds a golden cross before him in both hands. They exchange words, your basic “depart now, foul beast”/”eat me, padre,” bad guy/good guy exchange. The padre manages to piss her off and she transforms into an uber vamp similar to what I turn into, but with breasts (mercifully, the window leaves out the pit hair).
The vampire knight emerges from the church, snatches the cross away from the priest and pushes him back inside. Flames engulf the knight’s gauntlets around the base of the large crucifix. The knight walks toward the uber vamp, stops at the center of the steps, and falls to his knees. His head slowly lifts up to the heavens and he prays to God to intercede. When that doesn’t work, he recites the Lord’s Prayer in Latin.
All of the vampires cast their eyes upward, and gold-lettered text of the prayer scrolls by. The knight holds up his cross defiantly. That much I had to give him. He had stones. Two angels with fiery swords part the horde of bats overhead. All of the vampires, the knight included, are bathed in the light of the sun. Wisps of gray smoke drift up off Lisette, but the thirty vampires with her explode, their horses with them. Lisette gives the knight some haughty Wicked Witch of the West garbage about hunting him down, hunting down his whole family, and then she exits stage-left in a huff.
The knight collapses in the sun but it doesn’t burn him. His skin becomes less pale and he sits up, touching his chest, his teeth. He’s alive again. More golden text flows by and it tells him that as long as his family remains faithful, the curse of vampirism will be spared them until the seventh generation and then, if the seventh generation is faithful, the curse will vanish completely. I’m lucky number seven, by the way. Yeah. Oops!
The priest comes back out of the church, looks at the knight, and falls to his knees in prayer, then everything resets to an image of the knight opposing the uber vamp and her posse. The knight’s cross is gone and he holds a sword in its place, but that’s just poetic license.
I walked up the steps and stood where Dumbass the First had stood, then looked across the enclosure at the keep. Resuming my vampiric form gave me a whole-body case of pins and needles, and I wondered if the immortals had their magic tree house in place way back then and if they had watched while my ancestor faced off with an Emperor-level vampire.
Anger hit me hard, and I went uber vamp so fast the sudden change in height made me nauseous, but at least I didn’t black out.
“Motherfuckers probably sat there and did nothing while my whole family got cursed. Without the damn curse, I’d have died like I was supposed to. Sure, I might have risen as a revenant and killed Roger, but Marilyn—Marilyn might have been able to lead a normal life. She might have— She . . .” A cry of wordless rage ripped free of my throat and I took flight straight at the donjon. I didn’t even have to ask where they were, because High Society freaks like these guys are always going to be at the very top.
“Eric?” Tabitha’s question was just my name. Clueless. It’s not her fault I didn’t tell her about any of the Courtney family crap, but it left her with no way to come close to understanding why I was so angry. I don’t care about what happened to the other Courtneys in the family line. I don’t even feel bad for JPC. Even if Marilyn and I had wound up doing some lame Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore romancing like in Ghost, without the curse Marilyn wouldn’t have died in some damn strip club. I’d have saved her from Roger and . . .
Bea was piecing it all together as my wing beats pulled me over the moat, and I heard her voice echoing my thoughts from minutes before: “It happened here.” Bypassing the first five levels of the keep, I landed on the terrace. The prickle of a ward rushed over me, and I felt myself wincing in expectation. But nothing happened. Instead, I felt the ward part, accepting me, and words I’d heard before in a voice I recognized but couldn’t place echoed in my brain: “You are expected.”
17
ERIC:
FREEZE-DRIED DEMON
I was wrong, of course. There was no one on the terrace and the ceilings inside were so low that I had to move hunched over like a gorilla to make it through them as the uber vamp. On the fifth floor, a central pillar met the bones of the place and I realized that the king would never have walked up all those darn steps—servants would have had to do that. Winding my way down through the stone spiral stairs, I shifted from uber vamp mode to my normal height. The anger was still there, and I was spoiling for a fight, but the six-foot-or-so ceilings that cramped the uber vamp left my human form a couple inches of headspace.
Cold undecorated stone kept me company on the trip down. Floor-to-ceiling oak paneling greeted me when I got to what I thought was the second floor. Historians all over France cried in their sleep as I stomped angrily through a perfectly preserved royal bedchamber still decorated the way it was when Charles V lived at Vincennes. A fleur-de-lis done in gold on blue decorated each vault of the ceiling. Holy manuscripts were displayed in boxes in front of one of the windows. It was all very ornate and kingly, but what caught my attention was the floor.
“Nice tile.”
Luc was waiting for me by the fireplace. Flames shifted within, changing from one static view of fire to another like a slide show of fire that emitted real warmth. “Everyone is waiting for you in the first-floor meeting hall.”
“That’s the first impressionist fire I’ve seen in 3-D. How artsy.”
“Think of it as the memory of flames.”
“Weird.”
I crossed to one of the turrets and found the king’s coffers. “No guards?” I reached out and touched a silver coin. It felt real, and I rolled it over in my hands.
“Most of this exists in a Vale of Scrythax,” Luc explained, “as the demon would have remembered it; you can’t permanently damage anything.”
I bent the coin in half and dropped it back down.
Luc laughed. “Now turn away and look back. It won’t be bent anymore.”
He was wrong and I knew why. If my theory about the Stone of Aeternum being one of Scrythax’s eyes was correct, I could have wrecked the whole damn historic fossil with a quick trip back into the real world. Let the Eye of Scrythax get a gander at the keep in modern-day France and these Highlander rejects would lose their little playhouse (or at least the grand historic version of it) but quick.
I picked the coin back up and tossed it to him.
“You have an unusually strong will. But you may trust me. If we were to leave and return, the coin would revert to its natural shape.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Think what you will. This way.” He gestured. I followed, and we left the king’s chambers and went down more stairs to a meeting hall.
It was a massive room with more vaulted ceilings and fancy detail work. Charles V would have been astonished to see their renovations. This section of the castle held mostly modern furniture and equipment.
They’d tried to match the stylistic sensibility of the histor
ic site, but the laptops laid out on the U-shaped meeting table were a dead giveaway. Thirteen people I assumed were immortals lined the expansive room, not counting James, Luc, and Aarika. From their lack of reactions, it was as though I’d just barged in on a meeting of the Rotary Club at a garden variety municipal building, not the French Immortal equivalent of the Hall of Justice. I’d expected them to all look like Adrian Paul or Christopher Lambert, but they came in different shapes, sizes, apparent physical ages, nationalities, and genders, ranging from Aarika, who looked young and fit, to a man so old and fat I expected him to keel over at any second from a massive coronary.
At the center of the room, on a pedestal nestled within the curve of the meeting table, was the severed head of a demon unlike any I ever had the displeasure to meet. Curved asymmetrical horns layered the sides of its skull and it rested on them, the arrangement of horns holding it upright atop the stone. In places the skin had flaked away or had been removed, but in the spots where it was intact, it was more scale than flesh and had a metallic sheen to it as if the being to which it belonged were a combination of animal and mineral. Two rows of jagged fangs the size of varying calibers of ammo cartridges filled its mouth, though some had been torn away by force, leaving subtle cracks in the jaw. Beatrice and Tabitha stood on the far side of the table. The whole scene was lit by a dim golden glow emitted by portions of the ghoulish centerpiece. That side of the head had crystallized irregularly, revealing the cranial cavity, from which the semitranslucent light seemed to pour.
You didn’t have to be a mage to feel power, electrical, spiritual, or otherwise, flowing around the room, from the immortals, the place, and especially from the head.