Night's Templar: A Vampire Queen Novel (Vampire Queen Series Book 13)

by Joey W. Hill

  “A demon at large is a concern to far more than the human race or even one vampire.” Keldwyn shifted to glance out the entranceway, then brought his attention back to Uthe, his dark eyes intent. “Did you not think to seek other help?”

  “All involved with it were sworn to secrecy, my lord. You know as I do what element is attracted to a power source like this. Containing the demon itself has often been an overwhelming effort. If news of it had gone beyond us…”

  Keldwyn frowned. “Yet it can compel weaker minds. Why would it not have made itself known to those with evil intent that way?”

  “As I said, it can only compel those minds, not identify itself to them. And even if it could, the demon does not reside in this realm. It is beyond the reach of those with malevolent purpose.”

  Awareness dawned on Keldwyn’s face. “The Shattered World. That is what you have imprisoned in the Shattered World. And Reghan suggested this?”

  “Reghan and Shahnaz.”

  The Fae Lord digested that. “It makes sense. Magwel was in line for the Unseelie throne, and had the ear of the Queen then. He could have asked her help to open a portal there. Since that was before he and Magwel dissolved their relationship, she would have agreed with little explanation.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why worry about a weapon to send it back to a place it escaped once before? Why not leave it in the Shattered World for all eternity?”

  “Because there is more to it.” Uthe held Keldwyn’s gaze. “I would prefer to explain further after I attend to Fatima, my lord. Please.”

  “I tire of waiting for the full picture, Lord Uthe,” the Fae said, an edge to his voice. “It feels like you are deliberately keeping me ignorant to serve other purposes.”

  “I swore a blood oath never to speak of this to anyone but those who had to know to achieve God’s will.” Uthe rose to his feet, faced him. “I have always had to weigh carefully who I tell of this, never blurt things out hastily that cannot be retrieved. Yet you now know more than anyone alive, except myself. Draw your own conclusions from that, my lord, when I ask you for patience.”

  “I’ve never known you to blurt out anything, my lord.” Keldwyn’s expression eased some. “I believe current circumstances suggest I am now part of those who need to know.”

  “Yes. I agree. It makes sense to me that someone with your intelligence and power would be sent my way now, when the integrity of my own mind is degrading.” Uthe forced out the words, though the last one caught in his throat. “Yet I will be frank, my lord. I do not know your full motives for coming on this quest with me, but I know you serve both the Unseelie and Seelie Fae royalty. I have had one task to honor above all others. This noble woman died for it, and she was not the first. No matter how much my heart wants to trust you, the mind and heart are intertwined. If I cannot trust the integrity of my mind, I will not fail after all these years because your attentions make me wish for things I have set aside. I must be certain I can trust you, and for that I need your faith. I need your trust.”

  Uthe paused. He hadn’t realized all those thoughts had been there, just waiting to be said, building up throughout their journey together, and that journey had only just begun. Keldwyn was staring at him with an unreadable expression. Uthe inclined his head and spoke stiffly. “I am going to prepare her body now. Do as you will.”

  Taking the blanket from her cot, which still smelled like her body despite the less pleasant scents saturating the chamber, he wrapped her up in it, and lifted her tenderly in his arms. So light and small. Humans seemed fragile as birds when they died. Even some of his fellow Templars in full mail had felt that way to him when he carried them from the field.

  He left the chamber, moving back into the warren of tunnels. One led to the water source, a trickle through the rocks that splashed into a pool no bigger than a bucket. Laying her down on the floor of the cavern, he removed her torn and bloody clothes. She had a stack of wash cloths and towels back here, and he doused one in the water, using it to clean her. Then he wrapped her in the silk. Sitting back on his heels, he gazed at her once more, seeing the strength of her features despite the decomposition.

  It was rare for a vampire to be known to one family through so many generations. He’d seen the physical and personality traits Haris and Shahnaz possessed resurface or meld with the features of each successor who took on the mantle of magic and the responsibility of adding to their knowledge. Whatever Fatima had discovered had been built on their dedication.

  In her younger days, Fatima had been a nearly perfect physical replica of Shahnaz. It was as if, after a certain number of cycles, the genetics returned in full force. In Fatima’s flawless features, he was able to see what Shahnaz’s beauty would have been unmarred. It was not the only way the two women were similar. Shahnaz had made the first major breakthrough with the demon.

  When they’d unearthed the demon’s container under Solomon’s Temple, they’d found the binding on the vessel had an imminent expiration date. Up until then, Uthe had questioned the wisdom of removing the demon from where he’d been hidden, but that had suggested the discovery had God’s favor.

  Shahnaz had found a way to contain the spirit indefinitely. Relics had been useful to the binding, but finding a way to lock them to the demon and ensure the prison could not be breached as the years progressed had required magic of an extraordinary complexity. “Binding something so a smart person can’t figure out how to unlock it is difficult, but not impossible. Finding a way to protect something from random chance and dumb luck is the true challenge.”

  He smiled. He’d heard computer experts say something similar about hacking. Appropriate, since technology had always seemed like magic to him. Shahnaz had at last found the right combination of spell craft, but it had nearly come too late. As the demon was breaking free from his older, weakened bindings, she’d shouted the right words and laid the architecture of his new prison. It pulled him back into captivity—barely.

  He’d visited her shortly after it had happened. She’d looked as if she’d aged fifteen years, and he’d seen her only a year ago. Yet the close call with the demon didn’t matter to her. She brushed aside his concern, having more important things to tell him. For years she’d lived with the demon’s daily threats that it would break free and do unspeakable horrors to her, so Uthe guessed the threat nearly becoming reality hadn’t been enough to rattle her. She only wanted to talk to him about one thing.

  The angel who’d shown up on her doorstep right afterwards.

  * * *

  “You expect them to come down in a blaze of light and clouds, with wings gilded by a heavenly glow.” She unwrapped a sweetmeat and offered it to him. When he declined, she gave him a cup of tea instead and sat on a cushion, her feet drawn up as she rocked on the point of her buttocks. She preferred to wear loose cotton pants with a tunic over it, a man’s clothes, and she kept her hair hacked short. Though her face was a tragedy, she had a curvaceous body any man might desire. She stayed cognizant of that, though her reputation as a witch woman kept most at bay except those who needed her healing tonics. She lived in France, in a stone cottage in the forest, near the village of La Couvertoirade.

  “He showed up outside my door a day after it had happened. I thought a flock of birds had landed, and when I looked, his wings were folding up along his back. The eyes he turned upon me, they had no whites, my lord. His power was fearsome, overwhelming, but he was not unkind. He told me that he came to claim the demon, to destroy its container and send him back to Hell. Apparently when the binding faltered, enough energy from the demon had escaped to alert the heavens of the potential imbalance. Can you imagine? At first I got so excited, for all these years we thought we were facing this alone, but here was a potential ally of unspeakable power.”

  She rolled her eyes, looking so much like a fishwife at her wit’s end with her husband that Uthe almost grinned, despite the seriousness of it all. “But I should have remembered that the gods, by whatever n
ame we call Them, have their own agenda.”

  She pushed up the tunic, showed him an arm that had been burned to the bone. “I was still unsettled by this, else I would have known better. And the bastard gave me these white streaks of hair.” She ran a hand through the short crop, ruffling it. “The demon, not the angel.”

  “You should have called me, Shahnaz.”

  “To what end?” She eyed him. “You are a powerful vampire, my lord, but you are no magic user. There is risk in what we do here, we know it.”

  “I meant to help with this decision, with the angel.”

  She shook her head. “The binding has been perfected, Lord Uthe. Thanks to your connection to Lord Reghan, we’ve secured a place to put the demon and the relics guarding it, far beyond the reach of man. Beyond the reach of any but yourself, really. Foolproof, since fools are the cleverest among us.”

  “You said the angel was going to take it.”

  “Yes. But I convinced him the sacrifice was too great.” Shahnaz’s eyes grew serious, and she closed both hands over one of Uthe’s. “We cannot vanquish the demon at the expense of the others who share his prison. Giving him that victory would fuel evil in a way that would be worse than unleashing the demon upon the world. That was the argument I made with the angel.”

  Uthe imagined the sorceress standing toe-to-toe with a member of the heavenly host and making her point. It reminded him of Haris, the way the female Assassin had fought him that first time, so fearlessly. “I should have liked to see an angel, Shahnaz. Was he magnificent?”

  “He was.” A wistful look crossed her features. “He touched my face, and I felt beautiful. He told me if I let go of my anger, the scars would be only on my face, not my soul. As he departed, I saw several others with him. One of them winked at me, playful as a rogue, and then they were gone, following him back into the clouds.”

  * * *

  Uthe came back to the present and the silk clad body at his feet. If the angel had destroyed the demon, what would Uthe’s life have been? Possibly not much different from now, since he’d spent most of the past centuries waiting on the sorceresses to find the solution while he became involved in the politics and future of vampires. At first he’d steered clear of those things, thinking this might pull him away from the vampire world without notice, but he’d learned it made more sense to live his life fully.

  In a heartbeat, anything could end life as one knew it. Anticipating that was no way to make the most of the life the Lord had given him. His mission had not stopped him from joining his brethren at the tragedy of Hattin, and it was who he’d met as a result of that bloodbath that had given Shahnaz access to the Shattered World. There was no telling where life would take a man, but he had to live it to follow the path God gave him.

  After dislodging enough rock to form a proper covering over Fatima, he knelt and said the necessary prayers for her soul and his grief. Rising, he placed a hand on one of the rocks.

  “It won’t be in vain,” he promised her. “Unless my brain has gotten too stupid to figure out the clues you left me.” Wouldn’t that be a sad irony? Almost laughable, if he felt like laughing. Instead, he found himself wishing for Keldwyn’s company. Good or bad, the male’s presence steadied him, though he had no idea what the Fae was thinking after he’d made such a raw declaration about his feelings. But honesty was all he had now, and his only demand was for Keldwyn to give him the same. It was not the first time Uthe might have to accept painful truths, but he preferred them to sugar-coated lies.

  Enough of that. He had more important things to address, a puzzle to solve. He headed back toward the main chamber where a ceiling full of ciphers awaited. It had taken generations of sorceresses nine hundred years to find the solution for sending a demon back to Hell. Hopefully, it would not take him that long to translate it from Fatima’s walls.

  Chapter Eight

  When Uthe returned to the main chamber, Keldwyn didn’t ask him further questions. The vampire looked somber from laying the sorceress to rest, so Kel let him begin his study of the ceiling and walls, and his examination of Fatima’s books and notebooks, while Kel stood watch at the cave opening. He would go hunting once he sensed other demon pawns drawing closer. Until then, he refused to go so far out of range that he couldn’t return to Uthe’s side in a matter of moments.

  While Keldwyn had been frustrated by Uthe’s secretiveness, he knew Uthe was very much like himself. Dire consequences could result from a loose tongue: lives lost, secrets jeopardized. Withholding information was driven by those concerns, not a covetous need to keep everything to oneself, or an inability to extend trust when needed. Well, not entirely. Keldwyn was still reviewing Uthe’s harsh words in his mind. On each replay, they roused a different reaction in him.

  Uthe was an intellectually gifted male, one who rarely let himself act without thought. Though he’d frequently noted the fit hardness of Uthe’s body, the battle readiness of it, Keldwyn had rarely seen the male use those assets. As a result, Keldwyn had begun to think of him more as a bookish scholar, a Machiavellian strategist, than a vampire ready to combat violence in any situation. The day he’d watched him spar with Daegan, he’d been mesmerized, as if he’d seen a harmless garden snake sleeping in the sun suddenly morph into a striking asp.

  When they’d fought their way into the cave, Uthe’s measured and thoughtful consideration to every matter of import had been replaced by quick, brutal decisiveness.

  “Thus in an astounding and unique manner they appear gentler than lambs yet fiercer than lions.” Keldwyn had read the three texts Uthe kept by his bed: St. Bernard’s “In Praise of the New Knighthood,” The Rule of the Templars and that anonymous letter addressed to the order around 1130. The quote came from St. Bernard’s text, and Keldwyn had found it astounding in truth, the way Uthe unleashed an inner savagery for battle.

  Now—that deadly warrior side put away—Uthe leaned forward, tracing one of those hundreds of symbols climbing up the walls. The motion made the tunic pull across his shoulders and buttocks. Uthe stretched upward as he followed a line of text with his fingertips along the arch of wall to ceiling. His dark brown eyes were flickering, his mouth moving silently, talking to himself.

  Keldwyn’s first direct exposure to vampires had been through Lyssa’s father, Reghan. Keldwyn had been confounded by his best friend’s inconceivable love for a female of the fanged species. He’d brutally rejected the idea, trying in every way to dissuade him. It was incomprehensible, that a Fae could truly love a creature so inferior to himself. Beyond race, there was class. Even among the high Fae, Lyssa’s father was a cut far above, linked by blood to both the Unseelie and Seelie royal families.

  Keldwyn had been several hundred years old then. He hadn’t recognized his opposition to Reghan’s relationship with a vampire was fueled by more than his fear of what would happen to Reghan if he pursued it. He had reacted to his own hurt at being rejected. Yes—trite as the saying was—love was indeed blind.

  Until his death, Reghan had counted Keldwyn his closest and best friend. Never had one word had the potential to hurt so much, but Kel eventually understood the value and honor of being the male’s friend. He hoped he’d honored what it had meant in his actions ever since, not only in doing his best to protect both of Reghan’s daughters in the face of often violent politics, but in finally getting over his heartbreak enough to bring the two races closer together. It had taken him a few hundred years to give it his full energy, but the Fae were known to hold a grudge.

  In his defense, during that time, he’d experienced vampires who were nowhere near as commendable members of their species as Uthe and Lyssa. More than once, he’d decided his initial impression of them as creatures limited in intelligence due to the inescapable hold of blood lust and an inability to overcome their predator instincts was correct, the exception far less common than the rule. But then he’d seen the formation of the Council. He’d watched while Lyssa and others like her had determined—since their nature
could not be suppressed or changed—to guide and channel it with such concepts as the vampire-servant bond, and Council rules governing basic behavior to protect vampires from general human awareness of their existence.

  Lyssa was half-Fae, though. He’d ultimately expected such sensible behavior from her. It was Uthe who’d taken Keldwyn’s impression of full blooded vampires from benign disfavor and tolerance into a belief they could be something…more.

  Lord Varick Uthe. Varick was a good name for him, far better than Uthe. Keldwyn’s lips twisted. Perhaps it was no different from long ago. Then he’d used his belief in the inferiority of vampires to mask his resentment that Lyssa’s father had chosen one over him. Now he used his revised opinion of their intelligence to avoid the truth. One particular vampire had caught his attention for far more personal reasons.

  It had made sense to cultivate a good relationship with the right hand of the Council, but that had not included weekly chess matches, strolls through the gardens debating history, social inequity, or trading stories accumulated from their combined years and travels. After seeing Uthe spar with Daegan, Keldwyn would have added practice combat to their regular interactions, but this task had interfered with that pleasurable prospect.

  Kel, you have become entangled with a vampire yourself. Wherever Reghan is, he is laughing at you. All the more because Reghan had set that situation up himself. What would Uthe think when Kel finally revealed that?

  Before he was to be executed, Reghan had called Keldwyn to him. He remembered every word his friend had spoken to him, his facial expressions, the press of his strong hand, as vividly as if it had happened a moment ago. But the words that had meant the least to Keldwyn were what had resounded in his head the first time Lyssa had introduced him to her Council. “This is Lord Uthe, my right hand advisor on Council. Once upon a time, he was a Templar Knight, so he tends to be more honorable than the rest of us…”