by Tal Bauer
Cristoph smiles down at him. He takes Alain’s face in his hands, holding him so tenderly. “Everything about you,” Alain murmurs, “is so strong. You bend for nothing and no one. You’re like gold that’s been through fire.” Cristoph drops a kiss to his lips. “I admire you so much…” Alain breathes against him.
Everything after is a blur, a searing mix of touches and kisses, of bodies sliding and hands stroking down muscles as lips drag over skin. He’s a mess, overstimulated nerves and a raw heart, and his bones are on fire as Cristoph rocks with him, pulling gasps and groans and promises from his kiss-bruised lips that Alain swears he’ll keep. It’s too much, much too much, and he’s going to explode, white-hot bliss ripping through him. Alain reaches for Cristoph, cradles his face in his hands, presses their lips together as his orgasm tears free of his soul, burning him alive, burning him anew.
“Cristoph,” he breathes, their lips clinging together. “I—”
* * *
Alain woke to a world of pain. His dream disappeared with a crack, vanishing into the ether, leaving him cold and bereft as he reached for empty air.
His bones ached. His muscles burned, as if flayed from his body. His skin felt too tight, pressing in on him from every wrong angle. He buried his face in his pillow, trying to block out the signals from his body.
He froze. Pillow. Bed.
Scrambling, Alain scooted back. Hands spread wide, he grasped at his sheets, spinning around. Dried blood fell from him, adding to the smears on his bed. He looked down. Someone had stripped him to his briefs. Even his boots were gone.
A sleepy groan made him whirl, spinning around until he was facing the chair set beside his bed. The chair he’d stayed up in all night watching over Cristoph while he slept.
The chair where Cristoph now sat, bleary eyed and yawning.
And looking pissed.
“Cristoph?” He shifted, grabbed his sheet and pulled it over his lap. Why was he nearly naked in front of Cristoph? His dreams, his torturous dreams, flashed back. God, had Cristoph…? No, he wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. “What are you doing here?”
Cristoph frowned, somehow glaring through his sleep-haze as he pushed himself up. “What am I doing here? I dragged you back when you collapsed. What happened to you? You were torn to shreds.”
Looking down, Alain saw his unblemished chest, free of cuts, free of bruises. Dried blood clung to his skin, caught in his chest hair. He picked at it, rubbing it between his fingers.
“You asked me to smear that ashy blood all over you.”
No. God, no. Alain’s fingers froze as Cristoph spoke. He didn’t look up. Couldn’t meet Cristoph’s eyes. “Where did you find me?”
“Collapsed outside the Vatican Bank. I saw you crawling your way across the courtyard toward the barracks. You were bleeding out. Cut up. Soaking wet.” Cristoph hesitated. “When I got you up here, you made that bloody paste from that fucked-up chest in your kitchen.”
Alain cringed. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.
“You said it was vampires.”
Exhaling, he buried his face in his palms. Memories flashed back, snippets of scenes and sounds bled together, like films running on fast forward. The search in the sewers. The vampires attacking. Falling. The ring of Demon Fire.
The alpha vampire.
Escaping into the Tiber, the underground tributary beneath the city. Crawling onto the banks, exhausted after fighting melusine for an hour. Fighting for every single step, all the way into the Vatican.
Collapsing.
Clinging to a warm body. Wrapping his arms around his rescuer. Burying his face in a warm neck and smelling sunshine, green grass, and gunpowder.
Slicing Cristoph’s palm with a silver blade. Cristoph’s hands spreading the healing balm over his skin. Saving his life.
“What happened, Alain?” Cristoph’s whisper trembled. One of his hands reached out. It hovered between them. “What happened here?”
Swallowing the truth ached like swallowing a thousand knives. A complete traitor, his heart rebelled against his vow. Why not let Cristoph in? Why not tell him the truth? Why not try for that beach?
Dark years from his past, one blood-soaked night overflowing with screams and choking sobs, and his heartbroken vow, told him why not.
He pushed down his dreams, his vision of Cristoph—happy, breathlessly happy—and their slow lovemaking. Push it all down. Crush it all in the center of your chest.
Except, now Cristoph was in his heart, and when he crushed him there, he’d be crushing his heart for the second time in his miserable life.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Alain breathed. “I don’t normally drink—” His voice broke. Shame poured off him. With any luck, Cristoph would buy that it was the burning shame of an out of control man forced to own up to his failures. “I don’t normally drink because it brings out the crazy in me.”
Cristoph stared, his face screwed up, eyes narrowed, disbelief screaming from every line of his body.
“I’m sorry you had to see me like that.” Alain stood, wrapping the sheet around his waist. “I’m not proud of what I turn into.”
“No.” Cristoph jumped in front of Alain. “No. You’re not going to lie your way out of this. I know you weren’t drunk last night. Don’t treat me like I’m a fucking idiot. I know what I saw,” he hissed.
Alain couldn’t meet his gaze. “You have no idea what you saw.”
“Some kind of magic. Was it black magic?” Cristoph moved in front of Alain when he tried to escape, tried to bypass Cristoph. “Your lights blew out when you mixed that blood spell. Your cuts. They’ve vanished.” Cristoph slid in front of him again. “And you said vampires. You said the word.”
“I’m a crazy son of a bitch when I’m drunk.” Alain finally grabbed Cristoph’s shoulders and moved him to the side, never meeting his gaze. “The Vatican makes you crazy after a while. Don’t fall for my shit. Be smarter than that.”
Watching Cristoph blow his lid was like watching Pompeii erupt. His face twisted, racing from stunned to outraged to murderous in seconds. Hands fisted at his sides, shaking. “You think you can just make me ignore all of this because you say so?”
He was so exposed, so utterly exposed, and it had nothing to do with him standing in front of Cristoph in nothing but his briefs and a twisted bedsheet. He stared at the floor.
“What kind of sick fucking games do you play? What kind of fucked-up asshole are you?” Cristoph’s voice rose, deepening until he was bellowing, roaring at Alain.
In the doorway, Lotario appeared, hovering. His hair stuck straight up and dark circles clung beneath his eyes. His pinched look, the downward turn to his lips, hit Alain hard. He knew what Lotario wanted him to do.
I can’t. I just can’t.
“Cristoph—”
“I’ve had enough of your bullshit!” Cristoph hollered. “Of everyone’s bullshit! You’re everything everyone ever said about you! You are a fucking monster!”
“No—” Alain reached for him.
Cristoph slapped his hand away. “Fuck you!” He stormed out of Alain’s bedroom, the force of his rage sweeping through the apartment like a firestorm. He slammed into Lotario on his way out, shouldering him hard, and kept going.
Lotario took it silently.
The door crashing closed shook the walls. A picture in the front room rattled and fell, glass shattering. An iron blade tumbled from the bedside table.
His knees buckled beneath him and he dropped, falling in a heap. The white sheet flared around him. He hung his head, closed his eyes. Salt dug into his knees, scratching his skin. He shifted, and a broken shotgun shell rolled out from under the bedsheet.
Lotario slid down the doorframe, sitting with a sigh as he knocked his head back against the wood.
“Think he’ll buy it?” Alain’s voice rumbled, the words fracturing on the consonants.
“I healed his ankle.” Lotario nodded to the broken pieces of Cri
stoph’s cast, half under the bed.
“Fuck,” Alain whispered. “Goddammit.”
Silence strained the air as Alain crushed the shotgun shell in his fist. He threw it against the wall.
“We have another problem. We were led into a trap in the sewers. The vampires who attacked us didn’t kill the girl,” Lotario said, after a moment.
The alpha’s voice, like warm smoke caressing Alain’s spine, burned through his mind. “I know.”
Lotario frowned. “What happened? After the tunnel collapsed, the vampires were gone, and so were you.”
He sat back with a sigh, leaning against the edge of his bed.
And told Lotario everything.
* * *
Pounding in Archbishop Santino Acossio’s temples sent him back to his apartment late in the afternoon while the Roman sun smoldered over the city and heat waves rose from the pavement and cobbled streets. He’d spent the day in tedious negotiations, appointing nuncios to fill openings in Latin America. He’d had to end the last phone call early, cutting off the archbishop of Caracas almost midsentence.
He didn’t want to spend his days pandering to the aged drivel of men clambering for a richer station, for the trappings and mortal powers of the earthly world. Banal desires bored him.
Santino kept his apartment locked, unlike the other bishops and archbishops with whom he shared Saint Martha’s Residence. There was too much he kept hidden, too much that could be revealed.
An old iron key fitted into the antique lock set in his door. Metal clanged on metal, rust crunching as the key turned. A sigh of wood scraping over plush Turkish rugs greeted him as he pushed into his home. He dropped his briefcase by the front door and rubbed his eyes, and the hem of his cassock shifted across the wood floors as he headed for the kitchen. A glass of wine would set him right.
“Santino.”
He paused, one foot still in the air, at the sweet slide of a voice calling out his name from his front room. The voice was clean and cold, holding a touch of laughter inside. But not happy laughter. Mocking, if he had to put a name to it.
Turning, Santino stepped into his front room and stopped. He swallowed, his lips pressing together.
Asmodeus, or at least, the shadow of his being, cloaked in smoke and shuddering with darkness, perched on the edge of his French silk sofa. Rolling wisps of midnight mist tangled off the edges of the man-shaped column, sitting prim and with his head tilted to one side. The Venetian mask, white as death and plain of any decoration, hovered over the shadow where a face should be. Empty sockets in the mask, filled with black, still managed to stare into Santino’s soul.
Santino dropped to one knee, wincing as his old bones hit the floor. “My lord,” he breathed. “This is a surprise.”
“Why? You think that you can only summon me to appear? That I am constrained by your circle of silver and salt? Your runes?” A dry chuckle, like glass shards falling to the ground. “You devoted yourself to me, Santino. I can come to you whenever I choose.”
Santino licked his thin, aged lips. “It has been some time.” His hands fisted in the loose folds of his cassock. “I thought, perhaps, you had changed your mind.”
A whip of smoke, almost like the wave of a hand, and then a dark swirl circled lazily through the air. “The time was not right. There were others at work.”
“Others?”
“They don’t concern you. All you need to know is that they failed.” Asmodeus’s mask tilted again. “We require their work to be completed. Are you the man for the job, Santino?”
Santino’s gaze rose, meeting the empty eyeholes of Asmodeus’s mask. “And what do I get in return?”
Another flick of smoke. The mask gazed at Santino’s lavish apartment. “More of this?”
His lips curled back. “You already know what I want.”
Silence, save for the shift of smoke against smoke and a whiff of breeze that curled through Asmodeus’s shadow. “We require someone inside the Vatican,” Asmodeus finally said. “Someone who can gather information for us. Someone at the highest levels of the Eternal City.”
“What kind of information?”
“We need to find a man. A hunter.”
“Hunters in the Church died out long ago. The fourteenth century.”
“Do not presume to tell me what does and does not exist. Hunters exist today.” Asmodeus rose from the sofa. Ripples roiled through the shadows. “You know only what you’ve been told, and what you’ve been told has all been lies.”
Bowing low, Santino dropped his eyes as he pressed his palms to the wooden floorboards beneath his knees. “Tell me the truth of what you seek. I will complete this task for you.”
Papers at Santino’s desk rustled, moved by an unseen breeze. A heavy velvet curtain twitched.
“We search for a hunter. One man, the current descendant and bearer of the noumenon. He comes from a single line stretching back to when your kind lost their trail. Back to the fourteenth century.” Asmodeus floated across the floor, a shadowed mist that came too close. “Our first agent toiled through your archives. He was tracing the line of hunters. But he ran into troubles, and, sadly, he isn’t with us any longer.”
A whiff of smoke caressed Santino’s cheek.
“Our next agent was murdered.” Asmodeus pulled back, shifting until the smoke towered over Santino. “Before her task could even come to bear.” A soft tutting sound, almost disappointed. “Which paves the way for you.”
Santino pushed to his feet, steadying himself against the wall as he rose. “Tell me what you seek, and why, and I will find him for you. I swear I will. I will use the entire power and reach of the Vatican to search the world for you.”
“He’s here in Rome. You must identify him. You must find him.”
“And what will happen to this hunter when I do?”
Asmodeus’s mask tilted sideways and an almost childlike giggle escaped from behind the blank porcelain mask. Smoke shivered, moving quickly. “He will die,” Asmodeus said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “He must die.”
A moment passed, and then Santino bowed his head and closed his eyes. “It will be done, my lord.”
“See that it is.”
There was a pop and then a breeze, and when Santino looked up, the black column of smoke and shadow that was Asmodeus was gone. Even the mask had disappeared.
Santino grasped the doorway, leaning into the wood as his knuckles went white.
* * *
Alain was six cups of espresso too short for a conversation with Commandant Best. Still, the commandant persisted, bullying his way into Alain’s office, ignoring Alain’s red-eyed, hairy glares and the way his fingers white-knuckled his mug to hide his hands’ shaking.
Best didn’t waste any time. “What is happening? The polizia sent over a classified packet with information about a vampire murder, and His Holiness sent for a personal report.” Best’s eyebrows arched. “He’s never asked for a personal report before. Not once since taking over as the Holy Father.”
“Has he heard something? How could he have? We’re the only ones—”
“The camerlengo says His Holiness has been having troublesome dreams. He wakes from nightmares constantly.”
A scathing retort hovered on the edges of Alain’s tongue. “Dreams?” he snorted. “The last one didn’t care at all what we did, or how, and now, the new Holy Father says he’s having bad dreams just months into his papacy?” Alain scoffed. “Commandant—”
“I realize your faith is not as strong as it once was,” Best interrupted. “And that, despite working with the etheric and the paranormal every day, you refuse to entertain that which you cannot see with both eyes. Touch with both your hands.” Best sighed. “But His Holiness’s dreams are significant. He is tapped in to the etheric just as much as we are.”
“We?” Alain glared at Best over the rim of his espresso. “You are not involved any longer.”
“I passed the role on to you as it wa
s passed on to me. As you should be preparing to pass your duties on to someone else. You have done this long enough.” Best chewed on his upper lip for a moment, dragging the thin strip of red between his crooked teeth. “Is there anyone you could pass this on to? Someone… new, perhaps?”
“Jesus Christ.” Alain ignored the scathing look the commandant shot his way. “That’s what this has all been about, isn’t it? Getting me to be a mentor? Putting me with—” He couldn’t say Cristoph’s name. He just couldn’t.
“He reminds me of—”
“Don’t.” Alain slammed his espresso down. “Don’t say it. Don’t say his name.”
“Twelve years, Alain,” Best whispered. “It’s been a long time.”
“And yet, it feels like yesterday.” Alain pasted a wan smile on his face, trying to tell the commandant to back off and tread carefully through these bloody waters. Through these memories.
Best didn’t heed his warning. “The vampires are back.” He stared at Alain as he spoke, holding his gaze as if he didn’t know the world was dropping out from beneath Alain with those words.
Alain wanted to snarl, to scream, to shout and snap and rage. He wanted to wail at the sky and demand answers. He wanted to storm the sewers and burn the vampires’ bones. Boil the blood inside their bodies. Destroy their millennia-old civilization. Not just destroy. Desecrate. Scatter their bones and their lives to the winds, as his own life had been scattered. Had been destroyed.
He wanted to leave them with nothing but emptiness, a longing that could never, ever be filled. A waking nightmare for an existence. He wanted them all to suffer, as he had suffered.
He felt the weight of his office, of the long years of hunting, pull down on him like dust burying forgotten manuscripts. He felt the grounded power of demon trap beneath his feet, tugging on his bones. Runes etched into bits of teeth and claws stared at him from his shelves across the room. Scrolls of parchment inked with spells from dozens of civilizations piled haphazardly on the floor. He was just like the detritus of his office: a forgotten scrap of antiquity.