by Tal Bauer
On the floor, Acossio’s corpse shuddered, bowing up again.
“More are crossing through!” Linhart bellowed. “Destroy it!”
Luca raced to his side. “How?” He paled, watching Acossio’s mangled corpse writhe on the stone floor.
“Do something!” Linhart shouted.
Luca thrust his blade into the corpse, over and over, stabbing it everywhere. He kicked, trying to shove the mangled body as it began to collapse in on itself, into the void. He kicked harder, shoving the corpse until the raging wind died and the roar from the void faded.
Linhart watched the body as Luca gasped, doubling over with his hands on his knees.
He was the only one who saw the corpse shift.
“No!” He shoved Luca back, taking the brunt of the portal’s blowback as he threw himself down on the corpse and the void. A wave of gore exploded beneath him, warm and fresh and run through with the stench of rot and death and burning sulfur. He stayed down, taking the blast to the center of his chest.
He felt the portal collapse, fall away from him into the void. He almost fell with it, tumbling into the darkness.
Somewhere, there was screaming. Shattered stone. The ground shook beneath him.
And then, there was silence.
Linhart laid his head down, half on the corpse and half on the blood-drenched stone. He should have been excited about this much blood, should have reveled in it. Should lick the floors and roll in it.
But he couldn’t.
Exhaustion clung to him. The weariness of death.
Hands grabbed him. Spun him around. Luca’s face appeared, worry staining his eyes and darkening his expression.
Somewhere beyond Luca, a man wailed, bellowing his sorrow at the top of his lungs. A blade clattered to the ground.
Brother. Brother, don’t go. Not yet.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cristoph couldn’t speak when he saw what had been done to Alain. He couldn’t do anything except scream out his soul to the shaking rafters of the crumbling church.
Clemente closed his eyes and crossed himself. He whispered prayers over Alain’s breathless body. Tear tracks spilled from the corners of Alain’s still eyes, salt lines drying on his skin.
Alain’s blade clattered to the floor as Cristoph buried his face against Alain’s stomach, his hands fisting in the remains of Alain’s cut-away shirt. His tears soaked the fabric beneath his face. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
Luca’s shout broke through the rumble of the church. “We have to leave, now! This place is coming down!” He appeared at Clemente’s side, blood-spattered and sweat-stained, his normally perfect hair standing on end, soot marring one side of his face.
The Holy Father finished his prayers over Alain’s body before he let Luca bustle him away from the collapsing apse.
Stone crackled above Cristoph’s head. One of the bronze chandeliers swayed and fell, crashing behind Luca and Clemente’s footsteps. A rafter collapsed, the wooden beam splintering as it hit the ground.
“You must go.”
Cristoph gripped Alain’s shirt tighter and turned toward the weary voice.
Linhart.
“I don’t want to leave him.” A caught sob warbled his voice, but Cristoph set his jaw and held his ground.
“He’s not gone. Not yet.” Linhart’s gazed at Alain’s body, at a space just above his shredded heart. “His soul clings to his body, even now. For you, I suspect.”
Cristoph grasped Alain’s shirt, his ruined body. “I love him,” he whispered. He couldn’t have had the realization at a worse time.
Linhart nodded. His breaths were weak and wet, and he leaned heavily on the altar. One hand rose, holding Cristoph’s dropped blade.
He sliced from his wrist to his elbow, opening his veins and letting the last of his vampiric blood flow into his palms.
“I can give him another life.” Linhart held his cupped palm, full of vampire blood, over Alain’s lips.
Cristoph’s breath faltered. Alain, back from the dead. Alain, at his side again. Alain, alive.
No, not alive. A vampire. Undead. Would Alain even want to be reborn as a vampire? Would he even want to live as a dark creature?
Could he live without Alain?
Tears blurred his vision. “Please…” he breathed.
Linhart let his blood pour from his palms, coating Alain’s lips. He poured more into the ruins of Alain’s heart, into the sliced and torn muscle.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Alain heaved, a shuddering, rattling gasp rocking his body. His eyes flew open, and he stared up at Linhart, wild terror in his gaze. His hand rose, grabbing Linhart’s wrist. “No!”
“You have the choice, brother. You can choose your fate. You do not have to be a slave to darkness.” Linhart struggled against Alain’s hold. Dark blood oozed between Alain’s fingers, dripping down their joined arms. “You can stay in your life. You do not have to leave, Alain. Stay.” Linhart’s eyes darted toward Cristoph. “Stay with the one you love.”
Alain’s gasps shortened, growing weaker. His eyes flicked to Cristoph. Fresh tears flowed from the corners of his eyes, running down his face.
“Cristoph—”
“Please.” Tears poured from Cristoph’s eyes, ugly hot tears. “Stay.”
Alain’s breath faltered again.
Cristoph screamed through gritted teeth. “Alain!”
Eyes closed, Alain grabbed Linhart’s hand and dragged it to his lips, sucking down the vampire’s blood. He moaned as the blood flowed into his mouth, some escaping past his lips and dribbling down his chin.
The tears at his eyes shifted, changing to tears of blood cascading down the sides of his face.
Linhart smiled as Alain drank, and he lay his head down on the edge of the altar. His eyes slipped closed.
The church shuddered again, stone behind the apse tumbling free. Cristoph threw himself over Alain, covering him as Alain sucked the last of Linhart’s vampire blood from his body.
“We have to go.” Cristoph grabbed him, wrapping his arms under and around Alain and hefted him into his arms. The demon locks shattered. Alain sagged into him, rolling his blood-covered face against Cristoph’s chest.
Staggering, Cristoph stepped around Linhart’s body. Linhart fell back, and before his corpse could hit the floor, his body—unmade through his act—dissipated into dust and ash, sweeping around Cristoph’s ankles.
He ran down the center of the church as the walls came down around them. Glass shattered, wood splintered, and stone crumbled to dust, a cloud of destruction billowing behind him as he carried Alain out of the desecrated and destroyed church.
Cristoph collapsed to his knees and fell over Alain, pitching his forehead to the ground.
Clemente ran to their side. He wrapped Alain with a gaudy “I heart Rome” jacket lifted from the cart of souvenirs for sale left in the corner of the piazza. Luca squatted by the Bug, one hand on Lotario’s shoulder. Lotario was still out of it, his head lolling against the side of his car.
Alain’s bloody hand rose. He cupped Cristoph’s face.
Cristoph looked down, into Alain’s yellow eyes.
“For you,” Alain whispered. Blood burbled on his lips. “For you.”
Two Months Later
Cristoph woke face down, his face pressed to one of the last of Alain’s dirty shirts. His arms slid beneath his pillow, and his feet poked off the end of the bed.
Off the end of Alain’s bed.
When they’d returned to the Vatican—a bedraggled band of wounded holy warriors, a pope, and a barely alive vampire—Cristoph had ideas of what would happen next. He’d care for Alain, watch over him as he healed. Or recovered. Or whatever it was called when vampires were newly turned. Whatever it was, he thought he’d be by Alain’s side through it all. He thought they’d be together.
Of course, that wasn’t what happened. Not at all.
The night they got back, Angelo had been anxiously waiting for them
at the ruined Swiss Guard garrison. Cristoph had collapsed into his arms, exhausted and worn through and wrung out, and Angelo had taken him away, a heap of broken nerves and frayed spirit. He’d cleaned his cuts, bandaged his wounds. Listened to the whole story in silence.
Angelo had closed his eyes and bowed his head when Cristoph whispered what Alain had become.
The next morning, when he went searching for where the pope had taken Alain and Lotario, he was too late. They were gone. Clemente had whisked them away, taking them in a midnight helicopter ride off to Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s private retreat.
His heart had cracked, then, the first bit.
He tried texting Lotario next, but a stunning silence met every one of his one hundred and seventeen texts.
He moved into Alain’s apartment, bringing his single duffel up and setting his things alongside Alain’s. His T-shirts hung next to Alain’s button-downs in the wardrobe. His jeans went beside Alain’s black suits. His toothbrush lay next to Alain’s in the tiny bathroom.
Did vampires need to brush their teeth?
Would Alain ever return?
He spent the first month in Alain’s office, reading through texts and journals and books, trying to learn everything he could. He cleaned and repaired and then organized Alain’s office, filing loose papers and alphabetizing the books. Magical artifacts went on one shelf. Weapons on another. Tools on a third. He wanted it to look perfect when Alain returned.
Scattered on the floor, blown there by the blast through the garrison, were notes from a murder investigation Alain had filed away as unsolved. A dead end. A young priest, a clerk in the Vatican archives, drowned in the Tiber by melusine. An apparent suicide, but the unusual circumstances suggested supernatural murder.
A note in Alain’s scrawled, looping handwriting caught his eye. Victim was researching early Swiss Guard history at the Vatican.
He closed his eyes. At the end, it was easy to look back and see the connections. The demons had infiltrated deep in their quest to find the knights. To find Alain.
He went back to the Vatican archives and pulled up the young priest’s work. It was a slog, poking through ancient mementos and rotten remnants of journals, of sketches and half-bitten-off thoughts sketched on scraps of paper, the writer not intending for their words to last an eternity.
A torn and yellowed note written by Linhart made him pause. It was a bawdy tavern song, rewritten to sing of the Swiss Guard, and, if Cristoph squinted, he could see a double meaning. A song for the knights in hiding.
He found what the clerk had been researching: burial records for the first of the Swiss Guard. The first captain, the man who led the knights back to Rome, Captain Kaspar von Silenen, was buried in the Teutonic Cemetery in the Vatican, back when it had been an empty hill and a grove of quiet trees. A place of solace for eternity.
He’d been buried with two swords. A charcoal sketch yellowed with age showed both. His knight’s blade, identical to Alain’s—to Cristoph’s—and a larger, longer broadsword, almost as long as the captain was tall.
The artist had gone to great pains to show the gleam of the broadsword, little lines of light and shadow falling from the rubbed charcoal, even hundreds of years later.
Cristoph headed to the Teutonic Cemetery, an oasis of overgrown trees walled in on all sides, sitting in the ominous shadows of St. Peter’s Basilica. Red snubs of candles burned on Commandant Best’s headstone, the drops of wax bleeding down the front like blood, heading for the fresh dirt of his burial. He picked his way past Commandant Best’s fresh grave and wound his way toward the earliest tombs and the forgotten graves.
In the corner of the cemetery, the weeds thickened, the brambles grew waist high, and branches from cypress and orange trees seemed to block out all life, keep away all trespassers. Rotten fruit lay spoiled on the ground, and freshly fallen oranges waited to wither, nestled between fallen leaves and dead earth. No one, it seemed, came to the earliest graves and tombs.
He sighed when he found Captain von Silenen’s grave.
No one came to the earliest graves, it seemed, except for demons and grave robbers.
Captain von Silenen’s grave had been dug out, his bones open to the sky in the loose black dirt.
His hands were empty. The Templar Sword was gone.
He reburied Captain von Silenen as best he could and watched the sun set while sitting beside his grave, one hand on the mound of dirt covering him.
His life felt different, somehow. Larger, longer, now that he was connected to these men. Now that he shared their history and their lineage. He was one of them, part of something larger than himself, and after a lifetime of being disconnected, always on the outside, always at right angles to the world, he’d finally found a place to belong.
A place of the dead.
There would be no more running. Not from this.
Days rolled on, the heat of high summer descending over Rome.
No one bothered him. No one spoke to him. He was a ghost, as ignored as Alain had ever been. He caught the sidelong glares and silences that followed his every move.
Luca, especially, avoided him.
* * *
Luca knew it would come, the summons to Castel Gandolfo.
He just didn’t want to go.
He’d sent over half the guard to the Holy Father’s summer residence under Captain—now Major—Ewe’s leadership. He’d stayed behind in the nearly empty Vatican. He and Cristoph haunted the halls of the barracks and the rebuilt garrison offices.
He stayed far, far away from Cristoph.
Memories ghosted after him, like wisps of vapor and incense, or whispers muttered just out of reach. He woke every night drenched in sweat, clutching his sheets, nightmares of blood and flame tearing through his soul.
And different dreams. Thoughts he couldn’t file away, shadows of memories he couldn’t place. Like the way he knew how to wield the blade. Suspicion grew within him like a cancer, scratching at his soul.
When the summons came, he dutifully climbed into the Vatican car and sat in silence for the forty-five-minute drive across Rome. The city faded, turning to countryside and the villa-dotted landscape outside Castel Gandolfo. Fields of golden grasses and olive trees snaked across the countryside. A cloudless blue sky, unending and serene.
A perfect image of a perfect day.
It wasn’t a day for sorrow, but Luca felt the pull on his soul, the certainty that he wouldn’t survive this summons, not as he was now.
He was left alone at the front of the mansion, and it was up to him to climb the steps and enter. The heavy door closing behind him echoed throughout the spacious hall. He closed his eyes against hollow echo in his heart.
A note left on a tray by the door told him to head to an unused guest room in a corner of the summer residence the Swiss Guard hadn’t monitored in decades. As he walked through the empty, dust-filled hallways, he knew it was a place his men still didn’t venture.
He hesitated outside the door, trying to breathe. He didn’t want to face this. Didn’t want to face what was on the other side of the door. Sweat soaked through his suit, covered his neck. He gripped the strap of his messenger bag tight, his short nails biting into the leather.
Luca slipped inside.
Wet copper, the tang of iron, and a warm heat lay heavy on his tongue. He smelled damp earth, like a fresh grave. The beginnings of rot. Of something just past gone, a body needing to be buried. Mist seemed to cling to his skin. Lightning crackled behind his molars.
The room was dark, kept so by heavy drapes drawn over the window. A crack of light burned through the curtains, streaking a sunbeam across the floor.
Alain stood at the curtains, peering through the slip of light. A single ray curled across his sallow cheek.
Luca stared at the lines of Alain’s body, the lean form he’d served next to for twelve years. He tried to spot the differences, the changes that had already altered his existence. Linhart had been so far from human it h
adn’t even been fathomable to call him once a man, but Alain was Alain, a man Luca had spent almost half his life beside.
“I can hear your heart beat.” Alain spoke first, his voice barely a whisper, but deep enough to shake his bones. “I can taste your fear.”
“I’m not afraid of you. Not of what you’ve become.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
Luca snorted. So easy to fall back to insults, to twelve years of hatred and malice. And yet… “How are you? Really?”
“Really?” The curtain twitched back. Darkness closed around the room. “I’m a vampire. I’m a monster.”
Silence. “You’re still here, though. You’re alive.”
“I’m not alive.”
“You’re here, Alain.”
“I’m a monster. I’m everything I despise. Everything I hate most in the world. Everything I swore I would destroy.” The gleam of Alain’s yellow eyes burned into Luca. “I should be hunted and killed. I would kill myself, but the best part is… I can’t.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“I can’t even go suck down another vampire’s blood. It just so happens that there are no more vampires in Rome. The demons destroyed them all. I’m alone, Luca. Utterly alone. Do you know what happens to vampires who are alone?”
Silence.
“And!” Alain chuckled, the sound dark, like broken church bells. “I get to continue on, existing for who knows how long, knowing I carried the Devil’s soul inside of me. I let him back into the world!” Alain’s fist slammed into the wall. The whole room shook. Plaster fell from the ceiling.
“Linhart called it a noumenon. He said the demons don’t have souls.”
Alain fixed Luca with a dark glare, more heavy and dangerous than when he was alive.
Luca’s spine shivered. “Why did you call me here?”
It was Alain’s turn for silence. He collapsed into a chair by the window, his long legs snaking before him. His hair was a mess, all wild angles and standing on end. He grabbed a crystal tumbler and swirled it around, a heavy burgundy liquid coating the cut lines of the glass, falling in slow drags.