Night Blessed

by Megan Blackwood

  The creature—I could not give it the name Lucien, as if denying the person he had been freed him from this monstrous thing that he had become—stilled. The shadows wrapped around his body settled, their thrashing limited now to quick and spasmodic jerks, as if he were experiencing an electric shock. His eyes, rolling in wild panic before, fixed on me. Saw me—not a sunstrider, not an enemy—me, Mags. Magdalene. His, once.

  That recognition rocked me to the core, pushed me back a step so that my back crashed into the door I'd left ajar behind me. Not gone, my Lucien. Subsumed, but not gone.

  It would be so much easier if he were gone.

  "Magdalene." It—he—rasped the word, as if the sound of human speech were as alien to him as his screeching had been to me. The word raked shivers down my spine, and not in the pleasant way his voice had once done. No. No. This was wrong, all wrong. It had to end.

  Tightening the grip on my blade I drew, hard as I could, upon the thin power the sunlight had left—a lingering of warmth—upon my skin, and the power given over to me by mortal blood. Seamus I had fed from last, and I felt an effervescent shock, like a champagne cork giving way, as the strength of his blood rose in me and some distant sensation, some power for which there was no name, hissed in delight at having been used.

  Flames of light licked the edge of my blade, sealing over the places in the metal where his darkness had pitted the gold like strong acid. Whatever of Lucien had risen to the surface of the creature fled in a shattered panic.

  It flattened itself against the wall—truly flattened—then shattered into ragged strips of shadow like graveyard cloth, becoming so unsubstantiated that it slipped free of the chains. Metal clanked to the floor, a thundering sound that jerked at my heart, and the oily feeling of broken wards slicked the air.

  To think was to fail. I lashed out, slashing toward the core of the Lucien-thing with all my strength. It screamed—his voice, his pain, the very sound shaking me so soundly that I dropped my blade and staggered back, the flame of sunlight going out the second the steel left my hand.

  That didn't stop the damage, though. Light help me, it would not stop.

  Great furls of fire tore through the shattered pieces of Lucien, tracing his many-jointed limbs in terrible light, raising red shadows in the void depths of his eyes. The thing—thing, thing, always a thing—tossed its head and screamed, its body slamming back together as the sound tore from its throat, its shadow-forms curling with smoke black as bile at the edges, painting greasy streaks across the walls.

  The pieces of his being reassembled—damaged, but whole—and he was just Lucien again. Just a man standing barefoot in dark jeans and a black t-shirt, his hair swooped low across his forehead, the only sign that there was anything—anything at all—different from a mortal man the black orbs of his eyes, and the silvery cast to his pale skin. I forgot myself, and reached for him.

  He jerked back, stumbling against the window frame, his fingers piercing the wall easily as he steadied himself, his mouth jerked open to reveal distended fangs, too big for his jaw, the illusion of mortality—faint though it was—shattered as the scent of nightwalker—something more than nightwalker slammed into me.

  "What... what did they do to you?" They. A simple lie, a protecting lie, for it had been me who stepped into the ring of Ragnar's ritual, and Lucien who pushed me out of the way, putting himself in my place. Taking the brunt of whatever corrupted magic the Venefica poured through her veins.

  Commotion below dragged me out of the haze of pain and memory. Humans shouting, the stomp of feet up stairs. Raina's party. Talia. A whole gathering of humans—a hundred easily—below this chained creature of the nightwalkers. Maeve's magic had all but shattered upon me entering that door, there was no way they hadn't overheard the fight.

  Or his screams, as if torn from some other plane of horrible existence.

  I half-turned, unwilling to lose sight of Lucien but equally unwilling to let a mortal through that door and into the maw of the beast I faced.

  "I'm sure it was nothing!" Talia's voice was breathless as she raced up the steps after the other mortals. I couldn't let Talia get close to this thing Lucien had become. Couldn't risk her like that.

  I spun back to him, kicking my blade into my hand, pushing back every instinct I had to say something—anything—to plead with him to somehow undo what he'd become. Hopeless, stupid, the words died like ash in my throat and I came at him, blade swinging, unable to summon the fire again but I saw the way his limbs trembled, the pink weals around his bare arms and wrists. He was hurt. Tired. I would have no better chance.

  My traitorous muscles let me put all my strength into the swing, let me drive the blade toward his unprotected heart. His eyes widened, seeing not me, but something over my shoulder, something that made his whole body shudder. He brought his hands up, fingers twisted to claws twice the length they should have been, the cruel arc of them bending to shield his face, to hide his eyes. Why his face, when I struck for the heart?

  His being shimmered, unstable, as if he were getting ready to fly to pieces again.

  A mortal voice, Raina's, raised in indignant rage. "Who the hell—"

  Mortal concerns felt so far away, as if they were all slowed in time. Lucien and I moved on another level, supernatural strength and speed guiding our minds and bodies, though he had the edge under the shadow of night. A promise of another power, one I did not know, stirred within me. I pushed it away.

  He was in the window before I could follow, crouched, his hands up to cover his eyes. He was ashamed, and did not want me to see them.

  "You should not have freed me," he pleaded, voice soft with pain.

  Glass shattered, exploded inward and outward in a whirlwind of glittering, silvery shards. The curtains surrounding the broken window twitched up, the pull of the wind whipping them into white, gauzy smoke that shielded Lucien's body from view as he threw himself, backward, into the dark. A woman behind me screamed, the startled reaction of fear, not pain, and I heard Talia's voice rise above, trying to soothe, trying to help.

  There wasn't anything I could do for the fear of mortals, but Lucien's presence hooked me, yanked me forward. The oath screamed at me to undo this blight upon the world. I sheathed my blade and threw myself after him, tucking to roll down the steep roof outside the window, and landed in a crouch in the back alley.

  Clouds slithered across the full face of the moon, dipping the street into impenetrable darkness. Lucien's celestial mistress giving him a helping hand, no doubt, but my eyes were just as keen in the dark as they were in the day, and I was no longer trying to hide myself away from mortal eyes. His scent clung to the air, a sillage of darkness so thick I imagined I could see it, winding behind him like a trail of smoke.

  "Seamus," I said into my earpiece. "Following Lucien on foot. Talia is secure, no other nightwalker presence in the building."

  "Lucien?" His voice strained over the name, as if he were afraid to say it. "Roisin is on her way. I'll alert DeShawn, too. Hold tight, Mags. We're coming."

  The concern in his voice would have warmed me, if there were any part of me left to be warmed. The hunt thrummed in my blood, the oath screaming for action, and as I sprinted forward, my blade coming easily to my hand, I tried not to think of the mortal man I had seen, the moment all too brief, standing there in jeans and a t-shirt. Unarmed, vulnerable, fighting his own body from becoming the weapon that sprouted claws and double-joints and poured like black rain across the walls of his prison.

  Not Lucien. Something else, something monstrous. Something keeping my Lucien from a proper, peaceful rest.

  And that would not stand.

  Nine: Sanctified

  I tracked him to a park, the vibrant grass slick with dew from sprinklers. He'd gone to no effort to hide his path, and though that should have worried me I thought he was not in the frame of mind for subterfuge. The creature I had seen had been one of raw and undulating powers driven by animal instinct alone. There was no gu
ile in the thing that had shattered to save itself.

  And yet, the thing had run straight as an arrow across the grass to a cathedral. A church.

  Though small compared to the grand structures of my days, some architect had taken it upon themselves to hearken back to that old grandeur by crafting the thing in the gothic style. Flying buttresses reached out from its body to touch the ground like spider legs. A massive rosette of stained glass perched in the space above the doors.

  The ajar doors. Muddied footprints raced up the grey marble steps. One of the grand double-doors had been wrenched open with such force that it stood crooked, the top hinge broken. I paused in the wet grass, hesitating. All the old stories about holy water and vampires not being able to cross the threshold of a church weren't true. But that didn't mean the holy places of humans were comfortable for us.

  Stepping foot on hallowed ground drained us as surely as night drained sunstriders or day drained nightwalkers. Whether or not mortal gods existed, I was not the one to say, but I knew how it felt to walk their holy ground. Knew the itching-skin feeling of being watched, and scorned.

  I hated churches. Beautiful though they were, I could not cross their thresholds without feeling as if I was some terrible interloper in the world of mortals. As if, despite my oath, the holy space of humans recognized me as nothing more than a bloodsucking abomination, and rejected me.

  Whatever forces burgeoned in holy spaces, they were probably correct. And facing that... facing that was the last thing I wanted to do while hunting Lucien to his end.

  But he had entered that place willingly—some memory of his mortal days causing him to seek succor, as he had traveled to the monastery?—and in doing so had weakened himself. He could hand me no better moment to strike.

  And that broke all illusion that he was gone, and that only the monster remained.

  I crossed the threshold.

  A compulsion to flee ran through me. The air gripped me, thick and viscous, as if trying to congeal into a wall that I could not pass. My vision swam, starbursts of candle flame sparking at the corners of my eyes. The very light in this place rejected me, shunned me as a thing beyond that which this structure was built to shelter.

  I was a vampire. I made no compunctions about what I was. Though I dedicated my unlife to the defense of mortals, I was yet their antithesis. I could kill an innocent mortal, if I so chose. Could break them between my fingers, or drain them dry. I chose not to. This is the fine line, the distinction that allows mortals to suffer my presence while they decry my nightwalker kin.

  Hallowed ground had no room for the granularity of choice. It saw what I was, what I was capable of, and rejected me.

  Unclean, my body screamed at me as I took another step within those blessed walls. A filthy stain upon the shining marble, black ink spilled across clean parchment. Something to be excised, shunned, burned out of the world of humanity. Shame welled within me, a prickling mix of anger and hurt causing my throat to swell and catch.

  No wonder my ancestors fought their small skirmishes against the church. Though my mortal memories were hazy, I had never been religious. I had been a dancer, a fringe-person, already shunned by this institution that tried to reject me now. If I had loved the church, well... How easy it would have been for this oppressive feeling to twist that love into hate.

  Lucien had loved the church, and nightwalkers remembered their mortal lives—brands of fire stamped over their hearts, a taunting, teasing memory of what they had lost for all eternity—while their memories of their unlives as nightwalkers remained as hazy as my memories of mortality.

  He bent before the altar. Shadows lay fractured on the ground around him like broken glass, his body clothed in the human attire I had seen earlier, his spine bent in a way not at all human. His forehead kissed the ground, palms arced as if in agony across the floor, arms stretched out toward the seat of belief that had rejected him. So kinked was the line of his spine that it took me far too long to realize he was weeping, his body undulating to an unseen throb that caused him to pulse in waves.

  Thin. The word came to me unbidden. Whatever had twisted him beyond his mortal frame was sucking the essence from him, hollowing once firm, angular cheeks and making his muscles lie like ragged sheets across the knobby expanse of his many-jointed body. The broken shadows spread around him twitched as if cockroaches half-swatted, still enough life left within them to leap up again.

  "What are you?" I breathed.

  His body jerked as if an invisible hand yanked him to his feet by the tops of his shoulders, his toes scraping the ground as he hovered before the altar. Scattered shadows twitched faster, the strongest leaping to him, bleeding into his skin as if water onto fabric.

  "Hers," he rasped through a throat as dry as burial veils.

  Unbidden, jealousy roused within me. Mine. One hand on my blade, I dropped the other to the pistol Roisin had given me and took a step forward. His body shuddered as if I'd flicked a pebble into a pond.

  "Who is she?"

  He bent, too-long arms grasping either side of the altar, his claws extending to dig into the dark-stained walnut. His skin rippled as if repulsed by the sanctified wood, but he held on, his muscles convulsing beneath the thin cover of his clothing.

  "Don't make me," he whispered, rocking back and forth. "Please."

  "Lucien," I said his name the same way you might beseech a raving dog, taking another careful step forward as he pressed his chest upon the bible that lay, open, on top of the altar. A jolt went through him. Unseen powers jerked him away, ripping his claws from the wood. Splinters exploded outward, stained by his brackish blood, and something in the air popped.

  The pressure of the holy ground gave against me, as if I'd pushed too hard on that thickening membrane and, overburdened, it had given up all hope of holding back the blood-chained creatures that swarmed it.

  "Who is she?" I asked again, thinking of the possibility of a younger nightwalker we had yet to identify.

  He turned. Slowly, spinning as if being twisted from above, toes dragging over the cool floor, the shadows at his feet twitching and leaping, re-adhering themselves to his body. Too-long arms spread wide, his claws uncurled, his chest pressing forward against an unseen force.

  Light splashed across his body, multi-hued fractures of green, blue, orange, red, a kaleidoscope of color. Moonlight, I realized, far too late, filtering through the church's rosette. Feeding him strength, feeding him power—but not his own. Never that.

  "Hers," he said again, and laughed a low, raspy sound, his shoulders jerking.

  He was beholden of the moon. More than a nightwalker, he was an avatar of that silvery strength. An embodiment of the moon's cruel power.

  He hit the ground in a crouch, head snapped back so that his black eyes fixed on me like a hunting dog pointing. Any hint of my Lucien dissolved, his body a vessel for the power of that light—a light that existed only to reveal how dark the world could be.

  Many mortals thought the moon a gentle creature, a soft mistress of silken, watery light.

  They were wrong. Luna was a right bitch, and she faced me now, sneering at me through my lover's tortured eyes.

  "You cannot have him," I heard myself say as if from a distance, and she laughed. Oh, how she laughed, not a sound passing through Lucien's lips, but a soft twinkling of metal on the air throughout the whole of the church.

  He lunged. My world tilted as our bodies collided, my back slapped the ground and my arm flew wide, dropping the blade. His claws bit into my arms, his teeth—a maw unlike any other, many-fanged and grinding—latched into my shoulder and tore, ripping out a hunk of flesh. The contact of his saliva burned like silver poison.

  I screamed, jerking, and shoved my knee up between us, prying him off with all my strength. Seamus's blood sparked within me, lending me power, and I lined my talons with golden flames and slammed my hands into his chest.

  He reeled away screaming, clawing his burning shirt free. Runnels of scars t
raced his chest, a geological map of pain that flared silver as it lapped up my golden fire. I rolled, ducking behind a pew. Blood gushed from my shoulder. The wound was poisoned and would not heal without sunlight, pure and unfiltered. I hissed and pressed my hand against it, a futile effort to stem the flow. Whatever power Seamus's living blood had granted me bled out with the wound, my limbs growing heavy.

  I'd once told Adelia that standing beneath a full moon was one of my favorite times, as it was the closest I ever felt to mortal. I had not lied, then. I wished I had.

  Lucien's broken shadows swirled up from the ground, snapping over his bare chest like interlocking plates of armor. He snarled, body rounding forward as he stalked around me in a narrow crescent, wary of the fire that'd lashed him but knowing instinctively that he held the upper hand.

  "I need back-up. Now," I hissed into the earpiece.

  "DeShawn is on his way, lights and sirens, and Roisin is right behind him. Hang on, Mags. Run, run if you have to."

  I could not run. Just as I could not reach up and pluck the moon from the sky to grind beneath my heel, but I didn't expect Seamus to understand that. His voice was laced with fear. He craved to be here with me. Resented that his specialty kept him behind a desk, what might as well be worlds away as I battled for my life. Better that he was not here. He would only be used against me.

  Lucien growled, the sound raising hairs across my arms. Red patches of moonlight splashed across my chest from the rosette and I thought, for a breath, that this was fitting. That I should find my end here, in this place that reviles me, at the hands of the monster I had made.

  No. That was the moonlight, the saliva mixing with my blood poisoning my mind. Fuck that.

  I raised a single-fingered salute to the moon and pushed to my feet, drawing on every scrap of strength I'd ever held. Lucien cocked his head, bending it further than he should be able to, and grinned. He strolled toward me with such grace that it appeared as if he floated on a cloud of shadow. Perhaps he did. I didn't understand what he was. I knew only that I had to end it.