“Yes. But he also knew I had been bitten by a vampire in Greece, before they were all wiped out in the war. The creatures had amazing regenerative qualities, and he couldn’t know how my body would react to the vampiric contamination. A normal person would die, but those get of Dippel never sicken. He couldn’t risk that perhaps I would be able to procreate after all.”
“I see.” Harmony opened her purse and started looking for aspirin. Suddenly it was all too much. Her head had begun to pound.
“He thought that maybe I’d father a vampiric child that would be likewise changed—as I am—and therefore be strong enough to kill him.”
“It’s all wilder than Shakespeare’s dramas.”
“Yes, and that isn’t a bad way of looking at it. Thomasina died because the Dark Man’s family and my own were the Montagues and Capulets, and we did not know how to make peace…That was not because either my father or I ever wanted that much power, but they looked at us and saw their own ambition and reacted violently.” He sighed. “For all my talk of peace, I wouldn’t have done anything differently had I known he was the son of my father’s old enemy and their quarrel was not ours—at least not after he killed Thomasina. Peace be damned. I wanted him punished—dead—because of what he had done to her.” He shook his head. “Ignorance on a mission can be deadly, though. Because I didn’t understand who he was, I didn’t do everything that was needed to ensure that his line ended there. All evidence to the contrary, I am not an expert monsterkiller, and didn’t always routinely burn bodies in churches after dispatching them. He looked normal, and I thought him merely an evil man. It therefore didn’t occur to me to burn Saint Germain’s body—and to kill everyone around this monster because someone might find a way to carry on his evil, to retrieve his body, put in a new heart, and reanimate him. I thought he was just a wicked man. Evil, but still human. Look at me. I should have known better.” Alex’s voice was hard with self-loathing, and it hurt her to hear it.
“Don’t,” Harmony said. “Just don’t go there. You are nothing like this horrible man. And maybe—maybe you didn’t actually kill him. Perhaps he survived somehow. A bullet or knife wound might not have been fatal…”
Alex shook his head as she trailed off.
“I may or may not be like Saint Germain. But I killed him that night—I am as sure of that as I am of anything. It was revenge for Thomasina, and I was thorough, blinded with fury. Do you know what’s odd, though? Even when lost to a killing rage, with my hands around his throat and wanting nothing but his death, a part of me began to wonder why we had the same eyes, the same unnatural strength. It was like grappling with my twin. Again, I didn’t know then that the Dark Man had made more creatures like me. That he had ‘cured’ others like Lord Byron and Ninon de Lenclos—that it had amused him to create a sort of not-so-dead-poets society beholden to him, and he had traveled Europe looking specifically for artists and writers to seduce. To damn us even as he studied us. I thought I was a freak, a onetime experiment gone awry. But I should have known. I should have trusted my senses. If I had finished him then, none of this would be happening now.”
Harmony made another small sound of distress but didn’t interrupt with reassurances. This was not something she felt able to speak to. Alex would have to live with his guilt until he found a way to forgive himself.
“Le Comte said something that night that I didn’t understand. ‘It doesn’t matter if you kill me,’ he whispered the moment before I tore his heart from his chest. ‘For worlds without number has my father made.’ Then he said something else. It was Italian—‘La Cuore del Strega Sicilian lives for me.’”
“La Cuore del Strega Sicilian?” she repeated.
“The heart of the witch. It’s an obscure Sicilian legend about a wizard or a priest that wouldn’t die—and anyone who was exposed to this evil relic became a flesh-eating ghoul. He didn’t say anything more about it, because I didn’t let him.”
Alex cleared his throat and then looked at Harmony. His eyes were intent as he willed her to understand why he had committed such an act of violence. Why he would do it again.
“You think this heart is the original…contagion?”
“Possibly. Again, I don’t know. A part of me has been waiting ever since that night, waiting and watching for a sign,” he said. “You see, on some level I believed him. As much as I wanted to think otherwise, I somehow knew that his evil wouldn’t die with him. I’m not so lucky. ‘Worlds without number’ had he—or his father—made. We know what that means now. His father did it out of scientific curiosity and to protect his son. Saint Germain—for him it’s all about power. Though I never admitted it to myself, I’ve been watching for signs of their resurrection ever since that night. A part of me isn’t certain that the Dark Man will remain dead either. Byron killed him and burned the body, but all that Saint Germain needs is a bit of skin or hair—something with DNA—and I know he could grow another.”
Harmony felt the small hairs on her arms lift themselves at these words.
“Human cloning? Shit.” She exhaled. “And that is how you ended up in Mexico?”
“Yes. I was reading some amazing stories in the tabloids, the significance of which would elude all but a handful of people. You see, I found out from another ‘patient’ who contacted me once Dippel’s pogrom against us started, that though he had disappeared, the Dark Man had never actually died—and that he actually had many other clients who lived on as I did. This could have been a help had I known of them earlier and been able to organize them, but the Dark Man killed most of us before I was aware of the others. As far as I know, only Lord Byron and Ninon de Lenclos have also survived.”
Harmony shook her head. It was hard to take in no matter how often Alex said it—Byron and Ninon de Lenclos? Alive?
“Do you know where they are now?” she asked hopefully.
“No. Once we were hunted, I believed that we were safer not knowing where the others were, that we should remain scattered, holed up in hidden fortresses. Saint Germain is said to have the ability to eavesdrop on one’s dreams, and ignorance seemed best. But now I must find them. I think I can. I have a bit of a gift that way sometimes.” Alex exhaled and shook his head once. When he spoke, his voice was again light and pleasant. “And that’s enough of that. Lately the past has been very much present for me, and that isn’t a pleasant circumstance. The thing with long life is that once one has learned from one’s mistakes, one must let go. The guilt is too heavy otherwise.”
“But was it really all a mistake?” Harmony asked, feeling wistful without knowing why. She didn’t tell him that it looked to her as if guilt had him by the throat and was slowly tightening its jaws.
“All? No. I do not entirely regret loving either Thomasina or my children. But I have no wish to ever live any part of that life again. Some losses should never be faced more than once in a lifetime. Think about that before The Spider chooses to marry, and especially before she has children. Even if you evade Saint Germain, there will always be another danger looking for captives. In our line of work, it doesn’t do to give hostages to Fate.”
CHAPTER NINE
It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.
—Alexandre Dumas
For seven years, not an hour has passed without my thinking of you…Why did not God put himself out to the extent of whispering in my ear: “One day you will be loved by this child. Keep yourself for her.” Some angel also might have said to you: “One day you will be eternally adored by this man. Keep yourself for him.” God did not do what he should have done; the angels passed by without uttering a word.
—Dumas fils to Henriette Regnier (September 22, 1893)
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
—Alexandre
Dumas
Santorini, Greece
June 10, 1912
Loneliness made men do strange things. Alex had ended up in Greece looking for others like himself who were resurrected by fire and lived beyond their allotted years, but he had found only stories of a kind of vampire that lived deep in the island caves. It was bitterly disappointing.
His traveling companions, a pair of professors from Oxford collecting local fairy tales, thought the plethora of vampire stories were because the natives of Santorini were a superstitious, half-heathen people who loved their legends more than their everyday lives. Really, it was just because Greece had a lot of these vampires—and not the romantic revenant so dear to English literature, as it turned out. The local vampires weren’t humans who had died and returned from the grave in physical form to slake their lust for blood with beautiful women. No, the Greek vampires were wholly inhuman, small but strong supernatural beings that preyed mostly upon infants and pregnant women, though the sick and elderly were often victims too. They came in a variety of styles—there were lamias, mormos, empusas—Broucolokas, Byron had called them. Childeating demons. Thoroughly nasty creatures whose filthy bites got so infected that the victims died from being envenomed even if they managed to survive the blood loss.
Alex now knew that they also would occasionally attack a healthy man if he was walking alone on a night when the moon was full.
Alex sighed with disgust as he looked down at the tear in his arm. The thing’s grimy teeth had ripped away both flesh and muscle and ruined his best shirt. He’d broken its neck before it could do anything more, but this was probably bad enough. He had to pray that the Dark Man had been right when he told him that his own resurrected condition would protect Alex from all disease. If the Dark Man were wrong, then legend had it that Alex would fall into a coma before the full moon and then rise at the next dark of the moon in a zombielike thrall and showing symptoms of hydrophobia. After which, either the vampire would finish feeding on him or the villagers would try to kill him—a difficult and unpleasant proposition because the Dark Man’s creations didn’t die easily and it would take a great many painful wounds to accomplish the task.
Alex snorted as he bound up the gash. As if he hadn’t enough problems already. This was what happened when you played the quixotic fool and chased after legends. He just had to accept that he was the only one of his kind.
As the jeep bumped along the country roads, there were many things that Harmony could—should—think about before she climbed on a plane bound for Cornwall, but her brain chose the one that was most seemingly irrelevant to her present situation.
It was nogreat surprise, given the tale he had related, that Alex felt he had fulfilled his quota of romantic relationships and didn’t plan on having another. Not even with her—another psychic and now a comrade in arms. In fact, her being a psychic was probably a bad thing. He hadn’t been that blunt, but she was a veteran of the dating wars and quite capable of reading between the lines. She couldn’t blame him for feeling this way, either. Not really. She understood the appeal of “not having a lot of emotional mouths to feed.” Her internal resources were needed for her job, which was sometimes exciting but often filled with corrosive tension. Besides, hadn’t her brush with Beau frightened her enough to send her fleeing to Mexico? And she hadn’t been blindly in love with him, just very hopeful. Poor Alex. The record of his disastrous love affairs was public knowledge. Cupid didn’t use little gold-tipped arrows for some people; he seemed to favor hollow-point bullets. And Alex’s last affair had been a trifecta of disaster, composed of residual guilt over past love affairs, a superhuman enemy engaged in a vendetta, and a dead girl. All of which he seemed in danger of repeating now—except the dead girl part, or so she hoped.
But given that neither of them wanted to be involved long-term with someone, and that Harmony was not what her mother would have called a woman of easy virtue, what the hell had happened between them back in Cuatros Cienegas? She had imagined the intensity of their encounter in the gazebo, had she? Or imagined Alex asking her if she was certain that this was what she wanted, because he could tell that screwing a total stranger wasn’t something she would normally do?
Maybe the storm had overcome him later, but he had first led her outside with the purpose of…influencing her in another way. This wasn’t the happiest thought, but the idea that Alex, knowing that a relationship with her wasn’t any where in the cards, had still almost seduced her within minutes of their acquaintance was more maddening. That part had to have been an accident.
Alex—damn it! What was it about him? Why did she still feel attracted to this stranger? She should be furious and wary, and instead she was…horny. And thinking in circles, but she couldn’t let it go. He was an itch under the skin.
Understanding why the emotional deck was already stacked against even a short-term relationship didn’t help, either. It had been hours, but Harmony was still feeling cross and even a bit bereft that they hadn’t had their night together.
He hadn’t just been using her, had he? Manipulating her sexually to gain her trust and help? Could he really have been so carried away with hunger that he had simply forgotten everything else? But then, where had the lust gone? Did it truly come and go with the lightning? And what if it happened again?
What if it didn’t happen again?
Not that she wanted to get involved with him romantically! Her life didn’t allow for that. But it just seemed sad that he had ruled out the idea completely and forever. Wasn’t there someplace for tender feelings? Or plain old wholesome sex? And shouldn’t she have some say in this, anyway? Wasn’t refusing supposed to be the woman’s prerogative?
“Damn,” she muttered. “I’m ruminating. Stop me, please, before I brood again. Running emotional laps is stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“I was an atheist,” Alex announced, apropos of nothing, but definitely grabbing her attention. He looked sideways, eyes twinkling, and she wondered if he had somehow guessed her spiraling thoughts and was trying to intervene before she had a hissy fit over being rejected. She hadn’t felt him in her mind since waking up, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t able to eavesdrop from a distance. She was probably going to have to find some way of jamming his radar if they stayed together for any length of time.
“Was?” she asked.
“Was—and a firm one. After my change—my resurrection—I felt that religious rules no longer applied. It was easy to turn my back on other moral fixtures too, especially when the societal landmarks were changing so rapidly. Law—civil and canonical—was not immutable after all. It changed with whoever had political power. It even altered with fashion.
“Then one day I heard God. After that, everything I believed changed.”
“God? Like…God?” Harmony hadn’t thought that anything could shake her out of her distraction, but she had been wrong. Once again, Alex had surprised her.
“Yes. It was during the War to End All Wars, on what would eventually come to be called Armistice Day, the eleventh of November. We were in the field, slaughtering one another as usual, when suddenly all the soldiers just stopped. As one, as if by drill, they lowered their weapons. Some even dropped them in the mud, and we all stood, staring up at the sky. Silence fell—there wasn’t any sound, not a bird or bee or even the wind. Nothing the ear could hear. And it was in this unexpected, even miraculous quiet that hadn’t existed for years that I finally recognized God’s voice. Oddly enough, He doesn’t use words to get our attention, no angelic trumpets, no burning bushes with voices of thunder—he uses perfect and, on that day, impossible silence, stilling our minds so we could look about and really see what we were doing to ourselves and to others. You’re thinking I had a hallucination?” He shook his head. “I would think that, too, but I wasn’t alone in this. Others heard him as well—unfortunately, not enough. And not for long. Moments later the silence broke. We picked up our guns and we were killing each other again only moments later.” He added brisk
ly but with a trace of bitterness: “And then, because we weren’t done being destructive and thought we could do better a second time, we went on to have another world war a couple decades later. It is the way of mankind.”
“Not all of mankind,” Harmony protested.
“No, but the way of far too many.” He shrugged. “I could have enlisted again for the Second World War, but I’d already done my time in the trenches and then some. I remembered that silence and decided they could have that war without me. I was done killing for governments. I changed my identity and moved on. Again. And then again. I never went back to church, though, never prayed. Still, now I know the truth. There is a God. And that makes everything that happens so much harder to accept. It was easier when I didn’t believe. Now I have to take this fact into consideration and acknowledge that there may be a time when I will have to pay—even more than I have—for the life I have led. I want to be able to make an unashamed answer. There will be no innocent blood on my hands. Especially not yours.”
“Jesus, Alex.” But if this was his excuse for not having an affair, it was a good one. Who could argue with religious conviction?
He laughed. “No. Just God.”
“I…I don’t know what to say. Which happens a lot around you,” she complained.
“Should I apologize?”
Should he? Was any of this really his fault?
The countryside was growing wilder, and the jeep bounced gaily over the ruts with no concern for the anatomy of the humans riding in it. If that weren’t torture enough, the sun beat in on them mercilessly. It felt pernicious, life-threatening, and she began to have the feeling that they were not driving toward their destiny, but rather being driven by it.
Harmony didn’t want to talk about God. She wasn’t sure if she believed—or wanted to believe—in an omniscient being that guided the universe. As Alex had pointed out, if you believed there was someone in charge, then it was difficult not to be angry at him when things went wrong. Also, it seemed the height of foolishness to surrender any attention or will to some perhaps nonexistent Divine Plan; one could get killed waiting for God to fix things or reveal your purpose. And that didn’t even begin to address the question of guilt for every petty—and not so petty—transgression that one might have made.
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