by S. H. Roddey
When I was still “dead,” I could rest. I existed, yes, but I did so somewhere beyond this terrible consciousness. Beyond this pain.
They brought me to New Orleans to recover from death. They stripped me of my identity; suddenly I was not Countess Erzsébet Báthory de Ecsed, but Madame Delphine LaLaurie, a Louisiana socialite with a penchant for the bizarre. They spread rumors of my eccentricities to keep the locals away, to warn off those who would choose to spy on me. I feel it has backfired, as I find my neighbors often peering into my windows. It unnerves me.
They told me to prepare. I told them I needed time. I told them I was not strong enough. They care for my weakness no more than they care that I have a near-constant audience.
The easy access to young slaves is a convenience, yes, but the availability of pure blood would not be a problem anywhere. No matter where I go, I am not ready.
They bring in dignitaries from their religious ranks to take part. I was greedy in life, but this dedication to power astounds me. I wish I was dead. I am not one to be controlled, but I am weak.
“They have turned her into a weapon,” Luke said bitterly. “Made her the very thing she never wanted to be.”
“I understand your sympathy for her, but she cannot be allowed to live,” I reminded him.
“I know.” He turned his attention back to the book. “There is more.”
13 April, 1834
The fire… oh, God, the fire! It consumed the girl’s body, a badly offered soul, rejected by the demon, Verliaan. She was unfit because I was unready, and he sought to punish me. My hands are nearly ruined. They are burned black. Though my body heals, though my hands have healed, they continue to ache as I scribble these words. My whole body aches. I cannot see.
Everything went wrong. I told them. I told them…I was not ready. I am not ready. I am not strong enough!
So many dead—taken by the demon for their greed. Then the local people and their superstitions… They would have burned me as a witch if the few survivors had not found me first.
The rocking motion of the ship is a small comfort. At least while surrounded by ocean, I cannot burn. My immortality was born of hellfire; these flames can surely take it away.
As I fight to hold this pen and scribble down these pathetic words, I find myself wondering if diving into the fire of my own accord would not be a blessing of peace.
“Fire,” Luke said as he closed the book. The worn cover crackled under his touch, the leather toughening and drying without the preserving oils.
“She has to burn,” I commented, more to myself than him. “And when, exactly, will this ritual take place?” I added, turning my gaze to my companion.
“If the urgency expressed in her diary is any indication, as soon as possible.”
“They know I am here to stop the ritual.”
“It will be tonight,” Judas said as he threw open my door. Luke and I both turned to look at him. “Mary sent me to warn you that unless you go now, you will fail.”
“Mary?” I asked.
“The seer,” Luke said.
Luke stood and crossed to my place at the window. He glanced out into the darkened street.
“Take this,” he said. I lifted the gun from his hand. “I took the liberty of loading it with the last of your ammunition. You only have one shot left.” He laid his cold hand over mine. “Make it count.”
“Luke…”
“You do not have long if you intend to stop the ritual and save any of those children.”
“Come with me.” I glanced back at Judas. “Both of you. Help me end this.”
“I am ready when you are,” Judas confirmed, and gestured toward the door. “Time is of the essence.”
“Luke?” I asked.
He looked away from me. “Use the coin to gain entry, just as you did before,” he replied and pushed past Judas out the door, muttering curses under his breath.
Chapter 14
A new guard stood at the entrance to the chamber, young and ignorant of the danger before him. I expected guards to be waiting for me. I pulled the coin from my pocket and adjusted the cloak around my shoulders. Judas stepped up beside me silently, his head bowed. I pushed the coin into his hand.
“Take it,” I said. “They will recognize me if they see me. I’ve already done this once.”
The guard stepped in front of us as we approached, his face set hard in an angry scowl. Judas flashed the coin. The boy immediately lowered his head and stepped away, allowing us entrance to the catacombs.
“You go first,” I told my companion as we reached the landing. “You are less likely to stand out than me.”
“You get to Erzsébet,” he replied, handing the coin back. “Let me handle the demon…if they have managed to summon it yet.”
The smell of blood hung heavy in the dank chamber, coloring my perception of the air itself with a deep, red haze. Slow, rhythmic chanting rose from the interior, a single phrase repeated over and over:
“Ad sanguinem tuum in aeternum.”
“Prayers for blood,” Judas whispered, his voice nearly lost in the tumble of echoes. “They’re close to completion now. Get to that altar.”
He disappeared into the crowd as we cleared the landing, blending in with the swaying, chanting followers of this madwoman. Her journal entries played through my mind, but I refused to allow myself that flash of pity or feeling of fellowship. She had to die. This had to end. Those children…
I did not want their blood on my hands, but it was too late. My heart sank as I looked over the sea of chanting fanatics.
Three young women were already dead, their blood a mingled mass of deep crimson staining the channels of the pool. As I stepped up to the back of the gathered crowd, the executioner slit the throat of the young man I’d freed only days ago—Martin, his name was—and tipped him forward, belly-down on the stone slab. He gurgled and convulsed, straining against the bonds at his wrists. Blood ran from his body into the trough, zigzagging back and forth to join the growing pool at the feet of the girl bound on the altar. Erzsébet stood beside her where she knelt, her pale, tearstained face smeared with mud. Erzsébet’s blackened hands clamped onto the young woman’s shoulders, restraining her. She was wrapped in white linen bandages, the strips of fabric covering her eyes and face, obscuring everything but her mouth. They wound down and around her body, covering her dress to the waist and hanging down in tattered strings like a deformed wedding gown, bright white against the orange candlelight. Fear radiated from every line of her body, coiling around her like a cloud. She thought she would fail. She feared the demon she summoned, but she feared the Brotherhood more.
I pitied the poor creature. Death would be a mercy.
I grabbed the zealot closest to me and broke his neck with a single, hard twist, then dropped him quietly to the floor and stepped into his place. No one noticed, so intent were they on their goal and the shaky Latin they uttered. One by one, I quietly ended the lives of those joining in Erzsébet’s eerie chant, leaving them on the floor in a trail.
Her voice rose above the din, sad and uncertain. Quivering. Another of her followers stepped up behind the last sacrifice and lay the blade against her throat. The girl let out a terrified wail. She was young, and not one I remembered.
I lunged, but the blade moved faster, opening a scarlet river across the girl’s neck, which joined the pool on the ground. My disruption broke the chant and bought out weapons from beneath robes on either side of me. I removed the loaded gun from the holster at my side and leveled it at the head of the screaming, chanting woman on the altar.
I pulled the trigger, and the shot rang out in a deafening blast. Pain flared as a sword ran through my right side. Erzsébet shrieked when the bullet tore through her shoulder. Her hands left the girl’s body, but it was too late.
Blue and green flames licked up from the pool of blood, drawing the stunned attention of every participant. I used the distraction to my advantage and drew the blade from my side
as I dropped the spent firearm to the ground. I righted the blade, then swung again and again, cutting down one after another as the demon clawed its way out of the ground. It shrieked and roared, as if its ascent was painful. Flames slithered over the thick body, running like rivulets of water over stacks of gleaming muscle.
The appearance of the black-skinned beast sent many of those around me into a panic. They turned and ran, trampling one another in a desperate attempt to reach the door first. I continued to cut through the crowd, unfazed by the monster there, even as it rose to its full height—towering over me—and stepped over the body of a woman who fell into the pool in her attempt to escape.
“Unclean!” came the hiss from Erzsébet when I reached the edge of the pool, drawing the demon’s attention away from the waiting child. Horns protruded from its forehead, twisting upward in a pair of cruel, charred spires, and red eyes rimmed in blue fire trained on her. She cowered under the gaze, even as her arm extended toward me and cried again, “Unclean!” The beast then turned its attention to me, snarling at my defiling of this sacrifice.
The creature brought down one ashy, cloven hoof in a stomp, and the rest of the bloody pentacle ignited. The sudden blaze trapped Erzsébet and her offering at the final altar. Heat flared up my legs as my shoes and pants caught fire. I stepped into the pool and strode through the hellfire, intent on my goal. The screams of dying zealots rang off the walls of the dank chamber, and a blur knocked the demon out of my line of sight.
Luke.
“Hold it down!” Judas shouted over the cacophony around us.
Pain followed the heat as it crawled up my body. My skin seared, then burned. From somewhere on the periphery of my comprehension, I caught an angry snarl, a series of loud pops, and the weak, dying wail of the demon.
“Luke, the girl,” I called over the inferno. “Save her.”
He came into view at the edge of the flames, his face streaked in black blood and contorted into an inhuman mask of anger and pain. Still I kept my pace, stepping through the flames and up onto the altar. Erzsébet struggled, clawing against my burning flesh as her strength waned. I closed a hand around her throat and lifted her from her feet, holding her at arm’s length while I lifted the dagger and sliced through first one, then the other shriveled wrist, severing her hands from her body. She screamed, but she did not bleed; the ruined stumps withered in on themselves, retreating into the tattered bandages.
She shrieked at me in her native Hungarian, begged and pleaded, cajoled and threatened as I closed my arms around her body, pinning her arms to her sides. The rags she wore caught fire first, lit from my smoldering body. Her pleas turned to cries of agony as I stepped off the dais, back into the flames.
Pain so fierce my senses could not process crawled over my skin. My body began to shut down. I collapsed to my knees and held her while she burned, the flames a terrible swirl of black, white, and blue around us. Her extremities withered and curled. The screams weakened to soft whimpers of pain, then died away completely.
Adrenaline gave way to numbness. If I die in this pit, I thought, I will have given my life for the greater good.
Agony overwhelmed the adrenaline, and I collapsed forward, pinning Erzsébet’s unmoving husk between my body and the burning blood.
Distantly I heard three voices: Luke, Judas, and a frightened female voice. Someone called my name, the sound lost in a haze of burning flesh and crackling fire. I could not answer. The body beneath me began to crumble. The flames around me turned red.
The world went dark.
Chapter 15
My skin healed slower than I liked, and the indistinct, crawling itch beneath the surface threatened to drive me out of my mind. The agony of the healing was far worse than the pain of burning alive. At least, at this moment it was.
At some point after the flames died away, Luke and Judas removed my charred body from the chamber and collected the ashes that once comprised the woman Luke loved. Judas did not tell me exactly when they returned, only that they expected to find nothing when they came across my body but a crispy lump of flesh. I woke days later in my bed in Paris, my entire body bandaged. Both men fussed over me, changing bandages and applying a bitter-smelling salve while I drifted in and out of consciousness.
I hated that I’d survived.
Judas sat in the chair beside my bed, talking incessantly of his travels through time and history, prattling on about his companion and her powers. I scarcely registered his words as the burning shards of pain licked through my tender, healing body. I wanted to shove my fist into his mouth to silence him but could not muster the care to do so. It was much, much easier to lie still and let the hurt flow. It almost made me believe I could die.
Luke appeared just after dark, his pale face translucent in the wan moonlight streaming through my window. He wordlessly unwrapped the bandages to reveal delicate, pink skin, puckered and tender from the full-body burn I’d sustained. Judas sat by, not looking.
“You should be dead,” Luke said.
“I know.”
“It is done.”
“I know,” I replied, growing weary.
When I turned to glance at Judas, he rose and left the room, his skin an odd green hue. Surely I’d looked worse.
“I found Lenore’s father,” Luke said. “Or rather, Judas and his companion did. The authorities have been notified and have the girl in their custody. She will be reunited with her father when he arrives in Paris.”
I nodded. The effort of listening to his tale exhausted me.
“Her father wants to meet the man who saved his little girl.”
“Will never happen,” I said.
Luke smiled a small, sad smile. “At least now I know your weakness,” he said.
I wanted to curse him, but my tongue was thick and heavy. My eyelids closed of their own volition. I needed to sleep again.
The next morning, Judas sat beside the bed when I woke, staring at my face as one might study a bug. My opening eyes startled him.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“No,” he replied on a chuckle. “Though I must say, your ability to heal yourself is quite fascinating. I would love to know if it could be synthesized.”
“It hurts like hell.”
“I imagine it does. I need the coin, Adam.”
“You should have kept it.”
He laughed. “In retrospect, yes.”
“Check with Vlad. I can’t imagine my pockets survived the fire.”
Judas laughed. “I did. He said you have it, and you would know where it is.”
My cloudy mind took a moment to sort out what he’d said. I started to tell him that I had no hiding places, but then I remembered my last conversation with the vampire in this room.
Carefully swinging my feet to the side, I sat up for the first time in days. The world spun against my closed eyes, and as the worst of the nausea subsided, I rose and pushed one puckered, pink-skinned hand under the mattress. The book was gone, and in its place, I found the small, silver token. It was smudged with soot, but otherwise unharmed.
“Where were these forged?” I asked. I placed it in Judas’s waiting hand and lay back down.
“If hellfire couldn’t melt it, I imagine they’re Heaven-sent.” He nodded and rose from his chair. “Until we next meet, Adam, Son of No Man.” He paused at the door. “You should probably give yourself a better surname if you expect to blend in with society. Oh, and I hear New York is a great place to fight for money. Lots of people to beat up on.”
Then, he was gone.
A week later, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Luke, staring out over the gently sloping landscape of Nyírbátor. Though the sun was gone behind the horizon, the last, stubborn colors of evening streaked the sky, refusing to fade. In the days since the death of Erzsébet Báthory, Luke had grown more sullen, more reserved. He spoke little, and only when required. To a certain extent, I understood his anger toward me. He grieved.
The box conta
ining the ashes of his last true lover rested against his chest, cradled in his cold, pale hands. In the two hundred years since his evacuation of her home, it had fallen into disrepair. Stones lay on the ground, loosed from their mortar to leave wide, angry holes in the once-regal building. Little remained of the home aside from these ruins.
Tension radiated from Luke in waves. I almost felt guilty for ending the woman, even if it meant the last vestiges of the Brotherhood were gone. I’d accomplished my goal, and potentially severed the only true friendship I’d ever been able to call my own. All I could do then was what I’d done…
Accompany Luke as he brought her home.
I wanted to speak, to offer some sort of condolence for his loss. And it was Luke’s loss. He loved her, lost her, then lost her again. At my hand. Though I knew he understood the inevitability of this moment, I also wondered how long he would hold this particular transgression against me.
The last colors of evening drained from the sky, leaving behind a blank, blue-black landscape littered with stars. There were no night-sounds here; no crickets or birds, no snuffling of small animals. The world around us seemed to hold onto the memory of her atrocities. At the bottom of the hill, the little hamlet slept, unaware of our presence atop this local monument to debauchery.
As the small sliver of a crescent moon peeked out from behind a cloud, Luke stepped to the edge of the roof and carefully lifted the lid from the box in his hands. He made no sound as he brought the side of the box to his lips for a gentle kiss, then raised it and poured the contents over the lip of the container. The breeze caught the ashes, swirling them into a silver cloud as it carried them out over the overgrown property. Luke and I stood shoulder to shoulder until the last of her ashes settled out of the air. A single, bloody tear slipped down his face.
Luke turned without a word and walked away.
I looked out over the rolling landscape from the top of the ruined castle until the moon hung high above me. There was no satisfaction in the end of this affair, only a lingering grief over the deaths I could not stop and the weight of the loss my friend bore at my hand. A necessary evil, yes, much the same as he and I were…but an evil nonetheless.