by Rice, Anne
Yes, yes, his lips tasted like blood, but it was not human blood. It was that elixir that Magnus had given me, and I felt myself recoil. I could get away this time. I had another chance. The wheel had turned full round.
I was crying out that I wouldn’t drink; I wouldn’t, and then I felt the two hot shafts driven hard through my neck and down to my soul.
I couldn’t move. It was coming as it had come that night, the rapture, a thousandfold what it was when I held mortals in my arms. And I knew what he was doing! He was feeding upon me! He was draining me.
And going down on my knees, I felt myself held by him, the blood pouring out of me with a monstrous volition I couldn’t stop.
“Devil!” I tried to scream. I forced the word up and up until it broke from my lips and the paralysis broke from my limbs. “Devil!” I roared again and I caught him in his swoon and hurled him backwards to the floor.
In an instant, I had my hands upon him and, shattering the French doors, had dragged him out with me into the night.
His heels were scraping on the stones, his face had become pure fury. I clutched his right arm and swung him from side to side so that his head snapped back and he could not see nor gauge where he was, nor catch hold of anything, and with my right hand I beat him and beat him, until the blood was running out of his ears and his eyes and his nose.
I dragged him through the trees away from the lights of the Palais. And as he struggled, as he sought to resurrect himself with a burst of force, he shot his declaration at me that he would kill me because he had my strength now. He’d drunk it out of me and coupled with his own strength it would make him impossible to defeat.
Maddened, I clutched at his neck, pushing his head down against the path beneath me. I pinned him down, strangling him, until the blood in great gushes poured out of his open mouth.
He would have screamed if he could. My knees drove into his chest. His neck bulged under my fingers and the blood spurted and bubbled out of him and he turned his head from side to side, his eyes growing bigger and bigger, but seeing nothing, and then when I felt him weak and limp, I let him go.
I beat him again, turning him this way and that. And then I drew my sword to sever his head.
Let him live like that if he can. Let him be immortal like that if he can. I raised the sword and when I looked down at him, the rain was pelting his face, and he was staring up at me, as one half alive, unable to plead for mercy, unable to move.
I waited. I wanted him to beg. I wanted him to give me that powerful voice full of lies and cunning, the voice that had made me believe for one pure and dazzling instant that I was alive and free and in the state of grace again. Damnable, unforgivable lie. Lie I’d never forget for as long as I walked the earth. I wanted the rage to carry me over the threshold to his grave.
But nothing came from him.
And in this moment of stillness and misery for him, his beauty slowly returned.
He lay a broken child on the gravel path, only yards from the passing traffic, the ring of the horses’ hooves, the rumble of the wooden wheels.
And in this broken child were centuries of evil and centuries of knowledge, and out of him there came no ignominious entreaty but merely the soft and bruised sense of what he was. Old, old evil, eyes that had seen dark ages of which I only dream.
I let him go, and I stood up and sheathed my sword.
I walked a few paces from him, and collapsed upon a wet stone bench.
Far away, busy figures labored about the shattered window of the palace.
But the night lay between us and those confused mortals, and I looked at him listlessly as he lay still.
His face was turned to me, but not by design, his hair a tangle of curls and blood. And with his eyes closed, and his hand open beside him, he appeared the abandoned offspring of time and supernatural accident, someone as miserable as myself.
What had he done to become what he was? Could one so young so long ago have guessed the meaning of any decision, let alone the vow to become this?
I rose, and walking slowly to him, I stood over him and looked at him, at the blood that soaked his lace shirt and stained his face.
It seemed he sighed, that I heard the passage of his breath.
He didn’t open his eyes, and to mortals perhaps there would have been no expression there. But I felt his sorrow. I felt its immensity, and I wished I didn’t feel it, and for one moment I understood the gulf that divided us, and the gulf that divided his attempt to overpower me from my rather simple defense of myself.
Desperately he had tried to vanquish what he did not comprehend.
And impulsively and almost effortlessly I had beaten him back.
All my pain with Nicolas came back to me and Gabrielle’s words and Nicolas’s denunciations. My anger was nothing to his misery, his despair.
And this perhaps was the reason that I reached down and gathered him up. And maybe I did it because he was so exquisitely beautiful and so lost, and we were after all of the same ilk.
Natural enough, wasn’t it, that one of his own should take him away from this place where mortals would sooner or later have approached him, driven him stumbling away.
He gave no resistance to me. In a moment he was standing on his own feet. And then he walked drowsily beside me, my arm about his shoulder, bolstering him and steadying him until we were moving away from the Palais Royal, towards the rue St.-Honoré.
I only half glanced at the figures passing us, until I saw a familiar shape under the trees, with no scent of mortality coming from it, and I realized that Gabrielle had been there for some time.
She came forward hesitantly and silently, her face stricken when she saw the blood-drenched lace and the lacerations on his white skin, and she reached out as if to help me with the burden of him though she did not seem to know how.
Somewhere far off in the darkened gardens, the others were near. I heard them before I saw them. Nicki was there too.
They had come as Gabrielle had come, drawn over the miles, it seemed, by the tumult, or what vague messages I could not imagine, and they merely waited and watched as we moved away.
2
We took him with us to the livery stables, and there I put him on my mare. But he looked as if he would let himself fall off at any moment, and so I mounted behind him, and the three of us rode out.
All the way through the country, I wondered what I would do. I wondered what it meant to bring him to my lair. Gabrielle didn’t give any protest. Now and then she glanced over at him. I heard nothing from him, and he was small and self-contained as he sat in front of me, light as a child but not a child.
Surely he had always known where the tower was, but had its bars kept him out? Now I meant to take him inside it. And why didn’t Gabrielle say something to me? It was the meeting we had wanted, it was the thing for which we had waited, but surely she knew what he had just done.
When we finally dismounted, he walked ahead of me, and he waited for me to reach the gate. I had taken out the iron key to the lock and I studied him, wondering what promises one exacts from such a monster before opening one’s door. Did the ancient laws of hospitality mean anything to the creatures of the night?
His eyes were large and brown and defeated. Almost drowsy they seemed. He regarded me for a long silent moment and then he reached out with his left hand, and his fingers curled around the iron crossbar in the center of the gate.
I stared helplessly as with a loud grinding noise the gate started to rip loose from the stone. But he stopped and contented himself with merely bending the iron bar a little. The point had been made. He could have entered this tower anytime that he wished.
I examined the iron bar that he’d twisted. I had beaten him. Could I do what he had just done? I didn’t know. And unable to calculate my own powers, how could I ever calculate his?
“Come,” Gabrielle said a little impatiently. And she led the way down the stairs to the dungeon crypt.
It was cold he
re as always, the fresh spring air never touching the place. She made a big fire in the old hearth while I lighted the candles. And as he sat on the stone bench watching us, I saw the effect of the warmth on him, the way that his body seemed to grow slightly larger, the way that he breathed it in.
As he looked about, it was as if he were absorbing the light. His gaze was clear.
Impossible to overestimate the effect of warmth and light on vampires. Yet the old coven had forsworn both.
I settled on another bench, and I let my eyes roam about the broad low chamber as his eyes roamed.
Gabrielle had been standing all this while. And now she approached him. She had taken out a handkerchief and she touched this to his face.
He stared at her in the same way that he stared at the fire and the candles, and the shadows leaping on the curved ceiling. This seemed to interest him as simply as anything else.
And I felt a shudder when I realized the bruises on his face were now almost gone! The bones were whole again, the shape of the face having been fully restored, and he was only a little gaunt from the blood he had lost.
My heart expanded slightly, against my will, as it had on the battlements when I had heard his voice.
I thought of the pain only half an hour ago in the Palais when the lie had broken with the stab of his fangs into my neck. I hated him.
But I couldn’t stop looking at him. Gabrielle combed his hair for him. She took his hands and wiped the blood from them. And he seemed helpless as all this was done. And she had not so much the expression of a ministering angel as an expression of curiosity, a desire to be near him and to touch him and examine him. In the quavering illumination they looked at one another.
He hunched forward a little, eyes darkening and full of expression now as they turned again to the grate. Had it not been for the blood on his lace ruff, he might have looked human. Might …
“What will you do now?” I asked. I spoke to make it clear to Gabrielle. “Will you remain in Paris and let Eleni and the others go on?”
No answer from him. He was studying me, studying the stone benches, the sarcophagi. Three sarcophagi.
“Surely you know what they’re doing,” I said. “Will you leave Paris or remain?”
It seemed he wanted to tell me again the magnitude of what I had done to him and the others, but this faded away. For one moment his face was wretched. It was defeated and warm and full of human misery. How old was he, I wondered. How long ago had he been a human who looked like that?
He heard me. But he didn’t give an answer. He looked to Gabrielle, who stood near the fire, and then to me. And silently, he said, Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all he restored in a new form. Love me.
This silent entreaty had an eloquence, however, that I can’t put into words.
“What can I do to make you love me?” he whispered. “What can I give? The knowledge of all I have witnessed, the secrets of our powers, the mystery of what I am?”
It seemed blasphemous to answer. And as I had on the battlements, I found myself on the edge of tears. For all the purity of his silent communications, his voice gave a lovely resonance to his sentiments when he actually spoke.
It occurred to me as it had in Notre Dame that he spoke the way angels must speak, if they exist.
But I was awakened from this irrelevant thought, this obviating thought, by the fact that he was now beside me. He was closing his arm round me, and pressing his forehead against my face. He gave that summons again, not the rich, thudding seduction of that moment in the Palais Royal, but the voice that had sung to me over the miles, and he told me there were things the two of us would know and understand as mortals never could. He told me that if I opened to him and gave him my strength and my secrets that he would give me his. He had been driven to try to destroy me, and he loved me all the more that he could not.
That was a tantalizing thought. Yet I felt danger. The word that came unbidden to me was Beware.
I don’t know what Gabrielle saw or heard. I don’t know what she felt.
Instinctively I avoided his eyes. There seemed nothing in the world I wanted more at this moment than to look right at him and understand him, and yet I knew I must not. I saw the bones under les Innocents again, the flickering hellfires I had imagined in the Palais Royal. And all the lace and velvet in the eighteenth century could not give him a human face.
I couldn’t keep this from him, and it pained me that it was impossible for me to explain it to Gabrielle. And the awful silence between me and Gabrielle was at that moment almost too much to bear.
With him, I could speak, yes, with him I could dream dreams. Some reverence and terror in me made me reach out and embrace him, and I held him, battling my confusion and my desire.
“Leave Paris, yes,” he whispered. “But take me with you. I don’t know how to exist here now. I stumble through a carnival of horrors. Please …”
I heard myself say: “No.”
“Have I no value to you?” he asked. He turned to Gabrielle. Her face was anguished and still as she looked at him. I couldn’t know what went on in her heart, and to my sadness, I realized that he was speaking to her and locking me out. What was her answer?
But he was imploring both of us now. “Is there nothing outside yourself you would respect?”
“I might have destroyed you tonight,” I said. “It was respect which kept me from that.”
“No.” He shook his head in a startlingly human fashion. “That you never could have done.”
I smiled. It was probably true. But we were destroying him quite completely in another way.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s true. You are destroying me. Help me,” he whispered. “Give me but a few short years of all you have before you, the two of you. I beg you. That is all I ask.”
“No,” I said again.
He was only a foot from me on the bench. He was looking at me. And there came the horrible spectacle again of his face narrowing and darkening and caving in upon itself in rage. It was as if he had no real substance. Only will kept him robust and beautiful. And when the flow of his will was interrupted, he melted like a wax doll.
But, as before, he recovered himself almost instantly. The “hallucination” was past.
He stood up and backed away from me until he was in front of the fire.
The will coming from him was palpable. His eyes were like something that didn’t belong to him, nor to anything on earth. And the fire blazing behind him made an eerie nimbus around his head.
“I curse you!” he whispered.
I felt a jet of fear.
“I curse you,” he said again and came closer. “Love mortals then, and live as you have lived, recklessly, with appetite for everything and love for everything, but there will come a time when only the love of your own kind can save you.” He glanced at Gabrielle. “And I don’t mean children such as this!”
This was so strong that I couldn’t conceal its effect on me, and I realized I was rising from the bench and slipping away from him towards Gabrielle.
“I don’t come empty-handed to you,” he pressed, his voice deliberately softening. “I don’t come begging with nothing to give of my own. Look at me. Tell me you don’t need what you see in me, one who has the strength to take you through the ordeals that lie ahead.”
His eyes flashed on Gabrielle and for one moment he remained locked to her and I saw her harden and begin to tremble.
“Let her be!” I said.
“You don’t know what I say to her,” he said coldly. “I do not try to hurt her. But in your love of mortals, what have you already done?”
He would say something terrible if I didn’t stop him, something to wound me or Gabrielle. He knew all that had happened with Nicki. I knew that he did. If, somewhere deep down in my soul, I wished for the end of Nicki, he would know that too! Why had I let him in? Why had I not known what he could do?
“Oh, but it’s always a travesty, don’t
you see?” he said with that same gentleness. “Each time the death and the awakening will ravage the mortal spirit, so that one will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out.” And here he shot his glance to Gabrielle again and half smiled. “And the veil will always come down between you. Make a legion. You will be, always and forever, alone!”
“I don’t want to hear this. It means nothing,” I said.
Gabrielle’s face had undergone some ugly change. She was staring at him with hatred now, I was sure of it.
He made that bitter little noise that is a laugh but isn’t a laugh at all.
“Lovers with a human face,” he mocked me. “Don’t you see your error? The other one hates you beyond all reason, and she—why, the dark blood has made her even colder, has it not? But even for her, strong as she is, there will come moments when she fears to be immortal, and who will she blame for what was done to her?”
“You are a fool,” Gabrielle whispered.
“You tried to protect the violinist from it. But you never sought to protect her.”
“Don’t say any more,” I answered. “You make me hate you. Is that what you want?”
“But I speak the truth and you know it. And what you will never know, either of you, is the full depth of each other’s hatreds and resentments. Or suffering. Or love.”
He paused and I could say nothing. He was doing exactly what I feared he would, and I didn’t know how to defend myself.
“If you leave me now with this one,” he continued, “you will do it again. Nicolas you never possessed. And she already wonders how she will ever get free of you. And unlike her, you cannot stand to be alone.”
I couldn’t answer. Gabrielle’s eyes became smaller, her mouth a little more cruel.
“So the time will come when you will seek other mortals,” he went on, “hoping once more that the Dark Trick will bring you the love you crave. And of these newly mutilated and unpredictable children you’ll try to fashion your citadels against time. Well, they will be prisons if they last for half a century. I warn you. It is only with those as powerful and wise as yourself that the true citadel against time can be built.”