Now, her absence was as new and awful as the morning he had watched a bus drive Fana and her family away. Physical pain was a trifle; this was a daily horror.
Fana, come to me.
Michel barely heard his bedroom door open and close. Only Gypsy could leave and enter his room without notice. He had sensed her approach in the hallway—he’d sensed the moment she’d decided to come to his room—but she only made him tired. His swinging slowed as Gypsy’s scent swept Fana’s away.
She stared up, her hands on her hips. A portrait of disdain.
One day, Gypsy would be one of the most beautiful women left in the world. She was a brown-skinned Amazon, thick-bodied and tall, with wide hips and thighs, a stomach and waist so corded they were almost masculine, and breasts that overflowed in his palms. Fana was lovely, but Gypsy made Fana look like the schoolgirl she was.
Like him, Fana might never grow to the appearance of full maturity. He could barely grow a beard! Gypsy was full and complete. She had been modeling lingerie in New York when Bocelli found her. Bocelli knew Michel’s tastes.
“You’re so pathetic up there, rocking like a baby,” Gypsy said with her coarse, guttural London accent. “Really, Michel—you make me want to laugh.”
Gypsy could say anything to him, even things his father would hesitate to say. And Gypsy was no actress with a script—she was bright and arrogant and petty. Her arrogance had only multiplied since he had granted her the Blood a month after Fana had left him. Gypsy’s envy often made her hate him, but she was a groupie at heart. Loyal enough to kill for him. Or die for him, despite the implied contract of her new Blood.
“Nobody wants to see their gods acting like schoolboys,” Gypsy went on while he swung above her. “Look at you, zoned all to hell.”
Gypsy’s free tongue might have been the finest part of her beauty. She drove Papa crazy despite the opinions of him they held in common—reason enough to keep her. But he hoped he wouldn’t surprise them both one day and incinerate her to ash. Gypsy was teaching him restraint—his best rehearsal for Fana, who could hurt him with more than her tongue.
He never wanted to retaliate against Fana again.
“So has she come back?” Gypsy said. “Did she light up your mind?”
“Why would I tell you?” His voice was sandpaper. Did he look as bad as he sounded?
“I know she hasn’t,” she said. “That’s why you’re here instead of where you’re supposed to be. Everyone’s waiting, but you’re pissing around. Hoping a pretty girl will come pat your head, maybe toss a bone your way. Sit, Michel. Stay. Roll over. Bloody pathetic.”
As she often was, Gypsy was naked. The light from his open window made her dark skin sing, clarifying every hidden shadow. He could spend his day in bed with her. She could train a horde of other girls in her talents. He could blot out the pain of his waiting beneath a mound of wriggling flesh.
Michel gave up rocking near the ceiling and dropped himself to the floor, lighting on his toes. The tile was cold to his bare soles, waking his body’s pores. He didn’t notice his arousal until she was beside him, a head taller than he in her alligator heels. Gypsy had wrestled a gator on vacation in the Everglades when she was a teenager. She loved deadly teeth.
Gypsy slipped her fingers to his skin and squeezed him.
“Most High,” she said. “Is that you, or is it hype?”
He closed his eyes beneath her touch. When he opened his eyes, all he could see was Fana on the wall, a giant above them.
Forgive me, Fana, for what I have done.
Michel stepped away from Gypsy.
“Bring me my vestments,” he said.
“What’s the hurry now? You’re late. Why not remember you’re a man?”
Gypsy’s smell irritated Michel, reminding him of Fana’s mortal lapdog. Had Fana offered her skin to Wright’s clumsy fingers? Had she given herself to him? He almost charged into Fana’s head to know. He could barely remember why he shouldn’t.
My vestments, Michel said to Gypsy’s eyes. His temples flared.
Gypsy gasped in pain. Irritation had made the quiet thought a shriek in her head, louder than he’d intended. The pain dizzied her enough to make her stagger. But she had brought it on herself. When he was Michel, she could behave however she liked, say whatever she chose.
But now he was Most High.
Michel reveled in the spark of agony and fear in Gypsy’s eyes before she turned away. She stumbled a few steps to the glass case where his robes hung on the wall. One was crimson, one checkered crimson and white, one bright white.
He would wear white today. Fana’s people, his cousins, always wore white in ceremonies, which was why he had chosen white for their engagement dinner. His Lalibela cousins were already sharing their finer traditions with him.
Gypsy dressed Michel, fighting tears from the lingering pain in her head. He considered soothing her suffering to keep her hands steady as she straightened his gloves and stole, but he didn’t. Why should he deny her the only gift she really wanted?
Michel allowed himself to feel her pain, like running the tip of his index finger across a dancing flame barely long enough to register the heat. It stiffened his back and hitched his breath. No physical sensation could rival it.
“Dress properly this time,” he said. “My father will be there.”
“Yes, Most High,” Gypsy said through pain-clamped teeth.
A bead of blood crawled from her left nostril, peeking out. Michel wiped the blood away with his fingertip. He cleaned his finger by dabbing the blood into the pliant flesh of her cheek. Michel gently cupped his palm against her cheek and whispered in her ear.
“Solo Fana importa,” he said. Only Fana matters.
She forced a lie of a smile. Gypsy could hide the prick of new pain from herself, but not from him. It was sharp, deep, and satisfying. Better than blood. This time, he enjoyed her suffering without restraint.
Then he forgot Gypsy, her smell and her pain.
He brought Fana’s scent back to his nose. Closed his eyes, as if in prayer.
Forgive me, Fana, for what I have done. Forgive me for what I will do.
Craving forgiveness was another new ritual.
Michel was late to the Cleansing Pool.
Bright candles made the vast hall’s light as golden as dusk. Flapping wings overhead sent a tiny white feather floating down from doves that had escaped to the soaring rafters.
As Michel walked the hall at a ceremonial pace, his vestments weighted him like sand packs across his shoulders, chest, and back. He looked straight ahead, ignoring the eyes of the pilgrims crowding the balconies above him. The supplicants watched him in a hush, except for a man’s badly stifled cough and a woman’s awed whisper in Spanish: “Alli es.”
He could smell how long they had baked in the sun before the doors opened, and traces of cheap foods they had bought from vendors outside. He filtered them as silently as a brick wall, invisible. Hundreds of pilgrims visiting his home today only sharpened Fana’s absence. She should be walking at his side. They were here for her, too.
The music began, just when Michel needed to fill Fana’s silence most.
“Lacrimosa,” as he had instructed. Mozart’s last composition; his own requiem. The strings came first, their sad frolic echoing against the arched ceiling. Then the sixty-member choir he had brought in from Vienna gave chase, voices steady and earnest, filling the church-palace with splendor and gravity. The crescendo misted Michel’s eyes. Robed choir members lined each side of the hallway, individual voices caressing his ears as he walked. Where would he be without music? Music might be the only real gift his father had given him.
The tall double doors opened to the Cleansing Pool. No pilgrims would follow him here.
Inside, twenty-five men and women in crimson plumage waited near the door, hands clasped. These were Sanctus Cruor initiates, those who had seen the Letter of the Witness and aspired to see the Blood. They had been waiting in their V formatio
n near the door for two hours, all of them perspiring beneath the heavy regalia his father had modeled from the Catholics.
Their eyes devoured Michel. All they wanted was the Blood. Their offerings to the Cleansing Pool were only their way of trading the lives of others, no matter how much they quoted the Letter or swore their love for him. Given the chance, they would rip off his limbs and bleed him dry. Mortals, like starving dogs, would eat their masters.
The choir’s voices and violins were muffled as the doors fell shut. The row of scribes chronicled Michel’s arrival, ostrich-feather pens scratching lambskin parchment.
Michel had already decided that he would not travel beyond these walls the way he had on his previous visits to the Cleansing Pool. He would not send his thoughtstreams to Asia, or to the Caribbean, or to Africa, as he’d done when he’d touched Puerto Rico and Nigeria. He didn’t want to hurt Fana again. With the virus, he had found his voice; that was enough for now.
Today’s ritual was bureaucracy. When Fana came, true Cleansing would begin.
Gypsy was in the gallery, fully clothed for a change. He knew this without seeing her; even a polite glance would have made her ego insufferable. He dismissed an impulse to send her to the Cleansing Pool to join the others, but the irony niggled at him: Mozart had been denied the Blood, but not Gypsy? Eternity forgive him.
Someone was masking in the room, so crudely that the effort glowed above him.
Michel’s father stood in the private balcony, acknowledging Michel with a giddy flourish of his wrist. Stefan never missed a Cleansing Pool ceremony, although he couldn’t taste the power as Michel did. His father’s love for blood had nothing to do with the Shadows or prophecy; Stefan had learned blood as sport while he was still a mortal.
Beside his father, a surprise: Michel’s mother, Teru! No wonder his father was hiding his thoughts. Even a weak mask had kept Michel from suspecting that he was planning to bring Teru. He had never brought her to the Cleansing Pool before. Michel would have forbidden it.
Michel kept his eyes on the Cleansing Pool, although he did not let himself see, because he wasn’t ready to begin. He filtered out the whimpering, the colliding heartbeats.
Why are you here?
Michel sent his mother a private thought, but he avoided her sweet face, so much like Fana’s. Eerie in its resemblance.
After decades of mental imprisonment, his mother wasn’t used to direct address, expecting Stefan to answer for her. She was as ignorant as a mortal, but he coaxed her answer from her mind’s muddle: I WANT TO SEE WHO MY SON IS.
His father bit back a smile. Papa thought he was winning their battle over his mother because she hadn’t learned her freedom yet. She never left the grounds. She hadn’t left his bed. And Michel wouldn’t try to speed her progress any more than he would Fana’s. He’d offered to restore her old memories, but she didn’t want them. Why remember being a mother watching her son be stolen from her?
Stefan had brought Teru as his prize, but also to show her his life’s work.
This is not who your son is, Mother, he told her. This is the duty he was born into.
WHO ARE THEY—
Michel’s filters failed, and her question was drowned out by the buzzing. The cloying scent that filled the room like thick fog reminded Michel of the choir’s music. Beautiful and pure. The whimpers from the Cleansing Pool were a symphony of exquisite suffering. The low hum vibrated in Michel’s bones as his mind clouded over with the hum. Finally!
Twenty-five people stood up to their knees in the pool’s waters, one selected by each initiate. The water was warmed to body temperature, as if they shared one bloodstream, huddled shoulder to shoulder in nakedness. A boy of nine or ten shrieked when Michel’s eyes came to him, clawing his arms around his mother’s neck. She was trying to beseech for her child’s life, but she had lost her voice days ago, leaving nothing but urgent, teary whispers.
WHY CHILDREN?
Was that his mother’s voice buried in the buzzing? Fana’s? Or his own?
He had a ready answer for the voice: a child’s fear was pure and guileless. And what was the difference, since all mortals were children? The world teemed with children.
WHY CHILDREN, MICHEL?
Michel shuttered away the buzzing, looking away from the boy’s perfect terror. He closed his eyes, his face turned to the floor. He panted from the effort of filtering away the Shadows’ noise, like trying to balance a heavy table overhead. Heavier with each breath. The air itself was trying to crush him.
“Whose offering is this?” he said. “This boy?”
The question was only ceremony. He already knew.
Louis and Francesca, the married initiates from Paris, had considered themselves clever for bringing the mother and son they had caught stealing from their Las Vegas hotel suite. Children had been offered before. But Michel wouldn’t tolerate how Louis had raped the woman, or how Francesca had drugged the boy so she could watch her husband’s games in peace. Too many supplicants thought all-knowing was only a sales pitch.
Granted, Michel wasn’t normally one to judge. They had all fallen short of the glory of the Blood, and so forth. But his mother was there.
In the Cleansing Pool, the whimpers and shallow splashing stopped. Everyone stood still, praying for a negotiation to save them. Their anxious hearts goaded Michel, but he strained against his desire to succumb. His molars ground together.
“I brought him, Most High,” Francesca said. She had never been allowed to address him directly, and shyness quieted her voice. He could barely hear her over the Shadows.
“And me,” said reedy Louis. “We brought both.”
“Why?” Michel said.
“Thieves, my lord,” Louis said. His voice shook as he realized he was being challenged.
Francesca’s cheeks blushed bright red. “‘The wicked would sooner steal Blood than bread,’” she said, quoting the Letter of the Witness.
In the pool, the boy’s mother renewed her voiceless pleas. Water splashed as she tried to run, but Michel’s mental ring around the pool made her lose her balance and fall, confused, her limbs tangled with her son’s. Michel could feel Gypsy’s silent chuckles. And his mother’s pain.
Francesca and Louis stared, waiting with pale faces. He enjoyed their fear while the scribes’ pens wrote furiously of the unusual delays.
“I reject your joint offering,” Michel said finally, his voice raised loudly for the scribes. “You two will stand in the boy’s place in the Cleansing Pool … and his mother’s.”
Above him, Stefan couldn’t mute his annoyance. He had scouted the French couple himself and had plans for them, since they were journalists with a worldwide audience. Like Owodunni in West Africa, they had been groomed to help steer the masses when the wider plagues came. Untold numbers would rather drink poison from a blessed cup than wait for the disease to take them. But now Michel had no choice but to spare the mother with the boy.
His father would think twice before bringing Teru to the Cleansing Pool again.
“Yes, Most High,” Louis said, devastated. His husk of a voice stoked a deeper arousal in Michel than Gypsy could ever touch. Dutifully, Louis grabbed his wife’s hand.
“Whatever we must do, Most High,” Francesca choked. Her chin struck a noble pose.
The others in the pool screamed their objections, begging. The Shadows roared within Michel, riled by their pleas. Michel distracted himself by counting the sudden nosebleeds among those huddled in the pool: Uno … due … tre … quattro … cinque … seis …
None knew they were bleeding. None felt pain yet.
Louis and Francesca didn’t resist as they were led to the pool while the mother and son stumbled out. The others clamored and wailed, dumbfounded when the path the mother and son had taken was replaced by a barrier they couldn’t see, penning them in. Only Louis and Francesca stood stoically, still holding hands, at peace with their fate.
You were right, Papa, Michel said, unable to resist
a jab. They are loyal to the end.
GAMES INSTEAD OF DUTY, his father said. IS THIS TRUE CLEANSING, MICHEL?
The freed mother shrieked hoarsely and lunged at Michel. He had known what she would do before she knew herself, perhaps before she’d left the pool. His mental nudge made her lose her footing, slipping across the marble floor like an eel. Gypsy chuckled loudly at the ridiculous sight. The boy ran to his mother, hiding her nakedness.
Guns chambered around the room, but Michel held up his hand to calm his guards. Weapons were his father’s way. Who could guard him better than he could guard himself?
The freed woman grabbed the hem of Michel’s robe, bringing the fabric to her lips. “Thank you!” she struggled to whisper. “Thank you! You are an angel. God bless you!”
He was the vengeance she had prayed for. She had no thought of the others in the pool. She believed that she and her son alone deserved a reprieve. She was a thief, and a proud one, and her son would have grown up to outdo her. Soon, they would be dead of plague.
“There are no angels here,” Michel said. “You are pardoned by my mother.”
Teru smiled, pleased, and Michel was surprised at how glad he was to please her.
A sarcastic laugh came, as loud as a gunshot in the silence. Gypsy. She covered her mouth, but her eyes still twinkled with the joke of the woman’s display. Michel felt sharp disapproval throughout the room, especially from his Lalibela cousins who had joined him willingly, on the promise of decorum—all of them had come on their own, except one.
When he looked at Gypsy, all eyes followed his. His beauty in the gallery; his exquisite mistake. It was time.
Mi spiace, grazie per aver speso i tuoi ultimi giorni con me. He told her he was sorry, and thanked her for spending her last days with him.
Gypsy let out an audible gasp, as loud as her laugh had been. “Michel, please—”
He took her quickly to save her from the indignity of public begging. When he dove into her, she was warm, sweet jelly. But there was no time for amusement.
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