The Midnight Guardian

by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  Brigit concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, hardly knowing what she was doing. She felt as though Mors had stripped naked before her, but instead of its making him vulnerable, he’d reached out and gripped her throat, smiling that charming, sexy half-smile as his fingers squeezed just enough to warn her how quickly they could snap her head off, should he be so inclined. For a moment, she had no idea who, or what, he was.

  “Let’s not tell the others the whole story, not yet,” he urged, his voice its old self, although the defeat and frustration in it were unbearable. “Who knows, maybe the fool will come to his senses? Or if not, well, maybe we’ll break through in the next few weeks. We’re getting closer, aren’t we? You certainly have done well.”

  They both knew that wasn’t really true, but now was not the time to point out the truth. Nothing had gone as they had anticipated. These architects of the new Reich conducted business in a new way, and one that made such limited saboteurs more ineffective than they could have imagined. Even doors that looked open were closed. Things were conducted so baldly, in daylight with open windows. The nighttime parties and meetings, always frustratingly few and far between, had dissipated even further. The wives who had seemed so pliable instead subscribed wholly to the children/church/kitchen formula and were as caught up in the dream as their husbands.

  We didn’t count on the determination.

  They’d expected a house of cards. Well-built, yes, but a few gusts of discord here and there and the whole thing would collapse. It seemed so logical. They’d all seen empires rise and fall and knew how fragile they really were. How easy, then, to use all they knew, all those lessons from history, and infiltrate, kill the beast while it was still rising. But the beast was bigger than they were. No one wanted to admit it, yet it was so painfully true. Brigit puzzled it over and over. The house of cards was instead a shell game, which it should not have been. For all their power, they were just players in a casino.

  And it doesn’t matter how many tricks we know. The house will always win.

  “Brigit? You all right?”

  She wasn’t, and he knew it, but they decided to pretend otherwise.

  “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  Which was true. So tired she briefly hallucinated the shadow of a nearby human, watching, recognizing. But she smelled nothing and Mors had reverted to his jolly self.

  “Do you know what I think?” His eyes twinkled. “I think the next few weeks will really turn us around. Think of it, they’ll be so busy, so focused on what’s coming with France, they won’t pay as close attention to other details. That will give us ample opportunity. If nothing else, we can break in and stage a mass killing. You’re not massacred-out, are you?”

  The evil grin was as infectious as ever, and Brigit wanted to believe him. Maybe they did have one more chance. Anything was possible. Perhaps they could get a message about the useless Maginot Line to British High Command. Or indeed, use the energy focused elsewhere to their advantage.

  They don’t know what we know.

  One more chance. Brigit hoped they could use it well.

  Chapter 15

  London. March 1940.

  The energy in the West End was high that evening, and Eamon drank it in with nervous tension. He could barely stop himself from flying down to Folkestone and taking the ferry to Calais and from there go to Berlin. The noose was closing in, he knew it, and he wanted to get Brigit out.

  Otonia had agreed that they should prepare to come home. The disappointment in her face was palpable, but she covered it well. After all, they’d always known there was the possibility this wouldn’t work. Just because no one had ever voiced it didn’t mean it wasn’t known. Accepting it was something else again.

  “At least they can make one last big push. That will be something. As Mors says, if this attack on France happens, it may give them an edge. Unfortunate, but we must take what we can,” Otonia murmured, optimistic and pragmatic to the last.

  Eamon had an urge to contact someone connected with the military and give them the crucial information, but he knew with that familiar, horrible certainty that it wasn’t possible. Everyone in the tribunal had looked at him apprehensively since Mors’s last telegram, wondering how much he sensed and hoping he would tell them what was coming, but he couldn’t. His focus was on Brigit, on her coming home. He didn’t want to feel anything more.

  Even so, he was sure, looking at all the bright streetlights and theater marquees, that he could see them darkening, as though each step he took was one step back in his own history toward a darker, quieter time. A London in its infancy, a city of possibilities, and sometimes menace. It pained him to walk by the men in uniform, some of them so beautifully young and fresh. They were stepping into darkness, too, and they didn’t know it.

  One young soldier, too young, a boy who had lied about his age to escape a stultifying country life and become part of the glamorous set he thought soldiers might be, struggled to light a cigarette. His studied casual swagger fell away with each failed flick of the lighter. Eamon took pity on him and offered the use of his own lighter, a twinge of guilt flickering through him, this being the lighter he used when seducing prey who liked to smoke.

  “Cheers.” The soldier grinned. “Want one?”

  He held out the pack with easy generosity.

  “I’m all right, thank you.” Eamon nodded and was moving on, but the boy soldier was lonely and disjointed and desperately wanted to chat.

  “How come you’re not suited up, then?”

  “Ah, they wouldn’t have me.” Eamon smiled, shaking his head in a sort of sorrow.

  Although that would be something to see at the recruitment office.

  “Intelligence, is it?” Eamon’s questioner was eager, finding something innately intriguing about the handsome young man, so close to his own age and yet so self-possessed and seeming far older. Perhaps there was a friend lurking under the simple politeness, even though the man was so plainly wealthy and cultured.

  Eamon made the mistake of looking straight into the boy’s hopeful, smiling green eyes. He saw them cold, pale, open, staring without seeing at a misty sky through black trees.

  Waste, waste, waste! You unhappy many, stepping into the breach and over the edge.

  He pressed his lighter into the boy’s slim hand and smiled warmly.

  “In a manner of speaking. Now, take my advice and go find yourself a nice girl and have fun. Have a lot of fun. In fact”—Eamon slipped the astonished boy two ten-pound notes—“have more fun than you ever thought possible.”

  And he hurried away, desperate not to hear any thanks that might echo in his brain for longer than he could bear. He hoped the boy would find a girl, hoped he would know the feel of a woman’s skin, grasp an idea of love, have some sweet memory that might keep him warm while his life was ebbing away in that frozen forest.

  Even the shortest life is long without love.

  And the long life was worthwhile only with love, which was why Eamon often wondered how Mors managed, because he was always alone, except for the dogs. By all appearances, he preferred it that way. For himself, however, Eamon knew to be grateful, to thank the universe for what he had been allowed to enjoy all these centuries. Brigit may have stopped his heart, but she had also opened it.

  If music be the food of love, play on.

  And they had. Once the music began, nothing could stop it.

  Having all the time in the world means one doesn’t always notice it passing. Years went by, and still Jacob maintained a wall around himself. Brigantia was certain he knew what she could really be for him, that she was safe harbor, that she was warmth and happiness. But he hesitated to reach out to her. Distance was safer. Times were she felt he was afraid, afraid to push through his own barriers and step into love. There was a comfort, however cold, in the world he’d constructed for himself, and something about leaving it unnerved him.

  All the years he was meant to be a wild thing, the
n, were lost in a fog of contemplation, of guilt, of uncertainty, but it built him an unusual power. Otonia privately thought that Brigantia had chosen better than she knew, that this vampire was the missing piece of her, and she his own lost part, and when they finally locked hands, they would find they were stronger together, even unconquerable. The legend books wouldn’t know what to make of them, because this would not be the sort of love that could be confined by words. Otonia, as a great respecter and believer in words, found that unsettling, and Otonia was never unsettled. She did not shy from the sensation, however, and rather enjoyed its novelty. Neither was she impatient. The wall would come down, sooner or later, and the dance would be a wonderful thing to watch. In the meantime, she relished the thrill of anticipation.

  Jacob, however, thought he was in stasis. Both Otonia and Brigantia could have told him this was not the case, but they each felt he would do better to discover as much on his own. Just as he would eventually find who he was, and who he would be with Brigantia.

  Some paths are more satisfying to walk alone, however frustrating it may be for others.

  That was what Brigantia thought, but Cleland, Raleigh, and Mors could not understand her and were rarely as silent on the subject as she’d have preferred. They all thought Jacob—“Is he ever going to give himself a name?” Mors complained—was a better friend for the quiet and humorless Swefred and Meaghan.

  “You’re quite wrong,” Brigantia corrected them. “He’s neither quiet nor humorless. Just give him time, you’ll see.”

  She saw Cleland and Raleigh exchange glances, the look of condescending understanding, the amused patience and anticipation of laughing openly at a friend who had trapped herself so thoroughly in delusion but would eventually see clear again. Brigantia wanted to explain that love was a more peculiar creature than they knew, and chose its own maddeningly obstinate path, whether by design or by caprice or just because that was how it had to go. She couldn’t tell any of them what had happened before the bite, what she’d felt inside the man and what he’d seen in her eyes. That wasn’t something to be shared. It had happened, however, and she clung to it. Nothing else could have taught her patience, except the memory of that hour.

  Jacob wanted to rename himself, wanted to step into his skin properly, but the fog persisted, and his body was split. There was so much he strangely loved about vampire life, the power, the ability, the way his mind opened and absorbed all around him. Hunting was an adventure, and for all it followed a formula, it was different every time. He had never seen a play, but still he knew this was the stuff of drama, and that he was stepping into a role, embodying a different kind of human man for each girl, improvising a new script, entertaining and drawing in an audience. The bite was the climax, the blood applause. But once the curtain dropped and he was back to himself, this half-life that constrained him, the body filled him with guilt. There was nothing to be done, but he sometimes thought of the parents or siblings who would find the shell of a girl they’d loved, and be convulsed in sorrow, and he wished things could be different. Rabbits could not weep when foxes carried off their brethren, nor could deer mourn long when their kin were felled by wolves. He was a predator, he did not kill for sport, but to remain alive. It was who he was, who they all were, but that didn’t mean he could wholly embrace it.

  He was also still unable to accept Brigantia, and the way she’d torn him from his family. He’d kept the herb bouquet, but he still didn’t want to meet her eye. One afternoon, sleepless and pulsing with vengeful fury, he stalked into her chamber. She was asleep, and he stood over her, preparing to snap her neck. Looking at her, he grew repulsed. She was so plainly already dead, lying there without breathing. A pale, waxy, unreal thing. A graven image. An accident of nature.

  As his hands reached for her neck, her eyes flickered. He hesitated, but she didn’t wake. Rather, he could see her eyes moving rapidly under the lids. Her cheekbones twitched and her lips curved in a shadow of a smile.

  We dream.

  His own sleeps since that night had been so restless, he hadn’t registered dreaming. But Brigantia was undoubtedly deep in a dream, and perhaps a happy one. Her cheeks looked almost flushed, rosy, and moist. Or maybe it was a trick of the light.

  Her arm was folded up against her head, her palm open. Not knowing why, he laid a finger inside the palm and her hand closed lightly around his. He watched her for several minutes more, then withdrew his hand and went back to bed. That night, his sleep was deep and sound.

  The night that would have been Alma’s seventeenth birthday, Jacob wandered through the woods a long time, trying not to think. When he came back to the caves, he saw Brigantia in her garden, which was edged by delicately carved lanterns she’d made herself. Her fingers hesitated on a plant, just enough to let him know she sensed his approach, but she didn’t turn.

  He meant to skirt the garden and go inside, but he found himself stopping, and sitting on a tree stump, watching Brigantia. There was something remarkable about the way she coaxed so much life out of the earth. It seemed impossible that plants should thrive so well under hands that only touched them in darkness. Her fingers were deft, her touch delicate, and he saw how much love she had for those plants, how much passion she channeled into them, even though they were so unnecessary for vampire life, except that their sweetness lightened the air.

  Mors, Cleland, Raleigh, and Otonia loved her, and Jacob was sure she loved them, too. But there was something that hung over her and made him wonder what else was lingering under her skin.

  “Whom did you lose?” he asked.

  She inclined her head toward him, curious.

  “When you were turned,” he elaborated. “Whom did you leave behind, who missed you?”

  “No one.” Her voice was soft. “The Vikings slaughtered my people … . But even so, there was no one. None of them loved me. Nor I them, I suppose.”

  Jacob was torn between disgust and pity, but then she raised her eyes to his. It was the first time he’d looked directly into her eyes since that night, and he’d forgotten how deep they were, how much they resembled the Yorkshire sky on a cool autumn day. The honesty in them tugged at his heart. He stared at her, wondering what to say. She smiled shyly, and even though it was a small smile, and a sad one, it still had a potency that warmed him and enticed a return smile that he averted his head to hide.

  He murmured something and headed inside, but then he stopped and looked back. She was working again, her head bent low over the sage, and he wondered if she was weeping. He felt a tug toward her, remembered that he’d looked at her in his last human moments and known she was love. It had meant something. It still did, however much he tried to push it away. And however resentful he may have been of her taking him from his duty, he couldn’t help seeing that he’d had more than she did. He’d had human love, a family he’d adored, who had adored him. She may now have more strength and knowledge, but he had an advantage. He promised himself he would never wield it.

  On midsummer night, vampires roamed even more wildly than usual, as though taunting the dark that came so late and would fade so early. Its brevity could not keep them from tearing into the night air. They would eat the heavy scents, the lush sensuality that rose in the humans, if they did not eat any humans themselves. A vampire could get drunk on midsummer night, a dizzying high that would linger for days.

  Jacob had yet to really enjoy a midsummer night, there was something about it that made him feel distant, lonely, and to tread openly on ground so saturated with enchantment and intoxication felt indecent. Tonight, however, he was suddenly invigorated. A surge of the old Jacob polished his skin and brightened his eyes. He floated through the woods, danced his way under the moonlight, found himself on the edge of the Dales, and had no choice but to sing. These were new songs, songs he didn’t know he’d been writing, some without words, and all a mix of the two worlds he’d navigated with such trepidation and discomfort, but when united in melody they were bigger than he was, bigger
than a human soul, bigger than air. The echo rolled over the land, delving inside anyone and anything who paused to hear it. From the moths and mice, to the men and women, and more.

  It pulled Brigantia close, to the point where she felt like she was lodged deeper in him than his own demon. This was music to send indeed, music that made her dizzy, sounds so sublime, it was as though every beautiful sound the earth made had come together in one idyllic chorus. She was soaring, rolling in grass and heather, twirling under a waterfall. She was skipping over treetops, bouncing in clouds, pirouetting across rivers. She was balancing in a brilliant blue sky, floating through a blaze of daylight. The music she loved so much in Mors was dark and exciting and volatile, but this, this was evocative on a different plane altogether. It was what poets hoped to define, or would if they knew it existed. Mors’s music thrilled the demon and stoked the fire, but this was music that filled her with glowing warmth, with a bliss so pure and whole, she knew that if she never had another moment of happiness in her life, she would still have this sound to soothe and comfort her, and pull a smile into her eyes.

  He saw her, saw how much more beautiful she was with a face suffused with happiness, saw the glint of warm tears clinging to her lashes. The bricks of the wall around him, each from which blinked Alma and Abram’s eyes, began to rupture. One of Alma’s eyes smiled at him. Smiled, and even winked. Through the chink in the wall, he reached a hand toward Brigantia. She took it, and their intertwining fingers introduced a new song to his repertoire.

  “I am Eamon,” he whispered. “Jacob of Emmanuel has been dead a long time, and I release him. Eamon is pulled from Emmanuel, just as a remnant, but Eamon is his own creature. I’ve stepped into him and there is no way back.”