My Demon's Kiss

by Lucy Blue

  “And why are you not?” She moved closer, her hand outstretched. She wanted to touch him, to comfort him, but she was afraid, not just for herself, but for Charmot. He looked up at her, the anguish in his eyes like a knife in her heart. But could a demon feel grief? “Tell me, Simon.” She held the cross out before her, and he flinched as if it hurt him as it had hurt the other creature. “What are you?” She wept for him, but she feared him, too.

  “Vampire.” He crouched on the floor, his face turned away, and she thought of the wolf he had become. The wolf… Mother Bess had said that the wolf cannot die. Brautus made a noise beside her, and Simon looked up at him, a strange, scary smile on his face. “I am a vampire.”

  “Begone!” Brautus said, taking the cross from Isabel and thrusting it forward, making Simon recoil. “In the holy name of Christ, begone!”

  “No,” Isabel said, but Brautus held her back in a grip of iron. “Simon, please, just tell me how to help you.” Surely now he would tell her the truth; surely now he could have no more reason to lie. She was the lady of Charmot; she had a duty to protect her people. Her angel was a monster, a vampire. But she loved him even so; even now she wanted nothing more than to comfort him. Surely somehow she could do both. “I want to believe you, Simon. I want to—”

  “No.” If Simon could have willed his death, he would have at that moment. But he could not die any more than he could live. “There is nothing to believe.” Lucan Kivar was returned. The monster had come to his love’s very tower, he had touched her. Simon had brought him to her. He staggered to his feet, and Brautus held the cross out again, holding Isabel back. But he didn’t need the talisman. Simon wouldn’t touch her. “I am sorry, my love.” He would protect her even if she hated him; he would save her from Lucan Kivar. He loved her, and he could not stop. But he could leave her. He could keep her safe.

  “No!” Isabel lunged for him again, but Brautus held her in a grip of iron. “Simon, stop!” But he was gone.

  He fled out the door, moving faster as he reached the stairs. “My lord, what has happened?” Hannah asked as he passed her in the hall, and he broke into a run. He was not her lord and never could be. Malachi was still waiting in the courtyard where he had left him, and he swung into the saddle just as Kevin and the others came charging through the gates.

  “My lord!” Kevin shouted. “My lord, wait!” Simon spurred Malachi into a gallop, scattering dogs and gravel in every direction. In a single, mighty leap, they cleared the wagon and thundered through the gates, jumping again as the drawbridge was raised to land with a scramble on the opposite bank. Rearing once as he brought the horse around, the vampire fled into the night.

  Isabel heard the horse on the drawbridge and stopped fighting Brautus. It was too late. She would never catch him now. “Damn you,” she murmured as he let her go, crumpling to the floor, great gasping sobs threatening to choke her as she fell. Simon had said that he loved her. Simon was a vampire. She touched the sword he had pulled from his own stomach, the blade that should have been thick with his blood. It was as clean as if it had just been lifted from the grindstone and hot enough to burn her fingertips. Her lover was a demon. “No,” she said softly through her tears, sinking even deeper until she lay face down on the rug. “It can’t be true.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Brautus said. He bent down and took hold of her arms, hauling her upright again with no great show of tenderness. “We have no time for that.” She stared at him, aghast, as he wiped her eyes with the tail of her apron as he had done when she had fallen down and skinned her knee as a child. “You are the lady of Charmot, remember?” he said more gently as Kevin came running in behind him.

  “Lady Isabel, are you all right?” the groom demanded, pale and agitated.

  “She’s fine,” Brautus answered. “Tell us what happened at the churchyard.”

  “Sir Simon… something tried to attack Tom,” Kevin said.

  “Sir Simon attacked him?” Brautus said.

  “No,” Kevin said with a frown. “Sir Simon saved him. He is downstairs now. But Sir Simon left us at a gallop. He said he had to come and save Lady Isabel.” Isabel gasped, swaying on her feet, and Brautus took hold of her arm.

  “He saved me,” Isabel said. “If he is evil, Brautus, why did he save me?”

  “Hush now,” Brautus said, tightening his grip. “Kevin, where is that granddam of yours?”

  “Sleeping in our rooms, I think,” Kevin answered, looking more confused by the moment. “Lady Isabel, what has happened? Why did Sir Simon flee the castle? Does he need help?”

  “Tell Mother Bess to come to the solar,” Brautus answered for her. “Tell her Caitlin’s daughter needs her help.”

  “What are you talking about?” Isabel demanded. Caitlin had been her mother’s name, but she could not remember Brautus ever mentioning it before. “She wanted to tell me before,” she said, remembering. “But you wouldn’t let her.” The wolf cannot die, the old woman had said. But you will beat him in the end. Simon had transformed to a wolf. Simon was something called a vampire, something Brautus seemed to know but she did not. “You knew!” she said, looking at him in horror.

  “Forgive me, my lady, but hush,” Brautus ordered, giving her a shake.

  Kevin looked back and forth between them with a frown. “Aye, Brautus,” he said. “I will bring her.” Nodding once to Isabel, he left.

  “You knew,” she said again, tearing her arm from Brautus’s grip.

  “No, love, I did not,” he answered. “If I had, he never would have crossed the drawbridge, I can promise you.” He looked pale, suddenly, and shaken. “But come. It is time to let the old witch say her piece.”

  Malachi thundered down the forest path with Simon crouched low over his neck. Suddenly the stallion stumbled, sending the vampire sailing over his head without a moment’s warning like a stone launched from a flail. He slammed full force against a tree before crashing to the rocky ground, his spine giving way with a horrifying snap. Malachi reared over him, still fighting for his footing, the rope that had tripped him still tangled around his legs.

  “Easy,” Simon said, trying to stand, but his limbs were shattered, beyond his control. “Easy, boy.” He managed to roll out of the pathway, but one of the horse’s hooves still came down hard on his leg, crushing it to pulp beneath the animal’s weight. “It’s all right,” he said soothingly, the pain making him feel faint. “It will be all right.” He was a vampire; he would heal in an hour or so, but if Malachi should fall trying to avoid him, he would not.

  “That’s it,” he said softly as the horse stopped prancing to nuzzle him with his nose. “We’re fine.” But he couldn’t seem to make his arms work to reach up to him, and he was still restive, obviously still upset. Suddenly he reared up again, kicking Simon in the side, stoving in his ribs. The vampire cried out, unable to stop himself this time, and the stallion galloped away.

  “Shit,” Simon muttered, borrowing Isabel’s worst oath as he rolled himself onto his back.

  “Stop your crying.” Kivar had taken back the shape of the brigand, Michel, along with his manner and voice. “It’s not as if you can die.” He hauled Simon up by one arm, making him scream as his broken bones scraped and twisted inside his flesh, then threw him over his shoulder like a freshly dressed stag at the hunt. “Come, my son,” he grunted, shifting him to a more secure position, making him swear again in pain. “You and I must talk.”

  Isabel waited in the solar, the cup of warm wine meant to revive her after her ordeal untouched. Brautus said nothing, sitting by the fire, and she didn’t ask him to speak. She wanted to hear Mother Bess first. She went to the loom, to the tapestry her mother had been weaving up until the day she died and Isabel was born. All her life, she had studied it, trying to conjure up some sense of the woman who had made it, the mother she had never known. What would her mother tell her now? I love him, Isabel would say to her. I want to save him. Would the pretty peasant girl call her a fool?

  Th
e door opened, and Mother Bess came in, leaning on Kevin’s arm. “Welcome, old gran,” Brautus said, rising to meet her. “Come and sit by the fire.”

  “Never you mind where I sit,” the old woman snapped. “You and your lord nearly made quite a mess, don’t you think?” She smiled at Isabel, patting her cheek. “But we’ll soon put it right.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mother Bess,” Isabel said. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You will, poppet,” Brautus promised as the old woman snorted at him again in disgust before she sat down. “It’s all right, Kevin. You can go.” The groom looked at Isabel, obviously uncertain, and she nodded.

  “It’s all right.” He nodded back and left them, closing the door behind him.

  Brautus took out a scroll of parchment very much like the ones Isabel had taken from her father’s study. “All right,” he said gruffly, looking first at Mother Bess, then at Isabel. “Shall I begin?”

  “You know naught of the beginning,” Mother Bess said scornfully. “But aye, you may as well.”

  “Thanks,” he muttered, turning to Isabel. “I was with your father when he came here to Charmot. We had fought together many years already, and I knew that he meant to make this place his final home. But he never once mentioned any need to take a wife. He had loved a demoiselle once in his youth in France, but she betrayed him, and he swore he would never love another.”

  “Foolish Norman,” Mother Bess muttered, earning herself an impatient glance from the knight.

  “But one day just after we had finished clearing the land for this fortress and the architect was drawing out the walls, we looked up to see a maiden coming across our brand-new bridge,” he went on. “The most beautiful creature your father, or indeed any of us, had ever seen.” He smiled at her fondly, and she made herself smile back. She could not doubt he loved her, that everything he had done had been for love. But all she could think of was Simon’s face as he left her. I could have stopped him, she thought. I could have made him explain; I could have saved him.

  “You had not been born yet, you’ll recall,” Brautus was going on. “So this baggage walked straight up to Sir Gabriel like she knew him and said, ‘I will marry you.’ And he looked back at her for barely a moment before he said, ‘Yes, you will.’ And that was Lady Caitlin.”

  “She was a pretty thing,” Mother Bess agreed.

  Any other time Isabel would have found this story fascinating. She had certainly never heard it before. But she didn’t see what bearing it had on her present situation. Charmot was apparently besieged by demons from every side, one of whom had told her that he loved her. And she, poor fool, still loved him back. What did she care how her parents had come to be married? “I don’t understand,” she repeated. “What does my mother have to do with Simon?”

  “Caitlin’s father was a protector of the druid’s grove,” Mother Bess explained, as if this should mean something to her. “Your grandfather, my very dear Lady Charmot.” Isabel looked at her blankly. “Sweet God, did that Norman tell her nothing?” she demanded of Brautus.

  “Don’t speak that way about my father,” Isabel said, her temper starting to rise. “He was your lord, if you’ll recall, of noble blood—”

  “Your mother’s blood was far more noble than his,” the old woman cut her off with a dismissive little scoff. “Her line reached back to ancient days before the druids came to the southern lands of Britain, when the Normans were still nothing but savage pawns of Rome.” She leaned forward to take Isabel’s chin in her gnarled and wizened hand. “You come from druid stock, sweet girl. You are a child of the grove.”

  “Yes, but what does that mean?” she demanded. “What good is that to me, or anyone else?”

  Mother Bess let her go with a sigh. “Ruined… go on then, Brautus.”

  “No one expected your mother to conceive a child, druid blood or not,” Brautus said. “But when she did, she had a dream, a vision, she called it. She said her child would be the champion of her ancient line, that the child in her womb would avenge her race and overcome the wolf.”

  “That sounds horrifying,” Isabel said dryly, though in truth her show of not caring was losing strength by the moment. Simon had changed himself into a wolf. “What does it mean?”

  “The stories say that in ancient days in the first lands of the druids, one of their women was taken by the gods and gave birth to a demon,” Brautus explained, handing her the scroll. She unrolled it, but the crumbling page was covered in the same strange text as everything else in the catacombs; she couldn’t read a word.

  “It is no story, old man,” Mother Bess said with a bitter laugh. “This demon grew to manhood hating the druids and his mother’s people. He cursed them, using his immortal power to murder all of those who opposed him and make slaves of the rest. And his favorite form was that of the wolf.”

  “So he changed,” Isabel said, looking up from the scroll. “He could change.”

  “Oh, yes,” the old woman nodded. “But he was not all-powerful, as he believed. Some of the priests managed to escape him and come south, and they brought their wisdom with them, and their sacred blood. They wrote what they remembered of the wolf as a warning to their progeny, for they knew that someday he would find them and use all of his cunning to destroy them.”

  “And you think Simon is this person—this demon wolf?” Isabel said, hardly crediting her ears.

  “Simon?” the old woman said, looking at Brautus. “That young man…” She looked back at Isabel. “Dear Christ, can it be so?”

  “He is a vampire,” Brautus nodded. “He said it himself.”

  “But what is that?” Isabel demanded. “You act as if you know—”

  “I do know, love,” he cut her off. “A vampire is a cursed creature that can only live in darkness, feeding on the blood of the living.” He looked more pale than ever. “Your father and I had heard such tales at war, and I saw enough to know that they were true.”

  “The demon drank the blood of his victims, and his children did the same, mortals that he poisoned with his own immortal blood,” Mother Bess said. “No weapon could harm him; he could not die.” Her eyes glittered in the firelight. “But neither could he live.”

  “I stabbed him, poppet, remember?” Brautus said, taking Isabel’s hand. “He did not die. He did not even bleed.”

  “The druids wrote that their gods could not destroy the wolf because he was one of their own,” Mother Bess explained. “But they drove him from their forests and across the sea, and they cursed him for all time, condemning him to live in darkness, to never see the sun.”

  Isabel stared at them, aghast. “There is but one God in heaven,” she said, standing up as if she’d heard enough.

  “He could not live as mortal men,” Mother Bess went on, relentless. “He could taste no meat nor drink anything but living blood. He was the vampire.”

  “Your father believed as we do, poppet,” Brautus said, putting a hand on her arm, pressing her back into her chair. “He loved your mother very much, but he would not believe these pagan tales of demons and druids and gods.”

  “No more do I,” she answered. “I will not believe it.” God Himself has banished me from the light, Simon had told her at their first meeting. He had never eaten so much as a crust of bread or drunk so much as a sip of water in her presence; he spent the daylight hours buried underground. He said himself that he was a vampire; she had seen him transform himself into a wolf. But he loved her; he had said that, too. He was barely older than she was herself; he could not be some ancient pagan evil. He had been at Charmot for weeks; he could not mean them harm. “I believe in Christ, in the grace of God Almighty.” But what in Christ’s teachings explained how Simon had transformed himself into a wolf before her very eyes?

  “And so do we, my lady, and so did your lady mother, I do swear it on my life,” Mother Bess said, taking her hand. “But she believed in the old ways as well, that there was good and evil in the world tha
t God knew well but perhaps his priests did not.”

  “She did not argue with your father, but she trusted in her vision,” Brautus said. “She was certain that this wolf or vampire or whatever he was would be coming to Charmot and that the child she carried in her womb would be the one to vanquish him. She made your father promise to protect the wisdom of the druids in their catacombs, and she began this tapestry. It became a kind of joke between them.” He unrolled the weaving and held it out to her. “We always assumed the maiden was meant to be Lady Caitlin herself, that the wolf was bowing down to the son in her womb. Then when you were born a girl, and Lady Caitlin died…” He looked at Mother Bess. “Some people thought they knew better.”

  “Knew the truth, you mean, and so we did,” the old woman answered. “Caitlin knew it herself. She just feared to frighten her pigheaded husband with the knowledge that his daughter would be faced with such a task. She never expected to die; she thought she would have time to teach her daughter who she was, to prepare her for what she would become.”

  “After she died, your father refused to hear any more talk of a prophecy that would endanger his child,” Brautus said. “And I agreed with him; I thought it was all a lot of peasant nonsense, more than he thought it, in fact.” He glared at Mother Bess. “Despite what some would tell you, he had great respect for the wisdom of the druids, Christian that he was. He just did not wish to give them his daughter. He refused to believe that you, his precious child, were meant to battle some demon—you were a girl, for pity’s sake. He searched the catacombs all of your life for some evidence of some female warrior who had attempted such a thing in the past, but he never found a word to support it.” He stopped, taking a deep breath. “What else he might have found, I cannot say.”

  Isabel’s blood had run so cold, she felt numb. “Do you mean to tell me I’m supposed to murder Simon?” she said, her voice sounding hollow in her ears.

  “Slaughtering a monster isn’t murder,” Mother Bess said grimly.

  “Your father thought your husband would fulfill the prophecy, if somehow it really was true,” Brautus said. “That was why he was always so concerned that you should marry a man who could protect Charmot. That, he believed, was your true destiny.” He smiled with sadness in his eyes. “I believe it as well. That is why I became the Black Knight.”