My Demon's Kiss

by Lucy Blue

  “Can you kill him, then?” Brautus asked.

  “Where is the beauteous maiden of Charmot?” the brigand shouted, brandishing his sword. “Fight me or bring me my bride!”

  “Yes,” Simon answered.

  “No,” Orlando said at the same moment.

  “I killed him before,” the vampire said stubbornly.

  “Apparently not,” the wizard replied, his tone more gentle than his words. “Simon, without the Chalice…” He caught sight of Isabel’s face and let the sentence die.

  “This is probably a foolish question,” she said. “But what happens if we refuse to let down the drawbridge and open the gate?”

  “Kivar comes over the wall,” Simon answered. “Or under the lake or out of the sky. He’s a vampire, love— worse than a vampire. For ten years his spirit has been living inside the bodies of dead men—I killed the man you see myself, I promise you. He can turn into a dog or a vapor.” His hand had tightened on hers so much he knew he must be hurting her, and he made himself loosen his grip. “He doesn’t need the drawbridge to get in.”

  “So why bother with this challenge?” Brautus asked.

  “It amuses him,” Orlando said. “He knows Michel intended to kill the Black Knight, and he enjoys the joke of allowing him to do it.” He looked pointedly at the ring Simon now wore, the ring that the duke had regretted not giving him before his death. “It is one of his favorite tricks.”

  “He may not know I’m here,” Simon pointed out. “He may still think I died in his trap.”

  “Not likely,” Orlando answered. “He will have made certain one way or the other.”

  “But he doesn’t know whether or not you have the Chalice,” Isabel said, making them all turn to look at her in shock. “He knew I had the map, and he knew what it was. And apparently he wants it.”

  “Oh, yes,” the wizard nodded. “Very much.”

  “So let me fight him,” Brautus said. “You and the acorn go down and find this Chalice, whatever it is—”

  “No,” Simon said, cutting him off. “He’d know at once he was fighting a mortal man, and he would abandon the game. The only one with any hope of keeping him busy is me.”

  “And what good will keeping him busy do?” Isabel asked. “If Orlando is right, and you can’t kill him—”

  “Kivar is immortal, but Michel’s body is not,” Simon answered. “He never should have left Francis for me to find; I know now how to drive him out. If I can cut off his head and cut out his heart, his spirit will have to abandon its host. We don’t have any other corpses lying around the castle that I don’t know about, do we?”

  “You mean other than you?” Orlando said. “It’s too risky—if Kivar took possession of you—”

  “If he could possess me, he would have done it when I killed him the first time,” Simon cut him off, putting an arm around Isabel when he saw her horrified face. “He has other plans for me, I’m afraid.”

  “So what about this beheading and heart ripping,” Brautus interrupted. “Can you do it?”

  Simon smiled. “Oh, yes.”

  “Simon.” Isabel put a hand on his arm and pointed. “Look.”

  Kivar had stopped circling and shouting to hold his mount perfectly still, facing the castle. He raised the visor on his helmet and smiled, showing his fangs, his eyes glowing green in the dark. “He heard,” Kevin said, panic in his voice. “He heard every word you said.”

  “Very likely,” Simon agreed, staring back. He pressed a kiss to Isabel’s brow. “But I am not afraid.”

  14

  Isabel watched Brautus help Simon into the painted armor of the Black Knight in his tiny cellar room. “I am afraid,” she said, leaning against his bed. “I don’t want you to fight him.”

  “You and Brautus will take the others across the lake in boats,” he answered, strapping on the spiked plates that covered his arms. “Even if I fail, Kivar won’t be interested enough in the people of Charmot to make the effort to hunt you down. All he really cares about is the Chalice.”

  “You’re not listening.” Brautus’s chain mail hauberk was a bit long for him, hanging almost to his knees, but through the shoulders and arms, it was a good fit. “I said don’t fight him.”

  He laid his gauntlets aside. “You know I have to fight him.” He cradled her cheek in his palm, making her look at him. “You made me promise I would, remember?”

  “That was Michel, a man.” She pushed his hand away. “Not this demon in a dead man’s body, this thing that can’t be killed.”

  “He can be killed, and I will do it.” He made her meet his eyes again. “I am sworn to it.”

  “Oh, shut up.” She batted him away again, moving out of his reach. “Ever since I met you, you’ve been telling me what you are sworn to do and not to do, and it’s always exactly the opposite of whatever it is I want.” He looked at Brautus, hoping for guidance, but the knight just shrugged, barely trying to hide his smile. “I know you have to fight him,” she admitted, turning back to him. “But I still don’t want you to do it.”

  “I know.” He looked almost exactly the way she had pictured him in her desperate dreams before she had ever seen him, her true Black Knight, a deadly angel loosed from hell to protect Charmot. But he wasn’t that; he was Simon, her beloved, and she’d only just found him. How was she supposed to let him go? “I don’t want to fight him,” he said now.

  “Yes, you do,” she cut him off. “You’re fairly itching to go out there and hack him to pieces and take your revenge—”

  “And why shouldn’t I be?” he demanded, cutting her off in turn. “I want him gone, destroyed forever. I want to be free of him for good.” He framed her face in his hands, refusing to let her pull free this time. “I want to be what you told your people I was,” he said more gently, gazing into her eyes. “I want to be a man again, your husband. I want to grow old with you, to see our sons grow up in sunlight.”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, the willful girl inside her battling the woman. “Or daughters,” she finally retorted. “We could have daughters.”

  “Aye,” he admitted with a smile. “We could.” He kissed her, and she wrapped her arms around him, pressing herself against him with all her strength for a moment, memorizing every tiny portion of the way he felt before she let him go, and she could feel him doing the same, running his hands through her hair just before she pulled away. “Go with Brautus,” he said, still holding her hands in his. “I will find you when it’s done.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m staying here with Orlando.”

  “Poppet, enough,” Brautus said. “You can’t—”

  “I can,” she interrupted. “Orlando and I will wait down here outside the catacombs while Brautus leads the people safety. As soon as you dispatch this Kivar, we’re going to find your Chalice.”

  “As simple as that,” Simon said, smiling in spite of himself.

  “Why not?” she retorted, smiling back. “I have a map.”

  “We’ve no more time to argue,” Brautus said with an air of surrender. “Whatever this Kivar might be, I doubt he’ll wait forever.”

  Simon took the devil’s mask helmet and put it on his head. “How do I look?”

  “Terrifying,” Isabel answered, trying to sound careless and ironic in spite of the tears in her eyes. She touched the helmet’s leering grin. “So go and frighten him to death.”

  Simon hadn’t worn armor in so long, he had almost forgotten how uncomfortable it was. He stopped halfway across the courtyard to fidget, resettling the chain mail shirt on his shoulders, the devil’s-head helmet cocked at an odd angle as he tilted his head from one side to the other, loosening his neck. “You make quite a picture, my lord,” Kevin said, holding Malachi’s reins in one hand and a lethal-looking black lance in the other. “Brautus’s kit fits you well.”

  “Well enough.” He swung into the saddle, Malachi planting his feet to hold himself steady, an old hand at such business, and Kevin ha
nded him the lance. “You should hurry,” Simon advised him. “The others have already gone.”

  “Tom will watch out for his mother.” He adjusted Simon’s stirrups. “Besides, someone will have to open the gate.”

  “That’s true enough.” His voice sounded hollow and hoarse behind the helmet, but at least whoever had designed it had been clever enough to make the “eyes” wider than they looked, the actual openings set behind hooded lids of steel and tilted up at the corners to give him a clear view on either side. “Just keep an eye out and be ready to flee if you have to.”

  “Godspeed, my lord.” The groom stepped back and touched his forehead in salute before running to open the gate.

  Kivar was ringing the bell again as Simon rode out on the drawbridge at a trot. “Finally,” he laughed, turning his horse to face him. He rode Michel’s horse, the same armored destrier Simon had frightened so badly in the chapel yard after he had slain its master, and its eyes were wild with fear, its muzzle flecked with foam. What dark act of will had Kivar practiced on this creature to make him bear his weight? “I like your costume,” the ancient vampire said. “As depressingly moral as you knights can be, you have a great flair for occasion.” He seated his lance with graceful ease, as if he were born to it. Michel had been a professional fighter; how much of his skill could the demon have stolen? “But then, you are no longer a knight.”

  Simon seated his lance as well. “Why would you say I am not?” Malachi was pawing the ground, eager to be under way, and he smiled. “Did you not call for the Black Knight of Charmot?”

  Kivar’s smile turned darker. “So I did.” Without further warning, he urged his mount into a gallop, startling the animal—an amateur’s mistake. Malachi charged back almost before Simon’s own spurs touched his flanks, by far the superior beast. They came together at the center of the drawbridge, Kivar’s lance shattering on Simon’s breastplate as he leaned in to take the full force of the blow, trusting his vampire strength to hold him in the saddle. His own lance point found a ridge in Kivar’s armor just below the shoulder and levered him neatly off his horse. He quickly brought Malachi around, his lance still whole, as Kivar climbed back to his feet, clumsy and apparently stunned.

  “Well done, my son,” he said, drawing his sword. “I didn’t realize how little this barbarian knew his own craft.” His horse was trapped behind him against the gates, and it screamed, pawing at the drawbridge, desperate to escape. “But then the body only remembers so much.”

  Simon bore down on him again with the lance, the rules of engagement be damned, catching him solidly in the throat with the point before he was close enough for Kivar to reach Malachi with his sword. He jumped down from the horse’s back to shove the lance’s blade all the way through the ancient vampire’s throat, nearly beheading him with this single hit. Kivar struck at him with Kivar’s heavy broadsword, but Simon barely felt it, the blade glancing off the thick chain mail armor, his vampire body impervious to the bruises and scrapes of a mortal man.

  “I will kill you,” he said, ripping the helmet from Kivar’s head, watching his face contort with rage, unable to speak with Simon’s lance through his throat. “I will scourge your filth from this world for all time.” He drew Sir Gabriel’s sword and struck the vampire lord’s borrowed head from his shoulders, his blade passing smoothly through the Frenchman’s thick, dead neck. But just as he was raising the sword to cut out the dead heart, the head began to laugh, Kivar’s high-pitched, lunatic giggle ringing out all around him. The headless corpse reached up and grasped Simon’s sword, severing three of its own fingers as it did so but snapping the blade like a twig.

  “Fool!” the head cried out, the eyes coming alive again with demon fire. “My precious, beautiful fool!” Simon grasped it by the ears, crouched over the headless trunk, and a rush of cold wind, stinking of the grave, swept up and over him, knocking him backward, the head still clutched between his hands.

  “Kivar!” he shouted, struggling to rise, both horses now screaming and stamping in fright. The foul head he held went soft in his grasp, rotting away in a moment, and the body dissolved into a gray-black, slimy fluid that oozed from its armor into the cracks of the drawbridge. “Kivar!” Kevin opened the gates again, rushing out as the horses rushed in, but Simon barely saw him. Flinging the filth he held away, he grabbed the broken fragment of his sword and sprinted for the castle, tearing off his helmet as he went.

  Isabel gazed at the carving of Saint Joseph, absently clearing the cobwebs from his face. “I am surprised that you’re here, Isabel,” Orlando said from behind her. “Why aren’t you watching Simon fight?”

  “I didn’t want to distract him,” she answered. “I used to do it on purpose, back when Brautus was the Black Knight. I would stand on the battlements and watch, and if things were going badly, I would scream, or I’d cry out ‘God-a-mercy, sir knight, you are killed!’ if Brautus made a hit. Sometimes I would pretend to faint; that always seemed to work.” She hugged herself, the underground passage even colder than usual, and imagined the battle above them now, her heart’s love fighting a demon he knew he couldn’t kill. “May God forgive me.”

  “I would think he has already.” Orlando smiled as he patted her arm. “Brautus never actually killed any of these poor knights, did he?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But some of them were very, very embarrassed.”

  A door slammed above them as if it had been caught by the wind in a storm, and suddenly a terrible stench filled the passage, as if someone had opened a tomb. “Kivar,” Orlando cried as they turned toward the stairs. “Run, Isabel—”

  “Run where?” A freezing wind swept past her, the stench so strong, she thought she would be sick. She turned back toward the door to the catacombs as the stone carving on its face began to tremble and the shape of the monk began to crack, screaming as a skeletal hand broke through the stone, dried ribbons of sinew still hanging from the bone.

  “The cross,” Orlando called out over the sound of breaking stone and rushing wind. “Where is the cross?”

  She fumbled in her pocket, her eyes locked to the stone as it crumbled away. The desiccated corpse of the monk stepped down from the door where it had been entombed, the skeleton still draped in the rotting tatters of the cleric’s robe, his flesh dissolving further into dust with every step. Only the eyes looked alive, the glowing green eyes of Kivar.

  “Isabel,” he said, his voice echoing in the air around her rather than from his lipless grin. He held up one hand and saw the weapon of Saint Joseph he still held, a rough wooden stake, and he laughed, saying something more in a language she couldn’t understand before he flung it away.

  “Stay back,” she ordered, trying to sound brave as she held up the cross.

  “Not this time, little one.” He struck it from her hand so hard she felt her wrist give way with a snap, her flesh crawling at his touch as the talisman skittered away. “Now come.” He grabbed her broken wrist, and she cried out in pain. “Where is the map?”

  “I don’t have it.” How could she have ever mistaken this monster for Simon? This was his true form, this ancient, rotting corpse.

  “What a sweet little liar.” He yanked her closer, the smell making bile rise in her throat. “Shall I kiss you for it?” She screamed as he bent closer, but he didn’t do as he had threatened, snatching the map from her pocket with his other hand instead.

  “Release her!” Orlando shouted, holding up a fistful of something from one of his pouches. He flung the powder at Kivar, shouting some sort of incantation, and the skeletal vampire burst into flames, the rotting robe consumed in an instant. But the flesh and bone would not burn; with another icy blast of wind, the fire went out.

  “My turn,” Kivar said with a snarl, raising his free hand toward Orlando. The wizard rose up and sailed back into the wall as if he’d been flung by a giant, then slid to the floor, apparently lifeless.

  “I won’t open it,” Isabel insisted as Kivar turned her toward the door a
gain, tearing at the bony hand that held her fast.

  “Won’t you?” Kivar slammed her palm against the door, slicing a gash in her flesh with the sharp-edged, broken stone, and it swung open with a crash, the rusted hinges screaming. Holding the map out before him, he dragged her through her father’s study and into the pitch-black tunnel beyond.

  Simon ran through the castle and down the stairs, armed with nothing but fury and a broken sword. “Kivar!” He found the stone door to the catacombs shattered and Orlando slumped against the wall. “Orlando!” He fell to his knees beside the wizard and shook him. “Orlando, where is Isabel?”

  “Gone.” He looked up, blood running into his eyes from a scrape on his forehead. “Taken by Kivar.” He pointed at the broken door. “There was a dead saint buried in the stone… Joseph.” He was holding Simon’s sleeve, but his grip fell away. “We are lost.”

  “No.” The vampire shook him again, refusing to be patient. “Tell me how to use it—the Chalice. If I find it, how do I use it to destroy him?”

  “Kivar has the map,” the wizard pointed out. “He has the girl, the protector’s blood—”

  “Just tell me!”

  “I don’t know!” He struggled to his feet. “I always assumed that when we found it, somehow you would know, that some book or ancient carving would have told us by then or it would be an instinct… I don’t know.”

  “Lovely.” Looking around the passage for some better weapon, Simon found a rough wooden stake encrusted with cobwebs and dirt—the weapon of Saint Joseph. “Maybe this will work.”

  “Simon, how will you find them?” The wizard chased him into the study. “If Kivar finds the Chalice first, he will become more powerful than any demon in creation, a god in his own right. How will you find him first?”

  “Isabel’s blood.” He smiled a madman’s smile. “I can smell it.”

  “Of course…” The wizard smiled. “Come, warrior. Lead on.”

  Isabel stumbled in the dark, struggling to stay on her feet. She had no doubt that if she fell and broke both legs, Kivar would drag her the rest of the way. The glow from the creature’s eyes cast the faintest of glows on the damp cave walls, glittering occasionally on a trail of some phosphorescent powder on the floor.