by Bauer, Tal
Dawood swallowed. He said nothing.
Kris grabbed his car keys and his jacket from the counter and stormed out the front door. His car started a minute later, the engine throttling, tires squealing as he pulled out of the driveway.
Behroze’s voice floated back through his mind, the softly spoken words from the masjid that afternoon. “To know that Allah is in everyone,” Behroze had whispered. “His light and His love are in every person’s soul. And our purpose is to love each other the way Allah loves us, as we are loving Him when we do.”
He pitched forward, exhaling as his forehead rested on the countertop.
* * *
4
Vatican City, Rome
“Alain…” Cristoph let his whisper carry on the midnight breeze, drift between the snowflakes papering Rome. On the rooftop of the Swiss Guard’s barracks, he waited, his eyes closed. “Please, Alain. Come home.”
Snow sliding on snow. A tiny, shaking exhale.
Cristoph turned.
Alain’s yellow eyes glittered, inches from his own. A moment before, Cristoph had been alone.
He smiled, reaching for Alain. His fingers wrapped around Alain’s freezing hand. “How long have you been out here? You’re so cold.”
“You know I can’t feel that anymore.” Alain’s gaze slid away. He swallowed hard. Slowly, his fingers curled around Cristoph’s. “You’re warm.”
Cristoph felt Alain’s trembles, his body’s quakes. “Let me warm you up. Come inside.” He smiled, tried to flirt. “I’ll take care of you.”
“You know I can’t.” Alain tried to pull away.
“You won’t. Not can’t. There’s a difference.” Cristoph held tight to his frozen hand. Alain wouldn’t meet Cristoph’s gaze. “It’s been three months since you’ve come home. You’ve spent one night with me, and we didn’t even—” He breathed in. Snowflakes landed on his lashes. “I miss you. I still love you. I still want—”
Alain ripped away, pacing to the far side of the roof. Snow billowed around him, kicked up from the stone as if flying away from him on purpose. “You can’t say that to me. Not now.”
“Why not?”
“You cannot honestly still desire me. Cannot honestly still want me, not like this!”
“Of course I do! You’re still you!”
Alain glared. His sulfuric eyes turned to daggers, stilling Cristoph in his steps. “You have no idea what I am now. What I am capable of.”
Cristoph tried to swallow. His jaw clenched. “Did you kill those people in Trastevere?”
“You think I’m a murderer?”
They stared each other down, Alain’s presence, his power, seeming to unfurl, surround Cristoph, envelop the night around them both until Cristoph could barely breathe, could barely think. “No,” he croaked. “I don’t think you are. I know you didn’t kill those people. But you want me to believe you’re a monster—”
“I am a monster.”
“—and I know you better than that.”
Again, Alain’s eyes flashed. That presence, the weight of darkness, closed in on Cristoph. Was that Alain? Was that what it was like to be caged by a vampire, to have their strength, their power, focused wholly on you? He never feared Alain. But that didn’t stop his heart from pounding.
Alain moaned. His pupils dilated, the yellow in his eyes shrinking, the darkness expanding. He reached for Cristoph, whispering his name—
Skin to skin, hands sliding together. Cristoph almost collapsed into his arms, his face nuzzling Alain’s frigid cheek. Alain’s arms wrapped around him, almost crushing him as Alain pulled him close. Alain’s lips pressed to his temple, his cheek. His jaw. His neck.
Cristoph jerked. He couldn’t move. Alain had him locked in place, his head bent back, throat exposed to the sky, to Alain’s lips, his fangs. He felt a scrape down his skin, the tip of something sharp dance down his jugular. His heart beat faster, hard enough he felt the pounding of his veins all the way down to his fingers. He couldn’t see, could only feel. Snowflakes burned his eyes as he struggled to breathe.
Alain breathed him in, his open mouth, his fangs, pressed tight against Cristoph’s skin. He moaned again, the sound almost a whimper. “I want,” Alain whispered, “you. What we had. Our life. I was happy with you. I thought—”
Cristoph almost sobbed. He grabbed Alain’s hair, tried to pull him close, hold him tighter. “Me too, God, me too. Come home with me. Please, come home. We can—” He tugged again, trying to climb Alain’s body, wrap himself in Alain’s hold.
He felt the sting, the slice of fang against skin on his stretched neck. He gasped. Wet heat streamed down his throat, slipping beneath his collar.
Alain hurled him to the ground, fleeing across the roof faster than Cristoph could see. He saw the snow blur, saw a cloud of flakes swirl at the roof’s edge. Darkness shifted, and yellow eyes peered around the farthest stone column.
The glint from St. Peter’s Square reflected off the sickled edge of a fang, fully extended from Alain’s open mouth.
Cristoph grasped his throat as he pushed to his feet. His hand came away wet and warm. Blood. He felt the beat of his racing heart where his blood slipped past his touch.
“I can’t,” Alain growled. “I can’t be near you. I can’t. I crave you too badly.”
“You crave me?” Cristoph held out his blood-covered hand. “Or you crave my blood?”
Alain shrank behind the pillar. Cristoph heard marble crumble, shatter. “I crave everything about you,” Alain growled. “But I don’t trust myself. Especially not now.”
“Now?” Cristoph pressed his scarf against Alain’s bite. “Why now? What’s going on?”
“It’s the solstice.” Alain’s yellow eyes appeared again, pinning Cristoph in place. “The darkness is growing. The powers are strengthening. I never fully understood before, the power of the darkest night.”
“That’s why the risings are happening. How do we fight it?”
“I don’t know!” Alain roared. Again, stone shattered, ancient blocks larger than Cristoph crumbling to flakes and drifting to the snow-covered ground. “If I knew—”
“Why did you stop drinking from the Holy Father? Why did you stop taking human blood?”
“It’s too dangerous,” Alain hissed. His yellow gaze vanished. “I won’t turn down that path,” he whispered, his voice somehow floating on the snow.
“Why? What would happen? What would happen if you fed?” What would happen if you fed on me?
And then the presence lifted, the darkness surrounding Cristoph and the roof parting as if a veil had lifted from their corner of the world. The sounds of St. Peter’s Square returned, the revels and happy laughter of tourists and pilgrims mixing with the car tires and tinny brakes of Rome over the Vatican walls. Snowflakes fell, dusting his skin with gentle kisses.
He sighed. Alain was gone. Again.
* * *
There was no one else to text, not at midnight, not in the Vatican. Besides, he needed more than a simple stitch and a disinfectant after being bit by a vampire, no matter that Alain hadn’t fed off him. There was still the risk of the vampire’s venom.
Cristoph perched on a stool in Alain’s kitchen, his head tilted hard to the side, throat exposed to the light as Luca hovered over him. An old medical scroll from a ninth century monastery lay on the table. The paper was worn, almost translucent.
Luca’s hand cradled his chin. He inhaled as he held up the needle carved from a vampire’s bone and washed in holy water. A length of thread, braided inside a circle of runes, dangled from the bone needle. “I don’t know if this will hurt.”
“Get it over with.”
Luca pressed the needle to his skin. Cristoph held up a candle, the wax mixed with silver and grave dirt, and waved the smoke toward Alain’s bite, toward Luca’s first stitch. As the needle passed through his skin, he nearly screamed. He gripped the edge of the stool, his jaw clenching, eyes screwed shut, grunting through gritted teeth.
/> Luca’s thumb brushed over his jaw, his chin, his lips. “I’m sorry.”
“Needs to be done,” Cristoph hissed.
“He won’t be able to bite you again after this.”
Silence, save for Cristoph’s deep breaths as the needle slid through his skin. Smoke twirled around the blessed thread, seemed to stick to the bite.
“The solstice,” Cristoph said, trying to distract himself. “That’s why the risings are happening.”
“Makes sense.” Luca tied a knot in the second stitch and sliced the thread with a silver blade. He started the next stitch. “Is there anything in your books about the solstice? What we need to do?”
Cristoph had pulled out a few tomes as he waited for Luca. He’d been flipping through them in the kitchen with his hand pressed to his bloodied neck when Luca had walked in. Pale, wide-eyed, and looking like he’d been run through with a halberd, for a moment, Cristoph thought Luca was the one who had been bitten. Luca’s hands had trembled as he’d helped Cristoph gather what they needed to treat his bite.
“I didn’t find anything special. There’s nothing I found that will counter this specific rising darkness. It might be cyclical. Something we have to live with every year. It looks like Alain did, before. We work harder, I suppose.” He hissed against the pain. “I checked Alain’s journals. He had higher levels of activity around this time, too.”
Luca grunted.
“If the darkness is causing these risings, and if it’s affecting the etheric, it’s affecting Alain, too. Isn’t it? You think that’s why he’s been acting…”
Luca stilled. He looked down at Cristoph, mid-stitch. “Did you ever think he would bite you?”
“Did he really bite me? I mean, this is pretty minor—”
Luca’s eyebrows shot sky high. For a moment, he looked exactly like the Luca Cristoph had met so long ago, the arrogant, challenging, acerbic man that seemed to have vanished. Cristoph almost laughed, the relief, the familiarity, so sudden, so welcome. “I might have pulled him onto me,” he said, clearing his throat. “We were close.”
Luca’s eyes narrowed. “Close enough that his fangs were out and his mouth was pressed to your jugular?”
Cristoph said nothing as Luca tied the third stitch. Smoke stung his eyes, made his nose twitch. “He stopped. He didn’t drink.”
Luca did the last stitch quickly, sliding the bone needle through his skin and tying the knot in one quick move. He sliced the thread and stepped back. Cristoph washed the stitches in smoke as he chanted in Latin.
Luca washed his hands in the smoke three times before pinching the flame out.
“You did a good job. I can barely feel it now.”
“Not my first time.” Luca wouldn’t meet his gaze as he walked away, heading to the sink to wash his hands the normal way. The water echoed in the steel basin, heavy drops in the silence of the kitchen. “Do you think Alain is okay?” Luca finally asked.
Yellow eyes in the darkness. The full length of his fangs glinting in the light of the cathedral. The desperation in his voice, the push-pull of his darkness. What felt like liquid hunger burning through Cristoph’s being. He’d never felt that before. Never felt Alain as a hunter, as a predator. As a wild, out of control thing.
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
* * *
Fog glittered in front of their faces. Trastevere faded in the gloom, snow piles blurring into the edges of the foggy night, the streetlamps struggling against the close of the winter. Falling snow leached all sounds from the world, carving them off from reality, it seemed. Down the twisting alley, twinkling lights strung over the cobblestones, and an open window let Christmas songs into the night, ribald Italian falling into the snow and fading fast. Somewhere, a group of merry-goers walked home, their boots slipping, their laughter rising and falling.
Luca and Cristoph huddled in the back of an alley, faces buried in their coats, hands in their pockets. Angelo had officers stationed throughout Trastevere that night, plainclothes police watching and waiting. Every one of them was cold, cursing the predator that stalked Trastevere, hoping they caught the bastard that night. No one wanted to repeat this frozen stakeout.
Of course, most officers believed it was a human predator they were on guard against. Did they know to look up? Did they know to watch the shadows move, not only search the human faces that passed them by? Had Angelo briefed them thoroughly?
Luca and Cristoph had divided Trastevere into sectors, assigning themselves the area the serial killer incubus draining humans was most likely to target next based on the pattern of attacks. There had been two more complete drainings. The incubus attacked in the dead hours of the night when dark energies were highest and when most of the neighborhood was asleep, leaving young men left in alleys, tucked into the twisted backways of Trastevere.
They’d begun to chart the increasing risings, tracking which hours were most active, where, and when. The solstice drove the heightened activity, and as each night lengthened, the dead times—from sundown to the center of night—grew, attacks across the city rose. This Trastevere incubus—and wraiths and revenants and other creatures who hunted—chose those hours to strike. Ghouls prowled closer to sunup, feasting on the remnants from other hunters, the leftover kills. Leftover humans.
He and Luca were running ragged, trying to keep up.
And quietly losing their minds over Alain.
Six days. It had been six days since either of them had seen him. Six days since the bite, since Alain had fled the roof of the barracks.
Where was he? What was he doing? Why had he abandoned them?
Luca leaned into Cristoph’s shoulder, humming softly. Cristoph leaned back, watching Luca force his eyes open and stamp his feet.
“Do you need a break?” Cristoph asked. “Go take a nap in the police van for a bit.” Luca hadn’t stopped filling in for halberdiers during the day or hunting with Cristoph at night. He’d fallen asleep in Cristoph’s office the day before, researching ancient legends of incubi, and Cristoph had let him drool onto his desk for three hours.
“Not gonna leave you alone out here.” Luca rested his forehead on Cristoph’s shoulder. “Give me a moment.”
Luca’s breath tickled Cristoph’s neck, ghosted over the stitches Luca had sewn. He shivered. Luca’s warmth flowed into him, so different from Alain’s frigidity. For a moment, he wanted to fall back into Luca’s chest, lean into him, let that heat and the feel of another man—another living man, hot blooded, alive—burn into him. God, he missed Alain. But what were they now? They’d given in to their passion before Alain’s turn, but since—
Was he holding on to a dying hope?
What did Luca think of him and Alain now that Alain was a vampire? He’d never said a word, not one comment or criticism. The oddity of it scratched at Cristoph’s brain, a worry he liked to pick at when he couldn’t sleep, when his anxieties need another problem to tie himself in knots over.
Luca and Alain had bitterly fought before Alain’s turn. Their cold war was legend in the Swiss Guard. Cristoph had witnessed their fights, Luca’s seemingly seething hatred of Alain, firsthand. But now, nothing? Silence.
In the silence were questions, a thousand of them that made Cristoph’s mind spin. Luca, of all people, should have something to say about him trying to maintain his gay love affair with a turned vampire.
What had changed that kept Luca silent?
He should ask Luca. They should talk about it. Maybe it would keep them alert for a while. “Luca, I’ve been meaning to—”
A scream split the snow-drenched night, a man’s shout of terror bouncing off stone walls.
Their radios, borrowed from the polizia, spat static and a burst of Italian, Angelo and his officers triangulating the scream and ordering the teams in. “The Via Oreste Tiburzi,” Cristoph repeated. “Let’s go!”
They dashed through the narrow streets linking the Piazza di San Calistro and the Piazza di San Cosimato, then leaping the snow-co
vered market stalls in San Cosimato. They skidded down Luigi Santini, once again under twinkling lights snaking over the narrow alley, feet stamping through ankle deep drifts on the sidewalk. Cars covered in a foot of snow were parked half on the walk, and Luca slid over the hood of one. Sirens blared down the side streets, the red and blue lights snapping haloes over stone buildings and into the fog-laden drifts.
Shouts in Italian rose as they drew closer, polizia officers closing in on the Oreste Tiburzi, a curving, dreary stretch of road hallowed in trees deep behind a towering Renaissance building looming over the popular piazza of central Trastevere.
Exactly the kind of dark, secluded place that had been targeted before.
“Officer Calipari was patrolling Tiburzi,” Angelo said over the radio. “We haven’t made contact with him. Approach with caution!”
“We’re going in first,” Cristoph answered. “Tell your officers to hold a perimeter at both entrances to the alley!”
They passed Angelo’s plainclothes officers bracketing the brick arch entrance to the Oreste Tiburzi.
In the gloom, the alley, encased in snow-draped tree branches, blocked out the streetlights, seeming to cut the passage off from the rest of the city, the rest of the world.
“Be careful in there,” Angelo spat into the radio. “Call if you need help.”
They headed in together. Cristoph reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out length of braided string, tied with tiny bells and woven sigils on twisted silk. He wrapped it around his palm before drawing his sidearm from his shoulder holster and aiming his weapon down the curving street. Luca held his pistol in his hands, pointing into the fog.
Ahead, a single moan pulsed from the darkness.
“Officer Calipari? Are you all right?” Luca called. Silence. “Officer Calipari?”
A tree branch shifted above. Snow fell to the street, puffing in front of them. A low growl echoed.