The Blood of Kings

by John Michael Curlovich

Danilo cooked dinner for me most nights; Justin did it when Danilo couldn’t. I kept hoping Danilo was right, that I would play again, it seemed to be all I could think of. But I could hardly talk to anyone about it, not Jus, not Roland, certainly not Danilo. How could I tell him I wasn’t sure I believed what he was promising?

  On the day I was finally to have the casts off, Danilo offered to cancel his classes and come with me. But it seemed pointless. “I’m only going to get them cut off. It’s not like I’m having surgery or anything.”

  “Will you promise to come to my office, first thing?”

  “Sure.” I found his concern touching but a little bit funny.

  In the hospital waiting room I ran into Peter, of all people. He wasn’t exactly someone I wanted to see. At least he and Jus hadn’t gotten too serious before he panicked and hid in his closet.

  He asked how I was, said he’d read about my healing in the news, all the stuff I’d been hearing from everybody. I wanted him to go away.

  “Why are you here, Peter? Did you stub your toe on your closet door?”

  He mouthed the words “HIV test.”

  “Isn’t that a mighty bold step for a cautious guy like you?”

  “I think I need it. I wish you wouldn’t make fun of me.”

  “I can’t help it. Shame and timidity always strike me as funny.”

  “Oh.” He fell silent. “I’ve been getting more than my share of that from my frat brothers. They heard about Justin on the news, and…”

  “And?”

  “Well, they knew he was the guy I had been hanging out with. The fairy jokes still haven’t let up.”

  “I thought they were your brothers.”

  “Don’t rub it in, okay?”

  I felt no sympathy for him. He had hurt Justin, not badly but he had hurt him, for nothing that seemed at all reasonable to me. I pretended to have to use the men’s room, and when I came back, I sat pointedly as far away from him as I could.

  He refused to take the hint; he got up and moved beside me again.

  In a confidentially low tone he said, “There are rumors that all Greg Wilton’s victims were…” He seemed not to want to say the word. “… like us.”

  “Us? You and I don’t have much in common, Peter.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I?”

  He ignored my deliberate obtuseness. “I don’t see how that can have been, though. A lot of them had girlfriends, or fiancées, even. One of them was married.”

  “Well, that settles the matter, then.”

  “I even went to a meeting of the campus gay group. When I asked, they laughed at me, the way you’ve been doing.”

  “Then stop being laughable.”

  “Jamie, I’m afraid. If my family finds out… ”

  “I won’t tell them, okay? Now will you leave me alone?”

  He got up and moved away. But he kept staring at me across the room. If I hadn’t been so anxious to get the casts off, I’d have left.

  After another ten minutes, awkward ones, the nurse called my name. They did another quick set of X-rays, “just to be 100% sure,” then cut the casts. For the first time in six weeks I was able to move my fingers. It felt wonderful. The doctor warned me to take it easy with them, but I wanted to get to Danilo’s and play.

  Just as I got back to the waiting room, they were calling Peter’s name. As we passed each other, he caught hold of my arm. “We can’t all be as brave as you, Jamie.”

  “I’m not all that brave.”

  “If I were you, I’d never be out and about today. Not after the news.”

  It was the first thing he’d said that caught my interest. “What news?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Greg Wilton escaped from the police this morning.”

  He went inside. I hadn’t heard a thing about it.

  Greg, loose.

  I had no idea what to think or feel. I headed straight for the museum. Danilo was between classes. He held my hands. “How do they feel?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t used them for so long, I’ve forgotten what they’re supposed to feel like.”

  He massaged my fingers. His touch was wonderful. I told him about Greg.

  “Oh.” He hadn’t heard, either. “If he has any sense at all, he’ll leave town. Do you know where he’s from?”

  “Someplace in Indiana, I think.”

  “That’s where he’ll head, then.”

  Walking home, I couldn’t think of anything else. Everyone knew he was queer, now. He would blame me for that.

  I stopped at Mrs. Kolarik’s, wanting to show my newly-free hands, but she didn’t seem to be home. So I headed upstairs, to our place.

  The door was open. It was unlike Jus not to close it. When I got inside, I called Bubastis. She was gone.

  “Jus?”

  He must have had a late class, or a date or something.

  “Jus?”

  Nope, he wasn’t home.

  Bubastis had run away. I prayed she’d come back.

  I felt restless. Danilo’s. I needed to play. Feeling the response of the keys under my fingers after all that time would be paradise.

  The day was a slight bit chilly. Jus had borrowed my sweatshirt. I went into his room.

  He was on the bed, his throat slit. Blood soaked everything.

  I heard a movement behind me and turned. I caught the briefest flash of Greg’s face, filled with rage or hatred, or both. I saw the knife in his hand. Then I felt the blade cut into my throat. Slowly.

  I needed to vomit. But all that came out of my mouth was blood.

  Chapter Eight

  Darkness.

  Night.

  Cold.

  No dreams. There were no dreams.

  And then…

  * * *

  Stone. The coldness and hardness of stone, chilling and invigorating my body.

  Fire, filling my eyes.

  A rush of pleasure, the most intense surge of sexual pleasure I had ever felt.

  I awoke.

  Danilo stood over me, smiling gently. “Jamie. Welcome. Or should I say, welcome back?”

  I was weak and disoriented. Instinctively I put a hand to my throat, to feel the wound. There was none.

  There was something around me. It took me a moment to focus. I was lying in a sarcophagus. Alabaster, I thought. Pure white, at any rate. Danilo took my hand, then bent down to kiss me. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. I should be dead. Or in a hospital, under intensive care.”

  “If you were anyone else, and if you loved anyone else, you would be.” His hand felt especially warm.

  Groggy, stupid, I muttered, “I love you.”

  “Why do young people always feel the need to belabor the obvious?”

  There were candles burning all around the sarcophagus and in the corners of the room. And torches, too. Their light seemed impossibly bright. I tried to block their glare with my free hand, but I was too weak to hold it up for long.

  The world went black again.

  * * *

  Again I woke to find Danilo watching over me, holding my hand, and smiling like the father-lover-protector that he was.

  Had Greg been a dream, or was this?

  I reached up once again to feel the wound on my throat. There was none. No blood, not a bit of tenderness, even; no trace of what he had done to me. “Danilo?”

  “Relax. Sleep more, if you need to.”

  “I should be dead. I saw my blood spill, a lot of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I felt the knife go all the way through my throat. I felt it tear muscle and shatter bone.”

  He smiled at me.

  “And…” I remembered Justin, his eyes wide open, lying in a bath of his own blood. I remembered that my cat was gone. What horrible thing had Greg done to her?

  Danilo held a golden cup to my lips. “Here. Drink.”

  I pulled away instinctively. “Is it more blood?”

  “N
o. You’ve had enough of that for a while.”

  “Then…?”

  “Drink it.”

  I sipped, cautiously. It was wine, good red wine. It warmed me. I looked up at him and he touched my face. “It wasn’t possible to lose you, Jamie.”

  “You wouldn’t have been the first to give me up.”

  “Time has made me a skeptic.” He stroked my cheek. “Do you know that?”

  I didn’t know what he was trying to tell me.

  “Cervantes wrote that love is a force too powerful to be overcome by anything but flight. But I’ve waited too many centuries for it. I couldn’t lose you, not after the years I’ve waited and the things I’ve lived through.”

  He held the cup to my lips, and I drank a bit more.

  “I was there when the bishops passed the first law to condemn us. I was there when the Knights Templar were tortured for loving one another. To have lived through all that was awful enough. But losing you, Jamie, would have been worse.” He bent down and pressed his lips to mine.

  I was still lying in the sarcophagus. My back was beginning to feel a bit stiff. The torches and candles still burned brightly all around me. “Danilo, where are we? What is this?”

  Very quietly he said, “You will never die. Not until you want to.”

  The blood. The prayers. The ancient inscriptions. “You have made me…?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t sure I wanted that, Danilo. You should have—”

  “It was that or lose you. To lose you, Jamie… as I said, that I could not do.”

  “Then what I saw… Greg. Jus. It was real, not a nightmare.”

  “I’m afraid so.” He paused. “He slaughtered your landlady, too.”

  “Mrs. Kolarik. She was a nice lady.” I felt tears coming. “Justin. Poor Justin.”

  “I know how close you were.”

  “Bring him back too, Danilo. Please.” I could feel tears running down the side of my face. The stone was beginning to be more and more uncomfortable. I tried to get up.

  And I lost consciousness still again.

  * * *

  When I woke, I was alone and lying on my side. I tried to sit up again, unsure I’d be able to.

  For the first time I got a good look at the room I was in. It seemed I was in an Egyptian tomb, or in a place made to look like one. Torches and candles still burned everywhere.

  The walls were stone, and they were covered with painted reliefs of gods and demons. The great god Osiris and his consort Isis, who resurrected him when he was killed by Set. Maat, the goddess of truth, who weighed the purity of people’s souls when they died. Anubis, the god of the graveyard. There were winged serpents, insects with the wings of falcons, men with the heads of frogs and lions. A ship filled with the dead sailed overhead across the ceiling.

  It was a shrine, a holy place. From what little I had learned I recognized that every image in the room had to do with death and the underworld. A fit place for me, I thought.

  I was still weak. Carefully I moved some of the candles that were burning immediately beside my sarcophagus, stood up and climbed out.

  “Danilo?”

  I was quite alone. I saw that the sarcophagus’s lid was sitting on the floor, propped against it at an angle.

  There was a door. Not carved stone doors of the kind you’d find in a real Egyptian tomb. Just a typical wooden door, with a doorknob and keyhole. I tried it, and it opened.

  There were steps going up. I climbed.

  And was in Danilo’s kitchen. It was so unexpected I laughed.

  He was at the stove. Wearing, absurdly, an apron. I smelled bacon and eggs. When he saw me, he beamed. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.” I was so disoriented. “We’re in your house.”

  “Keen observation.”

  “How? Why?”

  “I was wondering how much longer you could sleep. The rites tend to take it out of a man, but…” He grinned. “You’re hungry?”

  I realized I was starving and said so.

  “Sit down and have some breakfast. It is the first morning of your new life. Your second life.”

  I was still feeling weak, light-headed. “I was… I really was dead, then?”

  He nodded. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t know. “Really dead?”

  “Yes, Jamie, you really were dead.”

  “And you… ?”

  “Yes.” He smiled a tight little smile. “And I…”

  “But…” My head was spinning. “But it isn’t possible.”

  “He that believeth, though he die, yet shall he live.”

  “Stop it, Danilo. I need you to be serious about this.”

  He set two plates, poured hot tea and we sat down to eat. The bacon smelled wonderful. I tucked in.

  “I got to your place not long after you must have on Friday.” He forked a slice of bacon. “I saw someone running away, I couldn’t tell who. The door was open, and I went in. Blood was still flowing from your throat when I got to you.”

  “And Jus?”

  “He’s dead, Jamie. There was nothing to be done for him.”

  “You brought me back.”

  “But not him. It wasn’t possible. You had already tasted the blood of the sanctified when you were in the hospital. That prepared you; that made it possible.”

  “Oh.” I fell silent.

  “You died in my arms, Jamie. I’ve been alive all these centuries, and all I could think was, my love should be able to keep him alive. My love should be strong enough. But you died in my arms. I sat there crying and holding you for I don’t know how long. Then I came to my wits. There was a way to bring you back. I knew it only too well.”

  It took a moment for this to sink in. “You have…” I groped for the word, “… resurrected others, then?”

  He nodded and ate. “They were, well, let me only say they were disappointments to me.” He bit a slice of bacon in half.

  Like him, I stopped talking and ate. Then I had a realization, “You said once that Jesus Christ was… Is he one of the ones you…?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.” He took a sip of his tea. “I have a great deal to account for. It has been his followers, by and large, who have stripped us of our birthright. If you could have seen the persecutions… Good men imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, burned alive, even.”

  “Where are they now? The ones you resurrected?”

  He shrugged. “They’re around someplace, sharing their self-hatred. Spreading it, like the malignancy it is.”

  He told me he had waited till nightfall, then carried my corpse to his house. He left a note addressed to Justin, signed with my name, telling him I was going out of town for the weekend, to a conference, with Professor Semenkaru. It was for the police to find. Then he phoned them, claiming to be a neighbor, saying there was something wrong at our house. And so they went and found Jus and Mrs. K.

  The story was that Danilo and I were at a professional conference, discussing that relief I had found. When the police called him to ask about me, he waited while they left a message. Then after a few hours he called them back to tell them we were out of town and would be back on Monday evening. It was now Tuesday morning.

  “But Danilo, what if they check?”

  “They will not.” He said it with perfect confidence.

  I remembered how he had dealt with that nurse at the hospital. “You have that kind of power over people’s minds?” He had hinted at it often enough. No one will ask questions about us, no one will try and get me fired for making love to a student… I asked him how he did it.

  “One step at a time, junior. You have only just been born.”

  I grinned. “Do you want me to wear diapers? Would it turn you on?”

  He tried to swat me playfully, and I ducked. The sudden movement made me dizzy. “I… I think I need to lie down again.”

  He helped me into his den, to the sofa. There, sleeping at one end of it, was Bubastis. When she h
eard us, she looked up. Recognizing me, she ran to me, purring excitedly.

  “How…?”

  “He didn’t hurt her. He must have left the door open when he went in, because she ran away. I went back to your place a second time, late that same night, to make certain there were no traces of your being there. She was hiding under a bush. When she saw me, she came out.”

  I stooped to pick her up, and the world spun. Danilo helped me to the couch. She climbed happily into my lap, and I fell asleep, still again.

  * * *

  The police came around that afternoon to question me. Two detectives, not the ones who had questioned me when I found Grant. I followed Danilo’s lead and told them we had been out of town.

  “Out of town, where?”

  “New York. A mini-conference at the Metropolitan Museum.”

  Danilo interrupted to tell them about that little relief I had found. “A few experts got together to examine it.”

  They were puzzled at the amount of blood they had found, enough for two people, apparently.

  I pretended not to understand it either. “Was it his own?”

  “No, we checked. He was AB positive. This was O negative.”

  “Maybe he had someone else with him and took the body away.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He’s crazy.”

  The detective seemed a bit suspicious, but Danilo had a private little talk with him, and he left, satisfied.

  My house, or rather Mrs. Kolarik’s, was off-limits, sealed off with police tape. It gave me a perfect, suspicion-free excuse to move in with Danilo “temporarily.” Not even the university administration would question it. I had to live someplace.

  The police let me in to get some things, clothes, sheet music and books. I’d be able to get the rest of it later. Greg had poured blood over my keyboard. My own blood, I imagine. It was ruined. Just as well.

  And so, I was in the news again. Or rather, Greg and I were. MANHUNT FOR SERIAL KILLER WILTON. DUNN ESCAPES MASSACRE. And on and on. I knew the media would get bored with me soon enough, but it was still quite unpleasant dealing with their vacuous questions. I refused to play their game.

  “How did you feel when you heard about the killings?”