“You’ve hurt yourself,” he said. “How careless.”
The mirror began to bow out just as the first of the vampire sentries reached me. He was huge and mindless like all the slaves, with only the basest hive intelligence remaining. I still had a lot to prove to the Grieve as both a witch and a man. Sophia watched me intently. To anyone else she would appear expressionless and cold, but I could tell she was on the verge of a scream. The corners of her mouth edged downward, the muscles in the hinges of her jaw had tightened.
I filled my hands with hexes but my attention couldn’t be diverted. My focus remained on the mirror. My palms burned with blue flame of power, but it wasn’t going to be enough to stop the guards.
I was fast. My spells and talismans made me faster. From the small of my back I drew my athame, my witch’s blade, used in solemn ceremonies on the holiest of the high days. I had never used it for sacrifice, not even an animal or a newt. I stood my ground. The drone reached out for me, jaws wide, spittle slathering across his fangs and hanging in strings from his chin to his collar.
It had once been a man and was now only posing as one, nothing more than a corrupted system of instincts gone insane with need. In ten or twenty years he would gain enough control of his need to begin forming a personality again. A decade after that he might be able to join in on simple conversations. In a half-century he might be a philosopher or scholar. This is what the Grieve did. They took some terminal bastard so afraid of death that he wanted to believe in miracles, and they ushered him into a whole new world of desire and loss.
I pressed one hand to his eyes and burned his skull out with hexfire. His tongue blackened and curled in his mouth, teeth charring, eyes bulging. Millennia of pagan worship and belief flowed through me. I whispered a quiet incantation of grace and hate. The guard’s vestments steamed.
It was hardly enough to slow him down. Another death hardly mattered to a vampire. He reached out for me, lips shriveling away, his hair on fire and wisps of white smoke rising from his nostrils. He snorted at me and the stink made me cough. His fingertips brushed my throat.
D’Outremal had sent the drone to humble and enrage me. It worked. I deserved a little more tact. He’d gone to great lengths to bring me here, and now he made a show of contempt in front of the Grieve. In my own way I had just as much of a dramatic flair as he did.
I dodged right, spun in a tight half-circle, and brought my blade around in a high arcing swing, plunging it into the drone’s left ear. It went halfway through his head. The power of the athame was enough to stop him. It might even be enough to kill him, eventually. It didn’t matter. He blinked once at me and the nub of his tongue tried to crawl slug-like over what remained of his bottom lip. D’Outremal let out a gleeful cry. Sophia’s eyes narrowed. I shifted my weight, took the drone by the wrist, and flipped him over my hip.
He somersaulted through the air directly into the mirror I’d bewitched. The glass didn’t shatter. Instead, the bowing silver extended itself and caught him, almost lovingly, in its sweeping currents. The waves swept him under.
I watched as D’Outremal waved off the other guards and peered at me with joy. “A sacrifice was it?” he asked. “To call forth one of your playthings?”
The other royals seemed to perk up at that. A flash of sorrow passed over Sophia’s face and was gone in an instant. She knew that her father’s boredom would only drive him to more and more dangerous games until someone like me destroyed the lot of them somewhere down the road.
An angel of death appeared and stepped free of the mirror. It was Yazael, a seraph of the seventh legion. He’d been sent to show me I was still in disfavor with the divine and infernal orders. Like all angels he was beautiful, nearly as beautiful as Lucifer himself. Yazael stood in the glass, wings folded, golden curls draped across his shoulders, blue eyes full of love and devotion for heaven, a burning sword in one hand, a rolled parchment in the other. The parchment was for me. I knew what it would say. He thrust it forward, and I had no choice but to take it.
D’Outremal clapped his hands happily like a child. “You summon a demon!”
“You summoned it with my brother’s blood,” I said.
“Did I?” He appeared genuinely astounded. “How glorious.”
I had to admit that I liked his buoyant sense of wonder, which he’d held onto for six centuries, mostly thanks to the suffering of others. Because of their pain, he still found the world vibrant and fascinating.
“You intend to keep all the Grieve at bay with the threat of a single demon?”
“I do.”
I didn’t. I knew D’Outremal would demand proof. He would sacrifice one or more of his own just to see what an angel of death was capable of against his minions. The parchment would say that I was running out of favors among the infernal order. It would say that Yazael would be allowed to take only one life before its proper time. And only to show the Grieve that their immortality had made enemies in the depths. It would be written in a hellish and lovely script. It would be signed with flourish.
I stood shoulder to shoulder with the angel. He held out his sword and I replaced my knife in the sheath under my jacket. It added more drama to step forward empty-handed.
I met D’Outremal before the rack. My brother’s blood hardly flowed anymore. He was as close to death as you could get and still have a pulse.
“We followed the rules of torture set down in the Malleus Mallificarum,” the lord of the vampires said.
“You needn’t have bothered,” I told him. “My brother’s not a witch.”
“But he smells like one. And I prefer the tried and true methods of confession.”
“I know you do.”
You couldn’t help but notice his hands first. They were pale and perfectly manicured, small and rather feminine, and he wore an onyx ring imprinted with the family crest of the Grieve. He placed one cold palm to the side of my face. His touch was full of tenderness. In his own way, he loved me. I kept his life interesting. I impressed him with my skulls. I was this close to being his son-in-law and a member of the Grieve myself. But he was condemned to follow the rules he and his brethren had set down centuries ago. He had his own role that he couldn’t diverge from even if he wanted to.
“Someday you’ll confess to me, Thomas.”
“Sure,” I said. “At high noon tomorrow, right in the park outside.”
He had a pleasant smile, but his laughter was shot through with something like hysteria. It grated on my nerves. I suspected it grated on everybody’s nerves, especially the other royals who’d been forced to listen to it for half a millennia. Several of them winced. While we waited for him to quit giggling I made several subtle incantations, my hands at my sides, scrawling against my pants legs, spelling names and marking the royals that I knew.
When D’Outremal finally fell into silence he leaned forward until our noses nearly touched. “So tell me, magician. What will you offer the Grieve in return for your brother’s life?”
“Not a damn thing.”
The edges of Sophia’s mouth hitched the slightest bit, exposing the very point of one of her fangs. She had nipped me with them. The pulse in my neck began to throb.
Thinking of our times together brought the loneliness up in me like a scrabbling animal. It clawed at the underside of my heart. My breathing hitched. D’Outremal recognized my pain and cackled once more. The rest of us all winced again. Yazael moved to me and tapped my arm with the flat of his sword. His wings fluttered nervously, as if he desperately wanted to take flight. Angels were notoriously impatient. He wanted his payment.
Duke Petrovitch, seated in a high-backed chair, his lengthy white beard dappled with red stains, spoke in a wearisome voice tinged with the slightest bit of fear. “My king, we must relent.” He had seen angels of death before. “The conjurer has proven he’s capable of great feats of power. He is marking us even now.”
“Calling on powerful figures to fight in your stead is not a feat of power, my dear
Petrovitch.”
“You are as strong as your mightiest ally.”
“Our magician has no true allies. Only those he has deceived. And deception is only a momentary circumstance.”
Yazael’s sword began to burn brighter. The Grieve looked at one another and at last began to understand their situation. One of them was going to die tonight. The possibility thrilled them. Sunlight could maim and disfigure them, but it couldn’t destroy them. Religious icons held no threat. An ash-wood stake to the heart brought them a little discomfort. Half of them had death wishes without even knowing it. They watched me hopefully. Others lowered their shoulders and bowed almost imperceptibly to me. They still got enjoyment out of their profane existence.
D’Outremal placed one of his pretty hands on my chest, over my heart. “You let him suffer for three days. How will you explain that to your brother?”
“I won’t have to. He already knows I hate him.”
“Does he? And yet you still came for him.”
I nodded. “You were having too much fun.”
I stepped over the channels of blood and moved to the rack. D’Outremal tried to reach for me again, and Yazael extended his fiery sword around and placed it firmly under the chin of the lord of vampires. D’Outremal giggled and applauded. The Grieve who wanted to live lost their remaining sense of propriety and rushed for the doorways, hoping to escape into their secret chambers and crypts. It wouldn’t help.
Simon couldn’t glare at me because he had no eyes. He couldn’t haul off and bust my jaw with an uppercut because all the bones from his elbows down had been shattered. The thrawing had pulverized most of his neck muscles so that he couldn’t hold his head up straight anymore. He couldn’t stand on his feet because his toes had been crushed.
I undid the straps. He tumbled from the rack and dropped into my arms with a huff of air. It was going to take me weeks of spellwork to heal him. I picked up his ragged, broken, nearly bloodless body and hefted him over my shoulder.
He was my older brother by two and a half minutes. We were fraternal twins but still looked a hell of a lot alike. I knew if the Grieve ever got me on the rack like this they wouldn’t be half as kind.
I turned to Sophia and said, “Will you come with me this time?”
“No,” she said. “Nor ever, my love.”
I passed Yazael as I headed for the door. “Take any one of them but those I’ve marked.”
His eyes grew hungry. His beautiful face became even more breathtaking as it filled with a celestial joy. He took a step forward. His wings unfurled to their full span and flapped once as he lunged into the center of the gathering. D’Outremal put his hands together as if in prayer. The remaining royals were too composed to scream, but the attendants, retainers, and even the drone guards broke ranks and made a run for it. I was curious as to who Yazael would choose, but I didn’t bother to watch. I carried my brother out of the abbey past the stone columns and golden braziers, beyond the shores of the lake of faith where the desperate and the damned would bathe in the morning.
Simon, with only half a tongue, whispered, “It would have been...worth it...if only they’d killed you.”
THE YEAR THE MUSIC DIED
By F. Paul Wilson
Nantucket in November. Leave it to Bill to make a mockery of security. And of me. The Atlantic looked mean today. I watched its gray, churning surface from behind the relative safety of the double-paned picture windows. I would have liked a few more panes between me and all that water. Would have liked a few miles between us, in fact.
Some people are afraid of snakes, some of spiders. With me, it’s water. And the more water, the worse it is. I get this feeling it wants to suck me down. Been that way since I was a kid. Bill has known about the phobia for a good twenty years. So why did he do it? Bad enough to set up the meeting on this dinky little island, but to hold it on this narrow spit of land between the head of the harbor and an uneasy ocean with no more than a hundred yards between the two was outright cruel. And a nor’easter coming. If that awful ocean ever reared up….
I shuddered and turned away. But no turning away in this huge barn of a room with all these picture windows facing east, west, and north. Like a goddamn goldfish bowl. Not even curtains I could pull closed. I felt naked and exposed in this open pine-paneled space. Eight hours to go until dark blotted out the ocean. But then I’d still be able to hear it.
Why would my own son do something like this to me?
Security, Bill had said.
A last-minute off-season rental of an isolated house on a summer resort island in the chill of November. The Commission members could fly in, attend the meeting, then fly out again with no one ever knowing they were here. What could be more secure?
I’m a stickler for security, too, but this was ludicrous. This was—
Bill walked into the room, carefully not looking in my direction. I studied my son a moment: a good-looking man with dark hair and light blue eyes; just forty-four but looking ten years older. A real athlete until he started letting his weight go to hell. Now he had the beginnings of a hefty spare tire around his waist. I’ve got two dozen years on him and only half his belly.
Something was wrong with the way he was walking…a little unsteady. And then I realized.
Good Lord, he’s drunk.
I started to say something but Bill beat me to it.
“Nelson’s here. He just called from the airport. I sent the car out for him. Harold is in the air.”
I managed to say, “Fine,” without making it sound choked.
My son, half-lit at a Commission meeting, and me surrounded by water—this had a good chance of turning into a personal disaster. All my peers, the heads of all the major industries in the country, were downstairs at the buffet brunch. Rockefeller was on the island, and Vanderbilt was on his way; they would complete the Commission in its present composition. Soon they’d be up here to start the agenda. Only Joe Kennedy would be missing. Again. Too bad. I’ve always liked Joe. But with a son in the White House, we all had serious doubts about his objectivity. It had been a tough decision, but Joe had gracefully agreed to give up his seat on the Commission for the duration of Jack’s Presidency.
Good thing, too. I was glad he wouldn’t be here to see how Bill had deteriorated.
His son’s going down in history while mine is going down the drain.
What a contrast. And yet, on the surface, I couldn’t see a single reason why Bill couldn’t be where Jack Kennedy was. Both came from good stock, both had good war records and plenty of money behind them. But Jack had gone for the gold ring and Bill had gone for the bottle.
I wasn’t going to begrudge Joe his pride in his son. All of us on the Commission were proud of the job Jack was doing. I remember that inner glow I felt when I heard, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” That’s just the way I feel. The way everybody on the Commission feels.
I heard ice rattle and turned to see Bill pouring himself a drink at the bar.
“Bill! It’s not noon yet, for God’s sake!”
Bill raised his glass mockingly. “Happy anniversary, Dad.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Today was nobody’s anniversary.
“Have you completely pickled your brains?”
Bill’s eyebrows rose. “How soon we forget. Six years ago today: November 8, 1957. Doesn’t that ring a bell?”
“No.” I could feel my jaw clenching as I stepped toward him. “Give me that glass.”
“That was the day the Commission decided to ‘do something’ about rock ‘n’ roll.”
“So what?”
“Which led to February 3, 1959.”
That date definitely had a familiar ring.
“You do remember February 3, don’t you, Dad? An airplane crash. Three singers. All dead.”
I took a deep breath. “That again.”
“Not again. Still.” He raised his glass. "Salud." Taking a long pull on h
is drink, he dropped into a chair.
I stood over him. The island, the drinking…here was what it was all about. I’ve always known the crash bothered him, but never realized how much until now. What anger he must have been carrying around these past few years. Anger and guilt.
“You mean to tell me you’re still blaming yourself for that?” The softness of my voice surprised me.
“Why not? My idea, wasn’t it?”
“The plane crash was nobody’s idea. How many times do we have to go over this?”
“There never seems to be a time when I don't go over it. And now it’s November 8, 1963. Exactly six years to the day after I opened my big mouth at the Commission meeting.”
“Yes, you did.” And how proud I was of him that day. “You came up with a brilliant solution that resolved the entire crisis.”
“Hah! Some crisis!”
A sudden burst of rain splattered against the north and east windows. The storm was here.
I sat down with my back to most of the glass and tried to catch Bill’s eye.
“And you talk about how soon I forget? You had a crisis in your own home—Peter. Remember?”
Bill nodded absently.
I pressed on. Maybe I could break through this funk he was wallowing in, straighten him out before the meeting.
“Peter is growing to be a fine man now and I’m proud to call him my grandson, but back in ‘57 he was only eleven and already thoroughly immersed in rock and roll—”
“Not ‘rock and roll,’ Dad. You’ve got to be the only one in the country who pronounces the ‘and.’ It’s ‘rock ‘n’ roll’—like one word.”
“It’s three words and I pronounce all three. But be that as it may, your house was a war zone, and you know it.”
That had been a wrenching time for the whole McCready clan, but especially for me. Peter was my only grandson then, and I adored him. But he had taken to listening to those atrocious Little Richard records and combing his hair like Elvis Presley. Bill banned the music from the house but Peter was defying everyone, sneaking records home, listening to it on the radio, plunking his dimes into jukeboxes on the way home from school.
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