The walkway led directly toward the ruins of the Gothic church. I ran forward, over a steel bridge and under an age-stained flying buttress, into an alley lined on one side in the standing stones of the ruins, and on the other with a plastered wall of lipstick red. In my hurry, I could see no breaks, no doors, so I kept on down the narrow, tiled alley, just ahead of the rest of the passengers from the lift as I slowed in the nauseating chill of the church’s endless memory of wrack and ruin.
I stepped out from an iron gateway into the lighted square ahead. Surrounded with fern-leafed jacaranda trees and filled with the memory of soldiers carrying rifles with red carnations protruding from the barrels, the square lay before me, heavy in icy Grey mist. In my eyes, the shadow of the convent ruins ran across the tiled square like a spreading black pool of blood. The restored parts of the building beside what was now a museum had shed much of their grim memory in constant use, but the wreck remained, more virulent now for some fresh horror that leaked out from behind the bright red doors and empty windows.
The doors were locked. The museum had closed at six, well before sunset, yet I knew Carlos was somewhere on the other side. The charming square on my side of the building was far too busy for me to call out for him without drawing unwanted attention to myself. But Amélia was here, more visible and present than she had been at the house. She stood at the corner of the building beside the alley I’d passed through and beckoned me closer.
I walked back to her, my legs feeling rubbery from exertion and alarm.
“How do I reach him?”
She pointed down the alley and I, shivering with a sudden sweat, walked back into the shadow of the ruins. At the point where the metal walkway diverged to swing out around the building as the ground dropped away on the steep side of the hill facing the Santa Justa Lift, a smaller red door huddled under a pointed Gothic arch. It was almost twelve feet below the walkway and I saw no way to get to it but to jump, which I didn’t feel very good about. But if the door was there, there must once have been a way to get to it. If I could find the right temporacline, I should be able to walk through the door in the past to emerge inside the ruined church in the present. I slipped into the Grey and started searching for the right slice of frozen time.
In the silver-film mist of the Grey, the earthquake’s shuddering, rumbling discord dominated everything and though I ran my hands over the razor edge of temporaclines, the only one I could lay hold of was the worst—All Saints’ Day of 1755. Shivering with dread, I slipped into the glassy memory of the past.
I plummeted down and hit the ground in front of the door with a jarring impact. I’d always wondered what would happen if I moved from one time to another at a different physical level, and I now knew that the ground and buildings remained as solid in the memory of time as they were in normal life. I crumpled and rolled as the earthquake shook the ground, heaving chunks of the paving up as other sections sank. Colored glass from the windows and white stone from the walls and flying buttresses showered from the height of the buckling building as men in brown monastic robes and white mantles ran from it, carrying whatever holy objects they could rescue. Most of them didn’t acknowledge me, but passed around or through me—here, I was the ghost. One paused to stare at my sudden appearance. I stood up and began to fight the tide of monks and occasional nuns who rushed out from the church like water down a sluice. The one man seemed on the point of stopping me, but he had no free hand, busy as he was, clutching a huge, jeweled book to his chest.
I shook my head as I passed him, bouncing off the other monks like a ball as I struggled into the failing building. The doorway led into a staircase that ran steeply up to the main floor and into a small room that finally led into the side aisle of the great, falling church building.
The roof along the central beam of the main aisle began crumbling, plaster and stone tumbling into the nave ahead of me. A carved grotesque plunged from high on the wall to the ground, striking a monk down and shattering the floor tiles where it hit, throwing up a spray of blood and a cloud of sharp stone shards. I felt their sting as several nicked me. I dodged to the side, cowering against the sturdy curtain walls that had withstood the earth’s rage, and waited for the shaking to stop.
It seemed forever before the earth subsided, but not knowing how long I had until the aftershocks would hit, I ran from cover and toward the highest ground I could find, willing to risk another tumble rather than be embedded in the floor when I emerged. I nearly tripped over the dead monk crushed by the carving, his blood sinking into the ground where the tiles had been cracked open like the thinnest sheets of ice. Layers of Grey fog lay across the point where the monk had fallen, turning the ground into a carpet of broken silver, and I stumbled to my knees, falling hard against the small chapel doorway from which the monk had come, the niche above it now hollow. I picked myself up and staggered over the broken floor, rushing from column to column for safety as the ceiling continued crumbling down.
I struggled up to the altar, to the highest point I could think of, and threw myself out of the temporacline, hoping I was high enough for safety.
I fell again, but not quite so far, and hit the ground with a little less force, rolling into a long, narrow patch of grass that now grew between the main columns, dividing the ruins into the nave and side aisle with strips of tended green. The nave and aisles were paved in the ubiquitous white stone tiles. The roof gone, there was only the night sky above, with a crescent moon and stars shining down through the skeletal fingers of the side arches. The devastated church appeared empty but for me and the dark shapes of archeological displays along the side aisles.
I shook from the fading adrenaline spike as I picked myself up and dusted off my limbs. My hands came away sticky with blood from scrapes and nicks. I stumbled onto the firmer paving stones and began searching for Carlos among the memorials and relics arrayed around the edges of the vaultless church. I blundered into tombs and statues and tripped over the iron uprights of displays, biting back my curses with every new injury and disappointment in discovering another shape that wasn’t Carlos.
I found him in a niche that must once have been a small chapel. At first he was only a dark shape in the shadow of the wall, the light picking out only a small gleam of white within the blackness. I shuffled toward it, picking my way through a collection of heavy stone objects until I could see that the white telltale was a reflection of moonlight off the surface of his open, staring eyes.
Utter stillness and silence are no great feat for a vampire, but the feeling of the space as I drew near was colder than all the surrounding silver mist and stone of the Grey. A familiar tangled web of energy lay over the place like a shroud as white as bone. Carlos did not move or make a sound. A glimmer of bright metal shone at the side of his throat. He appeared to have been crushed and thrown down as easily as a rag doll, as Griffin had nearly done to Quinton.
The spell was better constructed this time, and I couldn’t draw closer to Carlos with the mesh of energy around him, so I began tearing at it and shoving it aside, interposing my limbs and shoulders where I had made a hole. Then I forced my way in until I could use my whole body to heave the mass, which sizzled against me with a stinging pain, making my body quake and my sight fade toward blackness shot with points of glittering, colored light.
When I had pushed aside enough of the veiling magic to kneel down in the clear beside Carlos, he didn’t respond to my presence, but seemed to collapse a bit as if the energetic web that had covered him had also held him in shape and he was now decaying before my eyes. A black, insubstantial haze rose off him through the glimmering fog of the Grey, faltering and thinning into smoke that spiraled up toward the sharp sickle of the moon.
“Blaine. . . .” It wasn’t his voice, exactly, but more like the echo of it in my head.
The vaporous black pall drew together for a moment, taking a vague resemblance to Carlos, before it drifted apart and be
gan, again, to flow away in streamers of darkness. I felt the sharp pang in my chest that told me he was dying—if you can say that about the undead.
It did not occur to me that without him, any chance of stopping Purlis was remote at best, nor did I think for an instant of Amélia’s bizarre behavior or of all the incidents when Carlos had brought death, madness, or pain. I didn’t pause to consider all the times he’d caused me grief. I could have stood back and let him pass away into the restless mist of the Grey world, but I threw myself at the dissolving shreds of night-black soul and tried to capture them, force them back into the strangely broken shell they were escaping. But they slid away, eluding my grasp.
I touched the metallic gleam at his neck and found a dagger hilt, the blade driven through this throat from side to side. Whoever had taken him down had known what they were up against and stopped him from speaking any sort of spell. The dagger radiated a dread, black aura—a dark artifact—and the touch of it against my skin felt like ice that was cold enough to burn. I yanked it from his neck and threw it down on the ground. It clattered on the marble and slid away into the grass, but still Carlos didn’t move.
I grabbed his arm and felt no shock of nausea, pain, and horror as I usually did, only a low, disturbing static that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. I shook him, as if he were only asleep and my desperation alone could wake him. “Hang on,” I begged.
Carlos frightened me—he always had, even as we’d become reluctant allies and, eventually friends of a sort—but I didn’t recoil or think for more than an instant about what I was about to do. I shoved back my sleeves and dragged him to a more upright position against the wall, which was pockmarked with tombstones. Then I sat beside him, right arm holding him up, and I pressed the thin-skinned underside of my left wrist to his mouth. I might have cut my arm instead, had I thought of it, but I just hoped there was enough survival impulse left to make him bite.
For a second, nothing happened and I thought I’d left it too late. Then I felt the sharp tearing of my flesh as he bit.
The pain wrenched through me, making me buckle and cry out. My cry turned into stifled screams and gasps for air as he gnawed and sucked at my arm. My stomach lurched with nausea from the agony and the sudden, flooding odor of vampire. In stories, the bite of a vampire is a sensual thing, soporific and addicting to mortals who succumb, but to me it was anguish. He had once told me there was more than bloodlust in the vampire’s need to feed from humans; there was some intangible life force within us as necessary as blood itself. My senses reeled in torment, and I thought I could feel the blood and life flowing out of me, torn away as if every corpuscle fought and clung with barbs of steel to my tortured flesh.
I started to yank my arm away, but his hands flew up and gripped my forearm, pulling me closer to his cutting teeth. I thrashed, feeling weakened and faint as I tried to escape.
“Stop,” I gasped, twisting feebly. “Carlos, you’re killing me. Please . . .” My free hand groped for anything I could use to make him stop, to strike him or cut him, as I prayed I wouldn’t have to use it. I felt myself draining away so quickly. . . .
As I tugged and begged, the pain stopped. For an instant, I thought I had reached the threshold of death, where sensation ends as the body gives up, but I was still writhing, still alive, however frail. I felt him hesitate, his mouth touching my torn wrist, but still now.
I felt the word against my skin as much as heard it. “Blaine.”
“Yes.” I sighed, slumping a little in relief from the ache and terror that had held me. I tried again to draw my arm away, but he held it firm.
“Not yet.”
“No,” I protested, trying to rear back from him. If he drew another drop from me, I was sure I would die, and my mind went numb at the thought of what might happen to me in the state between Greywalker and vampire. What new horror would I become?
But the sensation on my ripped flesh now was not the tearing and torment of his bite, but a silk-soft brushing and a touch of cold breath. Finally, he let me go and I drew my wrist back to cradle it against my chest as I moved away from him, scraping against the stones of the earthquake-shattered church.
I pulled free of his weight and squirmed into a corner, feeling too weak and shocked to support myself any longer, and bent over my savaged arm that tingled with a strange flushing sensation of cold followed by heat and then the harsh prickling of flesh knitting together in a fire of magic.
Carlos had slumped to the side as I sidled away. Now he pulled himself up again to lean against the wall beside me, his movements rough jerks. He closed his eyes as if exhausted by the effort and seemed to be panting.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “I’m in your debt. Yet again.”
“I thought you were going to kill me,” I whispered, still pressing my throbbing wrist between my breasts, harder than I may have needed to.
“I might have, had I not realized it was you.”
“That would be some thanks for coming to save you.”
He made a coughing sound and sighed. “It is our nature to take what we need. I apologize for frightening you. How did you come to find me?”
“Amélia. How did she know you were in trouble?”
He gave a weak, lopsided shrug. “She was my wife and it appears she cares for me still, though I was the worst sort of human monster to her.” He twitched and frowned. He took a breath. Then he raised a shaking hand to his own chest. “How . . . strange that feels.”
“What?” I asked, finally daring a glance down at my wrist. The moonlight revealed only a set of faint lines on the inside as if I’d worn tight sleeves that pressed their seams and wrinkles into my skin. I stared at the soft, whole flesh, too surprised to speak, almost too surprised to listen, except that his words cut through my daze.
“My heart . . . is beating.”
“Doesn’t it always?” I asked, recalling the way I’d seen it once, a torpid red gleam in his chest that pulsed less than once a minute.
“Very slowly, yes. Not like this. Not like yours.”
Carlos reached for me and had to crawl to close the distance between us. He stopped and remained on his knees, leaning against the wall as he put out his hand. “Please. Your hand. Only for a moment.”
I held out my right, since it was closer to him and seemed less vulnerable. He took my hand in his, rubbing his thumb across my palm as if he’d never touched skin before. Then he pressed it against his chest, above the scar I knew lay there, scribed into his skin almost two hundred sixty years earlier.
I could feel throbbing, like a distant, uneven drumroll beneath his cold flesh. His heart beat like the reflection of my own. I looked at him in confusion.
“It’s been almost three centuries. . . . I didn’t think that I had missed it.” He frowned, thinking. His face went blank and dark and he peered at me from the corner of his eye. For just a moment, the edge of a cruel smile danced along his lips, his grip tightening on my hand until the bones ground together, keeping me close. Then he let me go and slid away, sitting back against the wall again at a short distance and no longer looking at me. Through the Grey, I could see shades of darkness and pinpricks of light gathering around him like a constellation slowly burning into being.
NINETEEN
I watched his power reassemble around him, changed and yet the same: dark as night, but no longer blood streaked.
He seemed surprised. “I cannot fathom what has happened. I feel. This blood moving within my veins, pumped by a heart that has not beaten thus in centuries, demands breath like a babe howling newborn from the womb. I feel all this, and memory of how precious it is brings me shame that for even a second I thought of killing you. Thought of consuming you and drawing this from you for my own selfishness.”
“For the sake of a heartbeat, for breath?” I asked. I was afraid, but it wouldn’t do me any good to give in to it. “For a mortal
thing that can stop like an unwound watch?”
He turned his head toward me. “You do not appreciate what it is to feel this after so long.”
“No,” I agreed. “But to feel my heart stop, to die, I know that. And the surge of my heart beating again, my lungs hungering for air, my body wanting to live, however broken it is, I know that, too. I die and I wake changed, and hope it won’t happen again, over and over. How many times have you died, Carlos?”
“In my own body, but once, and very nearly a dozen times more. But every life I take, I feel as if it were my own death and rebirth. Like you. But you live—truly alive—from heartbeat to heartbeat, and I exist in the bitterness of death,” he said. “But I had forgotten life’s tang, how sweet and sharp, like the taste of your blood on my tongue.”
His gaze on me burned with conflicting desires that sent chill and sorrow through me. I turned my head away and let it fall forward, tired and weak and unable to fight if it came to it. “If you’re going to . . . at least make sure I’m really dead this time. I don’t want to know what happens after this. After we fail.”
The small sound that came from him was not a laugh. “Oh, Blaine, you mistake me. I forfeited my soul for power, my life for knowledge and existence beyond my due years. Tonight I reached again into the abyss of that power, but I miscalculated and should have died. Because of you, I have survived. No, I live! Every fiber of my being cries to cleave to this sensation and I know it is nothing more than a fleeting semblance that will fall away, but that does not cheapen the gift, nor change my gratitude to you. For now, I feel the phantom of your heat in my body, my heart beating, my lungs striving for breath, and I know to whom I owe this. If what you see in my eyes is an unholy desire, it is only because I am an unholy creature.”
“That does still leave desire,” I said, still feeling weak and small and uncertain.
“I’ve never made a secret of my interest in you.”
“Yes, but your interest never looked like lust before.”
Revenant Page 20
