The Immortal Conquistador

by Carrie Vaughn

  The Abbot rubbed his face as if he was very tired. “Of course it is.”

  “I ran a saloon there. The Bucket of Blood Saloon.” He chuckled. Ladora had actually owned the saloon. He only helped. She had been tough and lively and wonderful . . . he remembered her, too.

  “Of course you did.”

  “Is there anything else, Abbot?”

  Now the Abbot laughed. It started as a quiet chuckle in his gut, until his whole body shook, though he made little sound.

  “I cannot believe it. Any of it. Ricardo, you are a vampire, a demon, a monster who drinks blood, and you are so good of heart that you met the Devil on the crossroad and didn’t even know it was him.”

  To be fair, Rick had been distracted at the time. He hadn’t thought he was worth the Devil’s time.

  “And then you turned him down?” The Abbot shook his head. “I didn’t believe it. Until I actually met you, I didn’t believe it. But here you are.”

  “I have a number of friends who would also think this was funny.”

  “See? You have friends. You have had friends for five hundred years. You’re not supposed to have friends! You’re supposed to have servants and thralls! You’re a vampire, and you have the gall to have friends?”

  He would not have survived without his many, many friends. He felt their ghosts line up behind him.

  “I have never been very good at being a vampire,” he said.

  “On the contrary, I think you may be the best of us. And now . . . and now we need you.”

  “He’s still out there, isn’t he?” Rick said. “I know Dux Bellorum is. But de Luz holds his leash. They’re planning.”

  “They’ve been planning for two thousand years, and now it’s all come to a head. We need you, Ricardo el Conquistador.”

  “You are making me an offer?”

  “No, I am asking for your help. Which I think is something you understand. Here at the Order of Saint Lazarus of the Shadows, we are vampires who are determined to serve God, whether He wants our service or not. And you . . . you have just proven that we still have souls to salvage. Will you join us, Ricardo, you who have never joined anyone in all your years?”

  He had spent so much time fleeing, hiding. Then he thought that Denver, one small city, easily overlooked against the backdrop of the world, would be enough. Some small power to keep the people he cared about safe.

  He had a friend—strange enough for one like him, as the Abbot had already said—who was a werewolf—even stranger, the old man would say if he knew, but surely he knew about Katherine, the werewolf called Kitty, who had already stepped in the light of the world to use what small power she had to protect her own. And anyone else she could manage to save, in the end. What would she say, if she were here? Besides demanding to know how old the Abbot really was. Ricardo el Conquistador thought she would say—take the step.

  Rick nodded. “I would like to face de Luz again. To thank the Devil for showing me my soul.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There was a time when I was absolutely certain I had no interest in writing about vampires. Everybody wrote about vampires. They were everywhere, always. The clichés had clichés. I didn’t need to add to that mess, I had nothing new to say about them. So when I started writing stories about a talk radio advice show for supernatural creatures, I made my main character a werewolf named Kitty because I was pretty sure no one had done that before. Early on, I mostly included vampires in that world so I could make fun of them.

  That didn’t last long. Vampires eventually draw an aura of gravitas around them. They start to fill up the room. You can’t not take them seriously. Their eyes are hypnotic.

  Almost from the moment I knew Rick had traveled with Coronado’s expedition when he was a young man, I also knew I would have to start filling in his five hundred years of history between then and the time of the Kitty novels, in which Rick is a major player. And that was when I discovered that I did have something to say about vampires,and I did have an interest in writing about them. In a word, it’s the history.

  The blood, the power, the seduction, the sex and twisted romance and all the rest that seems to be so ingrained in the modern vampire mythos? Not really interested. But give me a character who has lived for five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand, five thousand years—I will write about all that history in a flaming undead heartbeat.

  In giving Rick this particular backstory, which I did because it sounded cool at the time, I inadvertently made him a witness to the entire history of European colonization and settlement of the American West. This is a region with an extraordinary history and character that gave rise to its own genre of film and literature. Its own mythology. Rick is in the middle of it all, and the potential for story is vast. Rick gave me the idea of the vampire as an embodiment of history. Rick takes all that history personally.

  A lot of the short stories I write set in the world of the Kitty novels are origin stories for the other characters. I wanted to have those stories established in my own mind, even if they never made their way into Kitty’s story. That I can share them with readers and give them some insight is a bonus. “Conquistador de la Noche” is Rick’s origin story. “Hidalgo de la Noche” is almost a second origin story, as he moves to the next part of his life, from Colonial Mexico to the Borderlands, where he spends most of the next few hundred years. The challenge in writing this story was doing the research: there’s a massive amount of information available to a nonacademic enthusiast (whose Spanish is just barely good enough to order food and complain about the weather) about the conquistador period of Rick’s first story, and there’s a ton of information about the missionary period, when Spanish settlement, much of it driven by evangelizing Catholic priests, moved north into the Southwest and Rocky Mountain regions of what is now the United States. But there’s about a hundred years in between those two periods where I couldn’t find much information at all. This is the challenge of writing historical fiction: sometimes you just have to wing it. The important thing here is that one of Rick’s primary survival strategies is making friends. He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to.

  In Kitty Raises Hell, the sixth novel of the series, I drop a hint that during his travels, Rick once met Doc Holliday, the famous gunman and gambler. It’s a throwaway line meant to annoy Kitty, because Rick won’t tell Kitty the story. (Rick hasn’t told Kitty any of these stories.) Let this be a lesson to writers everywhere: If you add a throwaway line because you think it sounds cool, at some point you may have to write an entire story explaining it.

  The sections of this book that are new, Rick coming to Rome and telling his story to the Abbot of the Order of Saint Lazarus of the Shadows, take place after the events of Kitty Rocks the House, when Father Columban comes to Denver to recruit Rick into the Order. This sets the stage for the final book in the series, Kitty Saves the World, when Carlos de Luz, aka Charles Lightman, aka a dozen other names, appears again.

  The new story, covering the events of 1848, also incorporates the fact that every time I drive through New Mexico, which is usually several times a year, I think about Rick and what he might have been doing during his couple of hundred years of traveling in this region. I once stood in thePlaza of Santa Fe, on the street outside the cathedral, and had this visceral jolt that traveled through my feet and all my nerves: Ricardo de Avila stood right on that very spot. He’s a fictional character, but he was there, I just knew it, without a doubt. And so I wrote about it.

  I have been writing stories about Kitty, Rick, and their world for twenty years now. That I still find so much to write about here is a wonder and a joy. That so many readers are interested in that world is a blessing. Thank you for reading.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carrie Vaughn is the New York Times best-selling author best known for her Kitty Norville urban fantasy series. The series, about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural beings, includes fourteen novels and a collection of short stories.
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  Vaughn is also the author of the superhero novels in the Golden Age saga and has been a regular contributor to the Wild Cards shared-world novels edited by George R. R. Martin. In addition, Vaughn writes the Harry and Marlowe steampunk short stories featuring alien technology in an alternate nineteenth-century setting.

  Vaughn received the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award for her novel Bannerless. She is also the winner of the RT Reviewer Choice Award for Best First Mystery for Kitty and the Midnight Hour and the WSFA Small Press Award for best short story for “Amaryllis.” She has a master’s degree in English literature, graduated from the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in 1998, and returned to the workshop as writer in residence in 2009.

  A bona fide air force brat (her father served on a B-52 flight crew during the Vietnam War), Vaughn grew up all over the U.S. but managed to put down roots in the area of Boulder, Colorado, where she pursues an endlessly growing list of hobbies and enjoys the outdoors as much as she can. She is fiercely guarded by a miniature American Eskimo dog named Lily.