Ramon nodded. “But the price the baron will demand…”
“It won’t come cheap.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Alright,” I said. “Just try and keep me alive. Keep Edwin under watch. Time will be up before we know it. If I can survive until Nico is back, I’m hoping he can use his ability to summon all the vampires Alice has made. Since I turned Alice and she turned them, they’re all a part of his bloodline.”
“I was thinking the same thing, ma chérie. One problem with that idea…”
“If any of the vampires are staked, they’ll still be in hell,” I said.
“Nico won’t be able to summon them.”
“Can you see if he can try and summon them in hell?”
Ramon shrugged. “I can ask. But will those abilities work there? Aren’t the abilities we might acquire through feedings bound to our corporeal bodies?”
I bit my lip. “Good question. But it’s worth a try. It would keep Alice’s nightwalkers in check.” I took a deep breath. “How’s he doing, anyway?”
“Nico?”
“No, Edwin…”
“He’s a human in a vampire hell, ma chérie.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Ramon.”
“No kiss this time?”
I smirked, placed a soft kiss on Ramon’s cold lips, and thrust his stake back into his heart.
ALICE WOULDN’T BUDGE. I tried starving her of blood, which only drove her mad. I brought her a meal, she fed, recovered her sanity, and returned to her stubborn self. Weren’t believers like Alice supposed to give thanks to the deity who provides? She should have bowed down to me. Revered me. Thanked me profusely. Instead, she remained steadfast, pompous in her insistence that it was just a matter of time before I’d die.
“If I die, Alice, you’ll be stuck here in this circle. There will be no one left to release you.”
“They will come for me. They are not ignorant of this place.”
“The Order?” I asked, rolling my eyes. “If they knew you were here and gave three shits about you, they’d have come for you by now. Face it, Alice: you’re a vampire. You’re a tool they’re using against your own kind.”
Alice shook her head. “They’ll come.”
“Just like the nightwalkers are going to kill me by leading Edwin to heaven?” I asked. “Ramon has been watching Edwin constantly and hasn’t seen any evidence of your nightwalkers in hell. Seems to me that no one you’re trusting to do their job is following through.”
“Patience is a virtue, Mercy.”
“And wrath is one of the deadly vices,” I said. “Anger, rage, hatred… it consumes you.”
“I don’t hate you, Mercy. I want to see your abominable existence ended.”
“I didn’t say you were consumed with wrath toward me. Your wrath is against yourself—you hate what you’ve become. Tell me, Alice, once I’m gone—if that ever happens—who will you hate in my place, if not yourself? If I’m an abomination, so are you. Your self-loathing is so evident it’s palpable.”
Alice shrugged. “What I am already damns me. What does it matter if I’m consumed by deadly sins?”
“Then why do you cling to virtues? You realize it’s your perverted view of virtue that has trapped you in the very sins you despise?”
Alice shook her head. “That doesn’t follow.”
“The sin of wrath is the opposite of patience, is it not? It comes from an unwillingness to wait on your god to exact your definition of justice.”
“Maybe I am his sword, the means God has ordained to accomplish His justice.”
“That’s stupid. Follow that line of reasoning through and you could justify literally anything you thought God would consider just.”
“It isn’t my idea of justice I seek. I pursue what the Scriptures say.”
I rolled my eyes. “And what does the Bible say about vampires?”
“It condemns witches.”
“Does it?”
“Thou shall not suffer a witch to live. Exodus twenty-two.”
“You really think the witches the Bible was talking about in Palestine, centuries before Christ, were the same as those who practice the Craft today? Just because the word gets translated as ‘witch’ doesn’t make it so. Those witches were using spells and poisons to injure or harm others. They were using their arts to bypass God’s will, to take vengeance into their own hands. Tell me, Alice, who is more like the witches of the Bible that your holy book condemns? Me, or you?”
Alice huffed and sat down cross-legged in the circle. “I’m not going to argue the Scriptures with you. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I never claimed to be a Bible scholar, Alice. But I know bullshit when I hear it. And quoting the Bible about witches without understanding the context, even for someone who actually believes in the Bible, is irresponsible and self-serving.”
“Tell me,” Alice said, “when Moll deceived us into feeding your brother the ashes of your heart and liver, thereby condemning him to a vampire’s hell, isn’t that exactly the kind of witchcraft the Bible warns against? Doing harm to others, usurping God’s will…”
“That was Moll, not me.”
“But you were her follower.”
“Trust me, I’ve spent a century and a half hating her for the ways she deceived us all, for what she did to me.”
“Be that as it may, you did the same to me. You turned me apart from my will and desire.”
I stared at Alice blankly. “You attacked me, Alice. You and my father. And I wasn’t the one who turned you. That was the Order’s doing.”
“No, you didn’t turn me. You would have just seen me murdered.”
“You were the one trying to kill me. I was just defending myself. I rarely kill when I feed. And I bet you don’t, either. Being a vampire does not make you a murderer by default.”
“We drink human blood… You realize that consuming blood is condemned in the Bible, too? It’s in Leviticus. So while it doesn’t mention vampires by name, one can discern that vampires are damned, too.”
“Do the members of the Order follow all the Old Testament dietary laws?”
“No,” Alice said. “Peter had a vision from God in the New Testament where God declared all foods clean.”
“You just proved my point. Why focus on one dietary restriction, the consumption of blood, when it allows you to conveniently condemn our kind but not focus on other dietary laws because, as you said, they’re no longer in force according to your New Testament?”
Alice huffed and shook her head. “You’re so maddening. You say I take the Bible out of context, but then you use context as some kind of eraser to make inconvenient Bible passages irrelevant.”
“It’s not a magic eraser, Alice. But context is important. Nothing ever happens, has any meaning at all, apart from context. If you don’t consider context, what you’re doing is replacing the original context with your own worldview. In that instance, it isn’t the Bible you’re following at all. It’s a bastardized version of the Bible you’ve reinterpreted to suit you.”
“Since when are you so concerned with following the Bible?” Alice asked.
“I’m not. But over a century and a half of existence I’ve had more than one occasion to read it, to understand what it was that so fueled my father’s hatred. Following the Bible isn’t what interests me,” I said. “But I am concerned with the likes of the Order, who would use their religion as a pretense for hate, for erasing a species that God continues to permit to exist, simply because they don’t understand what we are. I have a right to exist.”
“At the expense of Edwin’s damnation?” Alice asked.
“I don’t like that, either. But I wasn’t the one who made that happen. And you and your Order saw to it, in pretty short order, that the witch who did was killed for it.”
“So you’d just leave him in hell?” Alice asked. “Wouldn’t it be nobler for you to wish him free? After all, as it stands you’re both damned. Why not allow him a
chance at redemption?”
I shook my head. “A martyr’s sacrifice might be noble when there’s no other option. But I haven’t given up on the notion that there might be a way to save us both.”
“If you haven’t figured it out after this much time has passed, who’s to say you ever will?”
I wasn’t about to tell Alice about the Caplata, the one I’d met when I first came to New Orleans so many years ago. While trapping my brother’s soul in a little totem or fetish isn’t paradise, it isn’t hell, either. And if doing so would allow us both to live, I hadn’t given up on the idea. The only problem was trying to find a way to make it happen…
29
TRYING TO REASON with Alice seemed to be more fruitful than threatening her. I’d thought about using sun lamps, or casting sunlight from my wand. Another spell with a cheesy incantation, courtesy of Moll: Wand light, want bright, let this witch see through the night.
It was probably not unlike whatever spell Alice and the Order had used to enchant their crucifixes. Not that they used a cauldron to craft their magic—they probably used a combination of supposed holy relics and holy water to make it happen.
They thought it was miraculous—but what they did wasn’t that much different than the Craft I practiced. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.
One performs a miracle in the church and they meet one of the qualifications for becoming a saint. One performs a spell and they’re burned as a witch. Like I said, a rose by any other name…
Same principle applies for turds too, by the way. Slap some dookie between two buns and call it a sloppy joe. Take a bite, still tastes like shit. Kind of like the utter hypocrisy that the likes of the Order demonstrated by condemning us—as witches and vampires—when for all intents and purposes they participated in the exact same “evils” they accused us of perpetrating.
Yes, I take pride in my ruthlessness. But humans can be just as vile. To pretend that everything is black and white, light or dark, as the Order presumes, is not only a gross oversimplification of reality—there is light and darkness in all of us, human and vampire alike—but it’s dangerous.
If they’d ever read their own Bibles and actually listened, they would have heard the bit about taking the log out of their own eye before trying to drive stakes in the hearts of others. Okay, I embellished a bit on the staking part, but go look up the passage—it fits.
Regardless, we were at something of a stalemate. I seemed to make some progress with Alice just by talking, getting to know each other. I had to show her a softer side. I had to appear human. Try to evoke some empathy. I knew what I was capable of. I knew I was merciless. But so was the Order of the Morning fucking Dawn.
If they could wear a facade of holiness to cover up their true villainy, I could too. Especially if it helped me convince Alice that damning me wasn’t the only way to redeem Edwin, if I could convince her I intended to save him, too. But that I didn’t have to die for it to happen.
To make that case, though, I’d have to convince her that she shouldn’t hate her own vampiric nature so thoroughly. We were creatures no more or less vile than humans. We were just a bit higher on the food chain. We were another step forward in the evolution of species. Not that Alice believed in evolution—but I could use the idea without evoking Darwinian terminology. S
till, while she was less combative, I couldn’t quite crack through her shell. She still believed in the Order. She still harbored resentment against me. She still despised what she had become and blamed me rather than the Order, which was equally culpable, for making it happen. I had no idea if there were other nightwalkers in hell working to free Edwin. She insisted there were.
Ramon continued to report no evidence of them there. But as Alice was always quick to point out, the fact that he didn’t discover them didn’t mean they weren’t there. It could have meant they were more successful than we’d imagined. So successful that they completely evaded detection.
The date came—November 1, 2019. It was time to bring Nico back.
I revived Ramon first. He warned me that Nico wasn’t exactly himself. He’d spent almost all of his time in hell with the baron. I suppose since the two had wrangled in the Otherworld for so long before, and it was a bargain he’d entered into that had made Nico the first vampire to begin with, they had some issues to sort out.
But according to Ramon, Nico was intent on exacting another bargain—one that might return him his soul. If that happened, he’d become human again… Why anyone would want to do that befuddled me. Humans are weak. Frail. They die young. So much power, so much authority, so must history—was Nico really willing to give all that up? Of course, perhaps being stuck in hell gave him a deluded perspective. I could only hope that once he was revived he’d be back in his right mind.
“Would you like to do the honors?” I asked Ramon, hovering over Nico’s emaciated corpse.
“I wouldn’t dare rob you of the privilege,” Ramon said, smirking. He knew full well that a revivified vampire can be a bit unwieldy at first. He’d be hungry. He’d want to feed—even if Nico could go a while without feasting. A decade under the stake was a bit much, even for him. Removing the stake is kind of like being the one tasked to let a gator out of its cage.
The creature might owe you its freedom, but in the moment, instinct takes over. While Ramon was a few decades older than me, such a small amount of time didn’t give him enough extra strength that I—fully satiated by blood—couldn’t handle.
Nico would be another story entirely. Letting a hungry gator out of a cage is one thing. Releasing a starving Tyrannosaurus Rex was another matter entirely. And Ramon, gentleman that he was, didn’t want to rob me of the opportunity to get run over by a stampede of vampiric fury.
Truth be told, it would take all both of us could muster to hold Nico back. And I had a meal waiting for him just outside his crypt, a hobo we’d found lingering outside the cemetery gates. I compelled him to wait just outside Nico’s tomb. No sense in unleashing Niccolo the Damned on the French Quarter. Still, trying to manage the Alice situation, the last thing I wanted was to attract unnecessary attention from rogue hunters.
“Here goes nothing,” I said as I gripped the stake and pulled it from Nico’s chest.
Nico gasped for air, his eyes wide and black—they’d turn red once he fed. Nico tossed me aside with ease as he exploded out of his coffin. Ramon tried to get in his way to stop him, but Nico ran over him like an armadillo on a country road. Bursting out of the door that had sealed his tomb, he immediately seized the homeless man I had waiting for him outside.
Talk about fast food. Nico drained him in a matter of seconds. I’d never seen him feed with such fury, without the restraint and control he’d so often modeled for me.
Nico released the man, whose drained body fell to the ground. “Thanks for that,” he said, still gathering his wits. He looked at me and grinned, his eyes red again. “Not the best meal I’d ever had. But it will suffice.”
“I figured you’d have a hard time restraining yourself. I didn’t want to bring you a meal that someone was likely to miss.”
“Good thinking. Have you been watching the Mulledy girl?”
I nodded. “So far everything has proceeded as you told me it would. She’s now a part of that Voodoo school you said you used to attend. She won’t be expecting a thing when you come after her for vengeance.”
Nico nodded. “My plans for her have changed.”
“Changed?” I asked. “How so?”
“It seems I need her now. And she might be of some use to you, too.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How can that girl help us?”
“She has a blade that can pierce the veil between worlds. She can help you go to hell.”
“In my body?”
Nico nodded. “You should finally be able to use that fetish to trap your brother. And while you’re at it, I’ve arranged a deal with Baron Samedi.”
“Ramon said somethin
g to that effect… What is this deal, exactly?”
“He’ll return my soul,” Nico said.
“In exchange for what?”
“If I allow him to possess my body. If I allow him to return to Earth.”
30
THE ONE THING about Nico’s plan that I didn’t like was the fact that once the baron took over his body, he would release Nico’s soul—he’d move on, and he’d actually die, truly die. Not as a vampire, but as a human.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” I asked.
Nico nodded. “I’ve lived long enough that I’m ready. Frankly, eternity wearies me. Some day, I imagine, if you endure in this form long enough you’ll feel the same way.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “What about me? I have Alice bound in our basement. Trapped in an enchanted circle.”
“That could be helpful,” Nico said. “There are other vampiric wraiths in hell, a host of them, who arrived after she left.”
“There are?” Ramon asked. “I never saw them.”
“That’s because you were watching Edwin the whole time,” Nico said. “They don’t need to convince him to want to move on. Alice took care of that, and frankly, it wasn’t like it took much to get him to agree that leaving hell was a good idea.”
“Then what are they doing there?” I asked.
“They’ve been working to create a path out of hell into the light,” Nico said. “And I fear they’ve nearly accomplished it. A pretty impressive feat, I should say. But I fear it does not bode well for you, Mercy.”
“How in the world are they pulling that off?” Ramon asked.
“Prayer,” Nico said.
I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me. They’re praying for a way out? I thought God didn’t hear prayers from hell.”
“He doesn’t,” Nico said. “But Baron Samedi does. And he’s always willing to make a bargain. They might think it’s God who is aiding them. In truth, it’s the baron. It’s always been the baron.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I mean, it seems like you and he are tight. Can’t you just convince him not to?”
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 87
