Ricardo drew back, pressing against his captors. “You wear Fray Juan’s face, but you are not a priest. You can’t do this, this is no time for communion.”
Juan smiled, but that did not comfort. “This isn’t what you think. What is wine, after the holy sacrament of communion?”
“The blood of Christ,” Ricardo said.
“This is better,” he said, taking the chalice from Diego.
Ricardo cried out. Tried to deny it. Turned his head, clamped shut his mouth. But Juan was ready for him, putting a hand over his face, digging his thumb between Ricardo’s lips and prying open his jaw, as if trying to slide a bit in the mouth of a stubborn horse.
Juan was stronger than he looked. Ricardo screamed, a noise that came out breathless and wheezy. The chalice tipped against his lips.
The liquid smelled metallic. When it struck his tongue—a thick stream sliding down his throat, leaving a sticky trail—it tasted of wine and copper. With the taste of it came knowledge and instinct. Human blood, it could be no other. Even as his mind rebelled with the obscenity of it, his tongue reached for more, and his throat swallowed, greedy for the sustenance. Its thickness flowed like fire through his own veins, and something in him rose up and sang in delight at its flavor.
The battle was no longer with the demons holding him fast; it was with the demon rising up inside of him. The creature that drank the blood and wanted more. A strange joy accompanied the feeling, a strength in his body he’d never felt before. Weariness, the aches of travel, fell away. He was reborn. He was invincible.
And it was false and wrong.
Roaring, he shoved at his captors, throwing himself out of their grasp. He batted away the chalice of blood. They lunged for him again, and Fray Juan cried, “No, let him go.”
Ricardo pushed away from them. He pressed his back to the wall and couldn’t go further. He could smell the blood soaking into the blanket at his feet. He covered his face with his hands; he could smell the blood on his breath. He wiped his mouth, but could still taste blood on his lips, as if it had soaked into his skin.
He had an urge to lick the drops of blood that had spilled onto his hand. He pressed his face harder and moaned, an expression of despair welling from him.
“You see what you are now?” Juan said, without sympathy. “You are the blood, and it will feed you through the centuries. You are deathless.”
Ricardo stared at him. The blood flowing through his veins now was not his own. He could feel it warming his body, like sunlight on skin. Sunlight, which he would never see again, if Juan spoke true.
He drew a breath and said, “You are a devil.”
“We all are.”
“No! I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I am not one of you. I would rather die!”
Juan, a pale face in lamp-lit shadows, nodded to his four henchmen, who backed toward the ladder, which lead to the trap door in the ceiling. One by one, they slipped out, watching Ricardo with glittering, knowing eyes. In a moment, Juan and Ricardo were alone.
“This is a new life,” Juan said. “I know it is hard to accept. But remember: you have received a gift.”
Then he, too, left the room. The door closed, and a bolt slid home.
Ricardo rushed to the door, and tried to open it, rattling the handle. They had locked him in this hole. A damp chill from the walls pressed against him.
Ricardo lay back on the bed, hands resting on his chest. Eventually, the lamp’s wick burned down. The light grew dim, until it was coin-sized, burnished gold, then vanished. Even in the dark, he could see the ceiling. He should not have been able to see anything in the pitch dark of this underground cell. But it was like he could feel the walls closing in. He waited for panic to take him. He waited for his heart to start racing. But he touched his ribs and could not feel his heart at all.
Hours had passed, though the time moved strangely. Even in the darkness, he could see shadows move across the ceiling, like stars arcing overhead. It was nighttime outside, he knew this in his bones. The night passed, the moon rose—past full now, waning. The way the air moved over his face told him this. Eventually, near dawn, he fell asleep.
He started awake when the trapdoor opened. His senses lurched and rolled, like a galleon in deep swells. He knew—again, without looking, without seeing—that Juan and his four caballeros had returned. They had a warmth coursing through them, tinged with metal and rot, the scent of spilled blood. The thing inside him stirred, a hunger that cramped his heart instead of his belly. His mouth watered. He licked his lips, hoping for the taste of it.
Shutting his eyes, he turned his face away.
Another, a sixth being, entered the room with them. This one was different—warm, burning with heat, a flame in the dark, rich and beautiful. Alive. A heartbeat thudded, the footfalls of an army marching double-time. A living person who was afraid.
“Ricardo. Look.” Juan stood at the foot of the bed and raised a lantern.
Ricardo sat up, pressed against the wall. Two of the caballeros dragged between them a child, a boy seven or eight years old, very thin. The boy met his gaze with dark eyes, shining with fear. He whimpered, pulling back from the caballeros’ grasp, but they held fast, their fingers digging into his skin.
Juan said, “This is one of the things you must learn, to take your place among my knights.”
“No.” But the new sensations, the new way of looking at the world, wanted this child. Wanted the warm blood that gave this child life. The caballeros hauled the boy forward, and Ricardo shook his head even as he reached for the child. “No, no—”
“You cannot stop it,” Juan said.
The child screamed before Ricardo even touched him.
It was not him. It did not feel like his body. Something else moved his limbs and filled his mind with lust. His mouth closed over the artery in the child’s neck as if he kissed his flesh. His teeth—he had sharp teeth now—tore the skin, and the blood flowed. The sensation of wet blood on tongue burned through him, wind and fire. His vision was gone, his mind was gone.
This was not him.
The blood, life-giving and terrible, filled him until he seemed likely to break out of his own skin. With enough blood, he could expand to fill the world. When they pulled the dead child away, he was drunk, insensible, his hands too weak to clutch at the body. He sat at the edge of the bed, his arms fallen to his sides, limp, his face turned up, ecstatic. He licked his lips with a blood-coated tongue. But it was not him. His eyes stung with tears. He could not open them to look at the horror he’d wrought.
He was not so cold anymore. Either he was used to it, or he could no longer feel at all. That was a possibility. That was most likely best. Even if this were not hell, what they had forced him to do would surely send him to hell when he did die.
If he did.
“It is incentive to live forever, is it not? Knowing what awaits you for these terrible crimes,” Diego said with the smile of a wolf.
The friar had shown him what horrors this life held for him: he brought Ricardo a cross made of pressed gold. He kept it wrapped in silk, did not touch it himself. When Ricardo touched it, his skin burned. He could never touch a holy cross again. Holy water burned him the same. He could never go into a church. His baptism had been burned away from him. The Mother Church was poison to him now. God had rejected him.
But I do not reject God, Ricardo thought helplessly.
There were rewards. Juan kept calling them rewards. Mortal weapons could not kill him. Stabs and slashes with a sword, arquebus shot, falls, cracked bones, nothing would kill him. Only beheading, only a shaft of wood driven through the heart. He was immortal.
You call this reward? Ricardo had shouted. To be forever shut out of God’s heavenly kingdom? Then he realized the truth: this was no tragedy for Juan, because the friar did not believe in God or heaven.
“Did you ever believe?” Ricardo whispered at him. “Before you became this thing, did you believe?”
Juan
smiled. “Perhaps it is not that I don’t believe, but that I chose to join the other side of this war between heaven and hell.”
Which was somehow even more awful.
Ricardo stood at the church wall one night. The moon waxed again, past new. Half a month, he’d been here. He didn’t know what to do next—what he could do. They held him captive. He belonged with them now, because where else could he go?
They told him that the blood should taste sweet on his tongue, and it did. He still hated it.
Perhaps he looked for rescue. When he did not report to the Governor, wouldn’t a party come for him? A troop of soldiers would come to learn what had happened, and Ricardo would intercept them, tell them the truth, and he would help them raze the church to the ground, destroy Juan and his caballeros.
And then they would destroy him, stake his heart, drag him into the sunlight, for being one of them. So perhaps Ricardo wouldn’t help them, but would hide.
Did he love existence more than life, then? More than heaven?
A jingling of bridles sounded behind him. Ricardo did not have to look; he sensed the four men approaching with the horses.
“Brother Ricardo, it’s good you’ve finally come into the air. It’s not good to be cooped up all the time.”
“I’m not your brother,” he said. His voice scratched, weak and out of practice. He had taken breathing for granted, and had to relearn how to speak.
Diego laughed. “We’re all you have, now. You’ll understand soon enough.”
“He has lots of time to learn,” said Octavio, one of the four demons who had once been men, who followed Juan. Rafael and Esteban were the others.
Diego said, “Ride with us. We hunt tonight, and you’ll learn at our side.” It was a command, not a request.
He followed, because what else could he do? Except perhaps stand in the open when the sun rose and let it burn him. But suicide was a sin. Even now, he believed it. He would show that he did not forsake God. He would ask for forgiveness every moment of his existence.
Diego seemed to be Fray Juan’s lieutenant; he had been the first of them turned to this demon life, years ago now. That was why he looked no older than he had when they returned from Coronado’s expedition.
He explained what they did here. “Each of us is as strong as a dozen men. But there are still those who know how to kill us. Those who would recognize certain signs and hunt us down.”
“Who?” Ricardo asked. “What signs?”
“Secret members of the Inquisition for one. And what signs? Why, bodies. Too many bodies, all drained of blood!” They all laughed.
“New Spain is the perfect place for us. There are thousands of peasants dying by the score in mines, on campaigns, of disease. Out here on the borders, no one is even looking much. If a whole village dies, we say a plague struck. We take all the blood we need and no one notices.”
At the mention of blood, Ricardo’s mouth watered. A hunger woke in him, like a creature writhing in his belly. Each time Diego said the word, his vision clouded. He shook himself to remain focused on the hills before them.
“I know how it is with you,” Diego said. “We all went through this.”
“Though the rest of us were perhaps not so holy to start with.” Again they laughed, like young men riding to a night of revelry. That was what they looked like, what anyone who saw them would think. Not that anyone would see them out here. That was the point, to feed on as much blood as they wished without notice. A land of riches. Diego had not lied.
“It’s eating away inside of me,” Ricardo said under his breath.
“The blood will still that,” said Rafael. “The blood will keep you sane.”
“Ironic,” Ricardo said. “That you must become a monster to keep from going mad.”
“Ha. I never thought of it like that,” Diego said.
He is already mad, Ricardo thought.
They rode for hours. They could not go far—half the night, he thought. Then they must go back, to take shelter before dawn. He could feel the night slipping away in his bones. It was the same part of him that now called out for blood.
Rafael said, “The villages nearby know of us. They go to the hills to hide, but we find them. Look toward the hills, take the air into your lungs. You can sense them, can’t you?”
The air smelled of dust, heat, sunlight that had baked into the land during the day and now rose into the chill of night, lost in the darkness. The breeze spoke of emptiness, of a vast plain where nothing larger than coyotes lived. When he turned toward the hills, though, he smelled something else. The warmth had a different flavor to it: life.
When they brought him the child, he had known what was there before he saw it. He could feel its life in the currents of the air, sense its heartbeat sending out ripples, like a stone tossed into a body of still water. A live person made a different mark on the world than one of these demons.
“Our kind are drawn to them, like iron to a lodestone,” Diego said. “We cannot live without taking in the human blood we have lost. We are the wolves to their sheep.”
“And now you hunt. Like wolves,” said Ricardo.
“Yes. It’s good sport.”
“It’s a thousand childhood nightmares come to life.”
“More than that, even. Come on!”
He spurred his horse. Kicking dirt behind them, the other four followed.
It was just as Diego said: a hunt. The leader sent two of the caballeros to ascend the hill from a different direction. They flushed the villagers from their hiding places, where they lived in caves and lean-tos. Like animals, Ricardo could not help but think. Easier to hunt them, then, when one did not think of them as human. It was like facing the native tribes with Coronado all over again. The imbalance in strength between the two parties was laughable.
On horseback, Rafael and Octavio galloped across the hill, chasing a dozen people, many of them old, before them. Diego and Esteban had dismounted and tied their horses some distance away, waiting on foot for the prey to come to them.
Ricardo watched, and time slowed.
It was as if he played the scene out in his mind while someone told him the story. Diego moved too fast to see when he stepped in front of the path of a young man, grabbed his arm with one hand and took hold of his hair with the other. The boy didn’t have time to scream. Diego held the body like a lover might, hand splayed across his chest, holding him in place, while pulling back his head, exposing his neck. He bit, then sank with the boy to the ground while he drank. The boy didn’t even thrash. He was like a stunned rabbit.
Each of the others chose prey and struck, plucking their chosen victims from the scattered, fleeing peasants. The creature lurking where Ricardo’s heart used to be sang and longed to reach out and grab a rabbit for itself. As he watched, the scene changed, and it was not the caballeros who moved quickly, but the villagers who moved slowly. Ricardo had felt like this once in a swordfight. His own skills had advanced to a point where he had some proficiency, his mind was focused, and he knew with what seemed like supernatural prescience what his opponent was going to do. He parried every attack with ease, as if he watched from outside himself.
This was the same.
It was not himself but the unholy monster within who stepped aside as a woman ran past him, then slipped into place behind her and took hold of her shoulders, moving like the shadow of a bird in flight across the land.
Jerked off her feet by his hold on her, she screamed and fell against him, thrashing, panicked, like an animal in a snare. He held her, embraced her against his body to still her, and touched her face. The coiled hunger within him gave him power. As he ran his finger down her cheek and closed his hand against her face, she quieted, stilled, went limp in his grasp. Her heartbeat slowed. He could take her, drink her easily, without struggle. This was better, wasn’t it? Would he have this power if this wasn’t what he was meant to do? She was young, almost a girl, her skin firm and unlined, lips full, her eyes bright. H
e could have her in all ways, strip her, lie with her, and he could make her want it, make her open to him in a way their Catholic religion would never allow, even in marriage. In the ghostly moonlight, she was beautiful, and she belonged to him. He lay her on the ground. She clutched his hand, and confusion showed in her eyes.
He couldn’t do it. He sat with her as though she were his ill sister, holding her hand, brushing damp hair from her young face. The creature inside him thrashed and begged to devour her. Ricardo felt the needle-sharp teeth inside his mouth. And he turned his gaze inward, shutting it all away.
I am not this creature. I am a child of God. Still, a child of God, like her. And the night is dangerous.
Quickly, he made her sit up. He lay his hand on her forehead and whispered, “Wake up. You must run.” She stared at him blankly, groggily. He slapped her cheek. She didn’t even flinch. “Wake up, please. You must wake up!”
Her gaze focused. At last she heard him. Perhaps she didn’t understand Spanish. But then, which of a dozen native dialects would she understand?
Fine, he thought. He didn’t need language to tell her to run. He bared his teeth—the sharp fangs ripe for feeding, wet with the saliva of hunger—and hissed at her. “Run!”
She gasped, scrambled to her feet, and ran across the hillside and into shadow.
Just in time. The world shifted, the action around him sped up and slowed as it needed to, and all appeared normal again. A still night lit by a waxing moon, quiet unto death.
The caballeros surrounded him. Ricardo could sense the blood on their breaths, and his belly rumbled with hunger. He bowed his head, content with the hunger, with the choice he had made.
They could probably smell on him the scent of resignation.
“Brother Ricardo,” Diego said. “Aren’t you hungry? Were the pickings not easy enough for you?”
“I’m not your brother,” Ricardo said.
Diego laughed, but nervously. “Don’t starve yourself to spite us,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Ricardo said. “I don’t starve myself for you.”
The four demons looked down on him, where he sat in the dust, content. They would kill him, and that was all right. The demon they had given him screeched and complained. Ricardo sat rigid, keeping it trapped, refusing to give it voice.
Vampires: The Recent Undead Page 32
