"It's Rome," I cried. "Rome restored."
Below us the Tiber snaked through the spires and domes, past the round Castel San Angelo, its crenellated tower near the riverbank, where pines swayed in the warm current above the river. Along the water, lovers embraced, their nude bodies perfectly proportional, strong, supple.
The marble facing of the Coliseum, torn away by the invading Visigoths, again covered it like shiny pink armor, and the noble buildings and columns and squares of the Forum were risen from the melancholy rubble. Medieval churches were restored too, their facades shimmering in the moonlight along the narrow streets. Crowds of spectators roared over gladiators in the Circus Maximus, whose sculpted muscles were as beautiful as their movements when they dodged and thrust the sword. And from the Pantheon, the sphere of perfection, haunting mantras to the gods rippled across the Piazza Navona, whose elliptical perimeter enclosed sword-eaters, lute-players, men at game tables, boys splashing through the waters of Bernini's fountain, women laughing with abandon as they inspected jewels on display in canvas-covered booths.
The colossal structures, the marble columns and Egyptian obelisks claimed as battle trophies, the noble shapes and movements of bare human forms, as breathtaking as statues and yet as flexible and rapid as the Tiber as it empties into the Ostian harbor, the eerie light cast on the city and its vital inhabitants by a white moon, round and precious as a giant jewel lying on velvet—all these things lent an awesome sublimity to the world we surveyed as we glided through space.
"Did you know this?" Michael yelled into the wind, panting, sweating against my body. "Did you know it would be like this?"
I shook my head. "It's beyond my wildest dreams."
Laughter caught my ear and when I turned, Tiresia moved through the air next to me, her dark skin spangled with jewels, a crown of rubies and emeralds glittering on her head. "Yes, Victor, it's time. What more could you want?" She stretched her hands, arched her smooth back, and dove down to a courtyard, where she mounted a boy stretched out on the ground and soon convulsed in pleasure as she rode him.
"I've waited centuries for this!" I shouted. "Now, with you, I can take my rightful reward. Laughter, sensuality, beauty, action. Action, Michael, action. For eternity."
He tightened his grip around me as his body trembled spasmodically against mine.
A moment later, we lay entwined once again in my cell, our chests heaving as though we'd run a race and collapsed beyond the finish line.
VII
Revelation
Chapter Twenty-six
« ^ »
"Two millennia?" Michael strained to comprehend the length of my history.
"Since the reign of Caesar Augustus, yes."
It was the night following our journey, the first chance to discuss an experience that had exhausted us both. We walked through the woods, where buds swelled on the oaks and maples stretching their arms after winter's dormancy into the sweet air of spring.
For the first time in my nocturnal existence, I unfolded the entire story of my origins, earthly and supernatural—Rome, Jerusalem, Tiresia, the roaming of the world's monasteries and the obsession that took me within their walls until that very moment. My means of nourishment I left for later.
"Joshu," he said. "Because it's closer to the Hebrew." He had listened silently as we hiked, until now.
"I wanted him as much as a soul can want."
"In love with Jesus of Nazareth." Michael mused over the idea. "The Christ."
"That's what history has called him. I knew the boy, the man of flesh and blood. The man who laughed at my crude jokes. The man who raced me across the Jordan. The man with pimples on his back. It's taken me 2,000 years to replace him."
"Incarnation. Incarnation." Michael murmured the word.
"What? What are you talking about?" I grabbed his arm to stop him.
"Nothing. I don't know. This is too much to take in."
Impatient with his musings, I leveled my eyes with his. "The point, Michael, is that you must inherit my existence. Wander here a brief time, then join me in that kingdom we've inspected. That's all that matters. Our eternity together."
"What do you mean inherit your existence?" He seemed to snap out of his contemplation, his eyes now sharp as a lawyer's.
"I mean this." I raised my hands. "The night. To live in the night until it's time to join me."
"Never see the sun again?"
"No. To hell with the sun!" I let go of him and took a few steps away to cool myself before turning back to him. "You want mortality when you can live forever? You'll have the power to take what you want. Anything. Then you'll go on living, really living, for eternity."
"But I wouldn't be mortal here. I'd become…whatever kind of being you are. Those are the terms?"
"Yes. You would have my powers. You could communicate with me."
"You're not telling me everything."
"What!"
"Everything, Victor." He drew close to me and clasped my arms, his eyes inches from mine. "There's still a closed door. Once again, you expect me to surrender, but you put up a wall. I'll take nothing less than everything, or there's nothing more to discuss."
I pushed him away. "Damn you. You want to know what it's taken me centuries to learn, is that it? A shortcut? I'm telling you, you can't understand it all now. Not until you are what I am. I can only promise you a freedom and power you've never known. Isn't that enough?"
"It's you I want, only you."
I laughed deeply and kissed him hard on the lips.
Over the next week, I made arrangements for Michael's new existence. His affection for New Orleans directed my search for lodgings there, not far from the above-ground tombs of St. Louis Cemetery, where his beloved Jana was buried and where he could easily claim the coffin of a new corpse and a forgotten mausoleum as his sleeping chamber. From a Swiss account, I transferred funds to a local bank in the French Quarter. Over the centuries I'd added to Tiresia's treasure through robbery and investment.
As for monastery life, that was up to Michael. He wouldn't share my initial motive for seeking cloisters, though he was drawn to the secluded life and would find in them companionship of sorts, as I had.
How would he take the life of predator, ripping into throats of children, women, crippled war veterans? He would adjust. Survival was survival, wherever you stood in the food chain. I counted on his supernatural cravings, his philosophical perspective, his passionate nature—these could obliterate mortal sensibility, which focused on the petty, the particular. I counted on his union with my soul to stir a sublime storm whose winds would devastate the oppressive claims of conscience. But for now, he must know nothing of my bloody nourishment. Before its strangulation, his conscience could misguide him, shrinking into a narrow chink his mind's all-encompassing window.
Chapter Twenty-seven
« ^ »
Easter lilies around the altar, the moist, clean smell of the season of love—it was the first time in a monastery that I'd caught the excitement of resurrection. Not Joshu's, which I'd cursed over the centuries, but stirrings, nonetheless, that only he had raised in me before now. A longing deep in my immortal core, echoed by warm wind when it rushed over the mountains and through the pines and maples, by spring rain falling like Chopin's melodies. A longing that promised completion, though it could never be truly completed.
We prolonged the time before my departure, the days before his death and new existence. If centuries should pass before he joined me, we wanted to spend them anticipating a continuation of an interrupted love affair. In balmy air or thunderstorms, under moonlit or raven skies, we haunted the woods together, laughed as we pitched stones at bats spilling from hillside caves, made heated love in abandoned shacks.
One night in early May, Michael challenged me to a race on the footpath where he'd disappeared before. The moon, directly overhead, washed the ground with pale light.
"Don't make me laugh," I said. "What are your chances against me
?"
He surveyed me arrogantly. "Let's just see." He pulled off his shirt and deposited a stick on the path. "That's the starting line. Are you ready?"
We positioned ourselves, and at the count of three, shot forward.
At first I held back, giving him a chance to gain ground so I could pass him more impressively. His arms pumped furiously, his feet kicked up high behind him, his dark ponytail bounced.
When he'd covered a good half-mile, I launched forward, speeding past the trees, reaching the apex of the hill in a matter of seconds. But when I got to where Michael should have been, I spotted him in the distance, at a curve in the path. Then he vanished behind the foliage.
Accelerating to my full speed, I gained the bend in seconds and intended to tug his ponytail, but once again he was relentlessly sprinting far ahead of me.
When I reached a rocky ledge, he was sitting on the ground, waiting for me. Winded, I dropped down beside him.
"Is this a trick Jana taught you?" I asked when I'd finally caught my breath.
"How did you guess?" He grinned and leaned back on his elbows. "I've got a surprise for you, another trick. Watch the sky."
The sweep of the wooded gray valley rolling to the horizon was magnificent. The river glinted through the branches. The monastery buildings huddled in a clearing and to the south, a black train threaded in and out of the trees, its lonely whistle piercing the silence.
Suddenly the pale sky brightened, as though the sun rose from the west, just beyond the horizon. "What!" I shot to my feet, ready to fly back to my dark refuge.
"Wait!" Michael grabbed my hand. "It's not real. Come on, sit down and enjoy something you haven't seen in a few centuries."
Light suffused the sky now, a sky bluer and clearer than I had remembered. Birds twittered in the false morning light.
"Now look there." Michael pointed to the eastern sky, where a ball of light blazed, my enemy in all his glory. Heat bathed my face, my arms and hands, as though I were on a beach near Positano rather than a mountainside at midnight.
The flaming sun shrank and the blue sky changed to indigo and then to silver as the moon resumed her post.
"Impressive," I said.
"It's my pledge to you, Victor. I have to admit, no one has ever affected me like you do. I've always been a detached spirit, drawing what I could from every circle I found myself in. I don't want to call it coldness or fear. It's just that I felt satisfied—working with the soil, studying philosophical discourses, drinking in the waters of mysticism. But now," he hesitated, lowering his eyes, "now I breath you like air. You're Patroclus to me."
"So you're Achilles? I like that." I grinned, and then clasped both his hands. "I've waited for this moment, night after night, century after century."
On the rocky ledge, the moon falling to the west, we entwined ourselves more like wrestlers than lovers, heaving, pressing, squeezing, and grunting, more primitive than the animals populating the woods around us. More than once, Michael's lips found my nipple, and each time the ecstasy his mouth brought to me almost numbed me to the danger of letting him drink too much of my blood.
"No," I finally said, each time, pushing his head away. "I'm not ready to leave you yet."
We stayed in the spot until the light of dawn bled into the sky above the mountains. I'd lost track of the time and now every cell in my body was alert to the imminent danger. His head on my chest, Michael had fallen asleep. I shook him.
"We've got to hurry. It's almost dawn." Scooping him up in my arms, I willed us to the monastery grounds. Branches gave way to us, the air formed a vacuum with the velocity of our movement.
As we raced to the entrance, Andrews's white sedan pulled up. He got out and motioned for us to wait for him.
"Go ahead," Michael said. "I'll talk to him."
With no other choice, I hurried to the crypt, my skin stinging from exposure to the predawn radiation.
Chapter Twenty-eight
« ^ »
Because Andrews watched my every move—as he emphasized to Michael the night of the sun show—my feedings required caution, mostly to prevent him from knowing when I left the grounds. I had to initiate my flight from within the courtyard, where I also returned at the end of my hunts. I could give him no grounds for linking me to the crime scenes investigated day after day in a city frozen by fear.
One night in late April, I stole through a poorly lit neighborhood of housing projects in the city. Ducking into shadows whenever a patrol car whirled its searchlight, I sniffed for a large concentration of blood to keep me satisfied for a number of days, reducing the number of risky trips. Just when I caught the scent of a mass of blood in one of the dilapidated apartments, a searchlight shot out from a police car hidden behind a tree in an empty lot. I moaned in pain at the intensity of light, too stunned to move.
"Police! Put your hands up!" an officer shouted from the car.
I couldn't see him for the light, but I heard footsteps and voices on the street. The smell of blood laced with alcohol wafted from his direction. I waited with my hands raised as he'd commanded.
By the time he started frisking me, while his partner pointed his gun at me, my pain had subsided and I was able to concentrate. I had no choice now that they'd seen me. In two moves I'd flung them both to the ground. I'd snapped the neck of the first officer when the second recovered his gun and fired, hitting me in the shoulder. Before he could shoot again I grabbed the gun from him and snapped his neck. Between the two of them, both hefty men, I could drain more than enough blood. But the shot had roused the neighborhood. A siren wailed only streets away.
I reached the opposite end of town in seconds, lighting near a park. A colonial home across the street emitted the sanguinary scent of at least two people. With no time for a more leisurely hunt, I broke into a side door hidden by a trellis and found myself in a richly furnished parlor dominated by a grand piano. Before proceeding to the bedrooms, I sank into a white sofa to rest while I healed. The bullet wound of a vampire closes in minutes, the missile itself disintegrating as soon as it penetrates the skin.
The floor was littered with wrapping paper. Empty drink glasses cluttered the tables. I picked up a greeting card from a stack on the coffee table, wishing Diane and Paul a happy 25th wedding anniversary. I could exhibit mercy, but under the circumstances I needed to feed and flee the city. Once I'd recovered, I crept down a carpeted hallway and up a staircase. The scent of blood swelled as I approached the last door, which was shut. With my ear against the door, I listened to gentle groaning and squeaking springs within. At the moment of climax, I opened the door.
The man's white body covered his wife's. Her legs were wrapped around his. He couldn't make me out in the pitch-black room, though of course I could discern his panicked expression as he glanced toward the door.
"Jimmy? Wait a minute, son." He rolled off his wife and grabbed his robe. She pulled the sheets up.
Now the pungent scent of semen and female secretions joined the smell of blood. My fangs shot forth and I lunged greedily at his throat.
"No!" The woman screamed. Scampering naked from the bed, she bolted out the door. I cut her off at the bottom of the staircase, where I had willed myself.
"Please!" she sobbed, dropping to her knees. "Oh, God, please!"
Although she was probably in her late 40s, she was quite alluring. I stroked her long, soft hair and raised her chin to me, as her body continued to convulse. Her breasts were large and round, the nipples unusually large. I pulled her up by the arms and dragged her to the open hallway, where I fell upon her breasts as she cried for me to stop. Licking the nipples gently for a moment, I finally pierced through the tender flesh and lapped up the blood. Then I turned to her throat, but before I could drink, footsteps pounded down the stairs.
"Mom, where are you?" a boy called in the darkness. When he reached the hallway, he flicked on the light. He was 15 or 16, in a sweatshirt and shorts. "My God!" He disappeared into the sitting room and came out b
randishing a fireplace poker.
"Get off her!" He drew back the poker as though he would run it through me. "Mom, are you all right?" His body trembled.
The unconscious woman remained motionless. I stood and stepped toward the boy. "She's just asleep."
When he jabbed at me with the poker, I wrenched it from his hands. I gripped his shoulders and drew his face up to mine and inhaled his luscious scent. His eyes were wide with horror.
"You're quite a specimen," I said. I kissed his full lips and sank my fangs into his neck. He instantly went limp.
When I had drunk every drop in his body, I returned to his mother to drain her. Between the two of them I was more than satiated. Even if the man upstairs had not already chilled to a dangerous point for drinking blood I wouldn't have touched him.
I left them all where they had died and exited through the same door I'd entered. Sirens howled throughout the city. Searchlights flashed up the street and scanned the park. Just as a patrol car turned the corner, I rose into the air and sped across the miles between Knoxville and the monastery.
It was nearly 3 o'clock when I returned. I crossed through the dark chapel on my way to the crypt. Exhausted from the killings, bloated with blood, I wanted to sleep though dawn was still a few hours away. But when I crawled into my coffin in the close, dark mausoleum, I lay awake for a long time, disturbed by something—not the killings, but a presence, like the presence I had felt once before outside my tomb, a presence that had amused me then. Now it threatened my dreams.
Chapter Twenty-nine
« ^ »
At dusk, as though electricity surged through me, my furious heart awakened me. He waited for me outside the tomb. The iron door squealed like a rat as I pushed it open to face Michael, who watched as intensely as the Roman sentinels outside the tomb of Joshu.
Vampire Vow Page 12
