“A vampyre? Care about mortal children?” I grinned.
“You are not like the others here. I know that. You loved Enora once. She was the mother of these two children. Did you truly give up that love?”
“Despite all she had done? I had watched her eat the heart of her youngest brother, his blood along her lips and chin. She was more the monster than I. How could I love her then? When she destroyed vampyres and burned many of the forest women—could I love her, despite this? When she...did all that she could, using bog sorcery and the old magick that the Myrrydanai taught her... No, I could not feel that pure love again for her that I had felt when our world had still been a place of innocence and purity.”
“But she was a prisoner of Medhya herself—a hostage to the White Robe priests.”
“Yes. A hostage. I could be blamed for her transformation, for it was my death at Pythia’s hands and my resurrection from the Sacred Kiss that brought about her descent into darkness. When I professed my love for her, and we took our passion into a chapel, beneath the gaze of the stone virgin, did either of us truly understand how love could turn to daggers in a heartbeat? We conceived our twins that night, and I was sent to war soon after. What war taught me was mortal waste and the inability of humankind to value what is within its grasp, and instead to value what others hold. Wars are for wolves and scavengers.
“So I grew to hate the world. While Pythia drank my blood in a tower of Hedammu, my beloved Alienora received news of my death, and then rumors of my damnation. Yes, the Myrrydanai priests began to dominate her. Yes, she turned to bog sorcery to learn my fate, and to try and bring power into her soul that she might—perhaps—save me. The taste of the magick of the forest turned her to a darker magick, to the bogs where the hounds of Medhya whispered to her of ancient sorceries, of plagues to be born, of dreams brought as a Disk into the world. It was her decision to spill the blood of our children to call up shadows from the bog. It was her decision to murder her family that she might become baroness after her father’s death. She sought power, and showed her true nature—a nature that is hidden when we’re young and untested.”
“You drink blood,” Natalia said. “You have sipped from my throat for many nights. You have murdered many men. Don’t pretend you’re not a monster. Perhaps you are more monster than a vampyre like Daniel, who is honest in his bloodthirst.”
I nodded. “I am no hero of mortals, I know this. What seems brutal is instinct to me. What seems bloodthirsty is merely...survival.”
“You could hate Enora for her crimes,” Natalia said. “You could love Pythia, despite hers. And your friend Ewen. He, too, murdered. The stain of murder and slaughter is also on your hands. It must be difficult to separate the good from the bad.”
I grew furious from her mentioning of names as if she understood who these people had been to me. I stood up, kicking my chair backward. “Do you say such things to drive a stake through my heart? How many nights will I tell you of these things? How many nights will you listen and not understand?”
I turned away from her, grabbing the flagon of wine. I threw it at Enora’s portrait. It smashed against the wall, just at Enora’s throat. A red stain dripped across Enora’s wolf-pelt cape and the robe beneath it.
“You must see with the eyes of the immortal to know. You cannot look at mortal life and see the difference between the way of the vampyre and the way of humankind. You all think us monsters! I have had companions hunted by human wolves who—in their blind ignorance—believed that annihilation of my tribe was for the good of all mortals. I spent years during the inquisitions in Europe, rescuing witches and gypsies—and when my kind was caught, we were beheaded and burned, extinguished as devils. Who were the devils? The inquisitors? The accusers of these innocents? Or the vampyres who drank blood for existence, but spent nights guarding those who had no guard left to them upon the Earth?”
I turned to face Natalia. “And you! The man you intended to marry when you were young would have destroyed you as he had destroyed others. I saw in his eyes what was to come, and I tasted it in his blood. He was a killer, a rapist, and a thug. He wanted your death, and he lied and cheated you to draw you into his web.”
“Vampyres only kill bad men?” she asked defiantly. “Your servants here killed people who had accompanied me. Those people were not murderers and rapists.”
My wings drew out from my shoulders, and I flew upward to the curved ceiling. There among the harpies and gorgons, I roosted on a wide ledge that separated ceiling from wall. “Do not question this, Natalia. Do not. You are here as my guest. That you even live is a testament to what I speak of. No creature is pure in thought or deed. No mortal, no immortal. The instinct of a lion cannot be compared to that of a lamb. When one creature kills for survival or protection, you cannot compare that to those who kill for pleasure and power.”
She stepped around my fallen chair and went to the portrait of Enora. She glanced from the portrait to me. “You two were not so different, Aleric.” Then she looked up at me with ferocity in her eyes. “She thought she was doing what was necessary for her survival, as well.”
Then she put her hand up to Enora’s face, as if looking for life in the portrait’s eyes. “Am I...is she my ancestor?” Her voice had softened. “Am I descended from her? From Lyan? Taran?”
“You must wait. For if I told you now of your bloodline, you would not yet understand.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she snapped back, and pointed at me. “You watched me for years. You knew I would find you here, eventually. You’ve withheld the truth from me. Tell me now. Show me the secret place. The place where the wolf key fits the lock. If you must, drink all my blood. Bring the breath of vampyrism into me.”
I felt what seemed a fist tightening at my chest. I willed my form to shift, as I had learned to do centuries before. I showed her the monster that I was—my canines grew to a size like a lion’s. I drew off some of my glamour that she might see the rotting corpse beneath my skin. I spread my wings wide, and revealed the kind of graveyard creature she had read of in fairytales and horror stories.
“Is this what you wish for yourself, Natalia?” My eyes went white and yellow, and my skull showed through the thinning hair. “This is what exists beneath the beauty you see. Do not forget it, for I never have. I have seen it in mirrors, and know that while others may see and feel the flesh of a youth, I am this. If you wish to be both beautiful and hideous, then come to me. Give up your life. Die for immortality, and become the blood-drinker you despise.”
7
In a moment, I returned my visage to its former glory—a youth, barely past nineteen, thick hair at the scalp, the skin of youth —an angel of the alleyways. Each was an illusion—both the corpse and the young flesh.
“I did not choose my fate. It was smashed against my soul. I chose the path of guardianship, rather than that of wholesale slaughter of innocents. What I do, I do to guard your realm. When I murder, it is within my instinct to do so—as the lion must chase down the antelope. What mortals do—when they slaughter and murder and war—is destroy their own kind.”
I swooped down to her, standing before her. “You may judge me as you wish—only wait until my tale is ended. You have reminded me of the brutality of that world of my past—and of this one, beyond this city, full of the avaricious and the self-destructive.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her arm and upturned her wrist toward my lips. “Drink from me. Show me the secrets that you’ve kept to yourself.”
I grasped her wrist and drew her into my arms. My wings unfurled, and we rose in the air. I carried her out of the temple, to the fields of bones beyond the walls of Alkemara. There, where the flowers of the Veil grew thick in vines along the ancient ones, I drew out a vine, plucking two flowers from it.
“Am I to get a lesson again about this flower?” she asked, crossing her arms before her.
“If you need one, yes. If I squeezed the juice at the center of this small, sw
eet petal onto your tongue, you would cross the Veil and understand all. You would die, also. No mortal can drink of this and not breathe her last,” I said.
She tried to reach for a blossom, but as soon as she neared it, it pricked her finger, and she withdrew it. About to thrust her finger in her mouth, I reached over and grabbed her hand.
“I must withdraw the poison,” I said.
I drew her hand to my own mouth, and sucked lightly at the pinprick wound. I tasted the copper of her life, and a slight essence of the Veil itself.
When she withdrew her hand, the wound had healed. She reached for my left arm, and drawing up its sleeve, she said, “Will you tell me what this marking means?”
There, like a tattoo of pale blue, just below my elbow, there was a jagged line that encircled my arm. “An old wound.”
“Your arm was cut?”
“Torn off, clean,” I said. “But there is sorcery that regenerates the flesh within me.”
“Do all vampyres have such power?”
“Many do,” I said. “Some do not. Some who have been maimed remain so, and others will draw back such limbs in a day’s rest.” I flexed my hand.
“Was it cut off in battle?”
I drew my sleeve back down, wishing to speak of other things, for I did not wish to remember the night when this scar had been new. She was insistent in her questions, and I told her that much of the Veil had touched me over the centuries, and I had seen many wars, and much peace; I had fought hunters who came to my tombs to destroy me, and had guarded those who were preyed upon by the world’s wolves.
“I would love to see the Veil,” she said.
“Perhaps, one night, I will cross it with you,” I said.
“But not yet?” She looked down at her finger, then at the petals in my hand, and finally up to my face again. “How long does the poison take?”
“To kill a man? I have seen one die before dawn, having ingested the flower at dusk. Others may die swiftly. It depends on the dose.”
“Is there an antidote?”
“None,” I said. “Do not worry. No poison flows through your bloodstream.”
She turned her attention to the many statues of the gods of death and of rebirth that had lain for centuries along the outer walls of the city. “It is still hard to believe that these treasures have been buried for so long.”
“Mortals have only recently found harbors and cities of the ancient world in the past several years that have been there for all to see for centuries. Sunken cities of Kah and Rohendris, the scrolls of Canuris, and the temples at Aztlanteum, with the bones of that prehistoric dinosaur that can be none other than Ixtar herself, extinct these many centuries. Yet no one looked before. The tribe brought our protectors here. Yet, if they were abandoned by us two hundred miles in the distance, they could not find their way here again. Only you found your path here. Myrryd has yet to be rediscovered.”
“It still exists?”
“A vast red city.”
“Where is it?” Natalia asked. I saw her eyes flash with desire, as if knowledge were a pleasure kept just out of reach.
“You must wait, for there is much to show you. I will tell you before dawn. The following night, again I will tell you more of those times. Each night until the telling is done.”
“You must tell me more of this now. I want to see the forbidden room. I want to know what has been waiting for me all these nights, Aleric. Tell me of the city of Myrryd. The battles. What happened to Pythia? Where did you go when you escaped Aztlanteum? She stole Ixtar’s orb, didn’t she?” Natalia shot the questions at me like the excited scholar that she had become. “There was someone—some stranger—following you in flight from that burning kingdom?”
Could I have told her that I had waited centuries for her to come to me—for the man or woman from this bloodline to find these secrets of the medieval age in which my fate was determined? For there was no scroll for this, no leathered pages. I had left the last tale of my first century as a secret, which only she and I would know.
The wolf key itself would unlock the final secret.
“The orb was known to me as the Serpent’s Eye, although it had a far older name that I would learn much later. Some called it the Lamp of Death. It was the size of Pythia’s fist.” I made a fist, remembering how Pythia’s hand had fit into mine. “Pythia clung to it as if it was the greatest of prizes, yet even she could not unlock its power.”
“She was pregnant,” Natalia said, recalling the events we had not long ago spoken of. “A mortal vampyre, because of the mask. Who pursued you from Aztlanteum? What of Calyx and the Akkadites, and Taranis-Hir?”
“You must wait for this,” I said. “Come with me to those ancient days of my first century when war descended like a storm of dark angels across many lands, and my path was illuminated by the Dark Madonna herself, the Queen of Wolves and Plagues and Shadows...when the fires of Nezahual’s city burned bright, and I followed Pythia through the billowing smoke.”
BOOK ONE
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THE PATH OF SERPENTS
PART 1: THE FOLLOWER
Chapter 2
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ESCAPE FROM WAR
1
I watched the skies when I escaped Nezahual’s besieged kingdom for a sign of the new moon’s birth—for it was the solstice that had become my target, the bomb lobbed at me by those who understood the Veil and its fragile nature during the shortest night of the year. These ancient sorceries were rumors to me, for I did not understand the importance of the season, nor of the solstice night. Though I had been claimed Maz-Sherah by the Priest of Blood called Merod, I did not feel as if I were anything more than a tool in the hands of some larger force.
2
When Pythia and I left Aztlanteum, on a continent far from my homeland, the moon no longer reigned over the black of night.
We had fled another war in an obsidian city when the vampyre king Nezahual was besieged by his brothers and sister in a battle for supremacy, for the blessing of their mother, Ixtar, and for the lands that had once been divided among them. Jealousy and envy divides all families, mortal and immortal, and the want of power—and the ignorance of its corruption—destroys many kingdoms.
The city of Ixtar burned and raged, and, below us, vampyres fought in the air, tearing at each other like wolves, while fires consumed the walls of their temples and palaces, while priests fought against invaders, and mortal men died for their gods. The cries of mortal and vampyre alike seemed to ride with us as we moved beyond its territories.
In the stream, we knew that someone pursued us through that blinding darkness.
Within an hour of our escape, I glanced back, briefly, and spied a gray shape in the whirling black smoke.
3
I was still weak, and did not think I could fight any of the vampyre guards who had trailed us from the burning city. I knew why this guard had followed us—it was not merely our escape, it was that fist-sized orb of black stone that Pythia had tied in a pouch around her throat as we flew.
She had stolen the sacred relic, and I had no doubt that this had awakened Nezahual’s ire, even as his city perished. Perhaps it held some secret power that only he could access, or perhaps it was simply that it belonged to Ixtar herself, and Nezahual’s existence depended upon its return.
At first I thought it was one unseen vampyre who followed, and then I felt many coming for us, but at a great distance. The stream felt strange to me, alive and yet confusing, and this follower seemed a disruptive influence. Perhaps, I thought, I only sensed those vampyres fighting many leagues away, amidst fire and smoke.
Below us, the smoke met a haze of mist out upon the sea. I was not going to be able to fight the pursuer off in midair, and Pythia was now mortal—she would easily be captured by a vampyre. I felt our only hope to deflect any pursuing guardians of Ixtar was to throw them the orb.
I flew toward Pythia and reached for the strap at her throat.
She hissed like a snake, her fangs bared toward me. The strokes of her wings increased, and she shot ahead.
If my sense of the stream was correct, I could not outfly the guard who followed. I turned in midair to face him, remaining motionless in the sky, my wings spread apart as if to glide downward.
“Show yourself!” I shouted. I glanced down toward the ragged land as it dipped several miles ahead to the sea. The thick smoke blinded my view.
I was sure I saw a movement in the clouds of gray and black, yet no one came forward from them.
I waited another few seconds—still feeling something in the stream—just a vibration there. If one of Nezahual’s brethren had been hiding in the ash-clouds, he easily could have leapt out and subdued me—though I would give him a fight he might not forget.
Finally, I turned again toward Pythia, who had almost reached the edge of Nezahual’s lands, a mile or more ahead. I flew along, catching up to her, but I could not shake the feeling that some vampyre stalked us.
The smoke of the burning kingdom swept across the sky, and held back the dawn.
4
Toward the western sea we soared, beating our wings against the tides of the wind. The stink of sulfur and ash attacked our lungs and seared our flesh, as if the inferno behind us reached up to draw the two of us back to Earth, two demons escaping Hell.
Pythia flew slightly ahead of me, like a dragon on the air, the spines of her wings flexing up and down as the eel-skin stretched across them like those of some angel of the deepest pit—beauty and terror bound up in her form.
The world below us burned and spat fire into the sky. Lamentations rose from among mortals of that land, and they sang of the immortals whose mother, Ixtar, had given birth to them. The songs that came up through the rumble of falling stones and the cries of war seemed like those hypnotic chants of the monks from my own country: beautiful and somber and not of the death of a city, but a mournful prayer to the gods for swift passage from this world to the next.
The Queen of Wolves Page 3
