by S. H. Roddey
“I am Adam.”
“Adam? Adam, son of whom?”
“Son of no man,” I replied.
She laughed.
“Who are you?” I asked, and her laughter died.
“Who am I? I am me.”
“Yes, you are,” I replied patiently, “but even though you are you, you need to tell me who you are.”
She laughed, a light, airy sound that came as a complete contrast to her macabre appearance. “I am she who calls forth demons; did you not know that?”
“I did…but your name, what is it?”
“I…” She faltered, her pale skin growing sallower. “I am nobody.” As quickly as the air of sadness crossed her features, it passed. “Adam?” she said after a moment of still silence. The woman cocked her head to the side and smiled. “Adam…the first man. Are you a first man?”
“You might say so.”
She sniffed again, then took a lurching step toward me. “You smell…strange.”
“Perhaps.”
“Are you an offering?”
“No.”
“A lover?” Her smile widened. “I have not taken a lover in decades.”
“I am not your lover.”
“Then what are you?”
“I am the monster in your closet. You are the woman determined to destroy humanity, and I have come to stop you.”
“You?” Her smile waned. “Who do you think I am?”
“You are the one summoning demons, are you not?”
Her spine straightened, though she stood as if connected to the ceiling by strings. “You,” she said after a moment, and curled her fingers toward me, “come to me.”
I remained in place.
“Come to me,” she repeated, this time in French more broken than her English. She muttered something else in that heavy Germanic tongue. “Come!” she screamed.
This woman was not accustomed to being ignored. I closed the space between us, keeping distance enough so not to be within her reach. She moved in jerky, stilted steps, her body lurching as if unused to walking. Her blood-red lips curled into a hideous caricature of a smile as her blackened hands extended toward me.
I stepped back, and she lunged. Fast. One hand closed around my wrist while she drew a fingernail down my forearm. Blood—thick as cold sludge—oozed from the wound. She dipped her head, mouth open to lap up the liquid, and paused. A wheezing hiss escaped her, and she recoiled, shoving me away.
“Unclean…” she snarled. Her voice rose to a painful shriek, and her gnarled hands covered the dirty bandages over her face and ears. “Unclean!” she screamed again. I advanced, and she backed away, the hysteria in her voice growing with each new, foreign word she uttered.
Voices echoed up the stairs—angry, American men shouting their vows to protect the woman they called “Mother.” They brought weapons: guns and knives. There were many of them—at least seven, possibly more—filing into the room and surrounding me, and before I could react, the room filled with a deafening boom. Pain tore through my right shoulder. Blood and the bullet flew from the wound, and the woman screamed, a shrill sound of terror, as she cowered in the corner. I turned my attention to her for only a second, but it was enough for two knives to bury themselves beneath my ribs.
One sliced through my side, but the other hooked under the bone as my assailant lunged, shoving the blade upward. I gasped as pain tore up my right side, blinding me in its intensity. I threw my hand outward, knocking the man backward. He burst through the railing and thumped down the stairs. The gun in his other hand clattered to the floor at my feet.
I bent and picked it up.
“Unclean, unclean, unclean…” She wrapped her hands around her head and threw herself back and forth as if to escape my presence.
“Delphine!” another cried as he ran to her. Her protectors advanced on me, guns leveled at my head. Rather than risk the pain and potential destruction, I turned and leaped, crashing through the window.
I landed on the muddy street, in a shower of glass and wood, and ran. Voices and gunfire echoed down the street after me, but none of the men dared pursue. My shoulder burned, my side screamed, and my lungs ached. Blood poured from the wound, and I wondered if it might be violent enough an attack to kill me. I certainly wanted to die.
I also had no idea what in hell’s name just happened.
What in God’s name have you sent me to do?” I shouted as Luke entered the room two evenings later. His face remained a mask of passive calm against my anger, which only infuriated me more. I wanted to kill him.
He stared at me without moving. He did not blink, did not acknowledge my presence except to follow me with his gaze.
“Luke, tell me. Now. What is she?”
“She is…immortal.”
“Is she vampire?”
“No.”
“They called her Delphine.”
“Delphine La Laurie is the name to which she answers now.”
“Now?”
The smallest flex of Luke’s jaw gave away his anxiety.
“Luke?” I pushed.
“Her name is Erzsébet Báthory, and I owe her my life.”
Chapter 7
I was wild, little more than an animal well into my first hundred years as a vampire.” He remained still as stone, just inside the doorway. I hated his stillness—his absolute inability to present the appearance of humanity. “She found me wandering the forest near her home, creeping closer to her abode, enticed by the smell of virgin blood.”
Virgin blood. Of course…yet another piece that fell into place. The disappearances were the responsibility of the Brotherhood and this horrific woman. And Luke knew her, which, while not surprising, was quite a disappointment. The weight of betrayal settled across my shoulders.
Luke’s shoulders hitched. The small movement startled me out of my thoughts.
“She understood the hunger. Her blood was different, unappealing, which allowed her to bring me inside. She taught me to feed without killing the vessel.” He paused. “She led me back to humanity.”
“And this is why you owe her your life?”
“Yes.”
“What is she really?” I asked, impatient with his poetry.
“Immortal,” he said.
“You said that. What does that mean? Who is she?”
“I never quite understood exactly what she was, but her given name is Countess Erzsébet Báthory de Ecsed. She is a disgraced Hungarian noblewoman.” He paused. “She was the last lover I took.”
“Lover?” I questioned.
“Yes, Adam. Lover. She fed me, then bedded me. We were quite the pair back then.”
“I’m sure you were.”
Luke nodded. “I last saw her in 1609, two days before she was imprisoned for crimes against humanity.”
I turned and walked away before I punched him. I wanted to. I wanted to hate him, but the agony in his voice halted my hands. The reason for his unwillingness to give me what I needed to end this came into focus with sudden, startling clarity.
Luke still loved this woman.
My own heart twisted in my chest in remembrance of Lisette’s betrayal. Luke was grieving for what he’d had with this woman and lost two hundred thirty-nine years ago. But he knew as well as I did that if the Brotherhood controlled her, there would be no reprieve. She could not be suffered to live as a tool of their wicked trade. Otherwise, he would have continued to hide her existence from me.
“Sit,” I ordered, favoring my right side as I moved to rest in the single chair in front of the fireplace, “and tell me everything I need to know about this woman. You brought me into this, Luke, now help me out of it.”
Again, Luke hesitated before reluctantly coming to sit on the edge of the bed across from me. His gaze remained on the flames dancing before us. I waited, silent. He knew I would follow were he to leave. I would track him down again. It would pain me to do so, but if Luke became a liability, I would end his life as well as hers. We’d come
to that particular agreement long ago—never let the other become the thing we fight.
Finally, after nearly half an hour of silence, he began to speak.
“I was alone, trapped in the damnation of my own immortality. I was feral, more or less the monster I pretend not to be, when she found me.” The ghost of pain passed across his face. “Her husband was two years dead and her children entrusted to the care of servants so not to fall victim to her…condition.”
“What condition?”
“In time,” Luke said. Another emotion passed across his face but was gone before I could decipher it. “She found me in her garden. I’d killed one of her servants—an elderly man named Tomás. Rather than turn me over to the authorities or end my existence herself, she accepted me into her home. She understood what it was to crave blood, to be something less than human. Erzsébet taught me how to be human again—how to hunt and feed without killing, how to control the bloodlust and channel it into a form of power instead of weakness. She also taught me what it was to truly love another.”
Luke stood and crossed the room, his steps smooth and measured, and stared out the window.
“Why have you involved me?” I asked when it became clear he was not going to speak again. “What is it about this woman?”
“I love her,” Luke said. “Despite what the head says, the heart always wants what the heart wants. Even if said heart is a cold, dead rock in one’s chest.”
The statement brought my fury back to the surface. “You…love her? That is all you have to say for yourself?” My lip curled in anger. My hands itched to close around his unbreathing throat and squeeze despite the lack of a pulse. “So you’ve called me in to handle your mess because you harbor misplaced feelings for this…thing?”
“This woman,” Luke corrected, showing the first hint of anger. “She may be many things, but Erzsébet is still a woman.”
“She is a danger.”
“Perhaps. But that is why I involved you.”
“Perhaps nothing, you fool.” My fingers curled into fists at my side. “I will kill her, Luke.”
His expression darkened. “I know.”
“You owe me for this.”
He turned and started for the door. “I wish,” he said, pausing with his hand on the knob, “there was another way. I let her live this long in corruption because I believed there remained some good in her.” He pulled the door open and stepped through. He said no more and did not look back.
Several hours later, Luke returned. His skin was flushed; he’d fed. I lay across the bed without moving, and he sat in the single chair. We remained that way for a long time. I could feel the anxiety pouring from him.
“Tell me something useful, or go away,” I said.
“I am sorry,” Luke said. “I should have been honest with you from the start.”
“Yes,” I replied, “you should have. But it is much too late for that. What’s done is done.”
I rose from my place on the bed and, disgusted by the very sight of him, left my own room without looking back. I could no longer stomach his presence. He could burn in the sun for all I cared.
“Adam, wait,” he said as the door fell closed behind me.
Chapter 8
Punching humans in the face helped calm the beast raging inside me. I replaced their faces with Luke’s face in my imagination, which made me hit harder and faster, dropping opponent after opponent to the hard, wooden floor in a matter of seconds each. I could have killed them all; I was so far gone into the fury-laced madness. When the men in black dragged me from the cage, telling me no one else would stand against me in such a black mood, I was handed a sack of coin and sent back out into the night.
The cool air on my overheated skin felt good. It helped to calm me, to adjust my thinking back to that of a more civilized being. I walked the streets until the sun rose, mulling over the events of the last weeks and desperately grasping for that missing thought, that single piece of information I’d not been able to uncover.
By the time I returned to the building, my room was empty.
Luke, however, left a gift for me before his departure. A box sat at the foot of my bed, the lid ill-fitting atop it. I lifted lid to find a series of items inside.
The gun I acquired from the dead American, which I’d left lying on the windowsill, weighed heavily in my right hand. It was bulky and unwieldy. It felt dangerous. But Luke also left ammunition for it—heavy, metal balls; wadding; and a horn of gunpowder. There were instructions beneath the horn, penned in his impeccable hand.
Adam—
When you open the chamber, load it in this order: powder, ball, wadding, then cap. Load all six cylinders in the same manner. Aim well and shoot to kill. And stay away from the fighting houses. Those will get even you killed.
— L.
He included a holster as well—a heavy contraption constructed of metal buckles and stiff leather—and a cloak. The weapon fit snugly, and the strap, I found, cinched nicely around my considerable waist. Now that I had the weapon, I wanted to use it. The target did not particularly matter. I was growing reckless.
I stalked the darkened streets of the Isle de Cite under the stifling weight of the wool cloak, waiting and watching for any sign of the Brotherhood’s movements. It seemed the constant news reports of innocents vanishing without a trace sent the residents of Paris into hiding once the sun fell beyond the horizon. Either that, or the sight of the giant, patchwork monster asking after missing children may have caused the sudden desertion of the busy city’s streets. I walked alone. Even the ladies of the night remained huddled in groups of two or three, warily eyeing any passersby. None would meet my gaze.
On the third night of such activities, my attention focused on a young girl moving toward me on the opposite side of the street. Such was unusual, so I halted beneath an awning and watched. I thought her both quite brave and quite foolish to have ventured out so late. As she passed, I turned and followed at a distance.
Within a block, a shadow joined our impromptu parade, falling into line behind her. After another half-block, the shadow lunged, catching her around the head and waist. It happened fast, a flutter of robes and kicking feet. She let go a single, frightened squeak, then fell absolutely still in his arms. He carried her as if she weighed nothing, moving swiftly through the darkness toward the walls of Notre Dame. I turned my collar up against the misty rain and followed.
The attacker never once turned to survey his surroundings. So focused was he in his intent that I easily closed the distance between us. He twisted through the city streets, unaware of my presence, even as he and I both stepped into the open space of an intersection.
We crossed the street single-file and entered a small cemetery. It was unassuming, less than a quarter of the block, and one I’d quickly passed over in my initial sweep due to its very size. As he entered the gate, a man mirroring his image stepped out from behind the single tree in the center of the yard.
They shook hands, and I watched as he and the girl disappeared into the ground.
Underground. Damn.
I tugged the hood forward over the scars on my face and pulled the coin from my pocket. If this plan didn’t work, I’d break the man’s neck and enter anyway.
He looked up into my face, alarmed by my size, but a flash of recognition passed over his face. It was the man from the fights.
“Vicar!” he exclaimed, and the coin in the moonlight had him falling over himself to get out of my way. “I-I have waited for you, but you have not returned on my watch,” he stammered, both excited and fearful. “We are blessed that you have come to us! Let me announce you!”
“No,” I demanded, and he halted mid-turn. “I wish to observe unannounced,” I continued, softening my tone toward him. He bowed his head in assent and pointed toward the place where the first man and his charge vanished.
“Down the stairs, they keep the offerings. It will be soon now. The woman will perform her ritual and grant us our gifts.�
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“When?”
“Tomorrow, most likely. This child is the last. We are ready to receive.”
“I will observe now,” I said.
I tucked the coin back into my pocket and entered the dank, musty stairwell, which led into a narrow, moldy passage devoid of any light. I made my way slowly, drawing my fingertips along the wall and testing each new footfall. The ground sloped sharply down at thirty paces and would have thrown me forward had I not anticipated the danger.
The slope turned into steps, and after so long in pitch darkness, the torchlight blazing in from the chamber at the end of the passage nearly blinded me. I shielded my eyes with my hand and pressed my back to the wall as I made my way down, ready for an attack.
The short passage was narrow and humid and led into a crypt. A gust of wind blew over me as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and when I turned to follow, pain blossomed across the back of my skull.
Chapter 9
I swung blindly around in the wake of the attack, groping for who- or whatever struck me. Footsteps echoed off the stone walls as I twisted and spun, chasing my assailant.
“You…” the voice hissed, familiar and menacing.
I turned toward it and lunged. My fingers tangled in fabric and I pulled, drawing him forward. As my vision cleared, the face became as familiar as the voice.
“Ne pas Fraternité?” I asked, staring down into the face of the young man whose attack I’d foiled on my first night in Paris. “Liar!” Fear shimmered in his eyes as I jerked the crutch—his obvious weapon—from his grip and dropped it behind me.
His chin trembled, and he muttered in stilted, hurried French, begging for his life, but the rage boiled inside me. I took him by the throat with one hand, and with the other, twisted his head until the bones crunched under my fingers.
I dropped his body to the ground and continued on.
The smell of blood as I stepped over the body and moved fully into the crypt was overwhelming. Bile rose in my throat. I gagged against it, unable to capture a clear breath.
