“You don’t understand,” Peter said, exasperated child to parent.
“Explain it to me.”
“They’re you! Don’t you see?” Now he turned to the group, sweeping his arm to include them all. “They’re you. That’s why you kill them. Surely, you need the blood, but they don’t have to die and you don’t have to take it without asking. You kill them because you hate them. What are these humans whom we discuss as if they were cattle?”
“They are cattle!” Karl screamed, at last.
“No, my friend,” Peter continued, softly still at first, then growing to a shout, “I say again, they are you. But not you. They are greater than we who can live forever, can take their lives at will. They have powerful spirits, the wonderful certainty of death, and warm, beating hearts. We hate them and kill them because they are us!”
Then, quiet again.
“And I cannot do it anymore.”
Finally, Peter bent to pick up his long coat, slipping it on. He looked up again at Sheng and Alex, the tiny Oriental and his tall, black goddess of a lover. The hate was gone now, and Peter thought he saw a strange mixture of pity and amusement on their faces. He turned hack to Karl, whose own face was a mask of sadness.
“Will I see you again?” his best friend asked.
“Not soon.”
And he left.
As he told his story Peter turned away from them, fumbled for something to do with his hands. Meaghan felt for him. Peter knew he had done right, but the specter of betrayal still haunted him. She reached out and pulled him down to sit beside her on the bunk.
“And that was it?” she said.
“No. Later that same night I came upon Alexandra and Sheng attacking a pregnant woman, an Irish prostitute, on her way home apparently. I knew I could not stop them from hunting, but the infant was an innocent. I . . . stopped them. I took the woman to the nearest building which would open its doors.”
After a moment of silence Meaghan spoke. “The woman died?”
“Yes,” Peter said. “But I returned the next night and discovered that the child lived. A boy, he was taken to a church orphanage.”
“Well,” Cody said, turning back toward the window, “I wish they had let me go so easily.”
“They didn’t?” Meaghan asked, and she and Peter both looked at him.
“Oh, Karl told them to leave me be, but some of them didn’t listen. I guess I just rubbed them the wrong way, eh? But that’s a story for another time.” Cody looked at Peter and realized he wasn’t paying attention. “Peter?”
“Oh, sorry,” Octavian said, shaking his head. “Just thinking about all of this, about Karl.”
“It was awful,” Cody said, and the two immortals locked eyes for a moment. Like ail those creatures who had been made more than human by Karl Von Reinman, they had witnessed his death in their minds. “More than awful, as helpless as we were, but we will avenge him or truly die in the attempt.”
In the silence that followed, a pact had been made. Cody wasn’t the only one who fancied himself a hero, nor the only one who knew what honor was.
“All right, let’s get back to the here and now.” Meaghan broke the silence, recognizing the men’s grief but not wanting to allow it to affect their efforts. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Von Reinman hired this Gypsy to steal the book, and we know that the guy just sort of up and died when Henri Guiscard walked in on him. Are we to assume this master thief had a weak heart?”
“I sorta doubt that,” Cody said. “I’d be willing to bet Karl hypnotized the man, planted a mental time bomb in him that, in the event of his discovery, would cause his heart to simply explode on the spot.”
Meaghan was horrified.
“Get used to it, Meaghan. Cody and I aren’t innocent by a long shot, but we’re about as innocent as our kind gets. The majority are devils, all right. There’s a reason for every stereotype, and thankfully, an exception to every rule. But make no mistake when we get to Venice—Defiant Ones are, in the main, evil and vicious creatures. Forget that and it could kill you.”
Meaghan took this as seriously as Peter meant it, and yet there was something about his words that just didn’t sit right with her. Looking at the two that she had ever met, she found it hard to believe that the creatures could be evil simply by their nature.
“Well, why didn’t Von Reinman go himself?” she asked, back to matters at hand.
It was Cody’s turn to get quiet as he backed off and looked at them both more closely. “Yes, Peter,” he said warily. “Tell Meaghan why Karl didn’t go himself to steal the book.”
“Simply that he couldn’t,” Octavian answered. He hadn’t noticed the lone of Cody’s voice. “Legend has told us that our kind cannot traverse holy ground.”
“But, Peter,” Meaghan countered, “tonight you—”
“Went in there yourself!” Cody finished for her. “How in hell did you do that, friend? I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
Peter shook his head. “In a way, and this is not meant as an insult, I sort of expected more of you. Will. Of course, it took me more than four hundred years to figure it out, so I shouldn’t act so high-and-mighty.”
Meaghan had some idea of what Peter was talking about, but he’d never explained it to her in detail and she was fascinated. Cody, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue, and this was obvious to both of them from the look on his face.
“It’s all bullshit,” Peter said.
“What?”
“Bullshit, Cody. It’s a load of crap. The sun, crosses, holy ground, all of that stuff is pure shit, made up by the church to weaken us, to give us those handicaps, to control us. Everything except maybe for silver, which is poison in some way. Our race has been brainwashed. Don’t you think there were Defiant Ones—don’t you think there were vampires around before the church was there to call us ‘Defiant Ones,’ before the cross meant anything, or their version of ‘holy ground’?”
“Well, of course, but—”
“Doesn’t it stand to reason, then, that if the religious aspects of legend are not true that all other aspects of the myth must be called into question?”
“Yes, of course, but if all of this is true, well, I mean, how did you figure it out?”
“That night, the night I betrayed the coven, when I stopped Sheng and Alexandra’s attack on the prostitute? I said I took her to the nearest door. Only when I was inside, laying her dying form on a table, did I realize it was a church.”
Cody nodded in understanding.
“That night I realized that not only were we not what we believed ourselves to be, but that we have never known exactly what we are.”
“Which is?” Cody said, stepping closer to them.
Peter looked up and the eyes of two noble men met in sorrow and wonder. “I truly do not know,” he said. “Any more than I can discover what the church knows about us, and how they were able to play with our minds in the first place.”
Peter smiled then. A clever smile that made the others smile, too, though they didn’t know what for. He picked up the leather case within which lay the book that had been the source of their troubles and their questions.
“But I know you for a gambling man, Will Cody. And I’m willing to bet that the answers to all of our questions are in here.”
“Well, then let’s get to it!” Meaghan said.
“There’s something else you both should know,” Peter said. “Cody, you haven’t asked where this train is headed, but if you think about it for a minute, I’m sure you can guess easily enough.”
“Oh, shit,” Cody said quietly. “Venice.”
“That’s right, brother. We’re going to the family reunion, something I would guess neither of us has done in a long time. I can’t imagine we’ll be too welcome there.”
“That’s for sure.”
“And yet we have to go. Meaghan and I had planned to go anyway, to see if we could find sanctuary and also because
I wanted to know what was being done about finding Karl’s killer. Now we don’t have a choice. It’s the only place we can go.”
Peter’s face was dark with anger, his eyes cold, and Meaghan knew she would never want to be the cause of that rage.
“What happened?” was all she said.
“Your assassinations, Cody? They’re a part of a larger plan, a much larger plan. Something I overheard Mulkerrin and his superior referring to as a ‘Blessed Event.’ Time is short, they said, and they must move on Venice as soon as possible.”
“So these killings,” Cody picked up, “they’re a smoke screen. Nothing more than a way to keep us off balance and unsuspecting of their real motives.”
“Or a way to make sure that some of our most powerful will be absent when the attack comes,” Peter answered.
“But in broad daylight?” Meaghan said.
“When better?” Peter nodded, a rueful smile on his lips.
“Speaking of which,” Cody said, getting back to business, “we’d better put the rest of this off until later. Sunrise is only a few hours off and I want to get an idea of what this book is all about before we look for a place to sleep.”
Peter looked shocked.
“What?” Cody said.
“With all due respect, um, Will,” Meaghan began, “I don’t think you get it. What Peter had said means these guys will be moving on your people as soon as they can get mobilized. You don’t have time to sit out the day in some dark room or a hole in the ground. This train will roll into Venice well after sunrise, and when it docs, we’re all getting off.”
“But I’ll die!”
“Haven’t you been listening? That’s all garbage, and besides, from what I’ve been able to pick up, you’re already dead. That much isn’t part of your brainwashing anyway. We’ll take an hour to go over this book, and then Peter’s going to coach you a bit on what is and isn’t true, and then it’s going to be up to you!”
“But I—”
“Look, you’re just going to have to trust us, okay! I mean if I can take all of this in and stay sane, then it’s the least you can do to try to learn a little faith!”
Peter and Cody just looked at her, the former with a wide grin and a heart full of pleasure and pride, the latter in surprise and admiration mixed with a good amount of fear of the coming day.
“Faith,” Peter said, putting his arm around Meaghan. “What a concept.”
They took out the book and began to read.
20
IN HER ROOMS, SISTER MARY MAGDALENE, to most known only as Sister Mary, prepared herself. She dressed in black, but in street clothes; slacks, a sweater, winter boots. It was to be the uniform of their forces upon arrival in Venice. She packed a change of clothing and two changes of her underthings in a black canvas bag, along with the silver dagger that was her only weapon. Of course, this did not include the weapon of her mind, her studies, her words. No, the dagger was for pleasure killing, for close-quarters dispatch of the hellspawn that had scarred her so. Certainly she had spells enough to do the job, but she enjoyed the physical struggle, enjoyed scarring them with hated silver in return for her own mutilation.
She had her orders, though; take no chances. Still, if an opportunity presented itself . . .
The Montesi brothers were also preparing. Isaac and Thomas packed their things, including a steel-reinforced silver sword, passed to them by their father and now dedicated to the purpose of eliminating his murderer, should they discover both his identity and his whereabouts. Though they didn’t expect to find out the creature’s name, they could be fairly certain of his whereabouts in the next several days. The two chatted eagerly about the coming battle, about where they would go when it was complete, and about the creatures they knew by name, whom they had been attempting to track but had not yet found.
Among them would be Peter Octavian, and almost assuredly this Cody October, who had popped up seemingly out of nowhere in Monte Carlo, distracting a team sent to find another one, a very old one. The team went after him and failed, and only one of them returned to tell of it. So he survived and the team did not achieve their goal, the discovery and death of the Defiant One called Hannibal.
“I knew I should have led the Monte Carlo group,” Isaac said now, mostly to Thomas because Robert was ignoring his older brothers. Par for the course.
“You can’t blame yourself,” Thomas answered.
“No, he’s right,” Robert said now, and looked up from the map of Venice, where he’d been charting their strategy in minute detail.
“What?” Isaac and Thomas asked together, surprised that they had elicited a response at all.
“Truly,” Robert said. “Or one of us should have been there at least. This can’t happen again. After all, the Von Reinman thing went smoothly, clearly because we were there. Certainly we lost some good men, but the effort would almost certainly have failed if we had not been along.
“Actually,” he continued, “we should be on all of these expeditions. Isn’t one of the main reasons for these assassinations that each of us, and Liam as well, wants to find the creature that killed Father? Why, this one that they went after in Monte Carlo, Hannibal. He could be the one, and there, we’ve missed it.”
“Yes, but our own thirst for vengeance is not the only, or even the primary reason for the killings,” Thomas said, and they all were silent.
Robert cleared his throat and glanced around the small, spartan room, noticing for the first time the stale, sterile smell and the dull sunlight filtering through the window. He knew what his brothers were thinking, that even though Mulkerrin also wanted their father’s killer found, he would not be pleased to find them making this their priority. In the larger scheme, they had hunted the older ones to lessen the chance that the Defiant Ones would discover and somehow overcome their mental bonds, as well as to thin the potential resistance in Venice. Von Reinman had been punished for his use of the dead Gypsy thief to attempt to steal The Gospel of Shadows. Robert shuddered to think of the book in the hands of Defiant Ones.
“All of this would have gone smoothly if it hadn’t been for Von Reinman,” he said. “Liam would not have been in Boston, and we would have been in Monte Carlo. Then we might have gotten Hannibal and Cody.”
“And that’s why Von Reinman died then, and not in Venice,” Isaac said. “If only we’d known about this Octavian earlier.”
“We could not have,” Robert insisted. “There was nothing to indicate he might be a threat. We’ve been too confident.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Thomas said. “After this purge, we’re going to have to be extraordinarily careful tracking down those few who escape or who didn’t come in the first place. With what we know this Octavian can do, and how clever the cowboy from Monte Carlo is, why, we’ve no idea what we’ll come up against next. No, proceed with caution is the best course.”
“And of course, the way we’ll find Father’s killer,” Robert added.
Isaac and Thomas looked at each other then, because they’d shared thoughts about just that subject a short time earlier. They had wondered together whether it was finding their father’s murderer that drove Robert so and gave him an almost supernatural energy, or whether it was simply the search itself.
Instinct told them both that their little brother was different. They were soldiers, assassins, and sorcerers in training; Robert was an artist. In that way, he was the most like their father, and like their mentor, Liam Mulkerrin. Certainly, Isaac and Thomas Montesi loved their work.
For their brother, though, it was lust.
They hadn’t been able to read the whole book, not only because some of The Gospel of Shadows was in Latin so old even Peter could barely understand it, but because of time. They’d agreed from the start that there was very little of that commodity; they needed time to look at the book, a little time to rest, and Cody needed some time to get used to the idea that he was going to have to go out in the sun.
William Cody had
always been an adventurous man, filled with strength and courage. In life he became a lovable braggart, but with a grain of truth in all his showman’s tales. It had been a long time since he was comfortable admitting to anybody that he was frightened, but not far into their reading, he said just that.
“Lord, I’m scared,” he said, and Peter nodded, confirming that Cody was not alone in his fear.
But they didn’t have time to be afraid, or to read all the many reasons they ought to be.
So they skimmed.
When they had finished, a cold silence settled over them, then Meaghan stood up.
“Look, it’s almost dawn and we’ve got about an hour and a half until we reach Venice. We should try to get some rest, hmm?”
“You’re right,” Cody answered. “Only thing is, this little berth is pretty cramped right now, never mind if we all try to catch a few winks in here. Why don’t I find an empty berth? I’m sure there are a couple.”
“What about the sun?” Peter asked, before Meaghan could voice the same thought.
Cody had started to walk toward the door, but now he turned, head down. It was a moment before he looked up at them, and his anxiety was plain.
“It’s there in the book, Peter. I’ll pull the curtains in the berth and come down the hall against the wall, away from the window. It’ll be good practice for me before I have to be in direct light. When we have to get off the train, why, you’ll get off first. I read the book—in my head I know it’s all bullshit, but my gut isn’t sure. Once I see you standing there in the sun, I think I’ll be okay.”
“You have to be,” Meaghan said, a command rather than a plea.
“You will be,” Peter said.
Cody turned to go again, but then looked back at them and laughed. “You know, it seems like such an extraordinary fiction. That damned book is so outrageous! Hell, I’m an undead, blood-drinking creature of the night, and I can barely believe it!”
Meaghan moved toward him, a hand on his elbow. “No,” she said, “the outrage, the fiction, is what they’ve put in your head. Now you’re just like me. All the things you thought you knew for certain are wrong, and you’re going to have to have some faith.”
Of Saints and Shadows (1994) Page 23
