Met by Midnight: Shadow World Stories and Scenes, Vol. 1 (The Shadow World)

by Dianne Sylvan

  He didn’t begrudge them a better life, or even a happy one—he just didn’t understand why that had to include David Solomon, a vampire, who was paid to kill and who could never truly marry her.

  Deven also didn’t understand why he would want to. She seemed sweet enough from a distance, but…what did they have in common? What would they talk about during the long years that she aged and her body slowly wrinkled and decayed before him? Would they talk about the children they couldn’t have, the beach parties they couldn’t attend together? Did she even know about his job?

  “I do not have to explain myself to you,” David snapped at him one night as they were leaving the sparring room.

  “Yes, you do. I’m your friend, David, and I’m worried about you. You know what happens every single time—either you are going to kill her, or she’s going to die of old age. Does she even know what you are?”

  David rounded on him, anger in his voice and silver in his eyes. “It’s none of your goddamn business.”

  But it was. Deven was his superior officer in the Elite, and David’s performance was growing more and more disappointing. It was almost time for his annual review—what was Deven supposed to say to the Prime, that his finest lieutenant had fallen in love and was now just shy of useless?

  He found himself wandering mentally down the list of other candidates for the position. Faith would be an excellent right hand, and she was bored in her current post; she needed new challenges or she was going to eventually move on to another Elite where she could make it all the way to Second. Arrabicci was just enough of a racist never to let her get that far…but if Deven recommended her for David’s job, she’d get it. Arrabicci had the usual prejudices of an American male, but he had gotten over Deven’s predilections after Deven saved his life—twice—and took down an entire ten-vampire cadre of insurgents on his own, killing all of them in less than three minutes without breaking a sweat. After that, Arrabicci’s opinion was basically that as long as Deven could fight like that, he could stick his dick wherever he wanted.

  Still, the idea of losing David over something so ridiculous…it was galling. He’d trained David for two years, made him a perfect candidate to run an Elite of his own someday—Deven had dreamed of retiring and going back to his real work, and David was the lynchpin of that plan. As soon as David was ready to take over as Second, Deven could leave, and devote his time to the Red Shadow, where his passion for the hunt really lay. He didn’t mind stepping up for Arrabicci—the old man had all but begged for his help getting his Elite in shape—but these petty gang wars and political grievances were beneath Deven’s skill. He had bigger fish to decapitate.

  And there was also…that other thing…

  Deven shook his head impatiently and went back to cleaning and sharpening his weapons. No, not that. He wasn’t going to think about that. It was nothing anyway.

  Was it?

  He sighed and set aside the sword he was working on, switching to a shorter knife he wasn’t as attached to, so that his apparent inability to concentrate wouldn’t ruin a good blade.

  The first time it happened he was sure he imagined it. They were in the locker room changing before a shift, and he felt someone staring; people often stared at his tattoos, or watched him out of fear he was leering at them even though he kept perfectly to himself at all times; but when he looked up, he saw familiar blue eyes flicking away from where they’d been traveling slowly up Deven’s bare back.

  If he’d been surer of his relationship with the young upstart lieutenant he might have said, “Were you just checking out my ass, Solomon?” merely for the pleasure of seeing him turn bright red at the ears. But he’d just let it go, curious, wondering if it would happen again.

  And it did. Over and over. A moment of eye contact went on just a second long; reaching for the same weapon, their hands touched, and Deven knew they both felt the jolt of electricity, a familiar yet completely strange fire leaping up between them; and stranger still, Deven found himself seeking the younger vampire out, wanting his company. He’d never done that with anyone here. His goal was, and continued to be, helping the Prime get established and then going home and getting as far from Signet politics as possible.

  And yet…an evening of sparring here and there led to Deven teaching David the finer points of his technique, and soon Deven realized he had found a prodigy who could very easily take over as Second—he had the skill, the strength, and moreover the ambition. Deven could see it…David Solomon might land in a Signet of his own someday…but he had a lot to learn before he was ready.

  So sparring led to teaching, which led to long discussions on fighting history and the different schools Deven had trained in. David wanted to know everything—his thirst for knowledge extended to just about every subject, though industrial and technological advances were his favorites. Weapons, strategy, tracking, organizational hierarchies—he was like a sponge, soaking up anything Deven taught him about anything and filing it in his vast brain where he could recall it with split-second accuracy. He never missed a detail.

  Deven couldn’t remember the last person who had actually listened to him, aside from his agents…but David listened because he wanted to know, not because he was afraid of Deven. David seemed incapable of fear. He wanted to know more about Deven’s life, how he came to be the creature he was. He wanted to understand what made the Second tick. And so, over too many nights and too many bottles of bourbon, Deven found himself talking, and talking, telling David about his life in the monastery, his travels after that.

  “But how did you become a vampire?” David kept asking.

  Deven refused to answer that one question. But he was happy to talk about the Dragon Fire school of jujitsu he had studied at, or the Swords of Elysium, one of the vampire monastic orders known for its weaponscraft and warrior training.

  And so, out of nowhere it seemed…they were friends.

  And Deven hadn’t had a friend in…

  Ever, really.

  So when David started in with Anna, and his timing and speed dropped dramatically during intra-Elite matches, Deven was faced with a very, very hard choice.

  Exasperated, he gave up on the knife and sat staring into the fireplace for a while, nursing a glass of whiskey and trying to make up his mind what to do.

  He couldn’t ignore what was going on just because he cared about the boy. But he didn’t want to turn David over to the Prime without talking to him first. It was damn near impossible to change David’s mind about anything once it was made up, but it had to work this time or his career was on the line.

  They both had the next night off, and he had every intention of ambushing David before he could leave to go to Anna’s house in town. He’d give David the stern talking-to he needed, remind him what was at stake, and hope that would be enough.

  Of course, a Second in Command was never really off duty; before he could do anything that night he had to stop by the Elite conference room and take reports from the last night’s patrols. He would have heard immediately if there was an emergency, so these evening meetings were largely tedious repetitions of “situation normal, sir” and a few discussions on personnel issues. Usually, though, the nightly meeting took twenty minutes at most.

  To his exasperation Torvald, one of the Second Lieutenants, was determined once again to cause trouble. He was always complaining about someone—Deven was well aware that he himself had been the subject of a few of Torvald’s rants to other lieutenants, and it was no secret why. Before Deven and Faith had joined the Elite Torvald had been the de facto Second.

  Faith, in fact, was in the meeting, presenting a counter-argument to Torvald’s nonsense. “Sir, the Second Lieutenant is as usual full of shit,” she said. “Browning doesn’t have the strategic sense God gave a ferret, but he follows orders faithfully. If anyone on the team is causing trouble, it’s not Browning.”

  Torvald was already on his feet from his opening rant, and leaned threateningly toward Faith, who merely
raised an eyebrow at him, unmoved. “This is outrageous,” Torvald said. “There’s a conspiracy in this Elite to shut down any dissent—”

  “Sit. Down.”

  Torvald’s head snapped around toward Deven, and he dropped into his chair. When he spoke again his voice was calmer, but the bile in the words was still evident. “Perhaps I would get greater satisfaction if I went straight to the Prime with my concerns.”

  Deven laughed. Arrabicci was a stickler for the chain of command; unless Torvald was promoted to First Lieutenant the Prime wouldn’t even look at him. Right now there were exactly two First Lieutenants: Faith and David.

  “Torvald, I have much more important things to do tonight than deal with your childish nonsense,” Deven said. “So let me save us all another hour of pointless argument. Browning stays where he is, and you shut your goddamn mouth. If you attempt to go over my head, you’ll lose yours. Dismissed.”

  The tone of the last word was the one nobody ever wanted directed at them; Torvald, for all his bluster, was no exception. He fled the room without objection.

  They were done less than five minutes after that. By the time Deven headed back to the barracks to David’s quarters, he had a splitting headache, and for the millionth time he shook his head at God’s caustic sense of humor for giving him a healing ability he couldn’t use on himself.

  Strange. David’s door was cracked open. He never did that.

  Senses immediately going on alert, Deven eased the door inward slowly, drawing his belt stake as his eyes adjusted to the dark room. “David?” he asked softly, rapping lightly on the door as he opened it. “Are you in?”

  As soon as he rounded the corner and entered the room proper, he smelled it.

  Blood.

  Deven carefully leaned over and switched on a lamp, casting a yellowy glow over a shockingly grisly scene.

  David’s bed—a luxurious affair with the softest linens Deven had ever had the privilege to pass out on after a drunken bender—was stained with blood, and there atop the covers lay the dead body of a woman. Judging from the smell and the stiffness of the body she had been that way for hours.

  On the floor, curled up in a ball and holding onto the woman’s hand, was David, shaking like a leaf, his skin greenish white, pupils hugely dilated.

  Deven took in the scene and barely even had to trace the story—he knew what he was looking at.

  “Oh, David,” he said softly. “You tried to turn her.”

  David barely made any motion that he’d heard Deven’s voice.

  Deven leaned over the bed, sniffing, holding a hand over her body and sweeping it with his senses. Again, he sighed. “You fool,” he said, but gently. “Her body is riddled with tumors. She would have died midway through no matter how strong you were.” Deven paused, looking from the corpse to David and back. “But you knew that. You knew we would smell the disease on her and try to stop you. That’s why you never let her meet any of us.”

  Slowly, carefully so as not to spook David, Deven knelt in front of him. “Close your eyes,” he said, gingerly tugging David’s hand out of Anna’s. Deven put both of his hands on David’s shoulders.

  David’s eyes flicked up toward Deven’s face, but whatever question he wanted to ask, he couldn’t; he simply obeyed.

  Left alone, the disease would pass through David’s body before sunup—the girl must have been near death already for her blood to have sickened him this badly—but David was already in enough pain, and besides, it was time he knew.

  Deven reached into himself for the power he had spent most of his life hating, and let it flow into the traumatized lieutenant, soothing the pain that wracked his insides. Cancer wasn’t contagious of course, but a case this advanced was essentially food poisoning. Very few vampires would be able to tolerate the taste of such polluted blood. How David had managed to choke it down, he had no idea. He must have been determined to give the girl the only cure that existed—immortality.

  He watched David’s skin return to its usual color, watched the shaking subside.

  David’s eyes flew open, wide, staring. “What did you do?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “I healed you,” Deven replied. “David…if you had said something, if you hadn’t tried so hard to hide this girl from me, I could have saved her.”

  “But how can you do that?”

  “I’ve been able to since I was born,” he said. “Our kind, theirs, animals, it doesn’t matter. No one else knows. I’ve healed cancer before. If you had just been honest about her, I could have helped you. Did…did you want her to die?”

  “Of course not!” David’s voice was plaintive, desperate. “I thought it would work…I thought she was strong enough.”

  “Have you ever turned anyone before?”

  David shook his head. “I’ve seen it done. And if I hadn’t tried she would have died anyway. I had to at least try.”

  “So she knew what you were.”

  “Yes…she was a nurse, trying to get into medical school. She was interested in studying us—not just for research, but to try and help vampires deal with injuries better. She wanted to be a part of all this. But she was running out of time…”

  “You wanted to bring her across because of mutual scientific inquiry?”

  They held each other’s eyes for a long time. “What do you want me to say, Deven?” David demanded quietly. “Was I madly in love with her? Did we have a burning passion that would outlast time? No. She was a lover and a friend. She didn’t want to marry me or be my eternal companion. We talked about it like adults and she chose to come across. I’m not some lovesick idiot child.” Venom entered his voice as he added, “But what you really want to hear is that the only reason I was with her was because she wasn’t you.”

  For a moment, Deven didn’t know what to say to that. He hadn’t even considered that David might have already acknowledged this thing between the two of them, might know it for what it was.

  David interpreted his silence as confirmation, and pushed away, getting shakily to his feet and turning toward the bed. He started pulling the sheets away from the mattress to wrap Anna’s body in, but wavered a little from exhaustion—Deven’s power could do a lot, but David’s body had been through the wringer, and would need a few hours to fully recover.

  “Let me take care of her,” Deven said, rising. “You need to rest.”

  “No.” David wouldn’t look at him.

  “David, you can barely stand.”

  He snapped, “I don’t want her dumped in a ditch somewhere. She deserves better.”

  “That’s all you think of me, then? That I care so little—for you, if not for your lover’s life?”

  David didn’t look at him. “I don’t think you’re capable of caring for anyone, not even yourself.”

  Snarling, Deven seized his shoulders and forced David to face him. He took David by the neck and kissed him hard, bruising their lips together, the contact searing—then he shoved David away so hard the younger vampire flew back into the wall and fell to the floor.

  “Go to hell,” Deven said softly, and walked away.

  *****

  To say he got a bit drunk after that would have been like saying Hitler was a bit opinionated.

  Deven hadn’t lived so long without learning to maintain his composure, however, so there wasn’t a trace of a stumble in his walk the long way back to the barracks from the bar…or more specifically from the alley behind the bar, where the handsome blonde soldier just home from the front was probably still standing in a daze, knees and throat both sore. The lad had been shy, and sweet, in that young human way, wary of being seen by anyone who might point fingers, but eager to slip out of the bar and be welcomed home from war.

  The combined high of sex, blood, and booze was almost enough to make Deven forget about the rest of the night, or the fact that David would probably never speak to him again.

  It was probably for the best. He was better off not having friends—being the heartless ba
stard David took him for. Caring about people had never ended well.

  For some reason he found himself thinking back, way back, to his first real lover…another boy at the monastery…Simon…or was it Stephen? Six and three-quarter centuries, give or take, tended to blur names and faces. It hadn’t mattered anyway. Not long after their first clumsy tryst they’d been caught and handed over to the Church authorities, and only Deven had survived, if you could call the life he had after that survival.

  He remembered, unwillingly, running down a street much like this one, that night in Dublin he had…

  Deven stifled a pained laugh. “You want to know how I came across?” he asked no one in particular. “No, you really don’t.”

  He made his way back to his quarters, one of the handful of officers’ rooms in the barracks. His was the most luxurious, which wasn’t saying much; he hadn’t done a lot to improve it the way others had, because he was afraid of getting too comfortable here. He had other apartments, in other cities, that were more fitting to his taste…and he devoutly wished he were at any of them now, instead of this depressing place.

  That was another thing he’d enjoyed, however briefly, about his friendship with David; the boy had a knack for making a space his own, even without really trying to, and his room was comfortable, even cozy. It was obvious that David had no more need of his salary than Deven did—whatever he’d done to make himself wealthy, David had expensive furnishings and an impressive book collection. The books weren’t for show, either; he could recite most of them verbatim.

  Damn it. Stop thinking about him. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  He flopped down on the bed and let the room spin around him, his thoughts with it. Damn that boy…it had been such a long time since he’d let himself feel genuine attraction to anyone. After a few centuries he got used to the idea of being alone, of scratching the occasional itch with a random stranger in back alleys or baths somewhere…it wasn’t as if he would ever be able to walk down the street hand in hand with a lover, or even leave a club without checking the shadows for men with baseball bats—but still, sometimes it still hurt…that one particular ache, the one he’d never understood, a gap in his mind that felt like it was waiting for someone to step into it. Bad enough to have a cold bed forever, never mind a cold heart.