I stepped closer to the soldier—the rich smell of iron in his blood overwhelmed me. It was like smelling a boar roasted for many hours on a spit. It made my mouth water. I felt the pain again—my incisors had begun the painful growth that might not stop for days. But it was a pain I could take, for it increased my thirst. I greedily pushed the other vampyres from this unfortunate man. His throat and collar were brightly colored with his blood. The mouths and chins of my fellows, smeared with the stain of life, their lips smacking like hounds with the kill of a fresh stag. I grabbed his shoulders, drawing that delicious milk of life to my lips, but when I saw the man’s eyes, I recoiled.
He looked at me with utter sadness. He was not yet dead, but he was well on his way to that place. I knew instinctively that to kill him would be a kindness—a swift kill was not the norm for my kind. The instinct within me knew that to drink from these cups of flesh was a gourmand’s pursuit—sips as well as guzzling, a taste or a drunken swallow. But a swift kill was not what I should want, because the taste was better when life still moved in the blood.
But I knew this man. I loved this man as a true brother.
I recognized him, as if a long-buried memory had surfaced.
Chapter 12
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THE SACRED KISS
1
It was Ewen, my friend, my companion, and I felt sorrow for him, and yet a distance from the world of mortal man so that I had no pity. He recognized me in the firelight, and his eyes seeming to glaze over, then brighten again as if he were fighting within himself to hang on to life.
“Aleric,” he whispered. “Aleric. Take me. Take me. Take me where you go.”
“I can’t,” I said, whispering this in his ear. “I love you, my friend. But you do not want to come to this place. We are demons. I am no longer Aleric. Let me drink the last of you and keep you from this world.”
“Please,” he whispered. “I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to go. I want always to serve you. I searched for you. I followed your path.”
But I could not let that be. I wept as I drank from him, the dual tears of one who wishes peace for a friend—to put him out of the misery of the pain of death, to open the door into whatever comes after—but also I wished to feed. Does the shepherd not name the sheep of his flock, yet pick the finest spring lamb for slaughter? When he sits down to eat that meal, does he not remember that lamb, and the sweetness of its youth, even while tasting of its death? So I tasted Ewen, his rich aroma like the exotic coffee of the East, like the wines of my homeland, the iron within him proving a gentle metal to my tongue, like the edge of dull blade, the sweetness of anise and of the meat he had eaten that day.
I learned that night of the memory that comes with the blood. Not the memory of those we drink, but the memory of our own mortality, the riches of it, and its poverty, too. The innocence of childhood, the touch of a mother, the love of flesh, and the hatred for self. All of it returns in a flagon of blood, drunk to quench an unquenchable thirst.
Life is the blood. Health is the blood. It is the drink of the gods, and all who have drunk of it for sustenance do not hate those from whom they drink, the vessels of mankind.
Love was my feeling then, and even caring.
I was not a ravager of this man—I ravished him.
I pressed my teeth against the much-torn flesh, and sucked hard against those ragged flaps of skin. He became the vessel of my life. It was a form of love that humans can’t ever understand because they think of life and death as opposites, when life is death, death is life, love is death, death is love, immortality is hell, and heaven is death. All of these thoughts washed through me. I felt his love for me in his blood as no man had ever given of himself before.
When I drew back, the blood across my chin and throat and chest, and saw a look of astonishment around me. The other vampyres stood as if watching, and I wondered if it was at my greed.
But when I looked back down at Ewen’s face, I knew: I had not yet stopped his heart. He still had a flush of life in him, and I saw an intense beauty to this last moment of existence. He was more beautiful then than any maiden—even than Alienora—to me. He had the beauty of what I would learn was the Threshold. The Threshold was the doorway between the living and the dead. Once passed through, there was no coming back. I looked at him and another instinct came to me—I wanted him with me. Ewen had been there, and he had no doubt camped there because he had tracked me and intended to find me. He was my link to mortal life, and I could not let him go. I could not let him die as little Thibaud had gone, at the hands of these creatures.
I could not.
Call it selfishness or fear or loneliness, but I wanted him again for myself, for my friend.
Instinct rose in me. Remembrance of Pythia as she pressed her lips to mine.
I would bring him into my world and make him one of our tribe.
2
I brought his head nearer to me and parted his lips with my fingers. His eyes fluttered open. He looked at me as one drugged.
I felt he knew me then, and I felt his acceptance.
Without further hesitation, I pressed my lips against his, locking to them as I remembered Pythia had done.
Like a viaduct, passing water through a new channel, I exhaled into his slightly quivering form. Another force made itself known to me—from my lungs, a power I had not felt before. My breath. The passing was in the breath itself. I passed this to Ewen, whose lips caught mine in tenderness.
I felt the slight grasp of his hand at my shoulder, then at my chest. His hand was cold, but warmed as I breathed into his lungs. The flow of the stream from my mouth to his increased, and I felt as if I might never stop, but instead lost myself in his mouth, down his throat, inside him completely, losing my body and spirit so that he might breathe again. His arms went to my back and drew me closer to him. I felt his desire increase, a furnace beginning to glow red. I felt an unseen presence there with us—whispering to me of the secrets of the stream, of the flow between vampyre and human, of passing the breath and the Death-that-was-Life to another.
I felt a terrible pounding in my ears, and a tender weakness in my loins. He wasn’t just drinking breath from my mouth. He swallowed my essence. I felt his delight at this plunder of my force—this sucking at my core, my fundament—my being. He was my child now, my baby, and my birthing into the undead. I felt the third presence, the creation of a new being within him from the giving of breath. He would forever be connected to me by my essence.
He inhaled greedily from my lips as a man who has been smothering seeks air, and the suction this created began to pain me. I remembered Pythia, how she drew back, breaking the connection between us, breaking out of the sacred stream that bound us. I felt excruciating pain as I felt his tongue searching the edges of my teeth and lapping up to the roof of my mouth as he tried to get the last of what I offered. But I used all the strength I had left and threw myself backward, away from him.
Something else, another memory of Pythia, as she gave me this life-in-death: I saw the great city called Alkemara, shining in moonlight, and the priest, with wings as oily as eelskin, spread wide behind his form. In his hand, the Staff of the Nahhashim.
Behind him, a figure lying upon a stone altar.
In Pythia’s streaming into me, she had shown me something secret, something terrible, and I did not know what it meant.
A woman stood there, naked, beside the wing-shrouded priest, her face covered with a gold mask. From her full breasts to her taut waist, down past her gently rounded hips to her slender but muscled legs, her sun-darkened body was soaked in blood. The vision had the quality of a dream, for parts of it were vivid, and other parts seemed only half-formed. I saw the gold mask clearly for a moment: it had a woman’s features, with her mouth wide and her tongue out, her eyes wild and wide. Behind the slits of the mask, I saw darkness where a woman’s eyes should have been.
Something drew me to her. My sight moved as if it had wing
s, toward the masked woman, who stepped aside to show me the altar. I moved unbidden into the realm of the altar on which a young woman had been tied with strips of leather. Clothed as if she were royalty, she wore a cobweb-thin robe. Around her shoulders, a turquoise cloak with gold thread sewn through it. On her scalp, a headdress in the shape of a hawk. It was Pythia herself.
Then this stream-vision of Pythia, which had flooded me when she offered me her open mouth and blood and breath, at the moments between life and death, vanished like smoke.
Shadows arose around the altar. Greedy shadows that tried to grab at the headdress and the robe, and I felt as if they turned to me, watching them from some distant time and place. The whispers of these shades became like flies at my ear—“Nahhashim, Maz-Sherah, we know you.”
3
And then the vision of that place exploded into brilliant light.
I was again with Ewen, my lungs burning, my body cold and empty.
He sat up, a curious grin on his face, wiping his hand lazily across his mouth. His face was suffused with a radiant glow that I had never before seen.
I felt weak, and fell back. I looked up to see the other vampyres over me, watching.
They had looks on their faces as if I had frightened them.
One among them crouched beside me. He had a canine look to his face—his jaw was long and stretched with the thorny cusps of teeth that had grown too long. He had thick, dark hair that fell below his shoulders, some of it swinging around his face. Tattoos of disks and strange symbols encircled his throat and his muscled arms. His clothes were of a type that I had seen on soldiers from Byzantium, but perhaps he had stolen these from one of his victims.
He grasped my wrist. “What have you done?” he asked. I felt his yellowed, twisted nails going into my skin. “What is this?”
“He is my friend,” I said.
“This is impossible,” he said, looking with wonder at Ewen, whose eyes rolled back into his head, showing only the whites. “Only the Pythoness can bring us into the fold.”
“I did to him what she did to me.”
“No,” gasped another, the dark woman who wore the turban. “She is the only one.”
“He will die,” another said, watching Ewen’s eyes close slowly, and the last shudder of life move through him. “He will die, and rot like all the others.”
“We should drink the last of him,” the tattooed vampyre said. “He should not die with blood in his body.” As he crawled forward, his slithering reminded me of a snake. I felt repulsion, because I knew I would become more like him and less like Ewen as the nights unfolded. I had become some dark vermin, a plague on the world.
Yet, there was a great fluid beauty in his movements. As he approached Ewen’s torn throat, he sniffed, his nostrils flaring, and he turned back to me. Then, looking at the turbaned female, said, “This cannot be.”
The female stepped over to Ewen. Straddling his chest, she bent down to bring her mouth near his. She sniffed all around his face and throat.
She shot me a suspicious glance. “Who taught you this?”
“The one you called the Pythoness,” I said.
“How?” the tattooed vampyre asked.
The female leapt up from Ewen and came to me, pushing me back down to the ground. “Did you see anything? Did you see the city?”
Remembering the altar and the priest, I nodded. “I saw a man and an altar.”
The female looked up at the others, who came closer to me as I lay beneath her weight. “You learned of this...the Sacred Kiss...from her?”
Before I could answer, another female vampyre stepped forward. She was lean and pale, and had a look of disgust upon her face. “We should never have taken him from the tower.”
“Rat ash,” the tattooed one muttered as if it were a terrible oath. “She abandoned us.”
The turbaned female atop me touched my forehead, then leaned into me, sniffing again. She whispered, “You would be dead if not for us, newborn. Your Pythoness abandoned you so that you would not feed if you rose from the first death. We knew of you and found you in the tower.”
The other female spat. “The Pythoness was right to leave him there. He brings evil upon us.”
Others began murmuring above—I watched their faces and saw anger and confusion.
The one pressing her knees against my shoulders to pin me to the ground let out a shrill cry, which silenced the others. Then, her face coming close to mine, she said, “What do they call you?”
“Aleric,” I said. “The Falconer.”
An enigmatic smile crossed her lips, and she showed her teeth. “Well, Falcon, tell me what the Pythoness showed you.”
“She drank of me until I had nearly lost all my blood, and had little breath left in my mouth and no vision in me. And then she pressed her mouth to me and breathed both death and life into me. And as she brought this warm stream into my throat, I saw a vision of a great city of an ancient time. I saw a woman of ripe beauty wearing a terrible mask of gold, and, beside her, a holy man with the wings of a dragon, and in his hand was a staff that seemed entwined with serpents. And behind them both, an altar of lapis stone, and upon it Pythia herself, like a prisoner waiting for sacrifice.”
“Alkemara,” the turbaned female gasped, glancing at the others.
I nodded. “The City of the Alkemars is what he told me. The priest. And there were terrible shadows that whispered to me. I saw them just now when I sent my breath into my friend’s mouth.”
One of the others nearby said, “The Myrrydanai. They come.”
“No,” said the tattooed one. “We would feel them in the stream.”
“Other strange words I do not understand,” I said. “Nahhashim. Maz-Sherah. I do not know the meaning of the vision, but Pythia drew back from me suddenly. I felt she had not known how I shared her sight of that place and those people. She shrieked at my knowing of them, and I watched great wings grow from her shoulders. She flew up into the night, crying out as if I had not been meant to see these things.”
“She gave you eternal life,” the turbaned female said. “The Pythoness created all of us to watch us extinguish.”
“But what of the vision? The great city?”
“It is no more,” the tattooed vampyre said. “It is a memory of the ancient world, a moment from another age. We have heard of it. But none...none has had the vision of it. Or of these things.”
“He lies,” the other female above me said. “She sent him to destroy us. She left him there. She knew we would feel his stream and find him. He is a trap for us.”
“But the Sacred Kiss,” the turbaned woman said. “None of us can manifest it.”
“We have all tried,” another vampyre said, a handsome man who stood holding Ewen’s sword. “We have longed to bring our lovers to be with us. Instead, we send them beyond the Threshold.”
“He is the One,” the turbaned woman said, as she looked to the others.
Another said, “How can it be?”
“Bloody Turks! There is no ‘one,’” the tattooed vampyre growled. “Nothing but a lie.”
“All lies,” the standing female said. “There is no Maz-Sherah. Alkemara is a fable. It is like the gods. They do not exist, but we create them so as to not fear the Extinguishing.”
“You have heard the voice of the dark mother,” the female atop me said. “The one who seeks to destroy us since she first gave us life.” Others mumbled assent to her words. The tattooed one spat out, “It is our damnation that speaks to us.”
“She has a voice of thunder, and we feel her lightning in the stream itself,” another said.
“She sends us to the Extinguishing,” the female said. “I tell you, he is the One. It is as Balaam told us.” She commanded one of the vampyres to go find more to drink, for I was weak. She held me in her arms, but I kept my eyes on Ewen as she raised me.
“You must feed again before dawn,” she said.
“The Maz-Sherah,” one of the vampyres said,
a sense of awe in his voice. “Balaam muttered about the Maz-Sherah too often. But I thought it was a dream.”
“If he is the one,” said the tattooed one, “why doesn’t he bring the knowledge? Why is he weak? Why don’t we recognize him?”
“The dream is not yet flesh. He has not yet become,” the turbaned vampyre said. “The priest breathes through him. Our dark mother who wishes the end of days fears him.”
“He will bring destruction to us,” one of the others said. “He will bring her wrath upon all who drink blood.”
4
The snarling female above me was named Yset; the longhaired one with the tattoos at his neck was Yarilo; the youth with the sword, Vali. The turbaned vampyre’s name was Kiya, she told me, after naming the others around us. She had once been the wife of a merchant who traveled the seas. But she had been transformed nearly a hundred years previous, by the Pythoness. The city of Hedammu had been overtaken with plague, then, but there was no disease. It was simply the Pythoness’s hunger. The oldest of the vampyres in Hedammu was named Balaam, “But his time is near,” Kiya told me. “He has weakened, and we bring him blood, for he can no longer hunt. But I will tell you more of that another time,” Kiya said. “You must feed and rest.”
After a while, they brought a woman to me. She shivered as they held her tight and drew her clothes from her slowly, presenting her to me.
“Drink of her,” Kiya said. “Drink long draughts, and don’t hesitate to finish her. She will bring you strength and blessings.”
I took to her throat. The prey clutched me as I did this, for as I knew, it was not unpleasant for our victims—as the leech clings to the legs that wade the marsh, so I clung to her throat and caused her little pain, though I made a mess of her. Drunk, sated, I fell back into Kiya’s arms and felt the antidote to my torment course through me again.
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