by Ted Dekker
In this way I would woo her, by removing the shackles from her eyes so that she could see.
“Leave,” she whispered. I thought she was going to burst out in tears. “Please, Toma. Please leave.”
My mind snapped. I could only see the one objective before me, and I no longer cared to think through the strategy of it. All of my plotting and figuring had brought me to this utter failure. I wanted no more of it.
I could either throw myself out the window or go down and kill the beast who had done this to my Lucine. I was a warrior, so the decision was born of instinct, not deliberation.
I stepped up to Lucine, kissed her once on her lips, grabbed my last remaining stake out of my belt, and went in hunt of that half-breed, Vlad van Valerik.
THIRTY-FIVE
The descending spiral staircase outside the room was lit by one torch mounted on the wall next to an iron railing. Sofia stood from her squat on the top step.
I did not fear her. At that moment I did not fear any living or unliving soul, or any beast that had no soul. But in particular, I did not fear this mysterious being who had shown me such graciousness. Her kind I would never again kill.
I glared at her. “I must kill that Nephilim,” I said. “Tell me where I can find Valerik.”
Her eyes fell to the stake in my fist, and she took a step backward.
I lifted it. “I have the means, now tell me what I must know. If he survives me, he will win her. If I slay him, I will win her.”
Her eyes darted down the stairway. “He can’t be killed,” she whispered. “He’s too strong! You’ll never reach him.”
But I pushed her doubt away and brushed past her, heading down the stairs.
“Toma!” she whispered.
I was too determined to stop.
“The fountain, Toma. Issue your challenge at the stone fountain.”
Now I ran, down the stairs, through a hall, into a room that appeared to be a dungeon with a slate table at the far end. A form lay in a pool of blood but it wasn’t the beast, and I was turning away when her face registered in my mind.
I rushed up to the woman. Natasha! The similarity between her and her twin stopped me cold. Except for the blonde hair, this was Lucine. Her throat had been slit and she’d bled out on the ground.
My knuckles were white on the stake. Dear God in heaven, what have I done? Alek, my only friend, is dead. Natasha, my charge, is dead! Lucine . . . My face twisted with sorrow. Lucine is dead.
A holy wrath seeped from my pores. I ran from the room, jaw tight, mind fractured. Through a dining room, into the grand ballroom with the twin staircases, where I slid to a stop.
I had no plan, no fallback route, no exit strategy to consider. Only the driving conviction that I must deal death a final blow.
But now I paused, breathing hard through my nose. The hall was empty. Smoke laced the air, heavier toward the back. But the fire was surely out by now. At any moment the duke would walk through the doors at the back of this room and see me. Sofia was right: I had no chance in an open fight with him.
She’d told me to issue my challenge at the stone fountain.
I ran along one wall, eager to be out of such a large open space where these wraiths could travel like the wind, through a doorway farther toward the back. This stone fountain might be in a courtyard or a bathhouse or another large hall. But I’d seen two already, and neither had a stone fountain.
The smoke was still thick in the atrium where I’d confronted Stefan only thirty minutes earlier. Still no sign of the Russians. They must all be in the tunnels dealing with the tragedy I’d left them.
I sprinted to the back and burst through a door. It opened into a large enclosed space with an open ceiling at the center through which sheets of rain now fell. Limestone carvings of animals with waterspouts for mouths lined the wall, spaced every two paces. A round platform with a huge limestone cross on it sat in the middle. And around the base of the table, a pool perhaps twice its width.
Two thoughts collided in my mind. The first was that I had found Sofia’s fountain. The pool was evidence of that. The second was that rainwater streamed over the cross and had filled that pool.
Water. And a blessing, there in the form of that crucifix that had once been the central fountain in what appeared to be a bathhouse.
My heart surged with hope. This was it! I had arrived at my own salvation here in the heart of the enemy’s castle, because I could now only be saved if Lucine were set free, and she could only be set free if Valerik’s grip on her soul was loosened. I was sure of it.
I staggered out into the pelting rain. The water came down in streams from an ominous gray sky, but surely the heavens were sending down their blessing, not a curse.
The pool was only two feet deep and I sloshed across, then hoisted myself up onto the round platform. Water streamed off my head, down my chest. I stood soaked from head to foot.
My right fist still clung to the wooden stake. I stepped up and pressed the palm of my left hand on the stone cross. It was coarse, a relic that had paid its dues exposed to the weather. The cross beam was at the level of my head, nearly seven feet high. Moss and thin vines clung to the surface in patches.
Water flowed over my fingers, down the stone cross, then spread at my feet before streaming into the large basin that circled the fountain. I saw no power or magic in this water. I wished it were blood, because blood seemed to have far more significance here than water. But water was like blood, wasn’t it? Flowing over the cross, cleansing, washing away evil.
“Bless this fountain, God in heaven,” I cried, facing the sky. “Wash it with your blood. Slay this beast, spare your bride!”
I didn’t know what else to pray. And again my lack of planning stopped me.
“Issue your challenge,” Sofia had said.
Staring at the large cross before me, I was struck by how improbable it all was. I was to issue a challenge to a beast who made even a hero of Russia appear like a twig for all his strength. But I had a wooden stake. And a crucifix. And the water, blessed by that cross, that flowed over my fingers. And I had love.
Above all, love.
I hung my head beneath my outstretched arm; water splattered about my boots. My throat ached with that love. My chest felt filled with lead. I was already at the end of myself, trusting only in the power of the blood from Immanuel’s veins to save Lucine and myself, that somehow it had been transferred to this water and this cross before me. I didn’t know how else it might help us.
My breathing thickened and I breathed a last prayer. “Do not forsake me. Let me save the one I love, I beg you.” I straightened and slipped my knife from its sheath. Now I held a weapon in each hand. “Bring him to me.”
The sound of those words comforted me, and I lifted my chin to the sky. “Bring him to me!” I roared. “Bring the beast to me and let me slay him.”
“I am here.”
Valerik’s voice was calm, from the entrance directly behind me. I leveled my head and stared at the water streaming over the cross. He’s too calm, I thought. He doesn’t fear this water.
My chest rose and fell. Such fear gripped me that I felt I could not turn. Orange light wavered on the walls; there was fire behind me.
“Do you fear me?” Valerik said. I could hear the mockery in his voice.
I turned slowly, shuffling so that I didn’t slip. The half-breed stood tall in the doorway as his brood filed past him, bearing lit torches. They spread out on either side, protected from the rain by a narrow projection that ran along the top of the round wall. Stefan was the last to enter, and he stood by his master’s side, scowling.
I was now completely encircled by the coven. There was no escape.
“You have hubris, I’ll give you that,” Valerik said. “Any sane man would still be running after causing us so much pain. But here you are, ready to slay the beast. Was this your purpose all along? You killed your friend and my subjects to this end?”
“I’m sorry abo
ut them,” I said. “It is you I want.”
“Really? I thought it was that woman. My bride.”
He spoke of her as if she were an object to trade.
“She loves me,” I said.
He gave me a wicked smile.
“I have come from her room,” I cried. “Where I embraced her and told her that I loved her. She wept in my arms.”
His smile softened and his right hand twitched, but he stood still, feet planted on dry ground, arms easy by his sides. His overcoat and his trousers were coal black like his eyes and hair.
“Then she’ll have you to thank when I show her my disapproval,” he said. “Not for loving you, because she cannot love any other suitor. But for not killing you while she had the chance.”
“Love? You have no understanding that to love is to give, not to take. Yet you take the souls of others.”
“And I give them the world!” he roared.
“But not life. You can’t give life. You are dead.”
“Do I look dead to you?”
He leaped at me without warning, landed lightly on the table next to me, and slammed his fist into my jaw. My head snapped up and I staggered back into the cross.
“Does that feel alive to you?” he rasped in my ear, pressing so close that I couldn’t move my arm to maneuver the stake. I swung the knife, but he caught my wrist out of the air and held it with an iron fist.
He lifted his other hand to the blade in my grasp and ran his palm along the razor edge. Blood oozed from the wound. He grinned and licked the cut, then ran his tongue up my cheek.
And then he leaped and was gone.
“You have no power here, human.”
I jerked my head up and saw that he was crouched on the top of the cross like a gargoyle. The rain falling past him glowed in the flames’ light. This is the devil, I thought, and he has come to tear me apart.
And he was relishing his task, taking his time without threat. I tried to think quickly, knowing that if I didn’t leverage my advantage with precision, I would die.
But I could no longer grasp that advantage. I had the water; still he gloated over me. I had the wood stake; still he was far too fast to make a target. I had the knife, but it was only a toy here. I had the book . . .
But I did not have the book! It was in the canvas bag still draped over the windowsill in the tower bedroom.
Then I had only my mind and my heart. The last power at my disposal was love. The power of wooing and affection.
“That’s all you have, Valerik?” I cried. “Blunt force? I know who you are!”
He leaped from his crouch, landed nimbly on his feet by the entrance, and turned to face me once again.
“Oh?”
“I have read a Blood Book,” I continued. “Alucard was the first of your kind to enter this world. You are a half-breed and you are dead already.”
He wasn’t quick with a return. I had touched something off.
“A Blood Book,” he said. “That’s impossible. They don’t exist in this reality.”
“Then where did I read Baal’s journal? Where did I learn that you are a descendant of the Nephilim, devils from another realm? Or that you fear wood and water?”
“Where is it?”
I ignored the question, seeing that I had gained an advantage.
“There is a great romance,” I said, “written about in that book. God’s wooing of his bride. You think you have stolen her, but you don’t know that it’s true affection, not merely seduction, that draws her. And you have no affection, only seduction.” I paused. “She is drawn to me.”
Valerik bobbed his head as if to say, “Really?” He looked around at his subjects who stood in black, staring at him with rapt attention. Ten or twelve torches licked away the darkness. I wondered what would happen to those subjects if Vlad van Valerik were killed.
He spread his arms and spoke with a condescending grin, addressing me, but his coven as well, surely. “So you insist on playing the part of suitor, Toma. You could have left me to rule my world as I see fit. You could have found another world for your affection and left me to seduce my own. But no!”
He stepped forward, into the rain.
“Instead you are here in the flesh! In my home! Have you lost your mind?”
“It’s my heart, not my mind, that I have lost. Lucine has it. All of it. I love her desperately in ways that you can’t possibly understand, much less experience! I cannot live without her.”
“She is my bride!” he bellowed, leaning into the words.
Was not the devil a fallen angel? And Nephilim, fallen angels who’d mated with women?
“What is it with you fallen ones, always wanting what isn’t yours?”
He lowered his arms and glared up at me. “Where is the book?”
I again ignored the question. I had to find a way to distract him, if only long enough for a single thrust with the stake. Or I could throw the wood like a knife, confident I had the strength and skill to place it through his chest. With some luck, through his heart. It was my only play here.
That and love.
“There is a great romance between God and his creation,” I said. “My greatest weapon is love.” I let the knife slip from my fingers and clatter to the stone at my feet. “But you refuse to let me wield that weapon because it threatens you.”
Valerik spit to one side. “We laugh at religion’s brand of love, forms and rules that keep the poor feeding from the church’s coffers. It is dead.”
“I agree. That kind of love is porcelain-coated balls of dung. But what of true affection? Can you offer that?”
“You’ve been a guest here before, you tell me. Did you see or feel any affection?”
“Then it should be settled. If you truly love her, you will let Lucine decide.”
“She has made her choice.”
“You’ve deceived her!” I cried. “And now she is in your prison. What love is that?”
He issued a crackling growl and leaped to my side, unable to contain his rage. But this time I anticipated the move and I rammed the stake with all of my strength into the spot where I thought he would land.
The wood sank into his flesh, precisely timed. Deep, to my fist.
He gasped and his dark eyes went wide. Both of his hands grasped the stake, but he made no attempt to pull it out. Around us the coven stood in stoic silence, like sentinels waiting for an order to tear me apart.
“Do you think I’m afraid of a stick of wood?” Valerik said.
I stepped back and saw it then. The stake had gone into his lungs but missed the heart. Or perhaps a half-breed didn’t react to wood the way his subjects did. Either way, Valerik wasn’t bothered by the sharpened sapling sticking out of his chest.
He pulled aside his shirt and jerked the stick out. Blood flowed from a hole that immediately began to grow together as if made of putty. Within a six count he was repaired.
He tossed the stake onto the platform, where it rolled close to the edge and came to a rest, far beyond my reach. Valerik’s lips twisted into a soft growl and his eyes hinted at red behind those black orbs.
It is the end, I thought and took another step backward. I would die here under a dark sky in the Carpathian Mountains. The hero of Russia would finally be stripped of life, undone by love.
And Lucine . . .
I let the fight go out of me. My arms sagged; my jaw felt heavy.
I would die and Lucine would be his slave for eternity. The full realization of this inevitable outcome poured into my mind. It smothered my heart with a wrenching sorrow.
“Lucine . . .”
Breathing her name only made it worse. I could see only her, watching me, confused by the war in her own heart. I began to panic.
My face wrinkled and I started to breathe in shallow pulls.
“Lucine!” Her name, just that, I still had her name, and I sobbed it, uncaring of anything but hearing her name, however distorted by emotion.
“Lucine . . . Luc
ine . . .”
It became too much for me. I dropped to my knees, reached clawed fingers at the sky, closed my eyes, and moaned her name, for it was the only salve for my pain.
“Lucine! Oh God! Lucine, Lucine, Lucine . . .” These were the guttural groans of a dying man clinging to the last thing that was more precious than life itself. To love.
“Oh, my God, my God, why? Why? Why do you forsake me?”
“He forsook you a long time ago,” Valerik said. “And now you will die. No lover, no God, no life.”
Filled with a sudden wrath, I leaped to my feet and screamed at him. “She does not love you! She will never love you! She will always hide a love for me deep in her—”
The air shattered with a ferocious growl, and I felt myself picked off my feet by the neck and slammed back into the cross as if I were an insect. The blow took my wind away.
Valerik shoved his face close to mine. I could feel the hot air from his throat when he spoke. “She . . . is . . . mine!” The roar of that last word blasted me full in the face.
Keeping me pinned against the cross at my neck, he ripped my shirt off with one swipe of his other hand. His hand flashed again and this time I felt his fingernails slice through the flesh on my chest. He cut to the bone, and I cried out with pain.
Blood flowed from the wound.
But he was only beginning. He sneered up at me and slashed at my cheek. Then my shoulder.
The pain was terrible, but it wasn’t what pushed me to sob as I hung there on that cross. My pain was not for me but for Lucine. She was now the lover of this monster, and I could do nothing to help her.
My strength began to fade and I let my muscles sag as I struggled to breathe past his iron grip.
“I will see you in hell,” he growled.
“Vlad?”
I could hear her voice now, speaking to me in my fading consciousness. Lucine was saying his name, but it was questioning, not sure.
Valerik had gone still. I opened my eyes.
I saw her over Valerik’s shoulder. Lucine. Lucine stood in the doorway, dressed in the same nightgown she’d worn earlier. A book hung from her right hand.
