Blood Guilt

by Marie Treanor

  “In between bouts of sackcloth and ashes.”

  A large tureen of fish soup was set on the table, together with a bowl of sweet-smelling asparagus and a plate piled high with newly baked bread.

  “Aren’t you eating?” Maximilian asked, tucking in with a vengeance.

  Saloman smiled and shook his head. “Eat up. I know a countess—two countesses—who are desperate to meet you.”

  “I’m not dressed to mingle with countesses.”

  “It’s a private party,” Saloman said blandly. “And it won’t be your clothing that interests your hostess or her guests…”

  Maximilian’s vision blurred and whizzed, his memory and his pleasantly aroused body eager to move forward to a later scene from that same night, when he lay sprawled among the cushions on a large couch with the beautiful, semi-naked, young countess Caterina in his lap. They were in a private room of her opulent palazzo with the doors firmly closed, and as well as the pleasures of the flesh, Maximilian had the countess’s fantastic murals and delightful glass ornaments to appreciate.

  On the periphery of his vision, half in shadow, Saloman and their hostess were making love on another couch. Saloman’s body moved with slow sensuality, his mouth buried in the woman’s creamy neck. She whimpered and mewled with pleasure, and the sounds aroused Maximilian almost as much as the girl in his own arms.

  “Is he a friend of yours, that man?” Caterina whispered in his ear. Her breath stirred the tiny hairs on his lobe, and he smiled as he reached for her mouth.

  “Yes.”

  “He frightens me,” Caterina whispered. “Be careful around him.”

  “He introduced me to you,” Maximilian pointed out, toying with her exposed breast. Deliberately, she reached over him, pushing her breasts closer into his eager hand, his face, and returned with a silver goblet of wine.

  “So he did,” she said and dipped her finger in the blood red liquid before rubbing it sensually into her nipple. “But I’m married and wicked.”

  Maximilian smiled and followed her finger with his tongue.

  And the memory went on through the night of sex and laughter until it was almost dawn and he swaggered home through the streets with Saloman by his side. Life had seemed almost perfect.

  ****

  Sensual warmth on his face drew Maximilian from the healing sleep. The pale, wintry sun was up, filtering through the thick curtains onto his bed. Not enough to burn, just enough to rouse him with a rare sense of wellbeing. And an even rarer sense of purpose. The unnatural earth tremor. The unusual congregation of vampires. The psychic child who leaked enormous power like a damaged battery. The hunter who’d freely given him her blood.

  Bizarre incidents, and not necessarily connected. But enough to whet more than his curiosity.

  Maximilian stretched his limbs in an experimental sort of a way, wiggling his toes and fingers. Everything seemed to work. His ribs no longer hurt where the vampires had crushed them with their feet, so he had to assume they were also healed. His body had fully absorbed and used the hunter’s blood. Although he was hungry again, he had grown used to feeding little over the preceding decades, and he could wait for a suitable meal.

  He needed to find the boy. But first, he rose from the bed and sent out a few feelers, checking for the threat of the vampires who’d attacked him yesterday.

  Yesterday had been a low point. He’d set out to get drunk because he’d finally realized he couldn’t keep running away, and yet the thought of his planned return to the world appalled him. Although he hadn’t deliberately left himself an open target, he hadn’t much cared when the vampires had taken the chance.

  Until the tremor which shouldn’t have happened. And the hunter who paid her debt. Intriguing creature. Strong blood. Prickly. And the memory of her hot little body crushed under his, writhing with arousal as he drank her blood, was enough to make him uncomfortably hard all over again. It was a long time—a very long time—since he’d experienced such powerful lust. It might even be good, when he had time, to track her down and act on it again. After all, he had promised to find her Gavril, and he saw no reason not to keep that promise. He was, he realized with some surprise, interested.

  Gavril and the other vampires were not hard to locate. He found their presences together, some distance across the city, far enough away not to concern him until he chose to act. But another consciousness touched him, from far closer.

  Maximilian walked to the window and pressed his face into the curtain. In the street below, among the few scurrying pedestrians, a much smaller figure stood perfectly still, gazing up at his window. An innocent, open mind, revealing all to whoever cared to look.

  Slowly, Maximilian drew back. It seemed the mountain had come to Mohammed. Come up, he invited telepathically, and felt the boy’s rush of excited pleasure.

  While he waited, he picked up the hotel’s cheap notepad and pen, sprawled back on the bed, and began to draw.

  The boy didn’t take long. He didn’t even knock, just pushed at the door, displaying no surprise when Maximilian manipulated the lock for him with his mind. It was an old trick of Saloman’s that Maximilian was glad to discover still worked for him.

  Maximilian regarded the child. He wore the same green anorak as yesterday, and he hadn’t washed his face.

  “The lady said I shouldn’t come. She said you’re dangerous.”

  “I am.”

  “How?”

  “I drink blood to exist.”

  “Will you drink mine?” the boy asked uncertainly.

  Maximilian shook his head, turned the page on his pad over, and began another drawing. Robbie drew nearer to see what was taking shape. “That’s me!” he exclaimed.

  Maximilian tore a couple of pages from the pad and pushed them toward the boy with another pen.

  Robbie took off his coat and sat down on the bed. Picking up the pen, he began to draw too. Oddly enough, he drew a wall, made up of varying-shaped stones that fitted together. As they worked, Maximilian began to ask questions, and Robbie to answer.

  After a bit, Maximilian took him downstairs in search of breakfast. Maximilian found a table well away from any direct light drifting in through the blinds, and watched while the boy ate with ravenous efficiency. When his left sleeve rode up, it revealed a dark patch on his skin.

  They walked back to the room, and once inside, Maximilian caught Robbie’s arm and pushed up the sleeve.

  The bruising ran all the way up his arm from the wrist, where Maximilian had already glimpsed the purple edge, to his elbow.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Chinese burn,” Robbie said at once. “It’s a game.” For the first time, he looked frightened, but Maximilian didn’t let him go. “I can’t tell you,” the boy blurted. “I’m not allowed. I promised.”

  The cruelties of modern human life, as compared with the more open abuses of his own day, had passed Maximilian by to a large extent. But he’d picked up enough.

  “Keep your promise,” Maximilian said steadily. “Don’t use words.”

  The child hesitated. Then, slowly, he showed Maximilian the picture from his memory. His foster father had held him by the arm and shaken him for running away, and when Robbie had fallen, the adult had simply yanked him to his feet. There were other blows, other bruises, mostly inflicted by his foster siblings.

  “Who chose such foster parents for you?” Maximilian enquired, and for some reason the cool, emotionless tone of his question seemed to calm Robbie’s fears.

  “They’d run out of options. I’m a troublesome child. I always run away.”

  Looking for someone to talk to? Maximilian asked telepathically. Like this?

  Robbie nodded. Aye.

  Find many?

  No… Not until they came.

  Maximilian received a clear picture of Gavril and his companion, and released the boy’s arm to turn his neck to one side and touch the vein. There were no signs, no residue of bites that he could determine.
/>   “They didn’t hurt me,” Robbie said a shade anxiously.

  Of course they didn’t. They’d have seen his foster parents’ mistreatment in the child’s head as easily as Maximilian had done and ensured his cooperation by being different.

  “You know they’re like me?” Maximilian said.

  “Vampires.” Robbie’s eyes gleamed. He looked away, then quickly back again. “Am I a vampire?”

  Maximilian frowned. “Why should you think that?”

  Robbie shrugged, moving restlessly away from him, picking up the pad with Maximilian’s drawings and flicking through them. “I’m different, ken?”

  “You’re a telepathic human, that’s all. There are others like you who are also not vampires. What did those vampires want with you?”

  “They wanted me to help them.” There was pride in the voice of the young, shunned child. “Said I was the only one who could.”

  “Help them with what?”

  “Dinae ken. It was meant to’ve been yesterday. Only, when I heard you, I wanted to talk to you, and they got angry because they had to chase me. And after what they did to you and the lady, I don’t think I like them anymore. I like her, though.”

  Maximilian glanced down at the drawing Robbie was showing him. It was the one Maximilian had dashed off while waiting for Robbie to come to the door. The hunter, with her huge, tragic, dark eyes and defiant, sensual mouth. In such a drawing it had been impossible to catch the full, translucent effect of her taut, perfect skin drawn over those exquisite bones. Later, when he got back to stone, or paints, he’d capture her properly. This time… “I drew her too,” Robbie offered and rummaged in the discarded heap of paper for his own drawings.

  It was childish, the strokes of his pen less sure, but he’d caught enough of her features to make her recognizable. Maximilian gazed at it, wondering if he should talk himself out of the plan forming in his head.

  He raised his gaze to Robbie’s face. “If I took you to her, would you promise not to run away?”

  Chapter Four

  Mihaela was almost surprised when she found herself at St. Andrews Cathedral. She’d spent most of the day walking around the town and thinking. Perhaps it was inevitable she should end up here, in the dark, where she’d first seen him step out of the mist to stand with her enemies.

  That had been more than a year ago, when the mission was to trap and kill Saloman. It had been a spectacular failure.

  Mihaela grimaced at the memory. Impulsively, she walked into the grounds. Elizabeth, her closest female friend, loved this place, and Mihaela could understand why. Walking from one arch with its distinctive, ruined single tower to the twin-towered one on the other side, she at last felt a kind of peace settle over her.

  It had been a difficult day. She’d woken late after her late return from Edinburgh and subsequent huge supper, and although she meant to rest to recover her strength after Maximilian’s bloodletting, she’d been too restless to sit still. She’d walked on the beaches, around the bustling town, and along the road to Largo and back. In between time, she sat in cafés among the students, as if their youthful optimism might rub off on her, and thought about the vampire Gavril and the psychic child, Robbie, and about what she’d done in preserving Maximilian’s existence.

  Now at last, under the sharp, cold moonlight, she accepted what she couldn’t change, and resolved to return to Edinburgh tomorrow to find Gavril, with or without Maximilian’s help. On the whole, she rather thought without. If she took the detector with her this time, she was sure she could track Gavril eventually.

  Memory—distant memory—was at least partly responsible for her restlessness. Even now, walking among the tumbled stones of this once great edifice, she got random flashes of that childhood vampire attack, of the slaughter, of the vampire’s back vanishing out of the window as the hunters broke through the door. Almost worse, she couldn’t stop thinking about her parents and her sister who’d died.

  She hated that she couldn’t remember them properly. They were only veiled flashes: a smiling face; a teasing grin; a hand holding hers in the street; indistinct faces around a table, eating and chattering; the unique scent of her mother’s perfume. But the important things, the details, the features, the actual sounds of their voices, what they did with their lives, were all blurred. In self-defense, she seemed to have blocked them along with the horror of the attack, just to survive. No one wanted to remember their loved ones screaming. It was better not to remember them at all.

  Only she should be thinking of them now; she wanted to be thinking of them with clarity, when at last she had the possibility of giving them vengeance. It broke her heart that she couldn’t.

  Katalin and Joseph, the hunters who’d saved her life, had tried to keep her parents’ memory alive by talking to her about them. Unable to bear the pain, she’d resisted, but they’d persevered whenever they visited her in the Romanian orphanage, and later on when she’d come to Budapest to live with Katalin while she attended university there, she’d met other hunters who reinforced Katalin’s efforts. As if they’d known she’d need it one day.

  Her heart warmed all over again to Katalin and Joseph, who’d taught her how to survive and made her strong and always done their best for her. It just seemed wrong that now she could remember them and not her own family.

  But perhaps if she killed Gavril, her parents and Anna would finally rest in peace. She couldn’t bear the thought of them not being at peace all these years. And as a side-benefit, vengeance might even bring her, Mihaela, the peace she’d never known.

  She planned to break rules. She shouldn’t hunt without backup, but she had every intention of doing so. Nor should she hunt without the knowledge of the local British hunters, but again, she’d do it. This wasn’t hunter business; it was personal.

  Turning inside the arch, she leaned against the stone and gazed at the tall square tower of St. Rule, black against the dark navy of the sky, then back over the distance she’d covered to the odd shape of the ruined gable and single spire at the far end. A monument to human endeavor and neglect, to constantly changing ideals and beliefs. This ruin had once been a great cathedral, the center of Scottish Christianity and treasure trove of religious art, before Reformation had swept away the art and the worshippers alike, and the magnificent building had been left to rot for centuries. Whatever the cost, sometimes things simply had to move on.

  With a deprecating smile, she straightened and began to walk back, remembering with sudden unease how the surrounding graves had once opened up to emit zombies. They’d fought on the hunters’ side, summoned by their temporary ally, the vampire leader Zoltán, but Mihaela rather thought Saloman had been right about that one at least. The true-dead, as he called them, should be left to rest in peace.

  Some sixth sense developed over the years of hunting prickled the tiny hairs at the back of her neck, and she shivered. Glancing around her, she saw shadows advancing from the gate. Not shadows. A man and a child. And something about the way the man walked, almost like a graceful glide while the kid skipped along at his side, made her distinctly uneasy. It couldn’t be…

  Heart racing, she felt for the stake in her pocket and kept walking. A gust of wind blew her hair across her face and she pushed it impatiently to one side. Moonlight glinted on the child’s white-blond head, allowed her a glimpse of the man’s even, angelic features, half-hidden by his windblown hair.

  I don’t eat children…

  The blood sang in her ears. For an instant, she thought she would faint under the weight of this.

  Jesus Christ, what have you done? What have I done?

  Why the hell was he here? Had he come to kill her now he had the strength? Or just to keep his promise about the vampire Gavril? Mihaela felt sick. Perhaps Elizabeth was right about the bizarre nature of vampire honor. Well, there was only one course open to her now, the one she should have taken last night. She just had to pray she wasn’t too late.

  She kept walking as if she ha
dn’t recognized them, gathered all her energy, and tensed for speed. Robbie dived from side to side, touching bits of the building as if he were feeling the shape and texture of the stone. Bizarrely, he seemed as happy as any other child in a sweet shop.

  As they drew almost even, the child waved and bolted to her, away from the vampire. Mihaela used the distraction, smiling at Robbie even as she lashed out at Maximilian with foot and stake.

  She didn’t see what happened. Her foot never made contact, but abruptly the vampire’s hand was over hers on the stake, controlling it, and he stood so close to her she was afraid he’d feel the battering of her heart.

  “You move like the Ancients,” she blurted.

  “No.” He sounded regretful. “But I learned from one.” From Saloman, obviously, last of the pure, Ancient vampire race which was older than humanity. Maximilian and all the other vampires of the world were hybrids of Ancient and human.

  With shameful ease, Maximilian plucked the stake from her hand. It didn’t matter; she had another. But before she could use it, he presented her again with the first, politely, the blunt end toward her. “You have no need of that.”

  She wanted to step back, away from him, away from the memory of his teeth in her neck and her overwhelmingly sexual response. Pride forbade it. “What are you doing with Robbie?” she demanded.

  “I brought him to you.”

  Frowning, she scanned his strange, silver-glinting eyes, then dropped her gaze to the expectant, upturned face of the boy. He smiled at her as if they were old friends. “Why?” she asked helplessly.

  “Because your enemy and his followers want to use him for their own purpose. And I don’t think we should let them.”

  ****

  It felt weird opening the front door of her temporary home, Elizabeth’s home, and inviting the vampire inside. She wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t felt it necessary to bring Robbie out of the cold and feed him.

  “It’s Elizabeth’s flat,” she warned Maximilian, as if the invocation of the owner’s name, Saloman’s acknowledged companion, would confer some kind of protection on its present occupants.