“I will go with you to find Laszlo, and kill him.”
“I won’t take you with me, Beatrix, I’ve told you already—”
She spun around to face him, at last dragging her gaze from the pile of damning evidence against her. “Then I will go alone! Your reasons for revenge against Laszlo are your own, Alder, and you may keep them if you wish, but mine are clear and not to be denied. I have nae choice. I may have shared my body with you, but it doesna make you my laird. I am the Levenach, and in this place, I rule. You are a vampire, and you have no power over me, tonight of all nights.”
“No power?” Alder challenged, seizing her shoulders and pulling her to him. “Not even over your tender, mortal heart? I don’t believe you, Levenach. You would have killed me long ago.”
She shoved him away. “What of your own heart, Alder, white wolf of vampires? Does it beat for me? Would you shirk your vengeance upon Laszlo to flee the Leamhan forest with me and be my man?”
“My heart is not tender, nor is it mortal,” Alder replied quietly, stiffly. “Our future together would be a sad one, Levenach. And for you, very brief.”
“Perhaps not,” Beatrix argued. She looked into his eyes for a long moment, contemplating the gravity of what she was about to suggest. “If we succeed—if we seek Laszlo together and slay him, you could make me one with you.”
“Make you a vampire?” he asked in disbelief and then shook his head. “Never.”
“You would rather leave me?”
“Than to condemn you to a soulless eternity, hunted like an animal for your evil thirst? Yes, I would rather leave you!”
The black woods around them were eerily silent as they stood in the midst of their heated emotions. No wind stirred. And yet Beatrix could feel an impatience radiating from the elm trees on this night of magic, urging her, but she could not discern its intent.
“Then we doona have much time,” she said quietly. “This night, and only this night, which is already upon us.” She cocked her head and looked slightly over her shoulder as she heard the muffled voices of the crowd of forest folk coming through the thick wood for her. Her eyes found Alder’s again. “Go inside and collect our weapons. I have visitors to attend and ’twill nae aid my cause for them to see you in a temper.”
“Are you so foolish as to have forgotten the feel of the noose around your neck?”
“That was a different day, Alder,” Beatrix said and smiled in the dark. She knew she would never convince him with words.
Beatrix left him and walked to the inn’s door, bent down, and raked a handful of chunky salt from a wooden bowl on the ground. She stood and turned, crunching the mineral tightly in her fist until it burned and bit into her palm.
“Tonight, I am truly the Levenach. On this night, I am”—she swung her fist, spraying most of the salt in a wide arc over the clearing. Where each tiny grain landed, a white spark of light sprang up, until the clearing seemed alight with a mirror image of the starry, black sky above them—“a witch,” she finished simply. The sounds of the approaching folk grew louder. “I canna die at the hands of the Leamhnaigh tonight.”
Alder looked at her display of glamour sparkling on the ground for a long moment but said nothing. He turned and began walking back to the inn.
Beatrix now faced the wood alone, the bright orange glow of advancing torches blinking through the trees at her like malevolent eyes.
The kitchen had fallen pitch with the outside, and Alder laid a trembling hand upon the old quiver that had once belonged to Gerald Levenach. Then he picked up the sling that held Beatrix’s weapons. He held these things before him, studied them both with his vampire eyes. These were the tools that had allowed the Levenachs and the Leamhnaigh to survive these one hundred years since the slaughter that Alder had helped instigate. One hundred years ago this night, he had stood in yonder clearing a mortal man, an ambitious, power-hungry man, unwittingly unleashing an evil over this land and these peoples.
And Alder had sacrificed his own soul in payment, been sentenced to one hundred years of servitude to the hellish band of monsters led by a vengeful archangel who had used Alder like the animal he had become. Soulless, heartless, a cold shell of a body housing the rotten remnants of his memories of life and warmth and love. A killer.
It was supposed to end tonight. He was supposed to kill Laszlo and then take the lifeblood of the last living Levenach witch, regaining his soul and his human nature for the rest of a natural life. Setting to rights those old, evil wrongs. Ridding the land of both vampire and witch, forever and ever, amen.
A breath of mirthless laughter escaped his lips.
Alder let the quivers of stakes and magical talismans fall back to the worktable with a startling clatter and squeezed his eyes shut, his fists clenched before him. Beatrix’s lovely, mortal face was clear in his mind.
He would get at least part of it right.
The hair on the back of Alder’s neck prickled as the first inhuman howls reached his ears. He turned his head toward the back door of the inn, and the rotten, burned stench of old vampire wafted in on a frigid breeze. Alder’s fangs erupted, and he felt his eyes dilate as screams of the Leamhnaigh fell like stones through water.
Laszlo.
Alder moved through the door once more, this time as if in a dream. The Levenach’s weapons lay forgotten on the table.
The clearing beyond the inn was still lit by the Levenach’s white witch fire, and enhanced by the score of torches carried by the woodland folk gathered in a mob some distance away from her. The light burned the images onto Alder’s vampire eyes and he reflexively hissed, his anger, his bloody hunger ignited like an oil-soaked cloth. He swung his gaze to the sky, to the tree line, to the shadows that stalked the mortals in the clearing. He could see no sign of Laszlo.
But he could smell him, feel him and his minions.
He barely registered the Levenach commanding the forest folk, who clutched at one another and scanned the cold sky above the clearing before turning their attention back to Beatrix.
“You must flee now,” her voice called firmly. “’Tis nae safe for you here—there are killers afoot, and soon, this place will be awash in your own blood do you not heed me!”
“The only killer afoot is you, Beatrix Levenach!” a Leamhnaigh man accused, angling his torch at her, but fear was bright in his eyes. “The claim that you and your kin were the protectors of our people was naught but a lie! We were your own herd of sheep, were we nae? To cull and have sport with as you saw fit?”
“That’s nae true, and you well know it,” Beatrix said.
“It is true!” The man shook his torch at Beatrix again. “You’re evil! Evil! Ev—”
The man’s words were abruptly cut off as a black skeletal shadow swooped from the night sky and snatched him off his feet, leaving his torch to fall and roll on the dirt.
The crowd gasped and one by one the faces of the Leamhnaigh turned upward once more, their eyes as big as their fists, and they saw the swarm of vampires circling like the birds of prey they were.
Screams broke out as two more vampires broke rank to dive into the mob of mortals and, like herons at a lake, snatch up their food from the depths.
“Behind me!” Beatrix shouted, her own face turned skyward, keeping a wary eye on the hungry flock above her clenched fists held high. “Leamhnaigh, come to me!”
“Do it!” a woman shouted. “The Levenach is our only hope!”
Alder watched from the corner of the inn as nearly two score of woodland folk crowded between Beatrix Levenach and the front of the White Wolf Inn. He was deep into his own hunger now, so much that he could not help the mortals being preyed upon by the swooping and diving vampires. But he could feel clearly the glow and power of the Levenach, and his hunger trebled as she spoke.
“Ancient light, rid evil from my sight! As I command it, so it becomes!”
The roiling cloud of evil rippled and perhaps five of the vampires heeded the Levenach’s spell. After o
nly a moment, though, they rejoined the flock.
Their numbers were too great, their power too strong, Alder realized coolly. He could not care. He had to feed soon, and the only sustenance that would do was Laszlo…
Or Beatrix.
She seemed to move slowly closer to him as he watched her hungrily, and Alder heard his own feral whine as if from far away. His vampire eyes could see every strand of her fiery hair, every pore in her creamy skin, and the vibrating light that surrounded her. He could remember the feel of himself buried inside her, the tiniest taste of her blood that had been left in his mouth when his fangs had scraped her neck, and he was ready to take her again. He would fly down upon her, knock her to the ground, and take her body and her blood in the same moment. Before her precious Leamhnaigh, where they could watch as he destroyed her and know the truth of her goodness as he drank it, used it up. And then he would destroy them all….
And then the most vicious scream shook the already trembling night air, announcing its owner’s arrival like wicked royalty, and Alder felt its vibration to his black, cold core.
“Beatrix Levenach,” the voice called, loud enough for the mortals in the clearing to hear, but also whispered like a lover into Alder’s ear. “You do look delicious.”
The sight of Laszlo le Morte strolling from the woods into the clearing like a dandy mortal caused Alder to go temporarily blind with madness. At last, there was the face that had haunted Alder these one hundred years—the pointed, bearded chin, the long, bony nose, the sharply slanted, black eyes. His arms were clasped behind his back, hiding from view the unusually long palms and fingers Alder knew he was so proud of. Alder could still remember the feel of those fingers digging into his shoulders, holding him down while his soul exploded from his being, his blood flowed out of his veins….
Alder crouched and then sprang, flying over the clearing in a single leap toward his unnatural maker.
But Laszlo was older, faster, and not even Alder’s supernatural vision saw clearly how fast the dark-haired devil flashed to Beatrix, bending her against his body, one impossibly long hand over her face, pushing her head away to expose the hump of her throat.
Alder fell to the dirt with a thud but then quickly sprang to all fours, ready to fly at Laszlo again.
“Alder,” Laszlo said mildly. “Why, it seems a hundred years!” The demon chuckled. Beatrix did not so much as twitch.
“Let her go, Laszlo,” Alder growled. “And put me off no longer. I will have your blood this night.”
“Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not,” Laszlo said thoughtfully. He looked down at Beatrix, leaned a mite closer to her neck and took a long, exaggerated sniff. A greasy smile slid across his thin lips. “Well, well—fucked her, have you? And—oh my!—what are these here? Fang marks?” Laszlo nuzzled Beatrix’s skin and laughed. “Tsk-tsk, Alder. Sampling the goods over-much, I daresay. Perhaps you’ve already drank enough of her, then, for me to end your life once and for all.”
“Test me,” Alder dared him.
“I think I shall,” Laszlo conceded. “Just as soon as I’ve had a taste of the Levenach’s fabled blood myself. I, too, have longed to savor witch blood again, and once again it is you who has given me chance, so I’m certain you won’t mind at all….”
He began to lower his open mouth, long, stained fangs protruded, and Beatrix’s right fist swung up from its dangle, smashing the remains of salt into Laszlo’s face.
Chapter Nine
Laszlo’s claws fell away from Beatrix and he hissed as he flew backward from her. Beatrix staggered aright and spat in the dirt, trying to clear her mouth of the close taste of his stinking flesh.
The vampire swiped at his face, and in the glow of salt fire and torch, Beatrix could see the melted pock-marks the mineral had left in his skin, like a sheet of candle wax onto which hot embers had flown.
The salt would not kill him, of course, but it had bought her time to escape. And it had shown Laszlo that the Levenach would not make easy prey.
“Not nice, Levenach,” Laszlo tsked, smiling through his pitted skin. He wagged a finger at her, and to Beatrix the digit seemed as long as her forearm. “Your determination is to be admired, but I do take offense. I would have taken you quickly. Now, I fear ’twill be much more painful if only because of your poor manners.”
“Test me,” Beatrix said, borrowing the phrase from Alder. “You die this night, devil.”
“Die? Me?” Laszlo began to chuckle. The chuckle grew into rolling laughter as, with swishes and soft thuds, vampires began to drop to the ground behind him, like a demonic army.
“Going to put end to us all, are you?” he guessed in a condescending tone. “That’s quite an ambitious task. I do hope you brought your supper along, Levenach. There is no mortal—or witch—who can match me. Your poor pet, Dunstan, discovered that too late. Smart enough to align with me, but too stupid to realize I had used him until he sat with his fat head in his fat hands.” Laszlo looked to Alder. “Remind you of anyone?”
Beatrix felt the crowd of Leamhnaigh gather closer to her, eventually flanking her. She let her eyes dart to the sides and saw that they had collected the talismans once piled against the inn’s door and were now clutching them defiantly in the face of Laszlo’s fiends. The folk now knew the truth, and Beatrix felt her ancient blood, her magic blood, shooting impatiently through her veins.
“Stay behind me,” Beatrix warned the folk in a low voice before addressing Laszlo once more. “It stops tonight,” she said to the vampire leader, realizing at once that Alder stood between the two groups—Beatrix and the Leamhnaigh on one side, Laszlo and his vampire offspring on the other.
In that moment, she did not know with which side he would stand.
But she could not allow herself—or her heart—to dwell on the repercussions of whichever choice he made. Tonight was All Hallow’s Eve, Beatrix was the Levenach, and she would honor her family’s vow to its ancient and unknown resolution.
Laszlo’s keen and evil senses must have caught her quick glance at the white wolf, for he homed in on it like fresh blood.
“You fancy he’s in love with you, don’t you?” Laszlo taunted, his children pacing and gnashing their fangs impatiently behind him, scraping at the dirt like beasts mad for the kill. “Perhaps he’ll take you with him when you’ve put through with me, eh?” He belched his despicable laugh once more. “Alder might be here to destroy me, true, but he also has another motive, do you not, Alder?”
Beatrix could not help but glance to where Alder had been crouched. He was no longer there. Her eyes flitted about the clearing, but she saw no sign of him.
She knew a blink of panic at the thought that he had abandoned her, but dismissed it. It did not matter. Alder was what he was, and naught Laszlo could say would deter Beatrix from her duty.
“Hmm, wonder where he’s flown off to?” Laszlo mused with a smirk. “Well, I’ll tell you why Alder is here, and why he’s kept such close company with you, Levenach—he needs you.”
“Alder doesna need me to kill you, Laszlo.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” the demon insisted, wide-eyed. “You misunderstand. He doesn’t need you to kill me, he needs your blood.”
Beatrix froze. “My blood?”
“Alder seeks his revenge on me, true, but do you know why?”
“Because it was you who made him a vampire,” Beatrix said boldly.
“Oh my, yes. And I must say he is still quite put out with me for that. He wants his pathetic little soul back, for what reason I can’t possibly fathom. He has come back to this place, on this night, one hundred years later, to try to regain that sorry scrap of humanity which I so graciously liberated him from.” Laszlo paused, looking at Beatrix with unconcealed glee. “Did you hear that, Levenach? One hundred years. Alder is no stranger to the Leamhnaigh. He has been here before. Think on it for a moment, if you must—what happened here one hundred years ago, tonight?”
“The massacre,” Beatrix whispered.
“A mortal,” Beatrix choked out.
“Right again! And that mortal was none other than Alder the White, ruler of a small English settlement just beyond the border. He was hungry for power, and it was power I promised him. Drunk with the idea of it, he couldn’t get here quickly enough! He was so very offended when the truth came out.” Laszlo showed his fangs.
“I care not if ’twas Alder,” Beatrix said, trying to overcome her shock and not let Laszlo see how it affected her. “You tricked him. He’s nae to blame.”
“No?” Laszlo challenged, amused. “Well, perhaps not. But I do doubt you’ll feel so charitably toward him when I tell you that he’s returned for a purpose more dear to him than my destruction.” Laszlo took a single step forward and the folk around her bristled, readied for his charge. But the devil stopped his advance and only brought a grotesquely long palm to his mouth, as if imparting an aside.
“In order for Alder to regain his soul, he must drink from the Levenach’s lifeblood.” Laszlo straightened. “Of which you, my desirable little witch, are the last defender.”
Beatrix’s blood pounded in her ears. “You lie,” she whispered.
But Laszlo only shook his head with a knowing smile, and in that moment, Beatrix recalled all the warnings Alder himself had given her.
Laszlo stole something from me, many years ago. I’ve come to get it back, and destroy him. And for both those tasks, you, Beatrix Levenach, are the only one who can help me.
You’re not safe with me, Beatrix…You’re in more danger than you have ever been, the whole of your life.
After Laszlo is dead, I cannot stay. You wouldn’t want me to, if you only knew—
And just before they had made love this morning: I don’t want to harm you, Beatrix.
She at last completely understood Alder’s coming, and the point of his mission.
“Make sense now, does it?” Laszlo’s grating voice burst the poisoned bubble of Beatrix’s thoughts. She didn’t know how he had managed to move closer to her, but now Laszlo was perhaps only five paces away. The folk around her were frozen, as if mesmerized by his evil presence, and the vampires behind Laszlo also held their places. It was as if time stood still in the clearing, frozen like the cold night stuffed between the trees.
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