Of Masques and Martyrs

by Christopher Golden

  Eventually, even Galin could no longer ignore the screams of the American people, and Secretary-General Nieto forced the American president to hear the screams of the rest of the world.

  Finally, Jimenez received the green light he’d been awaiting for nearly ten months. Ten weeks later, with all the planning, recruiting, and training complete, all the logistics finally worked out, and with a presidential and U.N. commission that gave him unlimited freedom of command, he was ready.

  As dawn broke over the elegant Altanta skyline, Roberto sat on the roof of his Humvee, on a highway overpass just west of the city. He didn’t need the night vision glasses any longer, so he picked up the high-res binocs instead. Scanned the streets for stragglers.

  “Points Alpha through Omega, last check-in now, please,” he said without turning.

  Inside the Humvee, his order was passed via televideo to the twenty-odd command centers located in and around the city of Atlanta. Less than a minute later, Lieutenant Sniegoski poked his head out the window.

  “All clear, Commander,” the young man reported.

  Roberto nodded. Waited. Watched the sun. It hadn’t completely cleared the horizon yet, and he wanted to make absolutely certain that day had arrived. It had rained yesterday, so the operation had been put off until today. But today looked to be an absolutely glorious day.

  Glorious.

  “Movement,” Sniegoski reported.

  Berto lifted the binocs again, scanned the edge of the city. A newspaper delivery truck made its way swiftly through the deserted streets. A moment later, he caught sight of a lone man walking out the front door of an apartment building.

  Without a word, he reached a hand beneath him and Sniegoski handed him a small comm-unit. He brought it to his mouth, pressed a tiny red button.

  “This is Commander Jimenez, security code Gamma Chi Niner,” he announced. “Operation Moses is a go. I repeat, Operation Moses has a green light. Get ’em all out of here, people. Don’t leave a single soul. Anybody puts up an argument, you know the drill.”

  Roberto sipped from a cup of coffee Sniegoski handed him. He sat and watched as the United Nations army of Shadow Fighters evacuated the city of Atlanta, Georgia. All citizens who would not come willingly were to be arrested and brought against their will. This would have been impossible even a few weeks ago, but with the city down to less than half its population, they would be evacuated by nightfall.

  While the evacuation was taking place, the thermite charges would be set. A short time before dusk, the combination of thermite explosions and napalm air strikes would burn Atlanta to the ground.

  Again.

  Eight thousand U.N. soldiers would surround the city and kill any vampire trying to make an escape.

  It was war.

  “Burn, you bastards,” Roberto whispered to himself.

  “I’m sorry, sir?” Lieutenant Sniegoski said below.

  “Nothing, Lieutenant. Let’s move in and lend a hand. I don’t want a single human being left in Atlanta when the shit hits the fan.”

  It had been a simple thing for Cody to backtrack and follow Erika and her vampire conspirators as they brought Allison back to Hannibal’s headquarters. They had a human with them, after all—Allison—and with Hannibal having limited their ability to shapeshift to certain forms, they couldn’t very well carry her back in their talons. No, they had to use a car.

  As a particularly ugly pigeon, Will had followed them up the shore of the Hudson River until they reached Sing-Sing. Now, in full daylight, with all of Hannibal’s fang-boys and -girls hidden away inside the prison, Will sat at the counter of a small diner that opened for breakfast at six A.M., trying to figure out how he was going to get her out of there.

  He tried not to think about what Hannibal might do to her in the meantime. He prayed that Hannibal’s wish to destroy him would keep the madman from hurting Allison much. But the idea of her being hurt at all was tearing Will’s heart out.

  Still, crashing into the prison without thinking things through first was very likely to get them both killed.

  Don’t worry, darlin’, he thought, trying to send the thoughts to her, though Allison had no capacity to receive them.

  “I’m coming for you,” he said aloud.

  It would have been nice to have Peter’s input, Will thought.

  “Well, why the hell not?” he whispered, and received an odd look from the waitress behind the counter, a matronly woman whose name, he had been stunned to read, was actually Madge.

  Will ignored her, sipped his cappuccino, and sent his mind wandering. It was never easy to make contact in this way, not from so far. Moments of extreme danger were an exception, however. That seemed to amp the power of a shadow’s mind somehow. Which was why Will usually carried a cell phone. He didn’t have one now, of course. It was back at the airport, in a carry-on bag he would probably never retrieve.

  Concentrating, he sent his mind out in search of Peter. Thought of him there, in New Orleans, with George and Joe and the others. Searched for the man who had become as a brother to him.

  And found nothing.

  Will panicked. Just like Rolf, he thought. And Erika had said Rolf was dead! Will refused to even entertain the idea that anything had happened to Peter. Just the unreliability of shadow telepathy over long distance. That’s what it had to be.

  He pushed off his stool, laid a twenty on the counter, and moved to the back of the diner toward the pay phone. For a moment, he struggled to remember his code, then punched it in and listened to the phone ring in the Ursuline convent in New Orleans.

  Home.

  “Hello?”

  “George!” Will said. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “I’m old, Colonel,” George replied. “I almost never sleep. But I sense the urgency in your voice. What’s happened?”

  “It’s . . .” Will began, then faltered. “It’s Allison. Hannibal’s got her.”

  “My God,” George said hoarsely.

  “Yeah. Well I’ll need his help for sure,” Will said. “Is Peter all right? I’ve been trying to reach him, but I just get nothing.”

  “That’s odd,” George noted. “I hate to disturb him, but I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you. Hold on.”

  And Cody held on. Several minutes passed during which he cursed the age in George Marcopoulos’s bones.

  “Will?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Peter’s . . . he’s not in his room, Will,” George said. “I honestly don’t know where he is. Is there a number where he can call you?”

  “No,” Will said. “I’ll try back in a bit.”

  As he hung up the phone, Will’s mind was racing. If something actually had happened to Peter . . . but no, he had to concentrate on getting Allison away from Hannibal. Until then, nothing else mattered.

  Nothing.

  7

  It can’t be that cold, the ground is still

  warm to touch.

  —PETER GABRIEL, “Red Rain”

  LIGHT REFRACTED THROUGH THE MYRIAD COLORS of the chapel’s stained glass windows, bathing the pews and altar in a wash of eerie hues. At the back of the altar, the mournful eyes of the suffering Christ stared down on a solitary figure, alone in a pew halfway down the central aisle.

  Elsewhere in the convent, shadows went about their business. Some slept, still more comfortable with night than day; others had gone out into New Orleans, moving through lives they had made for themselves. Some stayed inside, counseling human members who were trying to decide whether or not to accept the gift of immortality, the curse of vampirism. Still others huddled together and planned as best they could how to police a city that, for most of them, was not their home.

  In the chapel, bloody tears streaked soft flesh just as they had one thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight years earlier in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus Christ had asked his Father to take from him the burden of man’s redemption.

  Kevin Marcus had been born Christian, bu
t had spent most of his life believing that God had forsaken him. As he knelt in the pew, the scent of the courtyard gardens drifting in through the tilted sections of stained glass, face bathed in an otherworldly light, Kevin spoke to God in prayer for the first time in more than a quarter of a century. He wiped the bloody tears from his cheeks, and he made the sign of the cross over his face and chest.

  “You’re a brave man.”

  Kevin turned to see George Marcopoulos standing in the shafts of multicolored sunlight at the back of the chapel. Dust motes danced in the prismatic air, mottling George’s face. It should have made him beautiful, but it did not. They all called him “old man,” but George wasn’t so old, after all. It was only that, since his wife, Valerie, had died a year earlier, George had begun to wither. Kevin had barely known him then; he’d met him only a handful of times when politics drew them together. But it was impossible to miss the way he’d aged.

  “Brave how?” Kevin asked, thinking that it was George who had always been so brave, and yet so soft-spoken that very few ever noticed.

  “There are other shadows who pray, Kevin,” George replied. “But I think I’ve only seen one or two ever make the sign of the cross. It still intimidates them.”

  Kevin nodded slowly, thoughtfully, and smiled. “God is all I have now,” he said and met George’s gaze. “You’re Greek Orthodox, is that right?”

  “That’s how I was raised, yes.”

  “I was raised Catholic,” Kevin replied. “We lived in a fairly well-to-do community just outside Chicago. The only black family on the block, of course.”

  George had moved down the aisle, and Kevin felt keenly that there were three of them there now. An old man, a dead man, and God. Something about that made him smile.

  “May I sit?” George asked.

  Kevin made room for him. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Not at all. I’ve wanted to talk to you ever since I heard what happened last night,” George said tenderly. “I’m sorry about Joe, Kevin. He was a very good friend to me. Saved my life, last year, and kept me safe. Brought me here, in fact. But you know that, I’m sure. I just wanted you to know, if you want to talk about him, or anything else . . . there aren’t many things we have in common, but we do have Joe.”

  Blood began to flow from Kevin’s eyes again.

  “You’re making me cry again, old man,” he said, but there was no anger in him. Only sadness.

  Then he looked at George, really looked at him, maybe for the first time. He and Joe had been close, no doubt. And Kevin began to understand why.

  “Why are you so loving, so accepting, when the rest of the world is so afraid of what they don’t understand?” Kevin asked.

  “Oh,” George said, waving the praise away, “I’ve known Peter a long time.”

  “I’m not talking about Peter!” Kevin snapped, all his grief beginning to pour out of him. “I’m talking about me!”

  Then he wept. George opened his arms and Kevin went into them. They stayed that way for several minutes, an odd tableau of age and fury, and when Kevin pulled away, it was because George’s heartbeat was loud in his ears, and the smell of his own bloody tears soaking George’s shirt was more than he could bear.

  “I miss him,” Kevin said.

  “Yet, after all that’s happened, you don’t blame God,” George observed. “Many might have.”

  “You’re wrong, you know,” Kevin replied. “I do blame God. But I love God also. He took Joe from me, but Joe’s in heaven—wherever the fuck that is—with my first lover, Ronnie. They’re waiting for me, and I’ll be seeing them again. See, I paid attention when I did go to church. I’ll see them again.

  “But first, God had to make a warrior out of me.”

  George looked at him oddly.

  Kevin smiled, wiped his face again, licked the blood from his fingers self-consciously. “I used to go to my pastor for counseling. My parents thought it was more proper than a psychiatrist. Advice from God, without the price of real therapy. I guess I’m just lucky the old bastard didn’t rape me.

  “There weren’t a lot of black people in my town. I guess I mentioned that. When I was five, I started to stutter. You have no idea how wonderfully funny the other kids thought it was to call me ‘ni-ni-nigger.’ ”

  George winced at Kevin’s use of the word.

  “When I was fifteen, I had finally had enough speech therapy to get rid of the stutter, but by then, I’d realized I was gay. And so had the rest of my class. Then I was ‘fufu-fucking ni-ni-nigger queer.’ My stutter was gone, but the memory of it lingered.”

  “I’m sorry,” George said. “I know that’s a foolish thing to say, but I don’t know what else . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Kevin replied, leaning back in the pew now, deep in remembering. “It’s another world now, like it happened to somebody else. In a way, I guess it did.

  “I tried to kill myself once,” he said in almost a whisper, and he could picture it in his mind. A beautiful spring night when the moon was so full and high in the sky it seemed as if it would kiss the Earth. “I slit my wrists. Then I pussied out and called my sister, Alicia. I had to leave Illinois after that. If I stayed another day, I knew my life would end up killing me. Of course, eventually, it did.”

  Something occurred to Kevin. Something that made him smile.

  “You’re from Massachusetts, aren’t you?” he asked.

  George nodded.

  “I moved to Provincetown,” Kevin explained. “I loved it there. I had never imagined I could live in a place where people were surprised if you weren’t gay.

  “That’s where I met Ronnie. He had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen, and a smile that took all the hurt away. He did six shows a week as a female impersonator. His Eartha Kitt was to die for. She’s a—”

  “I know who Eartha Kitt is, Kevin,” George said. “I’m old, not dead.”

  Kevin laughed at that. Then he stopped, looked down at the kneeler on the floor. At the blood on his hands and clothes.

  “AIDS?” George asked.

  Kevin only nodded. He knew what George used to do, that he was the medical examiner for Boston City Hospital for decades. The old man was intimate with death. They all were, now, in a way.

  “I nursed him at home,” Kevin explained; his voice cracked and he didn’t fight it. “I didn’t want him to die in some hospice. I tried to give him sunshine and laughter and music and hope. But that goddamned disease just sucked it all away. It was as if the virus had drawn all the shades in the apartment, turned the lights down low, lowered the volume on the radio until we just couldn’t hear the music anymore.

  “For the longest time, life was about waiting to die.

  “And then it was about death. Or at least, I thought it was. Right up until I stood over Ronnie’s grave, crying, and realized that I was still waiting for death to arrive. But it was my death, of course, that I was waiting for. I had HIV too. It was only a matter of time. A matter of waiting.

  “Eventually, I ended up in a hospice.”

  “You didn’t call your family?” George asked.

  “Not even Alicia,” Kevin admitted. “I was ashamed to have them see me like that. I’d never been very good at taking care of myself. Other people, okay. But never myself. And I never really learned.

  “Then one night, less than a month after the Venice Jihad had been in all the papers and on every channel, an angel came to me.” He felt his face twist into a wistful grin and saw the quizzical expression on George’s features.

  “Not that kind of angel,” he explained. “Though I think I believed she was at the time. She was dressed all in white. This tall African beauty went from bed to bed, asking a question I’d only ever heard in church and in dreams. After a while, she knelt by me and whispered it in my ear.

  “ ‘Do you want to live forever?’ she asked me.” He looked up at George, met the other man’s eyes. “I pissed myself, George. Stank like hell, but I guess I was use
d to it by then. Either that, or I just didn’t care. Either way, somehow I wasn’t embarrassed by what I’d done.

  “I was just tired of waiting to die. I wanted to live, George. Forever wasn’t even part of the equation. Just for the next day. The next week. I wasn’t greedy. All I wanted was a little time in which I wouldn’t have to think about my body falling apart, and about what would happen to my corpse after my soul was gone.

  “A little time. That’s all I wanted.

  “But she gave me forever anyway.

  “I asked her name before she left. ‘Alex’—that was all she said.”

  George’s eyes widened.

  “Alexandra Nueva?” he asked.

  Kevin smiled. Nodded. “She never told anyone, did she?”

  “Not as far as I know,” George replied.

  “She saved dozens of lives that way,” Kevin said. “Of course, I didn’t know that then. Didn’t know she was part of Peter’s coven, or who the hell Peter even was. All I knew was she’d given me life. The world kept changing, and I would be here to watch it change. I wanted to savor every minute.

  “Then I met Joe,” Kevin said. “Ronnie had been dead three years, but I’d never loved anyone else. And, let’s face it, Joe was about as white as white gets. Not my type. But he reminded me so much of what I’d been like once. So vulnerable, searching for something.

  “Joe needed someone, and I was there.

  “And now he’s gone.”

  They were quiet together, this odd pairing, and then George laid a hand on Kevin’s shoulder.

  “It would be a simple thing, even a natural thing, for you to hate God for a while,” he said. “For you to rail against him and curse his name.”