Blood spilled out of the wound, fire-red, leaking on to the ground. The smell drew me, and my lips were almost upon the spilling wound before I whispered, “No.”
I knew what drinking would mean, I knew there was a tie in the blood beyond what Ryan suspected. No one had to tell me that, I could feel it. I felt it rippling from the blood that spilled from his arm—its life, powerful, seductive, and not my own. Accepting this from him would form a bond that I did not want to make.
I was still leaning forward, the need, the lust, pushing me. I repeated, “No,” and pushed the arm away. The blood drew a black arc in the snow. It was the hardest thing I had ever done.
When I turned away, everything returned to a sense of normalcy. I expected him to be angry, at the very least. But, from behind me, I heard the whispered word again, “Strength.”
I turned to face him. He was no longer a god offering communion. He was a figure of purely temporal power.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice unsteady.
“No one to trifle with.” He extended a now normal-looking arm ahead of him. “You have some strength. Do not confuse it with power.”
He began walking, and I had no choice but to follow him. I began to think that, had he wished me to drink, I would have drunk. My victory had only been over myself, my own desire. Apparently that was enough for now.
“What did I refuse?” I asked.
“Security,” he said. “Comfort. No small bit of power. That, and slavery.”
It was the blood. Ryan’s pseudovirus transmitted itself through blood, taking over the flesh, controlling the flesh. Somehow the mind controlled Ryan’s bug—
“You think you understand.” His words made me feel naked, as if my thoughts were exposed in his presence.
He laughed and it was terrifying to listen to. More terrible because I knew what he was laughing at. “Such desperate clinging, Tyler.” His eyes burned when he said it, heated from the internal fire that had nearly consumed me before. “The doctor has buried himself in the flesh, as have you.”
He reached over and gently touched the edge of my chin. “Do not think describing the Mystery, in whatever detail, will explain it.”
I was frozen, staring at him. I almost wanted to believe I was held in place by some mental power, but I knew that it was awe that held me there. His face was a fusion of the angelic and the diabolical, shaped like a man’s face, but no longer remotely human.
It stroked my cheek as if comforting a child.
“Blood is All. But the All is not simply blood. It is Life, Spirit, Soul. Our Mind, our Soul, everything us that transcends the physical is chained within us, has become part of the flesh chaining us to this world. It lives with the flesh, dies with the flesh. It controls the flesh and is controlled by the flesh. Ryan is not of us. He does not see the mind within the blood, the soul within the blood. He cannot see what we see, or understand that there is anything unphysical about us.” He looked deeply into me and said, “You have seen the soul within the blood, tasted it.”
I couldn’t bring myself to speak, so I nodded.
“You have seen the maelstrom of faith within a righteous man.”
I thought of Sebastian and nodded again.
“You cannot look into the daemon within your own eyes.”
I nodded again.
“You have left the world of men. The human being you once were is dead, and the remnant spirit has remolded your flesh. You must set aside the beliefs you once had; such things can only hurt you now.”
“But—”
A stern edge crept into his voice. He dropped his hand. “You think like a human and you will die like one.”
I backed away. “Why are you here?”
“Because of your ignorance, your novelty, your potential importance. Because you are a rogue. The first such born to us in half a century to survive the day of his creation. Because you are of use to me.”
The sense of otherworldliness seemed to recede. The cold I felt was real, and the colors I saw belonged to Shaker Heights, not a higher, or lower, realm.
“What use?”
“You have no master. No one has given you what I offered you.” He gestured with the arm he had brandished earlier. It was intact, no sign of wounding now. “You have a freedom that few have until centuries after their birth.”
I was glad of that, at least. I didn’t relish having a master, of any sort.
“No Master. No Teacher,” he said. “A rogue is dangerous, especially to himself. You have no status, no role, no protection. You honor no kin. You have no Name.”
“This makes me useful to you?” I asked.
“Yes, Kane Tyler. It does.” He steepled his hands in front of him, as if consciously withdrawing all the intense impressions I had felt around him, as if he folded his sprit back within his body. “I am older than you can imagine, and my power is such that even a thrall to me is a force few would contend with. But I cannot move incautiously, my acts bear too much weight for me to make an ill move.”
“Are you asking something of me?”
He laughed, “I am offering something.”
“Something with a price.”
“All things have their price. Can you accept the Covenant?”
Could I? Perhaps, more importantly, could I reject it? Gabriel had labeled me an outcast because I had not accepted the Covenant, and had said that someone would want much for “granting me that boon.”
“What do you want in return?”
“The conclusion of the troubles that have come to this city.”
“Childe?”
He laughed softly, “It is not for me to accuse. For me to express myself, rightly or wrongly, in this matter would do worse damage than is being done now.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“Those who search for the truth in this are blinded. I wish your eyes. I wish to commend upon you the duty of vengeance.”
“I thought that was Gabriel’s job.”
“Such it is. But I shall not wrongly demean his status if he is blameless. You shall be my agent, but you shall not be me. Shall you accept the Covenant and provide this for me?”
That gave me all sorts of questions about Gabriel’s role in all of this. I found myself nodding even before I had decided to do so.
“Again, shall you do this, refusing the option to turn back?”
“Yes.”
He placed a hand on my forehead, and I felt a burning there. “Between me and the night,” he said, “name yourself.”
The word was pulled immediately from my lips, as if it wasn’t me talking, but something speaking though me. “Raven,” I heard myself say.
“Raven it is, and shall ever be. As Jaguar, I am witness to your entrance to the Covenant, speak your name now, and it will be known of what you are a part.”
I opened my mouth to ask a question, one of a tumult of questions about Childe, and Gabriel, and even Bowie. However, before I had taken breath to speak, he had removed his hand and had stepped backward into a shadow. Though my eyes never left him, I could not see where he went. When I looked down, I only saw my own set of footprints.
“Jaguar,” I whispered, naming the apparition.
He had been right. Neither Ryan nor I had come close to the mystery. Or the Mystery.
24
I took my vampiric nonsleep in Ryan’s windless guestroom. For once I wasn’t tormented by memory. I simply rested, barely aware of my surroundings or the passage of time. The sunlit hours of Tuesday passed without me.
I came to full consciousness with someone knocking on my door. I felt a weird sense that the day had not fully passed, and that I had just laid down upon the bed. A glance at my watch told me that the day had indeed passed. It was nearly seven.
I sat up feeling fatigued and hungry. I rubbed the sleep from my face as the knocking continued. “Coming,” I said.
I stood up, feeling as rumpled as my clothes looked. I picked up my holster and put it back on b
efore I unlocked the door. I opened it to found Leia standing outside. She’d traded her black turtleneck for a navy blue one, and her perfume was as strong as ever. “Grandfather wants to see you in his office, to look at your hand.”
I nodded. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
I had a memory flash, and as she turned to leave, I asked, “How long have you been here?”
“Here? With my grandfather? All my life.”
I shook my head, “No, in Cleveland.”
She shrugged. “Six months or so, why?”
“Just curious. I’ve noticed your accent.”
“Oh,” she said.
Still thinking of England, I asked, “Does the name Cross mean anything to you?”
“Should it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You enjoy asking questions, don’t you?”
“It’s my job.”
She gave me a half-smile and said, “In my experience questions are often far more interesting than answers. Pardon me, but I have errands to run.”
She left me abruptly enough for me to feel that I had hit something significant. What, I didn’t know. However, I was too much a detective to discount Leia and Childe’s common nationality as coincidence.
I met with Ryan in his office downstairs. It was a study in whitewash and stainless steel. However, it was aboveground and a much more pleasant environment then the morgue in the basement. The room felt as if a person worked and lived there. There were pictures on the wall, a reassuring clutter on his desk, and a spider plant hanging in one corner of the room.
I sat for the doctor as he poked and prodded my left hand, which now bore no sign of yesterday’s gangrene. There was, in fact, little now to distinguish it from my right hand.
Ryan, as he’d shown last night, was a talker. As he flexed my hand and dragged little pointed implements across it, he’d talk all about what he thought was going on inside me. He talked about how much resources my body had used up during the night. How it had expelled or reabsorbed the dead tissue. He talked about a lot of chemical esoterica that I couldn’t understand.
Most important to me was the fact that he talked. It wasn’t very hard to change the thread of his conversation.
“So,” I asked as he tested the reflexes of my pinkie, “how’d you get into treating vampires anyway?”
“The war,” he said without missing a beat. “I was a volunteer medic. I was in London, treating civilians during the Blitz.” He nodded absently to some pictures on the wall, many were black and white, showing a young Doctor Ryan. “During the worst part of the bombing, there was an epidemic of unexplained deaths. All in a single ward, all in the middle of the night. We weren’t equipped for autopsies, not to mention the lack of personnel.” He rolled up my sleeve and began prodding my wrist. “So I stayed up to watch the men in the ward. That night I saw my first vampire. The creature must have been caught in the bombing, much of the soft tissue had been burned away. The face was little more than a charred skull.”
He paused for a while, looking my hand over. “Sunlight is bad, but fire is worse. Destroys the tissue immediately. This thing’s skin was like charcoal. It rustled like dry leaves when it moved. And when it moved, its skin cracked, showing livid red tissue.” Ryan shook his head. “The mass of blood it would have needed to repair that damage would have been twenty or thirty full grown men. As it was, with me and the orderlies there, once we overcame our shock and saw it begin feeding, we restrained it—and inadvertently killed it.”
Ryan put down my hand and pronounced, “Your hand is fine, Mr. Tyler. My suggestion is to feed, rest, and build up your strength. You should be as good as new.”
“Thank you. What can I do to repay you?”
Ryan smiled. “Money usually suffices. If you’re low on funds, a blood sample once you’ve fully recovered.”
“More research?”
Ryan nodded. “Feel free to remain my guest here as long as necessary.”
“I appreciate the offer.” I also had the suspicion that it was too generous. “Do you think you could answer a few of my nonmedical questions.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Tyler,” he folded his hands. “It’s actually refreshing when one of my patients has an interest in what I have to say.”
“That’s unusual?”
Ryan chuckled. “Very. What do you want to know?”
“I was interested in what you could tell me about some vampires I’m interested in.”
“What about them?”
“What you’ve heard, what they’re like—”
“I suppose I’ll be more forthcoming than your kinsmen, for what little I know about the figures in your society.”
You’re part of that society as well, I thought, you have to be to do your work. “Tell me what you know about one named Childe.”
Ryan shook his head. “He is old. He came out of central Europe about four hundred years ago. Childe is very—” He wrung his hands as if groping for a word. “Inner directed, I suppose you could say. He uses people. Uses them up.”
“You know him, then?”
“No,” Ryan said quickly. “I know of him.”
“From England?” I asked.
Ryan gave me a blank look and then he nodded. “Yes, from England.”
I nodded. “Your granddaughter said you left England about six months ago. Why did you leave?”
“Huh?”
“You were there since the war?”
Ryan nodded.
“Why return to the States now?”
“Oh. The last of my wife’s family passed away. There was nothing left to hold us there.” He glanced up at the wall and said, “I thought you wanted to know about vampires?”
“Do you know of a gentleman named Gabriel?”
“Gentleman,” Ryan smiled. “Appropriate word. He’s one of those Americans that become so enamored of aristocracy that they become more class-conscious than the British. He’s pre-Civil War, and he slipped into the society as if it were made for him. He would hate Childe.”
“Why?”
“Because Childe has no use for any rules of society, human or otherwise. He’s fond of quoting Alister Crowley, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law ...’ The fact that Childe is older, more powerful, and has more status than Gabriel does would be almost a perpetual insult.”
Ryan stood up. “Now, if you please, I have business to attend to.”
I stood and extended my hand. “Thank you for your help, and for fixing my hand.”
“It’s my job.” Ryan shook my hand. “As I said, feel free to use our guest room.”
“Thank you, but I think I should be moving on soon.”
Ryan got up to leave, and I asked, “How come you’re still human?”
“What?”
I stood up myself. “You must have been tempted, doing all this research, to become one of us.” The phrase, “one of us,” came much too easily to me.
Ryan shook his head. “Never.”
“You could, though, couldn’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes, I could infect anyone I wished to, viable specimen or not. But I have never been tempted. I’ve seen what it can do.”
Ryan, somewhat hurried, left me there. I could tell that I had hit a nerve or two. I also could tell he was lying through his teeth about not ever meeting Childe.
I glanced at the wall with all the pictures. Many shots—wartime England, a primitive-looking hospital, Ryan doing this, Ryan doing that, Ryan with the hospital staff, a color picture of Ryan and his granddaughter with a modern London background. I took a step back from the wall and was struck by a feeling that something was wrong here.
The sound of someone clearing his throat interrupted me. I turned to see Ryan standing at the door, waiting. “I’d like to lock up, Mr. Tyler.”
I nodded. “Sure,” I said, slipping out the door past him. I still felt something was not quite right about that office. I just wished I could figure out wha
t it was.
I called Sam’s number once Ryan and I were through with each other. Gail answered the phone. “Hello, Weinbaum residence.”
“Gail?”
“Dad?”
“Yes. What are you doing answering Sam’s phone?”
There was a pause before she said, “Hoping you’d call. How’re you doing?”
“Hand’s mostly better,” I locked my lips because a hunger was nagging at me as well, something I needed to take care of soon. I never again wanted to push myself to the point where something like my attack on Tony became inevitable. “How did things go at ... how’d things go?”
She paused for a long while before she answered. When she spoke, I could hear the stress in her voice, “It went well, I guess.” I could tell she’d been crying.
“I wish I could have been there.”
“So do I.” She sucked in a deep breath. “I’m going to miss Mom.”
“I miss her, too.” I’ve been missing her for five years. “Is Sam around?”
“Sleeping,” she said somewhat abruptly.
“He’s asleep?”
“You make it sound like an accusation.”
“He’s supposed to be protecting you.”
“It’s not his fault.”
She seemed on the verge of tears again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Look, I’m going to take a cab down there—”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I need the car.”
“Oh. I’ll be here, I guess.”
The strange conversation lasted a few more minutes, talking about nothing in particular, and I hung up the phone and realized that I still had a family. Despite everything else, they hadn’t taken that from me. When I called for the cab, I rummaged through my pockets for what was left of money I had liberated from my hotel room.
In fishing for cash, I found something that I had totally forgotten about—a small black film canister with a gray cap. I hadn’t slowed down long enough to look over the negatives I had found in my house. Whatever was on them still belonged to one of the black absences in my memory.
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