The keep had been abandoned when her sire left, and he’d not offered to take Lori with him, though he’d Embraced her for the game of seeing her feed on her mother and kill her, whom she’d grown to hate for jealousy of his love. Games, endless, death-filled games that had wiped clean the heritage of her village, her family, and a life she would never see again, and never forget.
The order had come much later. First had been men, small, dark men on whom she’d fed, but who’d remained, despite their fear, and their obvious understanding of who and what she was. They had brought great stones and tools, carting them into the valley by night, never using the main roads from the villages and avoiding outside contact when possible. The keep had been rebuilt, but it was not the structure of her childhood. Squat, powerful, walls thick enough to withstand nearly any assault, and empty.
Those odd, dark little men who’d built it had finished their work, sealed the keep, and departed, leaving few traces of ever having been there at all, and the structure itself, eerie and unopened. Lori had considered many times opening those doors and walking those halls, seeking the ghosts that still haunted her. She had ignored these impulses, at the same time creating the legend that would defend the valley from invasion until the eventual arrival of its owners.
The order had come by day. One moment the keep was empty, solitary and bleak, the next there were watches slinking along the upper walls, and wagon wheel ruts in the road, the sounds of animals and occasional voices filtering down through the ring of trees that she remained hidden behind, watching, listening, and wondering.
Lori had never gone to them. She had existed as always, feeding and remaining alone in the valley, watching. There was no remnant of her previous life to call her to that keep, and something in the aspect of those she caught glimpses of told her that there was no blood to be had by that road, either. She wasn’t certain who or what they were, but had sight enough to know they were beyond her power to control.
She also believed that they knew of her, and left her to herself, and she saw no reason to interrupt that silent partnership.
Abraham had seen it differently, and, eventually, had found his way to those gates. Lori had let him go. She’d claimed it was because the hunting had grown so much harder with him along, that the villagers were too restless providing sustenance to them both. The future had been a glimmer in the depths of her eyes.
She’d seen the truth that was Abraham’s existence. She’d known that, eventually, he would go to them. She’d seen that blood was not the only hunger that drove him, and that in the end, even the call of her own control would be challenged.
He had gone to the doors, early one evening, and he’d knocked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he visit them. The door had swung open reluctantly, at last, and he’d met Gustav for the first time. Very old, that one, very strong. His features bore the deformity and decadence Abraham now knew as Nosferatu, but there was something more. Beyond those twisted features, sparkling from within, softening the effect and the imposition of that taint on once-mortal flesh, a light had shone. There was something magic in the man’s motions, in his words.
Abraham knew in an instant that his secret was no secret at all in that one’s presence, and so without knowing why, he spilled forth his story. His father, his dreams, his descent to the valley. He considered trying to leave Lori out of the tale, but
Gustav knew. He smiled at the near insult of the attempted lie and assured Abraham that the Order had known of both of them for some time, and that her prowling of their borders provided them with a means of protecting their privacy without involving themselves personally, and that they approved. Abraham never left those walls to hunt with Lori again. They accepted him as guest, helped to provide his sustenance as he studied, and continually spoke to him of other places and times, things he’d heard or read about, but never hoped to be near or a part of. All that while, he’d begged them to share with him their secret, the power that made them what he was, and more. The power that lessened the weight of the sun’s bite on their soul and caused them such scant discomfort from their hunger that they seemed rarely, if ever, to feed.
They had smiled at his questions, feeding him knowledge, telling him legends of power, corruption, and wonder, and slowly indoctrinating him into their own purpose. The vaults remained sealed to him, but they let him know that those vaults contained secrets of the sort of which his father had spoken, and they drove him half mad with the desire to see them, to hold and experience them. He lived and breathed to become as they, and they used this to their advantage.
They sent him out as a spy. They used him to carry messages to other ancients, to other lands. Each time promising a little more, each time seeming sincere, until that one day outside Rome when he’d returned to them, ready to beg, to prostrate himself before Gustav and plead for a single drop of that one’s blood, and he’d found them gone. Vanished.
The road ahead wound up the mountain slowly, and on that road was the only man, living, dead, or otherwise, that Abraham hated now more than Gustav. They all seemed drawn by destiny toward some single focal point ahead, and though the hunger was eating at his mind and his thoughts, he kept his mount steady and slow, moving into the mountain’s shadow quietly and with patience.
It was his silence that brought the soft footfalls to his ears, his focus that whipped his head about and down the side of the mountain, beyond the trail. He was being followed, clumsily, and the scent of blood was in the air. Turning back to the trail with a soft smile, he slowed his mount further. It was a beautiful night for an ambush.
SEVEN
The footfalls Abraham heard were hurried and uneven, not at all stealthy. He quickly revised his initial image of ambush to one of flight and changed course, plunging his mount off the road on the upward slope of the mountain and moving into the trees…picking his way along parallel to the trail below him, stopping now and again to listen, and to speed or slow in tandem with the one below. There were other sounds now, from further back, more footsteps, and voices. Whoever it was below was being followed, and they were desperate to escape.
Something in that pursuit dropped the temperature in the silent, still organ that was Abraham’s heart. It was a relentless pursuit, neither gaining nor losing ground. Whoever was fleeing below was tiring quickly, but the pursuit only slowed. They were not trying to catch up, but to terrify.
The sounds of the pursuit themselves were calculated. Each gave a new direction, a new distance between pursuit and prey. There was no way to pinpoint how closely the others followed. Abraham stopped his mount, concentrating, reaching out with his mind, his senses, seeking those who hunted.
It took him only a moment’s concentration to realize that one of those who followed was a vampire. Two heartbeats, one thundering, the other easy and slow, relaxed, but one set of footsteps and two horses. The Cainite traveled with a companion, and that might be information that could be used. Perhaps the human knew the truth about his partner, perhaps he did not. From the terror in the heart and frantic pace of their prey, it seemed likely that, if the pursued did not know exactly what he faced, he knew the degree of danger.
Suddenly a figure crashed from the trees beneath the road, staggering onto the surface and whipping his head frantically up and down the trail. His clothing was tattered and torn, his hair matted with dirt and sweat, but it was easy to see that the man was noble. The torn shirt was fine, and the soft leather boots that flapped, ruined under his feet, torn by use they were never meant to see, were finer still. His eyes were wide, mad with fear, and without thought the man plunged off the other side of the trail and up the mountain toward where Abraham sat, obscured from view now by a large outcropping of stone.
Abraham stood his ground. Any sudden motion and he would become prey as well, and though he was not truly fearful of those who followed, neither was he foolish. He’d felt his freedom stolen from him once, and the memory of it was burned deeply into his mind. He did no
t want to feel that helplessness, that burning hunger eating away at him from the inside out, again.
The man passed well beyond the far side of the stone, heedless of the eyes that marked his passing. Moments stretched to an eternity, and then the sounds of hoofbeats followed.
The two horsemen melted from the shadows, long cloaks stretched back behind them in the night breeze like the wings of giant bats. They rode smoothly and easily, slung low over the necks of their horses. They were dressed in black, head to toe, large black hats with wide brims that stretched to obscure their features further from view. A glint of silver shone on the breast of each, and as they passed, Abraham got a closer look.
They wore crosses. They were ornate, silver crosses, like those worn by the clergy in Rome. Priests. Those who pursued were priests, or agents of Rome. And he who fled? Abraham had meant to let them pass, to wait until they had moved beyond his sight and to return to the road, and his own task, but now his interest was piqued. It was not that uncommon for the Damned to move among the clergy. For agents of the Church to hunt and terrify by night was a centuries-old custom. The two bound together was an altogether different and less likely situation.
Moving very carefully, crossing around the far side of the stone from where the others had passed, Abraham paralleled the pursuers’ course. It would not be long, in any case, before their prey fell to exhaustion and the hunt came to an end. There was nothing to be gained by remaining too close behind Montrovant at this point except detection, and that was something Abraham was not yet prepared to face.
The two wound up the mountain a few hundred feet, and very suddenly the easy going fell off and the cliff rose straight up, a sheer face of stone. It was against this backdrop that the chase reached its very sudden finale. Their prey ran to the cliff, looking wildly to the right and left, turning finally back the way he’d come. It was too late.
The two horsemen had ridden into sight, one to the man’s left, the other on the right, carefully approaching. The smile of the rider on the right flashed a brilliant white in the moonlight, competing with the silver of his cross for Abraham’s attention and nearly distracting him from the sight of the eyes above. Deep eyes…dark, but with glimmers of something, not exactly light, more like flames, dancing deep inside. The light did nothing to ease the darkness of that countenance.
Moving closer to the stone that still obscured him from sight, Abraham watched as the first rider dismounted slowly. The man’s gaze locked onto that of the terrified noble cowering against the stone, and once he had the other under the sway of his deep, smoldering eyes, his gaze never wavered. The horse was left behind, and the dark man stalked his prey with eerie precision. His head shifted to one side, nose sniffing the air like an animal seeking a scent, though his eyes were trained steadily.
The distance between hunter and prey lessened steadily, and at last the dark man stopped, no more than a foot away from the other, having said no word, made no gesture other than that of a snake mesmerizing its dinner.
“I smell it,” he said at last, gaze whipping around to meet that of his silent companion. “He has the scent on him, the taint of other worlds. The sulfur and the brimstone mix with his blood.”
Spinning quickly, face lowered now and back bent, the hunter approached within inches of the other man’s face. “You have spoken with them, haven’t you?” he hissed sibilantly. “You have followed them into their dens of darkness, watched as they fed on the blood of God’s people. You have led their lambs to slaughter, and all under the pretext of being a godly man.”
The trapped man found his voice finally, head shaking back and forth, eyes both searching and pleading at once. “No, no, I swear to you. I have no idea, no idea what you want, who you are…please?”
“You may save your breath,” the second rider said softly. “Noirceuil is not one to make mistakes, or to admit them if his first rule is broken. We know of your affairs, of those who rest beneath the floors of your keep by night and hunt our people by day. We know everything about you, in fact, and we will find them before we are done, with or without your cooperation.
“I would think that after the enormity of your sin, you would be prepared to repent. Your soul is surely damned, but there must be a lesser Hell that awaits those who beg forgiveness.”
“But I have done nothing,” the man dropped his head into his hands, moaning softly. “I swear to you by all that is holy. For God’s sake, my own daughter has been slain, taken to darkness. Surely you must see that I could not be a part of that?”
Noirceuil stood over him for a long moment, watching the man shake and sob, eyes darkening with each heavy, rasping breath his victim took.
“You make a mistake when you take me for a fool, my friend,” he hissed. “I can smell them on you, can sense their foul touch on your skin. Do you truly believe that if you keep their secrets they will come for you? I assure you, they will not, and if they do…it will be the last mistake they make in this world.”
Reaching down suddenly, Noirceuil grabbed him by his disheveled hair, slamming his head back into the stone and laying bare the man’s neck. Even from where Abraham peered from the shadows, the fang marks were obvious.
“They have fed from you, and yet you walk alive on the Earth. Do not do me the disservice of believing I do not know what this means. I assure you, there is little of their foul, damned hearts that I do not know, and well. I make it my business to know, and my business to end their madness wherever it crosses my path, such as it does this night. You will not be returning to their darkness, Dorval. You will not be completing the journey you have begun.” At this moment Noirceuil slapped the man’s throat hard, hand flat over the twin wounds of sharp truth.
Dorval lurched up and forward then, his courage returning in that last moment, or his sanity departing, and he lunged with his hands curled into claws at the cleric’s throat. Noirceuil waited an impossibly long moment, shifting to one side at just the right moment to avoid Dorval’s lurching attack. As his attacker stumbled, missing his target by the width of a man’s hand, Noirceuil struck, his own hand coming down with massive force on the back of Dorval’s skull, driving it harder and faster to the stony ground at their feet.
A sickening thump signaled Dorval’s final meeting with the earth. Noirceuil stood over the suddenly inert body, gazing down in silence. As he turned to walk away from Dorval’s corpse, his boot shot out suddenly, grinding into the back of the man’s skull and driving it more fully into the earth.
“Ashes to ashes,” he said, the words breathed softly, “dust to dust.”
“You might have left him a breath to tell us which way they went,” the second man’s voice rang out suddenly. “You might, for once, have controlled that urge of yours to play God. We are here to serve the Lord in all his glory,” the voice, now sarcastic, droned on, “not to feed the fires below. It is quite warm enough on this mountain without our help.”
Noirceuil’s gaze lifted to meet his companion’s, and his voice cracked suddenly across the space between them like a whip. “You will be better served by prayer, and by vigilance, than by sarcasm, Lacroix. He was tainted, and he would not have told us anything that we could use, or that I cannot find without his help. I tracked him here to save his soul, and to rid the world of potential evil. We will find those we seek, do not trouble yourself on that account. I am quite unaccustomed to failure.”
Lacroix fell silent at Noirceuil’s words, but his eyes did not waver. They swam with the fire of the fanatic, and again Abraham pressed more tightly to the stone, stroking his horse’s neck gently. He nearly prayed himself that moment, for the animal’s silence, and his own safety, but it proved unnecessary.
Noirceuil glanced about the clearing once, shaking his head oddly, and sweeping his gaze over the stone with a curious glint in his eyes, but at last turned he to his mount and slipped easily back into the saddle.
“The trail grows cold,” he said softly. “Let us ride, my friend.”
; The two wheeled, spinning toward the road below and away. Abraham sat as he was. He watched, and he thought about what he’d just witnessed. Noirceuil was Damned. There was no doubt of it, no way it could be denied, and yet, there lay a dead body, filled with fresh, hot blood, and Noirceuil had turned from it, without so much as a backward glance, and ridden away.
One thing was confirmed. Lacroix might know or suspect a great deal of dark things about his partner, but it was becoming glaringly obvious that the one thing that should have set off the alarm bells in that man’s brain was the one thing he was ignoring. Noirceuil was hunting the Cainites for the Church. He was putting an end to his own kind without thought, and to those who served them.
After waiting what he felt was a safe amount of time, and then waiting a bit longer, Abraham rode from the shadows and dismounted slowly. He stepped closer, leaning to grab Dorval by his hair, lifting the ruined face from the stone and bringing the inert form limply into his arms.
Without hesitation he latched onto the dead throat, drinking the cooling blood, slaking the hunger that had gripped him the moment he felt the man’s heartbeat, fleeing the two priests below the trail. His hunger, unquenched for two solid days, had pounded through him, backdrop to every thought, every image that flitted through his mind tainted by that insidious crimson haze.
That left the question of Noirceuil more prominent in his mind. Who was the man, and what motivated him? How could he walk so calmly from the curse that seared through Abraham’s veins? Why did he hunt his own?
The worst of it was the connection to the Church. If there were vampire hunters in the hire of the Church in Rome, and they were on the road at the same time, in the same area, as he, Abraham wondered why it was that Bishop Santorini had failed to mention it. There were two possibilities, neither of which calmed Abraham’s nerves.
To Dream of Dreamers Lost: Book 3 of The Grails Covenant Trilogy Page 8
