Lynn Viehl - Darkyn 1 - If Angels Burn (v1.1) (12 page)

Michael read it three times, but shock made him unable to calculate the time lapse. “This came in today?” His seneschal nodded. “How long have I been in thrall?”

“The operation left you weak, and we thought it necessary—”

“How long?” Michael shouted.

Phillipe ducked his head. “Five days, Master.”

Five days. Almost the same amount of time in which God made the world.

The report crumpled in his fist, and fell in a loose ball to bounce on the floor. “She was dead when she left the dreams.
She was not breathing
.”

“I, too, thought this.” His seneschal looked sick. “I had the men take her back to Chicago. I told them to leave her body where it could be found. I thought—for her family’s sake. She has a brother, a lover—”

Michael backhanded Phillipe, knocking him into the wall. It was not enough, but he would not allow himself to beat his seneschal unconscious. Instead, he walked through the house and out to his trysting garden. The sun was setting, and the last of its rays delicately gilded hundreds of blooming white roses. He found one of the little wrought iron benches and sat down, staring at nothing as his mind tried to grasp what had happened.

Michael had lived as one of the Darkyn since his human death in the fourteenth century. Human blood was their only nourishment, but over time he and his kind had learned that they did not have to kill. Taking small amounts of blood allowed them to survive, and held off the madness of thrall and the mind-destroying rapture it induced in their victims. It also preserved the lives of the humans upon whom they fed, for one had to drain a body of all its blood to satisfy thrall.

“She should have died five days ago,” he told Phillipe, who had followed him out. “I took her. I gave her the rapture and I took her.” He could still taste her. “Or was it all an illusion?”

“No, Master.”

If his attack had not destroyed her body, then the rapture would erase her mind. He looked at his seneschal, who was wiping the last traces of blood from his nose. “I should not have struck you. Forgive me.”

“It is nothing.” And it was. Like him, Phillipe healed instantly.

“I don’t understand.” He regarded his roses, and realized he would be able to paint again. Alexandra had not only restored his vision; she had given him back his hands, his art. “How can she still be alive?”

“I do not know, Master.”

A terrible fear rose inside him. If Alexandra survived exposure to Darkyn blood, then she was the first human being in centuries to do so. Whatever had saved her would turn her into a priceless commodity, unless he could lay claim to her first. “Who else knows?”

“Your
tresora
.”

“Say nothing of this to anyone.” He rose from the bench. “Bring Éliane back to the mansion at once, and watch her.” As he strode into the house, he came to a mirror and stopped to look at himself. His nose was longer, and his jaw more defined, but his face exactly matched that of his portrait. She had given him back everything. “Make travel arrangements for me to fly to Chicago at once.”

“Master, you cannot go to Chicago.”

“I have no choice. It was my blood. Alexandra is my
sygkenis
.” He turned to glare at his seneschal. “I have to get to her before she makes a full change.”

Phillipe frowned. “Why?”

His seneschal had never turned a human into a monster, but Michael had. “Because she is still human enough to kill.”

John blinked. Either he was having an auditory hallucination, or His Grace the archbishop of Chicago had just told him that his order had been created to protect the Catholic church against the ancient and ongoing threat of vampires.

I’m hallucinating
. “Forgive me, Your Grace, did you say the
maledicti
are—”

“Vampires,” Hightower repeated, his expression patient. “Demonic, eternally damned souls who rise from the dead to feed off the blood of the living. My order has hunted and destroyed them since the fifteenth century.”

John said nothing, for there was nothing to say. He had always had great respect for the bishop, who had done so much to strengthen and maintain the faith throughout the city parishes. In a moment of cold panic, he wondered if his mentor was unbalanced, and if he should notify Hightower’s superiors of this.

Oh, yes, call Rome and tell them your bishop has gone crazy. After what happened in Rio, they’ll believe you, as much as you believe in vampires
.

One of Hightower’s wispy brown eyebrows arched. “Feeling a bit skeptical, are we?”

“I don’t wish to contradict you, sir,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “but to my knowledge, vampires are simply a myth. They don’t exist outside folktales, lurid novels, and bad films.”

“No need to apologize, my son. I thought the exact same thing before I joined the Brethren. Happily, there is proof.”

He turned to look at the door. “Father Cabreri, would you join us?” To John, he said, “Carlo is also a member of my order, so he can be trusted.”

Hightower’s assistant came in carrying an unmarked videotape cassette and handed it to John before he took a seat to the bishop’s left.

“Play that and see for yourself,” Hightower told him.

He could take the tape and play it, or he could save the bishop any further embarrassment. “Your Grace, I am… flattered, but I’m not… I can’t…”

“Stop sputtering and play the wretched thing, Johnny.” Hightower settled back into his chair, while Cabreri selected a sandwich from the cart. “Once you’ve watched it, then we will talk about what you can or cannot do.”

John took the tape, inserted it into the VCR player sitting atop the old television set, and started it.

Several seconds of static, and then a picture snapped into place. The film quality was poor, and there was no sound, but it was still possible to see what was happening on the other side of the lens. Three monks, dressed in odd-looking cowled robes, dragged a wounded, naked man into what appeared to be a dungeon.

“This is an interrogation room.” Tea gurgled from the pot as Hightower refilled his cup. “The vampires nest together, you see, like the vermin they are. When we apprehend one alone, we question it to find our way to the others.”

The naked man, whose blackened legs had compound fractures, and whose feet had been reduced to blobs of raw ground meat, fought as they bound his arms to a large upright stone pylon. His bloodied face twisted into an animal’s snarl, but his lips didn’t move.

A veteran of jumping fences, too many to count, John recognized what they were using to bind the prisoner. “Why use barbed wire to restrain him?”

“It’s made of copper, the only substance besides fire that can hurt them.” The bishop’s hand flashed up to smother a small belch. “Pardon. It doesn’t hurt them for long, once it’s removed from contact with their unholy flesh. Observe the wounds.”

John went very still as he watched the gashes left on the prisoner’s arms stop gushing blood. They began to shrink and close, impossible as that was. John’s stomach clenched as his eyes registered not only the horror of it, but the familiarity of it. He had seen this before, in his nightmares.

He had seen it that night, in the alley.

Huddled in a collapsing cardboard box, his arms curled around Alexandra, holding still so the frayed piece of cord around their waists wouldn’t rub into her skin. They’d run away from the foster home a week ago, and John tied the rope around them every night now, so he’d wake up if someone tried to take her from him. Like the old bastard at the corner candy store, who had offered John a hundred dollars for an hour alone with three-year-old Alexandra in the back storeroom. He was probably still spitting teeth from the facer John had planted on him
.

Someone giggled nearby
. Gee-oh…
Heavy, shuffling footsteps drew closer
. Oh-gee-oh…

A junkie, or a maniac. There were too many of them on the street. John held his breath and willed the footsteps to move on. Night sky and a snatch of alley wall appeared for a second in the hole as something tore back the top flap of the box, and John reached for his pipe. Two big, ugly hands snaked inside, groping. He smashed the hands away, and the jagged end of the pipe dragged as he yanked it back for a second blow. Blood spurted from a ragged gash on one straining forearm
.

John’s lips peeled back from a silent howl
. Got you. Motherfuckincocksuckinbastard, got you.

Then the air was gone, and one of the monster’s hands dug into John’s neck. His eyes bulged, and his neck bones creaked. As he fought, Alexandra began to writhe and shriek, and he looked up to see where to kick. His eyes widened as he watched the edges of the bleeding wound puckering, shrinking
—

It was a stupid nightmare. John had woken up from it the next morning, still in the alley, still in the box, still tied to his sister. Still homeless and hungry, but alive. He’d looked for evidence. No bruises on his throat, no blood on the box or anywhere. His pipe had disappeared, that was all. What he had dreamed had never happened.

“John.”

He looked up, his eyes blind. Cabreri and the bishop were staring at him. “What?”

“You’ve paused the tape,” Hightower said gently.

John fumbled with the remote until the tape began to play again. The three monks picked up small clear glass vials from a table, uncorked the vials, and began to slowly dribble their contents on their writhing prisoner. From the looks of the wisps of smoke and burns spreading over the victim’s chest, it was some sort of acid. Was that why the man’s legs were black? Had they burned them after breaking them?

When John was a boy, he had run with street thieves, had preyed on winos and panhandlers. He knew a con when he saw one, but this looked real. “They’re torturing him.”

“Yes.”

“With acid.”

“With holy water,” Hightower corrected him. “That is all the vials contain.”

He looked at the screen, then at his mentor. He didn’t know what to say. One did not use the word
bullshit
in front of an archbishop.

Cabreri gave him an odd smile and spoke for the first time. “I have witnessed with my own eyes how they burn. Like God’s fiery hand, it is.”

It might be some sort of special effect, like the infamous “alien autopsy” video, but if they were staging it, they would have made the film quality better. Besides, in this day of CNN and investigative reporting, why would anyone fake the torture of a prisoner?

None of the monks showed their faces to the camera, but it was obvious that they were questioning their prisoner. They paused now and then and bent over the restrained man, who would only bare his teeth at them.

His teeth, John noted, were perfectly normal.

“They call themselves the Darkyn,” Hightower said softly. “We believe these creatures began rising from the dead in the fourteenth century, just after the Black Death. ‘Dark kin,’ their families called them, thinking at first that they had been buried alive—that happened, in those days, with alarming regularity—but then they began to feed on people.”

John wondered how, when they had no fangs. “They rose from the grave to walk the night and drink blood, I assume?”

“They can tolerate sunlight, but they’re stronger at night. Garlic doesn’t affect them, but holy water does. Holy water that has been kept in copper, that is. We’ve been using underground copper cisterns to store our order’s waters since the fifteenth century.”

John didn’t worry that Hightower had gone senile anymore. He was convinced of it. “Your Grace, have you shown this tape to your superiors?”

“No, dear boy, Rome knows nothing about this. Only members of my order are entrusted with the Brethren’s secrets.” His smile faded. “These minions of Satan have powerful allies. When they first rose from the dead and came into the world, their families turned them over to the church. Later on they hid them from us. Perfectly understandable. At that time, if the Templars found
maledicti
living among family, they would lock them all, human and Darkyn alike, in the nearest church. Then they would burn it down.”

Sickened by this fantasy, and the sight of the prisoner’s burned torso and the acid now being dripped over the broken bones of his thighs, John reached for the VCR’s controls to stop the tape. “I’ve seen enough. I’m turning this off.”

“Not yet,” Hightower warned. “You have yet to see the grand finale.”

Another man, this one wearing a black trench coat over his broad frame, came into the room. The monks turned and tried to fling their acid at him, but he moved incredibly fast, and knocked the vials from their hands. He drove his fist into the face of one monk so hard it disappeared in gore up to the wrist. John swallowed bile as he saw the man jerk his arm, tearing off the head of the monk in the process. The decapitated body fell over, and blood and ganglia spilled from the neck onto the stone floor.

The black-coated man shook the monk’s head from his hand the same way another man might flick off a bit of snot from his finger.

John had seen terrible things, but nothing as baldly, pathetically grotesque as this. “God in heaven.”

The other two monks retrieved the coil of barbed wire and threw it at the intruder. He caught it in his hands, stretched out a length, and began whipping the two monks with it. When they were on their knees, bloody-faced and cowering, he tossed aside the wire. His boot caught one monk on the side of the head and drove it into the other’s with such force that John could almost hear their skulls fracturing. When the two monks fell over, the intruder slowly used his boots on their heads, stomping on them over and over until nothing was left but pulp.

The torture might have been staged, but this was too real. John swallowed a surge of bile. “Where did this happen?”

“In Dublin,” Cabreri said. “The demon freed four of his kind, and killed twenty.”

“All the brothers we had there.” The bishop sighed. “God rest their poor souls.”

The last minute of film showed the black-coated man quickly releasing the naked, burned prisoner and carrying him out of the chamber in his arms. Before he exited, he looked at the camera, reached out, and grabbed the lens. Glass shattered—
was he really crushing it with one hand
?—before the screen filled with static.