Of Masques and Martyrs (16 page)

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, but 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 used 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.”

“I spent years doing that as a child, and later as a young man,” Kevin explained. “But first Ronnie, and then Alex, and finally Joe, taught me about love and goodness and what it means to be divine. They’re all dead now, but I’m still here.

“And I have enough faith in God to believe there’s a purpose to that. A lot of the others, even our coven, though they’d deny it, are still spooked by the crucifix. Not me. God has a plan for me. I know it. This war we’re about to have isn’t just about philosophy. It’s another jihad, a holy war. Heaven and hell have chosen their pawns. We’re on God’s side.”

Kevin took a breath, smiled apologetically.

“All of which brings me, in a very roundabout way, back to my pastor, and the whole point of my unloading all this bullshit on you,” he explained. “The priest used to say, ‘God never gives us anything we can’t bear. Instead, he uses the hardships our humanity brings us to teach us love, and the righteous fury of the warriors of heaven.’

“That’s what we are, George,” Kevin insisted. “We’re the warriors of heaven. Heaven just doesn’t know it yet.”

 

Tsumi had slept, fitfully, for several hours after dawn. Vampires didn’t actually need much sleep, of course, but it was refreshing just the same. Now she stood in the shower in her room at the Monteleone Hotel and let the scalding spray sluice over her body. She shivered with pleasure as the water burned her. She healed right away, of course, but the pain was delicious.

She caressed her breasts, her taut, scalded nipples, and wished she had more time to enjoy herself.

With a sigh, Tsumi turned the shower off. She squeezed the excess water out of her long, silky black hair. As she stepped out, she willed herself to heal more slowly. Then she ran the thick cotton towel over her body, savoring the way it scraped against her scalded flesh. But she didn’t dare linger. It was almost time.

She slid the bathroom door aside and stepped out into the hotel room. Tsumi knew that the windows were covered—she’d hung the bedspread over the regular shades herself—but instinct made her wince.

“You find me so horrifying?” Sima growled, his voice like grinding glass.

Tsumi almost laughed. How could he even think that? After all, it was Tsumi herself who had given Sima the scars on his face, that December night in 1898. She’d been traveling the lands of the midnight sun, enjoying the freedom, the banquet that the men of Finland and Sweden and Norway made during the winter. The sun rarely came out. Tsumi almost never went to bed.

Sima was Norwegian. He’d been a fisherman before Tsumi seduced him. She’d scarred his face just as he reached orgasm that first time they’d fucked, marked him as hers. Then she’d drained his body of blood, swallowed his life in thick, hot spurts down her throat. Turned him.

Now he sat, completely naked, in a wooden chair by the blanketed window, pained by her expression. Sima was still insecure about her feelings for him, even after more than one hundred years. It frustrated Tsumi, but she often found herself feeding off his insecurity. Exacerbating it. It couldn’t hurt, she told herself, to keep Sima off balance.

“Yes, you horrify me,” she said at last.

But her eyes told a different story. And the way she strutted, preening, as she moved across the hotel room toward him. The lights were off, and only a soft glow of sunlight shimmered behind the bedspread covering the windows. Of course, they didn’t really need lights to see.

“Your foolishness horrifies me,” she added.

Grinning, she knelt before him. Her silken hair was still wet but she let it hang down in front of her face as she bent to take him into her mouth. He grew hard instantly. Tsumi moved her whole body as she tasted him, and her hands drifted up to his chest. She traced her nails across his pectorals, then down to his abdomen.

Tsumi loved him, in her way. His long mane of blond hair, the scruff of beard that made him look so much like an ancient Viking warrior. The scar she’d given him, her own brand, which he’d chosen to keep even after he’d realized he could make it go away if he wished. And that voice. Deep and sneeringly arrogant, in spite of his insecurities.