Of Masques and Martyrs (7 page)

“Miss Wydra?” the old doctor said, and she fought the urge to block her ears.

Peter was an illusion of a good and decent man. A mirage. Reality was as deadly and unforgiving as the desert. Reality was, he was a dead man. A monster. A vampire, who preyed on human beings to survive long after nature and God had decided his time was up.

“It’s all right, George,” she heard him—it—say. “Nikki’s got a lot to deal with right now.”

Then he was gone. She didn’t turn to watch him go, but she knew he had gone just the same. For an instant, she regretted having been so cold to him, after he’d done nothing but enjoy her music—and then save her life. But he wasn’t even . . . human.

“Miss Wydra?” the doctor ventured.

A chilling thought struck her, made her breath catch in her throat. But she had to know.

“Are you—Are you like him?” she asked, still not turning to face him.

The doctor chuckled softly.

“No, dear,” he said. “There’s really nobody like Peter. But I do know what you mean. And no, I’m just an old man, a mortal man. I’m not a shadow.”

“A vampire, you mean,” she corrected, her voice heavy with indictment.

When she heard the old man’s heavy sigh, she did finally turn around. He looked worn, and tired, and far more decrepit than her initial impression had implied.

“I understand,” he said, and she stared at him quizzically.

“I’m sorry?”

“I understand,” he repeated. “How you feel. How you all feel. But I’ve known Peter Octavian since you were in grade school, young lady. He isn’t a vampire.”

She stared even harder at that.

“None of them are,” he added.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” she asked, angry now.

“You’d be surprised,” he said, and finally a small smile returned to the old man’s face. “You can learn more later, if you’re so inclined, but what it comes down to is this: there is no such thing as a vampire. Not the way you think of them. But these people, these undead, shapeshifters, whatever you want to call them . . . they are the root of all the legends.

“And they’re at war with one another.

“It’s a civil war, you understand,” the old man went on. “Ever since Salzburg, when the United Nations and part of the Shadow Justice System fought together, and against one another, it’s been a war. The lunatic in the White House isn’t helping matters any, either.

“You see, the world is changing because, for far too many centuries, the shadows lived the myth. And when the myth was exposed, some of them didn’t want to change. Some of them—sadly, most of them—liked the old ways. Liked the power of terror and the taste of death. Hannibal leads them, now, and his ‘family’ is spreading across the globe. The cities where people fear the dark, his power has done this.

“But New Orleans is different, you understand. For this city is where Peter Octavian makes his home. Octavian’s coven is vastly different. I am human. I don’t want immortality; perhaps I don’t have the courage for it. But I am a member. There are a lot of humans in the coven, people who want to work with Peter’s shadows, to aid them.”

It was all too much for Nikki; she shook her head, shivered, turned away. On the nightstand was a small pitcher of water and a glass. Slowly she sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Nikki gritted her teeth against the pain in her belly and arm, but she tried not to let her pain show.

After she’d had half a glass of water, she spoke again. Without turning, she asked, “Why? Why would you want to help them? Even if they aren’t like the others, they are still vampires. I’m sorry, but they are. And they drink blood, don’t they?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” George said, obviously beginning to lose his patience. “But you should rest. Maybe later we can talk about it more. Suffice it to say that Peter’s coven is the only thing standing in the way of Hannibal eventually turning the entire human race into slaves or, even worse, cattle.

“I know it’s a lot to handle all at once, but he’s a good man, Miss Wydra. If he weren’t, do you think you’d still be alive? Maybe you ought to think about that a bit,” the old doctor said.

“I’m Nikki,” she said quickly, before he could leave. It was almost an apology, offering him her first name. Almost, but not quite.

“I’m Dr. Marcopoulos,” the old man replied. “But please, call me George.”

“Will you come back, George?” she asked, feeling very lost.

“Of course. I’ll just let you sleep a bit more, and then we can talk again. You have a lot of deciding to do. Old Antoine’s is gone, I’m afraid. And Tsumi, the woman who attacked you, is still out there in the city somewhere. If she thinks you mean something to Peter, she’ll be looking for you.”

“Wonderful,” Nikki sneered, and the sarcasm somehow made her feel better. “But I don’t understand why she would think I meant anything to your friend.”

George smiled warmly, and for a moment it was almost as though he were the grandfather who’d died when she was too young to remember.

“Ah, but you fail to see the obvious,” he said. “Peter has shut out pretty much everyone since the traumatic experiences he had in Salzburg and in—and before that battle. Everyone with the exception of myself, for which I am grateful.

“But somehow, you do mean something to him. Your music does, at least. That’s why he kept going back to the club. He hoped to meet you last night, though I’m sure the horror of the circumstances weren’t what he had in mind,” the old man said.

Nikki remembered the way Peter had looked at her, when she’d thought he was just another man. Remembered his smiling eyes, and the easy intelligence with which he carried himself. Remembered, with an embarassed flush, that she’d walked offstage and been about to approach him at the bar, when all hell broke loose. But she couldn’t help also remembering the killing and the fire and the screaming. And that he wasn’t just another man. Wasn’t a man at all, despite everything George had said.

“Is this his room?” she asked.

The doctor looked at her oddly, cocking his head slightly.

“Yes,” he replied. “Yes, it is.”

Nikki glanced around the room. A large cherry wardrobe stood against the far wall. On a small table in front of the window was an array of flowers that looked several days old. Not for her, then. Just because he liked them? The walls were bare but for two large paintings. One was an apparently unremarkable seascape, the kind of thing she had seen bedraggled fishermen working on in beach parking lots her whole life.

The other was an extraordinary portrait of a woman grieving over the body of a child, a domed cathedral in the distance. The eyes reminded her of something by El Greco, a painter who could give more life to a face on canvas than anyone else ever had. But, of course, this one couldn’t be. . .

“It was a gift,” George said admiringly, and Nikki turned to him again. “It’s one of my favorites as well.”

“A gift?” she asked.

“Certainly,” the old man replied. “The Greek still paints, you know. Well, I’m sure you didn’t know, actually. But he does.”

“Oh, my God,” Nikki said and put a hand to her forehead. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“You should rest now, anyway,” George said and went to the door. “I’m not being a very responsible doctor, am I? Try to sleep, and I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Nikki glanced around the room again. At the paintings. At the bed. Finally, at the flowers.

“George,” she said, just as he was about to turn away.

“Yes, Nikki?”

“It was . . . very kind of Peter,” she said. “To bring me here. To let me stay here.”

The doctor beamed with pleasure and relief.

“I’ll tell him you said so,” he replied, and then he was gone.

And Nikki was alone in a house full of monsters. Monsters who loved art and flowers and music, who were gentle and kind, and who killed without hesitation when necessary.

Nikki tried to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t push the image of Peter’s eyes from her mind. His eyes, and the eyes of the grieving mother in the extraordinary painting on the wall. And she realized, just as she finally drifted off, that despite the smile and the joy she saw in his eyes, there was a horrible sorrow there as well. Like the mother in the painting, he had seen too much.

She dreamed of him. And in her dream, she comforted him.

—THE NEVILLE BROTHERS, “Fire and Brimstone”

 

 

 

 

In his dream, Kuromaku is killing Yoritomo himself. Stealing through the darkness into his home and tearing the black-robed man’s throat out with his teeth and drinking down the life-blood of the most powerful man in Japan. When he wakes, Kuromaku will know that the false dream reflects eight-hundred-year-old guilt for not protecting the shogun. In truth, after the shogun’s murder, he went rogue, became a
ronin,
and an immortal as well. He savaged the shogun’s duplicitous sons and turned the shogunate over to Yoritomo’s father-in-law.

In his dream, he is in Japan. In reality, he has not returned to his native land since leaving eight centuries earlier. As a
ronin,
he wandered the nations of the world, serving no one master but fighting and killing in honorable wars, and for righteous causes, down through the years.

Kuromaku and Octavian stand back to back, and the .
ronin
turns to his old friend, and in the dream . . . in the dream, he sees the oddest thing. Octavian has been slashed in the side, just beneath the ribs. Under his clothing, Octavian bleeds

 

Kuromaku’s eyes snapped open. He stared into the darkness of his sleeping chamber, the only sunless room in his little villa in the south of France.

“Kami,”
he whispered, but the gods didn’t answer.

They never had.

Kuromaku rose quickly and dressed in the dark. He phoned the pilot in his employ and asked the woman to have his plane standing ready at the small airfield nearby in twenty minutes. Then he packed a small traveling case and laid out his weapons on the bed.

To his own array of blades, he knew he must add another.

Kuromaku went to the eastern wall of his chamber. From its place of honor there, he drew down the sword of the greatest warrior he had ever known.

For what he had experienced was no dream, but a prescient vision. He had had such night visions perhaps a dozen times in his long life, and invariably they had been true. If the images from his nightmare were in fact a glimpse of things to come, it seemed Peter Octavian would have need of his sword once more.

Perhaps more than he ever had.

 

The lamp was an antique, its shade a globe of blown glass with a painted rose pattern. Its light was insufficient for the room, and so it cast a reddish-pink tint across the bedchamber of the vampire lord Hannibal. His long white hair seemed washed in the color, reflecting it back as did his pale flesh.

But the blood staining his bedsheets looked black in that light. Black as his soul, he might have boasted. Hannibal had neither the time nor the inclination to boast, however. Nor did he believe he had a soul.

A Strauss concerto flowed from the CD player. He was not without culture, after all. But the volume was not up terribly high. Hannibal wanted to hear every scream and whimper of his victims. It was the only thing that could arouse him anymore.

With the music lilting softly in the pink light, Hannibal extended his right hand once again. The claw of his index finger elongated even further, its tip a razor needle. Once more, he drew it across the deeply tanned, gently curving belly of the woman who lay on his bed, wrists and ankles trussed with thin wire that cut her flesh each time she moved.