The Red Cross of Gold I:. The Knight of Death (58 page)

“Lucio?” Mark saw lights swimming in front of
his eyes and a cold darkness encroached on his vision. He did not
recognize his own voice, but he recognized the face of his friend
and Brother, Lucio Dambretti, Chevalier l’Aigle d’Or. Someone had
sadistically re-opened the old scar on his face and had been
carving designs on his chest. Blood was everywhere.

Mark was sick of blood.

Dambretti heard his name being called from
the fog in which he drifted and opened his eyes reluctantly,
expecting to see the horrible face of the man who had been slowly,
but surely cutting him to pieces for quite some time now. Instead,
he saw the Flaming Sword of the Cherubim above his head and
immediately assumed that Chevalier Ramsay had come to end his
suffering. Whatever the man had done to him after he had lost
consciousness must have been horrible indeed and he did not want to
know what it was, nor did he want to linger long enough to feel it.
He smiled automatically and then winced and grimaced as pains stuck
him in several places at once. He’d forgotten about his hands. Even
the slightest move was paid for by unbearable pain in the palms of
his hands. He had never realized that his entire body was connected
to his hands before, but the last half hour or so had taught him
many things about anatomy.

“Brother Ramsay?” his voice sounded almost
conversational in spite of his troubles.

“Yes, it’s me,” Mark answered and looked more
closely at the hilts of the daggers. They were not real gold. Chips
and dents showed on the hilts where they had been hammered into the
bedstead. The knuckle guards almost touched the Knight’s bloody
palms. He reached out one hand tentatively, to touch one of the
hilts.

“No! No! No!” His Brother’s eyes widened with
desperation. “Don’t touch it. Leave it.”

“Mark!” Merry called his name. She was at the
door, looking out into the hallway for signs of the security guard.
“Mark, we have to get out of here. Mark!”

“We can’t leave him here,” he said.

“We have to hurry,” she told him again and
came to stand beside him, sniffing and holding one hand over her
mouth at the sight of what Maxie had done to the Knight with the
beautiful smile. “Just hurry! Do whatever you have to do.”

“Keep watch in the hall!” Mark shoved her
toward the door and turned back to look down at Lucio. “This is
going to hurt, Brother.”

He put one knee on the bed. Lucio moaned and
rolled his head back and forth.

“NO!” he shouted at him. “Get off! Get away!
Don’t touch it!”

“You have to be strong, Lucio,” Mark told him
calmly. “I have to get you out of here.”

“No! Just do it,” Lucio begged him. “Just do
it.”

“I am. I have to pull the knives out.” Mark
looked around the room in desperation.

“No! No! Just say the words,” Lucio gasped at
him and looked up at his hands. “Don’t bother with them. Just say
the words. I’m ready.”

“What words? What are you talking about?”
Mark shook his head. Was he supposed to know some magick to make
this go away?

“I am he that liveth and was dead and behold,
I am alive forever,” Lucio panted the strangely familiar words. “In
God, the Master.” Lucio closed his eyes tightly. “Santa Maria, just
say it. I hold the key of Death. I have seen…” Dambretti opened his
eyes to look at him again. “The words! Say the words!”

He moaned again as Mark climbed onto the bed
with him and put one knee on each side of his stomach. Mark laid
his sword on the bed beside him. Lucio continued to speak “I have
seen the work of thy labors and have been witness to…” Dambretti
stopped talking. He lay breathing very hard against the pain that
Mark’s movements on the bed caused him. “I have been witness to the
devotion of thy trust, O Brother. By this act…” He stopped as Mark
took hold of one of the daggers with both hands. “No! No! Please,
don’t do that.”

Mark ignored him.

“By this act I command…”

Mark rose up and put one foot against the
headboard, leaning straight back. Dambretti closed his eyes and
shouted at him to stop one more time and then began to babble
again. “I commend thy soul to God and set thee free of this broken
body.”

Ramsay wiggled the blade slightly and
Dambretti screamed at him. He set his jaw and then pushed against
the headboard with every ounce of strength he possessed. He closed
his eyes when Dambretti rose up beneath him and the knife came
free. He tumbled back across the bed, trying to catch himself
fruitlessly before flipping over the foot board onto the carpet. He
scrambled to his feet holding the bloody knife aloft triumphantly.
There was still one to go.

“Mark!” Merry shouted to him from the door.
“He’s coming.”

She dashed back into the room and stood near
the dormer window as he reached for his sword. He raised the sword
just as Valentino’s ugly security man stepped in front of the open
door swinging the shotgun up to bear on him. The sight of the
weapon did not stop the infuriated Knight.

The old familiar rage filled him at the sight
of the man’s face spattered and smeared with his Brother’s blood.
He was on the man before he had time to pull either trigger,
knocking him backwards onto the floor in the hallway. His own
momentum took him over the man and across the hall where he crashed
into another door and bounced off. He fell onto the floor beside
the struggling Maxie. The man made it to his feet first and
scrambled off down the hall toward the stairs, abandoning the
shotgun in his attempt to get away from the gleaming sword that had
embedded its point in the rug next to his head. Mark yanked the
blade free and started after him. He stopped halfway to the stairs
and doubled over as the pain caught up with him. The dual impact of
door and floor coupled with the tumble from the bed, brought biting
reminders of the dreadful wound he had received less than
twenty-four hours ago. Gasping for breath and clutching his side,
he leaned momentarily on the sword and then ran down the stairs
after the man.

Merry ran after him, screaming his name. At
the second floor landing he stopped. Maxie was halfway down the
hall and making for the grand staircase. Merry almost caught Mark,
but he sprinted away after the man oblivious to the pain in his
side and her desperate cries for him to stop.

The big man paused at the top of the stairs
and turned to look back. Mark brought up the sword and leaped into
the air swinging the blade around in a wide arc which would take
the man’s head off clean from his shoulders. Merry screamed again,
the man threw his arms into the air overbalancing himself. He
teetered on the edge of the top riser for what seemed like several
long seconds, grabbed for the banister and then toppled backwards
down the stairs just as the golden blade grazed his left arm.

Mark turned a complete three-sixty in the
air, landed heavily on the rug, stumbled and caught himself on the
banister with his left hand. He came down hard on the railing and
knocked what remained of his breath away. Pain, pain and more pain.
He was momentarily incapacitated as stars danced in front of his
eyes.

Maxie tumbled heels over head backwards down
the stairs until he sprawled face down on the marble tiles of the
foyer below. Valentino appeared in the hallway just as her security
man made his last yelping slap against the stone floor and then lay
very still. Blood trickled from his ear.

Merry dashed down the length of the upper
corridor and stood beside Mark looking down in shock at the scene
below. Valentino knelt beside the man and picked up his wrist. She
held a handkerchief in front of her face. Only her large, dark eyes
were visible above the cloth as she looked up at them. To Mark’s
pain-wracked mind, she looked like the veiled Saracen woman in the
courtyard. She stood up slowly, her eyes locked on Mark Andrew’s
face. He shouted something down at her in what sounded like Latin
and started down the stairs with his sword raised over his head,
but Merry threw herself at him, grabbing his shirt, yanking him
back against the banister. He spun on her and then blinked rapidly,
confused by what had happened.

“No!” she said adamantly. “We’ve got to go!
Leave her alone.”

“Lucio!” Mark said as his mind cleared of the
red rage. She found herself racing after him again as he ran back
up the hall and up the stairs to the room on the third floor.

Lucio Dambretti was no longer conscious. He
lay where Mark had left him with his free hand bleeding against his
forehead. He was a gory mess. Mark crossed himself, unaware of the
action, before laying aside his sword and climbing back on the bed
to repeat the same process with the other dagger. This time without
the strange accompaniment of the prayer Lucio had been repeating.
The second dagger was embedded more deeply and it took two panicked
attempts to dislodge it. Merry untied the Knight’s feet and grabbed
up his boots. She was still barefooted, still wore the ragged
lavender gown from the night before. It was hopelessly ruined,
stained with both Mark’s and Lucio’s blood, as she struggled to
help Mark lift the unconscious man onto his shoulder. She picked up
the golden sword and carried it, along with the boots, after Mark
down the hall to the service stairwell. They stumbled down the
stairs, through the kitchen and out into the pouring rain through
the side door.

“This way!” Merry rushed ahead, leading them
around the house down the walk toward the garage.

She held the door for him as he stumbled
inside the darkened building. She slammed the door and bolted it
while Mark dumped his Brother’s unconscious form across the hood of
the nearest vehicle, a black El Dorado. His car.

He leaned on one hand, holding his side with
the other, coughing up pink foam. Something had reopened inside
him. Water dripped from his hair and ran into to his face. Merry
joined him, looking down at Dambretti in shock. It was too much.
Too horrible.

“Is he dead?” she asked when she had caught
her breath.

“No,” he told her shortly and glanced about
the dark garage as a bolt of lightning flashed outside. “Where are
the keys?”

“In the house… my room,” she bit her bottom
lip as if she expected him to hit her. When he merely slapped his
palm against his forehead, she handed him the sword, dropped the
boots and hurried across the garage to a work bench where she
dragged a white box onto the counter.

Mark watched her in confusion. The box had a
large red cross on it next to the entwined serpent symbol of Hermes
Trismegistus. The Templars. Always the Templars! “Spes mea in Deo
est,” he said softly and checked his Brother’s pulse. It seemed
strong enough.

Dambretti moaned and rolled his head on the
hard metal surface.

“Until we shall meet again in Paradise. I bid
thee farewell,” the Italian whispered into the darkness.

“No!” Mark caught his chin in his hand. The
words! The words of his secret. Lucio was repeating the Last Rites
of the Key of Death. The memory of the meaning of the words
returned simultaneously with a jolting peal of thunder. “No, Lucio!
Wake up. You are not dead, Brother.” He leaned to kiss him on the
mouth and saw his dark eyes open in the dim light.

“I should be,” Lucio blinked at him and then
held up his hands to survey the damage. “Are you sure?”

“You’re not dead. I’m sure of it.” Mark
smiled at him very briefly.

Merry came back with several small packages
of gauze, a pair of surgical scissors and a roll of tape. Mark
helped Lucio sit up on the hood of the car and she hastily bandaged
his hands with gauze and tape. He grimaced and winced and made a
lot of noise, but otherwise seemed none the worse for wear in spite
of his wounds. It seemed his complaints were made more for her
entertainment than from real suffering.

Mark watched him curiously. Lucio had always
displayed a high tolerance for pain. The face of the smiling
ragamuffin in the catacombs with the terrible wound on his face
returned to haunt him. Now the scar was bloody again from the
sadistic work of Valentino’s watchdog. But another darker memory
hovered just beyond his reach and his feelings toward the Knight
took a slight downturn. He thought that he was supposed to be angry
with him for some reason. Merry finished her work and went back to
the box, bringing back antiseptic ointment for his face while Lucio
pulled on his boots with Mark’s help. Mark shook his head. Lucio
did not need antibiotics. He only needed time.

“Where are the others?” Mark asked him
finally.

“They were in the basement. All except
Brother Beaujold,” Dambretti said and shrugged somewhat chagrined.
“I was with them… for a while. The Will of God.”

Mark remembered that. To Lucio, everything
was the Will of God, especially the good things that happened to
him and the bad things that he might be blamed for.

“I have paid for my sins, Brother,” Lucio
held up his hands. “I have done my penance. It is very much like
crucifixion, no? And if you had cut off my head like the Infidels
cut off Saint John’s head, I would be very close to martyrdom. I
would be the first martyr of the Temple. San Lucio di Napoli.”

“You are very close to blasphemy, Brother.
St. John did not die because he was careless. He died for his
beliefs. That is one of the requirements of Sainthood.” Mark looked
away from him. “I have done my penance as well.” He glanced at
Merry who was rummaging in the first aid box again.

Dambretti followed his gaze. “But you are not
repentant, il mio Fratello. I can see it in your eyes,” he said and
reached up to take hold of the silver earrings entwined in the
strands of Mark’s hair “and your hair.”

Mark frowned as Lucio peered closely at his
hair in the dim light. The Italian recognized the earrings as the
ones the blond fairy princess had worn at the reception the night
before. So she was the one. Not the dark-haired Valentino. Lucio
was very relieved. It had almost happened… again. Only one stolen
kiss this time.