Zen and the Art of Vampires (12 page)

I hesitated, unsure of whether or not it would be wise to tell him.

He slid me another glance. “Afraid?” he asked, one eyebrow quirking.

“Honestly? Right now you're tops on my list of suspects,” I answered. “Despite the fact that you're about to swear up one side and down the other that you would never harm poor Anniki.”

“On the contrary, I would quite happily dispatch a reaper if it was within my means.”

A cold sweat started on my palms, but the memory of Anniki begging for justice was too fresh in my mind to ignore. “Did you kill her?”

The words came out stark and bold.

He glanced at me, his eyes unreadable. “Would you believe me if I said I didn't?”

“That's not an answer.”

Silence filled the car for a few minutes. “Answering is a moot point if you don't believe I speak the truth.”

“I think you do whatever serves you best,” I said baldly.

To my surprise, he nodded. “Yes.”

“Including killing the Zorya?”

His lips thinned. “As a matter of fact, I didn't kill her.”

I relaxed against the side of the car, relieved.

Kristoff sent me a puzzled glance. “You believe me?”

“Stranger things have happened,” I said, trying to gather my wits.

“That's not to say I wouldn't kill a Zorya if given the opportunity.”

I stared at him. He looked in deadly earnest.

“I suppose, then, given the fact that I just promised Anniki I'd do her job, I should be very worried.”

Amusement flickered momentarily on his face. “I have a different plan in mind for you.”

“Oh,
that
makes me feel better,” I said, my stomach turning over at the thought of what sorts of evil things he might do to me. I shook my head at my folly—surely the police would have been a better choice than a madman? “Why would you kill one of your own people?”

“I wouldn't.”

“But you just said—” The penny dropped with an almost audible clang. “Wait a second—you're not part of the Brotherhood?”

“Would that I were so I could see them pay for their crimes,” he said, biting off each word.

“Pay for what?” I was feeling more and more like we were talking in circles.

His knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “They killed Angelica.”

“Your girlfriend?”

He nodded.

“I'm sorry. Alec said something about you losing a loved one a few years ago.” Against my better judgment, a small well of sympathy opened up. Having lost both of my parents to a drunk driver some eight years before, I knew how long the grief of sudden, tragic death could remain. If he was on a vendetta against a murderer, I could understand his desire to see someone pay. “I assume the person responsible was never caught?”

He shot me a quick, unreadable look.

“I'm not asking just to be nosy—my parents were killed by a drunk driver with a long record and no license. It took my brother and me four years of legal wrangling before we finally got a vehicular homicide charge to stick, but I remember how consumed we were to see justice done.”

“I killed the reaper who conducted the ritual upon her,” he said flatly, his voice as hard as flint.

Horror stirred the hair on the back of my neck at the way he spat out the word “ritual.” I remembered Anniki saying something about how the Brotherhood performed rituals on vampires. . . .

That last word echoed in my head with a terrifying enlightenment, one that left me gaping openmouthed for a moment. “You're . . . you're . . . you're one of those vampires, aren't you? The ones Anniki was telling me about. The whatchamacallits . . . Black Ones?”

“We prefer the term ‘Dark One,' ” he said without the slightest sign of concern that he had just admitted he was a vampire.

“Holy Jehoshaphat and the Wizard of Oz,” I swore, fear skittering up my back. “A vampire. A real vampire. Oh my god. Does . . . does Alec know?”

He bent a look upon me that implied I was a moron, which at that moment was probably deserved. “Alec is older than me.”

I stared at him, my brain trying to come to grips with the fact that the man sitting next to me, the perfectly normal-looking man, was, in fact, the evil undead. “What does that have to do with anything?”

He spun the wheel, sending us careening off the main road and down a winding track that led into the small fishing town. “You can't expect me to believe you're that naive.”

I gasped, really gasped as his meaning struck me. “You're not saying Alec is one, too?”

“I just told you he's older than I am. I was born in 1623. He has at least eighty years on me.”

My jaw dropped again, so stunned was I that it only dimly filtered through my brain that Kristoff had stopped the car in the shade of a squat stone building that was perched on top of a cliff that overlooked the small fishing village. “But . . . a vampire? Alec? No. I don't believe it. You're just trying to scare me.”

“If I wanted to scare you, I'd tell you what I was thinking at this moment,” he said dryly.

“Alec is no more a vampire than I am,” I told him, absolutely confident in what I said.

Kristoff raised an eyebrow.

“Answer me this, then, Mr. Fangs—vampires drink blood, right? So if Alec is a vampire, why didn't he drink my blood?” I asked in tones of indisputable reason.

“I have no doubt that he did.”

“A feeble answer at best,” I said smugly. “I'd know if someone was drinking my blood.”

Kristoff suddenly leaned over me, turning my head to examine the side of my neck farthest from him. “I thought so,” he said after a moment's silence, releasing my chin and sitting back in his seat. “You are mistaken. You bear a mark.”

“What?” I pulled down the overhead sunshade, examining myself in the mirror contained on its back. Sure enough, there was a small bruising on the side of my neck, right where I remembered Alec nuzzling me. “That's not vampire teeth marks. It's a hickey.”

I could swear that Kristoff was having to fight to keep from rolling his eyes. “It is the same thing.”

I touched the spot gingerly, eyeing it before turning to him. “I always thought vampires left two little teeth marks.”

“You watch too much TV.”

“Are you saying you always leave a mark when you bite someone?”

“Not always. It takes much concentration, however, and generally we're . . . distracted.”

“By what?” I couldn't help but ask. “Garlic?”

He did roll his eyes now. “Hardly. The act of taking blood can be very . . . intimate.”

“Oh, that sort of distracted.” I touched the spot again. It didn't hurt, just felt somewhat numb. “So drinking someone's blood is sexually arousing?”

“It can be, yes. Not always, but it can be so, depending on the subject.”

I flinched at his term, casting my mind back to the events of the evening. There had been a moment when Alec was nibbling my neck, and I thought he'd bitten me a smidgen too hard, but that had eased up almost immediately. “And the person you're biting doesn't know you're doing it?”

“That depends,” he said, consulting his watch.

“On what?”

“On whether or not there is a shared sexual attraction.”

Well, there had definitely been that last night. So perhaps the hickey wasn't so much a hickey as it was an indicator that Alec was more than he seemed. But if that was true, then he'd be no better than Kristoff.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don't believe it. Alec is good. He's not evil, like you.”

Kristoff turned his teal eyes on me, the look of scorn in them so strong it stung. “Your people kill mine ruthlessly, without prejudice, conducting the most obscene rituals they can think of, and you call me evil?”

I clawed at the seat belt, ripping it off as I jerked open the car door, desperate to escape the dangerous Kristoff.

He snarled something and leaped after me, slamming me up against the stone wall of the building. We were on the shaded side, the sun not having yet warmed the stone, but it was not for that reason that I shivered against the cold wall.

“The Brotherhood purifies people—” I started to say, grabbing at my memory of what Anniki had told me the evening before.

“Purifies.” He spat the word out like it was poison, leaning close to me, so close I could feel the warmth of his body, but it was the rage and hatred in his eyes that left me paralyzed with fear. “Do you know how your precious reapers purified Angelica? They started with a crucifixion, draining almost all of her blood, leaving her racked with pain and almost unbearable hunger. After that, they called down their cleansing light. Do you know what that is, Zorya?”

I shook my head, tears blurring my vision.

“Complete immolation. They used to simply burn people at the stake, but now they use their damned light to burn a body from the inside out.”

My stomach lurched, a horrible vision rising in my mind. I closed my eyes, tears burning paths down my cheeks.

“They didn't burn her to death then. That would have been too easy a death for her. Their last rite of purification was a beheading . . . slowly, taking several strokes, with the spinal cord severed last.”

I shoved him away, racing to a small scrubby bush and falling to my knees, wanting to vomit, but my stomach was too revolted to do even that.

“They left her head with her body so I could see the expression on her face,” he said from behind me. “They wanted me to know what torment she suffered before she died. Those are the people you represent, Pia. And you wonder that I hunt them.”

“If that's true, I wouldn't blame you in the least,” I started to say, but before I could finish he yanked me to my feet.

“
If
it is true?” His furious gaze searched my face. “You doubt me?”

“I don't know what to think,” I wailed, too overwhelmed with confusion to try to sort things out. “I don't think you're lying, no. I know grief when I see it. But Anniki wasn't that sort of person. At least I don't think she was—she seemed compassionate, as if she really cared about people.”

“People, but not Dark Ones.”

I opened my mouth to dispute that statement, but didn't know what to say.

“It doesn't matter,” he said, his expression going hard as he wrapped a hand around my arm and hauled me to the front of the building. “Believe what you want. I'm going to ensure that you, at least, will not allow the reapers to kill any more of my people.”

“Oh dear god, you're going to kill me!” I screamed, panicking as he jerked open a wooden door and hauled me inside the building.

“If I wanted to do that, I'd have broken your neck last night. Be quiet, woman!” he yelled, startling me into silence, the last few echoes of my screeches fading away. “The priest here doesn't speak English, so it's no use begging him for help.”

“Priest!” I squawked, clawing at his hand in an attempt to get free. My entire body was riddled with fear and the knowledge that I was about to be killed by a vampire. “For last rites?”

A small, wrinkled man shuffled forward out of the gloom, and I realized with a start that I was in a tiny church. For some reason, that scared me even more. What if the vampires had their own horrible cult, someplace to conduct their dark doings?

“What I am about to do is much, much worse than death,” Kristoff said, pulling me so close I could see the tiny black lines that flared out from his pupils. Suddenly, he smiled, but it wasn't a nice smile, not nice at all. It was the sort of smile a panther would give a particularly juicy-looking rabbit just before it pounced. “We're going to be married, Zorya.”

I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head. “You're not going to kill me?”

His smile grew. “No.”

I sagged with relief until his next words hit me.

“But you're going to wish you were dead before I'm done with you.”

“Sign.”

“No. I'm not going to do it.”

Kristoff's hand tightened around my throat. “Sign it or I will break your neck.”

It wasn't easy to swallow with him half throttling me like that, but I finally managed it. “Look, I don't know why you want to marry me—”

“I'd as soon as marry a viper,” he interrupted. “Alec agreed to do it, but since he conveniently disappeared last night when I went to arrange for the license, I am the sacrifice instead.”

I bristled a little at the word “sacrifice.” “Well, I don't particularly like you, either! Alec is much, much nicer than you. He actually smiles.”