Of Masques and Martyrs Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Praise for Of Saints and Shadows . . .

  “Golden’s book is the template for a score of books that have been published in the years since its publication. Many of those books have been bestsellers. Reading Of Saints and Shadows again, I was amazed how many elements now familiar in the vampire and thriller genres appeared in Saints first. Golden’s imagination and expert plotting wove these elements into a startlingly original book, as exciting to read now as it was when it first appeared on the rack.”

  —Charlaine Harris

  . . . and for the Peter Octavian novels

  “Christopher Golden has reinvented the vampire myth into nonstop action, suspense, and fascinating dark fantasy. [He’s] an imaginative and prodigious talent who never lets genre boundaries hold him back.”

  —Douglas Clegg, author of the Vampyricon series

  “Harrowing, humorous, overflowing with plot contortions . . . abundantly entertaining. A portent of great things to come . . . a writer who cares passionately about the stuff of horror.”

  —Douglas E. Winter, Cemetery Dance

  “You can damn near chase me a mile these days with a vampire novel. Talk about your boring genre . . . Then along comes Christopher Golden . . . and [he] reminds me there is no such thing as a boring genre, just boring writers. A crew to which Mr. Golden does not belong. His work is fast and furious, funny and original.”

  —Joe R. Lansdale, author of Vanilla Ride

  “Golden combines quiet, dark, subtle mood with Super-Giant monster action. Sort of M. R. James meets Godzilla!”

  —Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy

  “Just when you thought nothing new could be done with the vampire mythos, [Christopher Golden] comes along and shows us otherwise.”

  —Ray Garton, author of Bestial

  “Christopher Golden is an imaginative storyteller whose writing is both chilling and suspenseful.”

  —Philip Nutman, author of Cities of Night

  “Golden has painted an intriguing canvas . . . filled with action, sweep, and dark mythology.”

  —Rex Miller, author of Butcher

  “One of the best horror novels of the year. Filled with tension, breathtaking action, dire plots, and a convincing depiction of worlds existing unseen within our own. One of the most promising debuts in some time.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  “Passionate . . . excellent . . . Golden has written one of the best . . . a deep probe into the inner workings of the church and a surprise explanation for vampires. [A] brilliant vampire novel in a blizzard of bloody tooth bites this year.”

  —LitNews Online

  “A breathtaking story that succeeds in marrying gore and romance, sex, and sentiment. A brilliant epic.”

  —Dark News (Paris)

  Look for all the Peter Octavian novels from Ace Books

  OF SAINTS AND SHADOWS

  ANGEL SOULS AND DEVIL HEARTS

  OF MASQUES AND MARTYRS

  THE GATHERING DARK

  (February 2011)

  WAKING NIGHTMARES

  (April 2011)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  OF MASQUES AND MARTYRS

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / December 1998

  Copyright © 1998 by Christopher Golden.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-52530-2

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  With love and respect, this one is for Jose R. Nieto, whose talent is matched only by his nobility

  Acknowledgment TK

  Prologue

  But the tigers come at night,

  with their voices soft as thunder.

  —HERBERT KRETZMER, Les Misérables

  AS THE FIRST HINTS OF DUSK BEGAN TO TAINT the wispy blue spring sky above Washington Square Park, the music abruptly stopped.

  A handsome young black man with a shaved head and stubbly goatee glanced nervously at the pink-edged clouds and packed his saxophone away in its case. He looked almost ashamed and didn’t meet the eyes of the muttering tourists and strolling locals who commented on the speed of his departure. He just went.

  “Too bad,” said a dark-haired teenaged girl, whose ragged clothes and sickly pale face might have given the impression that she was a homeless person, if not for the three-hundred-dollar sunglasses she wore.

  “I was hoping he’d play that blues riff again,” she added.

  The large, blond, well-muscled man on the bench beside her offered no response but a slight nod. He too wore sunglasses, but of the cheap plastic variety. Blue jeans and white sneakers and a sweatshirt with “Sorbonne” embroidered across the front completed his ensemble.

  An oddly matched pair, even to a casual observer. Not family, surely. And unlikely as lovers for a number of reasons, not the least of which was their apparent age difference. Otherwise, the two were determinedly unremarkable.

  They sat and watched as the
exodus continued. Dusk was coming on full speed. It had been unseasonably chilly that last week of April, and the night seemed heartened by the memory of winter, creeping quickly over the city as though full-blown spring weren’t a week away. Though growing longer, the days were still too short by far, all things considered. And the long nights were very sparsely populated. Only the foolhardy, the romantic, and the desperate tended to stay on the streets after sunset.

  It simply wasn’t safe.

  Parents left first, strapping infants into strollers and lofting toddlers to shoulders and whisking their families away home. Which was never very far. Even those brave or foolish enough to stay out after dark didn’t stray too far from home.

  Then the sky began to grow dark. The first star appeared. And the park’s crowd thinned more rapidly. Soon, only half a dozen skateboard kids still roamed the tree-lined park—kids whose parents worked nights, or were on crack, or just didn’t give a fuck—feeding each other false courage, baying to the moon, laughing at the night. Maybe they didn’t care what happened to them. Maybe they just didn’t believe it could happen. Human nature, that was. It isn’t real unless you can see it with your own eyes, touch it with your own hands, smell it, taste it, hear it.

  They’d been out there night after night after night, for months on end, those forgotten, daredevil children. Nothing bad had ever happened to them. Around them, most certainly. To people they knew, of course. There wasn’t anyone left in Manhattan who didn’t know someone who’d been taken by the night.

  By the shadows.

  With the coming of the night, the city began to quiet down. People were still out, but traveling in packs; in cars or on the subway. Bass beats still thumped the air outside the front doors of dance clubs, but the one-night stand had gone the way of the drive-in theater and the record player. Rarer than rare. Lunch dates were the thing now. House parties were big too. Adult sleepovers.

  Still, the city was far quieter after dark than it had been a year, even a few months, earlier. On the bench where they still sat—bearing witness to the terror that had transformed daily life in New York, and so many other places across the world—the silent man and the attractive brunette girl sat and waited and listened to the way the city had changed.

  The trees whispered with a warm breeze, a tease that tomorrow spring might finally triumph over the stubborn winter. In the distance, a police siren began to scream in horror. Just the first of many, like every other night. The clack-clack of skateboard wheels, of jumping and spinning and falling; the laughter of American youth—smart enough to know better but too jaded to care.

  “Tonight, you think?” the young woman asked. “It’s been nearly two weeks watching these punks. I’d hate to move on. If we find some other bait, I’m sure that’ll be the night they come for our skate-boys.”

  The silent blond man seemed to ponder her words. He looked at her, ice blue eyes narrowing a moment, remembering how young and arrogant she’d seemed when they’d first met, not very long after she’d been murdered on a dirty back alley in Atlanta, Georgia. She’d been sixteen when she died. She seemed so much older than that now, but looked exactly the same.

  He smiled half-heartedly, and turned to watch the skateboarders again.

  “Let’s hope,” he said, but his voice was only in her head. He hadn’t spoken aloud. Couldn’t, in fact. Rolf Sechs was mute.

  So they sat in silence, Rolf and Erika, as they’d done for too many nights, and they watched. On this night, they didn’t have long to wait. Less than an hour after full dark, the clack-clack of skateboards came to a clattering halt.

  “Jesus! What the fuck is . . .” one of the boys shouted. Angry words laced with testosterone.

  Sad counterpoint to the shrill screams that followed.

  “Yes!” Erika rasped.

  Together, she and Rolf melted away from the bench, bones snapping, skin stretching, shrinking, changing. A pair of filthy pigeons, too stupid to fly south for the winter, winged up into the night sky and across Washington Square Park. The birds came to roost atop the landmark arch in the middle of the park.

  From there, they watched the slaughter.

  Blood jetted skyward, spattering the cobblestones as five young lives were extinguished in an almost balletic act of carnage. The skateboarders never stood a chance. Ever silent, Rolf watched, with Erika at his side, as a trio of barbaric vampires feasted. For perhaps the first time, he relished his muteness. If he’d been able to speak, he would never have been able to control the urge to cry out in horror at the savagery of his own race.

  For they were of his race. Semantics had separated them, and loyalties as well. He and Erika were shadows, members of Octavian’s coven, and dedicated to peaceful coexistence with humanity. These others belonged to Hannibal’s brutal clan, whose goal was the enslavement of a human race they perceived as nothing more than cattle. They eschewed the less volatile name of shadow, embracing instead the title of myth, of terrible legend—vampire.

  Shadow and vampire, one and the same, and yet now forever at war. And by their very nature, the vampires were destined to triumph. For shadows did not recruit, did not steal life and thus violently draft new souls into the war. New shadows were created by individual choice. While the ranks of the vampire swelled, the number of shadows rose ever so slowly.

  But the shadows counted many humans among their ranks. They were even allowed to become members of the coven, these living, breathing souls. And it was to that alliance that Octavian’s faithful now looked for some spark of hope.

  Most of them.

  But Rolf was different. Rolf Sechs had many reasons to want the vampire lord Hannibal dead, not the least of which was the murder of his one-time lover, a human soldier named Elissa Thomas. He also knew Hannibal better than the rest of Octavian’s coven did. Better, perhaps, than anyone but the immortal madman himself.

  In the brief time when humanity and shadows had lived in peace, Hannibal and Rolf had worked together to police the vampires of the world. But Hannibal had not been in the game for any benevolent purpose. Rather, he had been there to find followers, to uncover those immortals whose personal philosophies might be aligned with his own.

  He was shopping for warriors. And he found them. And when the time came that the world, human and otherwise, needed him most, Hannibal betrayed them all.

  Hannibal’s crimes were an endless litany of horror and betrayal, and his perversion spread more each day. Major cities across the face of the globe cowered in fear of the dark. No matter what skirmishes they won, what nests they destroyed, the shadows could not seem even to slow the spread of Hannibal’s reign of chaos.

  Rolf was tired of it. Of fighting to hold ground rather than take it. Of fighting the slaves and not the master. He longed to hold Hannibal’s head in his powerful hands and crush it, to feel the vampire’s skull shatter, and blood leak through his fingers.

  He had abandoned Octavian’s coven because he couldn’t wait any longer. The only way to stop Hannibal’s campaign of terror, in Rolf’s mind, was to destroy the elder vampire himself. Thus had begun the descent into hell, the investigation which had led him here, to New York City.

  Erika had come along without being asked. He knew she loved him, but he kept her at a distance. She had been there, had witnessed the horrors Hannibal was capable of. She wanted him dead as well. But it wasn’t the same thing. And he could not offer her much of a life together until this one thing was done.

  So he watched. Together, they watched. They listened to the sounds of murder and saw the gore spread playfully around the park and the corpses of strong, young American boys defiled in ways Rolf—who was centuries old when Hitler came to power and still shivered in horror at the predations of the Nazis—had never imagined. Together they watched.

  And did nothing.

  When the vampires had drunk their fill, had painted themselves in blood and shit and danced a grotesque jig in the viscera of their victims, the savages laughed together like drunken c
ollege boys and shoved one another around in play. One by one, they transformed into huge, filthy bats, and flew into the northern sky. Confined as they were by Hannibal’s loyalty to traditional myths, the vampires could choose from a limited array of changes.

  The shadows, on the other hand, could be anything their minds might imagine. Anything. From city birds, Rolf and Erika transformed once more, to become birds of prey. Two large hawks took flight from atop the arch in Washington Square Park and set off after the trio of blood-matted bats flying north.

  Inside the lead hawk, the mind of Rolf Sechs burned with hatred, sang with a lusty bloodsong that the peaceful shadows rarely allowed themselves. The time had come. He felt it within him as surely as he felt the thirst upon him. Hannibal would die beneath his powerful hands, flashing talons, razor fangs. Rolf would show the arrogant elder the true face of the vampire.

  At her lover’s side, Erika Hunter flew in silence. Though he could not speak aloud, Rolf had become quite talkative in the year they’d spent together as a couple. Telepathy was only possible among shadows of the same bloodline. Fortunately, they shared an ancestor, and she was able to hear his kind voice in her mind, and was often required to communicate for him.

  Yet, over the days they had spent waiting for Hannibal’s followers to appear, so that they might follow the bastard creatures home to their master, Rolf had communicated with her less and less frequently. And when he did speak in her mind, she could feel the tension, the obsession, the darkness welling up within him.