Of Masques and Martyrs Read online

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I mean, I knew there were vampires. I came to grips with that years ago. It became a part of everyday life for everybody . . . every human being on Earth. I talked to this drummer I used to jam with, an old guy, and he said it was kind of like living during the Cold War, when they thought the Russians were going to attack with nukes at any second. Knowing vampires were out there was a lot like that, he told me.

  “But knowing it and living it are two different things. I mean, they tried to . . . tried to kill me last night. You have to understand how weird this all is to me.”

  “Believe me, I do,” Peter said gently. “People deal with it a lot of different ways. Violence, humor, denial . . . terror, of course. It’s okay.”

  “You don’t get it,” Nikki argued. “For a second, it almost felt like this was, you know, an actual date.”

  Peter had been leaning forward, a warm smile on his face. Now he sat back, blinking, and glanced away. His smile changed, became ironic, self-deprecating.

  “It isn’t?” he asked, and made a silly face. “How foolish of me.”

  Nikki laughed uncomfortably.

  “Listen, if you want to go, I’ll—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “No, I’m sorry. Eat your dinner and I’ll tell you my boring life story.”

  Peter relaxed and dug into his jambalaya, and Nikki spent all of ten minutes regaling him with tales of home and Mom and the blues.

  “Not much of a life, especially in light of all you’ve experienced, but it’s mine,” she said when she was done.

  “It sounds like a wonderful life,” Peter told her. “I envy you, in a way. And I have sympathy, as well. If we’re not able to stop Hannibal, these may seem like the good old days to you.”

  “Isn’t that a fucking optimistic thought,” Nikki said, laughing in disbelief at Peter’s morbid sentiment. “I guess you’re just going to have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  Peter blinked.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said simply.

  They ate in a more comfortable silence for nearly a full minute. Nikki watched him eat, glanced away when he looked at her, tried to push the confused thoughts from her head. Tried to make sense of the danger, the horror, the attraction. Her old life was over, she knew that much. It had ended the moment Tsumi and her friends came into Old Antoine’s the night before.

  She made a decision then. She would stay at the convent, or go wherever else Peter’s coven went. At least until Hannibal was destroyed and the world was safe again. The idea of being alone in the world, with predators in every shadow, did not appeal to her at all. No, she would stick with Peter. And she wasn’t at all certain that fear for her own safety was the only motivation for her decision.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said, breaking the silence.

  “Anything,” Peter replied.

  “Who’s the blond on your bedside table?”

  Peter raised his eyebrows.

  “Now that sounds like a date question to me,” he said.

  “Does it bother you?” Nikki asked.

  “Far from it,” Peter replied. “Her name was Meaghan Gallagher. She was a lot of things, to a lot of people. To me . . . well, she was the last woman I took out for a nice, quiet dinner.”

  Nikki smiled, looked away. “I don’t quite know how to respond to that,” she admitted.

  “You’re not expected to,” Peter said.

  Then he grunted, low and surprised, and reached up to his forehead. The frown on his face spoke of pain and anger. Annoyance, most of all. In that moment, Nikki saw another part of Peter Octavian. His warm kindness was no mask, but it was hardly all he was made of. He’d been a warrior all his life, after all. Fought and killed and died and rose again to kill some more.

  He was no saint.

  Nikki found the danger in Peter Octavian startlingly attractive.

  Peter grunted again and bent over slightly in his chair, massaging his temples with both hands.

  “Peter, are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said grimly. “I’ve been getting these headaches. This one’s the worst.”

  “Maybe we’d better go back,” she suggested.

  Peter nodded. He took a sip of water and signaled the waiter to bring the bill, paid in cash, and stumbled to his feet. Nikki found herself holding his arm and partially guiding him on their walk back toward the convent.

  Drunken revelers burst from a bar on Rue Dumaine, and Nikki started in fear and stared at their faces, terrified she’d find a beautiful Japanese vampire woman among them.

  With Peter almost staggering in pain, Nikki realized that she didn’t feel safe at all. If he wasn’t able to protect her, then being with him made her even more of a target. Part of her wanted badly to leave him to his own devices, to run and hide and forget all about the people, both living and dead, in the old Ursuline convent just a few blocks away.

  But she stayed at his side, and walked him the rest of the way home. She owed him that much at least.

  And, after all, she had nowhere else to go.

  The entire French Quarter, and then some, separated St. Louis Cemetery number one from the old Ursuline convent where Peter Octavian’s coven made their home. It had never seemed a long distance before. But as Kevin struggled against Stefan’s powerful grip, the screams of his lover echoing across the cemetery toward them, it might as well have been the other side of the world.

  “Kevin!” Stefan snapped. “We’ve got to go!”

  “No!” Kevin roared, breaking free of Stefan’s grasp.

  Stefan reached for him again and clamped a crushing hand down on Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin spun and reached for him, his hand changing without any conscious thought, and tore deep, bloody furrows across Stefan’s pale face. The other shadow snarled and clutched at the fresh wounds, but stopped. His face changed from pain and shock to fury. Stefan grabbed Kevin by the front of his shirt, hauled him up short.

  “I know you loved him,” Stefan said. “But there’s nothing to be done for him now, not unless you want to throw your life away! You want to fight for him, you want vengeance? Fine! But it can’t be right now! We’ve got to get back home, get reinforcements, tell the rest what’s happening here! Don’t be an asshole!”

  Kevin snarled, his fangs elongating as he shoved Stefan away. He was going to retaliate, to strike out with a fury usually reserved for bigots. How could Stefan speak to him like this, he thought, while the laughter of the vampires and Joe’s screaming could still be heard across the cemetery. Kevin’s lover was in agony, and there was nothing . . .

  Nothing.

  The screaming had stopped.

  No laughing either. Not a sound. Just the wind among the gray stone crypts. For the first time Kevin felt the warmth of the tears that streaked his cheeks, rich scarlet blood on ebony flesh.

  “They’re coming,” Stefan said curtly.

  For a moment all Kevin could do was watch in fascination as the wounds he’d slashed in Stefan’s face closed by themselves, healing instantaneously.

  Then he wiped the bloody tears from his face, glanced quickly around at the matrix of tombs that surrounded them, and something turned inside him. Turned cold. And dark. He drew himself up to his full height, a full four inches taller than Stefan.

  “I’m sorry,” Kevin said, without feeling.

  Stefan nodded.

  As if that were their cue, two slavering vampires cried out from atop a nearby sepulchre, and then leaped down a yard away from Stefan and Kevin. He knew they had to leave, had to get word back to the others—Stefan had been right about that, without question—but Kevin reveled in the attack. Even as Stefan traded savage blows with the other, Kevin turned toward the vampire closest to him.

  The primal thing shrieked as it scrambled at him. These two were no match for them, nothing more than watchdogs, he suspected, like dobermans in the car dealership lot. But they might buy the others time.
/>   Kevin blazed into fire, and the vampire passed right through him without slowing. When it turned, its hair was ablaze. It didn’t even bother trying to smother the flames. It simply came for him again. Kevin sidestepped, overconfident, and the thing raked his belly open with barely a whisper, so sharp were its claws.

  Enraged, he held his viscera in, forcing the wounds to heal, even as the thing came at him again. His left hand burst into flame. With it, he grabbed the savage vampire’s face and shot forward, feet barely touching the ground. He slammed the vampire’s skull into a marble crypt that had an angel mounted on its roof, and heard a satisfying crack. Skull or marble, he didn’t know. Perhaps both.

  His right hand transformed into a massive silver spike, and Kevin punched it through the vampire’s chest and heart. He realized he was screaming, but what exactly he was screaming he couldn’t be certain. Blood flowed down his cheeks once more, tears of rage and grief. He pounded the silver spike that was his right hand into the vampire’s body over and over, heart and spine and groin and throat. It writhed, still alive, until he spiked it through the skull, let his right hand return to normal, wrapped his fingers around the vampire’s brain, and burned it to ashes.

  As he backed away, the angel atop the crypt, unsettled by the violence, slid another millimeter and then tumbled down to shatter what remained of the vampire’s corpse.

  He heard applause. Turned to see that the vampires’ plan had worked. An attractive Asian female stood with a dozen or so others behind her. The woman must be Tsumi, he realized.

  “Sima,” Tsumi said to the huge warrior. “Kill them for me.”

  “Sorry, bitch,” Stefan said, stepping up behind Kevin. “We’re not staying.”

  Then Stefan grunted in pain, and Kevin spun to see a huge axe in the other shadow’s skull. A huge, naked male, blond and bearded, with a ragged scar down his face, stood over Stefan and pulled the axe from his brain. It would take a few seconds before Stefan could recover, and by then he’d have been beheaded.

  Kevin doubted more than a handful of vampires had the will to survive a beheading. Stefan wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t save Stefan, but Kevin knew his friend had been right. Kevin had a duty to the coven. Hate boiling up inside him like bile, he turned and threw off two vampires who had rushed at him, then spat his words at the Asian woman who commanded them.

  “I’ll be back for you, you little bitch,” Kevin snarled.

  Instantly, he transformed himself into a falcon. Part of him railed at his planned retreat, demanded he stay, for honor’s sake. Bullshit. He would honor his love for Joe, and his fidelity to the coven, by doing what was right, what he should have done minutes ago.

  Kevin pumped his wings, speeding over the lights of New Orleans. Over the French Quarter and toward the Mississippi River. Tsumi and the other vampires gave chase instantly, of course, but they were bound by their loyalty to Hannibal. They could only take certain forms, and of those forms, only bats could fly.

  And there was no way even the largest bat could keep up with a falcon. It was just that kind of handicap which gave Kevin even a glimmer of hope for the future. But they’d have to take the battle to Hannibal soon, or it would be too late.

  Kevin had never been vicious. Never been a warrior. Now he’d been made one. And that bitch Tsumi, and Hannibal himself, would regret it.

  Inside the chapel of the convent, which was bare but for the crucified Christ that still hung on the wall, George Marcopoulos stepped up onto the altar. He sat in a high-backed, hard wooden chair and faced the row of fifteen pews. George surveyed the seven faces that looked up at him in expectation. Black and white and Asian and Latin. Men and women.

  All human, like him.

  But unlike George, they were all young. He felt very, very old. Ironic, he thought. Yes, those gathered to listen to him speak were youthful, not one of them had yet reached forty years of age, but a great many of the other beings in the convent were far, far older than George. Older than George would ever grow to be.

  In the way his eyes wouldn’t quite focus anymore, in the way his hands shook ever so slightly, in the bone-deep ache that never really went away, in the late nights when sleep seemed as distant as his memories of youth—in all those things, George Marcopoulos felt death approaching. And despite the fact that immortality was offered to him nearly every day, he did not struggle or balk at the approach of death.

  In death, he had every faith, he would see his Valerie again. He had seen with his own eyes proof of God’s existence. Heaven waited, in some form or another, he believed. To George, the approach of death was as satisfying as sitting in a rocker on the front porch of his old vacation house in Maine, watching the sun drain away over the lake after a long day. His work was done. Soon, he would rest.

  But not yet. Peter needed him, this one last time. And he would hold death itself at bay in order to stand with Peter in a time of need. This one last time.

  “Thank you all for coming,” George began. “I have recently come from a meeting with Peter and have a great deal of disturbing news. I hope you will spread it to those of us who could not make it. We, the humans of this coven, are about to be faced with an extraordinarily difficult decision.”

  He waited, scanning their faces. George knew, better than anyone, the fear and temptation that was about to confront them.

  “The rest of the world remains ignorant of the real threat Hannibal and his vampire clans pose to our way of life. In their hatred of our kind, the leaders of the world have made cooperation impossible. You few, and those of your friends and family and acquaintances you have informed are the only people on the face of this Earth who truly understand what we face.

  “I feel sick at the very thought of it, but I have to tell you now that Peter doesn’t think we can win,” George said bluntly.

  His words had the desired effect.

  Horror.

  “George, what de hell are you talkin’ ’bout?” demanded a broad-shouldered Cajun man George believed was named Dennis, or Denny.

  “Yes, George, how can you even say that?” asked Janine, a beautiful mulatto woman descended from the quadroons of New Orleans.

  The controversy raged a moment. George did not interfere. He waited a full minute, then held up his hand, asking for silence without raising his voice. Conflict was not what he wanted, but he knew they needed time to vent their fears and anger.

  “Let me finish, please,” George said, and all seven faces turned toward him again.

  “You’re all, as always, perfectly welcome to leave at any time. You have joined us for your own reasons, and by your own will. No one will blame you if you decide to leave now,” he promised.

  “But human civilization is in jeopardy. Peter doesn’t think we can win, that’s true. At least, not without help,” he said.

  George glanced around the room, waiting for his words to sink in. For the understanding to begin. After a few moments, he noticed Janine drop her head to her hands and draw in a loud breath of realization.

  “Mon Dieu,” she whispered.

  “Indeed,” George replied, and she looked up at him, eyes wide.

  “Peter has asked that all of you, and all of the other human members of the coven, and anyone else you know sympathetic to our fight, gravely consider the possibility of taking the Gift,” he explained.

  “Of dying, you mean?” Denny said, doubtful.

  “Of living forever,” corrected a thin Vietnamese man behind him.

  “It’s a horrible decision,” George added. “Whatever your choice, you will always wonder if it was the right one. And nobody will be forced to pass into the life of shadows against their will.”

  “I don’ want to be a vampire,” Denny said tentatively.

  “Neither do I,” Janine said, “but I want to choose my own destiny. And having Hannibal decide whether I may live as a vampire or die as a human appeals to me even less.”

  “I will leave you to your decisions,” George said, using the armres
ts of the chair to rise with a crackling of his old bones. “It would be best if you could decide within the next few hours. The final struggle could begin at any time.”

  At any time, George thought. The end can come at any time.

  6

  I’ll tell you why baby’s crying.

  ’Cause she’s dying. Aren’t we all?

  —HARRY CHAPIN, “Taxi”

  THE MAN BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE TAXI stank of sweat and whiskey. He never looked in the rearview mirror, never spoke, just kept his eyes on Pontchartrain Expressway as it unfolded in front of the vehicle and was swallowed beneath it.

  In the back of the taxi, Kuromaku sat in silence. His body hummed with nervous energy, and he urged the car on with his every thought. The dream, or vision, still lingered with him. Of him fighting by Peter’s side, and of Peter bleeding, perhaps dying. In the dream, they had been in this city, the city of New Orleans. But where, exactly, he was uncertain.

  Kuromaku had amassed considerable wealth over the centuries. He traded in antiquities, when he conducted any business at all. It had been a simple thing to have his own pilot fly him from Bordeaux to New Orleans. Even better, it had been dark already, and as they were flying west, it was still night when they landed. Six years ago, Kuromaku had learned about the Venice Jihad the same way the rest of the world had—from CNN. It was there that he first saw video of shadows, of his own kind, standing in the sunlight and surviving.

  Two full years passed before he had the courage to try it himself. Though he now came and went as he pleased, Kuromaku was still far more comfortable sleeping during the day and conducting the rest of his life at night. However, in the past year, with the world on a vampire hunt, that had become more difficult. He’d had to take extra efforts to hide his true nature, far more than he had ever done.

  So he had been pleased to arrive in the Crescent City just after three o’clock. The airport was quiet in the early morning hours. As he was a dealer in antiquities, the weapons posed only a small problem getting through American customs. But even those few minutes had seemed precious to him. For Kuromaku had no idea where to begin searching for Peter Octavian. None at all.