The Gathering Dark Read online

  Our job. Faces flashed across his mind, images of friends who had been dead many hundreds of years and yet for whom his heart still ached.

  “We were supposed to keep the Turks out,” he said, a rasp in his voice that he did not like.

  His eyes opened and he glanced over at one of the canvases propped against the wall. It showed the ships in the water of the Golden Horn, feeding the assault on Constantinople, their bone-white sails pregnant with the wind, as though God himself were spurring them on to the city’s destruction.

  Peter shook his head. “They did the impossible, you know. The Turks, I mean. They could not pass the barrier the Emperor had placed to guard the entrance to the Golden Horn and so the Sultan ordered his armies to transport their ships across the land.” He stared at the priest. “Across the land, Jack. Do you have any idea of the enormity of that?”

  “I can only imagine.”

  The mage laughed then, a long, hearty sound that surprised him as it came out. He gazed longingly at his paintings again and then back at the priest.

  “No. You know, you really can’t. It was 1453, Jack. You don’t have a clue. Another world, not just another time. And so to your suggestion that I was a soldier I say, yes, I suppose in your terms I was a soldier. But we were a city at war and I was an able-bodied man in service to my Emperor, my father. I was a warrior, Father Devlin.

  “A warrior.”

  Peter hung his head a moment and took a long breath. Then he took another and looked up again.

  “Look, you came here for a reason. I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “You’re not,” the priest said quickly, and apparently with great sincerity given the expression on his face. “Please go on.”

  He sipped thoughtfully at his tea. “I wanted to kill Turks. As many Turks as I could. They were destroying the empire, destroying my home and my friends and the women I had loved or had wanted to love, and they were tearing apart my world. I wanted to kill them with a passion that is yet another thing I’m afraid you cannot possibly imagine.

  “But the city was falling, you see. It was only a matter of time. I don’t mean weeks, I mean hours.” Peter pointed to the easel, to the painting he had just completed. “That is the night, right there. Those trees and the roses in early bloom and nightingales singing and a man came to me who was not a man and he offered me a chance to become a far greater warrior, an invincible warrior who might slaughter Turks by the hundreds.”

  Peter leaned forward and set his teacup on the floor. He had lost his desire for it entirely. He gazed steadily at the priest.

  “What else was I to say? He took my blood and gave me his, and in all the ways that really mattered, I died. My name then was not what it is now, as I’m sure you know. He gave it to me, the one who made me a vampire.”

  Though he had been unable to stop Constantinople from falling, Octavian had spent years killing as many Turks as he was able, a new family around him. He remembered how it had changed him, had brought him to the point where killing seemed all he knew how to do, where it had seemed like a good idea.

  “I allowed myself to be lulled into the belief that I was not a warrior, but a hunter,” he said.

  “A vampire,” Father Jack whispered. “You were a vampire.”

  “Yes,” Peter replied. “And back in the day, that meant all the things we thought it meant. All the rules, all the bullshit, all the . . . all the cruelty and bloodshed . . .”

  He waved his hand as if brushing it all away. “Bullshit,” he said again. “There’s no such thing as vampires, Jack. Not the figures painted by the legends of myth and pop culture. You know that or you wouldn’t be here. But call them that if you want, for lack of a better word. I was one of them, but I became tired of killing. It wasn’t what I wanted, not what I signed up for.”

  A bitter laugh escaped him.

  “I changed my life, left the others who had become like a family to me but now hated me for pointing out what they already knew. It was evil, what we were doing. We didn’t have to live like that. And so I didn’t. Then I found out the truth.”

  On that last word his gaze fell upon the priest again, and though he knew this man was not of the same church, not one of the men who had wrought so much evil in the past, still he could not help but feel fury boiling within him.

  Peter could see Father Jack’s Adam’s apple bob as the priest swallowed nervously. The man knew what Peter was speaking of, but it was a dangerous subject. For almost by chance, some years past, Peter had been the one to discover that vampires were not evil, but only supernatural. That of all supernatural creatures they were the only ones whose nature was a combination of human, demonic, and divine. That from the earliest days of the Roman Catholic Church, its hierarchy had conspired to use magick to control all supernatural creatures and that vampires were the only creatures they had not managed to bend to their will.

  He had learned the truth. That the limitations upon their ability to shapeshift, to alter their bodies on a molecular level, and most of the traditional weaknesses—to the sun and to garlic and to the cross—had been implanted in the minds of a few of his kind and then spread like an infection, the church fathers knowing that creatures with total control over their molecular structure would burn in the sunlight if they believed that they would, and would be scattered to dust by a stake through the heart if they believed that they would.

  But Peter had created of the truth a kind of antivirus, and it spread just as quickly.

  “You discovered that the Church was about to make a final purge to try to wipe your kind from the earth forever,” Father Jack said.

  The room fell silent then save for the sound of the priest trying to catch his breath and the burbling of the little fountain, and the distant noises of the city beyond the little basement apartment on West Fourth Street.

  “All of this is documented,” Peter reminded him.

  And it had been. Exhaustively. What Peter had learned set off a series of battles between humans and vampires, and among the vampire clans themselves, that laid waste to Venice and Salzburg and part of New Orleans. Vampires had learned the truth, that they did not have to be monsters, did not have to be predators, that they had a choice in the matter. But some had wanted to stay in the shadows. Some embraced that new truth, but others ignored it.

  “I lost a lot of friends and a woman I loved very much. I spent the better part of a thousand years in Hell, learning sorcery and losing my sanity. When it was all over and done with, nearly every vampire in the world was dead.”

  Father Jack stared at him. “And you were human.”

  For the first time, Peter glanced away, unsettled. He looked at his hands, pictured his own mirror image, the one he saw every morning, the one with the graying hair and the lines around the eyes and mouth.

  “Yes. I lived. I found a way to exorcize the demonic and the divine from my body. I could have had one of the survivors change me back, make me a vampire again. But I chose to stay like this. To live.”

  The priest set aside his own tea and gazed at Peter as though they were in the intimacy of a confessional. “And it haunts you.”

  Peter did not like the sound of that. He narrowed his eyes, ran his long fingers over the paint-spattered legs of his jeans. “Let me tell you now what you don’t know.”

  “Please.”

  The mage turned his hands over, and when he did, there was a tiny ball of green fire burning in the center of each palm, a pair of glaring, verdant suns that cast their glow upon the entire room and threw sickly shadows across the face of Father Jack Devlin, across his suddenly wide eyes. Peter could see the magick reflected in the man’s glasses.

  “It’s for effect,” Peter said, voice low. “But it’s a good one, isn’t it? I mean, there’s a promise in it. Not an empty threat, this power. This is what I learned in Hell, while demons were picking at my mind like carrion birds on a dead dog.”

  He snapped one hand closed, snuffing out the light in it, but t
he other flared more brightly and Peter held his hand up higher, twisted it around so that the burning orb became a flame that played along his fingers.

  “I’ll never be just an ordinary man,” Peter said. “But I feel like one. When I was young, I was angry. At my father, at the Turks, at the world for not coming to save my city in time. My memories of my time in Hell and my life as a vampire are dim. There’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know. I remember my human life, my youth, very well, and the last few years of course. But the time between . . . it’s as though it happened to someone else. I remember the people I cared for and why, of course. Some of those who are still alive are still part of my life. But in many ways it’s as though I was a young man then, and now my life has begun again.

  “Do you want to know why I did not take the gift of immortality from one of my friends again?”

  The priest nodded.

  Peter waved his hand and the magick was gone.

  “Because when you live forever, nothing matters as much as it does when every heartbeat is a tick of the clock closer to the end. Life is vital. It has texture and preciousness that you lose track of very quickly if you do not have to worry about things as mundane as wrinkles and cholesterol and cemetery plots. When I was a Shadow . . . shadows of humanity, that’s what vampires are . . . when I was a Shadow I always felt that no matter who stood beside me in battle or lay beside me in bed, I was somehow still alone.”

  He smiled wistfully. “It wasn’t until I was human again that I remembered that the living feel that way too. Living is a journey we all end alone. The difference, then, my dear Father, is this: when you cannot die, it no longer matters how you live. Mortality gives meaning to the journey.

  “So I’m human. And I’m alone. And yes, I’m haunted. I have always loved art and now I paint to escape some of my ghosts.”

  Peter opened his hands and clapped them together like a gleeful child. “Now you know all there is to know about me. And can I just say, who needs therapy more than I do?”

  But there was no humor in it, and Father Jack clearly understood that, for there was not even the flicker of a smile on his features.

  “Your tea is getting cold,” he told the priest.

  Father Jack regarded him carefully. “I don’t really like tea.”

  Peter laughed incredulously. “You lied?”

  “It seemed rude to do otherwise.”

  “Until now?”

  “Oddly enough.”

  The mage let that sink in and then nodded once. “All right. I’ll stop toying with you, Jack. I just wanted to make sure you really understood what was going on here. If I’m a monster as the Bishop says I am, then so be it. But I figure that’s for you to decide. It sure isn’t up to me.”

  “I didn’t come here with villagers bearing torches to try to burn you out, Mr. Octavian.”

  “You couldn’t,” Peter replied. “That’s why I let you in. There are wards on this place. If you meant me harm, or even if you were searching for me for your own purposes, like some of the obsessive lunatics who showed up when I first moved in, you would never even have found the place. You would have been unable to see it at all.”

  “You have stalkers?” the priest asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Used to. But humanity does its best to forget what upsets it, doesn’t it, Father? People still have to be reminded that the Holocaust happened, and that was barely three-quarters of a century ago. The world is trying to forget about vampires, and there are so few of us— excuse me, of them—remaining that it’s easy for conspiracy theorists to start talking about mass hallucinations and genetic experimentation and supersoldiers and all that sort of crap. Kind of amusing, actually. The point is, if you meant me any harm, you wouldn’t be sitting on my sofa drinking tea.

  “You’d be dead.”

  Father Jack gave an uncertain chuckle. “And pleasant a prospect as that is—”

  “It brings us to why you’re here.”

  The priest nodded.

  “You’re here because you want me to help you with a spell to do some demonic pest control in Hidalgo, Texas.”

  The man had been reaching up to push his sliding glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and now he paused as if frozen and stared at Peter, his cheeks the color of his hair.

  “I didn’t tell you it was Hidalgo.”

  “No, you didn’t. You also didn’t tell me that as a priest in service to Bishop Gagnon, your primary responsibility is to attempt to recreate the contents of The Gospel of Shadows to try to rein in the demons and other supernatural creatures that have been running around without their leashes on ever since the Roman Church lost its war with the vampires and could no longer control them.”

  The priest’s mouth dropped open. “How . . . how can you know this?”

  Peter stood up, careful not to kick over his teacup. He walked over to the door and pulled it open, then glanced back at Father Jack. “I’m a mage, my friend. At a guess, I’d say as powerful a sorcerer as ever walked the earth. Well, save one.

  “You can go now. Thanks for dropping by.”

  Obviously confused, the priest stood up and slowly strode toward Peter, shaking his head, mouth working but without words coming out of it, as each response he considered was analyzed and then jettisoned.

  “You’re welcome. For the tea, I mean.”

  That stopped the priest. He had been about to step through the door but now he stopped, only feet away from Peter, and glared at him with real anger shining in his eyes for the first time.

  “You’re really just going to let all those people in Hidalgo die? Those demons will keep spreading if they’re left unchecked. It could be an epidemic unlike anything we’ve seen.”

  “Nuke the town,” Peter replied.

  “You’re joking.”

  A ripple of guilt went through him, and at last Peter relented. “Maybe a little,” he confessed. “I’m sorry, Father. But I cannot help you. Not in good conscience. You see, I was once part of a group of beings who numbered a great many monsters among them. So was your Bishop Gagnon, so he should understand. I just reminded you what happened the last time a religious organization came into the kind of sorcerous power The Gospel of Shadows represented. You really think I’m going to help you start that all over again?”

  Again Father Jack opened his mouth, and again no words came out. The priest had no response to that. He turned and walked out of the apartment and started up the brick steps toward the street.

  On the second step he paused and turned.

  Peter stood inside the door watching him. He had waited, for he sensed that the priest was not quite through with him yet.

  “I suppose I understand. At least partially,” Father Jack allowed.

  “That’s all I ask,” Peter replied. “Did you bring that French manuscript?”

  The priest’s face brightened and he reached inside his black jacket and withdrew a sheaf of faded parchment from an inner pocket. At the bottom it was scorched, portions of it burned away.

  Peter nodded once and whispered words in a hellish language. The air around the parchment seemed to shudder and warp like heat rising over blacktop on a hot summer day, and when it subsided, the pages of that arcane French manuscript were whole again.

  Father Jack stared at the pages in his hand and a slow smile crept across his face. He looked up at Peter gratefully.

  “Tell the Bishop you figured it out for yourself,” the mage told him. “I wouldn’t want to spoil my reputation.”

  3

  On the drive back up to Wickham, Keomany kept her window down and the radio turned up loud, her silken black hair blowing across her face almost constantly. At times it obscured her vision but she only laughed and plucked it away from her eyes, and whenever she heard Nikki Wydra’s song on the radio, she cranked it up even louder. It was played so often that she figured by the time she got home she’d know all the words.

  The road hummed beneath her tires and the little Kia seemed almos
t to float along without her help. Keomany was tired, but it was the sweet blissful sort of tired that was so wonderfully rare. The Bealtienne festival had been all she had hoped for, and more. Two nights and one full day of harmony and partying, of practical idealism, of dedication to the everyday magick in nature and in humanity. Keomany had run into a handful of people she had known from similar festivals in New York, but she had also met a lot of new faces, made new friends. She’d gotten on particularly well with Ellen Cortes, a crafts shop owner from Connecticut.

  Then there was Zach. Tall, broad-shouldered, well-muscled Zach with the sparkling blue eyes who had given a fascinating lecture on the significance of Great Trees, Standing Stones, and Stone Circles the previous morning and then talked his way into Keomany’s room that night.

  Now, with the wind blowing across her face and the sun shining warm upon her through the windshield, she shivered with the delicious thrill of remembering the feel of his hands on her, the things he had done with his tongue, and the goodbye kiss they had shared this morning. She did not even remember if she had gotten his last name, but she had his phone number. Keomany wasn’t sure if she would call Zach or not, but even if she never did, she knew she would get a shiver every time she thought of him and of the Bealtienne festival.

  A tiny smile played at the edges of her lips that she had not summoned but neither could she banish it, a fact that only made her smile more broadly and chuckle to herself.

  With a sigh she settled more deeply into the driver’s seat of the Kia, the sun and her memories of the night before making her warm and tired in that satisfied, sleepy way. The wind whipping across her face and the loud radio were meant to keep her from closing her eyes behind the wheel, but it still took a lot of self-control for her to shake off that contented feeling and stay awake.

  Just get home in one piece, she thought.

  Home. The word echoed in her mind along with the thrum of her tires on the highway. Once upon a time it would have ruined her mood to be headed back to Wickham, but things had changed. Much as she wished there could be a Bealtienne festival every weekend instead of once a year, she looked forward to tending the flowers at her place, and to getting back to work at her shoppe. Keomany had every confidence in Paul and Jillian, but opening Sweet Somethings had been her dream, and it meant the world to her to take care of the shoppe, to stand behind the counter and serve her customers. The beautiful thing about her business was that her customers were always happy. It was unlike almost any other job in that way. Homemade fudge and hand-dipped chocolates were magical products to sell. There might be those who wished the prices were lower, but nobody ever complained about what they had bought.