Of Masques and Martyrs Read online

  Without preamble, the dream changes. This is closer to memory. Not a nightmare, but a fond remembrance of his subconscious mind.

  It is January 1820, and Kuromaku finds himself marching on Madrid with the revolutionary forces of Colonel Rafael Riego. The colonel is familiar with the shadow race and has more than a dozen shadow warriors serving alongside his men. The Spanish king, Ferdinand, has abandoned the constitution. Riego’s troops force Ferdinand to yield; they keep him in their control, almost a prisoner, for more than three years.

  Side by side with Kuromaku in this triumphant strike against tyranny is the finest warrior he has ever seen. Octavian is his name, and he is fierce and swift, with flashing sword and regal bearing. A finer, more loyal friend and ally Kuromaku has never known. Together, they bathe in the blood of the oppressors, the moon turning red above them with the spray. Cannon fire fills the air, pounds their ears. When the battle is over, Octavian makes a gift of his sword to Kuromaku, to honor their friendship and his respect for Kuromaku’s skills as a warrior.

  Once again, the dream shifts. No memory now, but a warning. The moon is still red and full, and a cacophonous roar fills the air. But it is not cannon fire. Kuromaku stands next to Octavian, and the dead flow in waves against one another, and blood runs in the gutters. They are allies yet again, but their enemies are shadows like themselves, long of fang and swift of claw. Strangely, Octavian again wields the sword he had given as a gift of honor so long ago. In this nightmare Kuromaku sees bright colors and hears music merging with screams of terror and agony.

  He knows this place. He has been here once before. Long ago. But it looks different now, despite the war and the blood. It is an older city now.

  Kuromaku and Octavian stand back to back, and the . ronin turns to his old friend, and in the dream . . . in the dream, he sees the oddest thing. Octavian has been slashed in the side, just beneath the ribs. Under his clothing, Octavian bleeds

  And bleeds.

  And does not heal.

  And in his dream, Kuromaku begins to fear that Octavian is going to die. . . .

  Kuromaku’s eyes snapped open. He stared into the darkness of his sleeping chamber, the only sunless room in his little villa in the south of France.

  “Kami,” he whispered, but the gods didn’t answer.

  They never had.

  Kuromaku rose quickly and dressed in the dark. He phoned the pilot in his employ and asked the woman to have his plane standing ready at the small airfield nearby in twenty minutes. Then he packed a small traveling case and laid out his weapons on the bed.

  To his own array of blades, he knew he must add another.

  Kuromaku went to the eastern wall of his chamber. From its place of honor there, he drew down the sword of the greatest warrior he had ever known.

  For what he had experienced was no dream, but a prescient vision. He had had such night visions perhaps a dozen times in his long life, and invariably they had been true. If the images from his nightmare were in fact a glimpse of things to come, it seemed Peter Octavian would have need of his sword once more.

  Perhaps more than he ever had.

  The lamp was an antique, its shade a globe of blown glass with a painted rose pattern. Its light was insufficient for the room, and so it cast a reddish-pink tint across the bedchamber of the vampire lord Hannibal. His long white hair seemed washed in the color, reflecting it back as did his pale flesh.

  But the blood staining his bedsheets looked black in that light. Black as his soul, he might have boasted. Hannibal had neither the time nor the inclination to boast, however. Nor did he believe he had a soul.

  A Strauss concerto flowed from the CD player. He was not without culture, after all. But the volume was not up terribly high. Hannibal wanted to hear every scream and whimper of his victims. It was the only thing that could arouse him anymore.

  With the music lilting softly in the pink light, Hannibal extended his right hand once again. The claw of his index finger elongated even further, its tip a razor needle. Once more, he drew it across the deeply tanned, gently curving belly of the woman who lay on his bed, wrists and ankles trussed with thin wire that cut her flesh each time she moved.

  She shrieked in pain, and Hannibal slapped her left cheek openhanded. The crack was quite satisfying to him, and her flesh split just over the cheekbone. He bent and licked the blood from her face and she whimpered all the more.

  They were deep within the bowels of Sing-Sing prison, where the sun’s rays could not reach them. Hannibal liked the way the woman’s cries echoed through the steel and cement labyrinth. It was why he’d chosen to set up his own quarters so far from the less primitive rooms once inhabited by the warden and his staff. Hmm, yes. He liked the screams.

  “In case you’re wondering, my dear,” he whispered to her, “I am going to make love to you.”

  Her eyes went wide, then squeezed shut, tears springing forth as she bit her lip to keep from screaming again. They rolled down her face and mingled with the blood where her skin had split.

  “Please . . .” she rasped, hoarse from where he’d choked her, just to watch her face turn blue. “Please don’t—”

  “Oh, not to worry,” Hannibal interrupted. “You won’t feel it. I won’t find you at all attractive, not sexy in the least, until you’re very, very dead.”

  She screamed again, and Hannibal threw his head back and laughed loud and long. He was having himself a wonderful time. He glanced over at the corner of the cold, damp cement room, and saw that his other captive was struggling against his bonds, despite the fact that the wire had already cut his wrists to the bone. This one had a gag, only because Hannibal didn’t want to hear his whining pleas. Only the agony interested him.

  “Oh,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten you were there.”

  He didn’t know the man’s name, either. But he did know what was important. Hannibal’s eyes flashed as he smiled at the man.

  “Your sister does seem to be enjoying herself, doesn’t she?” he asked.

  The man nearly cut off a foot trying to get at him after that. He flopped on the cold floor in his own blood.

  “Well done,” Hannibal said. “Good show, young man.”

  A short time later, when the woman was dead but still warm, and her brother had passed out from loss of blood, Hannibal grew bored. A knock at the door made him look up from the woman’s corpse.

  “Come,” he ordered.

  Two of his lieutenants entered the room. Behind them, a third vampire dragged a prisoner behind him.

  “Ah, the girl,” Hannibal said appreciatively. “I’d almost forgotten we were to speak this afternoon. Erika, isn’t it?”

  Erika was thrown to the floor, hands tied behind her back, and her face slapped concrete. When she looked up at him, sneering, her lip was bleeding.

  “Fuck you,” she said grimly.

  “I think not,” Hannibal replied. “On the other hand . . .”

  He launched a swift kick at her gut, catching her just below the left breast, and she tumbled backward to the floor once more. Erika heaved and coughed, and a moment later, after sitting up again, spit blood out on the concrete.

  Hannibal crouched down in front of her and grabbed the front of her shirt. Hauled her forward so that their eyes met, only inches apart.

  “You’d better learn some fucking respect,” he snarled. “Or you’ll be just as dead as my old friend Rolf.”

  She winced at that, and Hannibal smiled.

  “Oh, yes, he’s quite dead,” Hannibal said, and enjoyed the sound of his voice in the echoing chamber. “Dead as the silly human bitch on my bed.”

  Erika glanced over at his bed, and her eyes widened at the sight of all the blood. Her heart began to beat a bit faster. Hannibal realized that, though she’d done her best to hide it, the smell of the blood alone must have had her salivating. The sight of it would only add to her hunger.

  “How long has it been since you ate?” he asked her. “Two days? Three?”
>
  “Five,” she replied and looked at him evenly. “Five days. And she volunteered.”

  “Got to love the volunteers,” Hannibal said happily. “But you don’t have to leave them alive. It just doesn’t taste the same if you’re not killing them.”

  He strolled over to where the dead woman’s brother lay slumped on the floor, grabbed the man by his hair, and dragged him back to drop him just in front of Erika.

  “Free her hands,” he ordered. Instantly, one of his lieutenants stepped forward to cut her bonds.

  Erika flexed her hands, stared down at them. After a moment, she looked up at Hannibal, brow furrowed with suspicion and doubt. Hannibal reveled in her emotions, her fear and her pain. The girl had been the protégée and more than likely the lover, of the deluded Rolf Sechs. Rolf, who might have been Hannibal’s right hand but instead joined with that self-righteous bastard Octavian.

  She deserved to suffer. But there was a way Hannibal might have even greater satisfaction, a way he might spit on Octavian, humiliate him and show, for all the undead to see, who was rightful lord of all their kind.

  As Hannibal watched, Erika stared at the wounded, unconscious man. His chest rose and fell with each rasping breath. The man was still bleeding profusely from his hands and wrists, where the wire had cut to the bone. He was naked and stank of fear and sweat. But the blood scent overpowered any other smell.

  Erika glared at Hannibal again, and he smiled. He could almost feel her hunger, and her growing hatred for him.

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “He’s already lost a lot of blood. He’s going to die. Why waste what little is left in him? You’re just going to let it soak into the concrete?”

  Her lips curled back and her fangs were visible, but did not lengthen. Nor did she change in any other way. Of course not. She couldn’t. Not after Hannibal had injected her with the serum. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try yet again to change. It was pitiful, in a way, and Hannibal chuckled at the sight. The vampire girl’s nostrils flared and she began to breathe heavily, as if she were in the throes of passion.

  “You hate me,” Hannibal observed. “I want you to hate me. And fear me. I’m sure you’d like more than anything to alter your form, to become something horrible right now—perhaps even some silver-clawed thing, eh? Since you shadows seem so fond of that disgusting, poisonous metal.

  “But you can’t, girl. You can’t change.”

  Still, though, Hannibal had to give her credit. She kept trying until a bloody tear slipped from the corner of her right eye. Erika kept her head down after that. Hannibal assumed it was more so she wouldn’t have to look at the bleeding man in front of her than in order to ignore Hannibal himself.

  “Can you smell the heat from his heart?” Hannibal asked. “Can you taste the copper tang on the tip of your tongue, feel its thickness slide down your throat?”

  “Stop it!” she screamed finally.

  “Ah, perhaps you can, then,” Hannibal said gleefully.

  “Why can’t I change?” the girl asked.

  That was what he’d been waiting for. She was so defiant, but she needed so much from him. Not only blood. Not merely her freedom. But information. She needed to know what had happened to Rolf, why and how he had died. And Hannibal planned to tell her all of it, in good time. For the worst thing he could do to Octavian, and the way in which he might truly soil the memory of Rolf Sechs, would be to make this girl a member of his own family. To take her for his own, to make her a real vampire, instead of this pale shadow of her true nature.

  “To understand what is preventing your change,” Hannibal began, pedantically, “you must understand one important thing: despite the demonic and divine origins of our vampirism, it is still essentially a scientific process. Somehow, we have a molecular consciousness.”

  She stared at him, as did the three lieutenants who were in the room with them. They had never had these things explained to them, either, and Hannibal chose to keep them in the dark. Knowledge is power.

  “Get out,” he said sharply. “All three of you. I will call to you when she is to be removed.”

  The silent vampire warriors glanced at one another, but none of them was foolish enough to question his will. When they had gone, Hannibal turned to address Erika again. She had inched herself, perhaps even unconsciously, ever so slightly closer to the man quietly bleeding to death on the cement floor.

  “As I say . . . somehow,” he began, emphasizing the word. “But the end result is that we can shapeshift because not only can we transform our cells on a molecular level, but the cells themselves have a memory of their structure. From woman to wolf or mist, and back to being a woman.

  “But in order to do that, a message must be communicated from the brain to the body, and passed from cell to cell through synaptic messages. The serum I’ve developed inhibits the chemical transference of those messages. You can’t change anymore, Erika. You can’t communicate with your bloodkin. You’re going to grow old, now. Eventually, you’ll probably die the true death. You still need the blood, you still have the strength. But you won’t heal anymore, either.”

  The girl stared at him, horrified, and he couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Come now, my little one,” he said. “It isn’t as bad as all that.”

  “You’re everything I swore I’d never be,” Erika whispered, under her breath. Of course, Hannibal heard.

  “Let’s put that to the test, shall we?” he asked. “You see, there is an antidote. There is a way to give you back the power that makes you a vampire. But if you want it, you will have to pledge your fealty to me, and to this coven.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, to rail at his suggestion, to berate and condemn him. But she closed her mouth again without uttering a word. That’s when Hannibal knew he had her.

  Erika quivered with anticipation and, Hannibal thought, self-loathing, as she crept forward on her hands and knees. She dipped her mouth to the throat of the still-unconscious man bleeding on the concrete floor. Her hands and knees were stained by his pooling blood. Tears of blood ran down from her cheeks and mingled with the man’s own blood as Erika ripped his throat out and drank deeply, her feeding punctuated by heaving sobs of profound remorse.

  Aroused by her despair, Hannibal looked down and was pleased to find himself hard. Remembering a promise made just a while before, he glanced back at the cooling corpse of the woman on his bed. His breath came faster as he returned to his victim and took her as his lover.

  His triumph was so sweet.

  The interior courtyard of the Ursuline convent—where the coven of shadows who followed Peter Octavian made their home—was awash in the colors and scents of flowers and fresh earth. Despite the threat they lived with each day, Peter and the others had made it their business to bring beauty to their home. It had rained a bit during the day, but now at dusk, as darkness fell, the sky splashed vivid shades of red on the horizon. As if the heavens were a garden all their own. And perhaps they were, Peter thought.

  He strolled a path that wound through the garden. Sweet floral aromas rode the breeze that brushed across his short, ragged-cut hair. Peter had a great deal on his mind. He was torn, within and without, drawn in so many directions. His instincts were splintered and thus inaccurate. He had never felt so desperately nostalgic in his centuries of existence. Peter was certain that at another time in his life, he would have seen the circumstances of his friends, his coven, with more clarity. Would have known immediately what actions to take.

  Peter Octavian was a man, and a monster. Dead and yet somehow not. Shadows were both demonic and divine. Peter, himself, had lived as a warrior, and now wanted only peace. If he would allow himself to be overwhelmed by the aggression he felt toward Hannibal, it might drive him to do something unthinkable. To take lives, to forcibly create new shadows to combat the vampires of Hannibal’s clan.

  He wanted to do it.

  He really did.

  And so he refused to
even think about it. Instead, Peter hid those urges away in his mind somewhere, hoping they would stay there. They were the thoughts of the warrior prince he’d once been, not the man he’d become in time. Peter could be brutal when it was necessary, when he was forced to it. But, not for the first, he wondered if that moment would arrive too late.

  Hannibal’s numbers were growing.

  There was more to it, however. He was torn not only by his past and present, his dual nature, and the dangers his people faced. He was torn by magick.

  For a millennium, at least in the way time is reckoned in such places, Peter had lived in Hell itself. During that time, he had learned a great deal about magick, a great deal of sorcery better forgotten. It made him powerful, there was no question about that. But what else had it done to him?

  Ages ago, and for centuries thereafter, the church had called his kind “Defiant Ones.” Eventually, Peter had learned the origin of the name. Vatican sorcerors had been able to call to heel a great many demons from other dimensions, from Hell or elsewhere. But the shadows could not be controlled by their magick, because each shadow had a human soul.

  Now those same demons, and so many other magickal forces, were Peter’s to command if he so desired. The magick repulsed him and fascinated him simultaneously. The more he used it, the more he wanted to experiment. Yet each time, he felt a little bit less the warrior he’d once been, and even less the man he’d tried to become.

  Still, he had spent time cultivating the spells and enchantments that had nothing to do with demons. Peter had long since had his fill of other dimensions and their denizens.

  Somehow, he was determined to master the magick at his disposal and retain the respect for humanity that drove him on. And he would do it. He had to.

  A short time later, Peter stopped at a green-painted wrought-iron bench at the center of the winding path and sat. He ran a hand across his goateed chin and scratched his head. When he leaned back, finally, to simply appreciate the garden, he found to his great surprise that there was a smile on his face. For many days, only Nikki Wydra’s music and raspy voice had been able to give him that gift.