Black Swan Rising (15 page)

“They’re moving too fast!” I complained.

“No, it’s you who are moving too fast. You have to slow your heartbeat.” He came close behind me and slipped his arm over my shoulders and his hand under my sweater. He lay his hand over my heart. I felt the pulse in his wrist beat against my skin and an answering beat in my heart.
My blood,
I remembered again,
it’s my blood beating in his veins
. “Take long, slow breaths,” he whispered in my ear, his breath purling over the back of my neck, over the still open wounds made by his teeth. I started to close my eyes, but then I saw
one
. A creature spun out of the colors of the night—indigo, violet, silver—it slipped among the heather bushes on blue-veined wings, absorbing the colors of whatever it landed on, bending its tiny, foxlike face toward each tiny, bell-shaped blossom. I thought at first that it was sipping nectar from the flowers, like a bee or a hummingbird, but then I saw that it was drinking light and color instead. As it dipped its face into a bloom, its diaphanous body vibrated with the flower’s color.

I turned to Will Hughes. “Is this real? Are you making me see these things?”

“They’re real. They’re called light sylphs because they drink the light. They can only come out at night, though; they’d drown in the daylight.”

The creature looked up from a flower, its mouth stained purple, and met my startled gaze. It cocked its little head and moved its lips as if to smile, but the smile turned into a snarl revealing a row of tiny, needle-sharp teeth and then it flitted away.

“Why . . . ?”

“Don’t worry,” Will said, drawing me away. “It’s not you it’s scared of; it’s me. The light sylphs aren’t too fond of vampires, but since we share the night, we mostly keep out of each other’s way.”

He drew me down the hill. Knowing things with teeth were riding the night, I stayed close to him—the
bigger
thing with teeth.

“You said before that only someone with a touch of the fey could see this,” I said. “How did you know I had it?”

“Because you’re descended from Marguerite D’Arques. And she was one of
them
.” He shivered as he said
them
. What scares a vampire? I wondered. Then I thought of something else—vampires could live forever, couldn’t they? And he’d already spoken of knowing Vincent van Gogh . . .

“Did you know the first Marguerite then?”

We’d come to a stone wall overlooking the Henry Hudson Parkway and the river. He leaned against the wall and faced me. The silver light in his eyes dimmed, then gleamed dully like tarnished plate, then like the sky before a storm. I felt something gathering in him, something that could lash out against me.

“Yes, I knew her. Knew her and loved her and lost her. She is why I am what I am today.” He laughed. “Well, I should say what I am
tonight
.” He hoisted himself up on the stone wall and swung his legs around to face the river. If he had spread his arms and taken flight, I wouldn’t have been too surprised, but instead he patted the wall beside him. “Come sit here and I’ll tell you all about it. After all, it’s your story as well.”

“When I was a young man I was, I am sorry to say, exceedingly vain of my good looks and exceedingly shallow.” He spoke facing the river so that all I saw was his profile outlined against the night sky, like a white cameo set in onyx. I could see how he might be excused for being a little vain. But shallow? If he had once been, the centuries had given him depth. “So vain that although many beautiful young women fell in love with me, and my father begged me to marry and produce an heir, I would not tie myself to one lest I lose the adulation of the many. My father was so desperate to have an heir that he commissioned a poet to write verses imploring me to procreate in order to assure my immortality. The poet came regularly to tutor me in poetry, love, and the responsibilities of my station . . . and then the poet fell in love with me.”

“Wait,” I said, “this sounds familiar.”

He smiled and went on with his story. “No longer did the poet tell me I must beget a son to gain eternal life, rather I should look to
him
to ensure my immortality through his verses. Vain as I was, I became enamored of that notion, and when the poet was sent away I followed him to London and joined his acting company.”

“Don’t tell me. Your poet was William Shakespeare.”

He turned to me, his eyes glowing with mischief. “Don’t tell
me,
you see a manticore, a vampire, a fairy, but you balk at William Shakespeare?”

“Yes!” I declared. “It’s like those séances where all the spirits turn out to be Cleopatra or Napoléon.”

“I see your point. Shall I go on calling him
the poet
so as not to strain your credulity?”

“Oh, call him whatever you like!” I cried, throwing my hands up in defeat. What was the point of questioning the details when I’d already accepted the premise? Besides, there was too much I was curious about. “Was it really William Shakespeare? What was he like?”

“Possessed. Mad. Talk about touched by the fey! Sometimes I thought
he
was a wizard the way he cast spells with his words. He had a fire burning in him that made this”—he swept his hand toward the million lights of Manhattan—“look like a swarm of fireflies. How could I not fall under his spell, even after I found out that there was a rival for his affections back in London?”

“Don’t you mean in Stratford-upon-Avon?”

He tilted his head up and raised one eyebrow almost mockingly. For a moment I saw the cruel young man he had been and felt sorry for those Elizabethan girls who had lost their hearts to him. “No, I don’t. The woman who captured his heart had to have more than a round bottom and a prosperous father. She had to offer him
inspiration
—the magic to spin words into pictures.”

“A muse then?”

“Yes, you could call her that. The poet called her that many times. She was a mysterious dark-haired woman. No one knew
her full name or where she came from. She so rarely presented herself in public. And even when she did, she seemed to blend into the shadows somehow.”

“The Dark Lady?”

“Yes. I always thought it was fitting that posterity gave her that name. It was close to her real name—Marguerite D’Arques.”

“My mother’s name?
This
was the Marguerite who you say is my ancestor? But you said no one knew her full name.”

“No one but me, and I learned it because I fell in love with her.” He paused for so long I thought he might not go on, but at last he drew in a long breath—it sounded like the sigh of the wind rustling the heather behind us—and went on, “And she with me. William was, of course, furious. He turned on her and wrote those nasty poems condemning her. All the hard things he ever wrote about women I believe stem from his anger at Marguerite. She never blamed him for his attacks on her, though. She never took away the gift of fey sight she had given him. How do you think he wrote those fairy scenes in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
? Or wrote about Caliban and Ariel in
The Tempest
?

“At first we were happy together . . . until I discovered that the reason she had the power to inspire Shakespeare to write about fairies was because she was one of them. She was one of the fey. Immortal. She would never grow old, never change. She had what I had dreamed of, what Shakespeare in his poems had promised me—eternal youth and immortality. I begged her to make me immortal too, but she refused. She was happy to spend
my
life with me, but I, in my vanity, couldn’t bear the thought that
I
would grow old while
she
remained young. She told me I didn’t know what a burden it was to live forever. We fought. And she left.”

A tremor passed over his face and he turned away for a moment. When he turned back toward the river, his face was once again as immobile as carved stone against the blackness. Beautiful, but oddly cold, inert.

“I was angry with her and yet desperate to be with her, and to prove her wrong. I sought out every magician and alchemist I’d ever heard of. Shakespeare had known them all, but these were different days now that King James the First had come to the throne. It was dangerous to be suspected of wizardry, and they had all gone into hiding. But I tracked down the most famous of them all.”

“John Dee?” Just saying the man’s name made me tremble, as if the sound of his name might summon him here.

“Yes. I knew that he and Edward Kelley had trafficked with spirits. I knew that he had sought the secret to eternal youth. When I told him why I wanted it—and what Marguerite was—he told me that I had to follow her to France and steal a silver box she kept with her at all times, and her ring, and bring them to him. With those two things, he told me, he could make me immortal.” He smiled ruefully. “You must wonder why I believed him, but I was desperate . . . and Dee can be very persuasive. I followed Marguerite to Paris . . . and from there I tracked her across France until I found her. I stole the box and the ring from her—”

“You told me that you and Marguerite
exchanged
rings.”

“A little lie. Forgive me. It
was
an exchange of sorts. I left her my ring with a note that said I would return soon and that then we could be together for all eternity. Meanwhile, I’d gotten word that John Dee had followed me to France. I met him and gave him the ring and the box. He used them to summon a demon from the shadows—a vampire who attacked me and
made me
this
. When I awoke, John Dee laughed at me. ‘Now you’ll live forever,’ he said, ‘that is, as long as you drink blood every night and hide your face from the sun during the day.’

“I tried to kill him, but he’d taken precautions and was able to escape. I wound up wandering the streets of Paris . . . half-mad with bloodlust and despair. I even crawled into the catacombs . . .” He broke off and smiled a rueful smile. “But you don’t want to hear about that. Eventually, Marguerite found me. I was afraid that she would be repulsed by the monster I had become.” He stopped again. This time for so long I was afraid he wouldn’t go on. I laid my hand on his.

“Did she turn her back on you?”

He shook his head. “No. Not exactly. She wasn’t repulsed by me, she wasn’t frightened of me, she was only sad . . . she sat me down to tell me a story.” He smiled and glanced at me. “Much as I have sat you down to tell you this story, only we sat beside the Seine, not the Hudson. She told me that she had found a way to become mortal, but because it was not permitted for one of her kind to become mortal, she made a deal with her rulers. In exchange for mortality she pledged herself and her descendants to guard the borders between the worlds and to protect humans from the demons of the night. Then she patiently explained that one of the creatures of the night she was pledged to protect mortals from was
me
. As you can imagine, that put a crimp in our . . . relationship.”

He laughed, but it was a joyless sound. I shifted my legs on the stone wall, realizing I had grown stiff. How long had we been sitting here? I wondered. How long had we wandered the park before coming here? How long before dawn? I felt as if I were under a spell. Would all this evaporate with the sunlight?

“Did you ever see her again?” I asked.

He shook his head, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it. He picked up a stone from the wall, stretched his arm back, and threw it toward the river. I watched it sail through the air with my heightened sight—
fey sight,
he’d called it—for farther than any
human
could have thrown it, until it landed in the water. I remembered the strength in his hands as he wrestled with the manticore. I remembered his teeth at my neck. And
I
was supposed to be pledged to protect the human race against
him
? How was I supposed to do
that
?

“And did you ever meet any of her descendants again . . . I mean, before me?”

“My path has crossed with some before, but only briefly. I have not come this close to one before. I can’t tell you how shocked I was when you walked into my apartment . . . and when you asked for my help. You see now why I had to say no.”

“But you came to the Cloisters to help me.”

“When I saw the fog rising, I knew Dee was sending something to kill you. That’s how he works. He can send his spells through the fog.” I thought of the fog that had risen last night when Jaws had come to life, and the fog that had closed around the Cloisters just before the manticore came to life. Air and mist, Will had said before. How could anyone defend herself against that? “. . . and I knew that without any training you would be helpless against him. I couldn’t just let you die . . . I didn’t plan though to . . .” He touched my neck and I had to bite my lip to keep from moaning out loud.

“What have you done to me?” I asked.

He stroked my neck, my hair, then lifted my chin with one finger. “I’ve done it to myself as well. Now that I’ve drunk your blood we’re connected. I can’t help that. The one good thing is
that it’s awakened your sight. You’ll need that when Dee comes after you again—”

“Again?” I asked, horrified. What other monsters might he send against me?

“Yes. He won’t stop now. He knows you’ll try to get the box back from him.”

“But what if I don’t want to get it back? What if I just let him keep it?”

He gave me a long searching look. “I don’t think you want to live in the world that Dee will make with the power that the box gives him. Even without the ability to open the box Dee has wreaked havoc over the centuries—he was with Cromwell in 1649 and he blighted the Irish potatoes in the 1840s. It was one of his shadowmen who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and he sat beside Hitler whispering in his ear.”