Devil at Midnight (35 page)

Christian turned until he did, too. Decided, he shouldered through the crowd, sword up, mouth spitting curses to clear his way. The Florentines’ attention was on the affray ahead, not on who shoved them from behind. Panic drove his legs faster. He saw the back of Timkin’s black helmet, bobbing and shifting with the characteristic darting motions of a knife fighter. If he was meeting much resistance, Christian observed no evidence of it. To his dismay, he could not tell how Michael fared.

Help me
, he thought to Grace.
I need to kill
Timkin now
.

This she had no objection to.

“Move!” he roared to the crowd as the heat that was her essence burst into full flame in him.

People screamed as they tried to obey his order, finally aware of the threat. Christian had reversed his sword, both hands poising it above his head for a downward plunge. The position left his front open to attack. Timkin spun toward him, crouched. Since the way between them was open, a dagger snapped from his hand, streaking toward Christian in a blur. Christian did not try to avoid it. He sensed it would glance off his armor. Instead, he focused all his strength and Grace’s on driving every inch of his sword’s forged steel into and through his objective.

Though the strike began high, it targeted Timkin’s inner thigh, beneath his hip joint where plate armor ended and a layer of leather began. Naturally, leather was no match for steel. His leg speared through, Timkin fell with a cry. Going with him, Christian grunted, twisted, wrenching the sharp edge upward through flesh and bone. Timkin’s left leg parted from his torso, showering everyone in the vicinity with blood. It did not matter then how strong Nim Wei had made Timkin. This wound was a death knell.

Knowing it, Timkin snarled and tried to swing his misericorde, a thin and especially nasty dagger, designed for sticking opponents through gaps in their armor.

His attempt never had a chance. Michael’s boot slammed down on Timkin’s wrist so hard that Christian heard bones snap.

“You ... die,” Michael said, his voice a moan between gasps for air. “You die, bastard.”

Michael seemed to have used the last of his endurance foiling Timkin’s attack. Lurching, he kicked the dagger away and then fell onto his hip.

Timkin began to laugh, a sound Christian had not heard him utter before. The noise was rusty and high-pitched, like a woman giving way to hysteria.

“You die,” Timkin said through the eerie, hiccupping screeches. “You idiot pustule. Oh, wait.” With his unbroken hand, he yanked his helm off his pale, sweaty face. “You have been dying for the last quarter hour, since the first little slice my special knife gave you.”

Michael and Christian looked at each other, realizing what Timkin meant at the selfsame time. The blue of Michael’s eyes, all Christian could see through his visor, burned like flames as the sun struck them.

“The idiots see it now,” Timkin mocked, his laugh noticeably weaker. “My lovely misericorde was poisoned.”

A shout swelled from the crowd surrounding the final fight, male and excited. Rocked by too many blows to handle, Christian’s palm landed on the bridge beside Timkin’s hacked-off leg. The leather glove to which his gauntlet was affixed splashed in the spreading blood. The sound of an armored body crashing to the ground suggested that his dread was well-founded.

Timkin wheezed in amusement.

“And so goes your precious William.” Timkin’s face was pasty as he strained for air, but-having spent so much of his life in silence-he would not relinquish his chance to gloat. “I poisoned Mace’s flail as well, just as your father asked. Poor Mace will think he killed William.”

Timkin died then, his curled lip going lax as one gush of blood too many ran out of him.

“Christian,” Michael said. He was crying, but it was not sorrow for himself ringing in the word. “Christian, I am sorry.”

Christian could not breathe well enough to speak. This was too much. His heart began to beat out of rhythm, sticking in his throat and then skipping crazily. The fight had not frightened him this badly. All his friends were dead or dying. Every one of them but him. He was going to disappear beneath the weight of this. Any moment, he would be no one.

“Help me up,” Michael said more sharply, hardly able to lift his arm. “We will say good-bye to William together.”

 

 

G
race could barely keep her ghostly self inside Christian. His emotions buffeted her like a choppy sea, trying to push her away from him. She didn’t think Christian was aware of this. The strength she’d loaned him was ebbing. She could feel both men shaking as he helped Michael to his feet. Michael staggered, almost taking Christian down with him.

Grunting, Christian wrapped his arm more firmly on Michael’s waist. Neither of the men was watching his back for threats.

Grace made that her job, but she didn’t see any of Gregori’s fighters-or not alive, at least. Timkin, Graff, and Jurgen lay where they’d fallen. For whatever reason, the Italians didn’t seem to want to take them away. Now that the fighting had ended, the locals’ numbers were thinning rapidly. As they left the bridge in gesticulating fives and sixes, Grace thought a few of the watchers appeared ashamed.

Though they shot looks at Christian and Michael, none of them spoke to them. Of course, they also might have been leery because some had seen Christian glow. One monk in tonsure caught her eye when he crossed himself.

The boy who’d called Christian to William’s aid was kneeling next to him. William lay on his back, big as a fallen tree, helmet off and eyes closed. A well-dressed woman who might have been the boy’s mother cradled one of William’s huge hands in hers.

“I am sorry,
capitano
,” she said. “This brave soldier is dead.”

For a second, Grace felt as if Christian were swallowing with her throat. He dragged off his headgear, holding it against his chest as if he were in church.

“Signora,”
he said, his voice almost too husky to come out. “Thank you for sitting with my friend.”

And then Michael’s knees buckled.

Christian caught Michael’s body against him, hugging him to him as they both went down. Grace thought her heart would break right along with his.

“No,” he pleaded. “Stay with me, Michael.”

Michael’s hands clutched him once and then fell away. Trapped inside Christian’s feelings, an earthquake seemed to be battering Grace’s soul. Michael was limp, a dead weight in Christian’s hold. Christian flung his head back with rage.

“
No
!” he railed at the crisp blue sky.

The earthquake turned fiery, a thousand stingers pricking her as it rumbled. Though she had no lungs, she gasped. This was worse than what Nim Wei’s aura had done to her. Christian was so sad, so angry, that his energy was at war with hers. Once she would have understood his despair. Once she would have felt no differently. She had changed since she’d come here, more than she’d realized. Now it was impossible for her and Christian to share space. Even as she clung to him, her consciousness flew from her.

The terrible fire of his grief had burned their bond to ash.

N
ow and then, when
upyr
transformed humans against their wishes, the results were empty-eyed, shambling creatures without independent will. Christian looked a bit like one to Nim Wei as he lumbered toward the abandoned camp at twilight. Though he appeared uninjured, a puppet’s limbs had more grace than his.

Only when he was close did she see the small, ice-cold flames burning in his eyes. Nim Wei’s spine tensed, ready to defend herself, but he stopped an arm’s length away.

“You know what has occurred?” he asked.

She nodded, unease coiling inside of her. She had seen the battle, hidden amongst the watchers with her immortal body bundled against the sun. Considering the slaughter Gregori Durand had arranged, staying alert had been less difficult than she thought. Certainly, the blood that had been flying everywhere kept her senses sharp. Looking back, she saw she had underestimated Durand’s rivalry with his son-and the lengths to which it would drive him. The question was, would Gregori’s son blame her for the loss of his companions?

“My father has disappeared,” he said, his gaze unnervingly steady. “Along with three of his mean.”

“I could track them for you.”

He stared at her, wetting dry lips before answering. “My friends are dead. My father and his men killed them. And she-” He shuddered, his hands curling into fists.

“
She
? ”

He shook his head. “It does not matter. I am alone. All that is left to me is killing their murderers.”

“I can help you with that.”

Again, he gave her that cool, hard stare-as if he were looking at her through the length of a dark tunnel. The mystic inside her shivered: Fate was laying its hand on her. The tiniest prickle of excitement began to flower in her veins.

“It can be healing to have a purpose,” she observed.

“You do not care if I heal.”

This was more statement than accusation. Nim Wei denied the little dig of hurt it inspired. “I did not know your father would go this far. I would not have wished it so.”

She was not sure he understood her implied apology. Christian looked at the tent behind her. It had been put up by the men last night, before this tragedy came to pass. A shadow fell across him, his eyes suddenly as black as the shelter’s silk. “Are you still willing to change me to what you are? To give me the strength to kill all of them?”

In his grief, he was not thinking clearly. She had seen him fight, had seen him kill, for that matter. If he waited but a few days, when the advantage her bite had given the others faded, he would be strong enough to smite them down. She looked into his haggard face, the truth rising toward her throat. He was exquisite in his suffering, sorrow bringing out the perfect lines of his bones. Like the darkest of fallen angels, his shoulders seemed all the broader for being bowed. She knew what her maker would have advised, but could she truly bear to let such harsh and aching beauty pass forever beyond the veil?

He was hers, if she wished. For all eternity, whether he blessed or cursed her, he would know she had given this gift to him.

She held out her hand, fingers glowing in the swiftly descending night.

“I can give you what you need,” she said.

 

 

A
fterward, Christian fell to his hands and knees beside the cold remains of the previous night’s cookfire. He had stumbled here from Nim Wei’s tent, and she had not followed him. A stunted tree grew nearby, now shading him from the moon. To judge by that orb’s position in the sky, mere hours had passed since his arrival.

It should have been longer. In the interval, not only he but the world had changed.

He breathed from his fallen posture, deeply, slowly, the action feeling as unfamiliar as the fragrances he drew into his nose. He identified the musty feathers of the ravens roosting in the branches of the olive tree, grapes fermenting in an oaken barrel miles away, the acrid smoke of a blacksmith’s forge that had been lit early in the day. Most of all, he smelled humans. Their flesh. Their blood. If he closed his eyes, he could hear them. Each heartbeat was a separate person, drumming to its own rhythm. Where they gathered in the crowded city, all of them together sounded like the patter of distant rain.

Delicious rain, as it turned out.

He ran his tongue around his lips, around the two long teeth that had descended so sharply. His fangs throbbed as fearsomely as the cudgel between his legs. This new body of his wanted, hungered, with an urgency that spelled madness. Had he been in Florence, no woman would have been safe from his desire to rape and plunder.

Nim Wei certainly had not been.

He sat back on his heels, cold hands covering his face as he moaned. He should have guessed she would be beautiful naked, but the truth of her had come as a shock. Every curve had been an invitation to his newly starving mouth and fingers, every plane like polished marble sparkling with rainbows. He had seen her loveliness without a single candle, the smallest scrap of light sufficient for his transformed eyes. He remembered swiving her in half a dozen different positions, remembered coming so hard he bellowed for the relief of it. He had begged her to give him more of that delight. That much was crystal clear in his mind.

The rest, however, was a bit hazy.

His hands fell from his face as he realized he did not remember how she had changed him. She had bitten him. He was rubbing his throat exactly as the others had-even as he thought of it. He remembered the stab of ecstasy her feeding had inspired, a violent seizure of an orgasm. There was something else, though, some secret act that caused the actual change. The lost knowledge nagged at him. He wanted to retrieve it more than he would have guessed, but she had stolen it from his mind.