Immanuel's Veins (35 page)

“Oh?”

“I have read a Blood Book,” I continued. “Alucard was the first of your kind to enter this world. You are a half-breed and you are dead already.”

He wasn't quick with a return. I had touched something off.

“A Blood Book,” he said. “That's impossible. They don't exist in this reality.”

“Then where did I read Baal's journal? Where did I learn that you are a descendant of the Nephilim, devils from another realm? Or that you fear wood and water?”

“Where is it?”

I ignored the question, seeing that I had gained an advantage.

“There is a great romance,” I said, “written about in that book. God's wooing of his bride. You think you have stolen her, but you don't know that it's true affection, not merely seduction, that draws her. And you have no affection, only seduction.” I paused. “She is drawn to me.”

Valerik bobbed his head as if to say, “Really?” He looked around at his subjects who stood in black, staring at him with rapt attention. Ten or twelve torches licked away the darkness. I wondered what would happen to those subjects if Vlad van Valerik were killed.

He spread his arms and spoke with a condescending grin, addressing me, but his coven as well, surely. “So you insist on playing the part of suitor, Toma. You could have left me to rule my world as I see fit. You could have found another world for your affection and left me to seduce my own. But no!”

He stepped forward, into the rain.

“Instead you are here in the flesh! In my home! Have you lost your mind?”

“It's my heart, not my mind, that I have lost. Lucine has it. All of it. I love her desperately in ways that you can't possibly understand, much less experience! I cannot live without her.”

“She is my bride!” he bellowed, leaning into the words.

Was not the devil a fallen angel? And Nephilim, fallen angels who'd mated with women?

“What is it with you fallen ones, always wanting what isn't yours?”

He lowered his arms and glared up at me. “Where is the book?”

I again ignored the question. I had to find a way to distract him, if only long enough for a single thrust with the stake. Or I could throw the wood like a knife, confident I had the strength and skill to place it through his chest. With some luck, through his heart. It was my only play here.

That and love.

“There is a great romance between God and his creation,” I said. “My greatest weapon is love.” I let the knife slip from my fingers and clatter to the stone at my feet. “But you refuse to let me wield that weapon because it threatens you.”

Valerik spit to one side. “We laugh at religion's brand of love, forms and rules that keep the poor feeding from the church's coffers. It is dead.”

“I agree. That kind of love is porcelain-coated balls of dung. But what of true affection? Can you offer that?”

“You've been a guest here before, you tell me. Did you see or feel any affection?”

“Then it should be settled. If you truly love her, you will let Lucine decide.”

“She has made her choice.”

“You've deceived her!” I cried. “And now she is in your prison. What love is that?”

He issued a crackling growl and leaped to my side, unable to contain his rage. But this time I anticipated the move and I rammed the stake with all of my strength into the spot where I thought he would land.

The wood sank into his flesh, precisely timed. Deep, to my fist.

He gasped and his dark eyes went wide. Both of his hands grasped the stake, but he made no attempt to pull it out. Around us the coven stood in stoic silence, like sentinels waiting for an order to tear me apart.

“Do you think I'm afraid of a stick of wood?” Valerik said.

I stepped back and saw it then. The stake had gone into his lungs but missed the heart. Or perhaps a half-breed didn't react to wood the way his subjects did. Either way, Valerik wasn't bothered by the sharpened sapling sticking out of his chest.

He pulled aside his shirt and jerked the stick out. Blood flowed from a hole that immediately began to grow together as if made of putty. Within a six count he was repaired.

He tossed the stake onto the platform, where it rolled close to the edge and came to a rest, far beyond my reach. Valerik's lips twisted into a soft growl and his eyes hinted at red behind those black orbs.

It is the end
, I thought and took another step backward. I would die here under a dark sky in the Carpathian Mountains. The hero of Russia would finally be stripped of life, undone by love.

And Lucine . . .

I let the fight go out of me. My arms sagged; my jaw felt heavy.

I would die and Lucine would be his slave for eternity. The full realization of this inevitable outcome poured into my mind. It smothered my heart with a wrenching sorrow.

“Lucine . . .”

Breathing her name only made it worse. I could see only her, watching me, confused by the war in her own heart. I began to panic.

My face wrinkled and I started to breathe in shallow pulls.

“Lucine!” Her name, just that, I still had her name, and I sobbed it, uncaring of anything but hearing her name, however distorted by emotion.

“Lucine . . . Lucine . . .”

It became too much for me. I dropped to my knees, reached clawed fingers at the sky, closed my eyes, and moaned her name, for it was the only salve for my pain.

“Lucine! Oh God! Lucine, Lucine, Lucine . . .” These were the guttural groans of a dying man clinging to the last thing that was more precious than life itself. To love.

“Oh, my God, my God, why? Why? Why do you forsake me?”

“He forsook you a long time ago,” Valerik said. “And now you will die. No lover, no God, no life.”

Filled with a sudden wrath, I leaped to my feet and screamed at him. “She does not love you! She will never love you! She will always hide a love for me deep in her—”

The air shattered with a ferocious growl, and I felt myself picked off my feet by the neck and slammed back into the cross as if I were an insect. The blow took my wind away.

Valerik shoved his face close to mine. I could feel the hot air from his throat when he spoke. “She . . . is . . .
mine
!” The roar of that last word blasted me full in the face.

Keeping me pinned against the cross at my neck, he ripped my shirt off with one swipe of his other hand. His hand flashed again and this time I felt his fingernails slice through the flesh on my chest. He cut to the bone, and I cried out with pain.

Blood flowed from the wound.

But he was only beginning. He sneered up at me and slashed at my cheek. Then my shoulder.

The pain was terrible, but it wasn't what pushed me to sob as I hung there on that cross. My pain was not for me but for Lucine. She was now the lover of this monster, and I could do nothing to help her.

My strength began to fade and I let my muscles sag as I struggled to breathe past his iron grip.

“I will see you in hell,” he growled.

“Vlad?”

I could hear her voice now, speaking to me in my fading consciousness. Lucine was saying his name, but it was questioning, not sure.

Valerik had gone still. I opened my eyes.

I saw her over Valerik's shoulder. Lucine. Lucine stood in the doorway, dressed in the same nightgown she'd worn earlier. A book hung from her right hand.

The Blood Book I'd left in my leather bag.

She held the book out. “Is this true?”

THIRTY-SIX

S
tefan eased away from Lucine. The others shifted as well. Something had altered the norm.

My heart bolted with both anticipation and fear at seeing Lucine. She'd found the book, and something in her reading of it had drawn her mind back from the darkness. But what price would she pay for her choice to question her master?

He still had me by the neck, but he'd twisted around and was staring silently at that vision of beauty that filled the doorway, backlit by an orange glow from within the castle.

Drenched, the beast's shirt clung to sinewy cords of muscle wrapped around his shoulders and down his back. I had no doubt that he could break my neck with a single squeeze of his fingers. My vision was already fading.

I reached up with both hands and grasped his wrist in an attempt to loosen his grip but only succeeded for a moment before his fingers wound tighter, cutting off my air.

“Is it true that you are a devil?” she asked.

“How dare you leave my tower!”

She looked up at me. “Let him go. Please, his only crime is to love me.”

He released me and I collapsed in a heap then fell to one side. My head hit the stone surface with a sickening thud. The stake was on the other side, too far to reach. I struggled to remain conscious.

“I found Natasha,” Lucine said. “She's dead. You killed my sister.” It was said simply, but the emotion behind her words betrayed a dreadful sorrow.

Valerik's reaction was immediate. One moment he stood on the platform, glaring down at her, the next he was in front of her. He slammed his fist into her gut and raked his claw up her face when she doubled over. The book flew from her hand. He'd knocked the wind from her so she couldn't breathe, much less scream.

“You haven't imagined the kind of pain I am capable of.” He grabbed her hair and jerked her head up so that she faced me. “Is this the ugly wench you love?” he mocked.

I pried my head off the stone and got one arm under my chest, afraid that if I said anything he would only hurt her more. But he didn't need the motivation.

Holding her up with one hand, Valerik hit her face with the other. Then again. “Is this the woman?” He ripped her dress and slashed at her breasts, bloodying her badly. Then he shoved her forward with a fist full of hair.

“Is this the bride you love? Tell me!”

I pushed myself up to my knees, sobbing now, terrified to say anything.

“Toma?” She gasped, choked with desperation.

The beast snarled and cut her a fourth time, this time silencing her with an open hand across her neck, laying her flesh open as if she were a fish. Blood spilled and I knew that she could not survive long.

“Luci . . .” My damaged throat could rasp her name. I tried again but this time only a whisper. “Lucine!”

He dropped her and she fell to her face without the strength to break her fall. And there she lay, perfectly still, bleeding in the rain.

Valerik moved like a storm, plucking me from my knees and pinning me against the cross to finish his killing. With two quick flicks of his hand he sliced my wrists.

“Now I will bleed your veins,” he breathed. And he held me tight against the cross as my blood flowed from the wounds, over my hands, and into the water.

So both Lucine and I would die.

But a thought crawled into my mind. Something I'd read in the Blood Book. Words about a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins.

Be her Immanuel, Toma
.

I did not understand it fully. I didn't even know if this single thought was only the mad fantasy of a dying man. But I let it consume me and I groaned my approval.

“Take my blood . . .” I forced the words past those cords around my neck.

“Bleed for me,” he growled.

“Take my blood!” I rasped. Then, with my last reserves of breath, “Find your life in my blood!”

I could see only the sky because his hand was wrapped under my chin. But he shook me like a rag and shifted that grip, allowing me air and a clearer vantage. And I saw.

I saw the blood flowing from my veins.

I saw the pool, turning red now with that blood.

I saw Lucine struggling to her knees.

My eyes darted to Valerik's face. The dark rage there made me cringe, but I only wanted more fury from him, so that he would find his complete distraction with me.

“Without the shedding of blood,” I said, then had to take a breath before I finished, “there is no remission.”

His face twitched. Something registered in his eyes—a stray thought or dawning realization.

“She is my bride,” I said. “She will always be my bride.”

He jerked around.

Lucine was already on her feet, falling forward. She toppled face-first into the fountain filled with blood drawn from my veins.

“No!” Valerik released his grip and I crumpled to my hands and knees. He leaped to the side of the pool. “No, no, no!” But she was past his grasp.

In a flash, Valerik was back on the platform, leaning over toward her body. He grasped her by the back of her dress and tried to jerk her out, but the cloth tore free and she sank.

“No!” He shoved his arm into the water and cried out with pain. When he yanked his hand out, it was blistered, seared by the blessed water.

Lucine was below the surface still, baptized in that shallow bath of blood. I could fall in after her and try to shove her to the surface. Or I could get my hands around the stake and try to end the life of this beast.

Valerik first. If I pulled her out it would only be for him to savage her.

I got to my feet, staggered to my right, and fell upon the lone stake. When I swung back, Valerik had his hand under the surface again, ignoring the pain of his seared flesh, grasping for her body.

I stumbled forward and threw my full weight into my fall, stake extended. Down upon the back of Vlad van Valerik.

The sharp wood entered his back and slammed right through to the stone beneath him. His body arched and he screamed, a terrifying demonic sound that would disturb the sleep of the most jaded fool.

His body shook violently, bowed back like a praying mantis. I knew I had hit his heart by the full-fledged panic in his eyes.

I knew I had ended his existence on this earth. He was surely dead.

But then I was falling, over the edge, into that bloody grave that was more than my own making.