Midnight Bites (4 page)

He was never as good when left to his own devices.

In Canterbury, in England, at a time when the young Victoria was only just learning the weight of her crown, he made mistakes. Terrible ones. The worst of these was trusting an alchemist named Cyprien Tiffereau. Cyprien was a brilliant man, a learned man, and Myrnin had forgotten that the learned and brilliant could be just as treacherous as the ignorant and stupid. The trap had caught him entirely by surprise. Cyprien had learned too much of vampires, and had developed an interest in what use might be made of them—medical for a start, and as weapons for the future.

Confessing his own vampire nature to Cyprien, and all his weaknesses, had been a serious error.

I should have known,
he thought as he sat in the dark hole of his cell, fettered at ankles, wrists, and neck with thick, reinforced silver. The burning had started as torture, but he had adjusted over time, and now it was a pain that was as natural to him as the growing fog in his mind. Starvation made his confusion worse, and over the days, then weeks, the little blood that Cyprien had allowed him hadn't sustained him well at all.

And now the door to his cell was creaking open, and Cyprien's lean, ascetic body eased in. Myrnin could smell the blood in the cup in Cyprien's hand, and his whole body shook and cramped with the craving. The scent was almost as strong as that of the hot-metal blood in the man's veins.

“Hello, spider,” Cyprien said. “You should be hungry by now.”

“Unchain me and find out,
friend
,” Myrnin said. His voice was a low growl, like an animal's, and it made him uneasy to hear it. He did not want to be . . . this. It frightened him.

“Your value is too great, I'm afraid. I can't allow such a prize to escape now. You must think of all there is to learn, Myrnin. You are a man with a curious mind. You should be grateful for this chance to be of service.”

“If it's knowledge you seek, I'll help you learn your own anatomy. Come closer. Let me teach you.”

Cyprien was no fool. He placed the cup on the floor and took a long-handled pole to push it within reach of Myrnin's chained hands.

The red, rich smell of the blood overwhelmed him, and he grabbed for the wooden mug, raised it, and gulped it down in three searing, desperate mouthfuls.

The pain hit only seconds later. It ripped through him like pure lightning, crushed him to the ground, and began to pull his mind to pieces. Pain flayed him. It scraped his bones to the marrow. It ripped him apart, from skin to soul.

When he survived it, weeping and broken, he became slowly aware of Cyprien's presence. The man sat at a portable desk, scratching in a small book with a feather pen.

“I am keeping a record,” Cyprien told him. “Can you hear me, Myrnin? I am not a monster. This is research that will advance our knowledge of the natural world, a cause we both hold dear. Your suffering brings enlightenment.”

Myrnin whispered his response, too softly. It hardly mattered. He'd forgotten how to speak English now. The only words that came to his tongue were Welsh, the language of his childhood, of his mother.

“I didn't hear,” Cyprien said. “Can you possibly speak louder?”

If he could, he didn't have the strength, he found. Or anything left to say. Words ran away from him like deer over a hillside, and the fog pressed in, silver fog, confused and confusing. All that was left in him was rage and fear. The taste of poisoned blood made him feel sick and afraid in ways that he'd never imagined he could bear.

And then it grew worse. Myrnin felt his arms and legs begin to convulse, and a low cry burst out of his throat, the wordless plea of a sick creature with no hope.

“Ah,” his friend said. “That would be the next phase. How gratifying that occurs with such precise timing. It should last an hour or so, and then you may rest a bit. There's no hurry. We have weeks together. Years, perhaps. And you are going to be so very useful, my spider. My prized subject. The wonders we will create together . . . just think of it.”

But by then, Myrnin could not think of anything. Anything at all.

The hour passed in torment, and then there were a few precious hours of rest before Cyprien came, again.

The day blurred into night, day, night, weeks, months. There was no way to tell one eternity from the next.
No time in hell,
Myrnin's mind gibbered, in one of his rare moments of clarity.
No clocks. No calendars. No past. No future. No hope, no hope, no hope.

He dreaded Cyprien's appearances, no matter how hungry he became. The blood was sometimes tainted, and sometimes not, which made it all the worse, of course. Sometimes he did not drink, but that only made the next tainted drink more powerful.

Cyprien was patient as death himself, and as utterly unmoved by tears, or screams, or pleas for mercy.

Time must have passed outside his hell, if not inside, because Cyprien grew older. Gray crept into his short-cropped hair. Lines mapped his face. Myrnin had forgotten speech, but if he could have
spoken, he would have laughed.
You'll die before me, old friend,
he thought.
Grow old and feeble and die.
The problem was that on the day that Cyprien stopped coming and lay cold in his grave, Myrnin knew he would go on and on, starving slowly into an insanely slow end, lost in this black hole of pain.

And finally, one day, Myrnin became aware that Cyprien had
not
come. That time had passed, and passed, and the darkness had never altered. Blood had never arrived. His hunger had rotted whatever sanity he had left, and he crouched in the dark, mindless, ready for whatever death he could pray to have . . . until the angel came.

Ah, the angel.

She smelled of such pale things—winter, flowers, snow. But she glowed and shimmered with color, and he knew her face, a little. Such a beautiful face. So hard to look upon, in his pain and misery.

She had keys to his bonds, and when he attacked her—because he could not help it, he was so hungry—she deftly fended him off and gave him a bottle full of blood. Fresh, clean, healthy blood. He gorged until he collapsed on the floor at her feet, cradling the empty glass in his arms like a favorite child. He was still starving, but for a precious moment, the screaming was silent.

Her cool fingers touched his face and slid the lank mess of his hair back.

“I find you in a much worse state this time, dear one,” said the angel. “We must stop meeting like this.”

He thought he made a sound, but it might have been only his wish, not expressed by flesh at all. He wanted to respond. Wanted to weep. But instead he only stayed there, limp on the ground, until she pulled him up and dragged him out with her.

Light. Light and color and confusion. Cyprien dead on the stairs,
the cup of poisoned blood spilled into a mess on the steps next to his body. The bloodless bite on his neck was neat, and final.

There was a book in his pocket.
That book.
The book in which he'd recorded all of the torture, the suffering. Myrnin pointed to it mutely, and the angel silently slipped the book from Cyprien's body and passed it to him. He clutched it to his breast. And then, with the angel's help, stamped his foot down on the wooden mug to smash it into pieces.

“I killed him for you,” the angel said. There was tense anger in her voice, and it occurred to him then that her hair was red, red as flame, and it tingled against his fingers when he hesitantly stroked it. “He deserved worse.” She stopped, and looked at him full in the face. He saw her distress and shock. “Can you not speak, sir? At all? For me?”

He mutely stared back. There was a gesture he should have made, but he could not remember what it would be.

She sounded sad then. “Come, let's get you to safety.”

But there was no safety, out in the streets. Only a blur of faces and shrieking and pain. A building burned, sending flames jetting like blood into the sky, and there was a riot going on, and he and his angel were caught in the middle of it. A man rushed them, face twisted, and Myrnin leaped for him, threw him down on the rough cobbles, and plunged his fangs deep into the man's throat.

As good as the fresh blood his angel had delivered had been, this,
this
was life . . . and death. Myrnin drained his victim dry, every drop, and was so intent on the murder of it that he failed to see the club that hit him in the back of the head, hard enough to send him collapsed to the paving. More men closed in, a blur of fists and feet and clubs, and he thought,
I escaped one hell to suffer in another
, and all he could do was hug the book, the precious book of his own insanity and suffering, to his chest and wait to die.

But then his angel was there, his fiery angel. She needed no sword, only her own fury, and she cleared them from him. She was hurt for it, and he hated himself that he was the cause of her pain, but she drove them back.

The head wound must have sparked visions, because he saw himself, a different self, sober and sane and dressed in brilliant colors, and he saw himself in an embrace with his angel—no, his Lady Grey, his savior; he remembered her name now. He remembered that much, at least.

The book was gone. He did not know where he'd put it. But somehow it didn't seem so important now. He had her.
Her.

The vision vanished, and then Lady Grey turned to him, with something strange in her wide eyes as she helped him to his feet.

“Come, my lord,” she said. “Let us have you out of this place.”

•   •   •

Escape was difficult to achieve, but she changed from her blood-spattered gown and wrapped him in layers of heavy clothes, then hired a carriage to rush them out of London. The streets were unsafe around them, and he was, he admitted, not the most pleasant of companions. The filth on him had been unnoticeable when he was locked away, but now, with the clean smell of the countryside washing through the windows, and Lady Grey in her neat dress seated across from him, he knew he stank horribly. As neither of them breathed to live, though, it was a tolerable situation. For now.

But in addition to the filth, he was also given to fits, and he knew they distressed her. Sometimes he would simply leave his body while it thrashed hard enough to snap his bones; sometimes, the fit came as a wave of terror that drove him to cower in the footwell of the coach, hiding from imaginary agonies. And each time such things came to devour him, she was there, holding his hand, stroking his foul and
filthy hair, whispering to him that all was well, and she would look after him.

And he believed her.

The trip was very long, and the fits passed slowly, but they lessened in intensity as his vampire body rejected Cyprien's poisons from it; he slept, drank more blood, ate a little solid food (though that experiment proceeded less well), and felt a very small bit better when the carriage finally rocked to a stop at the ruins of an ancient keep set atop a hill.

“Where are we?” he asked Lady Grey, gazing at the old stones. They seemed familiar to him. She looked at him with a sudden, bright smile.

“That's the first you've spoken,” she said. “You're getting better.”

Was he? He still felt hollow as a bell inside, and yet full of darkness. At least there were words in him now. Yes. That was true.

“You will remember this place,” she said. “Come. It looks worse than it is.”

She must have paid the driver off, or bewitched him, because the coach thundered off in a cloud of dust and left them in the moonlight beside what seemed a deserted pile of tumbledown walls . . . and then he blinked, and the ruins wavered like the shimmer of heat over sand, and rebuilt into what the keep would have been, in its prime. Small but solid.

And he
did
know it. He'd visited it often in his dreams, trapped in Cyprien's cells.

“I remember,” he said. “I had a bath.”

“And you'll have another, for all our sakes,” Lady Grey said, and linked her arm in his. “Can you walk?”

“Yes,” he said. His voice sounded rusty and uncertain, but his will was strong, and he put one clumsy foot before another as she walked
him forward. The gate opened as they approached, and servants bowed them in.

One of them, a tall, lean man, approached and said, “Shall I take him and see him presentable, my lady?”

Myrnin shrank back. He couldn't help it. The man wasn't Cyprien, but he seemed to be, in that moment, and he clung to Lady Grey's arm like a fearful child. She understood, he thought, for without a flicker, she said, “No, I will attend Lord Myrnin for a while. Draw a bath, as hot as can be done. He'll need a long soaking. Fetch him clothes, too.”

The servant—vampire, not human, Myrnin realized—drew away and went to do her bidding. Lady Grey walked him into the dark hallways, and for some ill reason Myrnin felt safer in the gloom than he had in the light. He'd adapted to the shadows, he thought. So many years in the dark, it had seeped into him and stained him.

“This happened before,” he said to her, as they walked. “Didn't it?” Things blurred when he tried to focus on them. Everything blurred and shook, except for her. She was a still, steady, glowing constant, and he kept his gaze on her.

“You were imprisoned before, yes, but not so unkindly as this time. But you are improving already,” she said, and smiled. In the darkness, it was as if the sun had come out, but it was a kinder sun, one that warmed instead of burned. “I've been searching for you for almost ten years, when word came that you'd gone missing. How did this happen to you?”

“I trusted.”

“The man I killed?”

Myrnin nodded. Just the thought of Cyprien, the impartial, cool interest in the man's face, made him shiver again. He'd known cruel men before; Amelie's father, Bishop, had been one such, with no regard for the living or the vampires who came after them. Death had been just another tool to him.