Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (8 page)

IT WAS STILL EARLY MORNING, YET PETER Octavian sat up in his bed. He stared into the darkness, not seeing his apartment but something else. He was not truly awake, yet neither was he dreaming.

Through the darkness of his room, across the city and the ocean and halfway across another continent, his mind’s eye looked upon a small room in southern Germany. A room in which his friend and onetime mentor, Karl Von Reinman, slept peacefully. Across his chest lay a young female Peter had never seen before.

Octavian had first met the German on the night of his own death, well over five hundred years earlier. Truth be told, Karl was his murderer, though it had been the result of a contract between the two men. Afterward, Peter became part of Von Reinman’s coven, following him all over the world with the other eleven. It was Karl who named him Octavian, the eighth.

Gradually something began to change between them. Peter was learning and growing, and though born to the life of a warrior, he had grown tired of it. He abandoned the coven in Boston on the eve of the twentieth century and struck out on his own to learn as much as he could about their kind. He did learn, and changed. He tried to convince Karl that he and the others were destroying themselves, that they were both far less and far more human than They cared to believe . . . or were able to believe. But it was hard for his old friend to listen. Though his mind had forgiven Peter, his heart still fell that betrayal.

Now Peter sat completely still, staring blankly at the walls of his Boston apartment, entranced by this vision of an old friend. He and the German shared a psychic rapport, a consequence of Peter’s initial transformation. He could see exactly what Karl was doing at any time, if he cared to look. This time, however, he had not looked. This was being shown to him and he had no idea why. He was a helpless witness.

It wasn’t a question of waking up. One moment Karl was asleep and the next he was simply wide-awake. He had sensed, far too late, the presence outside the front door. An ax crunched thick wood, the door. Quietly, he tried to wake the girl, Una. She was replacing number one, who had been brutally killed less than six months ago. Rut the new Una, formerly Maria Hernandez,, had been transformed less than a week earlier. Now she was too blood drunk to wake, and Karl’s silent prodding was useless.

He left her there.

There were no windows in the bedroom, a safety measure. If there was but one intruder, he need only wail in the dark room and kill them as they entered. Rut he knew instinctively who they were, and was certain they would not be foolish enough to send only one or two.

Karl grabbed the bedspread that was balled up at Una’s feet. He threw it over his head, wrapping it around his face like a cloak. Just in case. He ran into the front hallway. The ax fell again, letting a stream of daylight into the house. Light stabbed across the room and a flaming scar appeared on Karl’s face. He moved quickly from the spot.

What had Octavian told him, half a century ago?

Believe, he had said, and you will burn.

It was difficult to concentrate. In the hall he put a hand and foot on either wall and scuttled up a few feet. He pushed up on the wooden square that served as a door to the attic and moved it to the side. Quietly, he pulled himself in, and slowly replaced the trapdoor as a larger portion of the heavy front door splintered away, allowing a hand to reach in and work the locks.

Poor Una.

As he heard the invaders make their way into the house, he turned to the attic window. Bars inside the glass, shutters outside. He crept toward it, completely silent as he had taught all of them to he over the years. He thought again of Octavian. Believe and you will burn, he insisted. Karl tried to convince himself he did not believe in Christian legend, in myth. It was so hard to know what was true when you were a part of that myth.

Somehow, some way, Octavian claimed, the church had fabricated the legendary physical constraints of the immortals and had somehow convinced these poor creatures, his ancestors, that those constraints were real. Hence, though they were capable of wonderful and terrible things, they were also capable of their own destruction. Self-immolation, a sort of suicide.

Believe and you will burn.

The screaming began below. It seemed Una was awake, and unfortunately she believed in the legends. He moved over the bedroom. The light fixture in the bedroom, an old thing with a slowly rotating fan, had been installed by someone with very little skill, and there was space around the fixture through which Karl could see the goings-on in the room.

He wished he hadn’t. Una’s flesh was singed and scarred
—
the scars the shape of the silver cross wielded by a black-haired man. As others held her back with their own crosses, the man held the Christian symbol against her eyes, each in turn bursting in her skull. Her breasts were next, the nipples with their delicate pink areolae charred black by the crucifix, and if Octavian were to he believed, her own faith in its power.

Believe and you will burn.

Karl wanted to go back down and destroy them, make them suffer as she now suffered. But there were too many of them and who knew how many more might wait outside ?

“
We know you are here, thief and killer. Why not come out and we will free the girl? Come out before we do something irreversible to her.”

Karl held back the urge to answer, exercising more control over his rage than he had. ever been able, ever been called to before. Then the cross continued its assault on her legs and belly. Two of the men grabbed Una’s ankles and forced her legs apart, and the silver cross was thrust unceremoniously between them. The black-haired man, the speaker of the group, held the cross with both hands and stirred hard, as if churning butter. There must have been six inches of silver inside her, burning and tearing, destroying everything it touched.

Una’s screaming stopped and she began to vomit blood.

Karl smelled kerosene and realized they were about to torch Una and the bed and the house around her. The only way to end her suffering was right behind him.

He went quickly to the window and. as soundlessly as possible tore the bars from their place. The noise was partially obscured by Una’s retching, but nevertheless they heard him.

“‘
The attic!” one shouted, as if none of them had considered it before.

Karl Von Reinman barely had time to consider Octavian’s advice. If he were to survive
—
if there were any way to save Una
—
he must accept his old. student’s claims. His eyes fluttered closed for a brief moment, and he concentrated. on his disbelief He backed up four steps, ran at the window, and crashed through, the noise of the breaking glass and shattering shutters enough to tell them Immediately what he had done . . . the last thing they had ever expected.

He crashed to the ground amid the shattering glass, trying desperately to keep his concentration. He wished he could metamorphose, but he was certain the change would be strenuous, distracting, and therefore deadly. If he allowed himself even for a moment to become frightened, if he became even momentarily disoriented, he might fall back on his centuries of belief in the Christian myth of his own existence. And then he would hum just as surely as if he were at the center of the sun.

He smiled as he got to his feet, and if he could have spared the energy, he might have laughed. Octavian, his bastard son, had been right all along.

He glanced toward his front yard just as three men, led. by the one with the ax, rounded the corner and began to approach him. Though they were not dressed in their ritual garb, he knew them on sight, the way the mouse knows the cat, regardless of its breed. Vatican men. They were clergy!

Well, he supposed he shouldn’t really be surprised. It was only that he hadn’t expected retaliation so soon.

He sniffed the air
—
two more had come out the back and were behind the house and there was one cm the roof. The roof! Was he Santa Claus, that they thought he might climb out the chimney? No, they knew exactly what he was, and they were here to execute him. What Una had suffered would be nothing in comparison to what they must have planned for him.

The clergymen were almost upon him and he prepared. to fight, his mouth set with grim determination and a dark silence forced upon him by his need for total concentration. Though he was not burning, the sun beating down on him still hurt. Its pressure bore down on his hack, driving spikes of pain from all over his body to his brain.

The man on the roof dropped down onto Von Reinman’s hack with a net of some sort as another ran at him clutching a silver dagger. Looking at the dagger, he felt the vulnerability of his heart the way he had felt it in his eyes and testicles centuries ago as a human. He moved far faster than they, and had thrown off the net and its owner with one swift motion as he tossed the owner of the dagger to the ground yards away. The man with the net was scrambling to his feet as Von Reinman lashed out with his leg, his foot caving in the back of the man’s head. The skull gave way easily under his strength, and there was a slight sucking noise as he withdrew his foot.

The smell hit him immediately, and the previous night’s feast raced through his brain, reminding him of poor Una. He could smell them now, their blood; he could hear their hearts heat. It beckoned him, that smell, that sound, called to him to come and slake his thirst, to relieve himself of his desire, his hunger.

Karl looked up to see the man with the ax and another clergyman standing, unmoving, yards away. The priest who wielded the silver dagger and whom Von Reinman had hurled to the ground was up now and charging his back. His mind seethed as he realized this fool thought to take him by surprise. At the last moment he turned, a guttural snarl and the hate in his squinting eyes the only outward signs of his rage and pain. These priests and. monks, these pathetic, overconfident children, were insignificant. Yet the threat they posed was not. At a subvocal level, he chanted to himself “You do not believe, you do not believe.”

And it was working. In a blur of motion he moved from the dagger’s path, grabbed the hand that held it, and pulled, removing the arm at the shoulder. The man’s throat erupted in bellows of pain as his fresh wound spurted gouts of blood into the air. Karl pulled him close, driving the silver dagger into the man’s belly with such strength that its tip exited the back and Karl’s hand was buried in his guts. With the claws of his other hand he dug into the man’s face and pulled, tearing away much of the skin, leaving bone and muscle visible beneath.

Von Reinman grabbed the dead man’s neck and crotch, lifting him easily above his head, and heaving the corpse at the one with the ax and his companion, who still stood idly by.

And then he realized what it was, the other smell that the bloodlust had blocked from reaching his brain: it was fire.

His house. His house was burning down. Those assholes around the back hadn’t attacked him yet because they’d been busy setting his house on fire so he couldn’t get back in, torching a century’s worth of treasures and the corpse of Una along with it.

Now he was really angry.

The two who had ignited the house now rushed at him from the back and he spun to face them, worried about turning his back on the mart with the ax. These two didn’t look like much, he thought, and was ready to disregard them when one stopped still and, lightning quick, threw another silver dagger straight for his heart. He was so taken off guard that he barely moved in time and the knife plunged into his chest only millimeters from his heart . . . and he screamed.

Lord, it hurt! The blade seared his flesh as he removed it, all the while inwardly cursing himself. It did not hurt, he told himself yet he wondered. Octavian had never mentioned silver. Was that, too, a part of the brainwashing his people had undergone, a deadly hallucination? He was getting confused now, his concentration slipping. What was real and what was not?

I do not believe, his mind chanted, and finally the pain began to fade. Far too late, though, as the four men converged on him.

Worried about the shiny ax blade that might have been silver, Karl lashed out instinctively with the dagger, slicing deeply into a neck. The ax man’s head rocked back on its stalk, then spilled over, hanging from the spinal cord as the decapitated priest stumbled a few steps and then finally fell over.

He struggled with the three remaining clergymen, noting that the men. looked strangely alike. Ah, these must be the Montesi brothers, he realized, the pups of the late sorcerer Vincent Montesi. Karl fought on, hut he was confused, distracted, a little scared perhaps. Surely the destruction of the heart would be a logical way to destroy his kind, but the silver had hurt so badly. Perhaps that was true, and if so, what of the spikes of pain being driven into him now by the sun? What was real?

The man on his left was reaching into his coat, and Karl refused to allow another dagger to be brought into play. But it was a distraction, as the man on his right brought a large silver crucifix up in front of his face. A thousand questions stampeded through his brain, but before any of the answers could come, the cross was laid against his forehead and he was screaming.