The Queen of Wolves (3 page)

“You have been out during the day without my knowledge?”

She shot me a defiant glance. “You do not own me. You do not dictate where I go. What I do.”

“It’s a dangerous game you’ve been playing.”

“No vampyre threatens me during the day. Do you think I will destroy you and your kind?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “You have reason to do so. It is easy enough for mortals to send us to our Extinguishing when the sun is high above us. We are vulnerable during those hours. During times of plagues and famine, we were hunted like wolves—scapegoats for every crime of the earth. We were devils. There are hunters who seek our treasures.”

“You have given them freely to me,” Natalia said. “I do not wish the end of your tribe. But...Aleric, there is so much... It might take me a lifetime to decipher the scrolls here, to see each frieze and painting, and to pore over the works. As long as I am here, I want to explore all of it.”

“You have a great hunger for this.”

“I’ve spent my life dreaming of finding a place like Alkemara,” she said, and something in her voice reminded me of another voice I had heard centuries before. “I am here. Now. I don’t know for how long. I know people will search for me—at some point. I know that some night, you may...you may take my life.”

Never,
I thought. I did not answer her, for to do so might reveal what I sought to offer when I had told her of my past.

“The wars,” I said. “They grow closer with each passing night. I can’t risk you to any of this.”

“Will you give me my freedom here?”

“But the dangers,” I said. “I trusted Daniel, though I should not have.”

“He adores you,” she said. “And he’s terrified of you.”

“You can say this...after he...”

“He wouldn’t kill me. He’s afraid of me, as much as he wants to destroy me,” she said. “You are not so easy to decipher. I cannot read this much in you. In the papers and scrolls of your first century, I have begun learning so much. I want more. I want the lock for the key made of the bone of a wolf. Is it a box, or a room?”

“It’s in a room. Forbidden to all.”

“All but you.”

“Are you my Bluebeard?” she asked. “If I find a way into that forbidden room, will I find all your dead wives?”

I could not lighten my demeanor when it came to this chamber. “You must not even search for it,” I warned her. “I will take you to it when I know you will understand what is there. Come, my friends have laid out a feast for you.”

“After supper? Will I see this forbidden place?” she asked.

6

That evening, we sat in the Great Hall of the Temple of Lemesharra within the buried city of Alkemara. She was in a sullen mood, and I, too, had grown moody. She wanted too much too fast. She needed to know all that had happened, and yet there was much of the journey of my first century to tell.

All around us were the gently curved ceilings where—in centuries since my first discovery of this city—I had brought the young apprentices who had worked with Michelangelo himself to create a similar Heaven and Hell upon the walls of Alkemara.

Above us, the paintings of angels and demons, the creatures of the Veil and of Myrryd—including the Lamiades, the Akhnetur, and the Myrrydanai themselves—told a story of the visible and invisible world around us. The lizardlike Lamiades seemed to chase each other’s tails; while the Akhnetur—those flying scorpions with the faces of maidens—spun their webs and swarmed along a white tree that produced golden fruit at the center of a garden deep with the purple Veil flower. Other creatures, from harpies to gryphons, guarded the corners of the ceilings—each rendered so clearly as to seem drawn from life. A portrait of the vampyre Pythia watched us from the far end of the room.

Closer to our table, Enora’s portrait adorned the smooth wall. She glared at us, but the painting did not capture her ferocity.

Surrounding her in the portrait were her Chymer wolf-women, some vaguely in the middle of a transformation from wolf to human, others complete. All of them crouched at Enora’s feet.

I glanced up at the ceiling—to the magnificent falcons of my mortal life—and the words returned to me from many hundreds of years previous: “The falcons hunt the skies.”

As I spoke it, Natalia also glanced up from where she sat at the table. “You were a falconer as a boy. You flew as a falcon as a vampyre.”

“I was called Falconer, and did not understand for many years why the name remained with me,” I said. “Those birds...from my childhood...from the teachings my grandfather gave to me of their language and their nature. I did not know that my own nature was of a flying predator. The falcons became like spirit guides to me, although it took me until the first battle against Taranis-Hir to understand this.”

Upon our long table, laden with the scrolls, the maps, the debris of the past, all sprawled about amidst the generous repast my companions had brought for our mortal guest: grapes, dates, flatbread, spiced goat meat stewed in steamy tarjines, and chicken roasted to a tender brown-yellow. A flagon of red wine, a heavy bottle of white; a pitcher of warm jasmine tea; lentil samosas; and various other tidbits and tastes that they had gathered from flights to the cities each night.

The smell of sweet spice was in the air. The room, filled with a thousand candles, shimmered with the light, almost giving movement to the portraits and images on the walls. Between the flickering lights, the shadows.

“You haven’t eaten much this evening,” I said. I pushed away a scroll Natalia had unraveled and offered her some bread dipped in warm, yellow hummus. “Try something.”

“I’ll grow fat here,” she said, but took the bread from my fingers. Tasting it, she made a gentle sound of satisfaction. “This is heaven for me.”

“Heaven? Many mortals would call it the opposite.”

“This room, this temple. The entire city,” she said. She reached for a goblet, and I poured wine from the flagon into it. She took a sip. “All these scrolls. All this lost...lost history. Lost knowledge.”

“The world seems no worse without it,” I said.

“No better, you mean.” She glanced over at the painting of Enora. Enora, in her wolf-pelt robes, her hair dyed red for battle. Beneath the robe, a long gown of pure white. In her left hand, the Nahhashim staff; in her right, what looked like a great claw thrust on the end of a half-spear. “She was the mother of your children.”

“When she was Alienora,” I said, not bothering to look over at the painting. “The Myrrydanai took her over. She invited them into her. She sought the lowest form of magick—power over others. The destruction of others. Anyone can destroy. Even a child may wipe out a colony of ants with one well-placed footstep. She was nothing but fury...at the end.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, trying not to remember the last time I saw Enora, as she stood along the balcony of the tower of White-Horse. I did not yet wish to recall her words, or remember what her final act had been.

I opened my eyes and directed her attention to the far end of the table—the portrait of the Pythoness. “Pythia—a Pythoness of an ancient age. Daughter of Merod, child of Alkemara. She enjoyed power as well. A trickster, a deceiver, a liar, a betrayer. Despite all these qualities, she rescued me and led me from certain Extinguishing in Aztlanteum, risking her own life—for she had become mortal then.”

“The mask that leached immortality from her, yes. The Gorgon Mask.”

“Medhya’s Mask, the mask of Datbathani—the mask has had many names, for it has passed through many hands until it reached Pythia herself. Some legends say that the mask was stolen from the god of the sun and given to a tribe of men that slaughtered all other tribes in those years when men lived beneath the ground. Others, that the mask was stolen from the temple walls of a conquered god. The mask brought immortality to its first wearer, who then became a god. It has since leeched immortality or mortality from whoever wore it. Nezahual called it the mask of the Ketsali, and claimed ownership. I think he loved the mask more than he loved Pythia.”

“You loved her.”

I nodded. “Perhaps this love was forced upon me when she brought me into vampyrism. She was avaricious. Lustful. Lazy. Sneaky. Bloodthirsty. How do you love a betrayer? A seducer? A creature who brought her own father to misery? She could not see gold, but she had to steal it. She could not find a beautiful youth, but she must seduce him. That love is like a firestorm. In the centuries that have passed, all love seems...”

I could not finish the thought. I felt the old pain at my heart. I had three loves in my early life, and I could not think of any of them without experiencing regret and sorrow. “Yes. I loved her, and others.”

“I think most people would not believe a vampyre capable of love,” Natalia said as she reached to the middle of the table to pluck a handful of grapes from a wooden plate.

“Some vampyres cannot love,” I said. “There is a love between us, even so. The stream is a kind of love—it flows as if telepathically between all vampyres. We feel the sorrows of those we cannot even see. We understand those who have committed atrocity. We forgive the vampyre his flaws, because to feel what the other feels is to understand completely. That is a kind of love. But I suspect love doesn’t interest you tonight. Or does it?”

“What about your children? You had two with Enora.”

“Lyan, my daughter. Taran, my son,” I said. I did not like to think of them anymore. It had taken me centuries to want to recall their young faces.

“Surely you had not given up on them? Even their mother—I can’t believe you had given up on her.”

“A vampyre? Care about mortal children?” I grinned.

“You are not like the others here. I know that. You loved Enora once. She was the mother of these two children. Did you truly give up that love?”

“Despite all she had done? I had watched her eat the heart of her youngest brother, his blood along her lips and chin. She was more the monster than I. How could I love her then? When she destroyed vampyres and burned many of the forest women—could I love her, despite this? When she...did all that she could, using bog sorcery and the old magick that the Myrrydanai taught her... No, I could not feel that pure love again for her that I had felt when our world had still been a place of innocence and purity.”

“But she was a prisoner of Medhya herself—a hostage to the White Robe priests.”

“Yes. A hostage. I could be blamed for her transformation, for it was my death at Pythia’s hands and my resurrection from the Sacred Kiss that brought about her descent into darkness. When I professed my love for her, and we took our passion into a chapel, beneath the gaze of the stone virgin, did either of us truly understand how love could turn to daggers in a heartbeat? We conceived our twins that night, and I was sent to war soon after. What war taught me was mortal waste and the inability of humankind to value what is within its grasp, and instead to value what others hold. Wars are for wolves and scavengers.

“So I grew to hate the world. While Pythia drank my blood in a tower of Hedammu, my beloved Alienora received news of my death, and then rumors of my damnation. Yes, the Myrrydanai priests began to dominate her. Yes, she turned to bog sorcery to learn my fate, and to try and bring power into her soul that she might—perhaps—save me. The taste of the magick of the forest turned her to a darker magick, to the bogs where the hounds of Medhya whispered to her of ancient sorceries, of plagues to be born, of dreams brought as a Disk into the world. It was her decision to spill the blood of our children to call up shadows from the bog. It was her decision to murder her family that she might become baroness after her father’s death. She sought power, and showed her true nature—a nature that is hidden when we’re young and untested.”

“You drink blood,” Natalia said. “You have sipped from my throat for many nights. You have murdered many men. Don’t pretend you’re not a monster. Perhaps you are more monster than a vampyre like Daniel, who is honest in his bloodthirst.”

I nodded. “I am no hero of mortals, I know this. What seems brutal is instinct to me. What seems bloodthirsty is merely...survival.”

“You could hate Enora for her crimes,” Natalia said. “You could love Pythia, despite hers. And your friend Ewen. He, too, murdered. The stain of murder and slaughter is also on your hands. It must be difficult to separate the good from the bad.”

I grew furious from her mentioning of names as if she understood who these people had been to me. I stood up, kicking my chair backward. “Do you say such things to drive a stake through my heart? How many nights will I tell you of these things? How many nights will you listen and not understand?”

I turned away from her, grabbing the flagon of wine. I threw it at Enora’s portrait. It smashed against the wall, just at Enora’s throat. A red stain dripped across Enora’s wolf-pelt cape and the robe beneath it.

“You must see with the eyes of the immortal to know. You cannot look at mortal life and see the difference between the way of the vampyre and the way of humankind. You all think us monsters! I have had companions hunted by human wolves who—in their blind ignorance—believed that annihilation of my tribe was for the good of all mortals. I spent years during the inquisitions in Europe, rescuing witches and gypsies—and when my kind was caught, we were beheaded and burned, extinguished as devils. Who were the devils? The inquisitors? The accusers of these innocents? Or the vampyres who drank blood for existence, but spent nights guarding those who had no guard left to them upon the Earth?”

I turned to face Natalia. “And you! The man you intended to marry when you were young would have destroyed you as he had destroyed others. I saw in his eyes what was to come, and I tasted it in his blood. He was a killer, a rapist, and a thug. He wanted your death, and he lied and cheated you to draw you into his web.”

“Vampyres only kill bad men?” she asked defiantly. “Your servants here killed people who had accompanied me. Those people were not murderers and rapists.”

My wings drew out from my shoulders, and I flew upward to the curved ceiling. There among the harpies and gorgons, I roosted on a wide ledge that separated ceiling from wall. “Do not question this, Natalia. Do not. You are here as my guest. That you even live is a testament to what I speak of. No creature is pure in thought or deed. No mortal, no immortal. The instinct of a lion cannot be compared to that of a lamb. When one creature kills for survival or protection, you cannot compare that to those who kill for pleasure and power.”