Vampire Apocalypse - Revelations Part 19

Smiling, she took up his feelings within her mind, held them one last time, then let them go.

Good-bye, she thought as the darkness took her under.

Good-bye, Nicky.

*** 135.

England, 1390 Death reigned in those days. Reigned in black pustules and coughing, in black smoke pluming over the cities with the burning of pile after pile of bodies. Screams of pain and of mourning filled the air at all hours of the day or night. Hope had come to an end, and G.o.d reclaimed the world.

Hope still held part of Vivian's heart, small and trembling, as she walked up the long trail to the distant cloister. Stories had come from that place, about the monks there. They helped the ill rather than turning them away, nursed them as best they could. Some people even claimed to have come back alive and healed from the place. It wasn't unheard of for a man to live through the Plague, and many who had come here had lived.

Many more than seemed normal.

Some spoke of the touch of G.o.d within those walls. Still others spoke of bargains struck with Satan. Vivian didn't care which was true. She only wanted to live.

By the time she reached the end of the trail, she thought it might be too late. She could barely move, her arms and legs weak and shaking. It took a great effort of will to reach up and grasp the bell pull. But when she collapsed, her weight dragged the rope down with her, sending the bell pealing into the cloister beyond.

Time pa.s.sed, and she might have slept. She wasn't certain, as her mind drifted in and out of awareness. Finally a tall, robed figure appeared. Perhaps he had opened the tall door first. He must have. As Vivian peered up at him she saw the open doorway behind him.

He knelt next to her, bringing into view a long, sober face partially obscured by a brown cowl. "Child, why do you come here?"

Vivian stared up at him. Was he an angel? Surely not. Surely an angel wouldn't have asked such a stupid question. "I want to live," she said, and tried to reach for him.

The man's expression didn't change. Strong hands touched her, arms reached under her. "We'll see what we can do."

*** 136.

Within the cloister walls Vivian found, for the first time in months, air free of the stench of burning bodies. The place smelled of gentler things, of earth and baking bread. The man carried her to a room and gently settled her on a mat on the dirt floor. Her body ached with the need to breathe. She lay still, wondering how close the hand of death lay, if it reached out to touch and claim her even now.

"Rest," said the man. "The Father will come for you soon."

He disappeared out the door before Vivian could ask if he meant a particular monk, or the Lord Himself.

She drifted again, breathing as best she could, her lungs thick with fluid. She'd watched her mother die, her sister-had nursed them as well as she could before the sickness had claimed her, too. Her father had left them all and tried to burn the house down on his way out the door. Vivian had stopped the flames. Perhaps it would have been better to let them burn.

Surely death from fire couldn't have been worse than the Death which had come.

She didn't want to sleep, afraid she might never wake up.

But sleep claimed her, anyway, and she drifted into a velvety darkness. Pain still lurked at its edges. That must have meant she was still alive. It was hard to tell sometimes.

When she woke again, it was suddenly, her eyes flying open to stare at the rough-hewn beams in the ceiling. Not dead yet, she thought, and wondered what it would be like when she did die. Probably much like that velvety sleep, but without the gnawing pain. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to let it happen.

No. She wasn't ready. Something inside her screamed that it just wasn't time yet.

But had any of the thousands who'd died been ready? Why should she be allowed to choose the length of her life? More powerful forces than her own mind ruled that realm.

Then she heard a sound. A soft rustle to her right. Carefully, she turned her head.

Another monk had come into the room. Taller and broader than the first, he seemed almost to fill the whole room. A cowl shadowed his face. All she could see was the strong, hard jut of his nose. 137 "Yes?" she croaked.

He came closer, then knelt next to her, shifting as he moved so the shadow of the cowl always obscured his face. What did he not want her to see?

"Be still," he said. His voice was barely audible, and rough, as if it cost him dearly to speak at all. His hands came out of the folds of his robes and touched her. "How long have you been ill?"

"Not long." Her voice, too, took a great deal of effort. "My family died before me. I tended them as best I could."

He gently lifted her tunic, looking at her bare skin. Before she could give it thought, he had disrobed her completely and was looking beneath her arms at the black, swollen lumps there.

"You are near death," he said quietly.

"I know. I feel it."

He looked into her face, and for a moment she saw the glint of his eyes and a small piece of his face. Scars puckered his skin, as if he'd been terribly burned. So that was what he hid. She wanted to push back his cowl and look. What could be so terrible, as long as it wasn't the face of Death himself?

He skimmed her body lightly with his hands, a physician's touch, warm and careful. Eyes closed, he seemed to be a.n.a.lyzing her condition with his fingers. She dared a glance downward and saw that even his hands were scarred.

Then his touch shifted. He laid his hands on top of her head and held them there a long time, then moved them over her eyes, over her collarbones, over her stomach, then low on her belly, just above her s.e.x. Each time he moved he sat utterly still while a strange warmth grew on her skin. Her mind drifted, moving away from the pain and into a dark, quiet place where the pain was only a memory.

After a long time he leaned back, sagging as if weakened.

Then he straightened and looked at her face, again allowing a small strip of light to penetrate the shadows of the cowl. "You will be well in time. It was not too late. Try to sleep." He drew a folded blanket from the foot of her mat and gently covered her with it.

He left her wondering at the strangeness of it all. And she 138 did sleep, long and deeply, and without dreams.

The Present Vivian woke suddenly, gasping. She rarely dreamed during the Sleep, but when she did it was usually like this-memories so vivid they could have happened yesterday, rather than hundreds of years ago.

She hadn't thought about those days in England for a very long time. The memories weren't pleasant. The story of how she had become a vampire was one she rarely thought about, much less shared. But every once in a while, the remembrance came back to haunt her in her sleep.

She sat up and pushed damp hair out of her eyes. Darkness had just fallen outside, and her borrowed blood still moved sluggishly. She needed to feed.

Vivian had great control over her hunger, as did all her Children. She wasn't sure why, but had always accepted and taken advantage of the ability. Now she put her needs out of her mind as she dressed and headed to the kitchen for one of the specially prepared plasma drinks she always kept on hand.

Dr. Greene, a hematologist who lived and worked in the vampire underground, had formulated the mixture for her several years ago. Others of the vampires had found it helpful, as well.

She hadn't quite reached the kitchen when she realized someone else was in her house. Not an uncommon occurrence-her house sat on the unstable junction between mortal reality and the vampire underground, and various vampires wandered into it from time to time. But she was certain she'd been alone last night when she'd succ.u.mbed to the Sleep in her own bed. The presence tickled at the back of her mind, like a vague odor, but she couldn't quite pin it down. Not hostile, though. That she was sure of. So she fetched her plasma, then strolled through the house, trying to track the presence down.

She found it-or, actually, him-in her office, sitting at her computer desk. Lucien looked up as she positioned herself in the doorway, leaning against the frame and sipping her breakfast.

"Good morning," he said. "Sort of. Good evening?" 139 Vivian smiled. "Something like that." She gestured toward the computer. "Finding everything you need?"

"Not really. Where's the 'on' switch?"

Fighting back laughter, Vivian crossed the room and pressed the switch on the surge protector strip with her toe. "Better?"

"Much. Thanks."

The sounds of the booting computer filled the room as Lucien leaned back in his chair. "Julian showed me some of your e- mail earlier today. It's quite interesting."

Vivian sat on the edge of the desk, adjusting her lightweight robe to cover her thighs. Or most of them, at least. Lucien seemed to be enjoying the view. She let one flap slip off her knee.

"I haven't had much time to read any of it, just sort it as it comes in. What I've read is-well, I guess interesting is a good word."

"How long had the Senior been collecting it? The previous Senior, I mean."

"Years. Before I showed up to do the grunt work." She gave a light laugh. "I think he thought he could reconstruct the Book of Changing Blood."

The computer had booted up by now, and Lucien was frowning at the terminal. "He got a good start. I'd say better than half the text is here in one form or another."

Vivian stared. "The text of the Book? I thought the Book of Changing Blood was a myth."

"No. It's real enough."

"Are you sure?"

"I wrote part of it."

She could think of nothing to say to that. He'd lost interest in her knees and was absorbed in the computer screen. Vivian watched his face, gone quiet and contemplative. He had scars, thin lines across his nose and curving under his chin. One made a line from the top of his ear to the bottom, as if the ear had been torn off at some point. How did a vampire get scars? But he'd said he wasn't really a vampire.

The cool, gray-blue eyes scanned from side to side, and again Vivian was struck by the familiarity of his face. 140 "Have we met before?" she asked suddenly.

He turned his eyes to her slowly. "A few days ago. There was the incident with Nicholas..."

"Smart-a.s.s. I mean before that."

He smiled a little. "I'm sorry. It's all I remember."

"Then we haven't met before?"

"We might have."

She shook her head. "We must not have."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because you'd remember. I'm unforgettable."

His smile widened. "I'm sure you are. But so am I, so why can't you remember?"

"Touche." She slipped off the desk and walked around to stand behind his chair. "Indus Valley," she said, reading from the screen. The e-mail consisted of a graphics file, showing a wall full of carved hieroglyphics. "Can you read that?"

"Some days. Can't quite manage it today, I'm afraid."

"So today you can't remember if you met me, and you can't remember how to read ancient hieroglyphics from the Indus Valley, either? What day will you be able to remember?

This Wednesday, maybe?"

His implacable smile didn't waver. "Thursday, more likely."

"Are there translations attached with the pictures?"

"No. n.o.body's cracked this code yet."

"But you can read them?"

"Eventually, I'd remember the language."

"Then why don't you go help out the poor mortals who've been working on translation?"

"Because I remember enough to know there's quite a bit there those poor mortals don't need to know. At least in this excerpt."

He switched to another note, in another obscure language Vivian didn't recognize.

"Here," Lucien said. "This I can read. 'From the Mother's Spine came the First Demons, children of the union of the G.o.ds and the chosen virgins. They pa.s.sed out of the Mountain Lands into the East Lands. . . .' That's the end. The note says somebody burned the rest of this particular scroll." 141 "You can read that, but you can't remember that other language?"

"I've been alive twelve thousand years. There's a lot of s.h.i.t stuffed up there."

"So maybe you'll dredge up the answer to my question some other time?"

He turned toward her, looking directly into her eyes. She saw perhaps a thousand years there. How could it be possible to carry more? "It's entirely possible that tomorrow or the day after I'll wake up and suddenly remember exactly when I met the Vampire Vivian. The first moment I saw that sleek black hair, the first time I looked into those violet eyes." He leaned forward and touched her cheek, tracing a rough, scarred finger over her skin. She trembled deep inside, a quick, difficult tremble that eclipsed everything else for a moment. "Did I touch you then?" he said. "Back then when we first met?"

"I don't think so." Her voice betrayed her, shaking. She swallowed to steady it. "That I would have remembered." 142

FOUR.

After she'd left, Lucien sat for a long time staring at the computer screen, reading nothing. Vivian had said she'd gone to find Julian, but Lucien suspected she'd been as moved by their brief encounter as he had.

Perhaps not quite as much, though, and that only because he knew things she didn't. Like exactly the moment they'd first met, and how, and why, and what had happened after. It didn't surprise him she'd forgotten.

After twelve thousand years of existence his memory was spotty, but some memories couldn't be shaken. He remembered his own birth, the encounter with his dying mother, the times he'd died, and the time he'd spent with Vivian, several centuries ago. Everything else came and went.

He nudged his mind back to the present, always a difficult proposition, and focused on the e-mails. The Senior had been collecting this information for a long time. Julian had shown him a drawer in the Senior's office full of papers dating back to the early 18th century-all part of this same continuum of data, all bits and pieces of the Book of Changing Blood.

He'd written part of it, along with Aanu, but could remember none of it. But when he read excerpts, he knew which were legitimate, which were corrupted, and which came from entirely different sources. He didn't think the whole doc.u.ment was there, in spite of the ma.s.sive quant.i.ty of information the Senior had gathered over the years, but a good portion of it was.

Perhaps enough to answer Julian's questions.

"'Light will become dark, and dark light. The light will feed upon the light, the dark upon the dark,'" he read. He hadn't written that one. That sounded like Aanu's work. Lucien's sections weren't quite so obscure. "'Those who feed upon the light will war against those who feed upon the dark, and the outcome will determine the course of the universe.'" A bit overstated, that, but Aanu had always been melodramatic.

Melodramatic or not, though, the days spoken of were 143 coming. Julian's transformation had begun the process, and what had happened with Nicholas and Vivian represented another piece of the puzzle.