Ad Eternum (6 page)

The moon was waning now, but only just. A predator’s eyes shone in the dark with amplified light; a wampyr’s were no exception, and those reflections helped him see. He stopped in a meadow where the moon shadows lay like ink on the withered grass and turned back along his own path with folded arms.

„Obersturmführerin,” he called, softly enough so only a monster’s ears would hear him. „Why don’t you come out of the darkness?”

Ruth Grell appeared before him like a shadow in reverse, her pale skin and hair silhouetted against the darkness behind her as she let her concealing wine-red velvet hood slide down. The wampyr knew it was velvet; he heard the nap rustle across the space that separated them.

“English,” she said. “And please do not call me that, Dr. Chaisty.”

“If you promise not to call me Dr. Chaisty.”

She smiled, a lovely child, and drifted like a stalking wolf across the distance between them. The shell she wore had not aged a day since he met her in 1938. And yet what lived inside was a woman now, a warrior, and not a babe courageous beyond measure and determined to save—or avenge—her family. “All right, Dracula. That was what we settled on last time, wasn’t it?”

“Call me Jack. And I shall call you—Miss Grell?”

“Ruth,” she said.

He said, “Ruth. How did you find me?”

She touched the side of her nose. Her fingernails were thick and long, as clear as glass. She had filed them to elegant ovals. “I tracked you from the Aphatos. You said once…”

As if her throat had closed up around the words, she shook her head and looked down.

“I told you to find me when the war was over, and you were alone.”

“If I lived.”

“You lived.”

She was warm in the icy darkness. Steam rose from her words; none from his. Her chest rose and fell with the breathing. His lay still until he worked it like a bellows to push out the words.

She said, “Are you so sure?”

“Transformation is not death.” He placed a cold hand on her cheek. “Take it from me.”

“Heh.” It wasn’t a laugh so much as a soft huff. She folded her arms and leaned back against a tree. “So what is it like?”

“Transformation?”

“I’ve done that.” Bright hair whisked across the collapsed hood. “Death.”

“It hurts,” he said.
And what is it about this return to this city that demands confidences of you, left and right?
“There’s the pleasure, of course. And after the pleasure, the pain. And then a spiral, a cold vortex, pulling you down…until you awaken again, starving, with fire in every vein. Even the dark is too bright, and even the night is too loud. And if you are very, very fortunate…your creator is there to receive you, and explain what has happened, and what happens next.”

She said, “
Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha
‑
olam, ha
‑
gomeyl lahayavim tovot sheg’malani kol tov
.”

He said, “All places shall be Hell, that is not Heaven.”

She came and linked her arm in his, and said, “Some old monster you turned out to be. Come and walk a while with me.”

He let her lead him among the dark, and waited while she thought about what she wanted to say.
Aphatos indeed
, he thought, but eventually she found the words.

“Did you know I’d live forever? When you made that offer?”

“No one lives forever,” he said. “But I suspected you might endure for a long time. You and the other Sturmwölfe.”

“You,” she said. “You change your name. You move from place to place. You are a vagabond. Is that from fear of what they would do to you?”

Yes
. “Some of my kind have found other answers.”
Divorcing themselves utterly from human society, but for their courts. Cultivating a family, a dynasty to feed them in exchange for riches or protection. Hunting by night, without remorse. Setting themselves up as demon-kings, and taking tribute where they would.

Walking into the daylight. Walking into the fire.

He swallowed it all and said, “Nothing is eternal, Ruth.”

“Well,” she said. “The sorrowful fate of the Thousand-Year Reich proves you right. But this…abnegation of yours. This denial of continuity of experience? It
can’t
be good for you.”

“It isn’t.”

“But it keeps you alive?”

“I am not,” he said, “precisely speaking, alive.”

Her fingers tightened in the crook of his elbow. “I have no one but you. I am a war criminal. Ulfhethinn. A monster. The others like me—” she shrugged “—they are, or were, Prussian beasts. They hate me. They would hunt me as a dog hunts the wolf that slew its master.”

“We are monsters together.” He laid his cold fingers over her warm ones. “I don’t avoid politics because the world won’t change. I avoid them because it always changes back.”

“Do you think I did a bad thing?”

“I think you did a beautiful thing,” he said. “A task that, not being Sisyphus, one creature can only perform so many times before exhaustion wears her thin.”

“I want to see the world,” she said. “I want to be someone other than Ruth Grell, traitor.”

“You want me to come with you.”

She squeezed. The scents of the city night surrounded them as they rounded the edge of the reservoir: icy water, leaf mold, asphalt, exhaust, a whiff of gasoline. “Have you ever killed a man?”

He said, “You’ve only done it the once.”

“Yes.”

“It won’t get easier. Not until you learn to desire it, as some do.”

“It’s not a man’s death I desire.”

“No,” he said. “It’s a woman’s love. And you cannot have that either. Find someone else. Someone who has not sworn fealty to a worse monster than either of us. Find someone better. Love her.”

“First,” she said, “I thought I’d see if I could find a friend.”

He squeezed her hand again. Her grip was so tight on his sleeve that his clasp did not bend her fingers. “You can’t run from your demons, Ruth.”

“They have wings,” she whispered.

“And it attracts their attention.” He winked at her in the moonlight. She laughed, just a little.

“Come with me.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“You say you despise politics,” Ruth said. “And here you are, maintaining an identity as a wampyr in a city where that’s an act of public defiance. An act of politics,
Jack
.”

“I’m not doing it to change the world.”

“You’re tired.” She let her fingers fall from the crook of his arm. “I’m tired too.”

“You have,” he said, “as yet no frame of reference for how tired it is possible to become.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d said to anger her, but her spine stiffened and her heart beat harder as the warmth collapsed into her core. “Then just walk into the sun,” she snarled. “Have the courage for suicide, if you’re done with existing. Don’t stand around waiting to be killed! Or do you think anybody will care about a
vampire
martyr? Either kill yourself, or get your teeth back into the world. But choose one!”

She had done what she had done. And he believed she had been justified, even heroic, in doing it. But it was hard, so hard, not to listen to the voices saying otherwise. And unlike him, she had no models on how to live a thousand years with the worm of doubt gnawing your gut, and the regrets drifting around one’s foundations like snow.

“Ruth—”

The explosion interrupted him. Blue-silver, a gas fire, shuddering up behind the trees across Jardinstraat, climbing the night.

“Mein Gott,” she said, with the forgetfulness of long programming. “What is
that
?”

“It
was
my house,” he said.

She stared at him, seeming not to understand those words in his calm, almost bemused tone. “Your
house
? We have to—”

“There should have been no one inside. And there are the sirens of the fire brigade.” Faintly, a rising wail floating on the moist cool air. “Somebody wishes me to understand that I am not welcome here.”

“We have to do something.”

“It’s things,” he said. He touched her shoulder. “Just things, Ruth. And a beautiful old building, which can be rebuilt.”
Things. Jack’s things.

Perhaps someone had done him a favor.

“You can find me at the Aphatos,” he said. He let his hand fall away; she scarcely seemed to notice. “I recommend the side door.”

He was late, perhaps a little more so than was fashionable, but—just—within the bounds of etiquette for an informal gathering. The others were already assembled, and as Miss Emrys—Sarah—led him into the now-familiar library, Damian was checking his watch.

It left a sense of satisfaction.

No matter how old one got, it was always gratifying that someone cared enough to worry.

“I’m sorry I was delayed,” the wampyr said, unable to resist. “My house blew up.”

Unable to resist, perhaps. But he
should
have resisted, because a second explosion followed, though this one was composed of questions and not a little fussing.

“It’s all right,” the wampyr assured them, taking the seat they had left open. “No one was injured, to my knowledge, and the fire brigade seems quite competent to contain the damage. And it’s not as if it’s the first time—well, the first time for that residence, true.”

He’d had a house burned around him, once, but he wasn’t about to mention that here. Nor did he particularly care to recollect it, or the long and terrible process of healing. He had been far from help, far from others of his kind, young—by the standards of the blood—and callow.

He was not proud of what he had done in the time that followed.

Some of that history must have permeated the silence that followed, or perhaps it was just the wampyr’s calm that made Ragoczy’s cup rattle in his saucer. The expression on his face was quite gratifying, before he hid it behind the porcelain rim. As with the crystal, the china was mismatched, and as with the china, the effect was charming.

The putative Comte de St. Germain was trying for an aspect of bland sangfroid…but the wampyr could make out the tremor along his upper lip and the way his scent soured with fear.
There you have it, my dear Count. What it means to be what the world thinks of as “immortal.
”

In the awkward silence that followed, Ruthanna toasted him with her teacup—red cabbage roses quite overwhelming tiny violets, and a speckled gold rim. “We were just arguing over whether we should expect you, Jack. I am sad to say I doubted you.”

“Really?” He perched on the edge of the wooden chair, feeling unmoored. “I shall not ask who my defenders were. In any case, I am here now, and prepared to discuss the necessities—and the niceties—of arranging a foundation that can support your university.”

Estelle glanced at Damian, who had cleared his throat ever so slightly. She did not smile, exactly, as he made a gesture of handing something over to her. His hands were surprisingly graceful for those of such a large man.

She said, “What do we have to do to make you reconsider your role?”

“Please,” the wampyr said. “I—”

He stopped, arrested not by Estelle’s frown but by the still-fresh memory of Ruth Grell’s face painted in unearthly colors by the flames.

“I am still considering,” he said. “I am considering, in point of fact, if I am going to remain in New Amsterdam at all.”

Damian started from the settee, and Ruthanna set her cup aside as well. “Jack—”

The wampyr raised an eyebrow.

“Talk to me,” Damian said, rising the rest of the way. “In the kitchen.” He glanced at Sarah. “We’ll get some more tea?”

“Of course,” Sarah said smoothly. “Use the blue pot.”

The wampyr allowed Damian to usher him down the hall with every evidence of meekness. He leaned against the wall while Damian, obviously familiar with the kitchen, filled the kettle and lit the gas. The flames were as blue as the ones that had consumed the house on Jardinstraat.

“If this is too much for you,” the wampyr said, while Damian warmed the teapot and measured tea, “I understand quite fully.”

Damian laughed. He raised his face to the heavens and shook it from side to side in incredulous wonder. “Jack…this is not the first time a friend’s house has been firebombed. I am not looking for an escape. I was concerned about
you
. Are you really going to let them drive you out of the city?”

“Back into the wilderness?” the wampyr said. “I had not thought of it in those terms, or how it would appear—”

“Then what,” asked Damian, “was your motivation?”

“An old friend.” The wampyr idly picked the dry, hard skin of a fingertip with his opposite hand. “She wishes me to come traveling with her.”

“Another wampyr?”

Damian hid the jealousy well as he poured the first warm water out of the teapot and flushed it down the drain, replacing it with rounded spoons of dried leaves as the kettle began to sing. Well, but not well enough to fool the wampyr.

“A wolf,” the wampyr said. “What would you have me do, then, Damian?”

“I’ve known you for two days. I’m not sure I get to have an opinion.”

“But you do.”

Damian clicked the flame off and poured the boiling water. Aromatic steam rose from the leaves as he wet them.

“Opinions are like kittens,” he commented. “People are always giving them away.”

“I’m asking.”

Damian turned, folding his arms, his back to the white enamel stove which clicked as it cooled. “I’d stand and fight, if it were me.”

“You do. In point of fact.”

That drew a smile. “What better way to make students see a wampyr as a…well, as not so much a monster, than to
teach
them?”

“Damian,” the wampyr said softly. “I
am
a monster, my dear.”

In the time it took for the tea to be made, the party had drifted from its mooring in the library. Now Estelle and Ruthanna were engaged in some erudite argument about the nuances of spellcasting while Sarah played referee. Meanwhile, Ragoczy had taken his teacup and saucer into the parlor and seated himself on the leathern bench of a powder-blue bentside spinet tucked into a corner there.

The wampyr touched Damian on the sleeve in the hall, relieved him of the teapot, and made his way past the glass partition into the parlor.

“Tea?” he asked, when Ragoczy looked up.

“Thank you.” Ragoczy removed his cup from the sideboard and held it well away from the harpsichord so the wampyr could pour without endangering the instrument’s finish. He sipped, and set the cup back in the saucer.

“If I were cruel,” the wampyr said, “I would grant your wish.”

“My wish?”

“To be immortal, Nykyfor Borysovich. Or the nearest approximation there is.”

It was a good thing Ragoczy had set the tea down, given the way the keys of the spinet rattled under his fingers. “Where on earth—”

“My kind have been shedding our old selves and reinventing new ones for millennia. And we know how to find each other. You…are only human, Gospodin Kiroff.” The wampyr said it softly, like a benediction. “So, how fortunate for you that I am not cruel. Merely selfish.”

Ragoczy lifted his chin, like a maiden in a romance. “You will not help me.”

“You would think it help, for a little while.” The wampyr shook his head. “No. You will have to find your Philosopher’s Stone without me…‘Prince Ragoczy.’”

Ragoczy drew himself up and in, so the wampyr could imagine the armor assembling. “Who are you to make that decision for me?”

“I am making it for myself,” the wampyr said. “Call it selfishness. And a little charity. If you do not love yourself, as you are now, my dear Ragoczy, how little will you love yourself when a hundred years have refined you that much closer to your core?”

When the party ended, there was dark enough left that the wampyr decided to seek out Ruth Grell again. Dark enough, he thought. Inside and out.

He did not know where she would be, so he found the place in the park where he had left her. She was long gone, but he crouched by the roots of the tree she had leaned against and closed his eyes. He pressed his cold hand to the cold soil and sniffed deeply.

When he opened his eyes again, he smiled. “Can I not find a wolf in this city?”

He followed the scent like a hound—like a wolf—across the too-perfect squares of cement and the scraps of dirty ice that had collected in corners from the day’s melt. He followed her between the blown sandwich-wrappers and the cardboard pallets of the homeless, down the Boston Post Road and the channels of the gutter.

He found her on a rooftop. Beyond the streetlights, the sky was growing shallow with false dawn, but though he could sense it, he could not see it.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Ruth Grell said, without turning, from her seat on the parapet wall. “It’s rising morning.”

“Hours yet,” he answered. It was only a slight exaggeration. He hitched a leg over the parapet and sat beside her.

“So,” he said, when a few moments had passed. “Will you accuse me of cowardice now?”

“Have you made up your mind who to be?”

He shrugged, this time with slow intent. “I had thought you might help me decide.”

“It’s easier,” she said, “when there is someone you very much would rather not be.”

He didn’t answer. She touched his shoulder, finally, which was a good thing. It roused him from all those remembrances of all the people he had decided not to be, anymore.

He said, “Will you stay in New Amsterdam?”

“It was a long trip to come here,” she said. “But there are many places I have not been. And I…” She glanced away, coloring across the high bones of her cheeks. The flush warmed her skin. Her pulse speeded.

“Finances?”

“Not everyone has a lot of use for a retired Sturm-wolfstaffel Hauptsturmführerin,” she said. “And there wasn’t much of a pension.”

He rubbed a fingertip across the gritty cement of the parapet. “Wherever you want to go,” he said, “I can pay for it.”

She would have said his name in protest, but she didn’t know what name to say.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Money is no object. Consider it the just thanks for a grateful world for your service.”

She frowned. She stared.

He continued, “You can travel as you wish, and come back here. Or Paris. Or San Diego; it was lovely when I visited there with Abby Irene and Phoebe, and they will not still hold the war against you the way the English Americas will. There are wild hills for a wolf to run in—”

She was not a shapeshifter, not like the werewolves of the stories. Rather, she was a creature out of a different legend, one of the Ulfhethnar. A wolf-shirt, a kind of mystic warrior. It did not make her any less a wolf clothed in woman’s mind and woman’s skin.

“The sun—” she said, changing the subject.

He shrugged. “What of it?”