Crossed (17 page)

So as the story goes, Dumbass and his homeys hunted Lisette all over the damn place and when they finally caught her, they wished they hadn’t. I don’t know exactly what happened, but that motion-picture-magic window of Phil’s is all about their big showdown, really epic stuff.

Under the cover of darkness, a lone knight rides in on an injured steed and leaves his horse dying on the steps up to the chapel. He hesitates, tears off his helmet, and cowers before an immense cross above the door. Whoever did the stained
glass got that part a little wrong. Here on the real church there was no cross, but the
rosace
behind the cross was unmistakably, though crudely, rendered on the stained glass.

Then again, maybe the cross depicted on the stained glass was intentionally symbolic, representing the power of God or holiness. Either way, the knight, baring small fangs to show that he’d become a vampire, gathers his courage and charges into the church.

Time passes, a stylized sun rises over the church, and the white clouds transform into a churning horde of black bats, blocking out the sun. A female vampire dressed in medieval finery flies into the image from the left-hand side. Thirty vampires on horseback follow her on the ground. She lands before the steps of the great stone church and French writing flies past on the scroll. I had Beatrice translate it for me once, but I don’t remember exactly what it says . . . typical nyah-nyah-you’re-one-of-us-now vampire crap. Periodically the stained-glass figure’s lips part and she seems to laugh.
Mwahaha.

A priest in brown robes comes out of the church. He holds a golden cross before him in both hands. They exchange words, your basic “depart now, foul beast”/”eat me, padre,” bad guy/good guy exchange. The padre manages to piss her off and she transforms into an uber vamp similar to what I turn into, but with breasts (mercifully, the window leaves out the pit hair).

The vampire knight emerges from the church, snatches the cross away from the priest and pushes him back inside. Flames engulf the knight’s gauntlets around the base of the large crucifix. The knight walks toward the uber vamp, stops at the center of the steps, and falls to his knees. His head slowly lifts up to the heavens and he prays to God to intercede. When that doesn’t work, he recites the Lord’s Prayer in Latin.

All of the vampires cast their eyes upward, and gold-lettered text of the prayer scrolls by. The knight holds up his
cross defiantly. That much I had to give him. He had stones. Two angels with fiery swords part the horde of bats overhead. All of the vampires, the knight included, are bathed in the light of the sun. Wisps of gray smoke drift up off Lisette, but the thirty vampires with her explode, their horses with them. Lisette gives the knight some haughty Wicked Witch of the West garbage about hunting him down, hunting down his whole family, and then she exits stage-left in a huff.

The knight collapses in the sun but it doesn’t burn him. His skin becomes less pale and he sits up, touching his chest, his teeth. He’s alive again. More golden text flows by and it tells him that as long as his family remains faithful, the curse of vampirism will be spared them until the seventh generation and then, if the seventh generation is faithful, the curse will vanish completely. I’m lucky number seven, by the way. Yeah. Oops!

The priest comes back out of the church, looks at the knight, and falls to his knees in prayer, then everything resets to an image of the knight opposing the uber vamp and her posse. The knight’s cross is gone and he holds a sword in its place, but that’s just poetic license.

I walked up the steps and stood where Dumbass the First had stood, then looked across the enclosure at the keep. Resuming my vampiric form gave me a whole-body case of pins and needles, and I wondered if the immortals had their magic tree house in place way back then and if they had watched while my ancestor faced off with an Emperor-level vampire.

Anger hit me hard, and I went uber vamp so fast the sudden change in height made me nauseous, but at least I didn’t black out.

“Motherfuckers probably sat there and did nothing while my whole family got cursed. Without the damn curse, I’d have died like I was supposed to. Sure, I might have risen as a revenant and killed Roger, but Marilyn—Marilyn might have
been able to lead a normal life. She might have— She . . .” A cry of wordless rage ripped free of my throat and I took flight straight at the
donjon
. I didn’t even have to ask where they were, because High Society freaks like these guys are always going to be at the very top.

“Eric?” Tabitha’s question was just my name. Clueless. It’s not her fault I didn’t tell her about any of the Courtney family crap, but it left her with no way to come close to understanding why I was so angry. I don’t care about what happened to the other Courtneys in the family line. I don’t even feel bad for JPC. Even if Marilyn and I
had
wound up doing some lame Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore romancing like in
Ghost,
without the curse Marilyn wouldn’t have died in some damn strip club. I’d have saved her from Roger and . . .

Bea was piecing it all together as my wing beats pulled me over the moat, and I heard her voice echoing my thoughts from minutes before: “It happened here.” Bypassing the first five levels of the keep, I landed on the terrace. The prickle of a ward rushed over me, and I felt myself wincing in expectation. But nothing happened. Instead, I felt the ward part, accepting me, and words I’d heard before in a voice I recognized but couldn’t place echoed in my brain: “You are expected.”

    17    

ERIC:

FREEZE-DRIED DEMON

I was wrong, of course. There was no one on the terrace and the ceilings inside were so low that I had to move hunched over like a gorilla to make it through them as the uber vamp. On the fifth floor, a central pillar met the bones of the place and I realized that the king would never have walked up all those darn steps—servants would have had to do that. Winding my way down through the stone spiral stairs, I shifted from uber vamp mode to my normal height. The anger was still there, and I was spoiling for a fight, but the six-foot-or-so ceilings that cramped the uber vamp left my human form a couple inches of headspace.

Cold undecorated stone kept me company on the trip down. Floor-to-ceiling oak paneling greeted me when I got to what I thought was the second floor. Historians all over France cried in their sleep as I stomped angrily through a perfectly preserved royal bedchamber still decorated the way it was when Charles V lived at Vincennes. A fleur-de-lis done in gold on blue decorated each vault of the ceiling. Holy manuscripts were displayed in boxes in front of one of the windows. It was
all very ornate and kingly, but what caught my attention was the floor.

“Nice tile.”

Luc was waiting for me by the fireplace. Flames shifted within, changing from one static view of fire to another like a slide show of fire that emitted real warmth. “Everyone is waiting for you in the first-floor meeting hall.”

“That’s the first impressionist fire I’ve seen in 3-D. How artsy.”

“Think of it as the memory of flames.”

“Weird.”

I crossed to one of the turrets and found the king’s coffers. “No guards?” I reached out and touched a silver coin. It felt real, and I rolled it over in my hands.

“Most of this exists in a Vale of Scrythax,” Luc explained, “as the demon would have remembered it; you can’t permanently damage anything.”

I bent the coin in half and dropped it back down.

Luc laughed. “Now turn away and look back. It won’t be bent anymore.”

He was wrong and I knew why. If my theory about the Stone of Aeternum being one of Scrythax’s eyes was correct, I could have wrecked the whole damn historic fossil with a quick trip back into the real world. Let the Eye of Scrythax get a gander at the keep in modern-day France and these
Highlander
rejects would lose their little playhouse (or at least the grand historic version of it) but quick.

I picked the coin back up and tossed it to him.

“You have an unusually strong will. But you may trust me. If we were to leave and return, the coin would revert to its natural shape.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Think what you will. This way.” He gestured. I followed,
and we left the king’s chambers and went down more stairs to a meeting hall.

It was a massive room with more vaulted ceilings and fancy detail work. Charles V would have been astonished to see their renovations. This section of the castle held mostly modern furniture and equipment.

They’d tried to match the stylistic sensibility of the historic site, but the laptops laid out on the U-shaped meeting table were a dead giveaway. Thirteen people I assumed were immortals lined the expansive room, not counting James, Luc, and Aarika. From their lack of reactions, it was as though I’d just barged in on a meeting of the Rotary Club at a garden variety municipal building, not the French Immortal equivalent of the Hall of Justice. I’d expected them to all look like Adrian Paul or Christopher Lambert, but they came in different shapes, sizes, apparent physical ages, nationalities, and genders, ranging from Aarika, who looked young and fit, to a man so old and fat I expected him to keel over at any second from a massive coronary.

At the center of the room, on a pedestal nestled within the curve of the meeting table, was the severed head of a demon unlike any I ever had the displeasure to meet. Curved asymmetrical horns layered the sides of its skull and it rested on them, the arrangement of horns holding it upright atop the stone. In places the skin had flaked away or had been removed, but in the spots where it was intact, it was more scale than flesh and had a metallic sheen to it as if the being to which it belonged were a combination of animal and mineral. Two rows of jagged fangs the size of varying calibers of ammo cartridges filled its mouth, though some had been torn away by force, leaving subtle cracks in the jaw. Beatrice and Tabitha stood on the far side of the table. The whole scene was lit by a dim golden glow emitted by portions of the ghoulish centerpiece.
That side of the head had crystallized irregularly, revealing the cranial cavity, from which the semitranslucent light seemed to pour.

You didn’t have to be a mage to feel power, electrical, spiritual, or otherwise, flowing around the room, from the immortals, the place, and especially from the head.

“His brain glows?”

As I came closer, I made out more details. Shrunken eyelids were closed, concealing the empty sockets beneath. Above the snarling mouth, three slit nostrils gaped, a tear in the central nostril linking it with the right. The head was twice the size of a man’s and trailed off at the neck, revealing withered cords of muscle that would have seemed more at home in a robot than in a living thing.

“Guy looks like he was designed by H. R. Giger . . .”

And then it moved. Nostrils flared, gaping even wider, and the rush of air created by its sudden inhalation sent dust bunnies fleeing out from under its jaw. Its eyelids slowly opened with the sound of creaking leather to reveal empty sockets partially illuminated by the golden light pulsing within its ancient noggin.

My heart beat once and my vision shifted. Instead of feeling the energy moving through the room, I saw it. Ghostly streams of spiritual essence filled the room in a spiderweb of spirit and extended out through the doors. It flowed through the immortals, linking some of them, avoiding others. There was a separate strand tied to me, a deep line that ran from my chest to the head in the center of the room. As the immortals went into action, I watched cascades of spirit rise up from within them, manifesting into arms and armor. I realized that they weren’t re-creating the items like I do when I transform. Instead, they had stored them, converted them purposefully to energy, and were bringing them back.

The demonic lips of the thing parted and a withered purple tongue with forked ends that had long since dried together rasped along the portion of the lips that were intact.

It spoke, and I recognized the voice. The same ghostly voice had spoken to me when the wards parted for me, both here in France and back in the States during the whole “let’s trap Eric’s soul in a marble” affair when it had let me through the wards at the Highland Towers.