Dark Heart (7 page)

His options were always the same. Do as he was bid or feel the lash of his master’s anger. He still resisted when he could, but he knew always that resistance was futile. The demons of guilt for the things he had done ate away at his soul, but he could no more change his actions than he could stop the world from spinning. Even as the accumulated pain of centuries of killing weighed upon him, he knew he could never inflict the amount of pain upon himself that the Dragon could.

And all his killings weren’t futile. Sometimes he and the Dragon were in agreement. There were days when Justin understood that he must kill; there were people who deserved to die. Certainly he understood that! Had he not killed when he was still mortal? He’d certainly indulged in dealing death—in warfare and in what they would call justifiable homicide in today’s vernacular. But this night’s murder was neither of those things…

“To have your foresight, master…” Justin whispered. “To assuage my conscience by knowing how each of these steps ultimately serves mankind…it would be a balm to my soul.”

He ran through the events of this evening, trying to find another way out, something he could have done to stop them.

He’d been in the alley, after returning from Tina’s to the club to await instructions. He’d been standing in the shadows, wondering why his master had sent him here, when the alarm had gone off, indicating somebody was about to open the kitchen door into the alley.

Then he’d seen the cop find the skin, seen the fight with the Dropka disciple. From the moment the Dropka had appeared, he’d lost the option of dealing with the cop alone. And even then he’d known what the Dragon would demand. From the moment the cop touched the scales of the dragonling cocoon, his fate was sealed, no matter how much Justin fought it. Not killing him then and there had simply been a precautionary tactic—a mysterious, monstrously murdered corpse was the last thing he needed in an alley behind his home.

Justin rose, shivered. He often hated what he’d become, but he saw no way to change it.

Perhaps a shower would pull him out of the depression that always followed a kill.

The shower didn’t help. Afterward, he crossed to the closet. Throwing the door open wide, he pulled out a robe and put it on. The warm cotton settled over his wet skin.

You are my scalpel, Lord of Sterling.

The Dragon’s words echoed in his mind from long ago, from the day when Justin had first voiced his doubts about his mission.

Scalpels must cut deep to save the whole.

That was undoubtedly the truth. But why did those words never give him comfort?

He understood intellectually that his immortal master had a plan for the world, one which resulted in actions that seemed on the surface to be deadly, brutal, and hideous, but which served the greater good of the whole of mankind; but as the tool who carried out those terrible acts, his soul lived in torment. He could neither take comfort in the larger goals his master pursued, for his master rarely shared his plans with underlings, nor could he shake the guilt for his dreadful deeds.

His mind understood. But his soul shrieked in unbearable pain.

Justin looked about the room and saw an accusing gallery of ghostly figures whose deaths he had arranged over the centuries. They weren’t truly there, merely figments of his overwrought imagination, but they were still as real to him as they’d been on the day they died. They lived on in his memory as surely as they ever had in real life, forever trapped in that moment when they took their last breath while he watched. On the nights he killed, the images were most vivid, but the gallery of the dead never entirely vanished from his mind. Seeing them now, he knew there was no help for it. Sometimes he could hold them at bay, but not tonight.

Ghostly faces stared at him like death masks, each one contorted in fear and pain. Justin tried to ignore them. He wished desperately that he could sleep. He could escape them if only he could reach that oblivion. Justin’s nightmares were always waking ones, for he slept the sleep of the dead.

Mortals dreamed, but not Justin. He tried to remember what dreaming was like, but since the day he’d made his choice, he’d never again felt the soaring joy of a good dream, the terror of a nightmare. No warm summer days. No grave-cold horrors. His ghosts found him when he was awake. Tired, defenseless against them, but awake nonetheless.

When he did sleep, it was as though he ceased to exist. Justin wondered sometimes if his lack of dreams meant his soul had left his body forever on the day he became immortal.

If so, there was little he could about it now.

Except regret the loss.

And he supposed the Dragon had provided a substitute for dreaming—of a sort.

The master’s appearances in the mirror were strangely spaced. Those glowing red eyes would look out at Justin three times in the same day, every day for months at a time; then Justin would go decades without ever seeing the long, spike-toothed face of his Dragon lord in a reflection.

But the master often overwhelmed Justin’s sleeping mind. The Dragon had settled there long ago and the weight of its demands were crushing. Although Justin never dreamed as mortals did, he did have Dragon-sent visions. He would see the death of his next victim, and he would see himself as the slayer. He would see where, he would know when it would happen, and he would feel their blood on his claws.

And then he would awaken and execute the Dragon’s command.

Most of his victims had knowledge the Dragon could not permit to become public. The master didn’t allow anyone who was a threat to his security to walk the world for long, and it was part of Justin’s allegiance to ensure these people died.

When the Dragon or one of its disciples saw a problem, Justin was required to eliminate it, just as he had killed Jack Madrone. He had not waited for a dream to do it. The Wyrm had known what was required of him and had carried out the mission, no matter how Justin had felt about it.

It was only when Justin was unaware of the possible threat that the Dragon would cue him through the mirror or through a vision. If someone in a small town in Montana had somehow stumbled across evidence that might lead him to discover the master’s secret, Justin had a vision. And when he awoke, he would travel through the mirror and deal with the problem.

Madrone’s image now joined the throng of the dead surrounding Justin—his victims. The security guard, Baxter, stood beside him. Both stared at him, accusing, causing a pain in his heart that threatened to devour him.

The deaths were necessary. Justin knew that. He told himself that over and over again. But he never ceased to regret his part in them. From the Dragon’s very first order to kill that first hapless priest, a part of him had rebelled at what he was asked to do.

But the Dragon required blood and death as the payment for the boon of endless life.

And the price of his service was rapidly rising.

The cost might soon be out of his reach.

Justin opened a small drawer in his black lacquer night stand. He pulled out a tiny crystal vial of white powder. He tapped a bit of the powder into a sterling silver cup above an ebony lamp inlaid with ivory. From a jade decanter, he poured a few drops of water into the cup with the powder. With a twist of his fingers, the lamp sparked to life.

Loathing himself even more than usual, Justin withdrew a syringe and rubber tubing from the drawer. Sitting in the soft chair beside the cabinet, he looped the rubber around his upper arm and pulled it tight with his teeth. He looked at the powder. Slowly, it began to melt and dissolve. When it was liquid, he sucked the heroin up with the syringe.

It was a vice that he knew better than to indulge. His immortality and healing abilities spared him from the degradation and death that awaited virtually all junkies among normal humans. He wouldn’t even feel the terrible side effects of addiction—the wrenching pain, the chills, and the grinding need of withdrawal. But what was left of his self-respect died a little more every time he resorted to the needle to banish his ghosts.

Their images hovered before him. All of them, ancient ones and recent ones. Detective Madrone’s incredulous gaze watched him, as did Baxter’s. Then there was Becky Johnson, and the Italian priest who had fought so hard to live almost seven hundred years ago. A young bride, still in her wedding dress. Blackie Rogers, the cowboy. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and each one stared at him with burning questions in their eyes. Why? And why them?

Justin closed his eyes. His hand cradled the needle with its promise of a few moments of blessed peace, of relief from his haunted past. He was strong enough to resist the need, he knew it. He just had to find that strength where it was buried in him, somewhere deep down under the centuries of regrets.

The ghosts were stronger this time.

He plunged the needle into his arm.

Then something in the darkness moved. The other ghosts parted for it. It was the form of a woman, young and beautiful, looking away from him at something only she could see.

“Gwendolyne…”

Her ghostly image turned as if she had heard him, the train of her heavy velvet dress trailing across the floor. Ghost for the better part of a millennium, she still looked impossibly young to him. She pushed a strand of her long hair out of her face. He saw her upturned nose, her brown eyes, the long graceful neck he had kissed so carefully on their wedding night as an assurance to his child bride that there was nothing to fear.

Her ghost stood before him now, searching for his face, but she could not see him cramped and slouched in the chair.

“No.” That single word was a cry from his heart.

Again the sound of his voice called to her, and again she searched in vain for him in the crowd of victims haunting the room.

Justin?
She mouthed the word. Her lovely, delicate hands reached out, as if blindly feeling her way through the impenetrable darkness of wrongful death.

Justinian?

“I didn’t want to do it,” he whispered. “God forgive me, I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Where are you?

He closed his eyes again and put a fist to his forehead, pressing hard, as if he might push what was about to happen away with the strength of his immortal hand.

Justinian!

But he couldn’t keep from looking at her. When he opened his eyes again she stood before him, young and beautiful as she’d been in life. He huddled back into the chair. Her ghostly hand passed over his forearm and he shivered. So did she.

Justinian?

“Dear God, NO!” He fought the image, fought to control it, but the room around him had already begun to fade. His modern white stucco walls darkened into gray blocks of stone decorated with priceless tapestries, still glowing in their newness. Chicago’s nighttime haze of light pollution streaming through his picture windows muted, became the golden glow of a single candle.

“NO! I will
not
go through this again…”

Justinian…what have you done…?

C
enturies twisted and intermingled. The cusp of the twenty-first century melted away like so much candle wax in a fire, just as the walls seemed to waver and fade when heroin coursed hard inside his veins. The emptiness of Justin’s present vanished, filled like a chalice with voices from his past. The empty room in Chicago was gone from his senses, scattered like dust to the winds, replaced by a low-ceilinged bed chamber in the ancestral castle of the earls of Sterling, looking exactly as it had looked long ago and far away in the fourteenth-century English countryside.

But though his surroundings changed, Gwendolyne remained in front of him, as always an anchor to the man he’d once been and a reminder of what he’d become.

“My lord, what have you done?”

Justin stumbled forward into the room, into the arms of his wife. He clutched her soft curves to him, cherished the warmth of her flesh.

“Do not ask me,” he said.

“The village is afire,” she said. Her hands gently wiped the soot from his cheek. “They say you started it.”

Still holding her, Justin collapsed onto the bed. He pulled her close to him, burying his face in her hair.

“The Black Death,” he said. “It has arrived. Half a dozen of my tenants are already dead. I burned their houses with the bodies inside. I pray the fire will drive the disease away. I left only when it was clear that the fires would die down without spreading.”

“You burned the village?”

“Yes, I burned it,” he said. “It was all I could do. These are my people, their homes my property. Do you think I wanted to see their dwellings crumble to ash and scorched rock? But I had no choice. Do you want all the villagers to die? Their children, too, and our own children? Even after the fire, I can’t be certain that I’ve destroyed the contagion. The Death may still be out there, walking among them.”

His young wife pulled away from him, recoiling from the horror of his words. Justin sat up for a moment, then got up from the bed to pace the room like a caged wolf.

Gwendolyne watched him, her deep brown eyes glistening with concern.

“They simply do not understand,” he said. “They see only their own concerns, their own little lives, going up in the smoke from the pyre. They don’t know how terrible this can be, what is at stake here. Do they think I like ordering something like this? I would have sacrificed myself on their behalf if I could have stopped it. But the plague is here. Perhaps it is the devil’s will, perhaps God’s own. It was certainly not my will that brought it into our midst, but mine is the task of stopping it, if such a thing is humanly possible. It may already be too late.” He ran his hands over his face, as if by doing so he could wash the stain of this morning’s actions from his memory.

Gwendolyne got up, put her arms around him.

“Tell me what happened, my lord. Why is there blood on your hands?”

Justin looked down, saw the scarlet stains mixed with the soot from the fires, saw the drying blood where he had smeared it upon her gown. He tried to speak, but the words were thick in his throat. He coughed, then began to speak.

“I killed a man. We came to burn his house and he went mad. He was in there weeping over the dead body of his wife. The plague had taken her. Neck swollen, the black spots. She was with child, near to term. We tried to take him out before we put the torch to the place, and he went mad. He struck Goodman Miller and picked up a scythe.”

Justin looked away. He couldn’t look his wife in the face. She wrapped her arms around the small of his back, held him tight.

“The miller managed to grab the scythe and I struck the man. He would not stop fighting, and I was forced to continue striking him until he went down.” Justin let out a slow, anguished breath. “We dragged him to the village square. He kept saying that he’d built this house for her…they were going to live there…he’d built it for her. He crouched there in the dirt crying like a babe. Blood ran down into his face from where I’d struck him. When the house caught fire, he broke free from our hold and ran inside. I couldn’t stop him. He never came out.”

Gwendolyne led her husband to the bed and sat him down. She dampened a cloth in the wash basin next to the bed and began to wash the blood and soot from his hands. If only the stain in his mind could be cleaned so…

“Milord, you did what you could. When this passes, those who survive, they will see that.”

Justin sighed. “I stood there watching that man cry today, and all I could think of was you. What if you were the one in that house? What if it was me crying in the dirt over your body? I would have grabbed that scythe and threatened anyone who tried to keep us apart. I, too, would have chosen the fire.” Justin looked into his wife’s eyes. “But he was not me. I bear the responsibility for all of the people on this estate. I am not free to act merely on my own behalf. I am lord here. It is my duty to stop such madness. But how could I have saved him?”

“My lord, you did your best,” she said.

“It wasn’t enough. I told them today in the village that I would rebuild all their homes if I had to sell my own to do it, but nothing could bring back that man’s wife, and he knew it. I told them that their homes and their dead had to go up in flames, or the Black Plague would take them as well. But they did not care.”

Gwendolyne placed the cool cloth upon his face, washing away the soot and tears. “Shhh, love, there was naught else that you could do.”

“I…I don’t even know if fire will save us. But I had to do something. I can’t just let my people die, and I have seen that the plague moves from one stricken victim to the next. Perhaps by sacrificing the one village, I can save the rest. Perhaps…I had to do something! I am their lord!”

Gwendolyne pulled her husband down beside her on the bed.

Justin looked down into her face. She smiled up at him. Her serenity eased his troubled heart.

“From the first moment I saw you,” Justin whispered, “I hoped that you would someday look at me with that gaze in your eyes.” He smiled. “Your love gives me the strength to go on.”

She took his hand in her own and pressed it against her heart. Soot from his clothes rubbed off on her white dress.

“My love,” she said, “my heart pains me some days, so full it is with all that I feel for you.”

“And you will stay here, won’t you? You won’t go into the village? You’ll keep yourself safe for me?”

“I will be by your side, my lord, no matter what should befall us.”

Justin looked into her deep brown eyes. He slipped one hand into her silky hair and smoothed it. “I am afraid for us all, you know. I don’t want to die, my beloved Gwendolyne. I don’t want any of the people I love, or any of the people who depend on me and whose work provides the wealth of this estate to die, either. Surely there must be something more I can do…”

“Some things, my lord, are in the hands of God, not man. And you have done enough for today.” Gwendolyne pushed him back against the pillows. Her lips pressed onto his. Her hair, the scent of her warm body, surrounded and caressed him. No matter what hell he had tromped through each day, no matter what unspeakable miasma clung to his skin after his travels and adventures, she always welcomed him into her arms. She smelled like flowers on a spring day. He clung to the familiar comfort of her embrace, let it take him far away from the smoke, the flames, the dead and dying he’d purged from his lands with fire.

But as he closed his eyes and pulled her even closer, finally at peace, the moment was snatched from his grasp, even as one nightmare was ripped away from him and a new, though ancient, horror seared into his thoughts.

He knew what was coming next; this vision from his past was far too familiar, and the hell that followed a frequent, if unwelcome, visitor to his mental gallery of guilt. He felt time sliding by, running through his ineffectual grip like a catapult’s rope through ungloved hands, burning him unbearably.

He screamed, begged the fates to release him, but when he opened his eyes again it was too late. His wife was still before him, but horribly changed. Her face was drawn, her brown eyes cloudy. Even the soft scent of flowers that had surrounded her ever since he’d met her was gone, replaced by the acrid scent of disease and despair.

He was dying.

I am afraid it is necessary that you die…

“No!” Justin refused to believe it. He looked down at the fine linen sheet that covered him, hiding underneath its snowy expanse the strange and alien thing his body had become. He threw the bedclothes aside. As he’d suspected, the black spots were spreading. They dotted his shins, his thighs, his chest, and his arms like rot on a decayed fruit. Lumps the size of his fist, the swollen glands called buboes that gave bubonic plague its name, pushed up against the tight, bruised skin of his groin. His breath came in short, painful gasps—each lungful of air a burden dragged with great effort past the enlarged glands in his neck. His arms lay stiffly on the mattress, far away from his sides, pushed out from their accustomed positions by massive lumps in his armpits.

And he hurt, he hurt everywhere. The pain was unbearable, and it made him crazy. When the spots had first appeared, Justin had refused to believe he could be in the grip of the illness. The plague was for peasants. Surely his exalted position in society would protect him. He’d been blessed by God through the whole of his life, been given talent, beauty of form and face, the means to provide himself and his family with everything they could ever want. How could God desert him now?

But the Black Plague spared no one, king or commoner. It seemed to be God’s own curse, and, as such, did not respect the order that He Himself had established.

When the black spots gave no sign of receding, but instead spread at an increasing pace, Justin hid his illness from his wife for the little time he could. Even then, with the evidence growing right before his horrified eyes, he refused to believe he would succumb. It was all too terrible to contemplate.

He had not known then the meaning of terror. He had not known what pain was. He had not known what it meant to be damned.

He knew now.

The pain intensified. He seemed to leave his body sometimes, though he could never escape the pain. It came with him, an unwelcome passenger on his mad voyages through delirium. He would strike out at his wife while he watched his own erratic actions in confusion from some impossible mental distance. He would say nonsensical things, and then not remember them a breath later.

Gwendolyne, his beloved Gwendolyne, had nursed him in his misery. She would come to him and put cool cloths upon his burning forehead. Even when he struck out at her in his madness, she’d wince, retrieve the dropped cloths, and resume bathing him to reduce his fevers. She ignored the bleeding scratches he made on her ivory cheek, the bruises on her body.

Then there were the times his sanity returned to him. Times like this. He lay on his bed, staring at his grotesque body. The pain was a low murmuring thing crouched at the foot of his bed. He knew that if he moved, it would leap upon him.

I am afraid it is necessary that you die…

The local leech stood over him, one of the parish priests. Justin screamed at the priest, tried to tell him that he wasn’t wanted here. But his words weren’t in any tongue known to man. They were the insensible cries of a wounded animal.

The priest stood there, holding a cloth-wrapped bundle of sweet herbs over his nose. The trailing ends of the perfumed rag hovered an inch from Justin’s cheek. He tried to turn his head away from them, but the growths in his throat made it impossible. He moaned and lay still.

Gwendolyne stood behind the leech, waited in taut anticipation for his words. She was pale with worry, yet still so beautiful to Justin, even more so than usual now, despite her fatigue. He wondered if she ever rested at all. She had dressed up for him, in the elaborate gown and coiffure of a formal court appearance, going about her care for him as if nothing was seriously wrong, as if he weren’t rotting away before her eyes. Her safflower gown was made of embroidered silk as bright as the sun, even through the faded palette of his pain-tinged vision. Her waves of soft hair were confined in some complicated way with ribbons and braids and the odd tumbling ringlet. He loved to run his hands through her silky hair. But that was impossible now. Even if he could muster the energy, he would not defile something so beautiful with his wasted hands.

Finally, the leech-priest turned his head toward Justin. He knew what the priest was going to say, and he cried out against it, but once again his voice sounded more like the howl of an injured wolf than anything a man would say. The priest spoke directly to him, though it was clear he was unsure if Justin was still capable of understanding him in his current state.

“I am afraid it is necessary that you die. It is God’s will. You will be with him soon. One of my brethren will come to hear your confession and administer last rites.”

Justinian heard Gwendolyne’s stifled cry of anguish. He tried to find her, but he could not see her through the haze of pain surrounding him.

The door closed upon the priest.

After some time passed, Gwendolyne stood before him once again. He could see her now. Her gown was tossed in the corner, her corsets unlaced. Even as he watched, she removed them, loosened the ribbons on her chemise and let it fall off her white shoulders across her breasts, then past her waist to the floor. She was as naked as she’d been the day God made her. Slowly, carefully, she climbed into bed with him.

“No,” he said. “No, please, my love.” His words were barely comprehensible, beseeching pleas forced through his cracked, bleeding lips. “You must leave me.”

She did not heed him. She pulled the cover over both of them and laid her soft, smooth body next to his diseased flesh.

“I cannot see my face,” Justinian whispered frantically, “Gwendolyne…beloved Gwendolyne…how bad is my face?”

“Silence, love,” she whispered, and in her voice he could hear the tears that she’d never yet let fall in front of him, “Every movement causes you pain. Sleep, my love. Silent be…”