Darkest Heart (17 page)

As a boy, Noir had seen the contents of the rosewood chest only once, for the things locked inside it were rare and wondrous indeed, used only in the direst of emergencies. Lisha took from the box a glass jar sealed in beeswax and wrapped in a rosary. Inside the jar was something black and shriveled that looked like a bloom of fungus, but was actually the heart of a vampire. Utilizing specific elixirs and rituals, Lisha boiled the heart down into a vile broth the color of tar. As her son lay dying, she forced the noxious brew

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) down his gullet with the aid of a funnel. Within seconds of being fed the odious concoction, Noir breathed his last.

Although the life had fled her son's body, Lisha showed no outwards signs of grief or sorrow. Instead of ordering her servants to anoint his body and wrap it in a winding sheet, she told them that within three days time he would arise from the dead. The servants thought her mad, but none dared go against her orders.

On the second day following Noir's death, Baron Coeur de Neige arrived at the villa. Although he had not so much as spoken to Noir since renouncing him, the baron lost no time in riding out from Tyre with an escort of Knights Templar once he learned of his bastard son's condition. Upon his arrival the servants quickly filled the baron in on how Noir's death had unhinged the Lady Lisha's mind.

The baron was outraged when he saw his son's body still sprawled on his deathbed, his brow naked of the priest's unction. Coeur de Neige demanded to know why Noir had not been given last rites. Lisha stated that their son was not truly dead, and that he would rise on the evening of the third day as surely as Christ had rolled back the stone, but this blasphemy angered the baron even further.

Lisha attempted to explain what she had done, hoping he would understand the desperate measures love had lead her to take. Instead, Coeur de Neige turned upon the woman who had shared his bed for twenty-five years and, denouncing her as a witch, plunged a dagger into her belly. She died at his feet. The Templars who accompanied the baron saw that Noir's mortal remains were administered the last rites.

Now that the body was officially consecrated, Lisha's remaining servants sewed Noir into a shroud and took the corpse to be buried in a nearby churchyard. Satisfied that all was as it should be, Coeur de Neige headed back to Tyre, where his young wife and infant son awaited his return.

Of course, Noir awoke on the night of the third day, just as his mother had said he would.

Upon his resurrection, Noir found himself somewhere dark and close, his arms crossed over his chest and tied into place by strips of soft cloth, with a great weight bearing down upon his entire body. He tried to open his eyes, but something cold and metallic lay atop the lids, keeping them in place. He tried to cry out in alarm, but his mouth was filled with cotton.

Marshaling all his strength, he managed to tear his arms free, pull the cotton batting from his mouth, and knock the coins from his eyes. He clawed at the shroud with nails that were far longer and stronger than any he had possessed in life, struggling upward like a swimmer desperate for air. Loose earth fell into his eyes and open mouth as he struggled to escape the claustrophobic darkness. The moon of Islam hung in the sky as he wriggled free of his grave like a snake shedding its skin.

He wandered forth from the churchyard, dazed and empty-eyed, like a statue suddenly transformed from marble into flesh, dressed in nothing but the tatters of his burial shroud, his hair filled with grave dirt.

Like every new resurrectant, he was operating by instinct alone, shuffling towards those things his living brain had deemed family, as they would be the ones most likely, in their grief, to cast aside caution and throw open their doors to such a shocking apparition.

A mile from the churchyard Noir came upon a solitary pilgrim huddled in one of the shelters built along those roads that lead from the seaports to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The pilgrim awakened suddenly, startled from his pious dreams by the smell of death. Upon seeing the horror looming over him, the pilgrim cried out to his god to deliver him, but there was no salvation to be had in the Holy Land that night.

Noir attacked the pilgrim like a man fresh from the desert drinking from a skin of water. After he had drained the pilgrim dry, Noir's senses returned to him, at least enough to realize he must cover his nakedness if he wished to continue his journey unnoticed. After stripping his victim of garments, he set out anew, this time not to feed mindlessly, but to find his mother, for Noir knew that whatever change had been worked upon him must have been her doing.

In escaping the grave, Noir discovered he had also escaped the frailties of the human condition. His eyes now could see as clearly in the night as they once did during the day; he could smell all manner of things he never had before, things such as fear; he could hear the faintest rustling of a mouse amongst the dry grasses along the road, or the slither of an asp hidden amongst the rocks. But the biggest change of all was the need, unlike any he had ever known as a mortal man, located just below the pit of his belly and just above his loins, which called for the blood of the living.

As Noir drew closer to his mother's villa, he saw that no lights were burning in the windows. He found this strange, for he knew Lisha often sat up late into the night, working on her various potions and spells.

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) As he approached the outer walls, Noir caught a familiar scent rising from the nearby dung heap, a stink he had come to know all too well on the battlefield: the odor of decomposing human flesh.

There was what looked like a scarecrow, thrown by a careless farmhand, atop the heap. Upon closer inspection, Noir recognized the body as that of his mother. He could identify her only by her hair and clothes, since the dogs and vultures had been at her. A rage so great it manifested itself as calm broke within his breast.

Noir strode into the courtyard, kicking open his mother's padlocked workshop. The servants appeared, awakened by the noise, torches in hand, swords and cudgels at the ready. The majordomo demanded to know who he was and what business he had with them at such an hour. When Noir turned to face them, they gasped aloud, crossed themselves and offered up prayers of protection to Allah.

Noir demanded to know who had slain his mother and ordered her body cast out with the offal. At first the servants were too frightened to speak, but at last the majordomo said it was the work of Baron Coeur de Neige, who believed the Lady Lisha had poisoned their son in order to avenge herself against him for marrying the Lady Mathilde.

Upon hearing this, Noir burst into laughter, which made the servants gathered before him shiver in their boots. What an egotist his father was! The baron saw all things done by others as somehow relating to him; he could not fathom how Lisha's actions could be fueled by love, not hate.

Indeed, the Lady Lisha had not robbed the baron of his posterity, but presented him with a son who could never grow old, never die - one who could stride the world forever! And this was how he repaid her?

Two nights later, in the city of Tyre, Noir entered his father's house, moving like a shadow through the inner court with its splashing fountain and carefully tended rose garden. He found his father's wife alone in her chambers, her attention focused on a piece of embroidery. She looked up from her handiwork as he approached, her brow furrowed in confusion for a long moment, before her eyes grew wide in recognition.

Her gaze cut quickly to the far side of the room then back to where Noir stood. He followed her furtive glance and saw the peaked crown of a cradle, swaddled in white gauze to keep biting flies away from the occupant's tender flesh. Noir smiled, and his father's wife cried out in horror and flung herself at him, desperate to put herself between her child and the demon in her bedchamber.

Noir grabbed her by the heavy braid hanging down her back, jerking her out of his way as he would a hound on a leash. The Lady Mathilde fell to the stone floor as Noir snatched up his infant half-brother, dangling the child like a rabbit in a butcher's stall.

The babe opened its maw, revealing bare, pink gums, and issued a cry as thin as gruel. Noir shook his head in amazement that his father would chose to turn him aside in favor of such weak meat.

The Lady Mathilde, seeing the look in Noir's eyes, crawled on her belly and placed herself at his feet, promising she would give herself to him, to do with as he saw fit, if only he spared her son. Noir looked down at his groveling stepmother, her eyes swollen and made red by tears, and with a smile dashed the child's skull against the wall.

Noir then took his father's wife as she lay on the floor, stricken dumb by fear and grief. He was cold as death inside her, causing her to find her tongue at last, and she cried out to her savior to deliver her from the devil's embrace. As the last flicker of sanity and hope fled her eyes, Noir buried his fangs in her neck and took from her that which he truly lusted after.

Sated on Mathilde's blood, Noir sat in the dark and awaited his father's return to his family. As luck would have it, he did not have long to wait. Baron Coeur de Neige entered the room dressed in a long shirt and soft slippers, carrying a taper to light his way. Hidden in the shadows, Noir sneered at the sight of his father tiptoeing towards the bed, calling out his wife's name in a singsong voice like a smitten schoolboy. The baron nearly dropped his candle when he stumbled across the Lady Mathilde's corpse sprawled on the floor. At the sight of his wife's body, the baron made a noise somewhere between an angry roar and a pained sob. He looked about wildly, searching for the assassin he knew had to be lurking nearby.

"Hello, Father," Noir said, stepping from his hiding place. "Did you miss me?"

Coeur de Neige stared for a long moment, unable to believe his eyes. When he finally spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper. "I saw you buried. You're dead."

"No, Father. I'm far from it. But I will tell you who is dead: my mother, for one, as well as your other, lesser spawn. But as for your pretty little wife... once her incubation period has passed, she will return to this world, but as my bride, not yours. And while I may be a bastard, I am not a cruel one. I will not slay

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) an unarmed man; I am giving you a fighting chance, which is more than you gave my mother."

Noir removed the dagger from its sheath at his waist and tossed it to Coeur de Neige. It landed at the baron's feet, the pommel towards his hand. The baron quickly snatched up the weapon and buried it to the hilt in his son's chest, skewering his heart.

The baron took a step back and wiped the back of his hand across his lips, expecting Noir to collapse onto the floor. Instead, he stood and stared at his father, a mocking smile on his lips, the dagger jutting from his chest like a bothersome thorn.

Coeur de Neige crossed himself with trembling hands as his son pulled the blade free. Noir grinned, baring his new, sharp teeth so that his father could see them.

"You are not my son, but some fiend dressed in his shape, sent by Satan to torment me!" Coeur de Neige cried, his voice made hoarse by horror.

"Believe what you like, father," Noir replied. "It will make no difference in Hell." And with that Noir drove the dagger pulled from his heart into the baron's own. Coeur de Neige fell to the floor at his son's feet, his face set in a rictus of terror.

Thus Noir began his existence by obliterating his paternal line; assuring there would be no others of his blood, save for those of his Making. Still, he did not completely sever himself from his past, as he took the name Coeur du Noir, after the bar sinister coat of arms presented to him by his late father.

Still, avenging his mother's murder by committing patricide was just the beginning of what would prove a long and contentious existence. Noir quickly discovered he was not the same as other vampires. Having been Made through sorcery rather than by another of his kind, Noir lacked the patronage and protection that came with being part of an established brood, which meant he not only had to worry about detection by humans, but challenges from other vampires as well.

Realizing his disadvantage, Noir approached different Nobles and offered his skills as a necromancer if they would accept him into their service. But in undeath, as in life, a man is judged by what he is not, not by what he is. And, in the Ruling Class's bloodshot eyes, Noir was strega, not enkidu, and therefore not to be trusted.

Since the Nobles would not have him, Noir set about creating his own brood - one fashioned not only of those he Made, but other solitaires who did not fit the enkidu definition of "normal." And in time, Noir watched those who once snubbed him as a freak fall into extinction, while he continued, surrounded by his little family of oddlings.

He had spent centuries wandering from country to country, moving through the kingdoms of mankind like the shadow of a bad dream. For those who knew how to look, his will and whims were visible in the histories of a dozen peoples, like a vast tapestry woven from bloodied thread. But that was part of a time long past, in a world so different from the one he now dwelt in, it might as well have taken place on Mars.

Where once he commanded princes like pawns on a chess board, now Noir satisfied himself with manipulating the city councilmen, business executives and government officials who frequented establishments such as Dolly Dagger's.

While many Nobles turned up their noses at posing as a member of the "lower orders," Noir had discovered it was far easier to avoid detection by pretending to be a shady businessman rather than posing as a member of the aristocracy. Blackmail, hot cars and credit card theft might seem prosaic for one of his station, but it was nothing more than window dressing. Humans expected a certain amount of mystery from someone involved in the underworld. If they thought you a villain, they would never suspect you of being an actual monster.