Divine Madness (13 page)

“But—”

“It won’t affect me the way he thinks,” she yelled above the wind, trying to sound completely confident. “Also, if you want, I can make you like me.”

“And I would want that why? So I can be what I am forever?” he asked. She saw his point—he already had one rather large handicap.

“Well, if it goes according to plan, you’d be able to slow or even halt your vampirism and still go out in the daylight—something that might be impossible for you now that you have completed the cycle and taken blood. Look, I’m not sure how it all works with vampires or even with humans. I should need to eat constantly with the way my metabolism changed, but I actually need very little food to survive. I don’t age or get sick. I think it will be the same with you and blood. Also, I had a fatal, degenerative
lung disorder and it was halted by the…” She didn’t want to say electrocution. “By the treatment.”

For the first time he looked genuinely startled. She knew he was thinking that there had to be a downside to what she offered, but almost any consequence seemed better than the one he was facing now.

Cherie, what if it has the opposite effect? What if it turns the vampire in him loose and makes him strong and ravenous?

Then we have a problem,
she admitted.

Are you prepared to kill him? If something goes wrong.

Yes. But I won’t have to. He’ll kill himself.

Perhaps, but it will be immeasurably harder once you have transformed him. You know how hard it is to die.

I know.
And it would be harder for her to commit suicide as well when she had changed into a vampire, but she already knew that she would end it all if the vampirism couldn’t be controlled. Sin or no sin, that was the only option for her. She would not become a parasite preying on the innocent. That was a line she would not cross, not if she had to send her soul to everlasting hellfire to avoid it.

“Sounds good to me. I’ll chance it,” Miguel decided, interrupting her grim internal moral lecture. “What do we need to do?”

“We’re going to the church roof. I left some things there.”

“What things?”

“Things we need to safely electrocute ourselves with St. Elmo’s fire. Don’t worry, the roof is the perfect spot for it. Those bronze angel statues and the bell are like a massive conductor.”

“Splendid. How do you know there’ll be St. Elmo’s fire there?” he asked. To his credit, he hadn’t flinched at the word “electrocution.”

“It’ll be there. I attract it whenever there’s a storm. I’d have done this sooner, but Saint Germain has managed to keep the clouds away.”

“That’s why you asked Smoking Mirror for a storm?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t the whole truth, but she didn’t think he was ready to hear the rest.

He digested it.

“Not to be a wet blanket, but what happens if something goes wrong?”

“Then we die.” Either in the transformation, or by their own hands after.

He thought about that. But not for long.

“I can think of worse things,” he finally said. “You know that S.M. will probably kill us for disobeying him?”

“He’ll probably try.”
Again.
The high from the electricity in the air made her manic enough to sound cheerful. “If we’re lucky, he won’t succeed. Now tell me, do you have any strong feelings about patricide?”

“Very strong. I’m completely for it—at least in this case. I really think he actually meant for me to kill you tonight. He thought I’d lose control and drain you dry. It could have happened.”

“So, you knew his plan. I wasn’t sure.” She wanted to say that she was sorry he’d had to face this, to offer comfort. But there was none to put forward. His father was a murderous bastard who would torture and even kill his own son if it seemed expedient. Sorry didn’t begin to cover that.

“I suspected.” Miguel thought some more.

“What? There’s something else bothering you.” She picked up speed. Again, he kept pace. “Ask now, or forever hold your peace. Once we do this, there’s no taking it back.”

“Is your life always like this?” he demanded.

“Pretty much. It’s go, go, go, when you have a homicidal magician on your trail.” Fully recovered, she put on a final burst of speed. As she had hoped, Miguel did too. He was physically strong. He should be able to withstand electrocution.

Please,
bon Dieu,
I am not worthy. But make him able to survive the fire and for it to chain the beast. Don’t let me be the one to kill him. Saint Germain, yes—and Smoking Mirror. But not Miguel.

She found the stone in a small catalogue from the National Museum in Mexico City, published in 1929. It was believed to depict the standard female sacrifice ritual to the god of death, Mictlantecutli, in a ceremony of fire. What interested Ninon was that it was shown with lightning in the sky, bolts of which were hitting the altar. Some of the victims had lightning bolts hitting medallions on their chests as well. The presiding god had his tongue extended—as all gods do, because they are immortal and like sticking their tongues out at the world—but he seemed to have some kind of dagger or needle attached to the end of it. He also had something that resembled a serpent attached to his body in the general region of his penis. In no other stone was the god shown this way and some scholars, the pamphlet said, questioned whether this was even Mictlantecutli. Might he be some representation of the vampire cult that had flourished before the Conquistadors wiped it out?

Strangest of all was the calendar on the back of the cylinder. The Aztecs had a two-hundred-sixty standard day calendar broken down into eighteen equal months. At the end of that, they had a time called Nemontemi—five “lost days” that were to appease the gods. These were frightening days when the gods had to be propitiated or evil would come into the world. That was when the fire sacrifice took place.

Scholars were puzzled. Ninon was intrigued.

She visited the museum as soon as she could but was told upon arrival that the stone had disappeared more than seventy years ago, right after the catalogue was published. Would she like to see the stone of the sun instead?

Unhappy, she had nonetheless seen the stone of the
sun—and every other stone in the museum—but nothing offered her any clue as to what the first engraving had meant. Her only hint was where the stone was found. It was discovered at the bottom of one of the pozas in an area called Cuatro Cienegas.

For too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

—
“Garden of Proserpine” by Algernon Charles Swinburne

I was on the road to Tournai and was informed of the presence of M. le Comte de St. Germain at an inn and de sired to be presented to him. An interview was granted with the restriction that he would appear incognito and that I not press him to partake of food or drink.

—
Casanova,
Memoires

“Undress and lay down,” Ninon urged Miguel, unzipping the backpack she had left on the roof. She quickly began unrolling chains that she wrapped around the church’s bell and secured with an S-hook. They were heavy, made of iron instead of aluminum. As soon as he was naked, she began draping them around his wrists and ankles and waist where she hooked them in place. She ordered her hands not to tremble. It was difficult because the increasing electrical charge in the air made her muscles jumpy. Also, she was a little bit afraid—which was only right when preparing to steal fire from the gods.

“This is a bit kinky,” he said, lifting his wrists. She gave him a quick smile. The wind was whipping about them, lifting her hair into the sky. Now that she had stopped moving from place to place the storm was closing in quickly.

She knelt beside him, plucked the medallion off her own chest, opened it, and laid it over his heart. She pressed down hard so that small spikes pierced his skin.

“Ow. I guess you owed me one.”

“Sorry—we need iron over the heart,” she said, but the wind tore most of her words away. She didn’t really want to explain what was happening anyway. Most people would balk at the idea of constructing a lightning rod over their heart.

“Didn’t you want me to—well,
change
you first?” he asked.

She looked toward the storm front, then shook her head regretfully.

“No time. We’ll have to do it after.” Assuming there was an after.

She got out a second medallion—this one not decorative—and drove the prongs into her own body with a hard slap. The gesture was practiced and was probably reassuring to the watchful Miguel, though he had to notice the small trickle of blood running down her belly.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to find topical anesthetic,” she yelled. She didn’t add that there was also no time to apply a barrier between the metal and their skin. The whole thing was makeshift and they would probably be burned. The wounds would heal quickly, but would hurt until they did.

Miguel nodded. The lightning was close now. He counted aloud the seconds between the flash and the thunder. “One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand.”

“It’s not too late to change your mind.” She had to say this. There had been no time to explain what this transformation would mean—having to put oneself through the fire every few decades, the slight but ever mounting brain damage that occurred with each electrocution that would some day lead to insanity. And that whatever ailments you had when you transformed might come back—always stronger—each time the effects began to wear off. In his case, vampiric bloodlust.

If there had been time, she would have waited until she contacted Byron and asked him for help. The poet didn’t seem to have to renew himself as often as she did. Perhaps
Dippel had improved his process by the time he had “cured” the poet’s epilepsy.

“Yes, it is. Years too late.” He looked into her eyes. “If there is any chance that this will help control the vampirism, I must take it. I have been on the borderline for a long time and I know I’m getting worse. It’s only a matter of time before I kill someone.”

She understood. Sometimes the Devil really was worse than the deep blue sea.

“Anyway, you can be my training wheels while I learn to ride this bike.”

“Okay.” Ninon loaded a dose of adrenaline and amphetamine into a second syringe. The first was retrieved from her bag. The last thing she did was remove her contact lenses—it would be bad to have them melt in her eyes. She looked up and he saw her unveiled gaze for the first time and sucked in his breath. She knew that her irises were black—completely black. Her skin was also beginning to glow. She hoped no one was looking at the top of the church or there would be wild rumors about angel visitations at the
iglesia.

“I wish I could spare you this next part,” she said, between wind gusts.

“I don’t ask to be spared.”

“Nevertheless…”

“I know. I’m not crazy about hurting you either.”

Ninon stripped off her own remaining clothes. Carefully, she laid herself down over his body, belly pressed to belly as she grasped in tight fists the chains that bound him. His heart thudded beneath her. The pose might have been erotic under other circumstances, but neither of them could feel much but anticipation and dread.

“One-one-thousand…The lightning is following me, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s after me now. Hang on,” she murmured. “This part isn’t great.”

Miguel turned his head eastward where she looked, as
the storm boil toward them over the crenellations of the church’s wall. He glanced again at her face. She wasn’t watching the clouds. He looked down a few degrees, following her line of sight. The two syringes she had prepared were close by, cushioned on top of the backpack. Her dose, the smaller one, was closest at hand.

“I have to get to it immediately because my heart will be stopped and my eyesight gone,” she explained. “We’ll be blind and have only a minute, perhaps two, to work before brain damage begins to occur. If anything happens to me you must—”

The thunder came before she was done speaking. The air around them froze, crackling like ice cubes in water.

One-one
—His lips counted, then they were hit with the strange blue lightning, a strike that they could feel but not hear.

Ninon would have screamed if her lungs had not been paralyzed. It felt like a nest of maddened wasps attacking her skin and then chewing into her muscles. There was thunder on the inside of her skull, like a grenade set off in a small room, exploding in her brain, scrambling the cells that it touched. Light and heat entered every fiber of her body, spreading cruel fire. It was the fire of annihilation but also creation. But it didn’t burn like normal flames; rather it melted and reshaped everything inside. It filled the head with merciless sound, noise not understood by the ears, but rather a pulsation that altered the tissues, disturbed the very molecules of the body and drove them into violent rearrangement.

Her brain sizzled and confused synapses at once smelled and tasted every odor and flavor she had even known. There was also pain as every nerve in her body overloaded. This had to be what Hell felt like.

Then the flock of black birds—a murder of imagined crows—swooped in and buffeted her brain, confusing her and making it so she could no longer tell what was happening to either her own body or Miguel’s, though Ninon
knew that death was closing in quickly for both of them. She knew she was being electrocuted. So was Miguel. His inhumanly strong body had bowed up, lifting both of them off the church’s roof. It lasted forever, pain and light and the vicious birds trying to pull her soul from her body.

Noooooo!
she screamed at the birds in her head as her agony reached its pinnacle.

And then it was over. The last thing her failing eyes saw was lightning dancing over the clamoring church bell. The St. Elmo’s fire died out slowly, a last climax of eerie, incandescent light. Her world went dark. She was blind. She was dead. Again.

But she had expected this. It happened every time. She was not afraid. Not for herself. Miguel was another matter. She had to move quickly. The first time was terrifying, being lost in the blackness of death but still partly alive and all aware. There was no knowing how the vampire would react. That part of him might become violent, and the chains would not restrain him for long.

Her muscles were dead weight, but she gave her hand a command and it groped until it found the syringe, though every movement was dull agony.

Pick it up!
she ordered her hand. And again it obeyed, though not as quickly as she would like.

Miguel first? No, she needed to see what she was doing. Anyway, she might not be able to reach his syringe. Her hands were losing all feeling now as they realized she was dead.

Ninon made a huge effort and rolled onto her back. She pulled the medallion aside and turned the needle on herself, plunging it into her chest, angling it in below the breastbone and thrusting upward. She did it before she had time to consider the pain it would bring.

At first there was nothing. Then her heart stuttered back to life. Her vision slowly returned. She didn’t wait for full sight, but immediately pushed the medallion away from Miguel’s chest and retrieved the second syringe. Her
hands were still clumsy, but she managed not to drop the hypodermic. She rolled onto her knees, straddling him. Finding the proper spot below his sternum, she plunged it into the bull’s-eye of burned flesh that lay around Miguel’s heart.

For one long second nothing happened. Then his eyes popped open and he gasped, drawing in his first breath of air. His face was a mask of agony, his tongue with its stinger distended popped out as he exhaled with pain; but she was reassured. You had to be alive to feel hurt.

Church bells began to peal, shaken by the last gust of wind that had reversed its direction, pulling the storm away.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls
…Fireworks and bells—that made for a grandiose first time. It should have been more fun. Instead it was all fire and pain.

“Welcome to my world,” she said softly when Miguel’s breathing quieted and his muscles relaxed. She put a hand to her own chest. The assaulted skin glowed gold over the scarring that sealed her renewed heart inside. “
Laissez les bons temps rouler
.”

Miguel managed to lift his left hand and lay it on her thigh. His gaze was clear but very strange. His eyes were black and it was a bit like looking into a mirror.

“I saw stars,” he whispered finally. “Did you?”

She smiled at his small joke and didn’t say anything about the murderous crows that always swooped down on her at the moment of death, as if they were trying to tear apart her soul. If he saw stars, that was far better.

“Just do it,” she said, lying on her stomach in a puddle. The storm was gone but the roof was still wet.

Miguel stared at her slim back, so nearly childlike. Her skin was milky pale. She looked impossibly fragile and he felt ashamed that this should arouse him.

“Haven’t we done enough for one night? Surely it can wait—”

“No, the storm is clearing.” She turned her head in his direction. “That means Saint Germain and maybe your father will be able to get back into our heads if they are anywhere in the area. They’ll try to stop you. We have to have this finished before they can interfere.”

Miguel hated her answer but knew she was right. Smoking Mirror would do anything to stop him from creating another truly like himself. The god reserved that right unto himself.

“Okay. But neither of us is going to enjoy it.”

“I never expected to. Anyway, it can’t be worse than electrocution,” she said softly.

Feeling reluctant and more than a little unsure of what he was doing, Miguel stuck out his tongue and let the small stinger underneath unfold over his lower lip. He wasn’t sure where to inject her. The lower back looked strongest, but his stinger wasn’t that long and…

“The neck,” she whispered. “That would be easiest.”

He nodded, uncertain if he could speak without lisping.

Miguel worried that his small stinger might not be strong enough to crack the bone of her spine, but it turned out he didn’t need to. By feel alone, he managed to slip it between the vertebrae, through the cushion of the disc and into the spinal cord. His lips sealed tight on her skin. Injecting the venom happened with no effort on his part. It felt something like a climax.

Ninon gasped once as the stinger went in, but she didn’t react otherwise, though he knew she had to be in pain. Vampire venom burned like nothing else. He withdrew as quickly as he could, feeling ill but also disturbingly elated. A part of him had enjoyed doing that.

Ninon unclenched her hands and tried to roll over. Her muscles were uncoordinated and she needed help. Recalling his own experience with the venom and the paralysis it caused, Miguel reached for her, offering comfort with his body because he couldn’t think what to say that would
make this better. She curled close to him, accepting the shelter of his arms, though she didn’t appear to be at all cold and had no trouble breathing now.

“How do you feel?” he asked, praying he hadn’t hurt her too much.

“Different,” she said. “Strong. My heart has never been so physically powerful and I can breathe again. Let’s hope your gift to me allows me to remain this way—at least long enough to take out Saint Germain.” She looked up and asked gently: “How about you? Are you cold?”

“No, not at all. Isn’t that odd?”

“No, it’s good. That’s as it should be. I think.”

After they had snuggled for a while, they dressed and began to talk of other things. Though they probably should have been planning their escape, instead they finally had the pillow talk they’d been denied before. It was rather more grim than for most couples.

“Your lips say
hello
but your eyes say
o Hell
.” It was her small joke.

“Too many bad first dates,” he answered. His brief smile didn’t reach his eyes. It was weird to think that this day had actually been harder for him than it was for her. But it probably had been. To embrace his inner killer was to have his innocence die. That she had been a willing victim, and that he hadn’t killed her was only small consolation. A line had been crossed for him and there was no going back—they both knew it.

“You look beautiful,” she said. “More beautiful than before.”

“So do you, though we’re not very human-looking.”

“No, not very. I like your black patent-leather eyes, though—all shiny and mysterious.”

“Patent-leather eyes…That sounds too toylike, and I’m not a teddy bear stuffed full of love and kindness.” Miguel’s voice was neutral. “I am, in fact, probably full of something very, very bad. But you must know that by now.”

She shrugged. “I’m not all sugar and spice either. Doesn’t mean we need to slit our wrists or anything. Far from it.” He looked skeptical so she added: “This is just a weird kind of postcoital-vampire depression you’re feeling. Have a little faith. I think we’ll make a good team. If you still want to go with me…?”