Incarnation (11 page)

Morgaine went after me. We stood just beyond the timber hall, the night filled with the scents of winter pine and smoke, the swollen moon so bright that I could see her as well as if by day. Better perhaps, for moonlight always became her well.

“I will go to Damien myself,” I declared.

“No!” She cried out and made to grasp my arm. “You must not! We will find another way.”

Later, I came to believe that her effort to stop me stemmed, at least in part, from her sense of what she was becoming. If the arrival of the vampires in England had not fully awakened her as a Slayer, the process had certainly begun. But by the time I discovered that, it was too late.

She followed me and we argued further, then made up on a bed of sweet moss beneath a sacred oak. I stole away before dawn and sought out Damien. My plan was to reach an accord with him, then gather a combined army of vampires and mortals to stand against the Saxons.

It almost worked. Morgaine, having followed me by some Druid means known only to her, burst in upon us. Although as a Slayer she yet lacked the power to kill Damien, she wounded him grievously. Well aware of what the coming of a Slayer meant to his kind and desperate to protect them, he passed his power to me before giving up his light.

What shall I say of the years that followed? Morgaine loved me still even as the hunger to kill me grew within her. I do not underestimate the battle she waged inwardly. Arthur continued to insist on fighting the Saxons alone, with little success. More and more, he turned to the Christian priests, who grew in power.

So, too, did the Saxons who benefited from the conflict between the vampires and the Britons. Ultimately, Morgaine succumbed to the force within her. She attacked my kind with wanton abandon, finally becoming strong enough, she thought, to challenge me.

Against all evidence, driven by my love for her, I let myself believe that if I could only put a stop to my father’s
bloody folly, I could keep both my kingdom and my beloved safe for all time. I truly did not want to kill my father, but urged on by his priests, he had no such reluctance regarding me. In the end, I had no choice.

Arthur fell and Morgaine came against me. The rest is too dark and tragic to dwell upon. I will say only that she and I both left the field of battle sorely wounded. I survived; my beloved did not.

The entry concluded with Dee’s own words:

Thus did he whom I fear above all the rest explain the coming of his kind and the terrible bargain he made for what he claimed was his love of this realm, even beyond his love for she who sought to defend it against him and everything he represented. Twisted and dark are the ways of such love, and bitter its fruit.

Startled and uncertain of what to believe, I looked up. Marco was standing very close. Over the ancient book, his gaze met mine. For the first time, I saw that his eyes were a tawny shade of gold I had never seen before. Heat poured from him, intense, vital heat so powerful that it seemed to push against the coldness filling me, even to the point of threatening to crack the ice around what had been my heart. For a moment, the world seemed to tilt and shift, and I with it. Barriers slipped away and I was at once who I had become and who I had been, both parts of myself existing at the same time. But that was impossible. Surely no one could be both human and a vampire. And yet for that breath out of time, the contradiction
evaporated like rain striking a fiery surface, rising as mist to hang briefly in the air before vanishing altogether.

In a room nearby, someone coughed, perhaps the effect of too much sage smoke. The world righted itself. Time moved on and we with it. With a great effort of will, I dragged my attention back to the vital matters at hand.

CHAPTER 8

K
ing Arthur himself is a legend,” I said. “We cannot know whether he really lived or not. But even if he did, to think that vampires could have played such a role in our history . . .” Confusion filled me. Was such a thing remotely possible?

“Dee’s research was impeccable,” Marco said. “And nothing we have learned in the centuries since suggests that he was wrong.”

I looked down again at the book. “Whoever is speaking here . . . he names himself King Arthur’s son. In the legends, he is called Mordred. Is that who this is about?”

“So it seems.”

“And you believe this? That King Arthur’s son became a vampire in order to protect England?” As extraordinary as that sounded, upon reflection I had to admit that it might not be so unthinkable after all. I had seen for myself the powers a vampire could possess. Against human foes, this Mordred would have been formidable indeed.

“I know of no reason to doubt it. The evidence in the centuries since supports Dee’s account of what happened and why.”

I looked down at the passage I had just read, trying to understand all that it revealed. After my initial shock, I felt as
though I was peering into a hidden yet fascinating version of history that cast an entirely new light on much that was happening in the present day. Yet it all seemed to have begun in darkness and deceit.

“He speaks of Morgaine as though she was his lover, but I thought—”

“That she was Arthur’s half sister?” Marco asked. “Who laid with the king by trickery and bore Mordred as a result?”

Well-brought-up young ladies are not supposed to know of such things and gentlemen are not supposed to speak of them. Apparently, Marco and I were beyond any such restrictions.

“That was my understanding,” I said.

“The present British government is not the first to engage in such deliberate subterfuge. Morgaine was the daughter of one of King Arthur’s high lords. When that man died, Arthur made her his ward. That is how she and Mordred came to know one another. Who they all were and what happened to them has been concealed behind a mask of lies.”

As my own fate was being concealed, with Bram Stoker’s able assistance and to his considerable financial benefit, I could not afford to forget that any more than I could forget that he and Marco were members of the same society with presumably the same shared aims.

“What is your part in this?” I asked.

“To do as Dr. Dee did,” Marco said without hesitation. “He called on us to open our minds to the world as it really is, to see what is to be seen regardless of our personal desires or fears. He enjoined us to serve the greater good, no matter how difficult that may be.”

“How noble,” I murmured. Of course, any such sentiment depended on general agreement as to what constituted the
“greater good.” Clearly, Morgaine and Mordred had not seen eye to eye on that.

Slowly, I asked, “What is a Slayer?” Even as I spoke the word, a dark current of fear moved through me, as though I had some instinctive understanding of a deadly danger that terrified my kind.

“A mortal endowed with a preternatural ability to kill vampires. The coming of a Slayer is nature’s way of righting the balance. Without that sort of corrective action, vampires might have wiped out humans long ago.”

My eyes flicked to the chain around his neck and the stone secured by it. He smiled faintly.

“I am no Slayer, be assured of that,” Marco said. “One is born once every thousand years, no more. Morgaine was the first here in Britain. She laid waste to the vampires before she finally perished. Only Mordred was left.”

Doing my utmost to conceal my relief even as I still wondered how he was able to move among my kind with such impunity, I said, “But there are many vampires now.”

“Indeed. You will find the explanation here.” He pointed again to the book. Leaning forward, I resumed reading where I had left off. Mordred continued:

In the months after Morgaine perished in battle against me, leaving me sorely wounded but alive, I cursed the cruel fate that condemned me to be a cheerless wanderer in a world of perpetual darkness. With virtually all the vampire clan in Britain slain, I was truly alone. Had I understood the means by which I could contrive my own death, I would have gladly used them. But for all my power, I remained ignorant in the ways of my kind. I had no choice but to endure.

That is not to say that I did not attempt to end my life. In those as yet early days, I tried every method I could think of—poison, the knife, fire—everything, all to no avail. Yet the effort was not wasted, for by it I began to discover the extent of my own powers. I traveled for a time on the Continent—several centuries in all—finding my own kind, learning from them, and growing in strength. At length, I returned to Britain and began creating a new race of vampires to serve as my court.

“Mordred succeeded in his intent,” Marco said, “but he also showed great wisdom in restricting the number of vampires he created. He understood that if there were too many, they would overfeed on humans, who would realize what was happening and respond violently. Both species would be doomed.”

I thought of what I had witnessed at the Bagatelle, humans competing for the chance to become vampires. “Judging by what I’ve seen, the vampire population is about to increase.”

“That is a new development.”

A thought was forming in my mind, really no more than the flicker of a notion. I was ready to dismiss it out of hand but instead I asked, “How long ago did Arthur die?”

“Fourteen hundred years have passed since the great king was among us.”

But Lady Blanche had said that vampires could live forever.

“What of Mordred then?” I asked. “Is he still—”

Marco leaned over, so close that I felt the hard strength of his chest pressed against my back. His breath brushed the nape of my neck. I tried to remember that he was a human, therefore, strictly speaking, prey. But the thought dissolved into confusion borne of my own conflicting emotions.

“Remember,” he said, “what Dee asked of us, to see the world as it truly is rather than as we assume or even wish it to be.” As he spoke, he flipped through several pages of the book until he came to the one he sought. It contained the drawing of a man, or so he appeared. Only his face was shown, that taking up the entire page. Dark hair framed a high forehead, the straight blade of a nose leading to a chiseled mouth and a square, firm jaw. His eyes beneath sweeping brows were wide, aglow with fierce intelligence. Even in the simple pen-and-ink sketch, his pale skin appeared luminous as the moon, radiating light.

“This is Mordred,” Marco said. “Do you recognize him?”

I had to force myself to speak, so fierce was the sudden constriction of my throat. A hot wave of yearning rose up within me, so powerful that the world itself seemed veiled in the hue of blood. That compelling face, the intensity of those eyes, the lips that smiled in the instant before they parted to reveal . . .

The singer in the opera house, the being of my dreams. He whose summons I had no will to resist.

My voice sounded as though it came from a great distance, yet the truth I spoke resonated within me. “I should do so for he is etched into my memory. I can never forget him.”

Marco sighed deeply, the sound hinting at genuine regret, but also of acceptance.

“I thought that might be the case,” he said. “As far as the Golden Dawn has been able to determine, Mordred disappeared about the time you were incarnated as a vampire. In fact, it now appears that you were the last one to see him.”

“I don’t understand . . .” My mind reeled from the discovery that a vampire of such ancient and powerful lineage existed and even more that he had inexplicably chosen to make me one of his kind.

“He said nothing to you? Gave you no explanation for his actions?”

I strained to remember. The moor . . . the night . . . the sense of compulsion that I had been unable to deny. All remained starkly clear in my mind, but beyond that . . .

“He said nothing or if he did, I have no recollection of it.”

“That is unfortunate,” Marco said. “Mordred’s disappearance has very serious ramifications for the realm. Since returning to England and re-creating the vampire kindred here on our shores, he has ruled as its king. No one has ever been able to challenge his power and only a very few have been foolish enough to try. He is supreme among all the vampires in strength and will. Or at least he was.”