The Priest of Blood (24 page)

What madness possessed me that I laughed when I arose and wished for nothing other than something sweet and warm to drink?

I had been afraid that I would be wholly demon. That my need for human blood would turn me against myself. But this awakening from the grave gave me the feeling of utter joy: yes, I knew I would need to drink from a man or woman that night. Yes, that might mean the death of that person. But what did it matter? What was death, after all? It had taken me, but left me behind at the same time. I experienced a sense of freedom that no living man could ever feel. I loved humanity in this.

My mind raced as I stretched—would I take down a youth like a lion running after a young gazelle? Would I make a beautiful woman give me the gift of her blood in exchange for a night of passion? Would I grab a young man—another soldier, perhaps—of sinewy muscle and hearty laugh? Would I bring to them the knowledge of their own mortality, their vulnerability—or would I bring them tidings of their power as the source of my new life?

My love was death. My death was love. I brought death to mortals with this new incarnation, and it felt like a gift when I drank from them.

If I were a demon, then why did I still praise God? Why did I begin to understand that other gods roamed the world, as well? Why had my thinking changed, and why did I feel this unleashing of instinct as a beautiful force denied mankind?

Why did I still feel as if life was worth living if I were not truly alive for the first time in nearly twenty years?

Death was the battlefield. The bodies of my brethren had been scattered over its great field of blood. I was not dead, not in the sense of death. I was not alive—yet I felt more life in me than I’d ever known. My mind expanded with the thought: death, useless death, was what mankind brought. Mankind was a plague against itself. I was a newly reborn creature, then—I was a lover of man and woman. I appreciated what they offered, and I wanted to take it, with care, with kindness, as a lover takes the maiden’s chastity and holds it close. I wanted to hold a man in my arms while I drank of his red juice, kiss a woman’s throat before sensing the pulsing vein, then delving into her for that finest of liqueurs.

There was no madness to these thoughts. I felt as if I were not abandoned by God, but that, somehow, with my vital fluids, I was intertwined with Him. I had eaten of the fruit of the tree—not of the knowledge of good and evil, but of the knowledge of the life after death. Not in some unseen spirit realm, but here, on this Earth, in the very heart of the land of the dead.

The thirst overwhelmed me soon enough. I felt as if I had never fed in all my days, and that if I didn’t find blood soon, I would dry up like the last bit of kindling in an oven.

The others around me arose, as well, some swiftly, some slowly. Their figures looked beautiful to me—the males were muscled and possessed a beauty that I had never seen in mortal men. The females had that undead beauty also, that glamour of seduction that was no doubt needed to lure prey. Beautiful and damned and full of energy that was like a heat mirage of air around their forms. They did not resemble corpses or even demons—they looked like the gods of the Earth, possessing the vitality of life in their movement and upon the surface of their flesh.

I longed to speak with them, to ask them of this existence and their journeys, but they moved swiftly—swifter sometimes than sight itself. They showed no interest in either me or their companions in this demonic realm. Instead, they had gone up the passageways, to the world above.

A woman arose, whose skin was dark and whose hair was braided. The one who had first spoken to me of the need to drink of life. She wrapped a cloak of tattered raiment about her and briefly glanced at me. Her eyes were yellowed, and her parched lips parted, as if to speak. For a moment, I held hope, but when she opened her mouth, it was to bare the fangs of a wolf. She wrapped a cloth into her hair, which became a turban when it was done. Then she crawled up the side of one of the tall columns and moved across the ceiling of this graveyard dungeon until she’d reached the slit of a window. She pressed herself through it—she was remarkably slender of waist and hips, and she moved like a cat.

I dressed then, feeling the need to hunt, leapt toward the upper passageway, moving like a spider, my fingers and toes gently touching the stone, and yet somehow adhering so that I might climb a sheer wall.

5

The lights came up more brightly until it was no longer night, but a false daylight, yet with a skewed perspective—colors had been changed, and what had been red was yellow, what had been blue was white. As I emerged into the courtyard, the moon seemed an orb of darkness, and the sky was lit where there were no stars. Where the stars existed, only pinpricks of black.

The rest of my newfound tribe had fled into the night. They would find the traveler on the road, or the dying soldier still on the field, and drink their fills. I, too, set forth, smelling the musk of the undead as I followed the invisible trail.

Through the night, I sensed a gathering of my tribe within a few leagues, and so I moved along what felt like a warm, invisible stream of air—that stream that my tribe sensed and kept within. My mind moved with it, as did my body, and soon enough I found the others. Four or five of my brethren had gathered near a dying soldier who had camped at the base of a rocky hill. They had torn off his armor, and one female demon raised an ax as if in victory, dancing near the fire alongside which the man had only recently eaten his last meal.

I stepped closer to the soldier—the rich smell of iron in his blood overwhelmed me. It was like smelling a boar roasted for many hours on a spit. It made my mouth water. I felt the pain again—my incisors had begun the painful growth that might not stop for days. But it was a pain I could take, for it increased my thirst. I greedily pushed the other vampyres from this unfortunate man. His throat and collar were brightly colored with his blood. The mouths and chins of my fellows, smeared with the stain of life, their lips smacking like hounds with the kill of a fresh stag. I grabbed his shoulders, drawing that delicious milk of life to my lips, but when I saw the man’s eyes, I recoiled.

He looked at me with utter sadness. He was not yet dead, but he was well on his way to that place. I knew instinctively that to kill him would be a kindness—a swift kill was not the norm for my kind. The instinct within me knew that to drink from these cups of flesh was a gourmand’s pursuit—sips as well as guzzling, a taste or a drunken swallow. But a swift kill was not what I should want, because the taste was better when life still moved in the blood.

But I knew this man. I loved this man as a true brother.

I recognized him, as if a long-buried memory had surfaced.

Chapter 12

________________

T
HE
S
ACRED
K
ISS

1

It was Ewen, my friend, my companion, and I felt sorrow for him, and yet a distance from the world of mortal man so that I had no pity. He recognized me in the firelight, and his eyes seeming to glaze over, then brighten again as if he were fighting within himself to hang on to life.

“Aleric,” he whispered. “Aleric. Take me. Take me. Take me where you go.”

“I can’t,” I said, whispering this in his ear. “I love you, my friend. But you do not want to come to this place. We are demons. I am no longer Aleric. Let me drink the last of you and keep you from this world.”

“Please,” he whispered. “I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to go. I want always to serve you. I searched for you. I followed your path.”

But I could not let that be. I wept as I drank from him, the dual tears of one who wishes peace for a friend—to put him out of the misery of the pain of death, to open the door into whatever comes after—but also I wished to feed. Does the shepherd not name the sheep of his flock, yet pick the finest spring lamb for slaughter? When he sits down to eat that meal, does he not remember that lamb, and the sweetness of its youth, even while tasting of its death? So I tasted Ewen, his rich aroma like the exotic coffee of the East, like the wines of my homeland, the iron within him proving a gentle metal to my tongue, like the edge of dull blade, the sweetness of anise and of the meat he had eaten that day.

I learned that night of the memory that comes with the blood. Not the memory of those we drink, but the memory of our own mortality, the riches of it, and its poverty, too. The innocence of childhood, the touch of a mother, the love of flesh, and the hatred for self. All of it returns in a flagon of blood, drunk to quench an unquenchable thirst.

Life is the blood. Health is the blood. It is the drink of the gods, and all who have drunk of it for sustenance do not hate those from whom they drink, the vessels of mankind.

Love was my feeling then, and even caring.

I was not a ravager of this man—I ravished him.

I pressed my teeth against the much-torn flesh, and sucked hard against those ragged flaps of skin. He became the vessel of my life. It was a form of love that humans can’t ever understand because they think of life and death as opposites, when life is death, death is life, love is death, death is love, immortality is hell, and heaven is death. All of these thoughts washed through me. I felt his love for me in his blood as no man had ever given of himself before.

When I drew back, the blood across my chin and throat and chest, and saw a look of astonishment around me. The other vampyres stood as if watching, and I wondered if it was at my greed.

But when I looked back down at Ewen’s face, I knew: I had not yet stopped his heart. He still had a flush of life in him, and I saw an intense beauty to this last moment of existence. He was more beautiful then than any maiden—even than Alienora—to me. He had the beauty of what I would learn was the Threshold. The Threshold was the doorway between the living and the dead. Once passed through, there was no coming back. I looked at him and another instinct came to me—I wanted him with me. Ewen had been there, and he had no doubt camped there because he had tracked me and intended to find me. He was my link to mortal life, and I could not let him go. I could not let him die as little Thibaud had gone, at the hands of these creatures.

I could not.

Call it selfishness or fear or loneliness, but I wanted him again for myself, for my friend.

Instinct rose in me. Remembrance of Pythia as she pressed her lips to mine.

I would bring him into my world and make him one of our tribe.

2

I brought his head nearer to me and parted his lips with my fingers. His eyes fluttered open. He looked at me as one drugged.

I felt he knew me then, and I felt his acceptance.

Without further hesitation, I pressed my lips against his, locking to them as I remembered Pythia had done.

Like a viaduct, passing water through a new channel, I exhaled into his slightly quivering form. Another force made itself known to me—from my lungs, a power I had not felt before. My breath. The passing was in the breath itself. I passed this to Ewen, whose lips caught mine in tenderness.

I felt the slight grasp of his hand at my shoulder, then at my chest. His hand was cold, but warmed as I breathed into his lungs. The flow of the stream from my mouth to his increased, and I felt as if I might never stop, but instead lost myself in his mouth, down his throat, inside him completely, losing my body and spirit so that he might breathe again. His arms went to my back and drew me closer to him. I felt his desire increase, a furnace beginning to glow red. I felt an unseen presence there with us—whispering to me of the secrets of the stream, of the flow between vampyre and human, of passing the breath and the Death-that-was-Life to another.

I felt a terrible pounding in my ears, and a tender weakness in my loins. He wasn’t just drinking breath from my mouth. He swallowed my essence. I felt his delight at this plunder of my force—this sucking at my core, my fundament—my being. He was my child now, my baby, and my birthing into the undead. I felt the third presence, the creation of a new being within him from the giving of breath. He would forever be connected to me by my essence.

He inhaled greedily from my lips as a man who has been smothering seeks air, and the suction this created began to pain me. I remembered Pythia, how she drew back, breaking the connection between us, breaking out of the sacred stream that bound us. I felt excruciating pain as I felt his tongue searching the edges of my teeth and lapping up to the roof of my mouth as he tried to get the last of what I offered. But I used all the strength I had left and threw myself backward, away from him.

Something else, another memory of Pythia, as she gave me this life-in-death: I saw the great city called Alkemara, shining in moonlight, and the priest, with wings as oily as eelskin, spread wide behind his form. In his hand, the Staff of the Nahhashim.

Behind him, a figure lying upon a stone altar.

In Pythia’s streaming into me, she had shown me something secret, something terrible, and I did not know what it meant.

A woman stood there, naked, beside the wing-shrouded priest, her face covered with a gold mask. From her full breasts to her taut waist, down past her gently rounded hips to her slender but muscled legs, her sun-darkened body was soaked in blood. The vision had the quality of a dream, for parts of it were vivid, and other parts seemed only half-formed. I saw the gold mask clearly for a moment: it had a woman’s features, with her mouth wide and her tongue out, her eyes wild and wide. Behind the slits of the mask, I saw darkness where a woman’s eyes should have been.

Something drew me to her. My sight moved as if it had wings, toward the masked woman, who stepped aside to show me the altar. I moved unbidden into the realm of the altar on which a young woman had been tied with strips of leather. Clothed as if she were royalty, she wore a cobweb-thin robe. Around her shoulders, a turquoise cloak with gold thread sewn through it. On her scalp, a headdress in the shape of a hawk. It was Pythia herself.