Not only was he now deaf to Janette’s signature and to the vibrations of her collected strays, he was also powerless to repel an attack should any one of them choose to stalk the mortals now entering their domain.

The fact that Natalie had insisted on coming along only served to double that anxiety. Desperately though he’d wanted to be mortal, this was one place in which the condition rendered him helpless to protect her.

He didn’t like being helpless.

“Nicolas!”

Janette met them midway across the Raven’s deserted dance floor. Even without their centuries-old link, Nick could read the displeasure in her eyes. She spared no comment for Natalie, but took both of Nick’s hands in her own and looked into his eyes. For a fleeting moment, he felt her mind gently probing his own, searching for a connection that was no longer there. And tame though it had been, he found the intrusion unsettling. Was that how all mortals felt beneath a vampire’s scrutiny?

He didn’t like that feeling, either.

Janette was looking at him with pity in her dark blue eyes. “Oh, Nicolas,” she sighed. “What have you done?”

Self-conscious, Nick pulled free and reclaimed the more comfortable territory of Natalie’s hand. “You said you had LeFebre,” he reminded her. “Where is he, Janette?”

“I will show you. But first, you must know what he has done.” She glanced uneasily at Natalie. “And I must know how you brought this thing to be.”

Something icy cold clutched at Nick’s mortal stomach with needle-clawed fingers.

“What has he done?” he asked.

“Did you not know that he was a Hunter, Nicolas? You said yourself that he recognized the vampire simply by touching your hand.”

Impatience edged Nick’s tone. “What has he done?” he repeated. “Tell me.”

He could feel Natalie’s tense curiosity in the grip of her hand, but silently thanked her for not voicing the questions.

Janette sighed. “He has taken first blood this night. Two of my flock. The others tracked him down and brought him here to me.”

“Take us to him,” Nick said at once. “I have to see him, talk to him.”

“There is more that you must know. More I must know.”

“After I’ve seen him. Please, Janette.”

“All right. If you insist.”

For the first time since they’d arrived, Janette addressed Nick’s companion  directly.  “You  may  not wish to see this, Natalie. It is, let us say, not a particularly pleasant sight.”

Natalie answered her with a thin smile and admirable calm. “I’ve dealt with more than a few unpleasant sights in my time,” she said.

“Ah, yes. Of course.” Janette’s response seemed to indicate that she had only just remembered what Natalie did for a living. “Very well.” She looked back at Nick, her eyes now mildly accusing. “Come with me, then.”

She led them past the bar, through the Raven’s private back room sanctum, and into the shadowy maze of wine racks and storage crates that lay beyond. Nick had fully expected to be taken downstairs into the lair Janette’s flock occupied. But she remained on the ground floor, eventually removing a padlock from  the door of a storage room instead. The sign on it read simply PRIVATE STOCK.

Nick couldn’t help recoiling when the door creaked open.

Even to mortal senses the blood scent in the room was overwhelming. He forced himself to enter the darkened room and groped for the light switch. It powered a single, naked bulb hung from a chain overhead.

“Oh my God.”

Natalie’s exclamation propelled Nick forward, past the wine racks stacked high with bottles of Janette’s human vintage “house special” to the stifling little room’s back wall. LeFebre lay on the floor there, unmoving, his shredded clothing soaked with blood.

Nick could find no pulse under the cold flesh at his throat. While Natalie knelt to examine the body as well, Nick turned back to confront Janette, only to find that the Raven’s mistress had been joined by two of her so-called flock, a pair of golden-eyed young males who now flanked her on either side.

“Why?” Nick demanded of all three of them. “Why call me here, if all you meant to show me was a corpse?”

“Nick.”

Before the vampires could respond, Natalie called his attention back to LeFebre. “Look at him,” she said. Nick knelt to do just that while Natalie peered under a torn remnant of the faith healer’s shirt. “All this blood, and there isn’t a mark on him anywhere. Either it isn’t his, or...”

“Or he was brought across,” Nick finished.

Even as he spoke, the “corpse” opened its eyes to look up at them. And in their glowing depths, Nick was shocked to recognize the essence of a Beast that, until yesterday, had been his own.

He could see eight centuries of hunger, blood and death in those eyes; his own sins reflected back to him. But there was also the image of a recent kill, and the sated lust of having at long last fulfilled a craving too long denied. He saw the Hunger, the blood lust and the satisfaction of a successful hunt – the legacy of LaCroix’s gift in its full measure.

He saw himself.

“You knew he was a Hunter, Nicolas,” Janette’s softly accented voice said from behind them. “And now whatever you have done has made of him another creature altogether. One that preys upon our kind.”

Nick scarcely grasped what she had said. His world was collapsing around him, just as it had done in Constantinople five hundred years before, and the fragile thread of faith he had fought so hard to regain was rapidly fraying.

“LeFebre.”

He clutched at the man’s blood-soaked clothing and forced him to sit up against the brick wall. Janette’s minions had taken their revenge by draining him so severely that the Beast was all but incapable of exerting any movement. As Nick held him, the glowing eyes faded to green, but they still held no acknowledgment, no recognition.

Nick shook him. “Did you know this is what would happen?”

“Nick...”

Natalie’s cautionary word went unheeded when the faith healer’s gaze finally focused, and Nick repeated his demand. “Did you?”

“Non,” LeFebre said weakly. “Please, you must believe me. I never intended...” He coughed, shaking his head as though to clear it. “Never meant... any harm.”

“How did it happen?” Nick kept him pinned firmly to the wall. “Last night, in the church, what exactly did you do? I have to know.”

LeFebre turned his head to look at Natalie. “Both of you saw,” he said. “I took the disease from you, as God has allowed me to take illness from others.”

“Empathic healing,” Natalie ventured. “Probably the same way he cured the Belgian child’s tumor. It’s not supposed to be medically possible, but...”

“Neither are vampires.” Nick’s desperate hold on LeFebre’s shoulders tightened. “All right. Why?” he demanded. “You’d encountered vampires before. You knew the kind of evil you were dealing with. Why take that into yourself?”

“To banish it,” LeFebre asserted. Despite the man’s debilitated state, he gripped Nick’s arms with surprisingly strong hands. “Faith allowed me to take it,” he said. “I thought that faith alone could also destroy it. I was wrong.” He glanced warily at the vampires standing vigil at the door and said hoarsely, “Please, tell them. Je suis désolé. I could do nothing to stop it from killing. Nothing at all.”

“I know.” Nick had to pry the man’s vise-like grip from his arms before the bones began to snap. “You couldn’t control it. No one can, in the beginning. It’s too strong. Too overpowering.”

“My faith should have been stronger.” LeFebre’s voice was a near-sob. “Faith should have been able to destroy the evil.”

Nick shook his head. “This particular evil is very old,” he said, “and very powerful. Even with the strongest faith, destroying it may not be that easy.”

“I should say not,” Janette’s artfully tender voice intruded. “Nor is it that easy to prey upon our kind and suffer no consequences for your deed. As it is with mortals, there are also laws among our kind. And those laws must be diligently kept.”

Her meaning may well have been lost on the weakened LeFebre, but Nick understood it only too well, and wished that he hadn’t.

“This was my fault,” he said, rising to face the trio of vampires. “If you think you have to punish someone, then punish me.”

“Always the noble chevalier,” Janette chided him. “Unfortunately, mon cher, you are not the one who is a danger to us.” She nodded toward LeFebre. “As long as he is free, he will continue to hunt and destroy our kind. It goes without saying that we cannot permit such a thing.”

Nick did not like the direction this was taking. “You can’t just lock him away,” he said, though he half-hoped that this was precisely what she meant to do.

It wasn’t. And Janette seemed to have no qualms about saying so in LeFebre’s presence.

“By the Code, Nicolas, he must die. You know this.”

“No.”

“I will not have Enforcers here!” Janette’s eyes had begun to glow yellow with her anger. “If he is not dealt with, they will come. Make no mistake in that. And after they have destroyed him, they will punish us for failing to uphold the Code. You know this as well!”

Nick could only stare at her, though his mind’s eye saw not Janette, but the nightmare memory of LaCroix once again wrenching away all that was dear to him; taking his mortality, his soul, his world – and Natalie.

“No,” he said again, and closed his eyes against the nightmare’s image as well as the all-too-human tears that suddenly threatened to overwhelm him. “There’s another way.”

The rest of his lovingly reconstructed mortal world had just crumbled into dust around him.

*    *    *

Nicholas was drenched in blood.
 
The Beast gloried in that. He had given it free rein, not even trying to conceal its glowing eyes, and with a sword appropriated from a fallen Catalan, he had thrown himself into the skirmish that now raged between the great walls.

Time and again amidst the melee, he had been run through, only to confound his attackers by rising to strike fatally back. His herculean effort, however, was proving to be for naught. Having gained great sections of the outer wall, Mehmet’s forces could now fire down upon the city’s defenders, and the water-filled foss dividing the space between walls soon ran crimson with blood. Even Giustiniani’s seasoned troops were giving way under the onslaught. Nicholas wondered if their leader had died of his wounds, to leave them appearing so demoralized.

He fought his way to the top of the outer wall and to the section near Blachernae, still held by the Genoese. In the splintered ruins of the stockade, he recognized Emperor Constantine kneeling beside a fallen Giustiniani. Though sitting up, the commander of the imperial forces was bleeding from a wound that had shattered his breastplate. Anyone could see that he would not be fighting any more this night.

“Hold there!”

Nicholas’ progress toward the emperor was abruptly impeded by a javelin-wielding member of the Genoese Guard. “Stand away.”

Too weary to exert any influence over the soldier, Nicholas obeyed his command, though he did not retreat very far – only to a stockpile of powder kegs stacked nearby. From there, he used the vampire’s preternatural hearing to eavesdrop on the emperor’s conversation with the man who led his city’s six thousand remaining defenders.

“...cannot desert us in the hour of our greatest need, Giovanni. I implore you, do not do this!”

“He cannot remain!” That reply came not from Giustiniani, but from an aide who stood over them. “He will bleed to death if he is not taken from here, and he must be taken now!”

At the aide’s signal, a small party of Genoese gathered round their commander, prepared to carry him to safety. The emperor rose and gave way to them, though he tried one final entreaty to Giustinaini himself.

“If you flee, my friend, the heart of our battle is lost. Can you not see that the defenders will have no more will to fight without you to lead them?”

Giustiniani’s weak voice was almost inaudible, even to a vampire’s ears. “Forgive me. ...regret that I must go. They will fight on. They must.”

His men lifted him then, and carried him under guard from the battlements, down the narrow stairs and across the divided space, fending off all attackers along the way. Several of them fell just the same, under fire from Turks atop the wall.

Shortly after they had gone, Emperor Constantine gave word that the stockade must be abandoned.

His cold heart sinking, Nicholas watched the Greeks and their emperor retreat from the Blachernae wall to flee across the embattled foss below. Giustiniani’s men had taken him through both remaining inner gates, and it was through these same portals that the last defenders now streamed, killing those enemies who tried to follow and barring the great doors after them.

His Spanish sword still held firmly in hand, Nicholas flew to the innermost wall’s highest parapet to look down on the regrouping Greek forces. With Constantine working in their midst, they hastened to strengthen the wooden bulwarks that stood just inside the innermost wall. These were Constantinople’s final defenses.

The Turks had now commandeered or battered open three of the outer wall’s gates, and from the fog-shrouded Mesoteichion Plain, thousands appeared to pour through the breaches, signaling their triumph with war cries and chanting thankful prayers to Allah. The remaining Greek fighters on and between the great walls were quickly overwhelmed and dispatched.

For only the second time in a millennium, Theodosius’ triple walls, barriers that had once repelled the Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun, had been conquered.

From his high vantage point, Nicholas caught sight of the Genoese guards who had taken Giustiniani. Their wounded charge now carried in a cobbler’s wagon, they hastened past the Church of St. Theodosia toward the sea wall. They were headed for the Eis Pegas Gate and the small ship that lay at anchor just beyond, no doubt prepared to carry Giustiniani across the Golden Horn to Pera and relative safety.

And as the emperor had correctly foreseen, the defenders maintained little will to fight when their leader had gone. Many deserted, fleeing to their homes in the desperate hope that they might somehow be able to protect their families from harm.

Nicholas hoped they would succeed.
 
When the inner gates at Blachernae came crashing open, Constantine’s final defenses proved to be of little value. The Turks overran them with ease. While the bloodshed raged anew, Nicholas watched the emperor wield a great battle-ax against his foes, fighting as he had sworn to do, until the sheer masses began to engulf him. Though one of his aides tried valiantly to pull him back, Constantine shook the man off, raised his ax aloft and plunged full tilt into the fray.

No one ever saw him again.

Their enemies now vanquished, Mehmet’s armies, promised one day of pillage as payment for their service, surged full force into the city. They would be disappointed to find that the gold and silver riches she had held in her former glory were no more. But whatever did remain, they would take for their own.

“Well,” a silken voice said in Nicholas’ ear, “that was mildly entertaining. Now, perhaps, you would care to dine before we go?”

Nicholas turned hate-filled eyes upon his maker. “This is not a matter for jest!” he seethed. “Even you cannot possibly be that heartless.”

“No?” LaCroix clucked his tongue. “Don’t be so sure of that. I have had a great deal of practice.”

Nicholas glared at him, but said nothing. He could think of nothing more to say.

“We will, of course, have to see to your attire before we depart.” LaCroix plucked at the bloodied, torn sleeve of Nicholas’ tunic. “Surely somewhere in this miserable hamlet you can locate something more sartorially suitable for travel? Although, I’d suggest you make haste. The sun will rise ere long.”
 
“You disgust me.” Nicholas spat the words at him, as though words alone could impale LaCroix’s stone-cold heart.

“Tsk-tsk.” The ancient vampire admonished him with a look. “You will remember, I trust, that I have your word.”

“Yes. When it is over.”

Nicholas walked to the parapet’s crenellated brink and mounted the escarpment. With a final, withering glance back at his sire, he stepped off the edge and was gone.