7
“SO YOU’VE CLOSED THE BOOKS ON THE LEWIS CASE?”

Natalie’s popcorn bowl sat empty on the coffee table next to the glass that still contained two-thirds of her latest protein preparation. Key Largo was rewinding in the VCR, and on the other side of Nick’s shuttered windows, Toronto’s morning was making its debut.

“Juvenile division will take it from here,” he said. “I don’t know if the Crown will pursue any charges at all, but at worst it’ll be negligence vis à vis the use of a controlled substance resulting in accidental death.”

“I hope they recommend counseling.” Nat leaned back on the leather couch beside him. “Causing a friend’s death, even accidentally... That’s a heavy load of guilt for a seventeen-year-old to carry.”

“It’s a heavy load for anyone to carry.”

“Sorry.” Natalie bit her lip. “I didn’t mean...”

“I know you didn’t.” Nick leaned forward, nervously flexing his interlaced fingers. “You haven’t asked what happened with LeFebre. Don’t you want to know?”

She sat up then, coming even with his position on the couch. Two nights ago, Nick reflected, allowing her so close would have been out of the question. Tonight, he marveled that his Beast hadn’t once stirred at the presence of her nearby heartbeat.

“I guess I figured you’d tell me when you were ready,” she said. But there was a note of reluctance in her voice that told him she’d probably hoped the subject wouldn’t come up at all.

Nick looked down at his clasped hands and decided there was no way to broach this but to say it outright. “I’m going to let him perform the healing ritual.”

He’d expected an angry response. Instead, Nat got up and paced across the Persian carpet to the shelves that housed his audio-video array. She ejected the rewound tape, pulled it from the VCR and painstakingly repackaged it in the rental store’s black plastic video box.

Confused at this cryptic non-response, he came to stand close behind her, carefully placing his hands on her shoulders. “Nat?”

She didn’t shrink from his touch, which he took as a good sign. When he gently turned her to face him, though, there were tears welling in her eyes. He hadn’t expected that.

“What’s wrong?” He lifted her chin until he could look down into those eyes, wishing he could read what it was that troubled her so much. “Something I said?” he queried, only half in jest.

She met his gaze with an open and earnest concern in her own. “I just don’t want to see you hurt, Nick.”

Releasing her chin, he traced two fingers up the curve of her cheek, then caressed it lightly with the back of his hand. “I’ve survived being hurt before,” he said, and then abruptly let the hand fall away. “What worries me more is that I could be the one doing the hurting. If I lose control, if the vampire is unleashed, LeFebre could be harmed, or killed. That’s why I need your help.”

“My help? Nick, I can’t...”

“If it happens, if I lose control and attack him, there is a way the vampire can be stopped.”

Nat’s face reflected sudden horror at the direction she assumed this was taking. “Ohhhh, no. There’s no way I’m going to...”

“No, not that.” He turned away, opened a drawer and returned to press a .22 caliber pistol into her hands. “It’s loaded with hollow points,” he told her, “and those have been fitted with special curare-filled capsules. That’s the only known substance with a sedative effect on vampires. If things go wrong tomorrow night, I want you to promise me you’ll use this.”

Nat’s horror, having turned briefly into relief, now became open anxiety. “I...” She stared down at the small gun and turned it clumsily over in her hands. “I’m not sure I can!”

He took both her hands in his and folded them over the gun. “LeFebre’s life may depend on it.”

“But I’ve never fired a gun before, ever. I don’t even know how!”

“I’ll show you how to use it. Don’t worry. You’ll handle it just fine.”

“But you’re supposed to get permits and lessons and all that stuff first, aren’t you?”

“Nat?”

“And department clearance and a concealed weapons certificate and...”

“Nat?”

When she finally stopped chattering to look at him, Nick leaned in and kissed her, a surprise attack that evidently caught her completely off guard. “Say yes,” he said.

Her sigh of exasperation quickly became resignation and, reluctantly, she nodded. But he could still see the tears threatening to return at any moment.

“Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure her. “It’ll be all right. We’ll be all right.” She was in his arms then, clinging to him, still shivering in her fear. Nick held her and listened to the sweet, rapid pulsing of blood through her veins. He listened with a trepidation of his own, fearful that the vampire would respond to the allure of Natalie’s terror.

But the sleeping Beast he had battled for so many centuries never awakened.

Hours after she’d gone, Nick still sat on the leather couch, lost in thought. He scarcely noticed when the radio switched itself on, illuminating a strip of red LEDs across the receiver’s face.

“I seem to recall some tedious philosopher or other,” an unwelcome voice crooned from the speakers, “once said that he who loses money loses much; he who loses a friend loses much more, but he who loses faith, loses all.”

The ghost shimmered into being in front of Nick’s wide screen TV, coalescing into a transparent blue facsimile of Lucien LaCroix. “It’s all rubbish, of course. Sheer, unmitigated drivel.”

Nick rose to approach the specter, meeting it for the first time face to face and glaring to see if it would actually match his gaze.

It did.

“You do not need faith,” it sneered at him. “And faith has naught to do with you. It is a mortal vanity. A sham. A fantasy impressive in its sheer pervasiveness, I’ll grant, but a fantasy all the same.”

Ignoring the harangue, Nick moved still closer, and without warning, dared to thrust out a hand in an effort to touch the apparition’s shoulder. He wasn’t surprised when his fingers, finding no resistance, passed easily through the ancient vampire’s image. There had been no warmth, no spark of an electrical field, no sensation at all, save one. Nick could have sworn that in that brief moment, he’d felt the stark, icy cold of the grave.

LaCroix’s azure specter smirked at him. “Satisfied?” it purred.

“It’s not possible,” Nick breathed. “You’re not real. You can’t be. You’re dead.”

The response to that was pure, unadulterated LaCroix at his most sardonic. “Am I? How annoyingly inconvenient!”

“I killed you,” Nick persisted, “here, in this room, eight months ago. I watched you burn! How can you possibly be here? How?”

“I,” the ghost intoned, “am very old. And very, very powerful.”

“I did kill you. I saw you destroyed, by stake and by fire.”

“Nothing you do, or think you have done, will ever free you of me, Nicholas. I am you.”

“No...”

“Lo, I am with you always,” the phantom quoted with sacrilegious abandon, “even unto the end of the world!”

Nick backed away, shaking his head. “You are no part of me,” he denied. “Not anymore. I disavow you and all that you stand for.”

LaCroix’s laughter echoed to the loft’s high ceiling. “Deny me three times, St. Peter. Perhaps, if we listen, we shall hear the cock crow!”

“Damn you,” Nick seethed at him. “I want nothing from you ever again, do you hear? Take your lectures, your homilies, your threats and your blasphemies and go back to Perdition with them!”

The ghost’s eyes burned gold, then flaming red. “Tread carefully, ungrateful child,” it rasped. “I am your god – the only god you shall ever truly serve. So be warned. I will brook no other.”

Reining in his own fury, Nick answered that threat with more soft-spoken defiance. “You can do nothing to me now. My life is my own, and what I choose to do with it is my own affair.”

“For now, perhaps,” the ghost conceded, its eyes no longer crimson. “But I do fulfill a purpose. Someone must warn you of the tempest into which you fly, headlong and headstrong, as always. Faith is folly, Nicholas. If you learned nothing else from Constantinople, remember that.”

With that final, grating admonition, LaCroix’s shade vanished back into whatever ether had spawned it.

Nick swept past the coffee table, overturning the remains of Natalie’s protein drink, and made for the refrigerator. For the rest of a sleepless day, he drowned the cold echo of LaCroix’s warnings in three bottles of lifeless and utterly unsatisfying steer’s blood.

*    *    *

So many fires blazed beyond the city walls, it might be all too easy to assume that Mehmet’s encampment had been set ablaze. But from the air, Nicholas could see only too clearly what purpose the myriad fire lights served.

The sultan’s troops, hundreds of them, labored to fill the last remaining trenches between city and camp. Earth, rocks, felled trees, even bodies were being shoveled into the foss, then covered with wooden planks to allow the massive cannons to advance. All the while, a single reiterating prayer of supplication arose from all the soldiers in unison as they worked.

“There is no God but Allah,” they chanted, “and Mohammed is His prophet.”

Nicholas chose an outlying tent beyond the fires’ glare, and with his slumbering burden in arm, drifted to earth. Once there, he carefully lay the Janissary against the wooden slats of a cook’s box behind the bivouac.

“Malik...” A light tap on the man’s cheek elicited a moan. “Malik, wake up.”

The eyes fluttered open, lethargic and confused. “Where...?”

“The Turkish camp,” Nicholas replied. “Behind your battle lines.”

Malik came fully awake then. “How did we come here? We were in the prison...”

“Never mind that now. You must tell the sultan’s physicians how to dress your wound so that...”

He heard the mortal heartbeats – and the whispered release of a cross bolt – both too late. The arrow struck him in the back, piercing almost to the heart, and burned with an unnatural, venomous fire. He fell forward, nearly on top of Malik. The Janissary caught him by the arms, eased his fall to a sitting position alongside himself, and did not loose his hold when the owner of the crossbow emerged out of the shadows.

Nicholas lifted his head to see, through the luminous yellow haze of the vampire’s vision, two mortals walking toward them. The one carrying the weapon was Gaspar. The other, wearing mullah’s robes, gestured wildly at him and spoke in rapid Turkish.

He tried in vain to rise, to reach back and remove the wooden missile lodged perilously close to his heart. But his limbs refused to obey him. He felt Malik’s strong hands still gripping his arms, heard a clamor of voices above him, and from beyond them, seeming to come from every direction at once, the litany that had first greeted his arrival.

“There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet!  There is no God but Allah...”

The burning haze welled up to engulf him then, and the world faded into oblivion.

He woke to the echoes of spades striking rocks in rhythm with the ongoing prayer. The crossbolt’s piercing agony had vanished, but the weakening effect of the poison it had conveyed remained. He found he had been carried away from the encampment into an open field and bound to a sapling with silver cords like those that had secured the Kostas medallion. Four figures stood watching him in the flickering light of a campfire: he recognized Malik and Gaspar and the man in mullah’s robes. But the fourth... The fourth, though he’d barely attained mortal manhood, wore garments of silk and woven gold suitable only for a king – or a sultan.

“I am Mehmet,” he said in flawless Greek. “And I have been called here to witness what many have said is impossible. A man who is dead and yet walks among the living.” He moved so near that Nicholas could hear the tantalizing surge of blood rushing through his veins. In the vampire’s present, weakened state, it was almost more than he could bear. “It appears,” Mehmet said, “that you have presented my subjects with a dilemma; one which they despair to resolve. Malik tells me that he owes you his life, yet he cannot remember how you came to escape the Venetian devil’s prison. Gaspar, for his part, recalls a valiant battle to gain his own freedom, but it is one my most loyal spies assure me never occurred. And Mullah Aslal says that tonight he saw you fly into my camp with Malik in your arms, whereupon you were preparing to drink of his blood.”

Behind him, the mullah thrust out an accusing finger and shouted, “Vampir!”

The sultan ignored him for the moment, assessing Nicholas with keen eyes. “You are a vampire,” he said at length. “When you had finished with Malik, would you then have drained all of my army of blood? Are there  more like you?  What  manner of demons do the Greeks send against us now?  And why should such a creature call itself physician and, as Malik claims, show mercy to an enemy?”

Before Nicholas could answer, Mullah Aslal erupted into another fit of shouting and gesticulating. Mehmet silenced him with a dismissive wave of the royal hand. “Aslal wishes to be granted the privilege of lighting a fire beneath you and sending you back to Sheol, to the realm of your father Satan. Gaspar merely wishes to slice off your head. Malik, for his part, would free you, but I fear he is a lone voice in that regard.”

“And you?” Nicholas strove to capture the man’s gaze, to exert just enough influence to overpower his very strong will, but the iron gray eyes remained unmoved. He rephrased his question. “What will you choose?”

“You shall do the choosing.” Mehmet glanced at his three waiting subjects and hushed yet another outburst from Aslal. “Your choices are but two, demon. Swear an oath to Allah, and help me to reclaim that which is mine. Or remain here as you are and return to Sheol when you are burned to ashes with the sunrise. Now – how will you choose?”

Nicholas could not prevent the angry Beast’s emergence.

“Neither,” he growled, and felt his eyes glow with the predator’s yellow flame. “I can no longer serve any god. And I will not serve a mortal.”

The Beast’s snarl had driven Mehmet back a step, but he continued to meet the vampire’s fiery gaze with a king’s unwavering resolve. “Burn, then,” he said. “And Satan take you!”

He walked away, leaving Aslal and the two Janissaries still locked in some ongoing argument with each other. At length, the mullah shoved something into Malik’s hand and thrust him toward the tree. When he came near, Nicholas saw that the object was a gold and garnet rosary, a prize undoubtedly stolen from a Christian captive with no further need of its comforts. Malik held it aloft and allowed its pendant crucifix to swing free, glinting in the fire light.

Nicholas looked away.

“Mullah Aslal says that this infidel’s holy symbol will stop you from breaking his bonds before the sun returns.” Hands shaking, he reached out to twist the jeweled chain around the cords crossing the vampire’s heart. “Forgive me,” he whispered as the crucifix began searing its paralyzing agony into Nicholas’ chest. “Forgive me.”

All three of them retreated then, following in Sultan Mehmet’s wake, and left him alone with the campfire. Its meager pile of sticks collapsed, sending a flurry of sparks into the night air, and in response the little fire flared, danced and shifted, as though mocking him with the swift-approaching flames of hell.