8
“MAN, SOME GUYS HAVE ALL THE LUCK.” SCHANKE peered out the Cadillac’s passenger side window at Toronto’s lights and passing traffic. “You really got Old Stoneface to let you book off early tonight?”

“Uh-huh.”

Nick had only half-listened to his partner’s ongoing commentary as they’d pulled away from the home of a witness in the Seib case. Their visit had taken less than an hour and according to Schanke, had gathered a few potentially useful clues, but Nick’s mind had been elsewhere: he couldn’t recall a single detail of the interview they’d just conducted.

Schanke hadn’t seemed to notice his fellow detective’s distracted state. He was too busy complaining about his own woes. “I can’t even get two hours off to go to my kid’s school play. Can you believe that? Stonetree says I’ve got six hours to make up, time I supposedly lost getting docked for being late. Six hours! Geez. So he put me on Saturday shift tomorrow night to make the time up. Which means now I’ve gotta miss Jenny’s piano recital, too. I’m tellin’ ya, Nick. There’s no justice in the world. No justice at all!”

"Uh-huh,” Nick said again when a lull in Schanke’s monologue seemed to warrant a response. He wondered if Nat had been able to get the second half of her shift off tonight. She hadn’t called. He reached into his coat pocket, just to make sure the cell phone there was turned on. If she wound up trapped on some autopsy, if no one else could cover for her, all their carefully-laid plans for this evening would dissolve into ashes. He couldn’t go through the healing ceremony without her; couldn’t risk the vampire’s emergence, possibly harming or killing LeFebre. Maybe if he tried calling her...

The phone started warbling while his hand was still resting on it. Nick snatched it out of his pocket before the first ring was complete. “Nat?”

“Right first time,” her cheerful voice said in his ear. “Dr. Kaminski’s going to cover the rest of my shift.”

“Good.” Nick couldn’t hide his relief at that, and a sidelong glance at Schanke confirmed that his sometimes annoyingly inquisitive partner had taken notice. “Pick you up at nine, then?” Nick said into the phone.

“At my place,” she said. “I’ll need to drop off the car and change clothes first. And Nick?”

“Yeah?”

There was such a long pause that he’d begun to think their connection had been lost. “You’re sure you want to go through with this?” she finally asked.

He hesitated too, uncomfortably aware that Schanke was grinning at him from across the Cadillac’s front seat. “I’m sure,” he said. “I’ll see you at nine.”

“Hoo-boy!” Schanke exclaimed the moment Nick rang off. “Hot date with our favorite coroner, eh? A nice, romantic, three-day weekend?”

If vampires could blush, Nick would have been crimson. “It’s nothing like that,” he denied.

“Get outta here! You think nobody’s noticed the way she looks at you? And the way you look back? It’s nothing to be ashamed of, partner o’ mine. You ask me, it’s about time the two of you got together. Who knows? Maybe Nat will succeed where all others have failed at landing the Twenty-seventh’s most eligible bachelor. You sure never gave any of the other candidates a chance at you, that’s for sure.”

“We’re just friends,” Nick asserted.

But Schanke was having none of it. “Oh, come on. What’s to hide, Nick? If you love her, tell her. It’s what every woman wants more than anything else on Earth to hear. Trust me on that, okay?”

Trapped at a red light on Yonge, Nick offered his partner a strained smile and tried changing the focus from his own love life to Schanke’s. “You and Myra have certainly managed to keep your love alive,” he said. “How long have you been married now?”

“Eleven years next April.” Schanke sighed. “I can’t believe Jenny just turned nine. Kids. They grow up like weeds. You barely stop buying the Pampers and they’re in college. Then you turn around and they’re ready to get married and leave home already. Where the hell does the time go?”

“I wish I knew, Schank.” The light changed and Nick eased the Caddy forward into more traffic. “I’ve been asking myself that same question for years.” Centuries, as a matter of fact.

“Yeah, well, time flies, buddy, and believe me, you’re not getting any younger either. You and Nat are crazy about each other. You know it, I know it, the whole darn precinct knows it. So what’s keeping you, Nick? Why don’t you take her on a really romantic weekend getaway somewhere, wine her, dine her, and let her know you’re nuts about her?  Huh?”

Nick was momentarily spared answering by their arrival at the Twenty-seventh Precinct. He pulled over to drop Schanke off, hoping he might leave the question in rhetorical limbo. But Schanke turned around after closing the door and stuck his head back in the open window. “Well?”

“I’ll think about it, Schank.” He’d give anything to be able to do all those things his mortal partner had just described. If only...

“Atta boy!” Schanke said, and drummed a victory beat on the Caddy’s door with both hands. “See ya Monday, Romeo. Give Juliet my regards!”

The Caddy idled for several moments after Schanke walked away. “Thanks,” Nick said, thinking that at all costs, he would never permit this Juliet to suffer the original’s fate. “I’ll do that.”

Something else Schanke had said, though, prompted him to pull out the cell phone again. He pressed a number on the auto-dialer, and a pleasant female voice answered on the first ring. “De Brabant Foundation.”

“Hello,  Kat,”  he  said. “I’ll need to make a few reservations...”

*    *    *

The night had grown eerily silent.

Chanted prayers, fifes, drums, sounds of digging and filling and movement of cannons; all had ceased more than three hours since. Even the little campfire had died, becoming nothing more than a mound of cold, gray ash. Fire did still burn, however, from the crucifix resting over Nicholas’ heart, and the silver cords prevented him from doing anything to dislodge it. Worse, a far more deadly fire would shortly threaten him from the horizon.

His captors had quite deliberately bound him facing east, where he could now see the first faint streaks of dawn beginning to appear. Well before the sun’s fiery crest would break over the Bosporus, its light had already begun to sting him with the stabbing points of a thousand sharpened needles.

He closed his eyes against the coming horror and in faltering, tremorous Latin, tried to remember a prayer. He’d heard it as a child, in Brabant. It was a prayer for mercy, uttered by a heretic about to be burned at the stake. A very young Nicholas had heard the man beg God for a rapid conflagration, for a quick end to pain and for a mercifully swift death. He remembered that all of those things had been granted to the victim of that long-ago judgment. Now, Nicholas entreated a long-neglected God that today, they might also be granted to him.

The answer to his prayer took a curious form indeed.

Squeaking wheels and the soft snorting of a horse bade him open his eyes, though the gathering light was already making it difficult for his night-attuned vision to see. A Gypsy’s caravan wagon lurched over the uneven ground toward him, driven not by a Romany, but by a bearded Catalan whose countenance, when he drew near, proved as vacuous as the stare of his draft animal. Even through the pain of dawning sunlight, Nicholas could recognize the stupor of a vampire-induced trance.

When the wagon halted, the weaver of that spell, hooded and robed like a cloistered French monk, emerged from inside the caravan, clucking a derisive tongue at his silver-trussed protégé. “Nicholas, Nicholas. How do you get into such predicaments?” Long white fingers plucked the rosary from over his heart and casually tossed it aside. Its fire, however, was rapidly being supplanted by the intensity of the sunlight. And though he had removed the cross, LaCroix made no immediate effort to loosen the silver bonds.

“Please, LaCroix. The sun...” He detested the tremor in his own voice, hated still more being reduced to the indignity of pleading. But forcing him to beg had quite obviously been his master’s intention. Sheol’s first flames crested the horizon, but the ancient vampire merely stood and watched as its deadly kiss began to draw tendrils of acrid white smoke from his creation’s exposed flesh.

“My indulgence for this folly,” he said with all the calm he might impart to discussing the weather, “is very nearly at its end. Fortunately, this tiresome siege is about to end as well.”

“LaCroix...”

“Your word,” the glacial tones demanded. “Tonight, when  this tedious farce is at last concluded, you will return to your senses – and to Vienna – with me.”

The sunlight’s blistering agony had by now grown so intense that Nicholas would swear anything to escape it. “Yes,” he gasped, and writhed against the binding cords in a futile effort to break them. “Please, LaCroix! Help me.”

Blinded now by the searing light, he felt rather than saw the silver cords snap and fall away. He remembered falling forward, only to be caught in LaCroix’s powerful grasp. Then came the whisper of brief flight, and at last, the safety of blessed, soothing darkness surrounding him once more.

He lost consciousness for a time, coming back to himself when the smooth shape of an earthenware jar was pressed into his hands, and the aroma of fresh human blood roused his Beast to ravenous awareness. He drank until his hunger was assuaged, feeling the painful burns on his face and hands begin to heal even as he cast the drained jar aside. He looked up at the flickering light of a lamp suspended from the caravan’s wood-ribbed ceiling. It swung with the wagon’s movement, casting shifting patterns of light and shadow across the basilisk features that watched him from the opposite wall.

“Better?” LaCroix’s query was drawn out into a sarcastic drawl, an indication that he cared not at all how his creation might answer the question.

So Nicholas did not answer. They rode in silence, glaring at each other across the small, enclosed space that confined them. The former Roman general had pushed back the habit’s cowl, revealing short-cropped hair that glistened in the lamplight. LaCroix’s tonsorial preferences, Nicholas noted, had not changed at all in the two hundred-odd years of their acquaintance. More than likely, he suspected, it had remained unchanged since Vesuvius had buried Pompeii.

“Have we any particular destination?” Nicholas asked at length. “Or are we simply to drive all day over every hole and rock in the Mesoteichion?”

As though to answer his complaint, the swaying caravan creaked to a shuddering halt and remained still.

“A grove,” LaCroix said, “not far from your so-called holy city’s walls. It is a safe place in which to wait out the day.”

Another lengthy silence ensued. Spending the day in such close quarters with LaCroix was not the most pleasant of prospects. But as the alternative was to go back out into the sunlight, Nicholas had little choice but to endure it. “Why tonight?” he wondered after several more silent moments had passed. “Why do you say the city will fall tonight? How could you possibly know such a thing?”

“I know enough of wars, Nicholas, to know when one is lost,” the ancient Roman replied. “This sultan, whose sanguine acquaintance you have so recently made, has exhausted several genuine efforts at diplomacy. Now, it seems, he has exhausted his patience as well. Last night, he filled the last trench remaining between his army and your emperor’s wall. His cannons are moved up, his men advanced. Today, he will unnerve the Greeks by doing nothing whatsoever. Anticipation is its own strategy. Tonight, he will bombard  the mortar’s weakest point until it crumbles. After tonight, Byzantium-cum-Constantinople shall become not Constantine’s, but Mehmet’s holy city.”

“No. The walls will hold,” Nicholas argued stubbornly. “I know they will hold.”

“Will they?” LaCroix’s tone mocked him. “And upon what sagacious revelation, pray tell, do you base such prophetic knowledge?”

“The revelation of faith. Faith has held this place against all invaders for a thousand years. God will not fail it now.”

“Truly?” the elder vampire scoffed. “They did not fare so well against a certain Venetian ruler’s holy crusades two centuries past, as I recall. But then, you were scarcely out of mortal swaddling then.” LaCroix waved an indifferent hand in the air. “No matter. Your naiveté, I fear, undoes you. All empires – Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine – eventually fall. And surely I need not remind you that this much-vaunted faith of which you speak did not save the self-proclaimed son of your God from dying on a Roman cross.”

“And returning from the dead,” Nicholas countered.

The crocodile’s smile suddenly reasserted itself. “A feat, as it happens, not so difficult as mortals would have the world believe.”

When Nicholas’ only response to his goading was a sullen glare, LaCroix allowed his smile to fade. “Oh, come now, mon protégé. After all that you have lived and seen, even in a mere two centuries of un-life, can you really still place any credence in this artifice, this pathetic delusion that mortals call faith?”

“Yes!” Nicholas had answered the question without hesitation. But his sire’s cold-blooded assurance that Constantinople would fall this night had shaken his confidence more deeply than he cared to admit.

Perhaps with the exception of his jaundiced dismissal of mortal faith, LaCroix, in Nicholas’ experience, was seldom wrong about anything.

*    *    *

Natalie Lambert answered her apartment doorbell fully expecting to be swept into the hall and whisked “off  to see the wizard” before she could so much as click her ruby-slippered heels together. She dreaded this whole affair, and particularly hated the thought of having to deal with Nick’s devastation when Lefebre’s “healing” failed. Why on God’s earth had she ever let him talk her into this? Her door opened, however, on an unhurried, smartly-dressed Nick, holding a dozen red roses in one hand.

“A fair eve to you, Lady Natalie,” he said, proffering the flowers with an exaggerated flourish. “May a knight errant be granted the boon of entering m’lady’s chamber?”

Nat couldn’t help laughing at this theatrical (and unexpected) overture. “Will you get in here before my neighbors get an earful for the gossip mill?”

She grasped the hand holding the flowers and pulled both – with Nick firmly attached – through the door, closing it after. He looked hurt for a moment, until she turned back to accept the roses from him, breathing in their heady scent with an appreciative smile.

“Well now,” she said, “it’s not my birthday, St. Valentine’s, Christmas or New Year’s. So what’s the occasion,  Detective  Knight?  Attempted  bribery of  a fellow civil servant, perhaps?”

“Something like that,” he said cryptically. “Do you have a vase?”

She found one, and by the time the dozen roses were happily ensconced in faux crystal on her dining room table, Nick had produced a long white envelope from somewhere and was handing it across the table to her.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

Natalie extracted a single sheet of linen stationery from the unsealed envelope and unfolded it to reveal the crisp blue letterhead of the Nicholas de Brabant Foundation. Below the corporate logo was an open-date voucher authorizing Detective Nicholas B. Knight and Dr. Natalie Lambert unlimited use of one Foundation-piloted 35A Learjet for an itinerary to London, Paris, Vienna and Rome.

“I don’t understand...” she started to say, but before half the words were out, Nick was in front of her, taking her in his arms.

“I needed some way to thank you,” he said, “for everything you’ve done, for the risks you’ve taken, most of all for believing in me and not giving up on me.”

“Nick...”

He touched two fingers to her lips, silencing her. “Promise me you’ll at least think about it?”

“Nick...” She grasped his fingers and held them tightly in her own, letting the jet voucher tumble to the tabletop. “I know you’ve placed a lot of hope in what LeFebre claims he can do. But you can’t just assume that he’ll be able to...”

“I’m not,” he said quickly. “It’s nothing to do with that, I promise you. No matter what happens tonight, the trip is yours, whenever you want it. Tomorrow, next week, next year. I’m an optional accessory.” He smiled down at her. “But take me along, and I promise to behave myself.”

“But I haven’t done anything to merit a gift this generous,” she protested. “Why is...?”

He curtailed her question with a brief and decidedly unchaste kiss. “Because I love you, Natalie Lambert. Tell me you don’t feel the same, and I’ll tear up the paper. We’ll never mention it again.”

Nat felt tears forming in her eyes and for once didn’t try to restrain them. The truth of it was that in spite of their bizarre first meeting, she had fallen in love with Nick that day in the morgue two years ago. And though she’d long suspected that he cared in turn, she’d given up hope of ever hearing him say it. She couldn’t find the words to say anything at the moment, however, so she answered him by returning the kiss. Unchastely.

He ran both hands into her hair, smiling again when their lips finally parted.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “Want to start that trip next week? I’ve got more vacation time accumulated than Methuselah, and I happen to know you haven’t taken one in three years.”

“What? Oh come on, Nick. We can’t just drop everything like that. I don’t even have my passport up to date!”

“Bring it along. I know a guy in Passports who works nights.”

“But I’d have to find someone to take care of Sydney. There are at least two dozen reports I’d have to finish first, and I haven’t even got a...”

“Nat?” He was grinning at her again.

“What?”

“Just say yes.”

This time, when he kissed her, Natalie forgot all the rest of her objections, along with all her carefully cultivated reasons why a liaison like this could never, ever work. In fact, in that moment, she forgot just about everything.

In all the time she’d known him, Nat had never seen Nick so ebullient. He talked her ear off on the drive to the church, expounding on everything and nothing, on how much she would love Europe and how beautiful Paris and Vienna would be this time of year. He grew more solemn when they pulled up and parked in front of the church.

“I didn’t tell you,” he said. “I ran a background check on Henri LeFebre as part of the Lewis investigation. Got the results back from Brussels today.”

“And?”

“Seems he was quite a sensation there about a year ago. Story made all the European papers. There was a ten-year-old boy with an inoperable brain tumor, documented by hospital x-rays, doctors, the whole nine yards. After he was taken to one of LeFebre’s healing sessions, they couldn’t find any trace of the tumor anymore. The doctors couldn’t explain it. Nobody could.”

“I doubt if I could either,” Nat admitted, hating what she had to say next. “But Nick, spontaneous remissions occur all the time without divine intervention. I’m not trying to rain on your parade, here, but you have to see that ‘curing’ a brain tumor is a long long way from curing vampirism.”

“Yeah.” He kissed her again, quickly. “I know.” And with that, he was out of the car, instantly reappearing on the other side to open her door for her.

They went up the short flight of steps together, and Natalie took note of the fact that this time, Nick strode past the cross-decorated doors with scarcely a flinch. His control over the vampire had been increasing by admirable leaps and bounds in recent nights. She wondered if that might be due to her protein substitutes, or simply to his positive anticipation of tonight’s ceremony. She hoped it was the former.

LeFebre was waiting for them, or rather for Nick. He rose from one of the front pews when they entered, closing and setting aside a Bible as he turned to face them. Nat could see the surprise register when he saw that Nick hadn’t come alone.

“This is Dr. Natalie Lambert,” Nick told him. “She’s a... friend... who’s been looking for a medical cure for my condition for the past few years.”

LeFebre nodded and extended a hand in greeting. Nat took it, uncomfortably aware that Nick had avoided explaining why she’d come along, just as he’d also omitted the little detail of just what sort of doctor she was.

“Will you be joining us in prayer, Dr. Lambert,” LeFebre queried, “or merely acting as a medical observer?”

The question took Natalie aback for a moment. She thought of the gun with its treated bullets lying hidden in her purse, of the impossible thing Nick had asked her to do with it if the vampire should try to harm LeFebre. “I’ll be observing,” she said in the most clinical tones she could muster. She wondered if this man had any idea of the risk he would be taking tonight. He seemed to her to be completely oblivious to the danger. Surely Nick had warned him?

“You have to know what you’re risking,” she heard Nick say, making her ponder whether mind-reading might be a natural outcome of vampires kissing mortals. “If the Beast is unleashed, if I lose control...”

“Then we shall not unleash it,” the faith healer said with a confidence Nat found mind-boggling. How could he possibly know that? “All I ask is that you pray with me.” LeFebre gestured toward the upholstered benches forming a semi-circle in front of the platform. “Not a difficult task.”

Nick cast a nervous glance up at the huge cross suspended over the empty choir loft. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “I stepped out of God’s light a very long time ago, Reverend. It’s a light that burns us now, as surely as the sun burns us. You said it yourself. The spirits are inimical.”

LeFebre nodded again and smiled. “Pray with me,” he repeated, and without further comment, he moved to one of the benches and dropped to his knees beside it.

“Nick...” Natalie’s last effort to object to this was quelled when he grasped her hand, squeezed it reassuringly, and guided her to a seat on the front pew. She sat, feeling as conspicuously out of place as she had during yesterday’s service, and settled her purse in her lap, discreetly opening the clasp. Her hand slipped inside, past one passport and one neatly folded travel voucher, to rest on the cold metal of the little gun. She watched Nick step over to the prayer bench and kneel awkwardly across from LeFebre. Already embarrassed for him, Nat wished for this fiasco to end quickly, even though she still dreaded the long, brooding depression that she knew would inevitably follow.

“You have said,” LeFebre murmured when he and Nick were face to face, “that you believe in God.”

With yet another glance at the cross, Nick replied, “Yes.”

“And you desire to be forgiven for your sins.”

Nick’s shoulders stiffened. “I have sought to atone,” he said.

LeFebre reached across the bench to take hold of Nick’s arms, evoking an instantaneous flinch, as though the touch alone had burned. “Forgiveness is given by grace,” the minister said. “For the asking. None of us can atone for sin. That atonement has already been accomplished.”

“Not for what I’ve done. You don’t know. You can’t possibly imagine...”

“By grace. For the asking,” LeFebre repeated. “Pray with me.”

Nat thought for a moment that Nick would pull away. But when LeFebre released his arms and placed both hands on his head, Nick seemed, curiously, to collapse under the embrace. Immediately, the healer began murmuring in the oddly lilting cant of a prayer tongue. Nat edged forward uneasily. Why had Nick slumped forward like that? A simple touch couldn’t possibly have felled a vampire so easily – not even if it had come from another of his kind.

LeFebre’s prayer became louder and more strident. Nat could see now that Nick was moving: his hands gripped the bench so tightly that the fabric had begun to tear under the stress. He was shivering.

LeFebre’s voice kept building in volume until it was suddenly joined by another, incredibly reciting the rhythmic nonsense words in perfect unison. Nat stared. That couldn’t possibly be Nick! Were his lips moving? She couldn’t see from here.

Two minutes stretched into five, then seven, then ten. The voices continued together, a bizarre chorus of impossible words, until Nat decided this had gone on just about long enough. She stood, her open purse and its secret contents accidentally spilling onto the floor in an untidy heap. She stepped over it, intending to pull Nick free of this madman’s clutches. But before she could touch him, something she could only have described as otherworldly – a bright, rose-colored light – began to radiate from LeFebre’s hands.

Nat stopped, stumbling involuntarily back a step. “What the hell...?”

The light expanded, rapidly engulfing Nick’s head like a macabre halo, and all the while the ecstatic utterance from both men went on in flawless unison.

“Sibela latha abada, sibonai amono kai lamo...”

 “Nick?”

 “...aloa lamnas alakai, labala osla sakonakai...”

“Nick!” She reached out to take hold of his hand, to pry it loose  from the  bench’s shredded  upholstery. But the moment her fingers neared his, the voices abruptly ceased. Without warning, something bright and incredibly hot flashed outward at her, as though the halo had suddenly burst into a blinding flare of white hot energy. Nat heard her own cry echoed by Nick’s; saw him flung back and away from the light surge while LeFebre fell in the other direction onto the carpeted steps.

Nat recovered her balance with a less-than-graceful rebound off the front pew. She spun around and scrambled after Nick, dropping to the floor beside him and reaching down to turn him over. He’d struck the solid wood foot of a pew during his brief flight backward, and a small gash at his temple was bleeding freely.

That’s not right, Nat thought inanely, and wrested a white handkerchief out of Nick’s shirt pocket to begin stanching the blood flow. The cut should have healed instantly, vanishing even as she watched. But it was clearly not closing, at least not at a vampire’s normal healing rate. What was going on here?”

“Nick?” She shook his shoulder gently, but there was no response. “Nick, wake up.”

Nat was only dimly aware of LeFebre coming to kneel beside her and pressing two fingers to Nick’s wrist.

“That won’t help,” she said automatically. “They don’t have a regular...”

She abruptly curtailed the denial and pressed her own fingers to the carotid artery under Nick’s left ear. The unmistakable throb of a steady human heartbeat pulsed beneath her touch.

“That’s not possible,” she said, and checked again just to be sure that her fingers hadn’t deceived her.

They hadn’t.

She looked up into Henri LeFebre’s piercing gaze, into eyes that suddenly seemed infinitely wise.

The healer carefully laid Nick’s hand across his rising and falling chest, then answered Natalie’s statement in exhausted but triumphant tones.

“Oh, but it is,” he said, and smiled.