shaking. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“I was going to come here and tell you I couldn’t be with you if
you continued working for vampires.” She started to protest, but he
raised a hand. “I was going to give you a big ultimatum. Them or me.
Prove you love me by never seeing them again.”
“I think you know what I would have said.”
He nodded. “You seem to have a certain . . . loyalty to Julian.”
“And to Dominic’s memory.” She paused. “He was a good man.
Vampire or not, he was a good man. I loved him, and I owe him this. If
you can’t understand that—”
“I said I was going to do that. I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew it was the best, fastest way to lose you.”
“So . . .” she ventured, “you’re willing to accept what I do?”
“I’ve seen what you’ve done with Daniel. I assume there are
other children who need the same kind of help?”
“Yes, there are.”
“And they need the same kind of therapy I gave Daniel?”
“Yes.”
“Have you had any luck finding anyone else qualified?”
“Dr. Greene’s taking classes. Julian decided not to trust anybody
else.”
Gray drew a deep breath. “I want to help. And not just because
it’s the best way to be with you.”
“Why, then?”
“I almost killed those children, when I was Liam. The least I can
do is help them now.”
A smile began to form on her lips. “It seems fair. And the part
about you being with me—that works for me.”
“I was hoping it would.” He bent forward and kissed her gently.
“Because it totally works for me.”
Julian’s Journal
Cryptic. I’ll bet when these guys wrote this stuff down, they thought
it was fun to make it as obscure and cryptic as possible. Or maybe,
since it came from dreamtime, it was just hard to translate it into words.
I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I’m starting to get the picture, though. Two litanies, now, plus
additional study of the Book, over the past several days, and the theme
is beginning to emerge. I don’t like where it seems to be going, but it’s
too much to hope that I am wrong.
There is also still the question of my own memories. Or not so
much my own but the Senior’s. They become less painful to access as
I dig deeper, but there’s so much there—places I don’t have time to go.
Places I don’t want to go. Especially places where memories of William
lay buried. It’s hard enough to look him in the face as it is, knowing
how my possession of the Senior’s memories violates him.
We’re racing the clock here. I don’t know how much time we
have left, but it can’t be a lot. The latest disappearance was in Jersey
City—still far enough away to consider Manhattan safe, but there’s no
doubt that Ialdaboth’s strength is growing. I can feel it. I dream it. I
feel it lurking always in the background, stronger every day. He’ll be
coming for us. Soon.
Julian — Redux
All thine enemies have opened their mouth against thee: they
hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up:
certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we
have seen it.
Lamentations 2:16
Ialdaboth’s insane. It gives him a bit of an edge.
Email—Julian to Lucien
If the darkest of the dark days come, and the Children of the
Dark turn the earth to ashes, it will be because one of the Light
has not come forth, and offered himself, and said, “Here. I am he
who will change the tides of pain.”
The Book of Changing Blood
One
Aanu had skin, and hair. Eyelashes, even, if you looked closely
enough. Julian wasn’t sure. The glass panel in the hyperbaric chamber
distorted his vision so that he couldn’t quite tell about the eyelashes. He
could see eyebrows, though.
What lay inside that regenerated brain? Could they really expect
the man to remember what he’d known four thousand years ago, before
he’d been reduced to a bag of bones? Was there anything even
remotely realistic about that expectation?
Aanu’s eyes moved a little under his lids. The lids still seemed too
thin, not quite opaque enough, as if they were missing a layer or two of
cells.
Julian sensed rather than heard movement behind him. Without
turning, he said, “What does it feel like?”
“The regeneration?” Lucien stepped up beside him. “Hurts like
hell.”
Julian nodded. “I drowned once. It wasn’t like this.”
“No. It wouldn’t be. Closest I came was the volcano. I lost a
good deal of flesh in that one.” He tapped the chamber’s glass panel
absently with a big finger. “Didn’t have the benefit of one of these
things, though.”
“You think it’s made a difference?”
“Hell, yes. This would have taken months under open air conditions.
And I’m sure your additional work has helped, too.”
“Not just mine,” said Julian, out of politeness, if not accuracy.
He and Lucien had spent hours with their hands on Aanu’s gradually
regenerating body, manipulating the warm flow of his life force.
He himself had been experimenting to a great degree, testing and finding
the nature and the limits of his power. But it hadn’t taken long to
discover that his abilities went far beyond Lucien’s.
Julian studied Aanu’s face, quiet in repose, raw, not quite whole.
“Do you think he’ll be able to tell us anything?”
“Maybe not right away. There’ll be some disorientation.”
“For how long? We don’t have a lot of time, here.”
Lucien grimaced. “I know. I can probably help with that, or, more
likely, you can.”
Julian took a long, slow breath. The air tasted different these
days—cleaner, sweeter. Strange, he thought, when it seemed as if it
should be full of fear. It should, he thought, taste like Ialdaboth.
“He’s close,” said Lucien. “Not here yet, not ready, but close.”
It was hardly worth the effort it took to talk to Lucien, Julian
thought, when the Demon could pick thoughts out of the air like that.
Annoying. “I can feel him.”
Lucien nodded. “Yes.”
“Too bad you didn’t kill him in Romania.”
“I would have if I could have.” Lucien shook his head slowly, his
gaze, still seemingly focused on Aanu, going distant. “We’re hard to
kill. As you can see.”
“What does it take?”
“I’m not sure. Two of us together against one, possibly. I remember
. . .” He stopped, frowned.
“Remember what?”
“I forget.”
“Nice.” Julian stepped away from Aanu’s silver, coffin-like resting
place. More like a womb than a coffin, though, really. “You think on
that. I need to see Lorelei.”
Lorelei was asleep. She slept a lot these days—day, night, afternoon,
it didn’t matter. Softly, Julian settled onto the b
ed next to where
she lay curled around herself, one hand cupping her stomach. She’d
only barely started to show, even with two babies growing inside her.
They seemed to sap her strength, drain her beyond her ability to recuperate.
Having no experience with any sort of pregnancy, he couldn’t
help wondering if that was normal or a sign of something very abnormal.
Of course, one could argue that any child of a not-quite-vampire
would be strange and abnormal. That didn’t matter to him. These children
were his, whatever they turned out to be.
He caressed her hair. She shifted a little under his touch but didn’t
open her eyes. A vague smile curved her lips, and he bent to kiss her
forehead. Her skin felt too warm under his lips, but then, it always did.
He could sense the swirling of her energies, moving light of vivid blue
and magenta hues, the power that lay there. The babies had an energy,
as well, that swirled in soft pastels throughout her body, mingling with
her own life force. He had only begun to see the colors recently and
assumed it had something to do with his growing powers; but he could
tell the colors had changed since her pregnancy—there was more to
her than there had been before.
He’d wondered often over the past few months exactly what had
changed in her and what power she might have that they had yet to
explore. Her power seemed not to have manifested in the same way
his had. It was subtle, not there if you looked for it, only there when she
needed it. He’d finally figured it out—her power was for this, for the
children. Her body had known, even before she had quickened, that it
would need to protect her babies.
That answered one question, at least. She would be of little use to
him in the final confrontation he knew was coming. Hers was a specific
power, defensive, a mother-power. Lorelei could stand against
Ialdaboth—she’d proven that when he’d kidnapped her and threatened
her life—but she couldn’t attack him. He couldn’t hurt her, but
she couldn’t hurt him, either.
Satisfied that she was contentedly asleep and safe, Julian went to
his computer. He’d sat in front of it nearly every waking hour of every
day since Lucien and the others had returned from Romania, trying to
make sense of the pieces of the Book, trying to find the answers. The
additional material Rafael had supplied fit with what they already had,
but it still wasn’t enough for the clues to make sense.
He booted up the computer, reflecting. It was as if there were
something missing, as if the Book had a code, and he needed the key to
break it. It would make more sense, he thought, than the idea that all
these cryptic phrases and convoluted narratives actually meant something
practical.
He pulled up a file in which he had concatenated some of the
meatier passages. He would figure it out eventually. He would have to.
Otherwise, they were all dead.
He wasn’t able to keep at it for long, though. He was tired, exhausted,
drained down to his bones. When the words on the screen
began to blur into incomprehensible blotches, he shut down the computer,
slipped into the bed next to Lorelei, and let the weariness drag
him under.
He dreamed. He dreamed a great deal these days, when he took
the time to sleep. Floaty, disconnected images, usually, lacking both
color and sense. But these dreams were memories.
Not his own memories. The Senior’s. He had absorbed every
memory the Senior had owned when he’d taken the ancient vampire’s
blood. The blood had facilitated his transformation, but the memories
had plagued him, adding several thousand years to his eight hundred.
In the dream, he saw a face, looking into his own. He’d seen the
face before, in attempts to delve through the Senior’s past, and he
knew it to be Ruha, the fourth of the First Demons. He’d been the
Senior’s lover for a time before choosing the darker path favored by
Ialdaboth.
The face was made of harsh lines, the pale eyes a strange contrast
to the low, glowering forehead and dark brows. He looked more
like Ialdaboth than Lucien.
“The Book ” he said, and the last word drained
out into a sort of broken, wordless mumble.
Julian blinked awake, immediately alert and focused on what he’d
just heard. So there was something from the Book, something they
hadn’t yet found. Of course. No point in having everything be straightforward
or easy. There were verses still missing, and he would have to
find them.
At least, now, for the first time, he had some idea where to look.
Lorelei woke abruptly. Something was wrong, but she wasn’t sure
what. Inside her, one of the babies moved. It was a subtle sensation
still—a sort of wave motion—not enough to have awakened her. Slowly,
she sat up.
Vaguely, she remembered Julian having come to bed, remembered
moving up against him in the night. But he was gone now, and
she was once again alone. She’d gotten used to waking alone, since
Julian wasn’t much for sleeping these days. But for some reason, this
time, his absence bothered her.
She sat up and turned, still under the covers, putting her feet on
the floor. Her head spun a little. This morning sickness was never
going to go away.
head out of the Book these days. The answers were there, he insisted,
though she wasn’t so sure. She had a feeling he was missing something.
He must be. If he’d had all the pieces, as much time as he’d
spent working on the puzzle, he would have solved it long ago.
Slowly, Lorelei stood. Her head went revolving again, and she
waited for it to settle, then padded into the other room.
Julian sat hunched over the computer, fingers tapping softly on
the table in a meaningless rhythm. His brow was creased in a deep
frown of concentration and frustration.
“Shit,” he whispered, then closed his eyes. After a moment he
opened them again and started tapping the table again.
“Julian?” Lorelei ventured.
He turned to look at her and smiled wearily. “Hey.”
“Making any progress?”
“Not so you’d notice.” He leaned back in the chair and stared up
at the ceiling, then looked at her again. “How are you doing?”
“Okay.”
“You look a little pale.”
“I kind of feel like I’m going to vomit,” she admitted with a wry
smile. Then the smile faded. “Is something wrong? I mean besides the
usual. Is he closer?”
Julian frowned. “Why?”
“I just feel . . . I don’t know. I woke up scared, sort of, I guess.”
“He’s closer.” The soft matter-of-factness of his voice bothered
her more than any overt indication of fear he might have displayed.
“He’s closer and I don’t know what to do about it.”
She slid a hand protectively over the soft swell of her abdomen,
not aware she was doing it until her fingers brushed across t
he silk of
her pajama shirt. “Aanu will be awake soon. He’ll help.”
“Maybe. But what if he doesn’t remember anything?”
Another slow, rolling sensation in her womb made Lorelei clench
her fingers against herself, holding the movement closer, protecting it.
Warmth passed into her palm, bringing with it a feeling of certainty, of
reassurance.
“He’ll remember,” she said, and she knew it was true.
Morning was climbing the sky. Julian could feel it. He’d left behind
the involuntary vampiric Sleep, but his strong sense of the rhythm
of the daylight hadn’t faded. The knowledge that it was bright outside
made him twitchy, restless. So when Lorelei elected to return to bed,
he headed for the medical wing of the Underground.
Halfway there, he nearly collided with Dr. Greene, who was hurrying
down the corridor, looking harried.
“He’s awake,” the doctor said, breathless. “At least, I think he
is.”
They half-ran the rest of the way together, Julian wishing his new
powers included Lucien’s neat teleportation trick. “Where’s Lucien?”
he asked.
Dr. Greene shook his head. “I’m not sure. He was by earlier, but
I don’t know where he went when he left.”
“We need to find him.”
“He’ll find us,” Dr. Greene said, pushing open the door to Aanu’s
room. “He always does.”
The doctor was right, for Lucien was already there, standing next
to the hyperbaric chamber, peering in through the glass. “He’s awake.”
“Thanks for the news flash,” Dr. Greene said dryly.
Lucien quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t think he’s entirely conscious
yet, though.”
Julian went to stand next to him, looking down at Aanu’s face
through the window in the hyperbaric chamber. His eyes were open,
but he looked dazed, disconnected.
“I can help him,” Julian said.
“Are you sure?” Dr. Greene eyed him narrowly. “It’s been less
than twelve hours since your last session with him.”
Julian shrugged. Sometimes the healing sessions left him drained,
but more often, he was manic in the aftermath, energized to a point that
it was sometimes hard to control. “I know. It doesn’t matter. I can help
him.”