Dr. Greene nodded. “All right, then. I’ll get him ready.”
It was different, in an odd way that Julian couldn’t quite define. It
just felt different. He laid his hands on Aanu’s bare chest, and Aanu’s
eyes flicked toward him, looking into his face without recognition or
visible comprehension. As if the acknowledgement were little more
than a reflex.
“It’s all right,” Julian murmured. “It’s going to be fine.”
He let his palms shift, until both hands were in complete contact
with Aanu’s skin, and wondered what exactly was going to be all right.
Aanu? Certainly he would be fine, probably within a matter of hours. A
day at the most. But how long did they have until the shit that was
Ialdaboth hit the fan?
He pushed that ever-present question out of his head. He couldn’t
afford the energy required to think about it, not if he wanted to help
Aanu.
Aanu’s skin was warm. That surprised Julian for some reason. It
had been warm before, but not this warm. It was human-warm now.
Lorelei-warm. He closed his eyes, feeling the energy moving beneath
his hands. It, too, felt different today, less fragmented, its rhythms
steadier. Aanu’s heartbeat was stronger, as well, more regular. Julian
let himself fall into that rhythm, the slow, steady drumbeat. The indigo
pulsations seemed to wrap around his hands, where he drew them in,
magnified them, fed from them, let them drain back out of him and into
Aanu.
It was endless, a suspended, eternal moment, like an orgasm.
Then Aanu took a deep, gasping breath, and Julian opened his eyes.
Aanu was looking up at him, lucid, his pale eyes full of disbelief edging
on fear.
“It’s all right,” Julian said again. “It’s all right.” But Aanu only
stared, uncomprehending.
From behind him, Julian heard Lucien speak, his tone gentle and
reassuring but his words incomprehensible. Julian withdrew his hands,
and Lucien stepped a little closer, leaning over Aanu. Aanu’s expression
changed to one of relief and understanding.
“Belial,” he said, and Lucien smiled.
“Lucien,” he corrected, and suddenly Julian could understand him,
though the language was still the same foreign tongue. “Welcome back,
brother.”
* * *
“He’s not ready for extensive questioning,” Dr. Greene insisted
for about the tenth time.
He could be right, Julian thought, but under the circumstances, it
struck him as unwise to take the conservative approach. “We don’t
have time to wait any longer,” he said. “He been conscious and alert
for twenty-four hours and hasn’t shown any signs of relapse. I believe
he’s in better health than you think.”
Dr. Greene took off his glasses and wiped the lenses on his sleeve,
giving him a less-than-friendly look. “I suppose you would know,” he
conceded. “Your contact with him has been on an entirely different
and much more intimate level than mine has been.”
Julian shrugged a little. “The energy—the levels seem safe to me.
I’m sure he could withstand a few questions, and he’d probably be
okay out of the chamber, too.”
“How does Lucien feel about it?”
“I think the question is, how does Aanu feel? I’m sure he can tell
us if he’s up to answering questions.”
The doctor sighed and put his glasses back on. “All right. No
more concentrated oxygen, no more overprotective doctor. He’s breath
ing, his heart’s beating, his blood’s moving, and he seems fairly lucid.
Give me a couple of hours to get him situated in a new room, and he’s
all yours.”
Julian nodded decisively. “Good.”
An hour later, Lucien met him at the door to Aanu’s new room.
“You didn’t invite me?” Lucien said, sounding a little hurt.
“Since when do you have to be invited anywhere? You generally
just show up.”
Lucien grinned a little. “Well, I am a vampire. An invitation would
be helpful.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a First Demon proto-vampire biological
half-blood freak or something. And that having-to-be-invited thing is
“True.” Lucien glanced at the sheaf of papers Julian was carrying,
papers on which were painstakingly recorded all the most perti-
nent—and a few impertinent—questions Julian could think of. “Let
him talk first,” Lucien said. “Let him get out what he needs to get out.
He’s been dead a long time.”
Fighting a quick stab of irritation, Julian nodded. He realized he
was being impatient. He couldn’t help it. He felt naked, vulnerable,
unprepared, uninformed, and many other very uncomfortable conditions.
If Ialdaboth popped in right now, he would take down the entire
place.
“We have a little time,” said Lucien. “Not much, but I think it’ll be
enough.”
“Get out of my head,” Julian groused, then added, “How do you
know that?”
Lucien shrugged. “Like it or not, Ialdaboth is my brother. There’s
a connection. A small one, but still a connection. And my beating the
living shit out of him in Romania strengthened the bond. He still hasn’t
quite recovered. I can tell.”
Julian struggled to compose himself. “Okay. That helps—a little,
anyway.”
With an odd smile, Lucien tapped his knuckles against the door to
Aanu’s room.
“Enter,” said Aanu.
Julian was again surprised that he understood the language. He
had no idea what tongue it was, but it translated itself in his head when
he heard it. There was a bit of a delay, though, as if it had to go through
a relay process to hit the correct part of his brain. He’d figured out that
was because he himself had never heard the language before yesterday.
All knowledge of it came from the Senior’s memories.
“Are you ready?” Lucien asked.
Julian nodded. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Lucien pushed open the door. Aanu sat in the bed, wearing clothes
that had to have come from Lucien’s wardrobe, given the fit. Julian
knew his own or Dr. Greene’s clothes would have been too narrow
through the shoulders. Aanu looked up as they entered, his attention
immediately focusing on Lucien, and he smiled a little.
“Belial,” he said, then corrected himself. “My pardon. Lucien.”
“You have caused no pain,” said Lucien, tilting his head forward a
little. “This is our leader, Julian.”
“Not really the leader,” Julian corrected, a little stunned that the
words came out in the same language Lucien and Aanu had used.
Lucien turned to him with an eyebrow cocked in surprise. “I didn’t
know you spoke this tongue.”
“I don’t.” Julian lapsed back into English, his concentration disrupted.
“The Senior did. It’s a bit hard to dig up. I don’t even know
what language it is.”
“It’s an ancient Sumerian dialect, I think,” Lucien answered, also
in English. “Probably been dead for centuries.”
“What do you speak of?” Aanu said.
“Nothing of great concern,” Lucien assured him. “I was simply
surprised at Julian’s facility with our language.”
“Not a great facility. His accent is hideous.”
Julian laughed. “No doubt.”
Lucien smiled at him and pulled a chair from a corner of the room,
pushing it closer to Aanu’s bed. Julian sat and arranged his pages of
questions while Lucien retrieved another chair for himself.
“How long has it been?” Aanu asked. His gaze slid from one to
the other of his visitors as he tried with little success to hide his uneasiness,
his fear.
Lucien spoke gently. “Do you really want to know?”
“I need to know. How long has it been?”
Silence dragged through the room as Lucien eyed his half-brother.
Finally, slowly, he said, “Four thousand years.”
Aanu gaped. “Four . . .” He stopped, closed his eyes.
Again the silence came. Schooling himself to patience, Julian followed
Lucien’s lead and waited it out.
“Ialdaboth,” Aanu finally said. “And Ruha. They did this to me.”
“I thought as much.” Lucien shifted forward in his chair, leaning
other way to defeat one of us?”
“I was not defeated.” Aanu’s tone was mildly offended, but more
amused. “If I had been defeated, I would not be speaking with you
now.”
“Fair enough.” He started to say something else, but Julian broke
in. A memory had floated to the surface of his mind.
“When did Ruha turn?”
Aanu frowned. “Turn? What do you mean?”
“I remember Ruha.” The memory was fleeting and faded, one of
the Senior’s that Julian had no desire to pursue. “Ruha was not with
the Dark Children.”
“You cannot possibly remember Ruha,” Aanu protested. “He has
been gone for . . . since before you were Made, certainly.”
But Lucien understood. “The Senior?”
Julian nodded. “Yes. Ruha Made him, I believe.”
“Interesting. Did I know that? Maybe I didn’t.”
Aanu was staring at them in frustration now, as both Julian and
Lucien had switched to English. Julian rummaged for the words in
Sumerian. “Ruha was not always of the Dark Children.”
“No,” Aanu conceded, “but he chose that path a long time ago.”
“When he was with the Senior . . .” Julian trailed off. “But no.
That was why the Senior left him.”
“Ruha came to believe that we followed the wrong path.” Aanu
looked at Lucien as he spoke, as if seeking comfort in a more familiar
face. “He partnered with Ialdaboth for a time, and then he disappeared.
I believe that he and Ialdaboth also had an ideological disagreement,
though one different from the one he had with us.”
“He’s not dead?”
“There are stories. Someone told me once he’d been overcome
somehow, and cut to pieces. But that might just be legend again, like
the Osiris story.”
Julian frowned. “If he were dead and we knew how he died, we
might use that knowledge against Ialdaboth.”
Lucien shook his head. “My guess is, he’s been incapacitated in
some way, much as Aanu was. Where, how, why, even when—no-
body knows for certain.” He turned again to Aanu. “Do you remember
the Book? The one we dreamed when we were under the mud?”
Aanu nodded slowly. “Parts. I remember parts.”
“Good. We need those parts. Maybe if we get enough of them,
we can figure out what they mean.”
“Let’s hope it’s soon,” said Julian.
Lorelei was waiting for him. She sat at his computer, playing a
card game. On the desk lay an opened package of corn chips and a
bowl of guacamole. Julian made a face.
“What?” said Lorelei, moving a card into position with the mouse.
“That stuff’s just way too green.”
“It’s delicious.”
Julian eyed it skeptically. He could smell it, and even though he
had become accustomed to eating a wider variety of foods of late,
guacamole didn’t smell like something he wanted to try.
With no such compunctions, Lorelei scooped another large helping
onto a corn chip. “Did you guys make any progress?”
“A little. I think I know where to start.”
“With Aanu, of course. Hell, I knew that much. Because you
were supposed to question him, and he was supposed to pass on some
information that would put you on the right track.”
“And he did. I’m fairly certain at this point that each of the four
original brothers held a piece of the puzzle. Some of what they knew
came out in the Books, when Lucien and Aanu dreamed them under
the mud. But there’s another piece of knowledge that was either left or
taken out of the Book at some point. That’s where our answers are,
I’m sure.”
Lorelei had turned away from the computer and was listening
with some interest. “Really? What makes you think that?”
“We got one piece from Lucien. Then there was the bit that Rafael
remembered from Brigitte’s nightly ritual—that’s Ialdaboth’s piece.
Aanu has a piece, I’m certain, and once he gets a little more lucid, he’ll
remember.”
“So where’s the fourth piece?”
“I have it.” At her startled look, he went on. “It’s there, somewhere,
buried in the memories the Senior passed on to me. His memories
of Ruha.”
Two
The power continued to flow into him, filling him again, making
him strong. He had been weak long enough, and now the healing
process was almost finished. Only a matter of time until he had
the power, the focus, the strength, the magic, to confront the enemies
of the Dark Children. They were deluded, broken people,
searching for hope where there was none, dispatching love where
love could touch nothing, grasping at the falling straws of repentance
where repentance was impossible.
They would bleed, and they would die, and he would devour
the shredded fragments that remained
Julian opened his eyes. Had he been asleep? Perhaps, though it
seemed rather unlikely, given his state of mind. Perhaps he had only
been dreaming, without the benefit of sleep.
Or perhaps, as he’d suspected for quite some time, he was actually
tuned into Ialdaboth, his brain picking up signals on the Evil First
Demon frequency.
He was sitting in front of the computer, as he had been for the last
several hours. Lorelei, satiated on chips and guacamole, had gone to
bed a long time ago.
He had typed the fragments from Lucien and Rafael into a file,
where he could play with them. He’d looked at them frontward, backward,
upside down, sidewise, next to each other, one above the other,
superimposed on top of each other, and nothing had clicked. Not yet.
He had a feeling that wasn’t the right approach, anyway. There seemed
to be a narrative element in the fragments, which meant they needed
the rest of the story. So he would ha
ve to wait until the last two bits
came in. And hope they made sense.
Frankly, he was less worried about the piece they needed from
Aanu than he was about the one he would have to extract from himself.
Aanu would remember, and he would pass on the information, and
they could add it to the collection. Maybe that would be enough, but
Julian doubted it. He was going to have to dive into his own brain, and
dive deep.
No great surprise. He’d known since the day he’d realized the
Senior’s blood had brought memories with it that he would have to use
those memories. So far, he’d dipped into them to arrange the trip to
Romania, to protect Lorelei, and to perform a few other mundane tasks
in maintaining the stability of the Underground. Surface stuff only, like
wading ankle-deep in ocean surf. Getting to the memories he needed
now would take a headlong plunge into the mental and emotional equivalent
of the Marianas Trench.
He wasn’t entirely certain he could do it. There were the headaches,
for starters. Every time he tried to access the Senior’s memories,
his brain rebelled violently and painfully, and it seemed to get worse
each time. After Lucien’s party had left for Romania, he’d spent several
days recuperating, and the painkillers the doctor had provided had
done very little good. The truth was, he was afraid of what would
happen next time.
But that wasn’t the whole truth. In fact, it was probably just an
excuse. Because it wasn’t the memory retrieval itself that caused the
pain. It was his own stubborn, full-fledged fight to limit the memories
that caused it. When he accessed the Senior’s legacy, he carefully
looked for only the information he needed—the bits and pieces relevant
to the specific situation, and no more. Because even in those
limited incursions, he could feel the Senior as if he were still alive,
lurking there in his head. And Julian knew that what really terrified him
was the thought that, if he went too deep into that ocean of ancient
memories, he would lose himself entirely, and no longer be Julian Cavanaugh.
The babies were afraid. Lorelei sensed it the moment she opened
her eyes, realized it was, in fact, what had awakened her. The babies,
too small even to be called babies yet, without fully developed brains,
according to the developmental charts she’d been studying so diligently,