that was because a hundred years was nothing in the great expanse
the Senior’s lifetime.
Just go.
Lorelei’s voice echoed in his head. She sounded impatient. Lorelei
often sounded impatient these days. He couldn’t really blame her. She
was concerned about the babies. If he didn’t clear the way for their
safe future, nothing would be safe for any of them again.
So he went. Went through the whispered conversations with William,
private moments in the dark, things he had no right to see, skirting
around them as best he could, because in spite of William’s admonition
to “just do it,” it felt wrong to be here.
Soon he was back fifty years, seventy-five He heard Ruha’s
name drift by in a bubble and followed it.
You loved him, didn’t you—Ruha? William’s voice.
Until he changed, came the Senior’s answer.
What changed him?
He changed himself. Chose a different path.
What happened to him?
I don’t know. If you believe the legends, he’s dead, or as close
to dead as we can become, and has been for a long time.
He followed that thread, and it led him deeper. He fell all the way
through, to a hundred and twelve years past, when the Senior found
William feeding on drunks and criminals in Manhattan alleyways, and
had taken him in. Somehow, that event was connected directly to Ruha,
the memories of the earlier relationship being revisited and strengthened
in the memories of William.
That explained the connection, then, and the reason he hadn’t
been able to find Ruha without dealing with William. The Senior’s mind
had set up the two relationships in a continuum, one blending a little into
the other in spite of the space of several centuries between them.
Doesn’t he have a name?
Lorelei again, though fainter than before.
A name?
It’s the Senior. Always just the Senior. He must have had a
name at some point. Probably several.
A strange question, he thought. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder.
She was right, but whatever names the Senior had carried over his
ten thousand years were buried deep. There were more important things
to look for at the moment.
As he gently pushed Lorelei’s question aside, he felt her mild
amusement. Just wondering.
I love you. He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to tell her that,
but it seemed necessary. He made sure she’d heard him.
Then he jumped. With faith and Lorelei’s reassuring presence
shadowing him, he plunged through millennia, all the way from the
beginning of the Senior’s relationship with William to the end of his
relationship with Ruha.
I can’t stay with you if you take this path, and I will not follow
you. The last thing the Senior had said to Ruha, before Ruha had left to
join Ialdaboth.
And Ruha’s reply—You are a fool.
The pain in that moment was so intense he thought he would
weep with it. He pulled himself away, pushed deeper—and found yet
another barrier.
More pain. The agony of Ruha’s leaving had colored every other
moment of their centuries-long union. Even the pleasant memories hurt.
It wasn’t you. This isn’t your pain.
Floundering in the depths of that anguish, he’d nearly forgotten
Lorelei was with him. But I can feel it. It’s like knives, he told her.
I can help. Let me take some of it.
No . . . the babies . . .
He plunged in alone, sadness a murky shroud around him. It was
like trudging through a bog, thick and noxious. It reminded him of
Ialdaboth’s black, swarming insect power. The dense wretchedness of
the Senior’s grief, the crackling, crawling, overwhelming miasma of
Ialdaboth’s power—they seemed complementary in some way. But he
didn’t know if that meant there was a connection between the ancient
vampire and the Demon, or if his mind was taking things it didn’t un
derstand and constructing interpretations based on similar metaphors.
Either way, it hurt.
Hold on to me.
Lorelei. His anchor. But he wasn’t sure she would be enough.
Of course I’m enough. Just find what you need and get the
hell out.
Trust her to boil the situation down to the essentials. And she was
right. He didn’t have to go through every single memory. He just had to
find what he needed, take it, and leave.
Centuries. Over a millennia, they had been together, and no sort
of order to the memories of those years. Then, abruptly the earliest
memories bobbed to the top, and a strong truth leaped out, vivid with
sensation and emotion.
Ruha had made the Senior. Ten thousand years ago, perhaps before
any other blood-child had ever been created, Ruha had made the
Senior.
He was the first vampire? Lorelei’s presence radiated perplexity.
He told me he was. The other brothers, though, they would
have made Children, as well. No way to know who did it first.
What made them think of it?
She had drifted into irrelevance again, he realized.
I mean, when do you think, “Hey, if I sucked his blood and
then he sucked mine, what would happen?”
It’s an instinct. He passed the thought to her, then brushed the
rest of that line of questioning aside. He needed to concentrate.
Is it there? Can you see it?
If you’d shut up a minute, maybe.
She subsided, unoffended. Mentally, he caressed her, assured himself
once again of her presence. Oddly, he suddenly felt the babies,
small bundles of random emotion, some of which was fear, as Lorelei
had told him. That more than anything else made him gather himself
for another dive.
The end of Ruha’s presence in the Senior’s life was tied to the
beginning, like the snake that ate its own tail, and all the bits in the
middle seemed to be strung randomly along that continuum. He found
moments of William there, as well, as if the two relationships had become
inextricably linked.
So how was he to find what he needed? The language here was
old, older even than the one he’d used to communicate with Aanu, and
that made it even more difficult to find his way. Panic rushed through
him. Surely, he would lose himself here, in the net of language and
memory, lost in grammar as thoroughly as he was lost in this alien
I’m still here. Get yourself together.
The blast of English and irritation grounded him again.
Just look harder, find what you need, and get out. I have to
pee.
And there it was. All at once, written in bright letters like fire
across his interior vision. Then in words, whispered in the darkness of
a tent or some small house that smelled of goat-leather.
There were visions. I think all of us had them, all of the four
brothers. Belial and Aanu have gone missing, but wherever they
are, they must have felt this, too.
That’s it! Lorelei broke in.
I know. Just a minute. Let me get it all.
She subsided apologetically, and he co
ntinued to pick his way carefully
through the gaps of personality, language, and sheer time.
I saw things. Heard words. Most of it made no sense, but
somehow I knew it was important. It woke me out of sleep, then
forced me into it again, over and over, night after night.
He felt the Senior’s concern, his curiosity. He felt male skin under
his fingers, a soft caress to Ruha’s arm. Ruha’s face looked into his,
pained. Craggy features, blue eyes, like Lucien. Like Aanu and Ialdaboth.
Tell me. Was that the Senior, speaking to Ruha all those centuries
before, or was it him, demanding what he needed from the memories
inside his own skull?
There is power in the light, but also in the dark. Either power
may shatter the other. The light, however, is more willing to die.
The light, then is the stronger. The power of light, layered and
joined, melded in the willingness to lose itself, can conquer anything.
There was more, but he knew the rest was irrelevant. He’d read
the other bits before, in the reconstruction of the Book the Senior had
worked on before he himself had taken over. That piece, though, those
few lines, those he had never seen before. It fit into the puzzle started
by Lucien.
We have it.
Lorelei spoke softly, the impatience mostly gone. That’s it. We’re
almost there. We’ve nearly won.
Not quite. There will be tears before it’s over. Slowly, he swam
upward, through the ocean of alien memories, until he crossed the border
into his own and he was, once again, himself.
And Julian opened his eyes and looked at Lorelei, sitting next to
him, and he saw in her face that she understood.
He slept for a time, exhausted from his efforts. Some hours later,
though, he woke abruptly to find Lorelei asleep next to him and Lucien
bent over his bed.
“Wake up,” Lucien murmured.
Julian swung out of the bed and followed Lucien into the living
room. “What is it?” he asked, then realized they weren’t alone. Aanu
sat hunched in a chair, looking nearly as worn out as he had felt awhile
ago, when he’d come up from the depths of the Senior’s memories.
“You found it,” he stated flatly in the language Aanu understood.
Aanu gave a single nod. “As did you.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s share,” said Lucien dryly.
Aanu shook his head slowly. “The dreams. They were so broken—
You and I both had them, Lucien, you remember.”
“I remember.”
Julian was tempted to tell him to get on with it, but he cautioned
himself to patience and let Aanu work through the story. Like his own
search for answers, it had to be a process.
Aanu went on, haltingly. “The Black Sea flood—it was massive,
deadly. It’s no surprise they still write about it. Lucien and I were
there. We tried to save some of the people, but it was too late. And the
mud took us. Layers and layers of it, thick and black, and it killed us.
And we dreamed.”
“You dreamed the Book.”
“Yes. And we wrote down what we could remember, what we
could make sense of. The dreams were—”
When he broke off, Lucien said, in English. “Freaky. Weirdest
thing I’ve ever experienced.” Then to Aanu, “Strange. Disturbing.”
“Yes,” Aanu agreed. “Some of it was lost simply in the writing of
it. More was lost when the Dark Children destroyed what we had
done. But I found the piece I was looking for.”
Julian’s impatience spiked again, but he kept his voice level. “What
is it?”
“The power . . .” Aanu trailed off, then gathered the words again.
“The power in the life. The power in the life can defeat any power
forged in death. The one who takes his life without diminishing the lives
of others may channel the life of those who drink life from the air. The
giving of the life that cannot end can end the life that feeds from death.”
Lucien frowned. Julian nodded. “It fits.”
“Does it?” said Lucien.
“It does.” He recited what he’d found in the depths of his inherited
memories, and Lucien nodded.
“We have an answer, then.” His voice was grim.
“We do,” said Aanu. He stood, walked toward the door. “I need
to tell William.”
Five
“It’s time, Jarod,” Julian said gently, conscious that, in using the
doctor’s name, he was breaking down yet another barrier. And about
time, too, under the circumstances. He knew Jarod understood the
gravity of the situation, and what would have to happen now, but he
didn’t know how the other man could face it. He didn’t think he could.
“We need to draw him out.”
Jarod nodded. “We’ve been preparing.”
“But are you prepared?” Lucien put in.
Jarod looked at the floor, studiously avoiding eye contact with
anyone else in the room. “No, I’m not,” he said quietly. “But I think she
is.”
Julian nodded. “Then let’s do it.”
He had left this part of the larger plan in Jarod’s hands, and he
wasn’t surprised at how efficiently the doctor had dealt with it. Still, the
thoroughness of the preparations came as a bit of a shock.
hospital wing, Jarod had fortified a cave-like room several levels below
the currently inhabited areas of the Underground. The magic was thick
and dark down here, enough to make Julian’s scalp prickle, and the
place smelled of damp rock and vampires. Now that he’d broken some
of the barriers, the Senior’s memories were coming more easily to him,
and he knew the place was one of the first the enclave had used—part
of the original habitation the Senior had dug out and fortified, with Ruha’s
help.
Jarod had equipped the cave to contain Lilith when they re-opened
her connection to Ialdaboth. A bed furnished with chains and cuffs, a
tranquilizer gun leaning against the wall next to it—Julian could hardly
bear to look at it, understanding what it must have cost Jarod to make
these arrangements, knowing he might have to use them against his
lover. But Lilith, following Jarod into the low-ceilinged, somewhat claustrophobic
space, smiled at him and kissed his cheek.
“Nice work,” she told him. “This should do it.”
“How long has she been off the juice?” Lucien asked.
Lilith’s consumption of Jarod’s blood was, they had realized, the
only thing keeping Ialdaboth from using the bond he established with
his blood Children, of which Lilith was one.
Jarod looked at his watch. “Not quite an hour. It won’t have
worked out of her system yet.”
Lilith settled onto the bed, examining the manacles attached to the
headboard. “Better safe than sorry.” She slanted a look at the doctor.
“Tie me up, baby.”
“Do you two need to be alone?” asked Lucien with a grin.
Julian laughed a little, glad somebody could handle the situation
with some humor. He certainly couldn’t, not knowing what he was
going to have to do to win this war.
“Not really,” Lilith answered. “I’m kind of an exhibitionist at heart.”
But then she looked at Jarod, and a little shimmer of fear, meant for her
lover’s eyes only, appeared in her gaze.
Julian looked away. He heard the manacles click as Jarod fastened
them. When he looked back, Lilith was securely restrained, metal
around her wrists and ankles, leather straps across her body.
“You okay?” Jarod asked her.
“I’m good.”
“Anything else?” Lucien said. “Anything we’ve forgotten?”
“No, that’s it.” Julian supplied the answer. “Now we wait.”
He arranged for alternating shifts, so that at least one of the three
strongest of them—Lucien, Aanu, or himself—would be on hand at all
times. He took the first watch, until daylight came and Lilith slipped
into the Sleep.
Lucien arrived just as she faded into complete unconsciousness.
“Do you think we need to watch during the day?” Julian asked
him.
“I think we need to take every precaution,” Lucien answered and
took his place in the chair next to the bed. “When did Jarod leave?”
“About an hour ago. He’ll be back.” Julian bent backwards, feeling
his spine crack. “I’m going to see Lorelei. Call me if you need me.”
He used the time with Lorelei to resettle himself. He was edgy,
agitated, to the point where his skin felt like it no longer belonged to
him. A cigarette would have been heaven right then, he thought. Or
sex. Too bad he’d had to give up both of them. But stretching out next
to Lorelei on the bed, spooning against her, helped.
Lorelei had questions, though, which didn’t help at all. “Your power,
then, allows you to channel their power? So you can kill Ialdaboth?”
“That appears to be the case, yes.” She deserved honest answers.
He just didn’t want to think about what he knew was coming.
“Will it kill them?”
And that, of course, was the biggest of the questions he didn’t
want to consider.
“I don’t know.”
She nestled into him, seeming to understand his reticence, and
took his hands, folded them together over her stomach. Over their
children.
Several hours later, feeling more at peace, Julian returned to Lilith’s