The Gathering Dark Part 3

"Jack," the man replied, lowering it. "Or Father Jack."

"All right, Jack. Why aren't you supposed to be here?"

The priest's expression had become deadly serious. "My boss, Bishop Michel Gagnon, says that you're a monster. That you'd be unwilling to help us. But he authorized my paying you a visit if I could at first restructure a spell from a partially destroyed French text that we need to stop the spread of a demon infestation in a small town on the Tex-Mex border. I was unable to do that, but I think that you can. Or that you may know how to stop them without even having to figure out the text."

Peter narrowed his eyes. His right hand strayed to his cheek and he idly sc.r.a.ped dried paint from his skin. Sunny as it was, his bare feet were still a little cold with the door open and the breeze that swirled down into the apartment.

"Tex-Mex?" he asked doubtfully. "Isn't that a style of cooking?"

"It's shorthand for-"

"I know what it's shorthand for," Peter replied, at last rewarding Father Jack with a smile of his own. "It just seems a bit slangy for a priest."

"Maybe I'm not the sort of priest you're used to," Father Jack suggested.

Peter nodded slowly. "Maybe you're not at that." He stepped back and held the door wide to allow the man into his home. "Come in, then. But no promises, Jack. I don't know if I can help, or even if I'll want to. But I'll listen."

"Good enough," said the priest as he crossed the threshold.

Peter closed the door behind him and gestured toward the sofa set beneath the high windows. "Have a seat while I put on a pot of tea. You drink tea?"

Father Jack was glancing around the room, taking in every canvas, every splatter of paint, every overgrown plant. "I've been known to," he replied as he set himself down on the sofa. "Thank you."

"No trouble at all."

In the little galley kitchen Peter filled a battered tea kettle with tap water, set it on the burner, and turned on the stove. His day had taken an unantic.i.p.ated turn, but in his long, long life he had learned that any day, any hour, any minute might turn out to be laden with the unexpected. And as such things went, the bespectacled, redheaded priest seemed harmless enough.

Leaving the kettle to boil, he returned to the living room to find that Father Jack had risen from the sofa and was standing with his arms crossed, gravely studying the half-dozen paintings Peter had done for the new show.

"See anything you like?"

The priest glanced over at him and then back at the paintings. "I like them all. You're quite an artist, Mr. Octavian. I'd no idea. There isn't anything about you being a painter in-"

Father Jack paused and blinked several times, obviously uncertain how to continue.

"In the file the Church of the Resurrection has on me?" Peter suggested helpfully. "Honestly, Jack, do you think it surprises me? Even if your people weren't keeping tabs, there have been enough books written about my past and the Venice Jihad, not to mention Salzburg and then New Orleans, that you wouldn't even need to do your own homework."

The priest pursed his lips tightly, almost prissily for a moment as though Peter had offended him. "Actually, I prefer prefer to do my own homework." to do my own homework."

"An admirable trait," Peter replied carefully. "But when I opened the door, you said I wasn't what you expected. So something tells me you weren't as prepared for this conversation as you'd like to have been."

"True."

"Why?"

Father Jack's gaze ticked toward the paintings again and then back to Peter. A truck went by out on the street and its rumble shook the walls of the apartment, the squeal of its brakes rattling the windows.

"I didn't expect an ordinary man."

Peter laughed. He strode to an antique high-backed chair he had picked up the year before off the sidewalk two blocks away and slid into it. The chair was set strategically among several of the potted plants that needed little sun. Nearby there was a ziggurat-shaped water fountain that plugged into the wall and provided an undercurrent of noise, the bubbling of a tiny brook over stones. In the midst of his living s.p.a.ce, it was a place of manufactured peace for Peter, among things that lived and breathed and spoke of the earth.

Now, though, on the edge of that chair, he shot a hard look at his visitor, and when he spoke, his tone was decidedly different from that which he had used throughout their limited conversation thus far.

"You mistake me, then, sir. For I am far from an ordinary man."

Father Jack glanced around as though wis.h.i.+ng he had never left the presumed safety of the sofa, that soft and forgiving island amid what now appeared to be dangerous waters.

"I hardly meant-"

"I know what you meant," Octavian said curtly. "You've read about me in books and your Bishop calls me a monster and you know I have a certain facility with magick and so you expect some kind of smoke and mirrors for your entertainment and a man who is perhaps more imposing physically than the unwashed painter in grimy clothes in a Spartan little bas.e.m.e.nt apartment. Do I have that much right?"

Father Jack slipped his gla.s.ses off and clutched them in his hand, then raised his head high, as though a man without spectacles was somehow gifted with greater dignity than one who wore them.

"Are you aware that your speech becomes more formal when you're angry?" the priest asked.

Peter smiled, not now the friendly, lopsided grin he had worn before but something far colder.

"Oh, I'm not angry, Father. You haven't seen me angry." He held his hands out, palms upward, and sketched slightly at the air with his fingers. "And you haven't seen a single bit of magick. Not even a card trick. But that doesn't mean it isn't real."

The priest took a deep breath but kept his gaze locked with Peter's. "You're not telling me anything I don't know, Mr. Octavian. I'm sorry if I've offended you. If you'd like, I'll go now."

Peter slid back in his chair and crossed his hands on his lap. "Sit down, Jack."

After only a moment's hesitation, the priest complied.

"You know, I'm not the only one whose speech gets a little uptight when tempers flare."

Father Jack's hand was shaking when he raised it and slid his fingers through his neatly trimmed hair. Slowly, carefully, he put his gla.s.ses on once again and regarded Peter with an admirable display of calm.

"So tell me what I don't know about you. That is, if you'd care to."

Peter considered that a moment. Then he sat forward again, fingers steepled under his chin, the bubbling of his little ziggurat waterfall whispering in his ears, calming him.

"First, why don't I tell you what you do know? Or what you think you know. And you can tell me where I'm wrong."

"That really isn't-"

"No. I insist."

Father Jack nodded, sitting stiffly on the edge of the sofa cus.h.i.+on. When the tea kettle began to whistle, he actually flinched, then huffed out a short, embarra.s.sed breath.

Peter rose. "Let me get that."

In the galley kitchen he took a pair of brittle old china teacups and poured hot water from the kettle into each. He knew they were more appropriate for aged English women, but he was fond of them just as he was of the antique chair in the living room. There was texture to old things, impermanent things, that he appreciated now in a way he had not always.

Moments later he returned with a tray upon which sat the teacups, a variety of tea bags, milk, and sugar. He set the tray down on the end table beside the sofa and stood while he dipped a bag of Earl Grey into his own cup and then stirred sugar into it.

"Allison Vigeant's book about the Venice Jihad says I was born in 1424," Peter began, not looking at the priest as he poured just a drop of milk into his tea. "She made that up, Allison. Or someone did."

Now he did glance up and he saw that he had Father Jack's undivided attention. The man did not seem even to be breathing. Peter raised his cup toward the priest.

"Drink your tea."

Father Jack laughed but it was a hollow sound, for effect only. He did, however, reach over and pick up a tea bag and begin preparing his own tea. Peter turned and went back to his antique chair among the plants and the mist of the ziggurat waterfall. He sipped the tea and found it exactly right. Over the rim of the cup he regarded the priest.

"I don't know what year I was born, but that's near enough I suppose. My father was Constantine the Eleventh Palaeologus, the last emperor of Byzantium, but I was illegitimate, a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and therefore not exactly royalty myself."

"You . . . you were a soldier," Father Jack said, tea held halfway to his lips.

Peter frowned at him. Out on the street someone honked a car horn and the priest started, spilling several drops of tea on his lap. He barely noticed.

"We were all soldiers in those days." He closed his eyes. "I can see it all still, you understand. The blood and the rain storms and the men digging in the mud that spring when the Turks hammered at the walls of the city harder than ever before and tried to tunnel beneath them. That was our job for a time . . ."

Our job. Faces flashed across his mind, images of friends who had been dead many hundreds of years and yet for whom his heart still ached.

"We were supposed to keep the Turks out," he said, a rasp in his voice that he did not like.

His eyes opened and he glanced over at one of the canvases propped against the wall. It showed the s.h.i.+ps in the water of the Golden Horn, feeding the a.s.sault on Constantinople, their bone-white sails pregnant with the wind, as though G.o.d himself were spurring them on to the city's destruction.

Peter shook his head. "They did the impossible, you know. The Turks, I mean. They could not pa.s.s the barrier the Emperor had placed to guard the entrance to the Golden Horn and so the Sultan ordered his armies to transport their s.h.i.+ps across the land." He stared at the priest. "Across the land, Jack. Do you have any idea of the enormity of that?"

"I can only imagine."

The mage laughed then, a long, hearty sound that surprised him as it came out. He gazed longingly at his paintings again and then back at the priest.

"No. You know, you really can't. It was 1453, Jack. You don't have a clue. Another world, not just another time. And so to your suggestion that I was a soldier I say, yes, I suppose in your terms I was a soldier. But we were a city at war and I was an able-bodied man in service to my Emperor, my father. I was a warrior, Father Devlin.

"A warrior."

Peter hung his head a moment and took a long breath. Then he took another and looked up again.

"Look, you came here for a reason. I don't want to waste your time."

"You're not," the priest said quickly, and apparently with great sincerity given the expression on his face. "Please go on."

He sipped thoughtfully at his tea. "I wanted to kill Turks. As many Turks as I could. They were destroying the empire, destroying my home and my friends and the women I had loved or had wanted to love, and they were tearing apart my world. I wanted to kill them with a pa.s.sion that is yet another thing I'm afraid you cannot possibly imagine.

"But the city was falling, you see. It was only a matter of time. I don't mean weeks, I mean hours." Peter pointed to the easel, to the painting he had just completed. "That is the night, right there. Those trees and the roses in early bloom and nightingales singing and a man came to me who was not a man and he offered me a chance to become a far greater warrior, an invincible warrior who might slaughter Turks by the hundreds."

Peter leaned forward and set his teacup on the floor. He had lost his desire for it entirely. He gazed steadily at the priest.

"What else was I to say? He took my blood and gave me his, and in all the ways that really mattered, I died. My name then was not what it is now, as I'm sure you know. He gave it to me, the one who made me a vampire."

Though he had been unable to stop Constantinople from falling, Octavian had spent years killing as many Turks as he was able, a new family around him. He remembered how it had changed him, had brought him to the point where killing seemed all he knew how to do, where it had seemed like a good idea.

"I allowed myself to be lulled into the belief that I was not a warrior, but a hunter," he said.

"A vampire," Father Jack whispered. "You were a vampire."

"Yes," Peter replied. "And back in the day, that meant all the things we thought it meant. All the rules, all the bulls.h.i.+t, all the . . . all the cruelty and bloodshed . . ."

He waved his hand as if brus.h.i.+ng it all away. "Bulls.h.i.+t," he said again. "There's no such thing as vampires, Jack. Not the figures painted by the legends of myth and pop culture. You know that or you wouldn't be here. But call them that if you want, for lack of a better word. I was one of them, but I became tired of killing. It wasn't what I wanted, not what I signed up for."

A bitter laugh escaped him.

"I changed my life, left the others who had become like a family to me but now hated me for pointing out what they already knew. It was evil, what we were doing. We didn't have to live like that. And so I didn't. Then I found out the truth."

On that last word his gaze fell upon the priest again, and though he knew this man was not of the same church, not one of the men who had wrought so much evil in the past, still he could not help but feel fury boiling within him.

Peter could see Father Jack's Adam's apple bob as the priest swallowed nervously. The man knew what Peter was speaking of, but it was a dangerous subject. For almost by chance, some years past, Peter had been the one to discover that vampires were not evil, but only supernatural. That of all supernatural creatures they were the only ones whose nature was a combination of human, demonic, and divine. That from the earliest days of the Roman Catholic Church, its hierarchy had conspired to use magick to control all supernatural creatures and that vampires were the only creatures they had not managed to bend to their will.

He had learned the truth. That the limitations upon their ability to shapes.h.i.+ft, to alter their bodies on a molecular level, and most of the traditional weaknesses-to the sun and to garlic and to the cross-had been implanted in the minds of a few of his kind and then spread like an infection, the church fathers knowing that creatures with total control over their molecular structure would burn in the sunlight if they believed that they would, and would be scattered to dust by a stake through the heart if they believed that they would.

But Peter had created of the truth a kind of antivirus, and it spread just as quickly.

"You discovered that the Church was about to make a final purge to try to wipe your kind from the earth forever," Father Jack said.

The room fell silent then save for the sound of the priest trying to catch his breath and the burbling of the little fountain, and the distant noises of the city beyond the little bas.e.m.e.nt apartment on West Fourth Street.

"All of this is doc.u.mented," Peter reminded him.

And it had been. Exhaustively. What Peter had learned set off a series of battles between humans and vampires, and among the vampire clans themselves, that laid waste to Venice and Salzburg and part of New Orleans. Vampires had learned the truth, that they did not have to be monsters, did not have to be predators, that they had a choice in the matter. But some had wanted to stay in the shadows. Some embraced that new truth, but others ignored it.

"I lost a lot of friends and a woman I loved very much. I spent the better part of a thousand years in h.e.l.l, learning sorcery and losing my sanity. When it was all over and done with, nearly every vampire in the world was dead."

Father Jack stared at him. "And you were human."

For the first time, Peter glanced away, unsettled. He looked at his hands, pictured his own mirror image, the one he saw every morning, the one with the graying hair and the lines around the eyes and mouth.

"Yes. I lived. I found a way to exorcize the demonic and the divine from my body. I could have had one of the survivors change me back, make me a vampire again. But I chose to stay like this. To live."

The priest set aside his own tea and gazed at Peter as though they were in the intimacy of a confessional. "And it haunts you."

Peter did not like the sound of that. He narrowed his eyes, ran his long fingers over the paint-spattered legs of his jeans. "Let me tell you now what you don't know."

"Please."

The mage turned his hands over, and when he did, there was a tiny ball of green fire burning in the center of each palm, a pair of glaring, verdant suns that cast their glow upon the entire room and threw sickly shadows across the face of Father Jack Devlin, across his suddenly wide eyes. Peter could see the magick reflected in the man's gla.s.ses.

"It's for effect," Peter said, voice low. "But it's a good one, isn't it? I mean, there's a promise in it. Not an empty threat, this power. This is what I learned in h.e.l.l, while demons were picking at my mind like carrion birds on a dead dog."

He snapped one hand closed, snuffing out the light in it, but the other flared more brightly and Peter held his hand up higher, twisted it around so that the burning orb became a flame that played along his fingers.

"I'll never be just an ordinary man," Peter said. "But I feel like one. When I was young, I was angry. At my father, at the Turks, at the world for not coming to save my city in time. My memories of my time in h.e.l.l and my life as a vampire are dim. There's something I'll bet you didn't know. I remember my human life, my youth, very well, and the last few years of course. But the time between . . . it's as though it happened to someone else. I remember the people I cared for and why, of course. Some of those who are still alive are still part of my life. But in many ways it's as though I was a young man then, and now my life has begun again.

"Do you want to know why I did not take the gift of immortality from one of my friends again?"

The priest nodded.