The Hunger (44 page)

The press of the crowd around him grew more specific. Hands pulled at his boots.

“Plus de louis,”
someone shouted, and they all took up the chant.

John glanced down. Hands scrabbled at him. The horse was going down on its knees. He threw the saddlebags themselves into the crowd. Those nearest him turned to watch the arc. The horse scrambled up. He pushed it on.

As he jerked his gaze back up to the platform, he saw the executioner push Beatrix down again. His shout nearly burst his throat. But it was lost in the roar of the crowd. He drove his spurs into the horse’s flanks.

But now the crowd, angered that they were too far from the saddlebags to benefit, descended on him in earnest. The horse stumbled. Hands tore at him. As he fell into the seething mass, he saw that Khalenberg and Sincai were still too far to stop the executioner. To hell with showing the crowd their power, they should transport to the platform and kill the son of a bitch. Burned into his brain was an image of the lord high executioner reaching for the lanyard. The crowd closed over him, kicking him, tearing his clothes. Women scratched him, shrieking.

“Companion!” he shouted aloud. “For pity’s sake . . .”

He did not complete the thought, for power came rushing down his veins. He surged up, flinging a burly man and two women away. He pushed through the crowd, growling. A red film descended on the scene. They gave way like the red sea. He could see the platform now. Beatrix laid her neck down, but she held her head up, searching the crowd. The executioner held the lanyard. The blade looked too heavy, too sharp, too inevitable to be real.

A voice from his nightmares shrieked, “Do it, you fools!”

There was Asharti, pointing at the executioner. For the first time he noticed that two vampires stood just behind Beatrix, with the man who held two feet of gleaming auburn hair. Khalenberg had a vampire by the neck at the base of the platform. Sincai lunged for Asharti.

John began to run, as in the slowness of a dream. He would never make it.
Companion!
The darkness whirled up. He tried to concentrate on the place just next to the executioner.

Through the blackness he saw the lord high executioner jerk the lanyard.

The great blade hissed down.

Too late!

John! It was John on the horse in the middle of the keening mob. Asharti did not have him! He had come for her! Not abandoned!

“John!” she called, but her voice was lost in the roar.

The lord high executioner pushed her head down. She felt the compulsion shower over her. She laid her neck in the notch on the block. But she didn’t want to die. Not anymore. She called to her Companion.
One last time, my friend
.

There was no time to think more. She knew she was weak. She knew it was impossible, with Asharti’s vampires damping her power. But she had to try. The surge along her veins said her Companion heard the urgency.
I am old
, she thought.
Older than any here but Asharti, I can do this
. She pulled her head up and searched the crowd for John.

That was when she felt the others. The vibrations of ones even older than she. She concentrated on drawing up the darkness. Inch by inch she pulled it from her veins. The scene before her went slowly red. She saw John go
down in the crowd.
Distance yourself. You have your job
. Stephan appeared in the crowd below her, lunging for Asharti.

“Do it, you fool!” Asharti screamed, pointing at the lord high executioner.

She pulled against the power that had been dampening her life force for days.

Above her she heard a clunk as the executioner jerked his rope with a grunt.

A hiss.

No! Companion!

The curtain of power that held her slacked.

She jerked her head up.

The great blade thunked into its slot in the block, an inch from her nose. Its passing wafted a four-inch lock of auburn hair onto the breeze. Beatrix breathed in little convulsive gasps. The wall of sound beyond the blade held screams and terrible animal sounds, but they were all distant. Everything seemed to go on quite slowly. John appeared from nowhere, and pushed the lord high executioner off the platform into the crowd. Jerry stepped forward. She looked up at him, curiously. His eyes were not red. They were that pale blue she had seen in Dover. But they were no longer indecisive. They gave off a fierce glow. He had decided to let her go, in spite of Asharti, in spite of his own best interests. She was quite sure of that.

He smiled.

John threw himself down on his knees beside her and took her in his arms. She could hardly breathe, but it felt good not to breathe. His heart was beating wildly in his breast. He was saying something incoherent into her ear. “Yes,” she soothed. “Yes.”

A man with a hawk face ran up the stairs to the platform. Why, it was Khalenberg. He was covered in blood. Where was the other vampire who had stood behind her? Oh, there was his body. And his head? Yes, over there.

Khalenberg pulled Jerry around to face him. He grasped Jerry’s head in both hands and simply twisted it off. Blood splattered her. Khalenberg tossed Jerry’s head beside the other.

The crowd’s noise rushed in on Beatrix. “You beast!” she screamed at Khalenberg, pulling out of John’s embrace. “He saved my life.”

“He was made,” Khalenberg barked, and grabbed her arm. “Time to go.”

She shook her head and pulled away. “John,” she said. “John.”

“Yes, yes. Come along, Englishman.” Khalenberg’s hand gripped her upper arm. Darkness whirled up. The stab of pain passed through her and the Place des Grèves disappeared.

John sputtered as the pain receded. The dim space of Notre Dame de Paris stretched around him. Above, the great rose window of the north transept was lifeless with night. Khalenberg and Beatrix stood in the center of the transept, getting their bearings. A second blackness rolled up directly under the window and resolved into Asharti and Sincai.

“Why do you bring her here, Sincai?” Khalenberg barked, as Sincai shook his head. Asharti tried to wrench away, spitting like a cat.

“Because she is my responsibility,” Sincai answered calmly.

“Then dispatch her and be done with it.” Khalenberg’s voice held not a scrap of doubt.

“I’ll see you both in hell first,” Asharti hissed. She let her eyes go red.

“My dear, you aren’t going anywhere.” Sincai’s eyes flashed and hers faded. “Not even hell, for the moment.” Asharti went still, as she realized struggle was useless.
Sincai let go of her wrist. “Better and better. You are not beyond an intelligent assessment of the situation.”

“She of any must be killed,” Khalenberg said. His face was chiseled stone.

“It must be difficult to have no belief in redemption, old friend.” Sincai still studied Asharti. “Beatrix? You know her better than any of us. Shall she die?”

John saw Beatrix go still. If it had been up to him he would have turned his thumb down and walked away without a backward glance while they tore Asharti’s head from her body. Beatrix had just felt the effects of Asharti’s evil. Why did she hesitate?

“I cannot judge her,” Beatrix whispered. “As you say, she is your responsibility.”

“I made a bad job of it, didn’t I?” Sincai’s clipped tone hid pain.

Beatrix looked at each of them in turn. Asharti’s eyes were still defiant. “None of you cared what she went through as a human,” Beatrix murmured. “She saw incredible atrocities. She was raped, hurt. She understood the suffering of the powerless. She couldn’t bear the possibility that it could ever happen again. So the need for power consumed her. Is that so hard to understand?” She searched for answers in their eyes. “Is there no such thing as redemption?”

Asharti said nothing, gave her no help, made no defense. She stood erect and proud.

Beatrix took a breath. “So I say she lives.”

Khalenberg turned away in disgust.

John felt a strange combination of emotion circle in his heart. Asharti would live and that made him afraid, but he was proud that Beatrix had the courage for mercy. In some ways, she was the most honorable, virtuous woman he had ever met. She took responsibility for him, when she had infected him with her blood. She took responsibility for
releasing Asharti. How strange to think that of a courtesan, a vampire who sucked human blood.

“So be it,” Sincai intoned. “Perhaps she shall be redeemed, kitten. But I think a period of contemplation is required.” Sincai turned to Asharti. His voice grew implacable. “You will not be allowed to make vampires. There will be no political machinations. I suggest forty days and nights in the desert to start, or perhaps forty years. I shall escort you, personally.”

“Do . . . do you need help?” Beatrix asked, in a small voice, flushing.

John steeled himself. He had known it would happen. His job was to keep still.

Stephan came to stand over Beatrix. He pushed a lock of hair, rudely chopped, from her forehead. “We must talk.” He glanced to Khalenberg. “Could I perhaps get you to supervise our would-be empress?” he asked softly, his eyes back on Beatrix.

Khalenberg made his lips into a thin line. But he didn’t protest.

Sincai didn’t notice. “Come, kitten.” He took her hand.

Beatrix looked up at him and followed him into the darkness.

John swallowed and watched them go. There it was. His die was cast. He would be left alone with his damnation. He took a breath. There was always the guillotine. But at the mere thought of the sharp blade, his Companion surged inside him in protest. He shuddered in revulsion and knew he could never do the deed. Perhaps Sincai’s older blood had robbed him of the will to suicide even as it gave him enough strength to reach the Place des Grèves. Fair trade, on the whole; an eternity of damnation for Beatrix’s life.

Twenty-Four

Beatrix followed Stephan down the nave of the church. Impossible weights of stone balanced on the arched tracery above them in the darkness. Churches were supposed to be places of contemplation, where you viewed your soul from a distance and knew what to do. She had never known less what to do, and there was nothing like calm in her soul.

What had happened? She had found the strength to resist death. John had come for her. Were the two linked? Jerry had died even though he saved her and she couldn’t stop it. And Stephan, Stephan was here after all these centuries. John had brought him, but he had come. His dear face was somehow different than the one that lived in her memory, but now she had seen him she couldn’t say how. Her thoughts caromed in her head. She loved him. He had thought her an experiment. She hated him for that. She didn’t hate him now. How did she feel? Turning in the darkness, she saw John standing with his hands in his pockets, staring after her. If in the next minute Stephan said, “Come with me, kitten, it has always been you,” what would she do?

She shook her head. Stephan wouldn’t say that. And John didn’t want a monster. He had come for her out of a sense of obligation, because she had rescued him from Asharti. If naïveté required strength, it also required opportunity.

“Bea . . .”

She turned at the sound of Stephan’s voice. A smile trembled on her lips. Damn! She didn’t want to tremble. “Stephan?” It was all she could manage.

“There are things that must be said.”

She let out the breath she held. “What can need to be said after all this time?”

“You thought I didn’t love you. But I did.”

She started at the past tense. Vindication and regret mingled into something she could not absorb or understand. But she held her tongue.

“The hell of it was I wanted to love Asharti. I felt obliged to love her. But I didn’t love her. Not the way I loved you. She knew it. That’s why she hated me. That’s why she had to take you from me. I realized that in time. I made her what she was. The fact that I didn’t love her embittered her and turned her into the path she walks today.”

Beatrix frowned. “You think
you
made her what she is? You are responsible for today only because you did not kill her. But her experience and her own tortured soul made her.”

“She was damaged, I agree. But love could have healed her. I . . . couldn’t, that’s all.”

She could feel his emotion strangling him. “That’s why you never tracked her down.”

“That’s why I never tracked you down.”

“What?”

“Because to love you was a betrayal of all I intended. I wanted to save her, and my love for you damned her.” He
took a ragged breath. “And my love for you was never fair or right.”

“What do you mean?” If Stephan loved her it must have been right, mustn’t it?

“You were young. I was very old. You fell in love with my experience. You would have outgrown me, Bea. In some ways Asharti did you a disservice. If you had come to it naturally we could have parted friends. You would not have spent the years wondering.”

“Let’s not go back to that whole thing about it being inevitable that I leave you.”

“Was it not inevitable?”

Was it not?
She stared at him. It was. He was her first love. But he was right. She was so young. Was that why he loved her? Would he have loved her when she was experienced, when she challenged him, when she came into her own? Could she have loved someone who did not?

He smiled in the darkness. The cathedral smelled like stone and dust. Somewhere water tinkled into the baptismal font.

“We can’t come round to love again?” Her mouth said it before she thought the words.

He moved into her and put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him and he stroked her hair. Surprisingly, the feel of Stephan’s body was warm, comforting. But it wasn’t . . . electric. Not like John’s. “Let us rather come round to the point we should have reached without Asharti,” he said. “Let us be friends. You have your own love now . . .”

She glanced over her shoulder to John, standing, so dejected, under the rose window in front of Khalenberg and Asharti. She squinched her eyes shut. “He will never love a monster. Especially one who made him a monster, too.”

“Nonsense. He’s wild for you,” Stephan said. “He was ready to brave the den of the devil himself, in this case,
me, in order to save you. Hell, he mastered his revulsion enough to drink a cup of my blood, just to be sure he didn’t fail you. He volunteered his life, if I required he give it up in order to go after you. Don’t tell me that isn’t love.”