Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
Stalking
I
vo liked trains. The flying vistas outside the windows soothed him. He was reminded of all the decades that had flown by since he had begun his mission. It was as if those years still existed somewhere, the way these towns and stations and patches of riverside scenery would still exist when the train was gone.
His approach should have been different, of course: a charge on a strong horse, a battle cry, and a ringing stroke to cleave the enemy into bleeding, dying meat before him
Ah, the old days. He smiled.
In these times, the horse was iron, trundling along its shining rails at a speed no flesh and blood creature could have matched. He sat at a window with a newspaper, picked up from a seat across the aisle, open in front of him.
He thought of himself as circling the prey, a wide circle right now, but destined to narrow until the coils closed tight. The signal had been given, the war-horn sounded, and now it all lay in his hands to accomplish. His plan must be sound. The original raging lust for revenge had long since settled to a cooler resolve.
So for today he was merely a specialty dealer come to check the local antique shops for possibly undervalued treasures in the wealthy town of Rhinebeck.
He might buy; he might sell.
He would definitely reconnoiter. The lie of the land was a vital factor in war.
A Man at Bay
N
ick walked his dogs along the back wall of the long garden behind his house for the second time that day. He’d been unbearably restless for two days since Jessamyn’s visit. Only getting outside, out of the house, seemed to help.
Although the trees that lined the stone boundary fence were leafless, their branches at least partially shielded him from the view of anyone who might be snooping around in the woods beyond. Anyone: the enemy, faceless and nameless and unimaginable in ways that he could never have explained to anyone, not even Jessamyn.
He’d had rivals before, angry men opposing him over some issue or some prize. But this was someone moved to destroy him because of who he was, and who his father had been, and his grandfather and on back, he couldn’t tell how long. This was something far beyond mere social or professional friction, the bristling of hackles, a flurry of challenges, insults, even punches.
Among other things, this was more invigorating. Nick walked without his cane, not easily and not fast, but with determination. Today he would do the whole fence line with hardly a trace of the limp he had exaggerated for Jess, running on self-discipline fueled by adrenaline. Tomorrow maybe he’d do it without limping at all.
Small, hot needles of pain darted through the muscles above his knee with each step. He accepted the pain as penance for deliberately stonewalling Jess, hurting her, and now driving her away. He was disgusted with himself for having been able to do it. But hardness was his reality now. She deserved to be spared further contact with it.
The dogs paced beside him, alert but quiet, heads high. He’d named them “Mac” and “Beth” in defiance of the old theatrical superstition that “the Scottish play” carried bad luck. The gesture, originally spit in the eye of Fate, seemed puerile to him now.
Never mind; they knew their names, answered to them with alacrity, and showed none of the viciousness of their shared namesake. They were beautiful and affectionate, but he was careful not to spoil them.
He’d had dogs as pets, of course, for their energetic cheerfulness and their love. Those days were gone. He had these dogs because he needed them.
He walked, his gloved hands swinging at his sides for better balance and momentum and to break his fall, if he did fall. The lame leg sometimes slackened when he was tired. His foot sometimes dragged, catching on a root or a rock.
The sun wallowed in cloud-wrack low behind the trees. He shrugged his duffle-coat higher around his ears, his breath misting the air in front of him. Early or late, cold or warm, he walked every day, in the privacy of his own grounds and without his cane.
He didn’t want to have to count on the dogs. He needed to be able to trust his own strength, to be able to run, to pivot, to plant his feet firmly so he could back a punch or a kick with his weight.
His enemy was close. The play would bring him closer. That was its purpose.
This was the enemy Nick had never believed in. Uncle Rob had talked about him just that one time, after the funeral of Nick’s father. Pressed for details, Uncle Rob had retreated into iron silence.
The story was ridiculous. Nick had tried to mock Rob into retracting it. There had always been a bit of a rivalry between Rob, the artistic one, and Nick’s tycoon father. Nick hadn’t been willing to let his uncle rattle him.
And yet: the family history proved that many male heads of the family had died young and violently, a few even by their own hands. But that must have more to do with their reckless pursuit of wealth than with some crazed, supernatural enemy stalking them down the centuries!
If you were going to seek your fortune shipping slaves from Africa, you might expect someday to be killed in a revolt on board. A man who went West burning with gold fever might be killed over a rich claim. And one who ran down rumors of a lost emerald mine in South America could run into gangsters down there and not be seen again, which was what was thought to have happened to Nick’s father.
At first Nick had ignored the package in the safe, which Uncle Rob swore held convincing evidence. Nick let it sit there and fester, whatever it was. Let it rot in the dark, deprived of the nourishing fears of the latest head of the Griffin family. Nick wasn’t going to play into the hands of any so-called “curse.”
He’d been away traveling so much since, he’d all but forgotten the thing existed. Nobody used the clunky old safe anymore.
But then he’d wandered into the battlefields of central Europe, and the dark history of that bleak but beautiful part of the world had stirred his creativity, and out of that came “Blood Kin.” When it was accepted in Chicago for their spring festival, he’d gone out to celebrate with the woman he loved, and driven them both straight into the impossible.
No one believed him. Why in hell would they?
But he knew what he’d seen that day: a woman in dark, floating garments sitting bareback on a massive milk white horse built like a medieval war mount. Horse and rider had simply appeared in the middle of the junction with the paved road, halted there, waiting, dead ahead. The woman’s head had turned, as if with mild curiosity, toward the onrushing car.
“First the Woman on the White Horse comes,” Uncle Rob had whispered, “and shows herself to the victim. A little while later, in some terrible, violent way, he dies.”
Nick had almost died right there at the junction, first from a surge of fear so huge it had felt like the bursting of his heart, and then from the impact of the crash.
He hated to think that in his arrogance, his foolishness, his partisan distrust of Uncle Rob, he had nearly gotten Jess killed. He’d loved that woman, from the moment she came staggering, swearing and laughing, onto the stage that day in summer years before (having tripped becomingly over a lighting cable). And he’d come close to destroying her.
In the hospital he’d dragged himself from his room to hers, watching over her in a relentless turmoil of pain, fear, and remorse. She’d just lain in drugged sleep, her head and hands swathed in bandages and her broken arm covered in a cast from shoulder to wrist. He sat there for hours on end, beyond tears, deprived by the bandages of even a decent look at her. That hurt, because he knew by then that this would be the last intimate time he would spend with Jess Croft.
His dreams were haunted by the vision of her crushed eye socket, which had hit the corner post of the windshield, before the doctors reconstructed it. He remembered watching, feeling sick, as a nurse unwrapped the raw mangle that had been Jess’s left hand. He’d fled the room that day, hobbling down the hall as fast as he could despite the agony of his leg.
It had been a mercy (and an unbearable deprivation) to finally be allowed to go home, away from her. And it had been absolutely necessary.
First came the lady on the white horse, and then came—what, exactly? What was he to expect, and what could he do about it?
The first thing he’d done on returning home was to make his painful way down into the cellar and open the wall safe. He found a document in spidery writing on parchment, so old that it was surely a museum piece, and the typed, modern version that his grandfather had provided. Behind these was another bundle of papers, bound in a black silk ribbon, pertaining to the incredible situation the letter described.
And there was the ruby, in a cardboard box.
It was a dusky, blood-red stone the size of a small bird’s-egg, simply set and hung like a medallion on a chain of thick gold links. No maker’s mark or karat stamp showed on the gold. This thing had a crude, brooding beauty completely different from modern gems, which were cut and polished to sparkle and shine.
The documents recounted how, because of this rather ugly jewel, his forebears had died cruel, early deaths, pursued by an implacable enemy who claimed ownership of the ruby.
And now, according to the story, it was Nick’s turn. The Lady had come for him.
He believed it, because he had seen her and almost died for it.
It took him a long time to work his way to the determination that he wouldn’t allow himself to just wait for the devil to come get him. Instead he’d made a plan and set it in motion. He’d turned to his one real talent, and had begun revising the play into the lure that he needed.
And he’d made damned sure that Jess wasn’t going to be involved in any way; he’d done enough damage there already.
Still, hidden away while he worked on the play, he’d phoned Jess’ physical therapist every week for secret and highly illegal reports on her progress. Later on, he’d learned of the onset of her paralyzing attacks of stage fright. The problem had struck, embarrassingly, when she was called on to deliver lines in Ernie Wilkes’s class for professional actors—just saying lines in a class!
Ah, poor Jess.
Actors went to school all their lives to keep their skills sharp, but Jess had been turned into a beginner again; worse than a beginner, because she was older than most others in the class, and less sure of herself. She must be terrified that her looks—not a matter of vanity but the foundation of every actor’s toolkit—had been spoiled by the accident.
By him.
He rewrote the play to be a signal flag, high and red and waving, a crudely coded message to lure this crazy enemy out of hiding and bring him within reach:
Here I am, I know about you, come and face me.
Jess must not be anywhere near when the answer came, just in case.
He’d simply never imagined that she would try out for the part of Eva, not after his cold disconnection of his life from hers. He was still furious with himself for not foreseeing her starting her stage comeback so soon, and trying to do it in his play. He should have been able to divert her somehow, before things got to this point.
She wasn’t going to quit, that was clear.
What the hell was he going to do?
Her visit had hurt him, badly. She looked different, she carried herself differently, her eyes were shadowed with anxiety. He had longed to comfort, explain, draw her close.
But how could he? He was an unarmed man with wolves on his trail.
He should have refused to see her. Letting her into the house and spending even that brief time with her had been a mistake. He’d denied himself even a handshake, a touch on the shoulder, because one touch, the ghost of a touch, would have leached all his resolve out of him.
He felt the weight of that damned red gem like a boulder on his heart.
His breath showed pale in the chill air. The dogs paced at his side. He swiped moisture from his eyes with the cuff of his coat and limped the last twenty feet of the stone fence back to the house, his left leg beginning to drag.
Blood Angel
I
vo, back from his day in the country, was restless. So that was his quarry at last, a tall man attended by two fine dogs, walking his boundaries like a lord patrolling his castle’s defenses. Just a glimpse of him through the trees had been exhilarating, and exhilaration had burned up a lot of energy.
Lying back now on his bed in his clothes, Ivo slept away the bright afternoon, dreaming the only dream he had dreamed for centuries.
In the dream, he saw the castle walls reddened by flames. Firelight glinted on the armor of figures fallen around him. Someone groaned nearby. He turned his head to see, and pain lanced from his shoulder down into his chest. It took the breath he needed to scream with, and his sight went dark.
He woke to the sound of a horse nickering in the night, but no accompanying human voices. This would be no helpful ally searching for survivors, for the sound was moving away as the animal wandered among the bodies.
The moon was high. Its light silvered the curved surface of a breastplate on a still form a yard from his right hand. He knew the design engraved on that armor as well as he knew the crest on his own shield, but the name of that friend and comrade, survivor of a hundred skirmishes and pursuits, eluded him.
He could not recall the names of his uncle, his two nephews, and his younger brother, all of whose hacked-off heads he could make out jammed onto the spikes on the wall by the gateway in to the forecourt. His father must have been taken captive—he would never retreat from his castle.
Best not to think about what might have happened, or might still be happening, to him. Or to his mother, the sister who had never married and who ran the estate better than any man, or . . .others . . . .
Magda, who was to have been his wife, ravished away, a prize not of war but of treachery. Her name was seared into his heart with a blazing iron. It stung and burned like the spit of the Devil bubbling on the flesh of the damned.
His people were dead or gone, his home tumbled stone from stone and consumed in flames, and all the treasures of his lineage robbed away by strangers. He would soon join all that was lost here. He’d seen enough battlefields to know that his wound was fatal, so he should have been praying for the salvation of his immortal soul while he still could.
Instead he cursed his luck in a weak whisper. He pictured the enemy and cursed them: mercenaries in foreign gear, ruthless men who had lain in ambush for him in his own home, hacked him down, and thrown his bleeding body out here with the rest.
Ivopold Hugo Dedrick von Craggen, who had spent two years fighting for his Church against unbelievers and heretics of all sorts, now called not on his God but upon the legions of Hell, begging them to follow and strike down his family’s murderers.
Time drifted; his curses floated impotently away.
Someone was coming. He turned to look, scarcely feeling his injury now. A sturdy white warhorse, stripped of its trappings, walked placidly among the tumbled bodies. On it rode a woman, seated sideways on the horse’s broad back. She was a stranger to him, a white-faced woman in dark garments with long, black hair swirling from her head as she turned to look out over the dead, this way and that.
The wife or daughter or leman of a man of the castle, seeking her butchered lover or father to pray over? She passed nearby, a dark shadow in the moonlight. He tried to call out to her, but could only groan.
Yet she must have heard; she turned to ride closer, and she slid down from the horse’s back. Her dark skirts rustling, she knelt beside his good companion in battle, poor Pero (
that was the name of that lifeless hulk
), handling him somehow, but without sobs or prayers. Handling him—raising him up a little—to rob the corpse? Was it some peasant woman, come here on a strayed or stolen war mount to find enrichment among the corpses of her betters?
He uttered a croak of protest, and she looked at him.
Her face shone pale, with a stillness like the moon’s own face. Ebony hair floated about her pallor like windtorn storm clouds, and the white column of her throat drove down in a gleaming arrow into the sable stuff of her gown.
This was no peasant.
“Lady,” he whispered, “who are you?”
He felt a chill in her gaze, from eyes invisible in their shadowed sockets. Her lips were black. Blood shows black in the moonlight, but she was clearly unwounded.
You know me
, came her voice straight as a spear into his mind.
I am the Blood Angel of this land, Baron. You have glimpsed me sometimes while you hunted the forests of your father’s domain. Where blood is spilled, there I drink; and with the blood I take up memory, I take up oaths and curses and destinies. I take up the crimes of the past and the promises of the future, Baron. You know me.
Why yes,
he thought in muzzy astonishment,
I do.
There had always been whispers among the peasants and villagers about a dreadful rider in the wooded hills, an ageless being who supped on the blood of her people. Dark nourishment linked her unbreakably to this ancient soil: she had always been there and could never die. They had spoken of her with fear and with warding-off signs given them by their priests; but they spoke of her with pride also.
He’d thought he had seen her sometimes, but those sightings he had never spoken of, for could a godly man be taken by such visions?
Well
, he thought;
she is real. And Pero must be not quite dead, for she would not drink blood from a corpse.
And I know you, Ivo Hugo Dedrick Maria von Craggen
.
His nape prickled; no honest man wants such a creature knowing him. But he was dying, so what could it matter?
He listened, spellbound.
I can smell your blood
, she went on,
rich with the courage and the pride of your line. Warrior of many battles, you must know that you are wounded to death
.
He did know; and now he was stunned to glimpse salvation, of a kind. The wrong kind, but why should he care?
“Then drink from me,” he said, dragging himself up on his elbows in a surge of desperate energy. “Leave poor Pero, he is a good soldier, a devout man all his life. Let Heaven have him, Lady. He has earned his rest from this misery of iron and death. But I have failed in everything that I tried to do. Damnation is no more than I have earned.”
Be sure of what you offer
, she answered, smiling slowly with those blackly shining lips from which he could not avert his eyes.
Perhaps it is only your fear of death that speaks so recklessly, Baron von Craggen —a coward
’
s fear
.
His mind, slowed by the onset of darkness, caught up suddenly with events: she would address him by this title, which she did for the second time now, only if his father the Baron was dead. So Egon, the true Baron and respected (if not precisely beloved) father of Ivopold, must lie dead somewhere, no doubt tormented first and then butchered by the enemy to the encouragement of their treacherous leader—the blond foreigner with the white gryphon on his shield. The damned man, a renowned mercenary, had been hired to head the castle forces in Ivo’s absence. So Ivo was Baron now; the dying heir to a dead line.
“Take my blood,” he said, or thought he said; “give me some kind of life in return. My family is destroyed, my wife is the booty of a treacherous thief, and the treasure of Craggenheim is stolen away. We had this gem from the hand of Charlemagne himself, and we have kept it safe, until now! As the last of my name I have work to do, the work of revenge. But I cannot do it like this—help me, I beg this of you!”
I dream
, he thought, floating on pain.
Hurt as I am, how can I speak? My lungs are lanced through, I am already in Death’s hand.
This is a dream, or the torments of Hell.
The woman with the bloody mouth inclined toward him, attentive and unhurried.
You have lost a wonderful treasure
, she replied,
a gem beyond price. And these have been terrible deaths that the betrayer has forced upon your family. But haven’t you had enough punishment, Baron? What you ask of me is no favor, believe me. What you beg from me now, you will curse me for in ages to come
.
Listen to me curse, then, and laugh at me for it!
he responded, voiceless now and coughing blood.
I would willingly be the butt of your sport in that cloudy future, if I can only live long enough to avenge my family! Lady, drink before all my blood runs out of me. Make me a demon, like you. I will do whatever you bid me, at whatever cost.
She touched his forehead with her cool wrist.
Do you think I am lonely, Baron? Do you think I long for your companionship?
No more than the moon longs for another moon in the night sky. The longing is all mine, Lady. The pain I feel is nothing to this longing. If I live with the life you offer, I will go hunting on the trail of my enemy. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far I must range, I swear to return to him and his the slaughter and the reaving he has given me, until the last of his line is dead and the Craggen treasure is in my hand again.
Well
, she murmured,
that
’
s a fitting purpose for a proud young man of noble blood
.
She drew down the hood of his mail shirt, exposing his torn neck to the night’s chill. Her fingers rested lightly against the faintly throbbing artery at his throat. Her touch was ice.
You will leave this place on your travels
, she said,
but you must come home again if I call you. You will be unable to create others like yourself, for with that power I do not part. And I will speak to you from time to time, through the link this land’s blood creates between my mind and yours.
She leaned close. A cold breath that stank of carrion glided on his skin.
I will agree to all this, if you give me your oath and it satisfies me. I see no impediment. The men of Craggenheim have not pursued me or set priests and Inquisitors after me. By the orders of your forbears, I have been let go my own way. The women of Craggenheim have bought favors and powers from me and paid the fair price. Something is owing for that, too. Your own lady mother was one of those women. She
’
d have had no sons, but for me.
So: what you must do is give your word to obey my rules. On what will you swear, Baron?
On my blood, Lady.
He choked, darkness dancing in his wavering sight. Her lips pressed cool against his skin, and knives of ice tore his skin. The cold of the blackest spaces of Hell flowed into him, taking the place of the warm blood pulsing out of his body. He floated away on a freezing tide toward a sleep from which he would awaken changed forever.
* * *
He started up with a gasp from the well of sleep. The dream, initially sharp and bright as a stained glass rendering of some saint’s agony, faded at once. It didn’t matter. He knew it by heart, and felt a wry fondness for it sometimes—his one true relic of the old life, still faithfully his.
He got up, stretched, and went to the window of the bedroom, rocking gently on his heels and thinking of the culmination of his labors. Not too soon, though; nothing spoiled revenge like haste. He’d had time to learn that lesson well.
On the whole, he thought he’d made a good bargain.
There was someone else he needed to be thinking about: the woman, the one the cab driver had mentioned in Rhinebeck yesterday.
“The Griffin house?” he’d said. “I took someone out there just the other day. Good looking. Maybe she’s an actress, looking to be in Mr. Griffin’s play. It’s opening in the city in a month or so—you know about that? Everybody talks about it around here . . .”
Yes, Ivo knew about that.
Now he knew something new about it, something very interesting. A woman, a beautiful actress at Griffin’s house, maybe in his play? A pawn he might use, perhaps, in this stalking of the final prey? A plot twist to amuse himself with? Perhaps he might tease a little extra pleasure out of the process by choosing a more oblique approach than usual . . . .
The lie of the land sometimes included some particularly interesting features that might go to make his own last act a great deal more interesting, subtle, and flavorful.
Ivo had had a long time to learn to appreciate subtlety.