The Dark Blood of Poppies (22 page)

Yet John could not let his friend go.

To Cesare, this symbolised the way vampires would cling to the past unless he – the new prophet, dare he think it? – could turn their thoughts to the future.

“And you, Pierre,” Cesare murmured, looking down at him. “Once so bold and cruel. Now you cower here, afraid of your own shadow. It’s pitiful.”

“Whose fault is that?” Pierre snarled. “Yes, I’m scared!” He waved a hand at John. “I spend time with vampires I hate, rather than be alone. Violette’s crippled me.” His eyes grew wild. “I daren’t enter the Crystal Ring because she’s there. I see her eyes in the clouds, and her hair like a great black shadow. The strangling knot of her hair. Why am I so afraid? Why?”

He lurched forward and clung to the front of Cesare’s robe.

“Because she is the Enemy.” Cesare eased him back onto the pallet. “Don’t be ashamed of your weakness, my brother. You have faced our greatest threat.”

“I have?” Pierre blinked.

John, meanwhile, only stared at Cesare from dead eyes. He spoke little these days.

“Look at you two and Matthew: this is only the beginning of her evil,” said Cesare. “The darkness of the Crystal Ring is Lilith’s shadow falling between us and God. It’s her fault that we could not bring Matthew back to life.”

At that, John’s eyes flared with poisonous light.

“Perhaps Kristian protected us from her before,” Cesare went on with passion, “but Kristian is gone, and we must protect ourselves. The Almighty has revealed His purpose to me. I am the one chosen to unleash the forces of heaven against her.”

Far from seeming impressed by this statement, Pierre groaned, “
Mon Dieu
.” He covered his face with his hands, muttering.

“What are you saying?” Cesare snapped, gripping Pierre’s shoulder.

One blue eye blazed up at him from the tangle of hair and fingers. In it, Cesare saw the cynical spirit of the atheist. Pierre, though, seemed to think better of arguing.

“Nothing, nothing. I don’t care what you do. Dress this up as a religious crusade if you like – only please get rid of that damned woman! I see her in the corners when the candles burn out. Please.”

Cesare let go, and smoothed Pierre’s crumpled shirt as if petting a dog. How pleasing to see Pierre with his blasphemous insolence knocked out of him. Like a bud, a tiny hope for the future.

“I’ll crush her like a wasp.” Cesare dropped his hand on Pierre’s head in benediction. “Come and pray with me, my brothers.”

Pierre shrank away, shaking his head.

“John?” Cesare held out his hand.

The other vampire came to Cesare, pausing only to glance at Matthew’s head. Pierre, too, stared at it as if to say,
Don’t leave me alone with that thing!
But as John and Cesare left, Pierre did not follow.

“Let him be,” said Cesare. “I’ll make a believer of him eventually.”

Cesare led John to Kristian’s inner sanctum, a cell tucked beside the meeting chamber that contained the ebony throne. Inside, he knelt on the bare stone floor, John facing him.
This is now
my
sanctum
, Cesare thought.

“Concentrate,” he whispered. “Let your mind flow towards God. This is our prayer for guidance, and more: a call to his messengers. A summoning!”

The chamber was lightless, but with vampire acuity, Cesare saw the livid red scabs on John’s skull, the raddled hollows of his face.

“This is blasphemy,” John whispered. “We’ve no right to call on God’s name. We’ll be struck down!”

“Still clinging to your old ways? Find some pride, some courage! John, I never questioned Kristian’s doctrine.” As Cesare spoke, tears flowed down his cheeks. “But Kristian died to force us to think for ourselves! And I’m so happy.”

“Happy? When we’re in hell? We’re damned souls; silent penitence is our only hope of redemption. We must submit to His will, not demand help!”

Cesare looked into the baleful eyes. “You’re wrong! Very well; let this prayer be proof. If angels come and strike us down, then I am wrong. But if they answer and help us, then you’ll know that I am right! Do you agree?”

The swollen skull dropped in acquiescence.

“Good. Pray with me.”

Cesare let his vampire sight dim. He drifted into the Crystal Ring, hovering between the two realms. The flagstones seemed to soften, holding him like an ant in molasses. The sanctum became featureless, like the inside of an egg, flushing from black to deepest purple.

Cesare began to pray silently. Very far above, he felt a cold black energy gathering, feeding him. He thought,
I could begin a new religion here and now. Kristian could be the vampires’ Saviour: a prophet murdered by his enemies only to live again. But with no resurrection…

He began to tremble. In truth, Cesare no longer wanted Kristian reborn. His own ego had flourished too vigorously to tolerate competition.

He chastised himself for this heresy.

A compromise
, he thought, bowing his head.
I’ll call on God to send a sign. If Kristian appears, I’ll submit to his will and establish the Church of Kristian. But if not – dear Lord, send me guidance!

His lips began to move.

“Almighty God, Lord of All, Creator and Destroyer, hear me. In the name of Kristian our Father, I beg for guidance. I am thy humble servant, a thought in thy great Mind. I beg thee, send forth thy thoughts as envoys to do thy will in the world…”

Something happened. The purple glow above him flushed to gold.

“Oh, Kristian, beloved Father, manifest unto me, tell me how best to continue thy work. In the name of God, appear!”

The light swelled to a sphere, and Cesare’s heart swelled with it. John groaned.

“God hears us!” Cesare cried. John moaned in terror and keeled over, face down, arms outstretched.

The light birthed a shape, a long glowing figure that hovered before Cesare’s wondering eyes. A force pulsed from it, invisible but icily bright. Cesare pressed his hands to his chest, overawed.

“Kristian?” he whispered.

“No, not Kristian,” said the light. “I am your holy messenger, your sword of flame.”

“God be praised!” Cesare cried. “Speak, tell us who you are!”

“My name is Simon.” The light dissipated to reveal – not an angel, but a tall blond man in modern clothes: white shirt, fawn trousers. Yet his eyes were suns, and he was as golden as Cesare was colourless. “Although I have been called Senoy.”

To Cesare’s astonishment, this glowing creature gathered both him and John in his arms and hugged them hard to his chest.

“God be praised, indeed,” Simon-Senoy whispered, biting into Cesare’s neck.

* * *

Simon had felt the call as he wandered through the Crystal Ring, brooding on his losses and failures.

To be needed
, he was thinking,
that’s the essence
.

Fyodor and Rasmila begged me to take them back but they’re children; they need a nursemaid, not a soldier of God. And Sebastian never needed me, but perhaps it’s for the best. He is a loner, and I need a pair to recreate the magic trinity.

Yes. The alchemy of three.

He thought of Karl again.

I need…

He floated in silence, wrapped in violet clouds, webbed by rainbow lines of magnetism. He watched a knot of darkness far above, perceiving it as a hole through which all the energy and beauty of the Ring was leaking away.

Panic and despair flashed through him…

And then he felt the pull. The magnetic lines thrummed like violin strings. The ether shuddered. He felt his hands turn hot, and saw that they were glowing, as they used to when he was God’s envoy.

Simon gasped. “Dear God, what is this?”

He felt power returning. Not a blaze of ineffable light this time, but enough to prove that he was still an angel, that someone on Earth had empowered him by
needing
him.

And Simon went with the call, diving towards the source as if winged. He heard the prayer, bathed in the beseeching, honeyed words, slipped softly to Earth to greet his summoners.

His glorious manifestation was an act, for his new-born strength was fragile. Still, it was enough to convince them that he’d answered their prayers.

A sword of God to slay Lilith.

So someone had finally realised the danger and called for Simon’s aid! He was so grateful, he couldn’t help but embrace them in his joy.

When Simon stood back, he was far from enraptured by what he saw. A mousy choirboy with a visionary light in his eyes, and a mutilated little man like a leper from a medieval woodcut. No beauty here. Yet there was
something
, a feeling of inchoate power that excited Simon beyond reason. So he clasped them, bit their throats and swallowed their blood in ecstatic greeting.

Because it was better than nothing. It was a start, at least.

* * *

The day after the party, Robyn walked to the Public Garden and sat under the willows by the lagoon. The gold-leaf dome of the State House glinted through the trees, bright against an overcast sky. She wished the sun would shine. The weather was so capricious in early June, changing from chilly to hot in an hour. Still, the park was always green and lush; the dogwoods laden with blossom, purple beeches and maidenhair trees shimmering all around her.

Robyn watched the swan boats circling the small lake. Round and round they went in genteel procession, each with a man pedalling stoically between the wings of a carved white swan, families seated in rows on the benches, children throwing bread to the ducks. She stared at the boats until she was hypnotised.

She’d put off Harold, invitations to lunch, everything, saying she was unwell. She wasn’t lying. She was in a state of shock.

When Karl caught her on the terrace, she’d put on a show of levity.
“Oh, how foolish of me to miss the step, no harm done, how lucky you were there…”
But he knew there was something wrong; she saw concern in his eyes. God, Karl’s eyes… too much like those of the stranger in the garden for comfort.

He and Charlotte had been solicitous, as if they feared she’d been in danger. Robyn, however, said nothing about Violette or the strange male. None of their business, really. She only wondered why they were so concerned.

Josef wasn’t himself, either. Preoccupied, he’d insisted on leaving the party early. So Robyn asked Wilkes to drive him back to his hotel, but Josef wouldn’t say what was wrong, only that he was tired.

Now she wished that she’d dispensed with social niceties and asked Karl and Charlotte directly, “What exactly is going on?”

At the time, though, it had been impossible. Why, when they were so lovely, so charming and kind, had she felt so uneasy with them?

After seeing Josef safely to his hotel, she’d gone home and to bed. No hope of sleep. In the middle of the night, she’d gone to Alice’s room and woken her.

“I met a ghost last night,” Robyn had said. “Or an angel of death, maybe. He told me that Russell Booth intended to commit suicide. Or already had.”

Alice sat up in bed, half-asleep. “You woke me to tell me this?”

“Did you hear me?” She told her bemused companion everything.

“But, madam, if he’d killed himself, they wouldn’t be holding a party, would they?”

“That’s what I said.” Robyn exhaled. “I know what it was – his god-damned brothers playing a sick joke on me! Funny. I never took any of that family to have a sense of humour.”

Later, as Robyn ate breakfast, Alice went out to visit a friend. She returned within minutes, looking stunned.

“I just met the housekeeper from the house next door to the Booths. First thing this morning, the family found Russell dead in his study.”

Now Robyn sat by the lake, her stomach a cold knot. Russell’s death, however tragic, barely touched her heart, but last night’s eeriness persisted.

Maybe I imagined the man after all. Some ghastly premonition?

Josef’s hotel on Tremont Street was only minutes’ walk away, but she suspected that even if she asked him outright who his strange friends were, he wouldn’t give a straight answer.

As she sat watching the swan boats, she became aware of a shadow in the corner of her eye. He appeared as suddenly as before: a dark figure in a black overcoat, his face pale against the material. He stood beside her bench, hands in his pockets, silent as the air.

Robyn looked at him in a mixture of shock and relief. Her heart was pounding.
So I didn’t imagine him
!

“Good afternoon, Mrs Stafford.”

“Good afternoon… I’m afraid I don’t recall your name,” she said, with all the poise she could gather. She wouldn’t let any man think he’d unsettled her.

“I am Sebastian Pierse,” he said, “and I owe you an apology.”

His words, spoken in a low, contrite tone, took her aback. She studied his profile and saw a high, curved cheekbone, well-shaped nose and jaw, long black lashes. Features a sculptor might have moulded with idealistic fingers – but they told her nothing about his character. The distant look in his eyes could have been arrogance, or something subtler and darker.

“Yes, perhaps you do.”

He only stood there, watching the swan boats as if transfixed. Eventually she said, “Why don’t you sit down, Mr Pierse?”

“Because I wait until I’ve been invited.” He came to sit beside her with a dancer’s effortless grace. As he half-turned towards her with one arm along the back of the bench, she saw him clearly for the first time.

“It was unforgivable of me to approach you without warning,” he said.

Difficult to tell his age; he might be anywhere between twenty-five and forty, a world away from the brash, scrubbed American men who were considered handsome. His was an old-world beauty, chiselled but not polished, the fair skin radiant with a particular Celtic translucency. Despite his pallor, he seemed all shadows. His hair – darkest brown, soft, formless and too long – shaded his forehead. Dense black eyebrows and lashes gave alluring depth to his eyes. The irises were hazel-green, like woodland pools.

“You must understand,” he went on, “I was upset about my friend’s death. That is no excuse –”

“No, it isn’t,” Robyn said coolly. “You were rude, and I certainly did not deserve your insinuations.”