Chapter 18

18

GAbrIEL

I tried not to think about Nathan's emaciated form as I hunted through drawers and shelves, gathering up as many records as I could find, but I couldn't help it. The too-sharp jutting of his bones through his skin stayed with me. As did the guilt. The guilt was more complicated, a two-fold thing. First, guilt that it took me so long to find him. Second, guilt that of all the people we had freed, I was only able to focus on my friend. Many of the vampires we'd freed were exactly the sort of people I'd tried and failed to help for so long. If I had been more active, if I had pushed past my father's pacifying and actually achieved something, maybe fewer of them would've been here.

But there still would have been someone in those cells, wouldn't there? Some other magical creatures. Thinking like that was just like focusing on Nathan, simply on a larger scale. What right did I have to consider myself a leader if I only considered the people directly associated with me?

The stack of papers and ledgers was big now. I looked around the room frantically, trying to find something I could use to carry them, then sent a silent thanks to whoever had left this place so ready to be reoccupied. The large wastepaper basket in the corner still had a roll of trash bags on the bottom.

There were enough records to fill one of the large black bags nearly to the top. The thin orange straps dug into my fingers as I tossed the bag over my shoulder. My nerves were frayed, and the rustling of the paper right next to my ear was loud enough to drown out the other sound for a moment.

There was someone in the hallway, walking with brusque, clicking steps. Not one of the prisoners—they were all barefoot. It wasn't Evangeline, either. She'd been wearing the newfangled rubber-soled boots people liked these days.

How many of the people that we had freed were still upstairs, waiting for Evangeline to get them to safety? Too many, I was sure. The footsteps were getting closer. I set down the bag and squared my shoulders, then stepped out into the hall.

My father was looking at the empty cells, blank-faced in a way I recognized from meetings where someone had infuriated him. He stopped when he saw me. He didn't look surprised. He must have suspected someone was still here, or he wouldn't have bothered to make noise. It had been an intimidation play.

I felt oddly calm as I stared my father down. Sooner or later, we would have ended up here. It was inevitable. There was a strange sense of relief in knowing things had come to a head between us.

For the first time, I realized I was taller than Roland. Not by much, half an inch at most, but it was absurd that I hadn't noticed it for the past nine hundred years. Had I always made myself smaller around him? Or had I simply been blinded to the way he made himself the most important person in any room he walked into?

"Gabriel," he said calmly, like we'd bumped into each at the mall.

"Father."

"You've been meddling again." This was scolding, as if I'd trod mud into a rug. It was so patronizing it hurt my teeth.

I moved first, but it was close. We lunged at each other and collided in the hallway, snarling. It wasn't a pretty fight. Our years of weapons training didn't come into play. Neither of us used any finesse or strategy. The fight was a purely animal thing, two predators fighting for superiority.

I was faster, but my father was meaner. I clawed at him, and in an instant that caught me off balance, he stopped trying to grapple me. I fell forward just enough for him to take advantage of it. He hefted me into the air and threw me down the length of the hallway. He probably hadn't accounted for the fact that the walls were weakened by years of abandon, and I crashed through it in a puff of aged plaster and woodworm dust and into a theater.

It was small but had once been grand. The red velvet curtains were moth-eaten, the seats threadbare, but the gilding on the carving above the stage still gleamed. The stage was still set. Plywood painted with the suggestion of stone walls lined the back of the stage, and there was a moldering gold-painted throne set on a pedestal in front of them. The harsh light from the music wing shone through the hole like some absurd parody of a spotlight, throwing the room into stark shadow.

My father stepped through the gap, his shadow cast across the entire stage.

"Is that all you've got?" The blow barely registered in my brain. Adrenaline or whatever was making me stronger and faster than before. Now was not the time to ponder over it, though. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Mother was always the strategist. Everyone knows you're not the brains of the operation."

That did more damage than any of the hits I'd landed on him so far. He snarled, charging at the stage. His anger made him fast, but I was faster, and he was clumsy with rage. I was in front of him in a flash, using his momentum against him and sending him sprawling into the edge of the stage. Something cracked. It could have been bone or old wood.

He staggered to his feet with a drunken lurch, snarling. He was off kilter. Roland was used to attacking, and his defense was clumsy and slow, as if he couldn't believe I had the gall to strike him. I swept my leg out, kicking him off his feet. Before he could get his bearings, I was on him again. He hit me in the stomach, and I snarled down at him, slamming my fist into his face so hard, I felt something give beneath my knuckles. He wheezed, tried to scrabble away, but I snatched him up and tossed him to the back of the stage. He crashed into the throne, and the plywood split under him, leaving him slumped in the seat at an odd angle as he tried to recover.

In a second I was on him, pinning him down. The pained, frantic whimper he let out seemed unnatural coming from him. I slammed him back against the splintered remains of the throne's back. Blood dribbled from his mouth. Blood he had stolen from someone. He looked up at me, fear flashing in his eyes.

It was so simple to force my way into his mind. He had no barriers up to protect himself. He'd always assumed nobody would ever be bold enough to violate his privacy so blatantly. His mind was bloody and dark, cluttered with centuries of memories, but I found the thread of what I was looking for with ease. Some part of him was always thinking about it. I became a spectator in my father's memories, just like he often was in mine.

It started with pain. Pain and blind fear, the shock of a sudden and unasked-for existence. People wreathed with power all around, staring down with cold interest. "Another experiment gone wrong," one said to another without any emotion in her voice. One of the people—one of the witches—stepping forward, and an instinctive knowledge that this was bad. The woman was tall and pale, very beautiful, with long dark hair, and a hungry look in her eye. She held a wand still covered in black and white tree bark. The creatures the spell had created didn't know much, but they knew fear. When the witch raised the wand, they fled.

Some of them were fast enough to get away. Many weren't. The forest had been so cold, so dark, so alien. The creatures had fully-formed bodies but the minds of babes in arms and no one to care for them. They were hungry. When they found the village, they didn't hesitate to feed themselves.

The most important creature was caught once, early on, before the power that was rightfully his had completely settled into him. The witches ran tests, tortured him, saw how much he could withstand. The witch with the wand was there, taking him apart and watching him put himself back together.

The creatures that survived realized there was nothing else like them. They came up with names for themselves, because there was no one else to do it. Shtriga. Mandurugo. Vampir.

The creature who would form himself into Roland De Montclair remembered the fear, the hunger. He never wanted to feel it again, and so he built himself into something powerful and dangerous.

He also remembered the witch with the wand.

Roland wasn't smart, but he was stubborn, driven, and bloody-minded. He wasn't good at finding things out on his own, but he could scare people into doing the work for him. People fell into step behind him and found out all sorts of things. They found out what the witches had wanted.

The witches had wanted immortality, and they had, in a way, created it, but not for themselves. They created the things that had become vampires, and the vampires could live forever as long as they took on the life force of others. That was the hunger. They needed life and couldn't make their own.

His informants told him that the wand fed on life force, just like the vampires did. It was a backup plan meant to destroy vampires. Roland had laughed at that. The weapon wouldn't even have worked against them; vampires could get more life, could drink and drink and drink it as long as they were willing to hunt it down. The witches were the ones who would be stuck if they were drained. After all, the life force was part of them. They called it magic, but Roland knew better. He knew better.

The witches were wrong about vampires. They thought vampires were abominations, mistakes, but they were fools. Vampires were pure, divine, the only true beings. They were separate from that life force, that magic , and therefore above it. Roland would show them. Every time he ate, it was an act of communion with himself. The more he ate, the more divine he became.

He found Iskra. Sharp, brutal, wonderful Iskra, the epitome of cold control. It hadn't been love—gods didn't love—but it had been as though he'd found a part of himself. She found the wand and didn't even know how important it was. Just another silly trinket she picked up. He knew, though, and he took it and started experimenting with it.

He'd had one of his followers use it, of course. Gods didn't do these things themselves. His people captured a hedge witch, the sort of lowly creature that scraped out a living curing warts and getting cattle to produce milk. When the vampire he'd selected leveled the wand at her, she withered away, weak and useless without her so-called ‘magic'. The vampire withered away, too.

There were many more experiments over the years. Every time, the peon selected to wield the wand was insufficient. It didn't matter. Roland could always get more people to follow him. He was good at that. People liked following someone stronger than them, and Roland was stronger than anyone.

He wasn't going to use the wand himself, that much was clear. But someone had to use the weapon, and it would have to be someone powerful enough to fully drain that witch before succumbing to the wand themselves. Roland knew what he had to do. He thought about the witch with the wand, how she had tortured him. He thought about the samples she and her accomplices took from him.

The samples had been preserved. His people found them. They'd captured another witch, kept her alive long enough for her to do the divine alchemy required to combine what was his and what was Iskra's. When Roland pressed his hand to the magical womb, he felt the pride of a master smith who had crafted the perfect blade. A weapon to wield a weapon—an extension of Roland. The child would carry out his grand design one day, when Roland was ready. Roland kept the wand close, hidden where only he knew. Things were coming together, just as they should. He was willing them into place.

Roland saw the witch with the wand every time he closed his eyes, but it was nearly a thousand years before he saw her in person again. She didn't recognize him. She came to him with offers of power. A seat at her right hand. Scraps and dregs of the corrupted, lowly results of her ‘magic'. But Roland saw the opportunity for what it was. The witch was strong and had gotten stronger over the years. She must have seen that vampires were the true and holy creatures, because she had begun to emulate them. She ate life now, too, although she still called it magic. She wasn't made for it, and it twisted her up, made her erratic. She confessed that she was trying to gain enough power to undo this, to find an immortality that didn't require the divine consumption. Roland nearly laughed in her face. Nearly struck her. So many years, and she still didn't see.

Soon, she would understand. Soon, he would explain it all to her, just before he used the weapon. It would be him, really. The boy was part of him. Just an extension of Roland's power. But the boy had forgotten this. He would have to be reminded, shaped into something useful.

He would understand. Roland would make him understand. And then the boy would fulfill his purpose, the witch would be dead, and the whole world would see the true power of vampires. The creature had made itself into Roland De Montclair, and then it had made Roland De Montclair into a god. He would destroy the witch, and then he would ascend. The whole world would worship him. They would beg to offer themselves to him, and he would finally drink his fill.

Roland wasn't scared anymore, but he was still so, so hungry.

All of that rushed over me in a few seconds. I yanked myself out of my father's mind and stumbled away, breathing hard with dead lungs. I couldn't bear to touch him for a moment longer. Bile crept up my throat, and my stomach roiled with a ravenous hunger.

The fight had left my father. He was limp against the ruined prop throne, but he was smiling, eyes focused on me.

"Now you understand, don't you?" he rasped. "You see what it's all been for."

He had never even wanted a child. I had always been a tool to him. All these centuries, and he never even saw me as a person.

My father hadn't stopped fighting because he was exhausted or hurt. He'd stopped because he thought after that revelation, I would be on his side. He thought he'd won. His smile was triumphant.

Slowly, deliberately, I bent and picked up a piece of the throne that had splintered off. The cheap wood had splintered into a long, narrow triangular piece. It wasn't terribly sharp, but it didn't have to be—not with the amount of force I intended to use.

I stared down at my father, slouched in the remains of the cheap imitation of a throne. I knew what to do—I'd done it before. The right angle, the right placement, the right amount of strength. Roland kept his glassy, manic smile as I positioned the makeshift stake against his chest. Even now, it didn't occur to him that I wasn't going to do what he wanted.

As I thrust the stake in deep, his grin never shifted. There was a wet noise, and then silence.

I stood there for several long minutes, looking down at him, then I closed the corpse's eyes and went to retrieve the files with the names of the dead.