He stepped so close I could feel his breath on my face:
“Bastard!” he said. “You were made by the outcast, Magnus, in defiance of the coven, and in defiance of the Dark Ways. And so you gave the Dark Gift to this woman in rashness and vanity as it was given to you.”
“If Satan does not punish,” said the tiny woman, “we will punish as is our duty and our right!”
The boy pointed to the black draped pyre. He motioned for the others to draw back.
The kettledrums came up again, fast and loud. The circle widened, the torchbearers drawing near to the cloth.
Two of the others tore down the ragged drapery, great sheets of black serge that sent up the dust in a suffocating cloud.
The pyre was as big as the one that had consumed Magnus.
And on top of the pyre in a crude wooden cage, Nicolas knelt slumped against the bars. He stared blindly at us, and I could find no recognition in his face or his thoughts.
The vampires held their torches high for us to see. And I could feel their excitement rising again as it had when they had first brought us into the room.
Gabrielle was cautioning me with the press of her hand to be calm. Nothing changed in her expression.
There were bluish marks on Nicki’s throat. The lace of his shirt was filthy as were their rags, and his breeches were snagged and torn. He was in fact covered with bruises and drained almost to the point of death.
The fear silently exploded in my heart, but I knew this was what they wanted to see. And I sealed it within.
The cage is nothing, I can break it. And there are only three torches. The question is when to move, how. We would not perish like this, not like this.
I found myself staring coldly at Nicolas, coldly at the bundles of kindling, the crude chopped wood. The anger rolled out of me. Gabrielle’s face was a perfect mask of hate.
The group seemed to feel this and to move ever so slightly away from it, and then to draw in, confused and uncertain again.
But something else was happening. The circle was tightening.
Gabrielle touched my arm.
“The leader is coming,” she said.
A door had opened somewhere. The drums surged and it seemed those imprisoned in the walls went into agony, pleading to be forgiven and released. The vampires around us took up the cries in a frenzy. It was all I could do not to cover my ears.
A strong instinct told me not to look at the leader. But I couldn’t resist him, and slowly I turned to look at him and measure his powers again.
2
HE WAS moving towards the center of this great circle, his back to the pyre, a strange woman vampire at his side. And when I looked full at him in the torchlight I felt the same shock I had experienced when he entered Notre Dame.
It wasn’t merely his beauty; it was the astonishing innocence of his boyish face. He moved so lightly and swiftly I could not see his feet actually take steps. His huge eyes regarded us without anger, his hair, for all the dust in it, giving off faint reddish glints.
I tried to feel his mind, what it was, why such a sublime being should command these sad ghosts when it had the world to roam. I tried to discover again what I had almost discovered when we stood before the altar of the cathedral, this creature and I. If I knew that, maybe I could defeat him and defeat him I would.
I thought I saw him respond to me, some silent answer, some flash of heaven in the very pit of hell in his innocent expression, as if the devil still retained the face and form of the angel after the fall.
But something was very wrong. The leader was not speaking. The drums beat on anxiously, yet there was no communal conviction. The dark-eyed woman vampire was not joined with the others in their wailing. And others had stopped as well.
And the woman who had come in with the leader, a strange creature clothed as an ancient queen might have been in ragged gown and braided girdle, commenced to laugh.
The coven or whatever it called itself was quite understandably stunned. One of the kettledrums stopped.
The queen creature laughed louder and louder. Her white teeth flashed through the filthy veil of her snarled hair.
Beautiful she’d been once. And it wasn’t mortal age