But in the same miraculous way, the hatred melted. The face was again that of a sweet and fresh mortal boy.
The old queen vampire smiled almost wanly and ran her white claws through her hair.
“You turn to me for explanations?” the leader asked.
His eyes moved over Gabrielle and the dazed figure of Nicolas against her shoulder. Then returned to me.
“I could speak until the end of the world,” he said, “and I could never tell you what you have destroyed here.”
I thought the old queen made some derisive sound, but I was too engaged with him, the softness of his speech and the great raging anger within.
“Since the beginning of time,” he said, “these mysteries have existed.” He seemed small standing in this vast chamber, the voice issuing from him effortlessly, his hands limp at his sides. “Since the ancient days there have been our kind haunting the cities of man, preying upon him by night as God and the devil commanded us to do. The chosen of Satan we are, and those admitted to our ranks had first to prove themselves through a hundred crimes before the Dark Gift of immortality was given to them.”
He came just a little nearer to me, the torchlight glimmering in his eyes.
“Before their loved ones they appeared to die,” he said, “and with only a small infusion of our blood did they endure the terror of the coffin as they waited for us to come. Then and only then was the Dark Gift given, and they were sealed again in the grave after, until their thirst should give them the strength to break the narrow box and rise.”
His voice grew slightly louder, more resonant.
“It was death they knew in those dark chambers,” he said. “It was death and the power of evil they understood as they rose, breaking open the coffin, and the iron doors that held them in. And pity the weak, those who couldn’t break out. Those whose wails brought mortals the day after—for none would answer by night. We gave no mercy to them.
“But those who rose, ah, those were the vampires who walked the earth, tested, purified, Children of Darkness, born of a fledgling’s blood, never, the full power of an ancient master, so that time would bring the wisdom to use the Dark Gifts before they grew truly strong. And on these were imposed the Rules of Darkness. To live among the dead, for we are dead things, returning always to one’s own grave or one very nearly like it. To shun the places of light, luring victims away from the company of others to suffer death in unholy and haunted places. And to honor forever the power of God, the crucifix about the neck, the Sacraments. And never never to enter the House of God; lest he strike you powerless, casting you into hell, ending your reign on earth in blazing torment.”
He paused. He looked at the old queen for the first time, and it seemed, though I could not truly tell, that her face maddened him.
“You scorn these things,” he said to her. “Magnus scorned these things!” He commenced to tremble. “It was the nature of his madness, as it is the nature of yours, but I tell you you do not understand these mysteries! You shatter them like so much glass, but you have no strength, no power save ignorance. You break and that is all.”
He turned away, hesitating as if he would not go on, and looking about at the vast crypt.
I heard the old vampire queen very softly singing.
She was chanting something under her breath, and she began to rock back and forth, her head to one side, her eyes dreamy. Once again, she looked beautiful.
“It is finished for my children,” the leader whispered. “It is finished and done, for they know now they can disregard all of it. The things that bound us together, gave us the strength to endure as damned things! The mysteries that protected us here.”
Again he looked at me.
“And you ask me for explanations as if it were inexplicable!” he said. “You, for whom the working of the Dark Trick is an act of shameless greed. You gave it to the very womb that bore you! Why not to this one, the devil’s fiddler, whom you worship from afar every night?”
“Have I not told you?” sang the vampire queen. “Haven’t we always known? There is nothing to fear in the Sign of the Cross, nor the