Balthazar
Page 16
“You mean—the one who died last summer.”
Skye nodded. “It wasn’t him. That’s not how Dakota died, and—it just wasn’t him. But it reminded me of him. That was bad enough.”
Balthazar had always thought that if Charity had died in another way, he might have been done grieving for her by now. That eventually he could have accepted her death and moved on. Looking at Skye’s devastated face, he wasn’t as sure about that any longer.
Keeping his tone gentle, Balthazar said, “What happened to your brother?”
“He was spending his summer break in Australia with his girlfriend, Felicia. They went off-roading in the outback. His ATV flipped. He broke his neck.” Her eyes had reddened with unshed tears. “So when I saw that guy beneath the bleachers, and he looked like Dakota, and there was all that pain in his neck, it was like—like I was feeling my brother die, too.”
Skye looked away, apparently struggling for composure. Balthazar had learned over centuries that some grief could not be answered or consoled; the only service to give to people in that dark place was to bear witness. So he wrapped his hand around hers, accepting her sorrow, letting it flow through the space between them as her breathing slowed and became more steady.
After a few moments, Skye said, “We need to talk about Redgrave.”
“I know.” On top of all this, she still had Redgrave after her. How much would she have to bear? It was too much, and Balthazar felt a surge of anger—at Redgrave, at fate, at her brother for being such a daredevil—at anybody who had hurt Skye—
No humans, he reminded himself.
Skye then told him about Redgrave’s latest stunt. Though Balthazar felt slightly relieved that Redgrave wasn’t reckless enough to go after her in public—yet—the rest of it only made him angrier. “Don’t listen to any of his … bargains, or compromises, or whatever else he’s calling them. I did, once, almost four hundred years ago. I’m still paying the price.”
“You mean—is Redgrave the vampire who—”
“He killed me. He turned me into a vampire.” Balthazar realized his hand still clasped hers, and reluctantly pulled it away. It was difficult admitting this to her—to anyone. He disliked reliving their history even through the retelling. “Technically, I agreed to the change. But only after he took me to a place where I would’ve done anything just to have the chance to die and end it.”
Her face white, Skye nodded. “I don’t trust him. I never will. But—he still knows something about me that we don’t.”
“We’ll find out for ourselves.”
It was an automatic response; anything was better than turning to Redgrave and expecting answers. So it surprised Balthazar when Skye rose and went to the medicine cabinet. “Okay, then. Let’s start.”
When she turned back toward him, she held an empty plastic syringe, and he realized what she meant to do. “This is a bad idea.”
Skye shook her head. Though she was obviously still weakened from her ordeal, having a goal made her focus on that and nothing else. “The only way we’re going to understand what my blood does is for a vampire to drink it.”
“I may have already done that.”
“Wait—what?”
“After all that insanity at the gas station—right after Mr. Lovejoy crashed his car, I tasted a few drops of blood that were on the ground. I thought it might have been his, but… I felt strange afterward. So the blood must have been yours.” Shameful to admit how much he had wanted that brief taste of human blood, but it had become too important not to talk about. But the intense hallucinatory experience that had followed—the almost total immersion in his own past—that couldn’t be only about her blood. It was impossible. Or was it? “I can’t be sure.”
“You can be sure if you try it again, and you drink more this time.”
“It’s a bad idea.” Getting used to the taste of her blood—it was so insanely tempting that Balthazar thought it would be better if he never, ever knew.
The desire to drink living human blood was the most inescapable part of being a vampire … more inescapable even than death. Living off animals was possible—Balthazar had proved that—but their blood lacked the full lifeforce that vampires craved past the point of reason. In the past century, the practice of blood donation had created ways to get even human blood without hurting people, but only a few hours outside the body robbed the blood of its most precious qualities.
Drinking human blood allowed vampires to continue to look human, to continue to use reason. Animal blood would hold the monster within at bay, too, but not for nearly as long. Trying to withstand temptation only led to madness—only brought the monster closer to the surface. To resist becoming nothing but a homicidal predator, Balthazar had to drink human blood from time to time. It was the governing irony of vampiric existence.
But to get hooked on the blood of one human in particular—that was far more dangerous than not drinking blood at all.
Her expression only became more stubborn. “It’s the only way to find out what they’re after, so we’re doing it.” Skye hesitated as she looked down at the needle. “I never actually did this before, but it looks easy enough on TV.”
“So does flipping over your car at a hundred miles per hour and not dying.” Balthazar took the syringe from her. “I did some medic duty during the Korean conflict. I can handle this.”
She was right, of course. They had to investigate, and there was no other place to begin than with testing her blood’s true power.
But as Balthazar looked at Skye, he knew they courted danger. The vision he’d had before had been overwhelming; so real, he’d lost all control over the here and now. Bad enough at any time, but here—where he was being offered the blood of a living person, the human blood he so desperately missed and craved—in this small, private, closed-in room with a girl who drew him even more strongly than blood—
He slid the soft, plum-colored sleeve of her sweater up her arm. Her human skin was warm and silky against his. There was nothing handy for a tourniquet, so Balthazar simply clenched his fist tightly just above her elbow. A shiver ran along his body as she whimpered so softly he could barely hear, and the pale, fragile skin at the inside of her elbow seemed to streak with the blue of her veins, with the darkness of her blood.
The predator within him wanted to throw away the needle, lower his mouth to her skin, bite in deep. His fangs burned within his jaw, eager for release.
Slowly, deliberately, he slid the needle into her arm, then pulled back the depressor. Brilliant red liquid filled the syringe. That shade of red had, as always, a hypnotic effect on him, and it was all he could do to keep going, to pull the needle out at the right moment and then bend her arm.
“You’re good at that,” Skye said. “It didn’t hurt at all.”
Balthazar couldn’t look away from the syringe. He could feel the heat of her blood through the plastic. “I’m going to drink this now. If I act strangely—especially if I make a move toward you—get the hell out of here. Immediately.”
Skye held her bent arm against her chest as if it might provide some protection, but said nothing. Balthazar angled the tip of the syringe into his mouth, pressed down, tasted warm, real, true human blood—
—and he was gone.
Massachusetts, 1640
“YOU CAN’T CATCH ME.”
Though he couldn’t see Jane, he could hear her giggling. Balthazar looked for her, but in the thickly wooded glade, with the still-thick leaves only just starting to turn to gold, she was just one of the many shadows.
Grinning, he said, “I can try.”
He dashed in the direction of her voice and was rewarded with a cry of laughter and a glimpse of her. Jane’s favorite green dress would have made her invisible in the summertime, but now she was vivid against the gold, the one thing still living in a forest on the verge of its long sleep.
Although he could have caught her almost right away, Balthazar prolonged the chase as long as he could. It was wonderful to hear her laughter, to not worry about anyone overhearing or judging them, to just be in the moment—
—but even better to catch her.
His hands slid around her waist, and she pretended to push against his chest to escape, but she didn’t push very hard. After one moment’s hesitation, one moment where he wasn’t sure he dared, Balthazar bent down and softly kissed her … hardly for a second. He’d never kissed anyone before.
Nor had she. He knew that when she pulled back and put her hand to her lips. Yet he could tell she was as delighted as he was.
“You shouldn’t,” Jane whispered, trying to sound scandalized. “What would the elders say?”
“The elders aren’t here.” If they were, Balthazar thought, they might order him put in the stocks for immorality, so people could throw rotten cabbages at his head. He imagined getting out of it by offering to marry Jane to preserve her honor. If the church elders agreed to that, his father couldn’t stand in the way any longer, and he could have his own home with her.
A cool breeze rustled through the trees around them, and a fall of golden leaves showered down. Jane flung her arms wide and spun beneath them, her face turned up to the sky. “Oh, right now I feel like I could fly. Just like a bird.”
“Come here, and we can both feel that way again.” Balthazar caught one of her arms and pulled her close.
This time, the kiss lasted much longer, and by the end wasn’t nearly as soft.
When they pulled apart, Balthazar combed his fingers through Jane’s dark hair and smiled down at her—only to see her own expression crumpling, as if she was about to cry. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re wrong,” she said. “Or so everyone around us believes.”
“They’re the ones who are wrong.”
“We are Catholics.” Jane spoke the words as though she had been over them in her mind many times before. “Your family are heretics.”
“You know I care little for the church—”
“The churches care for us whether we like it or not. Where would we live?”
Balthazar fell silent. Throughout the colonies, a patchwork of religious beliefs and rules governed each settlement; the only true faith in one colony was forbidden and outlawed in another. Though the rules governing marriage were secular—at least, here in Massachusetts—nobody would allow either of them to remain here married to the other.
I could convert, he wanted to say, but the words died in his throat. To become a Papist would be to cast his parents, and Charity, out of his life forever; they would never even acknowledge him after that, and he could never reside permanently in Massachusetts again. He, like Jane and her father, would require special permission even to visit. Could he bear it? Yes, he could leave his parents—but not Charity. His dreamy little sister had no one else to understand her.
More than that, he’d heard sermons his whole life about the evils of the Roman Catholic Church. Although he could think for himself enough to judge Jane and her father as he found them, he knew he could never, in honesty, claim the Catholic faith as the truth of his heart. Without that, any conversion would be empty, and Jane would know it.
Jane stepped away from him, her earlier joy faded and blown away like the first fall leaves. “We shouldn’t have come here today.”
“Jane, don’t. Let’s enjoy what time we can.”
“It will only make parting more difficult.” He held out his hand to stop her, but Jane dodged him. “Let me go. Please. I can’t think on this any longer now.”
The gentle, mournful quality of her expression then stirred a memory in him of another girl—someone who reminded him of her. The name Bianca flickered in his mind, and it seemed to him it was important, but he couldn’t hold on to it for long.
Skye nodded. “It wasn’t him. That’s not how Dakota died, and—it just wasn’t him. But it reminded me of him. That was bad enough.”
Balthazar had always thought that if Charity had died in another way, he might have been done grieving for her by now. That eventually he could have accepted her death and moved on. Looking at Skye’s devastated face, he wasn’t as sure about that any longer.
Keeping his tone gentle, Balthazar said, “What happened to your brother?”
“He was spending his summer break in Australia with his girlfriend, Felicia. They went off-roading in the outback. His ATV flipped. He broke his neck.” Her eyes had reddened with unshed tears. “So when I saw that guy beneath the bleachers, and he looked like Dakota, and there was all that pain in his neck, it was like—like I was feeling my brother die, too.”
Skye looked away, apparently struggling for composure. Balthazar had learned over centuries that some grief could not be answered or consoled; the only service to give to people in that dark place was to bear witness. So he wrapped his hand around hers, accepting her sorrow, letting it flow through the space between them as her breathing slowed and became more steady.
After a few moments, Skye said, “We need to talk about Redgrave.”
“I know.” On top of all this, she still had Redgrave after her. How much would she have to bear? It was too much, and Balthazar felt a surge of anger—at Redgrave, at fate, at her brother for being such a daredevil—at anybody who had hurt Skye—
No humans, he reminded himself.
Skye then told him about Redgrave’s latest stunt. Though Balthazar felt slightly relieved that Redgrave wasn’t reckless enough to go after her in public—yet—the rest of it only made him angrier. “Don’t listen to any of his … bargains, or compromises, or whatever else he’s calling them. I did, once, almost four hundred years ago. I’m still paying the price.”
“You mean—is Redgrave the vampire who—”
“He killed me. He turned me into a vampire.” Balthazar realized his hand still clasped hers, and reluctantly pulled it away. It was difficult admitting this to her—to anyone. He disliked reliving their history even through the retelling. “Technically, I agreed to the change. But only after he took me to a place where I would’ve done anything just to have the chance to die and end it.”
Her face white, Skye nodded. “I don’t trust him. I never will. But—he still knows something about me that we don’t.”
“We’ll find out for ourselves.”
It was an automatic response; anything was better than turning to Redgrave and expecting answers. So it surprised Balthazar when Skye rose and went to the medicine cabinet. “Okay, then. Let’s start.”
When she turned back toward him, she held an empty plastic syringe, and he realized what she meant to do. “This is a bad idea.”
Skye shook her head. Though she was obviously still weakened from her ordeal, having a goal made her focus on that and nothing else. “The only way we’re going to understand what my blood does is for a vampire to drink it.”
“I may have already done that.”
“Wait—what?”
“After all that insanity at the gas station—right after Mr. Lovejoy crashed his car, I tasted a few drops of blood that were on the ground. I thought it might have been his, but… I felt strange afterward. So the blood must have been yours.” Shameful to admit how much he had wanted that brief taste of human blood, but it had become too important not to talk about. But the intense hallucinatory experience that had followed—the almost total immersion in his own past—that couldn’t be only about her blood. It was impossible. Or was it? “I can’t be sure.”
“You can be sure if you try it again, and you drink more this time.”
“It’s a bad idea.” Getting used to the taste of her blood—it was so insanely tempting that Balthazar thought it would be better if he never, ever knew.
The desire to drink living human blood was the most inescapable part of being a vampire … more inescapable even than death. Living off animals was possible—Balthazar had proved that—but their blood lacked the full lifeforce that vampires craved past the point of reason. In the past century, the practice of blood donation had created ways to get even human blood without hurting people, but only a few hours outside the body robbed the blood of its most precious qualities.
Drinking human blood allowed vampires to continue to look human, to continue to use reason. Animal blood would hold the monster within at bay, too, but not for nearly as long. Trying to withstand temptation only led to madness—only brought the monster closer to the surface. To resist becoming nothing but a homicidal predator, Balthazar had to drink human blood from time to time. It was the governing irony of vampiric existence.
But to get hooked on the blood of one human in particular—that was far more dangerous than not drinking blood at all.
Her expression only became more stubborn. “It’s the only way to find out what they’re after, so we’re doing it.” Skye hesitated as she looked down at the needle. “I never actually did this before, but it looks easy enough on TV.”
“So does flipping over your car at a hundred miles per hour and not dying.” Balthazar took the syringe from her. “I did some medic duty during the Korean conflict. I can handle this.”
She was right, of course. They had to investigate, and there was no other place to begin than with testing her blood’s true power.
But as Balthazar looked at Skye, he knew they courted danger. The vision he’d had before had been overwhelming; so real, he’d lost all control over the here and now. Bad enough at any time, but here—where he was being offered the blood of a living person, the human blood he so desperately missed and craved—in this small, private, closed-in room with a girl who drew him even more strongly than blood—
He slid the soft, plum-colored sleeve of her sweater up her arm. Her human skin was warm and silky against his. There was nothing handy for a tourniquet, so Balthazar simply clenched his fist tightly just above her elbow. A shiver ran along his body as she whimpered so softly he could barely hear, and the pale, fragile skin at the inside of her elbow seemed to streak with the blue of her veins, with the darkness of her blood.
The predator within him wanted to throw away the needle, lower his mouth to her skin, bite in deep. His fangs burned within his jaw, eager for release.
Slowly, deliberately, he slid the needle into her arm, then pulled back the depressor. Brilliant red liquid filled the syringe. That shade of red had, as always, a hypnotic effect on him, and it was all he could do to keep going, to pull the needle out at the right moment and then bend her arm.
“You’re good at that,” Skye said. “It didn’t hurt at all.”
Balthazar couldn’t look away from the syringe. He could feel the heat of her blood through the plastic. “I’m going to drink this now. If I act strangely—especially if I make a move toward you—get the hell out of here. Immediately.”
Skye held her bent arm against her chest as if it might provide some protection, but said nothing. Balthazar angled the tip of the syringe into his mouth, pressed down, tasted warm, real, true human blood—
—and he was gone.
Massachusetts, 1640
“YOU CAN’T CATCH ME.”
Though he couldn’t see Jane, he could hear her giggling. Balthazar looked for her, but in the thickly wooded glade, with the still-thick leaves only just starting to turn to gold, she was just one of the many shadows.
Grinning, he said, “I can try.”
He dashed in the direction of her voice and was rewarded with a cry of laughter and a glimpse of her. Jane’s favorite green dress would have made her invisible in the summertime, but now she was vivid against the gold, the one thing still living in a forest on the verge of its long sleep.
Although he could have caught her almost right away, Balthazar prolonged the chase as long as he could. It was wonderful to hear her laughter, to not worry about anyone overhearing or judging them, to just be in the moment—
—but even better to catch her.
His hands slid around her waist, and she pretended to push against his chest to escape, but she didn’t push very hard. After one moment’s hesitation, one moment where he wasn’t sure he dared, Balthazar bent down and softly kissed her … hardly for a second. He’d never kissed anyone before.
Nor had she. He knew that when she pulled back and put her hand to her lips. Yet he could tell she was as delighted as he was.
“You shouldn’t,” Jane whispered, trying to sound scandalized. “What would the elders say?”
“The elders aren’t here.” If they were, Balthazar thought, they might order him put in the stocks for immorality, so people could throw rotten cabbages at his head. He imagined getting out of it by offering to marry Jane to preserve her honor. If the church elders agreed to that, his father couldn’t stand in the way any longer, and he could have his own home with her.
A cool breeze rustled through the trees around them, and a fall of golden leaves showered down. Jane flung her arms wide and spun beneath them, her face turned up to the sky. “Oh, right now I feel like I could fly. Just like a bird.”
“Come here, and we can both feel that way again.” Balthazar caught one of her arms and pulled her close.
This time, the kiss lasted much longer, and by the end wasn’t nearly as soft.
When they pulled apart, Balthazar combed his fingers through Jane’s dark hair and smiled down at her—only to see her own expression crumpling, as if she was about to cry. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re wrong,” she said. “Or so everyone around us believes.”
“They’re the ones who are wrong.”
“We are Catholics.” Jane spoke the words as though she had been over them in her mind many times before. “Your family are heretics.”
“You know I care little for the church—”
“The churches care for us whether we like it or not. Where would we live?”
Balthazar fell silent. Throughout the colonies, a patchwork of religious beliefs and rules governed each settlement; the only true faith in one colony was forbidden and outlawed in another. Though the rules governing marriage were secular—at least, here in Massachusetts—nobody would allow either of them to remain here married to the other.
I could convert, he wanted to say, but the words died in his throat. To become a Papist would be to cast his parents, and Charity, out of his life forever; they would never even acknowledge him after that, and he could never reside permanently in Massachusetts again. He, like Jane and her father, would require special permission even to visit. Could he bear it? Yes, he could leave his parents—but not Charity. His dreamy little sister had no one else to understand her.
More than that, he’d heard sermons his whole life about the evils of the Roman Catholic Church. Although he could think for himself enough to judge Jane and her father as he found them, he knew he could never, in honesty, claim the Catholic faith as the truth of his heart. Without that, any conversion would be empty, and Jane would know it.
Jane stepped away from him, her earlier joy faded and blown away like the first fall leaves. “We shouldn’t have come here today.”
“Jane, don’t. Let’s enjoy what time we can.”
“It will only make parting more difficult.” He held out his hand to stop her, but Jane dodged him. “Let me go. Please. I can’t think on this any longer now.”
The gentle, mournful quality of her expression then stirred a memory in him of another girl—someone who reminded him of her. The name Bianca flickered in his mind, and it seemed to him it was important, but he couldn’t hold on to it for long.
