Crimson Death

Page 21

 
 
4

   I CALLED EDWARD FROM my Jeep, because I’d finally figured out how to use the Bluetooth so that I could talk and drive at the same time. It was a little bit like being able to pat your head, rub your stomach, and jump on one foot at the same time while chewing gum, but much more useful and less silly looking.    The phone had rung three times before I realized I hadn’t done the time zone math and it was probably the wee hours of the morning there. Had I learned anything that couldn’t wait until he was awake? No. I hung up, hoping he’d slept through it. I wasn’t used to Edward being half a world away from me. We’d never been more than about a five-hour plane ride from each other before. I guess Ireland wasn’t that much longer actually, but the time difference made it feel like more.
   I wasn’t surprised when his ringtone filled the car just moments after I’d hung up. I’d have called him back, too. “Hey, Ed . . . Ted,” I said.
   “I’m in my room alone; you can call me whatever you want.” His voice was thick and rough with sleep.
   “I forgot the time change. Sorry.”
   “Just tell me you found out something that will help.”
   “Yes and no. There have always been vampires in Ireland, or at least for the last thousand years and change.”
   I heard the sheets move as he changed positions. “Say again.”
   I did.
   “How do you know?”
   “First Jean-Claude told me, and then we had one of the vamps from Ireland in town.”
   “I didn’t know you had any Irish vampires in St. Louis.”
   “He doesn’t consider himself Irish even though he was a vampire there for about a thousand years, give or take a few hundred.”
   “You don’t have that many vampires that old, or you didn’t. Is it one of the Harlequin?” See, he really did know most of my business.
   “No, it’s Damian.”
   “What? He doesn’t sound Irish.”
   “Like I said, he doesn’t consider himself Irish. He said, I just died there. He still thinks of himself as a Viking. He was what history calls a Danish Viking, and that’s still how he thinks of himself.”
   “Even after a millennium in Ireland.”
   “Yep.”
   “Okay, I don’t have to understand Damian’s motives. What did you learn?”
   “His old mistress, She-Who-Made-Him, literally, you can’t say her name without risking her invading your mind. She can do some of the tricks that the Mother of All Darkness could do, and some of the old vampire council could do.”
   “He tell you, or you experience it?”
   “She’s visited us once. She caused fear in Damian and it spread to me and Nathaniel. It was pretty awful. I think that if Richard and Jean-Claude hadn’t been able to lend a metaphysical hand, she could literally have killed us with fear.”
   I heard the sheets move again. I was betting he was sitting up against the headboard. “You mean scared to death, literally?”
   “Yes.”
   “I know you’ve met other vampires that could cause fear like that.”
   “Night hags, yeah, but they were amateurs compared to She-Who-Made-Him.”
   “You really don’t want to say her name out loud.”
   “No, I really don’t.”
   “She spooked you.”
   “Let’s just say that I don’t want a revisit.”
   “You don’t spook that easy,” he said.
   “Not normally, no.”
   “Why didn’t the Irish know they had vampires?” he asked.
   “Damian said that they kept their numbers small, a dozen at the most and usually fewer. They took a little blood here and there, and when they did kill it was easy to blame it on war, wild animals, just the violence of the day. He said there was usually some battle or something to blame disappearances on.”
   “That makes sense.”
   “He also said that the jail nearby didn’t care if people died a little early as long as they weren’t the ones who paid the jailer for better treatment.”
   “A thousand years ago jails and hospitals would have been perfect for a vampire to feed from, and he’s right: no one would have given a second thought to a few more deaths.”
   “Most of the vampires I’ve known well wouldn’t feed in jail or hospitals. It wasn’t elegant enough victims, I guess. I know the vampire council didn’t feed like that.”
   “They were aristocrats, Anita. They could prey on peasants and no one would question it, or no one that mattered. There were enough human nobles who used the common people like their personal hunting ground and no one questioned them either.”
   “The only two nobles I know that were ever brought up on charges were Elizabeth Báthory and Gilles de Rais, but at least Báthory was caught because she had the bad taste to use a minor noble’s daughter as a victim. Only de Rais was actually put on trial without a noble victim.”
   “I always thought one of them must have had a vampire involved somewhere.”
   “The vampire community actually thinks that Gilles de Rais sold his soul to the devil after his friend Joan of Arc was burned alive. It sort of damaged his faith in God’s goodness.”
   “I could see that,” Edward said.
   “You and I both know that even if the devil wanted his soul, the urges that made him a murdering pedophile had to be there all along.”
   “Yes, but he used his faith in God to not act on them. It was the theory that the Church used for centuries that you could pray yourself out of pedophilic urges, so become a priest.”
   “Yeah, ask the victims of pedophile priests and nuns how that’s worked out.”
   “I didn’t say I agreed with it.”
   “Sorry. Raised Catholic, so it’s a sore point with me.”
   “Sometimes I forget that about you.”
   “What?”
   “That once you were a good little Catholic schoolgirl.”
   “I actually didn’t go to Catholic school.”
   “Really, so no little plaid skirt outfit?”
   “No. Sorry to disappoint you.”
   “Schoolgirl really isn’t my thing.”
   “Somehow I didn’t think it would be.”