2

He was moving towards the center of the 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 that had ravaged her. Rather, she appeared the lunatic, her mouth a horrid grimace, her eyes staring wildly before her, her body bent suddenly in an arc with her laughing, as Magnus had bent when he danced around his own funeral pyre.

"Did I not warn you?" she screamed. "Did I not?"

Far behind her, Nicolas moved in the little cage. I felt the laughter scorning him. But he was looking steadily at me, and the old sensibility was stamped on his features in spite of their distortion. Fear struggled with malice in him, and this was tangled with wonder and near despair.

The auburn-haired leader stared at the queen vampire, his expression unreadable, and the boy with the torch stepped forward and shouted for the woman to be silent at once. He made himself rather regal now, in spite of his rags.

The woman turned her back on him and faced us. She sang her words in a hoarse, sexless voice that gave way to a galloping laughter.

"A thousand times I said it, yet you would not listen to me," she declared. Her gown shivered about her as she trembled. "And you called me mad, time's martyr, a vagrant Cassandra corrupt by too long a vigil on this earth. Well, you see, every one of my predictions has come true."

The leader gave her not the slightest recognition.

"And it took this creature," she approached me, her face a hideous comic mask as Magnus's face had been, "this romping cavalier to prove it to you once and for all."

She hissed, drew in her breath, and stood erect. And for one moment in perfect stillness she passed into beauty. I longed to comb her hair, to wash it with my own hands, and to clothe her in a modern dress, to see her in the mirror of my time. In fact, my mind went suddenly wild with the idea of it, the reclaiming of her and the washing away of her evil disguise.

I think for one second the concept of eternity burned in me. I knew then what immortality was. All things were possible with her, or so for that one moment it seemed.

She gazed at me and caught the visions, and the loveliness of her face deepened, but the mad humor was coming back.

"Punish them," the boy screamed. "Call down the judgment of Satan. Light the fire."

But no one moved in the vast room.

The old woman hummed with her lips closed, some eerie melody with the cadence of speech. The leader stared as before.

But the boy in panic advanced upon us. He bared his fangs, raised his hand in a claw.

I snatched the torch from him and dealt him an indifferent blow to the chest that sent him across the dusty circle, sliding into the kindling banked against the pyre. I ground out the torch in the dirt.

The queen vampire let out a shriek of laughter that seemed to terrify the others, but nothing changed in the leader's face.

"I won't stand here for any judgment of Satan!" I said, glancing around the circle. "Unless you bring Satan here."

"Yes, tell them, child! Make them answer to you!" the old woman said triumphantly.

The boy was on his feet again.

"You know the crimes," he roared as he reentered the circle. He was furious now, and he exuded power, and I realized how impossible it was to judge any of them by the mortal form they retained. He might well have been an elder, the tiny old woman a fledgling, the boyish leader the eldest of them all.

"Behold," he said, stepping closer, his gray eyes gleaming as he felt the attention of the others. "This fiend was no novice here or anywhere; he did not beg to be received. He made no vows to Satan. He did not on his deathbed give up his soul, and in fact, he did not die!" His voice went higher, grew louder.

"He was not buried! He has not risen from the grave as a Child of Darkness! Rather he dares to roam the world in the guise of a living being! And in the very midst of Paris conducts business as a mortal man!"

Shrieks answered him from the walls. But the vampires of the circle were silent as he gazed at them. His jaw trembled.

He threw up his arms and wailed. One or two of the others answered. His face was disfigured with rage.

The old queen vampire gave a shiver of laughter and looked at me with the most maniacal smile.

But the boy wasn't giving up.

"He seeks the comforts of the hearth, strictly forbidden," he screamed, stamping his foot and shaking his garments. "He goes into the very palaces of carnal pleasure, and mingles there with mortals as they play music! As they dance!"

"Stop your raving!" I said. But in truth, I wanted to hear him out.

He plunged forward, sticking his finger in my face.

"No rituals can purify him!" he shouted. "Too late for the Dark Vows, the Dark Blessings..."

"Dark Vows? Dark Blessings?" I turned to the old queen. "What do you say to all this? You're as old as Magnus was when he went into the fire .... Why do you suffer this to go on?"

Her eyes moved in her head suddenly as if they alone possessed life, and there came that racing laughter out of her again.

"I shall never harm you, young one," she said. "Either of you." She looked lovingly at Gabrielle. "You are on the Devil's Road to a great adventure. What right have I to intervene in what the centuries have in store for you?"

The Devil's Road. It was the first phrase from any of them that had rung a clarion in my soul. An exhilaration took hold of me merely looking at her. In her own way, she was Magnus's twin.

"Oh yes, I am as old as your progenitor!" She smiled, her white fangs just touching her lower lip, then vanishing. She glanced at the leader, who watched her without the slightest interest or spirit. "I was here," she said, "within this coven when Magnus stole our secrets from us, that crafty one, the alchemist, Magnus ... when he drank the blood that would give him life everlasting in a manner which the World of Darkness had never witnessed before. And now three centuries have passed and he has given his pure and undiluted Dark Gift to you, beautiful child!"

Her face became again that leering, grinning mask of comedy, so much like Magnus's face.

"Show it to me, child," she said, "the strength he gave you. Do you know what it means to be made a vampire by one that powerful, who has never given the Gift before? It's forbidden here, child, no one of such age conveys his power! For if he should, the fledgling born of him should easily overcome this gracious leader and his coven here."

"Stop this ill-conceived lunacy!" the boy interrupted.

But everyone was listening. The pretty dark-eyed woman had come nearer to us, the better to see the old queen, and completely forgetting to fear or hate us now.

"One hundred years ago you'd said enough," the boy roared at the old queen, with his hand up to command her silence. "You're mad as all the old ones are mad. It's the death you suffer. I tell you all this outlaw must be punished. Order shall be restored when he and the woman he made are destroyed before us all."

With renewed fury, he turned on the others.

"I tell you, you walk this earth as all evil things do, by the will of God, to make mortals suffer for his Divine Glory. And by the will of God you can be destroyed if you blaspheme, and thrown in the vats of hell now, for you are damned souls, and your immortality is given you only at the price of suffering and torment."

A burst of wailing commenced uncertainly.

"So there it is finally," I said. "'The whole philosophy and the whole is founded upon a lie. And you cower like peasants, in hell already by your own choosing, enchained more surely than the lowest mortal, and you wish to punish us because we do not? Follow our examples because we do not!"

The vampires were some of them staring at us, others in frantic conversations that broke out all around. Again and again they glanced to the leader and to the old queen.

But the leader would say nothing.

The boy screamed for order:

"It is not enough that he has profaned holy places," he said, "not enough that he goes about as a mortal man. This very night in a village in the banlieue he terrified the congregation of an entire church. All of Paris is talking of this horror, the ghouls rising from the graves beneath the very altar, he and this female vampire on whom he worked the Dark Trick without consent or ritual, just as he was made."

There were gasps, more murmurs. But the old queen screamed with delight.

"These are high crimes," he said. "I tell you, they cannot go unpunished. And who among you does not know of his mockeries on the stage of the boulevard theater which he himself holds as property as a mortal man! There to a thousand Parisians he flaunted his powers as a Child of Darkness! And the secrecy we have protected for centuries was broken for his amusement and the amusement of a common crowd."

The old queen rubbed her hands together, cocking her head to the side as she looked at me.

"Is it all true, child?" she asked. "Did you sit in a box at the Opera? Did you stand there before the footlights of the Theatre-Francaise? Did you dance with the king and queen in the palace of the Tuileries, you and this beauty you made so perfectly? Is it true you traveled the boulevards in a golden coach?"

She laughed and laughed, her eyes now and then scanning the others, subduing them as if she gave forth a beam of warm light.

"Ah, such finery and such dignity," she continued. "What happened in the great cathedral when you entered it? Tell me now!"

"Absolutely nothing, madam!" I declared.

"High crimes!" roared the outraged boy vampire. "These are frights enough to rouse a city, if not a kingdom against us. And after centuries in which we have preyed upon this metropolis in stealth, giving birth only to the gentlest whispers of our great power. Haunts we are, creatures of the right, meant to feed the fears of man, not raving demons!"

"Ah, but it is too sublime," sang the old queen with her eyes on the domed ceiling. "From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries, I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart."

The gray-eyed boy was beside himself.

"Dispense with the trial," he said, glaring at the leader. "Light the pyre now."

The queen stepped back out of my way with an exaggerated gesture, as the boy reached for the torch nearest him, and I rushed at him, snatching the torch away from him, and heaving him up towards the ceiling, head over heels, so that he came tumbling in that manner all the way down. I stamped out the torch.

That left one more. And the coven was in perfect disorder, several rushing to aid the boy, the others murmuring to one another, the leader stock-still as if in a dream.

And in this interval I went forward, climbed up the pyre and tore loose the front of the little wooden cage.

Nicolas looked like an animated corpse. His eyes were leaden, and his mouth twisted as if he were smiling at me, hating me, from the other side of the grave. I dragged him free of the cage and brought him down to the dirt floor. He was feverish, and though I ignored and would have concealed it if I could, he shoved at me and cursed me under his breath.

The old queen watched in fascination. I glanced at Gabrielle, who watched without a particle of fear. I drew out the pearl rosary from my waistcoat and letting the crucifix dangle, I placed the rosary around Nicolas's neck. He stared stuporously down at the little cross, and then he began to laugh. The contempt, the malice, came out of him in this low metallic sound. It was the very opposite of the sounds made by the vampires. You could hear the human blood in it, the human thickness of it, echoing against the walls. Ruddy and hot and strangely unfinished he seemed suddenly, the only mortal among us, like a child thrown among porcelain dolls.

The coven was more confused than ever. The two burntout torches still lay untouched.

"Now, by your own rules, you cannot harm him," I said. "Yet it's a vampire who has given him the supernatural protection. Tell me, how to compass that?"

I carried Nicki forward. And Gabrielle at once reached out to take him in her arms.

He accepted this, though he stared at her as if he didn't know her and even lifted his fingers to touch her face. She took his hand away as she might the hand of a baby, and kept her eyes fixed on the leader and on me.

"If your leader has no words for you now, I have words,"

I said. "Go wash yourselves in the waters of the Seine, and clothe yourselves like humans if you can remember how, and prowl among men as you are obviously meant to do."

The defeated boy vampire stumbled back into the circle, pushing roughly away those who had helped him to his feet.

"Armand," he implored the silent auburn-haired leader. "Bring the coven to order! Armand! Save us now!"

"Why in the name of hell," I outshouted him, "did the devil give you beauty, agility, eyes to see visions, minds to cast spells?"

Their eyes were fixed on me, all of them. The gray-haired boy cried out the name "Armand" again, but in vain.

"You waste your gifts!" I said. "And worse, you waste your immortality! Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past."

Perfect silence reigned. I could hear Nicki's slow breathing. I could feel his warmth. I could feel his numbed fascination struggling against death itself.

"Have you no cunning?" I asked the others, my-voice swelling in the stillness. "Have you no craft? How did I, an orphan, stumble upon so much possibility, when you, nurtured as you are by these evil parents," I broke off to stare at the leader and the furious boy, "grope like blind things under the earth?"

"The power of Satan will blast you into hell," the boy bellowed, gathering all his remaining strength.

"You keep saying that!" I said. "And it keeps not happening, as we can all see!"

Loud murmurs of assent!

"And if you really thought it would happen," I said, "you would never have bothered to bring me here."

Louder voices in agreement.

I looked at the small forlorn figure of the leader. And all eyes turned away from me to him. Even the mad queen vampire looked at him.

And in the stillness I heard him whisper:

"It is finished."

Not even the tormented ones in the wall made a sound.

And the leader spoke again:

"Go now, all of you, it is at an end."

"Armand, no!" the boy pleaded.

But the others were backing away, faces concealed behind hands as they whispered. The drums were cast aside, the single torch was hung upon the wall.

I watched the leader. I knew his words weren't meant to release us.

And after he had silently driven out the protesting boy with the others, so that only the queen remained with him, he turned his gaze once again to me.