Vampire Vow Page 4

  "Gotta have porters and groundskeepers, too." He smiled sheepishly.

  "Ah, I see. You are responsible for the charming landscaping, then?"

  "Me and Brother Michael. We tend the greenhouse, too."

  "And is Brother Michael a stooped old farmer?"

  Luke shook his head. "He ain't but five years older than me. Lot smarter though. Reads like a fiend. Just not interested in scholar stuff."

  As the boy helped me unload my trunk from the car, I surveyed the landscape in the moonlight: the long dirt path to the monastery snaked through trees and down a hillside until it hit a country road, invisible from the promontory. Behind the buildings, acres of woods rose to the Appalachian peaks that now looked like bites taken from indigo paper. We were far from the city of Knoxville, from heavy settlement, but I smelled human blood in the cold night air, as I'd known I would.

  My stay here would be short if I fed on monks again. This time I would resist the urge even longer than I had the last time. Once I started on monks—sick of feeding on drifters and prostitutes and other refuse no one missed—once I started on monks I couldn't control my appetite for their consecrated flesh, which carried me to orgiastic heights. I would grow careless, leaving trails of blood, missing the suppers I only pretended to eat anyway, missing compline—unable to stomach invocations of Joshu. In the bloody chaos, clues would point to me and I would have to flee once again, often destroying the monastery as I had recently done in England, when the good brothers of St. Sylvester discovered too much.

  My cravings defeated my own purpose. I intended to steal the souls of devout boys, not their mortal lives. Controlling a boy thrilled me as terrifically as it had during my existence as a man. My cock still hardened. I could still take a boy, though it was the sight of him surrendering his will to me, not the friction of fucking, that triggered my orgasm.

  I took no pleasure in barring the doors of St. Sylvester's, in torching the carpets and draperies, in razing the buildings that had given me security. But I had no choice, and no choice but to assume the identity of Abbot Reginald in order to make arrangements at St. Thomas. This time I would resist longer. I would stick to the indigenous food.

  "People live in the mountains?" I asked, lugging one side of the trunk while Luke took the other.

  "Some. Most is miners. But the mines done closed." Luke's breath steamed before him in the cold. "They get by on whatever they can shoot in the woods or pull out of the dirt. Michael takes them food and supplies."

  "Indeed."

  Inside the foyer, Luke unlocked a door that opened onto a dark and narrow stairway beneath the vestibule of the chapel. He flicked on the light and turned to take his side of the trunk.

  "It'll be easier if I carry it myself." I picked up the trunk and he moved out of my way.

  "My God, do you lift weights or something?"

  I grinned, feeling his eyes admiring me from behind—for when I chose to I could feel any senses directed at me. "Natural, brute strength, my friend." He did not know the half of my powers.

  Deep in the bowels of the church, we walked along a flagstone corridor, past alcoves made of brick, like burial niches in the Roman catacombs where I fed upon the neophyte Christians: the first martyrs—because of me, not the lions. The widely spaced incandescent bulbs along the walls shined upon marble altars within the alcoves.

  "The ordained brothers used to say their masses down here." Luke was leading the way now. "Don't see how you can sleep so close to the graves. Gives me the creeps."

  "With the Blessed Sacrament just above me? How can I be afraid, Luke?"

  "Still…"

  "Ah, I see we're coming to the crypt." Engraved marble tablets spaced six feet apart lined the walls. Six names were engraved on each of the tablets, which were embedded in the wall above an iron door that was soldered shut. I'd seen this sort of mausoleum many times: the coffins inside the small chambers were sealed in vaults, stacked in pairs. "How long has it been since a brother died?"

  "That'd be Brother Raymond, last year. Ninety-two years old. There he is." Luke pointed to one of the last mausoleums. The soldering was shiny still.

  I deposited my trunk on the floor of my cell, a small storage room beyond the crypt, which had been furnished with a bed, a desk, shelves, and a chest of drawers. In a room across from mine, plumbing had been installed for the priests who said their masses near the crypt. A duct from the boiler room directed meager heat into the entire subterranean space.

  It was after midnight, and I was growing ravenous, not having fed since the night before when I broke out of the coffin being shipped on a flight from London. When Luke offered me a fraternal embrace to welcome me, I wanted to pierce his supple throat and drink. I clutched him as I clutch my prey, willing him to immobility. Within his stunned body, I felt him succumbing. In that second I could have ordered him to do anything, he was so pliable. Latent homosexuals—a category that obviously fit him—were always the easiest to control in monasteries, where such creatures flourish. But there was no hurry. Young Luke could wait. I released the boy and he pulled away, embarrassed but not sure why.

  Minutes after he had ascended to his cell, I was once again in the night air. The scent of blood drifted through the dense woods. I tore through branches, over frozen soil and brittle leaves, my preternatural sight steering me though the darkness in the direction of my prey.

  The wooden shack, its porch sagging and windows boarded, nestled into the mountainside near a frozen brook. A doorless old refrigerator and a heap of rusty cans and other garbage littered the ground beside it. Light bled through the windows. Inside, a baby cried. I stood on the porch, listening to a husky-voiced woman singing. Before she could finish her lullaby, I charged through the door.

  The woman, seated on a kitchen chair, cradling the baby in her arms, screamed. Of course my appearance was horrible, as always when I fed. My skin took on the jaundiced hue of a new corpse. My fangs grew in an instant to the length some stalactites take a century to reach. Fire burned in my eyes. I panted like a rabid dog.

  "Oh God, please. No!" She clutched her baby to her breast when I reached for it.

  I snatched the brat from her, raised it to my mouth, and, shaking off the blanket, sank my teeth into its soft belly. Its blood squirted like the juice of a plump tomato in my mouth.

  Shrieking hysterically, the woman grabbed at the baby, but I held it firmly, draining it and dropping the corpse on the dingy linoleum floor. She scrambled from her chair and threw herself on her dead child. Snatching a handful of her oily hair, I pulled her to her feet and ripped off her sweatshirt. She reeked, as though she hadn't bathed in a month. Her face was pockmarked. But her breasts, swollen with milk, enticed me. My fangs sliced into them. Her eyes rolled back. Her head dropped and her body went limp. When I'd had my fill, I let her crumple to the floor beside her child.

  I hauled their bodies to the heart of the dark woods and flung them into a ditch, rolling a fallen tree over them. Then I returned to the shack and wiped up stray drops of blood. Anyone searching for the victims in their remote dwelling—whoever supplied their food and fuel—would assume they'd vacated and trudged to the warmth of the city.

  Shortly before dawn I raced back to my cell. Stuffing pillows under the blanket in case anyone should look in on me during the day, I left the cold cubicle and hurried to the crypt. The iron door of old Brother Raymond's mausoleum gave easily under my strength. I slipped into the dark, cramped chamber, where I had to stoop like a humpback, and pulled the gate firmly shut behind me. The lingering smell of decay, no longer detectable to a mortal, wafted to my nostrils, at once familiar and repugnant. Tracing the odor to the top vault of the third pair of tombs, the one farthest from the door, I pried it open. The plain pine casket was perfectly intact, probably the only one in the whole crypt in such a condition. I opened the lid, scooped out the skeleton, still dressed in a habit, dumped it on the floor to be discarded later, and climbed into the coffin. Within seconds of closing th
e lid, I drifted off, sated and exhausted.

  Chapter Nine

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  I did not need to feed every night. Sometimes I could last a week or more if I'd imbibed enough blood. The woman and her baby had glutted me. I went for 10 days before killing again, this time a tramp who lived in a hovel of corrugated metal. In the first month at St. Thomas I fed on several more mountain people, careful to bury their remains in the woods to avoid raising alarm. After centuries of inhabiting monasteries, I slipped easily into a routine. Rising just after sunset, I joined the brothers at table because it was expected of me, even though I always arranged to eat my own meals in the kitchen at times appropriate for a nocturnal schedule to keep hidden my inability to take normal food. While they swallowed their stew, the 23 men—most in their 50s and 60s with a few younger monks scattered about, all garbed in black, hooded robes—listened to readings from Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ or from the works of their fat hero, Aquinas. (I'd never lived with that medieval scholar's community, but I had met many monks who confirmed rumors that a semicircle had been carved into the dining table to accommodate his piggish girth.)

  After dinner came a period of recreation. The monks could gather in the social hall or exercise in the basement gymnasium. Compline was chanted at 8 in the dimly lit choir stalls. Then the monks filed to their wretched holes. Fortunately, the chanting of matins had long ago been abandoned by the group; being in my assigned stall at 3 in the morning used to take some maneuvering, especially when my victims took me far from the grounds. I usually attended compline, as much as I loathed it—hearing Joshu's name again and again, the words about his blood, his body, at once a mockery of my own feedings and a reminder that I could not possess him. I was always half afraid that I would storm up to the altar and rip open the priest's throat.

  But of course I did no such thing.

  Instead, very easily, I exerted ever-increasing control over young Luke. I had him violating the Grand Silence within a few weeks. He would sneak down to my cell after compline, eager as a spaniel who wanted petting. He sobbed to me more than once about the mother who abandoned him after the death of his father, about the stern grandfather who raised him.

  "Very sad," I said after one of his crying jags. "Come sit by me." I patted the cot I'd never slept in.

  He rose from the desk chair and settled on the bed, nestling against my shoulder. His wet cheeks gleamed in the light of the candles burning on the bookshelves. I detested the overhead fluorescent tubes.

  "That's better, isn't it?"

  He nodded. "Victor…" He paused.

  "Why have qualms?" I could hear his thoughts, like the confused voices of children on a playground. "What could be better? God has brought us together."

  "Do you think so?" He sniffed.

  I dug a handkerchief from my pocket. "Here, blow your nose."

  He did as I directed, then said, "Brother Matthew talks about particular friendships. The Imitation says they're the work of the devil."

  "Has the good abbot spoken to you about us?"

  He avoided my eyes. "No. In his sermons, I mean."

  "What about the others?" I glared at him. "Do they talk of you and me?"

  "Not really." He lowered his eyes once again.

  "Tell me the truth."

  "Well, Mike has asked a thing or two," he finally admitted, sheepishly.

  "Brother Michael wanted information about me?"

  "Not information, really. Sometimes when we're working in the greenhouse he asks things."

  "What kinds of things?"

  "Well, he asked about your order."

  "And what did you tell him?" I stood and walked to the desk.

  "Nothing. I don't really know nothing but what Brother Matthew told us all. You was in some other kind of Dominican order in England, Order of the Divine Word, and the monastery burned down and the other brothers died. And it was our duty to take you into our community. You never told me nothing else."

  I leaned against the desk with my arms crossed, examining his childlike face. "Tell me, if Brother Michael's as intelligent as you say, why is he content to spend the day doing mindless work in a greenhouse?"

  Luke twisted his mouth to one side and contemplated the question. "I expect it's a spiritual thing. He's damn holy. God comes first in everything. Maybe working the soil is good for his soul."

  I pondered the crucifix above the bed. I'd left it there to avoid rousing suspicion. "Why didn't you tell me about Michael's curiosity?"

  "I… I don't know. I never told him nothing, though. Not about breaking the Grand Silence or coming down here. I won't say nothing about you anymore."

  "Never mind, Luke." I turned my eyes back on him. "Talk to him all you want about me. Now you'd better leave. It's nearly midnight."

  Chapter Ten

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  From then on I paid special attention to young Brother Michael, whose good looks and intensity I'd already noticed during compline, when he sang the psalms with such fervor one would have thought he'd already entered the courts of paradise—or that he feared losing paradise altogether. I liked the latter possibility much better.

  I'd seen many monks like Michael in my time: cocky, full of themselves, aware of their brawn and handsome features, of their intelligence and charisma. Yet at odds with themselves because of their strange ideas about religious perfection. Why in hell they did not stop resisting their gifts and make the most of them…well, I didn't waste time puzzling over this question.

  Such monks always posed the most intriguing challenge. I loved to watch them squirm against my magnetism, fasting, even flagellating their backs with cords until the flesh was raw and bleeding, and then inevitably succumbing to my powers. I possessed them—sexually, emotionally, spiritually. But when I considered making them like me—for I had come to understand this possibility—I despised them too much to have them as companions. Still, I never grew tired of seeking a companion or torturing my prey, especially those who were particularly unworthy of me.

  Once I'd observed Michael long enough to know that invariably he lifted weights on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, I started showing up in the workout room at the same times. At first, I only nodded to him and went about my workout (a joke, really, since to me the free weights might have been made of cork rather than steel). But one night, after a couple of the other monks had finished their workouts and left the room, I spoke.

  "You know," I said, turning my head from the bench press after replacing the barbell on its rest. "You should not worry so much about Luke. You can't keep him from worldly dangers."

  Without looking at me, Michael continued working the leg lift, his calves bulging into balls of olive flesh. Though the basement was cool, he wore only shorts and a tank top, soaked with perspiration. His dark, normally unkempt hair was tied back, accentuating his noble forehead, classic nose, and sturdy chin. He reminded me of the best of the Roman gladiators, one fiercely flaring his nostrils, searing his gaze into the eyes of his opponent, and yet alert to sudden moves.

  "I know you want to protect him," I persisted.

  "Why should you care what I think?" He glanced coldly at me, then returned his attention to exercise.

  His spiritedness only aroused my admiration. I looked him over as though he were a rare jeweled goblet, while he pretended to ignore my attention.

  "None of us is above sin. True, good Brother?"

  "None of us." He stopped, glaring at me. "I'm not pretending to be superior."

  "Of course not."

  "Some people are impressionable, that's all. They should be left alone."

  "I think you do consider yourself superior." I sat up on the bench and faced him. "You're even above this kind of conversation, aren't you? I'll wager you've never had one quite like it within the walls of this monastery."

  "I can't say that I have." He resumed his lifts, straining to speak as he raised the bar with his feet. "You don't care much for our Rule, do you? Surely, you
r own community had a similar one. How could you have made your peace with it?"

  I laughed. "Now I see. You like me. You really do. Yes, Michael, I am worldly. But it doesn't mean I belong to the world. Oh, it sounds like a contradiction, I know. To crave things of the flesh, but to be above them. But that's exactly my position. And I relish it."

  "You mock the spirit of monasticism. We're to live in the world, but not be of it. That doesn't mean giving in to bodily cravings, or believing we're above them." His emotion fueled an acceleration in his lifts.

  "I didn't say I was above the cravings. I'm above this world."

  He stopped, his chest heaving from the workout, and swiveled around on his bench to face me, his dark eyes intense. "You believe that, don't you? You're not just trying to scandalize me. But you're wrong, Brother Victor. You do belong to this world. So much so that you frighten me."

  "Frighten you?" I grinned. "I'm flattered."

  "Don't be. It says a lot more about me than you." Michael stood and grabbed a towel from a shelf above the weight bench and wiped his face and neck. "I have to shower before compline." He started toward the door.

  I grabbed his wrist. "You're hard on yourself," I said. "But not by nature. That's why I like you." I smiled.

  He studied me apprehensively and left the room.

  That night, long after midnight, I crept down the dark dormitory corridor to his cell. The heavy door creaked on its hinges as I entered, but he did not stir in his bed. For several minutes I gazed at his form in a darkness that, in my gifted vision, borrowed the shades of dusk, not moonless night. He lay enshrouded in shadows, breathing with the regular rhythm of one whose conscience is clear. He lay on his side, his arm outside the wool blanket, his hair splashing the white sheets with black. Stooping and touching his shoulder, I entered the dream, which, though buried far beneath his consciousness, played as vividly before my eyes as my own memories.