As for his mind, he did not know. He had traded emotion for what he used to survive, and rarely did he feel anything beyond pain anymore. He had become a glacier encased in tortured flesh.
Perhaps he owed his life to a phantom. As he thought of her, that invention of his own desperate loneliness, her image came to him: a pale, fair-haired maiden, alone in the forest, searching. What she sought, Gabriel did not know; nor had he ever seen her beyond his dreams. But as imaginary as she was, having her come to him these last months had kept him from surrendering himself to the eternal comforts of oblivion. Thanks to her, he could live with knowing that no one else in the world cared for him or thought of him anymore.
"If you will not come to the light, I must bring it to you." A tiny scrape and a hiss of burning sulfur brought a small flare of flame into the airless, lightless chamber. The human holding the struck match touched it to the blackened wick of the kerosene lamp the old priest had left behind, and the circle of light spread. He lifted the lamp so that it shed its yellow glow over his face and Gabriel. "You see, vampire? Unlike you, I am no monster."
Someone out of sight grunted. A sack dropped with a weighty thud.
The human wore the garb of a monster: a black cassock with three crosses embroidered in bloodred silk over his left breast. One, Gabriel knew, for every Darkyn the human had personally killed. The Brethren wore them as modern soldiers would medals.
Gabriel wondered if he would earn the human a fourth, and why he did not care if he did.
"We haven't been properly introduced yet, have we?" Blunt, small teeth gleamed between ruddy lips. "I am Father Benait."
Benait posed as a Catholic priest, as did all the other members of the secret order of Les Frères de la Lumière, the Brethren of the Light. This human and his fellow zealots possessed the blind dedication of true fanatics, which fueled their belief that Gabriel and others like him were a curse upon humanity.
The Brethren did not care that Gabriel and his kind, the Darkyn, had learned to temper their need for human blood, their only nourishment, and no longer killed humans for it. During his first year in captivity Gabriel had drawn on all his powers of persuasion to negotiate peace with his captors, but nothing moved them. They cared only for the preservation of their own twisted faith, and the perversions it allowed them to practice. Such as capturing vrykolakas like Gabriel and torturing them until they betrayed other Kyn.
Gabriel no longer bothered with useless diplomacy. Whatever the Brethren did to him in this place, he would endure it. It was his duty to do so. Even if he had wished to die, his body's ability to heal spontaneously ensured that he would survive almost anything. The numbing void created by using his talent kept out everything else.
That was the Kyn's true curse: to live beyond the desire for life.
Am I dead inside, and my body does not yet know it? Gabriel could not say.
Wheels nearby squealed as they turned; another, heavier load was dumped outside the room, sending vibrations through the wall. Benait smiled as he removed a cell phone from his cassock and dialed a number. Unconsciously he moved away from Gabriel as he spoke in rapid Italian.
Gabriel took advantage of the light to study the unfamiliar place he occupied. No windows, no exits or entrances, save the one open doorway through which the human had obviously entered. The room offered no clues as to exactly where he had been brought; all he had seen above in the moonlight when they had removed him from the truck were the overgrown grounds of some vast property and the outlines of a ruined, ancient structure. The trip from Paris to this place had taken many hours, yet he was fairly certain that he was still in France.
Why am I still in France?
That the Brethren hadn't moved him out of the country puzzled him. In Paris, he had overheard the interrogators discussing a ring of thieves who had been targeting and looting Brethren strongholds for icons and religious treasures. Evidently while burglarizing such places, they had been lured to several imprisoned Kyn and had released them. When the Brethren had taken Gabriel from the city, he assumed it was to keep the thieves from liberating him.
Freedom might never be his again. Gabriel had accepted this possibility a long time ago. But he had not yet run out of hope that he might reveal to the Kyn what he had learned as a prisoner of the Brethren. That knowledge, too, became as if another curse upon his head.
Unfortunately Benait spoke correctly: Gabriel was presently too weak from blood loss and injury to free himself. His only hope remained a slim chance to use his talent again, or perhaps lure one of the local humans in this new place to him—or the girl from his dreams. Surely if he kept dreaming of her, it meant that she was real.
Surely he was not mad.
The Brethren assumed that Gabriel had long ago gone insane, in the same way Thierry Durand had in Ireland, and often left him unguarded now. It was a pity the last interrogation had reduced him to such pitiful condition, or he might free himself. Neither his old nor new wounds would close, however, until his talent or a human provided him with enough blood to heal them.
Finding the desire to heal…
Dark and ugly reality gripped him, a merciless gauntlet of iron, smashing the wavering image of the pale-haired maiden of the forest. Such dreams meant nothing. Those Gabriel had loved were dead; his entire family had been butchered by the Brethren. His loyalty and silence had been for nothing; no Kyn had come to fight for him or release him. After two years he could think only that he had been forgotten, given up for dead, or purposely discarded. Even with the burden of what he had learned about the Brethren, the prospect of prolonging his existence, of serving only as a toy for his sadistic captors, no longer appealed to him.
In the end, even the most noble persistence became pointless, as futile as the Brethren's interrogations.
Benait was speaking to him again. "Do you never wonder why they left your face untouched, vampire?"
Gabriel had stopped wondering about most things done to him after his first year in captivity. He would have said as much, but he had stopped speaking to his captors at approximately that same time. Originally he had kept his silence as the only form of defiance left to him. Now it had become his only retreat, his final sanctuary. A fortress of ice made no sound.
He couldn't speak if he wished to; they had gagged him in Paris by welding together the ends of a thin band of copper over his mouth. That, too, gave him valuable information about his present state. They had brought him someplace where they could not afford for him to make noise.
Benait stepped closer. "My Irish brothers were under orders not to mar your visage. I suppose they took photographs of you and sent them to your king. Their proof that you were being well treated, at least, from the neck up."
Gabriel heard more sounds of activity on the other side of the wall. Stones hitting stones, water, the scrape of metal against brick. He stared at the glass bowl of the lamp, partly filled with liquid. They had repeatedly burned him with heated rods and irons as well as countless copper implements, but never with kerosene or oil. How long it would take his nearly desiccated body to burn. Hours? Days?
Why didn't he care? Had they drained the last of the terror—of remnant feeling—out of him in Paris?
"Your king never met their demands for your release." Benait's ruddy lips compressed. "Instead he sent his assassin to Dublin just after we brought you to Paris."
Lucan.
"He slaughtered every living thing there," Benait continued. "Brethren and maledicti alike. The security cameras captured it all on videotape."
A woman screamed inside Gabriel's memory, drowning out the human's voice. In Dublin, she had cried out repeatedly from a chamber near Gabriel's. He had never caught a glimpse of her, but her shrieks had been in an old tongue, the one the priests could not speak. She had screamed that they were skinning her alive. He had spent the better part of a year replaying the hours of her screams in his head, over and over. He still did not know if she had been a stranger, or his younger sister, Angelica, who had also been captured with him and the Durands.
Had she been Angelica? Had Lucan found her, broken and flayed, unable to heal from the horrors done to her? Had he killed her out of mercy?
Not knowing those answers added to Gabriel's bleak inner winter hourly, one acid snowflake at a time.
"We know from their reports that they were never able to break you in Dublin, or convince your king to meet their demands," his captor was saying. "Despite the dedicated efforts of my brothers in Paris over the last year, you resisted them as well." Benait set the lamp down on the rickety table near the fireplace and stretched his arms out, groaning with pleasure as a joint popped. "You have proven to be virtually useless to us."
Virtually useless. A condemnation. A compliment. As meaningful as maintaining his honor.
No, Gabriel thought. For if I had been broken, I would have betrayed Kyn, and others would have suffered my fate. I was right to resist.
Would the girl from his forest dreams understand, if she were real? Would she forgive him for being unable to go to her?
"No need to be afraid, vampire." Benait turned down the wick so that the light became a softer glow. "You are comfortably situated at your final destination, and I bear the responsibility of performing these last small rites."
Relief and shame set fire to the last of Gabriel's rigid self-discipline and indifference. His head demanded he fight, endure, and survive, but the human's words enveloped his frozen heart. No more endless interrogations, no more pointless torture. No more agony at being abandoned by his own kind, and left alone and wretched in the silent shadows. No more sorrow for outliving every soul he had ever loved. No more surrendering more and more of himself to his talent. No more succumbing to the icy hell inside him only to stay alive. Now this human would mutter his prayers, take out a sword, and cut off Gabriel's head, and this level of hell would be his last.
Done, I am done, it is over.
Everything he had drawn upon in order to keep his silence had been gathering for this moment. So long as he did not beg for his life, it was finished. He had lost, but he had won. They had not broken him. Not once. That much victory he could claim.
