CHAPTER 6

 

 

Ariadne knelt at Liliane’s feet in the Prince’s study. The door was closed, and of course, there were no windows. The Prince sat in a great leather chair, crossing her legs as she reached for a crystalline goblet topped high with blood.

“Our Silent Knife.” Liliane smiled, patting the seat of the chair beside her. “Come, sit with us.”

Ariadne could no more refuse than the blood in her veins could have refused to circulate when she was alive. She laid her scabbarded swords down by the foot of the chair and sat down on a bed of cushions. The enveloping pillows felt like a maw, eager to swallow her small form whole.

“You seem hesitant to accept the honor we have bestowed upon you. Do you not desire it? Do you think yourself unworthy?”

Ariadne could not look up, for fear Liliane’s gaze would flay away her flesh and reveal only mistakes. Still, she managed to speak.

“You have raised me, my lady. Tutored me, made me what I am.”

“Are you not pleased? Are your blades not feared by quick and dead alike, in the court and beyond? Ah, I see. What transpired of late has sowed the seeds of doubt.”

Infinite warmth pooled in Liliane’s crystal-blue eyes. “Hera’s destruction is a lesson, if you are but wise enough to see it. The world is full of those who seek to extinguish the light of righteousness. The bearers of that flickering light must needs stumble at times, so fierce are the gales and storms. This, too, is a part of God’s divine plan. Do you understand?”

Ariadne did not dare speak a word.

“Our own mistakes have been legion,” said the Prince. “I learned, quite painfully, how a misstep in building the castle of Paradise will rain down stones and fire.”

On those rare occasions when Liliane used the personal I, Ariadne shivered. Such intimacy somehow seemed dangerous, like the removal of a screen that was in place to protect Ariadne, and not her Prince.

“Even now, the memories fade. The tide washes away all things, Daughter, and memories are but the vanguard grains of sand upon the shore. But still, I can recall those days before God cast me out from the light of His love, as befits my own place in His plan. As a young novitiate of His most Catholic Church, I indulged in such hubris as to believe that I knew the path He had set out for me. Though a mere initiate, I saw myself one day as prioress of the abbey, and studied day and night, neglecting my chores, teaching myself to read—a forbidden act for Eve’s stock in that time and place.

“Yes, they beat me whenever they found me. But every fall of the lash against my naked back, every dunking of my head in the bucket, only seemed like one more test of my faith. Oh, what a fool I was, my Silent Knife. Not for seeking to better myself—no, for the Christ Himself was a teacher, preaching the advancement of the mind and soul. I was a fool for arguing this before deacons and scholars who could not see past the threat to their own power. Had I a mother like you have in me, who warned me to keep my plans wedged safely beneath my tongue, I doubt I would have listened to a word she said.”

Liliane smiled and closed her eyes. “I thought myself comely in those days—so laughable a thought now, when even the destitute have rosier skin and richer hair than the fine ladies of my youth. But then, I had a good deal less to eat, and a good many more childhood fevers to suffer.

“In any case, my looks—and, so I thought, my intellect—caught the attention of a young scholar of the Church. Peter! His name was Peter. And here I thought it would never return to me.”

Ariadne looked on, trying to share in the world unfolding beneath the Prince’s closed eyelids. “He said he would teach me all the secrets of the Holy Writ and the inner workings of the great philosophers, and I believed him. True, he showed me books. More often, he showed me the straw of his bed, and the hair of his chest as he pressed upon me. I learned far more than Aristotle and Aquinas from that one, oh yes.”

Ariadne could not keep her stomach from clenching at the mention of the young lovers. Only the greatest possible exertion of will kept her from leaping up from the chair to confess her recent, unwished-for remembrances of Andrei.

Liliane, meanwhile, continued her own confession: “When I took with child, Peter sent me away and paid me a handsome retainer, for he was wealthy. How else could he have afforded to spend his days studying within the abbey walls, while most of his fellows toiled in the fields? I saved every last coin, particularly those he sent after my son was born. Peter sent me enough to provide for the two of us in the style to which his family had been accustomed. My boy and I made do with far less, and hoarded the rest. Money laid roads to books, to Church officials, to the realms of knowledge that opened their own roads to power.”

Liliane shook her head slowly. When she opened her eyes, they were blood red.

“Poor Peter. He never did understand politics nearly as well as he thought he did. When his rivals discovered his sin with me, they cast him out of his high position. My uncle, not content with this punishment, hired some lawless resolutes to abduct him from a tavern one night and, with a rusted blade, rob from him his manhood.”

Liliane’s face sank slightly. “A shame. He made one beautiful child.”

She continued: “To be a woman with money and no husband—and truly, now, no husband would ever have me, ruined as I was—this was the only kind of freedom for a woman in my time. That freedom convinced me more than ever that God intended me for great things. When the abbey fell on hard times, neglected when its patron lord passed away and his sons decided matters of the Church should be left to bishops, I gladly stepped in and helped pay some of the debts. It took all of the resources I had, but I did it, and the grateful nuns, apparently rendered amnesiac to my past sins at the sight of my present gold, appointed me prioress.

“Prioress of an abbey!” Liliane’s eyes flared. “I doubt you can imagine it, in these days when a woman can lead a nation in arms, heal the sick, or preside over a guild the likes of which would humble the Dutch East India Company, but in the times when I still walked in daylight, prioress of an abbey was tantamount to queen. I had access to networks of words, channels of finance, troves of secrets. All of these—words, coins, and secrets—could be exchanged for power.

“And what does one exchange power for? Safety. Justice. I opened the doors of my abbey to women fleeing the cruelty of their husbands, to women cast aside as I had been. To women who had been declared witches for no other sorcery than speaking their minds every once and again. They came to me, sometimes bringing money or cattle or wagons. I took them in, one and all, using the coffers of the wealthy ones to support those who came empty-handed. Other than my son, Astrolabe, who had grown into a healthy and hearty young man, we were all of us women, working together as equals, subject to neither king nor sheriff. We rebuilt Paradise. This, I thought, must have been God’s plan for me.”

The longer the Prince spoke, the more Ariadne found her own eyes closing, until the darkness of her lids spread out as a canvas. Upon it she saw the images Liliane described, not just with imagined sight but all senses, so detailed were the Prince’s descriptions. Ariadne found herself seeing the women in their simple peasant robes, found herself hearing their laughter and the tinkling of bells and tambourines, even smelling the aroma of roasted chicken and spices. She felt the warmth of the fires—comforting, not terrifying, as fire was to Kindred—and the sweat on their brows as they danced at night. Ariadne felt like weeping, not only for the beauty of the scene, but out of pity for herself, that she could not join in.

As Liliane’s voice dropped, clouds rolled across Ariadne’s vision. “I should have seen the mistakes I was making. I have no excuse, for the Lord sent me a messenger, in the form of a dark lady who would never meet with me by daylight. I smelled the stink of Satan upon her as she warned me of the enemies I had made, of the forces they were mustering to wreck our dreams.”

Ariadne could see a woman-shaped form flutter from shadow to shadow.

“Puffed with pride I cursed her, ordered my son to drive her out with flaming brands and garlic, as was the common wisdom of the day. I dismissed her words as the lies of the Adversary, forgetting in my pride that even he is but one more servant of the Almighty. I told myself she only wanted me to flee because my abbey stood proud as a bulwark of light, unbearable to her kind. Oh, for all of my book learning, how little I knew.”

Liliane’s voice sunk to a whisper, and in Ariadne’s mind, the clouds grew dark and menacing. “They came in the night, dozens of them, with swords and torches, hoes and spades. In defiance of God’s sanctuary they scaled the abbey walls, set fire to all that would burn. They slew all those who fought and took their pleasure from all those who couldn’t flee fast enough. I watched my son, my beautiful Astrolabe, crushed and burned and violated before me. They shoved his mutilated form into my arms, then ripped me away, crying, screaming. They announced that they had worse in store for me.”

Ariadne could see it all, feel it all. She tried and failed to block the screams from her ears.

“That was when she returned.” The Prince’s lips curled into a cruel smile. “She fell upon them faster than my eyes could follow, a blur of black hair and black robes. She wielded a sword—a woman with a sword! Every time I see your face, Daughter, when I see your blades in motion, I am reminded of her fury.”

In Ariadne’s dream-vision the shadowy woman-form coalesced into her own shape, wore her face, wielded her katanas.

“She made of the men a harvest. Many fell before her, their blood soaking the already drenched walls. As sharp as her blade was, her nails and teeth cut men down just as surely. When she was done, when not one of them remained, she knelt down and drank, like a preening cat, at the rivers of red flowing down the stones of the abbey.

“Then she turned to me. I was a shattered thing then, and as she spirited me away from the conflagration, she Embraced me, lovingly, painfully. At first I thought it the Almighty’s final judgment upon me for my hubris. Soon enough I learned that I was indeed to be His instrument, to lead the people to His truth, to create a New Jerusalem where justice and harmony reigned. Yet as He punished Moses of the Hebrews for his pride and anger, so He punished me. As a fallen creature, struck down for my arrogance, I would never be permitted to enter the Promised Land. So it was His will.”

Ariadne felt as if a cold sweat were beading on her forehead. Her eyes opened to find Liliane’s staring back, her ice-blue eyes inscrutable.

“I have accepted my mistakes. I work in the shadows now, content with creating a paradise only for the Damned. Is it not written that in the End Times, even the angels and the demons will be judged? Let the Most Holy look upon our own New Jerusalem that day and declare what we Kindred have created to be good. I have been at work at this task ever since the abbey’s fall, all these long centuries. I have gathered the dispossessed and the weak and made them better.” She clenched her teeth. “This is the dream your swords serve, Daughter.”

Lungfuls of pride, if not actual air, swelled Ariadne’s chest.

“Yes, some will perish along the way. Such is the price of Paradise, and such is the tally of sins etched upon my soul. I tell you this so you will not crumble at your mistakes, but learn from them. Everything for which I have trained you, though you may have cursed me all the while, was to prepare you to be the instrument you need to be. Divine justice must be delivered by sword. The wielder of that blade cannot, must not, ever blanch at the thought of doing what is required.”

Ariadne wasn’t precisely aware of when it had happened, but Liliane had risen. The Prince was standing behind her, wrapping her arms around Ariadne’s chest, her lips icy as they brushed against her ear.

“Do whatever you must, Silent Knife, Hand, Daughter. Unleash your blades with the full pardon of your Prince, who will instead suffer for your sins before God, to redeem you . . . and through us, our damned Kindred race.”

She released Ariadne, dismissed her, and the new Seneschal almost fell over while bowing. She was dizzy, light-headed, as if she had never recovered from the last battle at all.

Ariadne’s world was still spinning as she staggered to her quarters. She sat on her slab for a long, long time. She tried to envision the spires of New Jerusalem again, the life she would be leading after the world crumbled to dust. Try as she might, the scenes kept bleeding away into smiling pictures of a girl wearing her face, sitting on a sunlit bench or dancing across the campus green in broad daylight.

She shoved the images aside, began her wind-down ritual. Dawn was coming. The sounds of revelry upstairs filtered down like a heavy rain to where Ariadne sat, alone, in her room, polishing her blades mechanically.

They were mourning Hera. They were singing to New Jerusalem. Ariadne mouthed the words along with them. Her mind, just minutes ago the site of so many vivid scenes, now felt like an endless gray plain extending in all directions. The Prince had forgiven her. In the service of the dream, tonight had been a victory. That, she told herself, had been the Prince’s lesson.

In victory, a soldier felt pride. At the death of a comrade, a woman felt grief. But a weapon . . . a weapon didn’t feel anything at all. Ariadne felt nothing at all.

Ariadne tried to convince herself that such an emotionless state was for the best, or better than the alternatives. At least she wasn’t like Bourne, who mocked everything as some sort of cosmic joke. But she could not help but wonder if there should not be another path open to her.

If there was, there in the dark of her barren cell, Ariadne could not see it.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 7

 

 

Andrei’s departure drains the light from the room. Ariadne spilled wine—wine! If only her parents knew!—on his new shirt. He shrugged and hand-waved as if it didn’t bother him, but she knew from his winkled brow that it did, had felt the grinding of his teeth when his cheek pressed against hers. It is evening but he excuses himself from her room, refuses to stay the night, leaving her to bunch up in a ball on her bed until morning. The blue flowers printed on her pillowcase seem like gaping jaws, their petals teeth that will close around her and consume her utterly.

Just as she feels her atoms merging with theirs, Andrei knocks on her door and returns. Calmer, composed, he takes her in his arms again, plays “Imagine” on her guitar. She curls up by his feet, deciding silently that great romances are thick, that they have a tapestry, not just some sunbeam yellow of young love or ashen black of love departed, but a heavy plaid coat of rich chocolate brown, stripes of red and orange, spots of blue and pink, stains from spilled wine and small rips and patches. They’re inches and inches deep of wool. It sometimes chafes when you wear them, sometimes smells, sometimes comforts, but it’s always thick. . . .

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

Ariadne hopped the subway at Maverick Station, blended in with the shadows, unseen by passengers in their coats, reading their books, listening to their iPods. Metallica’s “The Unforgiven” leaked out from someone’s ear buds.

She switched lines and, between the Park Street and Kendall stops, the train snaked up like the neck of a plesiosaur from the depths into the night air for one station only. Once aloft, it seemed to grow phobic of the dazzling harborscape and skyline around it, or perhaps feeling the Boston cold, reconsidered its decision and plunged back to the steamy underground. During this brief moment of the train’s aspiration to a larger world, Ariadne looked up.

Twelve years ago, new to the city, she had looked up, down, left, right, everywhere she could, with the rapt fascination of a newborn, hungry for every detail. She had noted every advertising poster (“Tutoring in 80 languages, including Swahili!”), every traveler (the young Indian man with a dotcom look checking his shiny Rolex, the pink underside of his brown fingers nervously tapping the handle of his designer briefcase; the Latina woman’s fingers clenched in prayerlike steeple, barely emerging from the leopard cuffs of her jacket sleeves), the name of every station as it sailed by beyond the window. She would look, and then she would write, wearing pencils down to nubs, scratching on ATM deposit slips and dry-cleaning receipts and whatever other salvage could be found in her pockets.

Since becoming what she now was, Ariadne had shut heavy doors against the world outside, as if she were some Victorian lady whose constitution simply wasn’t up to the bustle of Hyde Park today. But tonight, she was looking out at the Charles River, in the summer dotted with the white acne of sailboats and seagulls, now marred with patches of ice, trapping the Hatch Shell amphitheater like the HMS Endurance. She craned her neck away from the skyline to see the Soviet bloc-style cube of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Passengers got off. Passengers got on.

The train was not a dinosaur, not a full organism at all. It was merely a red blood cell, dumping off and collecting loads of oxygen. The city would live for at least another breath.

Then the train plunged underground and that shimmer of fire inside Ariadne re-froze, a candle returning to the refrigerator to preserve its waning life, the way her mother always stored them in the refrigerator after birthdays. She stepped fluidly and silently onto the Kendall Station platform.

She knew she could take the train farther toward her destination, but where she was going seemed to demand travel by foot.

Out here in the night air, the war seemed far away. She could not see the scouts she had ordered to comb the city to confirm or refute the captured rebel’s information. Those scouts could return at any moment, but their Seneschal would not be there to hear the reports.

Their Seneschal was instead walking into the face of winter winds, down Memorial Drive, along the snakeskin of the Charles River as it bent and turned toward Watertown. She could tell the local drivers from the visitors by who knew when to shift left before a line of parked cars filled the right lane at the edge of Harvard’s campus. Those unfamiliar with the road formed a chain of sudden brake lights. Liliane had told Ariadne to keep clear of the university, which the wizards had claimed as theirs.

Ariadne walked past anyway, defiant.

Her feet carried her all the way to Medford, a lone, thin woman striding through the unpopulated night. She followed the remnants of a familiar smell all along the Mystic Valley Parkway, past the cemetery and the gas stations, past junkies hovering outside tenement flats, past the cardboard structures of the homeless, past the stray dogs and abandoned car chassis until she found the office of the Ronnie Cab taxi company.

Her heart had ceased to beat ten years ago, but some other tempo within her seemed to be intensifying with every mile she covered toward this spot. Unflinchingly she had done battle with Roarke and his minions, yet none of that had made her hand-wringingly, stand-on-toes nervous like this.

Ariadne stopped cold, pulled herself into the shadows of a stoop.

What are you doing here? There’s a war going on.

But Roarke had hideouts in Medford. Ariadne’s presence here could be construed as legitimate reconnaissance. Besides, as Seneschal, she now answered only to Liliane.

The imagined pounding of blood in her veins begged her to burst into the taxi office, swords flashing, and take what she wanted. But Ariadne collected herself, walked into Ronnie Cab so softly that no heads turned among the men seated around the card table inside.

The radio was playing Shakira’s “La Tortura” as Ariadne’s eyes scanned the room up and down. The walls were a collage of decades-old calendars, beer and soda advertisements, pizza delivery flyers, maps of the city poked full of pushpin holes. There, a closetlike bathroom. There, a cluster of rusty lockers. There, a storage area for filthy mops and brooms.

There, an office.

The room was yellow and brown, smelling of beer and old Chinese food. Surrounding a desk piled high with papers, reachable through a narrow path, were boxes upon boxes of filer folders; they seemed to consume every last millimeter of free space. As a centerpiece for the desk, a half-eaten donut sat on a paper plate, hosting a small but faithful congregation of ants.

Ariadne searched for a Rolodex or a promising-looking ledger, but the notebooks she opened contained financial records, car inspection forms, reimbursement slips. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. The folders were labeled in shorthand, and half the labels were too faded to read.

Left to her own devices, Ariadne might never find Andrei’s contract before dawn. She looked hopefully to the laptop resting atop the paper mound on the desk, hesitantly tapped the keyboard. A password was required.

Perhaps if she stole the computer, brought it back to Liliane’s sanctum, one of the others could figure it out. Archibald, certainly. But she couldn’t trust him with this. She couldn’t trust anyone.

The ants swarming the donut seemed to be mocking her.

Ariadne heard footsteps and voices approaching. Stiffening, her hand flew immediately to the guitar case at her back.

A short, balding man in a half-buttoned white shirt walked into the room, blasting rapid Spanish into a cell phone while a toothpick between his lips darted left and right like a compass needle madly seeking north.

The man paused in his conversation when he saw Ariadne. Immediately, his eyes and lips widened into a smile, and curtly ended his call. As he turned his full attention to Ariadne, she could see the room’s dim halogen light glint faintly off his hair gel.

He removed the toothpick in a smooth, graceful gesture. “Nice guitar case. Can I help you?”

Ariadne slowly dropped her hand.

“Andrei Montague,” she said simply. “I’m . . . I’m looking for Andrei Montague.”

“Andrecito?” the man asked. “What do you want with him? He’s ugly. We got much better lookin’ guys than him, right chicos?”

A few laughs issued from the doorway. Other faces were now peering in.

Sensing Ariadne’s tension, although not the reason behind it, the man raised his hands conciliatorily. “Okay, just kidding. Andrecito’s got the night off.”

Ariadne nodded, then stood there dumbly.

“You his sister or something?”

Ariadne nodded again, wondering where her voice had fled to.

“Good,” one of the others called from the next room. “Then you can tell him his mama needs to teach that boy how to drive!”

More laughter. The man in the doorway told them to shut up, smiling the whole time.

“Tontos. Don’t mind them. So where you from?”

“Out of town,” said Ariadne softly, with no idea why.

“How long you been in Me’for’t? Andrecito show you ’round yet?”

“Look, I just need to know . . . I just need to know where he’s living.”

“What? You his sister, and he don’t tell you where he lives?”

The man’s eyebrows rose, but his eyes were still dancing all over Ariadne’s body.

“We’ve been a little distant lately.” Ariadne fumbled over the words. At least that wasn’t a lie.

“Hey, no worries. My name’s Ronnie, and I can take you to him.”

“Ronaldo, you dog!” another of the cabbies shouted. “Don’t you go after Andrecito’s sister, hear? Just ’cause he’s the new guy don’t mean his family’s meat.”

“Yeah, ain’t you got enough girls already? Leave some for the rest of us.”

New. Andrei just started this job. How long ago? Ariadne couldn’t find the words to ask all the questions in her mind, but managed to force out the important one. “Where is he living now? Please,” she added. “I need to know.”

“Okay, all right.” Ronnie shrugged. “You sure you don’t need a ride? Don’t believe these hijos de puta. I’m a regular gentleman.”

“I believe you. But I don’t need a ride, thank you. Just the address.”

Ronnie sighed good-naturedly. “Suit yourself. Just don’t tell Andrecito I told you, okay? Just in case he wants to get mad at someone, I don’t want him comin’ in here and mouthin’ off. Got too much of that already.” He aimed those last words out the doorway, where they were received with friendly jeers.

Their easy camaraderie lit flames of envy in Ariadne.

“Here you go.” Ronnie wrote down an address. “Mira, see that beneath it? That’s my phone number—in case, you know, you ever need anything.” He grinned.

Ariadne stared at the address hungrily. It had been so simple that she didn’t quite believe its existence in her hands. A freezing dread began to overtake her stomach. With a hastily muttered thank-you she walked swiftly out of Ronnie Cab.

She stared at the address, flipped the paper to and fro in her hands. Ever since that cab ride, the channel inside her head had been tuned away from dead static by only two things: Liliane and the memory of the man at this address.

The address belonged to a cheap motel in Fresh Pond. For a moment, Ariadne thought Ronnie had played a joke on her. But mortals’ pulses and breathing betrayed deception like beacons, and Ariadne, with her carefully trained senses, hadn’t sensed any from the taxi manager. Still, Andrei in a cheap motel at Fresh Pond, not in a suburban castle in Lexington or Lincoln?

Fresh Pond, right near the commuter train yards.

Ariadne’s mind skipped painfully from her thoughts of Andrei. According to what the tortured captive had told them last night, those train yards housed Roarke’s command center.

Ariadne shuddered. For all she knew, Roarke had his fingers in Ronnie Cab. He certainly had been able to move troops around the city with ease. His spies could have noticed her already, and even if they hadn’t, there was no way she could make it to the train yards undetected. She was too well known.

For a moment she entertained thoughts of the risk anyway. But Liliane was counting on her. Liliane, who had given her so much, when no one else would. Liliane, who had already been betrayed by one Seneschal.

No, Ariadne could not choose this moment. The smart thing would be to choose no moment at all, to crumple up the address and throw it away. But the letters and numbers had scorched themselves across whatever remained of her soul.

In that moment the thrill began bleeding into fear. Ariadne was ten years out of practice, could not sustain the emotion. Her heart moved to her throat as she stormed into the night, past steaming manhole covers and the flickering neon and chrome of the city. She picked up the pace, trying to walk herself clean of all feeling entirely.

Ariadne walked all the way back to the city proper, frost forming on her form-fitting bodysuit beneath her jacket. Her black hair blew in billows in the night wind, and her heels, although they dug and dropped into a thousand cracks and fissures in the pavement, never wobbled or made her lose her balance.

She passed closed storefronts, their windows failing to show her reflection. It was midnight by the time she made it back to the city, but on a Friday the crowds of partygoers were still massed. She passed through them like a shark through minnows. Most of them, subconsciously sensing a predator in their midst, simply stepped aside, not quite knowing why. Only a few turned their heads and stared, seized by suicidal fascination.

Ariadne never made heads turn during her life. Her mother had always called her beautiful, as had Andrei, and she had never in her heart believed them. Accepting their word would have opened the door to a new kind of identity, a mantle she would have been far too embarrassed to take up.

Now, she was Liliane’s Seneschal. The Prince’s forces—no, her forces—were all assembling. She texted her scouts, who confirmed that the tortured rebel had spoken the truth. They knew where Roarke was.

Do we move now? the soldier texted back.

Ariadne checked the time. No, she tapped back. Not enough hours to dawn. Tomorrow will be the reckoning.

Tomorrow. She could be forgiven staying out now, walking, working out the swarms of centipedes crawling inside her.

Ariadne looked over her shoulder. Was that a flash of motion she saw, or just her own guilty conscience? Her guitar case and the swords within weighed reassuringly across her shoulder.

Ariadne found herself striding down Lansdowne Street, cutting through the queue of young people, wealthy college students in expensive outfits, mascaraed eyes and dyed hair begging passersby to notice, a sea of hot, bright faces blowing puffs of warm life into the chill night outside a club. They parted for her until she was face to face with the bouncer, a small bald mountain of man braving the night cold in nothing but an undershirt, revealing powerful biceps, one of which sported a tattoo of a snake wrapped around a knife.

Ariadne looked past his posture, saw the flutter of his arm hair, heard the quickening of his heartbeat and the mad inflation of his lungs that all attested to just how chilly he felt in the wind. Beneath the bouncer’s gritted teeth and menacing expression, his pulse spoke the story of desperation to flee inside to the warmth and press of the club. It leapt in gratitude whenever he opened the door to admit a few new entrants, letting a blast of heat escape to warm him in the process.

Ariadne felt no sympathy, just that coldness inside her that nothing could warm.

He stood two heads above her, outweighed her twice over, but she walked right up to him, stared into his eyes for one determined moment, and pushed without ever touching him. She felt his muscles move in response to her will. He opened the door and admitted her, deaf to the protests of the young people at the head of the line.

Inside a club was one of the few places aside from a battlefield where Ariadne could find peace. Here the bass pounded loud enough to drown out the million whispers that had been her constant companions these past few nights.

Ariadne spoke into the eyes of the clerk as she handed over her guitar case at the coat check: “Don’t open this.” The buzz-cut young woman nodded robotically. Ariadne stretched. The weight around her shoulder that she had found so comforting felt, once removed, as if it had been nothing but an anchor.

With a gasp of relief she let the music take control of her body, which spun, turned, and undulated according to its dictates. Time passed, the club grew more and more packed, the press of bodies and their heat enveloped her. She prayed for it all to smother her entirely.

Ariadne was dimly aware, at times, of the men who approached. They danced next to her, preening and strutting only inches away, yet miles beyond the range of her focused perceptions, even when they ran their hands across her body or whispered things in her ear. None of them were bold enough to do anything more.

Soon enough, another song started to sing even louder than the music. Ariadne heard the rhythm of a hundred pulses, beating in time to the music, overlaid against a harmony of the song of blood inside thousands of veins and arteries.

The music on the speakers had been primal enough for her to lose herself in, but this new song was finally, truly, a river in which she could drown. It pulled her in a dozen directions at once, threatened to shatter her into a million pieces. She silently begged it to annihilate her, yearned for the explosive release more than she had ever yearned for anything in either of her two lives.

She seized the man dancing next to her, her fingers clasping tightly around his muscled arms. He smelled like alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline, with a small twist of mint. The unshaven stubble of his chin scratched her cheek as she pulled him close, dragged her lips across his ear, down his shoulder, to his arm . . . where she saw a snake-and-knife tattoo.

The bouncer. He must have been off-duty now, finally finding the warmth he had sought before. She felt his body responding to her and, for the briefest of lucid moments, reflected that he was the kind of man that, in her former lifetime, would seem to her to radiate confidence, assuredness, power. She would have fished then for the word that now seemed to come so readily: life. He radiated life.

Ariadne pulled him by the hand, and he did not question where this slip of a young woman found the strength to drag his near-three hundred pounds off the dance floor, into the DJ’s private prep room. He had the key, and fumbled to use it as her hands traveled all over his body. She draped herself over him, warming herself by the energy he gave off. Oh, that this moment, this promise of heat, might last forever.

The metal door slammed behind them with a clanging finality. She let him embrace her as the two tumbled around in the small confined space. In here, only the bass beat of the music could be heard, but Ariadne willed her heart, usually still in her chest, to pound to the tune of the bouncer’s pulse, and that tune alone.

She didn’t hear the words he was saying, didn’t feel his hands where they touched her, over her clothes, under her clothes. It was like trying to keep track of each individual drop of water while she was swimming. He pressed his lips to hers, and she could not keep control any longer, did not even want to. She felt the pre-orgasmic thrill of her fangs slipping loose from their fleshy casings.

He grunted at the pain, but the sound was lost in the winds of song in Ariadne’s ears. She pushed him down to the ground, straddled him, held one hand down against his bleeding mouth to keep him from screaming. He grabbed at her with his giant arms; she was unsure if he was trying to draw her close or push her away. It didn’t matter.

Ariadne became a living blanket, pressing herself to him, moving her mouth over his neck until the song was so loud and ringing that it pained her skull to hear it. Her whole body burned and shook. She had to release, had to, or she would die from the denial of it. She plunged past the soft, succulent flesh, tasting of sweat and cloves. The song, released from its prison, blasted its music into her bloodstream with every gulp.

Explosions blossomed within her. She cried out in long, keening moans in time with the pulse that now rushed his blood not through his own veins, but through hers. She felt as if she were dying and being born, over and over again, all at once, and in one transcendent moment the universe was entirely whole for her.

Ariadne lost consciousness. When she came to in a dizzy haze, she found herself braced up against a speaker, a toppled stack of CDs in her lap, a motionless bouncer lying under her legs. She pulled herself shakily to her knees and crawled over to check on him, but she knew the answer before she even touched flesh to flesh. He was dead.

Ariadne dusted herself off, adjusted her clothing, eyes always alert for the door to open. With the barest exertion of her strength she hoisted up the dead body. High on the fresh blood, she felt capable of anything right now, of tearing the club to shreds with her fingernails if she chose. Opening the door cautiously, she peered out, watched the club’s crowd thinning, a new DJ taking over as the old one packed up. Just how long had she spent here?

There was a war on. She needed to get back.

But now there was a new problem. She hadn’t meant to drain the bouncer dry, only to quiet the demands of the hunger. But it wasn’t the murder itself she regretted, not in the way she did during those first few terrible, nauseating, thrilling times she killed someone.

Memories of those first few nights after Liliane took her in began seeping out from under the iron lid of Ariadne’s mind. Among all the outcasts in Liliane’s court, only Ariadne had never met her sire even once, had never been schooled in the ways of what she had now become. The Prince thus took Ariadne’s training upon herself.

Liliane would lock her in a room, starve her until she was frothing, then bring her some pitiable creature—a stray pup, an alley kitten—and watch as Ariadne lost the battle to be kind, watch as she turned the tentative trust in the small creature’s eyes into terror as she fell upon it to feed. Then the animals became people—usually old, decrepit, unmissed people, but sometimes there were children. Each time, Ariadne would resist with everything that made her human. Each time, she would fail.

And each time, she fought a little less.

Afterward, always, Liliane would hold Ariadne’s shivering form, stroking her hair, whispering consolations, absolutions. Alone, Ariadne would dream a thousand ways to revenge herself upon the Prince for forcing her to do those horrific things. But the moment Liliane arrived, Ariadne realized how much she needed just to be held, to have her pain stroked and caressed away, to be told that everything would be all right.

Ariadne had come a long way since those early nights, or so she had thought. Yesterday’s carelessness in the rebel house might have been an aberration, but tonight, too?

There would be time to puzzle it out once she disposed of her latest mistake. She cleaned herself up, then stepped out into the hall and found a wandering techie, a young man whose neck was ringed both with headphones and an invisible collar of cannabis smell.

“No one enters this hallway.” Ariadne spoke to him in a voice that came from deeper than her throat, and in a daze he dropped the roll of electrical tape he was holding and stood guard at the hall’s end. She set up a similar wall of “sentries,” and as she passed each, holding the bouncer’s corpse in her arms, she spoke the words, “You will not remember.”

Ariadne wove in and out of the alleys in the pitch of night, shielding herself beneath the walls of Fenway Park. The Massachusetts Turnpike seethed nearby, but she resisted the urge to drop her bundle off an overpass onto it. A suicidal jump that left no blood would be noticed.

Again, she saw a flash of motion just at the edge of her perceptions. No, not motion. A small wrongness, a piece of the night the shape of which didn’t fit.

It was time to leave. She debated going back for her swords, but decided she could do that once she had taken care of more pressing business. Feeling a sense of déjà vu, she broke into a car, dumped the body in the passenger seat, and began to hotwire her new ride. The engine sputtered, sputtered, then turned over.

She stayed calm, didn’t peel out. Ariadne guided the car at a leisurely pace through the side streets. When she turned onto Commonwealth Avenue, she found the streets empty. The bars closed at 1:00A.M., leaving the Boston University students to huddle squirrel-like in dorms and apartments, seeking warmth from bottles or bodies.

That blur of motion again! It was keeping up with the car, but every time she looked, it vanished. Both the city skyline and its mirror-reflection in the Charles River blinked away innocently, sharing in the conspiracy.

Ariadne turned onto the BU Bridge, pulled into the right lane and set the hazard lights. She watched the thin stream of cars, a pair here, a singleton there, until the concrete span was empty of traffic. Still she kept searching the night, looking for signs of the blurred motion, that will o’ the wisp that seemed to live at the edge of her vision. Nothing.

Was it anything more than her own subconscious?

Eyes constantly checking for bystanders, Ariadne scooped the bouncer’s corpse up against her shoulder, like a drunken friend unable to stand on his own. She shuffled him over to the edge, past the orange construction barrels lined up for bridge repair, to the waist-high metal mesh that stood between pedestrians and the Charles River. Looking to her feet, Ariadne could see through holes in the deck to the black waters rolling below.

Ariadne extended all her senses to their fullest. The calm flow of the water became an ocean roar, the cars from nearby Commonwealth Avenue a gale force wind. An airplane cut a thunderbolt through the sky. But no footsteps. No scent of warm blood, no scent of Kindred decay. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

She lifted the bouncer over the metal divider. Without his blood, the man seemed so light. She found a construction barrel, stuffed him unceremoniously inside, and used her strength to bend the rusted metal of its frame into a crude seal. All it took now was a heave, a motion of her wrists, a release of tension in her fingers. The weight of the barrel and its contents dropped away, banged a ricochet against the old CSX railway bridge beneath, and spun two full rotations before being swallowed up in a small black plume of river water.

Ariadne felt a release in her stomach, the closest to exhaling she could get now that she didn’t breathe. She turned back to the car.

The blur of motion materialized, right in the center of her field of vision. It shot across the bridge deck and up onto the car, resolving suddenly into canine form as it flew down at her.

Two paws and all the momentum behind them slammed into Ariadne. Her back crashed into the divider, then moved up and over. A blinding mass of fur and fangs tore at her, pushing, pushing, until it pressed her over the point of balance. She reached instinctively for the guitar case and the swords inside, only to grasp air—she had left them at the club.

Cruel jaws sank into her shoulder, ruining her chance to make a last-minute grab to save herself. Ariadne felt the wind rush around her, then a terrible crack that rocked every bone.

The upside-down mirror-city in the river swallowed Ariadne, welcoming her into its alleys and avenues. Water pressed in all around, silencing her every sense.

 




 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

DAVID NURENBERG, PhD, is a teacher, freelance writer, and social activist who lives in the Boston area. His credits with White Wolf include writing for the Vampire: The Requiem, Scion, and Exalted lines. His nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Newsweek, USA Today, and Multicultural Review, as well as many lesser-known papers, ’zines, and blogs. Silent Knife is his first novel published by a major press. His favorite animal is the wombat.