PART TWO





Love never dies a natural death.

—Anaïs Nin

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 12

 

 

Ariadne writes a letter under a covered bridge at the edge of campus at night, by the dim glow of a police call light. Her sweat makes the felt-tip pen slip in and out of her thin fingers. Her wrist smudges the blue ink with every motion.

Andrei has just severed the ties between them. Her tears, her pleas, only made him turn away faster. If spoken words will not reach him, perhaps written ones, read in the light of a new day, will.

The scratching sounds of the pen compete with the rustle of the leaves whipped by the cold winds. The sounds of the wind’s rush seem as solid and well defined as footsteps.

A shadow falls over Ariadne. She shifts unconsciously, trying to find more light.

She will not give up so easily. She calls upon every poem, every metaphor, tries to write a symphony. She has to convince him it isn’t too late. His fears are unfounded. The two of them can return to what they were. Anything is possible. He shouldn’t ever forget that.

As she writes she begins to shiver, a visceral response, a prickling beneath her skin from cells with DNA that still remember the savannah. Something wicked is near. But so much is prickling within her that these cries go unnoticed, unheeded.

Now she consciously recognizes the presence, like a cold blanket pulling around her skin. Chemicals explode in her brain, flooding into the mix of grief and yearning. She pulls her coat tighter around her. She feels some inexplicable urge to run, but forces herself to stay rooted, to finish the letter. She cannot give in to any fear, of the world around or of what she has to put on the page.

It’s close enough now to elicit a kind of nausea in her, this hovering shadow that seems to be waiting, measuring what Ariadne will do. Perhaps it wonders why she isn’t running.

Curiosity and hunger battle behind the gaze that regards her. Eyes watch, fascinated. It can taste her emotion in the warm breaths she exhales with every pen stroke.

Ariadne rises, her stumbling pace toward the dull green campus mailbox quickening. Whether it comes from within or without—she cannot tell, even now—she cannot deny the imperative in her every nerve to move swiftly. The watching presence senses this, knows the time to spring has arrived.

Her slim white hands open the mailbox, let the letter slip in. The metal creaks. She wishes the letter Godspeed, straight to Andrei’s hands, his heart, to whatever switch will turn his affections back to her.

Footfalls, like the padding of wolves, rush up from behind.

Ariadne turns, eyes wide, tears forming a veil between her and the thing bearing down on her. She feels an explosion, but she cannot tell if it comes from her neck or her heart.

She lets loose a scream that lasts for ten years.



*   *   *   *   *



Ariadne felt a weight on her body like the press of grave dirt, and with frantic gasps for breath, mere reflex from lungs that no longer functioned, she flailed her arms, hurled the heavy sheets and comforter from her body. She tried to spring into a sitting position, but every limb ached so much that all she succeeded in doing was twisting her limbs and rolling onto her side.

In the dim light she could see the dismal motel room, the brown-paneled walls and stained gray carpet that perhaps was once white. She saw the heavy cream-colored window shades that stank of tobacco, the cracked mirror above the chipped dresser that reflected the image of a man.

Andrei.

His back was to Ariadne, but she could catch glimpses of his face, watch his motions as he bent over a hotplate. Boiling water? Immediately her mind coughed up memories of the times in college when she or Andrei had taken ill with a headcold and the other one had leapt at the chance to brew teas and apply compresses and pull covers around the beloved’s neck, excited at this chance to play nurse.

If the two of them had only seen what Ariadne had seen in the last ten years. Draining the blood of the terminally ill in hospital wards made for easy, suspicion-free feeding. Deaths were never questioned there. In those wards she saw the desperate pain of lovers tending to afflicted dear ones, the pity and the pain and the revulsion, the smell of uncontrolled bowels and decaying flesh that had already outlasted decaying affection. Occasionally Liliane would make Ariadne linger in the shadows to watch the loved ones leave the hospital room, to see the gratitude and relief in their faces, to watch as tears of joy, not grief, came from their reddened eyes. Now their lives could resume.

Ariadne sometimes wondered if Andrei had felt like that when he broke off their relationship, let her go from his life.

“Ari? Are you awake?”

Ariadne remained silent. Every rise and fall of Andrei’s shoulders as he approached, every twitch of his mouth, every tone of his voice, lit firecrackers of memory within her. Random bits of Ariadne’s past had been hurled behind a wall of fog ever since her Embrace. She could not remember her mother’s maiden name, or the breed of dog her grandmother used to own, or even whether or not she had any brothers or sisters. It all seemed like useless trivia, exiled to the same land to which facts learned in high school vanished. But Andrei—everything about him stayed, stayed too well, too loudly, as if the memories of him were drowning out the memories of everything else.

His face had grown fleshy. His eyes, still deep and blue, had developed small bulges beneath them, and his mop of blond hair was thinner and had begun to recede. His clothing, always pressed and coordinated in college, now looked weatherbeaten. But somehow he was more the Andrei she remembered than ever, especially when he sat by her side and let loose a sigh. It was the same sigh of frustration that he would express after she had “embarrassed him” in front of the dean or a student senator or someone else he was trying to impress. She had always been saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time.

Ariadne began to feel her fists clenching, drawing up bunches of linen in her hands. In all her battles, had she ever felt anger quite like this?

“Ari, what on earth happened to you?”

Where could she begin? Fury rushed through her as if her blood still circulated. What had happened? Wasn’t everything, from the throat-ripping Embrace on that covered bridge, through Liliane’s loving torments, right up through the flaming power station last night, wasn’t this all a result, a direct result, of what he had done when he had broken her heart?

Ariadne tried to spring, tried to launch herself from the bed, rend him with her claws and teeth, but her limbs refused to obey her commands. Her fingers splayed and clenched madly, seeking a sword that wasn’t there. Ariadne hissed, and Andrei backed away, face growing pale.

What was happening? Why was she so weak?

Ariadne thrashed and moaned beneath the bed covers, to no avail. A low, rumbling howl issued forth her throat, an animal cry of indignation. All the words she wanted to say, all the depictions of the hells in which she knew she had been forged and tempered anew, were clotting inside her throat.

“Easy, Ari,” Andrei said, drawing tentatively closer. “You must have a fever or something. You’ve been fading in and out all night and day.”

Day? Ariadne glanced in terror and desperation at the curtains. If they should open, if they should open . . .

Andrei followed her gaze. “Don’t worry. I’m keeping them closed. Even with the clouds out there today, you were screaming fit to wake the neighborhood whenever I tried to get some light in here.” He glanced around, eyes lingering on the dents in the wall paneling. “I guess we’re both lucky this neighborhood is pretty used to screams.”

Daytime. That explained her physical weakness. Was that also why her rage was now fleeing as suddenly as it had come? She became absorbed in watching Andrei scratch at his neck—that habit hadn’t changed, either—which meant he was searching for an appropriate euphemism, some way to politely say what anyone else would just put bluntly.

“I took the day off from work to take care of you. Ari, you . . . you need some help, obviously. You told me you didn’t want me to call 911, but I’m really worried. You look like you got caught up in that huge fire last night. Please, tell me what’s going on.”

Pity. In his eyes. For her. Even now, after all she had become, he saw her as weak. This would not do.

Ariadne summoned what strength she still possessed, pulled the covers to her body and stepped off the bed. She stared into Andrei’s eyes, attempted to take on the posture of the Silent Knife.

Then she smelled him. The scent of his skin and sweat crumbled her. So much had changed—the brand of shaving cream, the lack of his characteristic cologne, the saturation of the mold and cigarette reek of the motel—but enough remained. Ariadne found herself throwing her arms around him, burying her face in his chest as she fell forward. His body was a sponge, absorbing her own.

Somehow he brought them into a sitting position on the bed. He held her awkwardly around the shoulder, swiveling to face her.

Shivering, he shook his head. “God, you look the same. You haven’t changed at all.”

“At the moment, I probably look like shit.”

“No,” said Andrei, reaching out, stroking her long black hair, all tangled and matted, “you look beautiful.”

Ariadne looked anywhere but at him—down at her torn, tattered, and burnt clothes, at the soot and clay on her skin that had flaked all over the bed and the floor beneath her.

He suddenly withdrew. “Ah . . . this is . . . um . . . strange. I . . . I shouldn’t have said that. Or touched your hair like that. I’m sorry. This is just, ah—”

He scratched his neck again. “This is a very confusing time for me. You have no idea what I’ve been through in the last few years. And it looks like you’ve been through even worse.”

Andrei rose to his feet, backed up. “I mean, you probably have a boyfriend, or maybe even a husband. Just because you don’t wear a ring, I shouldn’t assume. Someone’s surely worried to death about you right now. Now that you’re coherent, you can use the phone, call him up.”

“There’s no one out there looking for me,” said Ariadne, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Andrei’s eyes kept wandering all around the room, but then returning to her. “You can use the shower. The towels aren’t very clean, I’m sorry to say, and the hot water’s unreliable, but, ah, I wasn’t expecting to have guests. Certainly not you.”

He blinked. “Ari, am I going crazy? Are you really here? How did you know where to find me?”

Ariadne said nothing. She planted her feet on the ground, noticed they were bare. Had he taken off her boots? Why did her feet look so small and delicate? She rose, feeling dizzy, off-balance. She suspected she would not feel herself until night fell in earnest.

But a shower couldn’t hurt.

Andrei backed away, gave her a wide berth, but even with her back turned she could tell his eyes were following her.

“If you need anything—more shampoo, a razor . . .”

She waved him off and staggered into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. She turned to look at herself in the mirror.

Nothing but a blur, of course. Why had she even for a moment suspected otherwise?

Through the thin wall in the adjoining room, Alanis Morissette crooned out the lyrics to “Uninvited.”

The cold shower bit and tore at Ariadne, washing grime and dried blood and burnt flesh into a murky brown slurry at her feet. She saw her skin had healed the gashes, the punctures, the worst of the burns, but that was as much as her body had been able to accomplish. The damage inside had been done, and some of it could not be undone until she fed. But strangely, she didn’t feel the thirst.

Stepping gingerly out of the shower, Ariadne reached for a comb and brush Andrei had laid on the toilet tank. All of his things were lined up in neat little rows, just like in college. It looked so familiar, yet so bizarre when she added the cracked porcelain of the sink in this dive motel.

Ariadne began running the comb through her hair, tearing through knots as if someone else were moving her arms on puppet strings. She picked up Andrei’s deodorant, studied it as if it were a fragment of some fallen meteorite. Ariadne hadn’t touched the stuff, hadn’t needed to, in ten years. She uncapped the roll-on stick, brought it close, up to her armpit, centimeter by centimeter, until she felt the cold prick of its head, and shivered.

She now remembered how annoyed Andrei had always got when she used his deodorant or toothbrush. He had called it unhygienic. He hadn’t understood how doing so used to make her feel closer to him.

Slowly, she capped the stick and replaced it in its place in Andrei’s neat row. Then she wrapped a towel around her dripping form and stepped out into the motel room.

Andrei was shaking out the sheets over the wastebasket, watching the cascade of detritus Ariadne had left there billow out in small clouds as he did so. She gave the environs a good, long survey. For all the stains in the carpets and the dents in the walls, Andrei had done a valiant job of creating an island of order here. Shirts and trousers hung at attention in perfect rows in the closet. The desk, its trick leg propped up on a phone book, boasted organizers, fil-o-faxes, a laptop computer. Small framed photos surrounded the workspace, photos of a smiling blond-haired child.

Andrei had just begun to make the bed when he turned around and noticed Ariadne. “Oh. I didn’t hear you come out.”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

Andrei sat down on the bed, hands folded in his lap. Then he spread his hands and looked down at the floor. In this light, from this angle, as he sat in that posture, she could again see how old he had become. How many differences existed between the Andrei burned into her memory and this one. Reality and memory fought, and memory, as always, won. Reality simply had to be wrong.

Andrei took Ariadne’s silence as an invitation to speak.

“I know things look kind of bad now. It’s temporary. I’m, ah, in a bit of a pickle right now. Doing some freelancing work, with the taxi bit as supplemental income.” He laughed weakly. “Just until I can get back on my feet again.”

Ariadne was convinced that, had she met Andrei in some corporate boardroom wearing a three-piece suit, lecturing the executive committee of his dreams, she would have sprung, struck, slashed him from gut to neck. She would have braved legions of security officers, faced the scorch of sunlight itself, just to savor that expression of shock when she unseated him from his summit of power, the one to which he had climbed, tossing her aside like a used-up tank of oxygen.

Or if she had come upon him at a five-star restaurant atop some glittering hotel in the financial district, out with a beautiful wife wearing a diamond necklace and, two angelic young children at their sides, then Ariadne the Silent Knife would have delighted in ripping their tiny little lungs and kidneys, forcing Andrei to watch and scream helplessly as she devoured them. She had lost her tolerance for innocence long, long ago.

But seeing Andrei here, wearing a stained polo shirt, eating the remains of leftover Chinese food, stuttering and apologetic, Ariadne found she couldn’t move. If Roarke stormed the room at that moment, she wondered, would she still have been powerless to move from that spot, standing dripping in her towel?

“When you left school, Ari,” he was saying, oblivious to her thoughts, “it was like you vanished. Your parents told me they didn’t know what happened to you, but I wasn’t sure if they were just saying that so I wouldn’t find out. Sometimes I used to wonder what I’d say if I ever saw you again. This . . . this wasn’t in any of my scenarios.”

Ariadne nodded, mouth half open.

“Please, Ari. Say something. Tell me something about where you’ve been all this time. What your life’s like right now.”

“My life story’s a little complicated,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

He paused, waiting. Finally, he offered, “Why are you here?”

Ariadne became keenly aware of the paleness of her skin, the tautness of her muscles. Her body felt ugly, corpselike, brittle. “Do you have any clothes?”

“Hm? Oh, sure. I’m sorry. I should have offered earlier.”

He scrambled to a drawer, pulled a T-shirt and some slacks out of the meticulously organized piles, offered them to her. She took them, keeping one hand tightly closed around the towel.

Why did she care if he saw her naked? He’d seen her naked a hundred times. But not after she became Kindred. Even now, he must have been able to sense how she had changed. It showed in the distance he kept from her, the awkwardness, the slight tingle of fear and pity in every one of his actions.

Pity? No one pitied the Silent Knife!

Ariadne snatched the clothing from his hand with a speed and ferocity that made him flinch back. She swept into the bathroom, slammed the door.

This was ludicrous. She should show him what she was capable of now. She could smash the steel radiator in the corner of the room with her bare hands, could slice his limbs off so quickly he wouldn’t even see or feel the motions of her sword. She wanted to see his reaction, this man who had judged her and found her wanting.

Dropping the towel, she stared at her body. It was frozen in the prime of youth, everything still smooth and firm and blemishless, if you discounted tonight’s battle scars. Ariadne remembered the men at the dance club, how she could bend any of them to her will if she chose. Andrei should have been begging for her to fall back into his arms!

She fumed alone in the bathroom, pulling his too-large clothing over her body. It smelled like him, and the smell sent her angry thoughts fleeing in an instant. She was twenty again. She had never left being twenty, had she? At twenty she had been Andrei’s, often whether he liked it or not.

Ariadne stepped back out as Andrei was blowing his nose. She saw a small chunk of tissue break away and go sailing to land on his worn but polished loafers. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Hi again,” he said.

Ariadne waved weakly. She stood in the bathroom doorway as if in a trance.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t even offered you anything to eat or drink.” He pointed to the pot of boiled water. “I’m fresh out of instant coffee, and there’s nothing but beer and little leftover lo mein in the fridge, but I can run out and get something if you want.”

Ariadne shook her head silently.

He rubbed the back of his neck again. “Please, say something. I’m . . . I’m acting like an idiot here. I haven’t seen you in, what, ten years? I don’t know what to . . . to . . .”

Ariadne tried to open her mouth, but an infinite queue of questions had formed a logjam behind her lips. Why did you leave me? would have been the first out, if she had been able to speak. Why did I come here? might have been the second.

She had come to Andrei seeking to feel, to feel in the ways she used to be able to feel. But now that she was here, it had come out all backward. Were anger and self-pity all she was capable of now?

Unable to speak, Ariadne just stared, posture slouched, arms held behind her back, eyes staring up into his with the kind of hopeless expression he probably had only seen before in injured animals along the roadside.

She found herself crumpling into his arms.

“Ari.” Andrei breathed softly into her hair. “This is, ah—”

“Just shut up and hold me.”

He pulled her to him. Despite her admonition, he spoke. “Everything is going to be okay now.”

They sank to the bed, laid together side-by-side. It was just like in college. Except this time, he wouldn’t run off in a few minutes, off to work on some “vital” project. She knew that this time, he would stay.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

With nightfall, Ariadne felt some of her strength returning. She and Andrei had lain together the entire afternoon, and even now that she felt the call of the blood in her veins, she resisted leaving his embrace. When he got up to use the bathroom, she rose to her feet, casting off the covers.

She walked to the window. Drawing the shades aside, she peered out into the night.

Lights twinkled from the city skyline, each one of them denoting a room, a scene, a small stage where human actors danced out their little dramas. In her old life, she would always linger at lit windows she passed at night, curious to see what kind of lives they would reveal.

There was a war going on out there right now, but you couldn’t see it. Not even if you stared into those windows. She could shut the shades and the world itself would vanish, leaving only this motel room.

“‘I shut my eyes,’” she whispered Sylvia Plath’s words, “‘and all the world drops dead. I think I made you up inside my head.’”

She walked to the television, thumbed through the miniature cable guide, hit the button on the remote and flipped through the channels. Action dramas. Nightly news. Sitcoms. The world she had left behind. Watching it felt like getting back on a bicycle. As wobbly as it all felt, she was confident she would soon regain her balance.

Andrei emerged, walked over to her, put an arm around her shoulders.

“I half expected you to be gone by the time I got out. I fought getting up as long as I could because I was afraid of that.”

She turned to him and smiled weakly. “I’m still here.”

“Yes, you are. Will I see you again after tonight?”

“Do you want to?”

He nodded. “When will you—?”

“I don’t know. Will you still be in this motel?”

“Unfortunately, yes. But not for much longer. I’ll get an apartment soon enough. I just need one or two more big contracts with the freelance work. I—”

“This is fine.” She gestured to the television. “You have cable here.”

Andrei stared at her, then decided she had made a joke and laughed.

“Ari, it feels like we never left.”

“I know.”

“I have so much to tell you,” he said. “So much to explain.”

“Not now,” said Ariadne. As desperate as she was to know, the night was washing a bucket of cool water over her. Every passing minute it showered her with reminders, reminders that tensed her muscles, that made her fingers clench around absent sword hilts. She was the Silent Knife. This world in the motel room was a dream from which she knew she would wake very soon.

Ariadne turned around, shushed him with a finger on his lips. “Let’s not talk right now. Please.”

They sat in the glow of the television, side by side, staring ahead.

When Andrei dozed off, Ariadne gathered together what remained of her jacket and bodysuit. They felt itchy, foreign, the wrong size for her. She stared down at Andrei sleeping, listened to his chortled snores and tiny chokes, sensed the life as it beat in his veins. Her fangs tingled and pulled to get loose from her gums.

She found herself by his side, close enough to his neck that she could see the pulse of his veins.

Ariadne gripped the sides of the bed. With effort, she pushed herself back up to her feet, turned and slipped out into the hallway, closing the door gently behind her.

She saw the glint of light off her discarded sword from within the maintenance closet. A thick, sturdy-looking woman in a stained blue maid uniform was approaching, changing the bag in the hallway trash. Her iron-gray curls shook back and forth as she moved her head.

The woman looked up as Ariadne drew near.

“Hello,” said Ariadne.

“’Allo,” said the woman perfunctorily, refusing to meet Ariadne’s gaze. Her accent was unplaceable. Her arms were thick and sinuous as they went about their task, yet Ariadne could not help but think them motherly. It seemed as if one embrace from those arms could quiet any of a thousand fears.

Ariadne stepped forward and her new proximity made the maid look up. The maid smiled tentatively with yellowed teeth, some missing their neighbors.

“You . . . are okay? Yes?” Caution and concern mixed in the older woman’s eyes. Ariadne realized she still looked a mess.

The woman moved toward the closet, began to open the door. Ariadne rushed up just as the maid saw the sword, cocked her head quizzically.

Ariadne shoved herself into the doorway, almost collapsed into the maid’s arms. Some reflex of human kindness in the older woman made her rush forward and reach out. Eyebrows raised in confusion, she nevertheless kept her arms around Ariadne. Maybe she was used to such things from the clientele here, or maybe something in this girl young enough to be her daughter demanded caretaking.

“You need help?”

Ariadne looked up, her own eyes full of endless black yearning. She opened her mouth uselessly. No words came.

The older woman hugged her a little tighter. “Going to be fine-fine, yes?”

Ariadne drew herself up a little, smiled weakly, not without some embarrassment. Her hands rose up the woman’s back, gripped her firmly. Her eyes gazed to the hallway, found it otherwise empty.

In one swift motion, Ariadne pulled the maid inside the closet with her and slammed the door. At the same time she drove her head forward. Fangs extended into the other woman’s throat. A wild splash of red flew across Ariadne’s eyes.

She guzzled, filling herself with no regard for the taste or texture of the blood. The older woman’s eyes froze wide in shock. Her lips parted in a scream that had been suddenly denied the breath to make it.

The shivers of the woman beneath Ariadne resonated throughout her own muscles, making them spasm in rhythm to her victim’s palsy. Ariadne could feel her skin knitting, the bruises smearing and fading back to white, the cracked ribs swelling and solidifying.

The maid lay pale and still beneath her, ashen face frozen in a moment of terrified betrayal. But she would live. Ariadne was in control again. She licked the wounds she had made, sealed the punctures, mopped up the mess. Then she placed the semiconscious maid neatly atop a pile of toilet paper rolls.

Daaa-da-da-daaa, da da da . . . da da da ta-ta-ta-ta . . .

The song. Ariadne found that she remembered almost a whole measure. It hadn’t hit her like a bolt; the memory was just there, more complete, as if it had always been there. She still didn’t recall precisely where she had heard it, in life or in undeath, but she hummed it softly as she donned the maid’s clothes, as she wrapped her sword in a plastic garbage bag. It was about yearning, but also triumph, renewal. It seemed a shame to let the memory go when it came time to leave.

Ariadne closed the closet door without making a sound. Then her feet passed silently over the cement beneath a sliver of moonlight that seemed to dim complicitly.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 13

 

 

Silas was crying.

Whatever it was that Ariadne was expecting when she returned to Liliane’s sanctuary by night’s end, it wasn’t the sight of the elder bunching his bony hands against his eye sockets, weeping bloody tears over a tattered pile of wood and canvas at his feet in the drawing room.

The drawing room itself looked as if someone had converted it into a miniature warehouse. All around Silas, Liliane’s house-servants were hauling boxes and sorting through burnt and twisted objets d’art. No one seemed to notice Ariadne as she entered.

“Animals,” the elder hissed, limbs quivering. “Barbarians! Life is fleeting, but art? Art is eternal! How could they have m-m-m . . . massacred Renoir like this? I watched the man paint these himself!”

Ariadne stood in mute disbelief. It was as if her one day with Andrei had unwoven the finely bound threads that kept the universe as she knew it intact.

She didn’t feel like approaching Silas in this state, so she managed to take one of his men aside. He explained that Roarke’s forces had hit Silas’s safehouse, killing all his retainers and demolishing his priceless collection of French impressionist paintings.

Despite her best efforts, Ariadne could not escape the room before Silas looked up at her. The hate and pain blistering in his crimson eyes seemed to shoot out directly at her. She hadn’t intended to step in at this very moment, to bear witness to this rare moment of weakness. But neither was she going to cower and apologize and slip away.

Ariadne remembered her momentary vision of Silas crumbling to dust at a wedding ceremony, the top hat all that remained to mark his passage. Then she remembered the claws and teeth of his hound as it mauled her on the Boston University Bridge, and any sympathy she might have felt fled.

She bowed her head in simple deference. “Roarke will pay for all his crimes.”

Silas laughed a scratchy, bone-tearing laugh. “Really, now? You’ve done such a fine job, young Seneschal, of halting his efforts thus far. What will burn next while you’re out trying to make him pay?”

“Roarke lost his primary base of operations,” said Ariadne. “I destroyed it personally.”

“Ah, I see, then,” Silas sneered. “This is your revenge. Drawing back our defenses from my personal holdings. Well-played, youngling. And here they were all mourning what they thought was your loss. So you’ll have their sympathy, too. Idiots.”

Ariadne let his words wash over her, as she had so many times in the past, and it worked, too, right up until he said, “Wherever you were yesterday, you weren’t where you needed to be. Roarke still moves with impunity through this city—the demesne Liliane and I and the others spent decades building with our blood, parleying with the wizards as if they were our equals. All you see is the end result. Little wonder you care not if it falls!”

Behind her mask, Ariadne flinched. Silas was a fiend, but he was right. She had been gone for a full night. A night was an eternity during wartime.

With a silent bow of departure, Ariadne left to seek the Prince. She walked as slowly as she could. Silas’s howls of pain and frustration echoed throughout the halls.

She half-expected Bourne to be here, lording her failure over her. But Po-Mo had checked back in long before Ariadne’s return, reporting Roarke’s trail cold and Bourne to be missing. Had he been a victim of Roarke’s forces during that fight in the train yard, slain while she was still in the subterranean depths? Had he simply cut and run? If so, he certainly would not be returning. Liliane reserved her most creative and protracted punishments for those who committed treason during times of war.

Treason. During times of war.

Ariadne swallowed hard.

She moved through the halls, passing among cots where wounded men and women, Kindred and conscripted ghouls alike, lay writhing on blood-soaked sheets, their bodies slowly healing wounds from fire and iron, from stakes and from explosive shells. It would appear that, over the course of this one night, the war had erupted into an all-out conflagration.

“Roarke’s on the offense,” someone was saying.

“Last ditch hope. He knows he’s done for, wants to go out with a bang. Bring it on!”

“Wizards aren’t going to like this. Heard some of them have declared Kindred fair game. Any Kindred.”

“Let ’em try.”

“Help. Please, I need some blood—”

One night. She had only been gone one night. Not even a full night.

Ariadne felt as if she were walking through a humid wall of tension. The silken chatter of the socialites was no more; everyone was swapping battle stories, some with pride and some with shellshock. She saw one of the jet-setter ancillae rocking back and forth, hands over her ears, while another young Kindred futilely tried to draw her out of her stupor. These vampires were predators, but they were not soldiers. There was a difference.

“Make way. One side. Coming through . . .”

Ariadne felt a bump from behind and wheeled around in time to see the house steward, that diminutive, bald-headed ghoul who tended the maintenance of the facility, shout and try futilely to catch a number of ceramic urns that were falling off the tray he had wheeled into her. They shattered on the ground, pouring fourth piles of black ash.

Cursing, the house-steward scrambled, trying desperately to sweep up the piles. Ariadne knew the reason for his fear. Urns such as those contained the earthly remains of fallen Kindred. Liliane insisted they be treated with the utmost respect. She severely punished those who failed to show that required respect.

Ariadne bent down to help him with his sweeping, and as she stared at the ashes—ebon, charred—she recalled Hera’s fate.

What was going on here? How had the world spiraled away from her?

There was no time for questions. Ariadne finished her trek to Liliane’s study, hand wavering tentatively over the doorknob. She had tried to rehearse the explanation she would give a thousand times, but the practiced words rang hollow in her mind now.

“Come in, Silent Knife.”

Ariadne was on the other side of the door, but her Prince knew she was there, knew her secrets, knew everything.

The door opened. Liliane sat on her divan, radiant. Ariadne had never seen Liliane’s skin so vibrant, practically glowing. Her movements seemed to have a lift to them, an energy that suffused her practiced poise. Liliane’s crimson lipstick was freshly applied, and her white suit replaced with a sparkling, diamond-studded evening dress that glimmered even in the soft light of the study.

“My lady.” Compared to this vision, Araidne felt like nothing. Even to take in the sight of the Prince with her eyes seemed to profane the image.

Ariadne fell to her knees.

“Forgive me.” She stared at the floor. Long seconds passed.

“Your lady isn’t in a position to do much of anything,” said a gruff male voice. Ariadne raised her head just enough to locate the speaker.

Mister Rose moved into view behind Liliane, his thick hands falling slowly upon the edge of the divan. There was rage in his eyes.

“‘The situation is under control’?” His basso voice shook. “Indeed not! There are fires throughout the city. Even if the Ravens bury nine-tenths of it, it will still be the worst breach of the Masquerade in years. As of this moment, for the sake of us all, the Council is seizing control of this situation. And this demesne.”

 

 




 

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.

 

 

 

Quotation by Anaïs Nin is reprinted by permission of The Anaïs Nin Trust; from Winter of Artifice, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.