Divine Fire (13 page)

“I’ve wondered.” Damien began searching through the papers on his desk. “There is another version of the story that she recounted to Abbé Scarron, claiming that the dark man appeared three times in her life. The dark man was said to be able to produce thunder and lightning at will. Ah! Here we are! Read this. Right before Ninon’s eighteenth birthday she and Gentilly sought out a dark magician living on the outskirts of Paris.”

Brice took the letter and read aloud in French. Her accent was improving with practice:

Upon entering the village, we enquired after the building where there lived a famous necromancer; and a guide presently presented himself to lead us thither. After proceeding five minutes along an underground passage, we found ourselves in a circular chamber hewn from the heart of the mountain.

I stared at the figure on the throne before us, a dark man, oddly scarred, with eyes as black as midnight.

“Approach!” he cried in a terrible voice. “What do you wish?”

Brice stopped reading aloud and scanned the rest of the letter. “Amazing.”

“Yes. It reads like bad fiction, right down to their being blinded by lightning. And there are several other intriguing incidences. Twice in her life, Ninon’s hair began to fall out, and twice, after she retired to the country for a rest, it grew back completely—in a matter of weeks. The second time it happened, she went to England. It was when she witnessed the execution of Charles the First—a king who had been lame as a child but who was miraculously healed as an adult. A king whose eyes had also gone dark.”

“Charles the First?” Brice’s voice was awed. “He was Dippel’s patient also?”

“Maybe.”

“I recall this story about Ninon. Rather than wear a wig, she arranged her short curls in a style called
se coiffeur à la Ninon
. It was very popular. But everyone in Paris marveled that her hair grew back so quickly. I think they were dismayed at finding themselves with such short crops when her own hair grew in so rapidly. Do you think that this is when she…
renewed
herself?”

“It’s suggestive, isn’t it? But as for it being Dippel’s brand of eternal youth, I don’t know. I always suspected it but could never be sure. Reason says Dippel couldn’t have done it. Not if he was actually born when he said he was.”

Gooseflesh raced up Brice’s arms. She put the letter down carefully. “But was he?” she asked. Then, shaking her head: “But Ninon eventually died. There was a funeral, and many people saw the body.”

“I had a funeral too—several of them, in fact. And people thought they saw my body as well,” Damien pointed out. “Services and burials really don’t mean as much as one assumes. I have a lock of her hair, so DNA testing would be possible—and I’ve had French lawyers petitioning to have the body exhumed so a comparison can be made, but the odds of them ever granting the request aren’t good. And so far I haven’t been able to bring myself to try grave-robbing.”

“Has there been any sign of her? Any…anything?”

“No. Not that I’ve found. But I still think it may be possible that she survived beyond her nineties.”

“I think my brain just imploded,” Brice said weakly.

“I’m sorry,” Damien apologized again, genuinely contrite. “It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?”

Brice suddenly wanted noise, everyday noise—a vacuum, a telephone, traffic, voices—anything to break the weird spell that surrounded them. But there was only that eerie wind that pawed at the windows, and the last soft crackle of ashes falling in the fireplace.

“Such a fierce expression. What are you thinking?” Damien asked.

“That I know very little about you, other than you prefer your coffee mercilessly black. Also, it seems a pity that I can never tell the world the truth—that the immortal poet Lord Byron really
is
immortal,” Brice finally said, forcing a smile to go with her understatement.

“Not immortal.” His face was serious as he tried to explain. “Only indefinitely alive. Understand, I can be wounded. I can even be killed, though my body has a great capacity to heal damage. Frankly, in my more fanciful moments, I find this fact reassuring.”

“How so? Afraid of eternal boredom eventually setting in?” The question just slipped out.

“Not yet.” He smiled briefly. “No, my thoughts are actually more gothic, more morbid. I don’t know that a twenty-first-century mentality can understand them.”

“You worry about your soul,” she guessed, certain that she was right. It would worry
her
, and she had not been raised in the nineteenth century when religion was treated more seriously.

“Yes. And it is odd that I should wonder about it now, for I never did when I was young.” Damien frowned.

“And what have you decided?”

“It seems to me that unlike a vampire or fictional Frankenstein’s poor monster—or Dorian Gray, perhaps—since I did not seek out this quasi-immortality, and since I can die, that I have not actually sold my soul for this gift of long life. And therefore, I have not rendered myself unfit for heaven.”

“Do you often think about this?” Brice asked, feeling sympathetic.

“No, not often. In fact, until the last few weeks, I hadn’t thought of the matter since April of nineteen sixteen.”

“Why nineteen sixteen?” Brice asked. Then, guessing, she said: “Because it was the anniversary?”

A noisy buffet shook the window. The wind howled like a wounded animal and threw itself at the building, and like a wounded animal after its attacker, the wind seemed dangerous. She was glad that the glass was thick. Heavy shutters would have been even better.

“Yes, the centennial.” Seeing her distress, he went to the window and pulled the drapes against the storm. “But suddenly I find myself thinking about these things again—and being watchful. Perhaps it is just this strange weather that has plagued us this winter, but I’ve felt as if Fate is closing in, that the wheel of life is turning in a new direction.”

Brice shivered and made an effort to push back the tiny fear that was making the hairs on her nape stand on end. It was an atavistic fear, a sudden dread that reached out from the blackest night and the earliest primeval awareness of evil. Timeless evil, intelligent and calculating—though probably mad—was once again walking among men, and was stalking them.

Oh, bullshit. What evil? This wasn’t intuition—it was just the storm.
And Byron or no Byron, she’d had enough of the macabre for one night. It was time to turn the subject to happier things, like the miracle she had just made love to. A miracle who could answer all the questions she’d ever had about his life as a great poet.

She laughed softly.

“I heard a rumor that you gave Murray a bible—a very handsome one which he liked to display,” she said. “Or he liked it until someone pointed out that in John 18:40 you had changed the verse from ‘Now Barabbas was a robber’ to ‘Now Barabbas was a publisher.’ ”

“But can you blame me?” Damien asked, answering her smile. He seemed as relieved as she to have the subject turned.

Brice thought of her own situation with her publisher, which involved as much hate as love, and grinned wryly. “What of you going about London eating nothing but hard biscuits and soda water? I always thought your supposed creative diet was a sham or caused by a tricky stomach.”

“Of course it was a sham, but it got me attention—and so many of those fools actually followed it, waiting for the muse to visit them. It was inconvenient, but I could eat other things at home—sparingly, of course. In those days, when my health was so fragile and I could not exercise, I was prone to fatness.”

Lord Byron fat? Brice shook her head, still feeling more than slightly dazed.

“And the story about you swimming the Grand Canal in Venice with a lantern in your left hand?” She tactfully left out the part about him doing this after visiting his mistress.

“Well, I tried it the night before without the lantern and kept getting whacked by oars from passing gondolas. It turned out there was a law that everything in the canal had to carry a lantern after the sun was down. I was only obeying the ordinance.” He was smiling easily now, more relaxed.

“And did you really keep a bear in your rooms while at university?”

“Only briefly. And only once. I quickly discovered the difficulties in sharing living quarters with the beast, and there were more convenient ways of expressing defiance of scholarly authority. I also got expelled for using the bear to tree one of the dons.” He shook his head. “But that’s enough of my past sins for one night. It’s nearly dawn. Time you were in bed.”

“I’m only going if you come with me,” she said quickly, perhaps fearing that he meant to leave her to the storm now that his secret was revealed.

“I’ll come with you—but only if you agree to stop asking questions. Your eyes look bruised. And I can see you’re half dizzy with lack of sleep. I’ve not treated you well. You must rest.”

“It’s just the brandy that’s made me tired,” she assured him, wanting him to know that he hadn’t hurt her when they made love.

He shook his head and then took her hand. Sparks flew, though they were invisible to the eye and comparatively tame. He began to lead her toward her bedroom.

“You won’t be able to resist me,” she predicted smugly. “Not with the storm still raging.”

“We’ll see,” he answered. “I am certainly going to try. And you will help me.”

“I will?” she asked doubtfully.

“You will,” he said firmly.

“And what will happen if I don’t? Will you spank me?”

He looked back, eyes amused. “Nothing that enjoyable. I’ll just leave you to sleep alone.”

“That’s cruel. I knew you were an alpha,” she muttered under her breath.

“And I knew you’d be my undoing.” His voice took on a stronger accent and he slid into his lecturer role. “Now, let’s talk about something dull and un-arousing so you can sleep. Let’s see. Victorians, they’re the dullest of the dull. Frankly, I found the era of the nineteenth-century absolutists more depressing than anything that came before. It took the world a long while to shake off the Victorians, since they attempted to smother any new ideas at birth and precious few innovations survived to challenge their way of thinking. It was better in America, of course. At least here ideas were given a chance if they showed any hint of economic viability.”

“I’m a historian. That’s not a dull subject,” Brice warned him.

“It will be,” he promised. “And if that doesn’t work, there’s always baseball.”

“Please! I know it’s un-American, but anything but baseball.”

Chapter Ten

And thus did I instruct my assistant: These volumes should be your study day and night, your familiarity with them sufficient that you should retain an understanding of the material that you may perform these experiments without recoursing to notes. Until such a time, no experiments should be undertaken, for this is not something to be enterprised lightly. We are treading in the realm of gods and must beware.

—From the medical journal of Johann Conrad Dippel

I am in terror. I have seen my man in black! The man with the red tablets bearing my name and the dozen bottles of elixir—the one who appeared before me seventy years ago. And I heard him say he has a son who will be called St. Germain and the world shall know him and be filled with awe and dread.

—From the letters of Ninon de Lenclos

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

—Byron

The reading or non-reading of a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

—Byron, letter to Richard Hoppner, October 29, 1918

Brice dreamed as she never had before, her weird, night-marish visions played out before a sewn-together backdrop of strange emotions, memories and wild imaginings, where frightening things both real and unreal happened over and over again. The only difference in each performance of the nightmare was that the stage grew progressively dimmer and the mood more ominous.

She came awake in a rush, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, her voice raspy. She wasn’t her usual bushy-tailed self after only a couple of hours of sleep and the lingering terror of the dreams made things worse.

“The power’s out,” Damien answered, his voice also hushed.

Brice glanced at the clock on her nightstand. It was dark in the room but not completely so. She looked quickly toward her door. Out in the hall, there was a small red light up near the ceiling. It blinked periodically.

“The smoke detectors have battery backup,” Damien said, guessing her next question. “Just sit still and listen for a moment. There should be light soon—if this is just an accident. The security man at the desk knows how to turn on the backup generators.”

They waited for what seemed an eternity, staring at the small red dot—
danger, warning, spilled blood
, it said—then Damien threw back the covers.

“
If,
you said. You think this isn’t an accident?” Brice’s voice was barely louder than the wind outside. The storm had worsened while they slept.

As though hearing her thought, Damien went to her window and pried it open. The wind rushed inside, hurling snow at them. The bitter confetti latched onto the drapes and carpet and clung with icy claws.

Brice thought of the story Damien had told her about the unnatural storm that brought him to Dippel’s castle. She shuddered, pushing the memory away.

“It’s dark over the entire block. But only this block. Damn,” Damien said. “Get dressed, Brice. I have a bad feeling.”

Brice scrambled after Damien, her skin crawling with more than cold. She had a bad feeling too. She rushed to the window and looked down before he could close it, half expecting to see something evil waiting there in the fierce night.

The streetlights were out as well, but she could see that there were tracks in the snow leading up to the building’s main entrance. It was difficult to tell, since more than one person could have walked the same path, but she counted at least three distinct trails. And there was something ominous about them.

“Who would cut the power? Could it be street gangs?” she asked, allowing Damien to pull her back and slam the window shut. The question should have surprised her, because it came out of her subconscious, bypassing reason. It didn’t, though. She felt very in tune with Damien and knew what he was thinking.

Brice shivered. The magic bubble of new love—or at least new lust—that surrounded them had burst. The dark that had been romantic only hours before was now sinister. And she was standing naked with a man who was, if not a virtual stranger, then at least still very strange to her. However, the death of romance did not mean her mental connection with Damien had ended. If anything, it was stronger than before.

“Trust me, it’s no one you want to know,” Damien said grimly, dusting her off with his crumpled clothing and then pulling on his dampened shirt. “You recall when I said that there was one other thing I needed to tell you? One other danger connected with my prolonged life?”

“Vaguely.” She remembered more clearly his passionate description of her body by moonlight.

She reached for her boots, then decided she had better put on her pants first. She turned to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer, grabbing clothes by feel alone. She hated that she was always a little slow upon waking, that part of her mind seemed tethered in the dreamlands and she had to reel it back in before being fully functional.

“Well, there are actually three things you need to know,” Damien said. “One, Dippel probably isn’t dead. For the longest time I thought he was, since the peasants in his village did a real torch-and-pitchfork number on his castle and supposedly killed everyone in it. But I have recently begun to suspect that it is otherwise. Two, I know of two others of his former
patients
who have come to a bad end. I wasn’t close with them, you understand, but we knew of each other. One lived in France, one in Florida. Both died early last year in suspicious fires. I didn’t find out about it until this fall, though. The will of my acquaintance in France took a long time to probate, and the small instruction of informing me of Jean’s death was overlooked for months. And Paul had no will.”

“And three?” she asked, keeping her voice level. It required an extreme effort, because she was beginning to shake violently. The snow was off of her body, but not the chill.

“I hired a firm of private investigators to find the man I suspect to be Dippel, and to determine if he had anything to do with the deaths of Jean Perregaux or Paul Holmes.”

“And?” Brice pulled on a sweater, hoping she had it the right way around.

“There was no proof one way or another. But the man who sounds a lot like Dippel has vanished from his bunker in Nevada—which also conveniently burned—and one of the investigators turned up dead, again burned in a car crash when his vehicle ran off the road.”

“Was it an accident?”

“The police report says so.” Damien moved toward the door. “But I don’t believe it. Not now.”

Brice grabbed her coat and moved behind him. As always, he didn’t seem to feel the chill.

“I think I’m frightened.”

“Come on. We need to get to the library. Just stay close and be quiet and everything will be fine.” His voice was brisk and reassuring.

They ghosted down the hall, their way lit by the distant city lights bleeding through the iced-over windows and by the intermittent red light of the smoke detectors. Damien stopped by a small table and lifted the receiver of the antique telephone.

“It’s dead. It could be the storm.” He didn’t bother to put any conviction in his voice.

“Uh-huh, and pigs may fly. Do you have a cell phone somewhere?”

“No, I told you. I can’t get a signal off the bloody things. In fact, I wreak havoc on lots of machines. Do you have one?”

“No. Remember? I told you I can’t stand constantly being interrupted.”

“So…” Damien turned and continued down the hall.

“I think we have to assume that we’re really in trouble,” Brice said as she followed.

“Yes, I believe the expression is ‘in deep shit.’ ”

Brice almost laughed. The phrase sounded ridiculous on his lips.

“Yes—but how deep?” she asked. “I’m not sure I understand, or even have the scales on which to measure our difficulties. What does Dippel want? To kill you? And if so, why?”

They walked quickly, being careful to avoid the desk Brice had been using. There was still a faint glow of embers in the fireplace.

“That remains to be seen, though I suspect you have the right of it. He wants me dead—if not, why not just send a Christmas card or phone for an appointment?” He asked abruptly, “Can you use a gun?”

“Yes,” Brice answered without hesitation. She didn’t ask if he could. Lord Byron had been a noted marksman. It wasn’t likely that he allowed his skills to deteriorate.

“Good.” Damien opened a side panel in his desk and extracted two pistols. She didn’t recognize the make of either gun in the dark, but they were heavy, and hers was warm—almost hot. She began to be aware of how warm Damien really was. His body temperature had been normal while resting, but standing beside her, he radiated heat like a fully stoked iron stove. His elevated body temperature had heated the metal in the few seconds he held the gun.

“It’s loaded,” he said. “Just point and shoot.”

Brice turned toward the window and sighted down the barrel. She checked to see where the safety catch was and then opened the gun and looked inside. It held eight bullets. She hoped that would be enough.

“Aim for the face,” Damien said, tucking his weapon into the band of his pants. “It may not kill them, but it’s hard to chase someone with your eyes shot out.”

Them? Dippel’s monsters, his undying soldiers
. All the horrors she’d read about in that leather-bound journal. So she hadn’t been wrong about the ominous prints in the snow and what Damien was thinking.

Brice swallowed and nodded, trying not to feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. It was difficult, because in spite of what Damien had told her, the proof she had seen with her own eyes, and what she had read in Dippel’s own journal, she hadn’t really believed most of it. She still didn’t. It was easier to think that any invaders were conventional thieves or drug dealers.

Brice dropped the pistol into her coat pocket. She thrust her hands in as well. She didn’t want to see if they were shaking.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” Damien said. His face was harsh in the dim red light. “We are going to climb down the ladder in the elevator shaft to the floor below. After that, there are stairs we can use. We are making for the fifth floor. That’s where the security office is.”

“There’s more than the guard in the lobby?”

“There should be at least one other on duty even at night. Hopefully, he hasn’t been incapacitated yet.”

“And if he has?” Brice asked, even though she was sure she wouldn’t like the answer.

“Then we take any weapons we can find in the office. And we come back up here and I lock you in the vault while I take care of this mess.”

“No,” Brice said immediately. She didn’t like the sound of the vault or of Damien “taking care of this mess.” Both sounded potentially fatal.

“It has an inside latch. You’ll be able to get out if you need to,” Damien said, understanding that she was objecting to being shut up in the vault. He started for the foyer where the elevator was.

Brice thought of all those not-so-accidental fires that Damien had mentioned and shuddered. If the building went up, escaping from the vault wouldn’t help her.

“No. We don’t split up. Not for any reason. They always split up in the movies and it’s always a bad idea.”

“Yes, we do split up—if the guard has been gotten at,” he argued. He looked back at her. “Unless you’ve done a lot of mountain climbing in the snow?”

“No.” Their footsteps echoed in the hall. She asked, “Why would that matter? You said the elevator had a ladder. And there are stairs.” She could do stairs, even in the dark. The elevator…well, she would manage somehow. A shaft wasn’t like a car, and she rode in elevators all the time. Well, a lot of the time. When she had no other choice.

“If Dippel’s gotten to the security room, then they are in the building—using the stairwell probably. If I’m to get down to the generator and see about reconnecting the phones, I’ll have to go down the outside of the building. In good weather, it would be a hard climb. In this hell broth? No, I couldn’t let you risk it.”

“No.” Brice repeated. Again, she didn’t ask about who “they” were. It made some sense that Dippel wouldn’t come alone. And there were those tracks—so at least three people were here. “No, absolutely not. Look, I have a better idea. If they’ve gotten to the security guard, we burn a match under the smoke detectors and set it off. That’ll bring the fire department. They can call the police if we need them.”

She didn’t think about the fact that Dippel might have a similar plan, only one that involved actually burning down the building. That was too horrible to think about.

“Good plan, but it won’t work.” Damien stopped in front of the elevator doors and began working his fingers into the crack. He shouldn’t have been able to force the car open, but he managed it quickly. “The smoke detectors only alert the security room. If there really is a fire, the guards call the fire department. I had to do this because I kept setting the damned things off every time it stormed or I had a nightmare. And you can bet the phone lines have been cut for the whole building, not just on this floor.”

Damien finished opening the metal door with one hand. Brice could only stare at him and wonder how strong he actually was. Had Dippel’s treatment done more than extend his life and turn him into a human furnace?

“Let’s try it now,” she urged as he swung into the dark shaft. She could smell grease from the gears and cables and began to feel a little dizzy at the thought of stepping into the black hole. She didn’t like confined spaces. She never had, and it had gotten worse since the car accident. The petroleum smell rolling out of the dark didn’t help, either. “If the guard is there, then he’ll call the fire department and help will be here in no time.”

“The ladder is to the left,” Damien said. “It’s stable, so don’t worry about falling.”

“Damien, damn it! You aren’t listening.”

“Look, we can’t do that. If Dippel has taken over the security room, then this will just alert him to the fact that we’re up and know he’s here. We might as well lay out the welcome mat and shout
‘yoohoo, over here!’
Anyway, I’m not sure we want the police and fire departments. This would be awfully hard to explain, and I don’t much fancy becoming anyone’s medical marvel—which is bound to happen if anyone with an ounce of medical training gets a look at me.” His voice was getting fainter. “Brice, just wait for me up there. It’s safe for now, and I’ll be back in five minutes.”