The Hunger (23 page)

Six hundred years later, on the edge of Hounslow Heath, Beatrix began to run, her night vision more than human, up a boulder-strewn slope as though she could run from what she had become so long ago. Trees gave way to a clearing. She turned her face to the moon and put her back to a gigantic boulder. The stone was rough and cold through her cloak. She sank to the earth, trembling.

She had rejected all that. Blood was not paired with sex anymore for her. She had stopped even making love to them when she fed, in case Asharti’s demons lurked inside her. A century late perhaps, but she had found the will to resist the seductive sucking of life. Yet all these memories kept rising to torment her. Why? What were they trying to tell her? Why couldn’t she shut them off anymore? She had to find a way out of this. Maybe she had to experience it all before she could be done with it. She forced herself to remember the last time she saw Asharti.

KRAKOW, MALOPOLSKA
, 1221

Beatrix raised her head from the young squire’s neck and eased herself off his softening member, a feeling of lassitude drenching her. She looked over to where Asharti’s English knight bled from half a dozen cuts and bites. He was still erect. Asharti still wanted the use of him. His eyes were glazed, though, and his chest heaving. He would not last much longer. Asharti looked up from where she curled against him upon the Turkey carpet in the castle that reminded Beatrix of Stephan’s. “Are you satisfied, Bea?” she asked. “Do you mind if I use both of them?”

Beatrix shook her head, feeling queasy in a way she couldn’t fathom. “He’s yours.”

She watched as Asharti took control of them both. She lay back on the rug. The firelight gleamed on Asharti’s golden, creamy skin. The knight turned in to her. The squire scrambled to her other side. Each bent to suck a nipple. Asharti purred like a cat when it is stroked and arched her back. The knight, older, more experienced of women, was Asharti’s choice to finger her wet sex. Beatrix watched, unable to look away, yet repelled in a way she could not explain. What was happening to her? Had she not done the same? She liked being pleasured by two at once. The feeling of subtle horror had been coming on for some time. That she knew
.

Asharti brought the young squire’s neck up to her teeth and sucked just as she climaxed
.

She collapsed, and they with her. “Ahhh, Delightful,” she whispered after a moment. She opened her eyes. “What for you, Bea? Mouth? Cock? Or would you like something more exotic?”

Beatrix felt her gorge rise. Asharti had developed some strange proclivities lately. She liked to work the anus of her victims with whatever was to hand: broomsticks, whip handles. Beatrix shook her head and looked away
.

“Why not, sister?” Asharti raised herself on one elbow. “Are you sick?”

“I don’t know,” Beatrix managed. Sick? Yes, she was sick. Sick of the death, the endless repetition of ecstasy and the horrible letdown when it faded. It was a treadmill grinding away at her, and if she did not get off now, she might never escape. It had turned out there were consequences far worse than lightning striking
.

Asharti waited. Beatrix knew Asharti could feel that she was becoming distant of late. Beatrix’s small seed of independence threatened her. Beatrix wasn’t sure why. They both knew Asharti was stronger. Was her strength
because she fed more often, or was it that she took in the power of the souls that shushed past her lips like a whispering breath? She certainly killed more
.

Beatrix said nothing. Thoughts swirled in her head. She had no mother. No father. No siblings. No Stephan. She was alone in a world that thought her a monster, among beings who could never understand her, let alone accept her. She shivered Asharti was all she had in the world now. That thought was all that kept her with Asharti these last months
.

But Beatrix knew there was no choice but to deny all this, even if she was denying who she really was. Asharti’s way was tearing at the very fabric of her. Beatrix took a breath. What could she say? Asharti waited, black eyes flat. Perhaps it was already done, and the words were not even needed. “I don’t think I can, Asharti.”

“But you aren’t sick.” Asharti pronounced it like a sentence
.

“I think I have been sick,” Beatrix said, then rushed forward. “Stephan hurt me, hurt you, no matter what you say. We have been trying to punish him by breaking all his Rules. But he isn’t here, Asharti. He isn’t hurt by this. Only we are.”

“Hurt?” Asharti’s eyes narrowed. “Us? We are vampire, immortal.”

“But our souls, sister, our souls are eaten away with every life we take, like rust on iron, like the rot eating the flesh of the leper.”

Asharti stood and pulled her velvet robe around her. “What nonsense are you talking?”

Beatrix pressed her lips together. “Let us not become the monsters they all think us.”

Asharti laughed. It was brittle. “You never did have the courage to be who you are, Bea. And
you
were born to it.” She pointed to the knight, still gasping on the carpet. “They have no purpose but to slake our thirst. They are small beings. We are large. We have the Companion in
our blood, and two are more than one plus one.” An expression of hurt flickered in her eyes. “Don’t be small, like them, Bea”

Beatrix just tried to breathe. She knew she had little if anything in common with the men on the floor, so close to death, or indeed any being within a hundred miles, or five hundred, other than Asharti. Asharti was her soul mate
.

“Have you been seduced into shame by these Christians?” Asharti peered at her
.

“No. I know no god who would claim us,” Beatrix whispered
.

“Then what? Why can you not accept who we are and embrace it?” Asharti’s voice rose. “We can be
anything,
Bea. We can rule the world. We can have all the pleasure there is. You like books. We can learn everything there is to learn.” The words had the air of pleading. “We are gods, Bea.” Something she saw in Beatrix’s face made her continue. “You want to spare these?” She kicked at the knight. “We spare them. What is more godlike than that?”

“I have to stop this, Asharti.” Beatrix was surprised at how even her voice was. It made her sound more sure than she was inside. “Come with me. Let us find new ways of living.”

Asharti went still. She straightened. “I like this.”

“Too much.”

“What is too much? How can you like living too much? What is left of life if you hunger for nothing?” The words tumbled from the too-wide mouth in that faintly accented French
.

“Passion for life is important,” Beatrix said carefully, trying to tell the truth as she knew it. This was her sister, her friend, the one she had always admired, the only one who understood her. “But desire must be tempered, like steel, if it is to last.”

“We are
immortal!”
Asharti spoke as if to a child. “What is more lasting than that?”

“I know. And it frightens me.” Beatrix swallowed. “I need a new path. Join me . . .”

“No.”

Just what she feared and expected. She glanced down. “I must go. Let them go, too.”

“I want the last drop from them,” Asharti said, lifting her chin
.

Beatrix stared at Asharti for a long moment, not knowing how to convince her that her path was one of self-destruction
.

Asharti must have known she was losing Beatrix. Her face contorted in rage. “You think their death matters? Then you don’t know how the world works, sister. I was made after the sacking of Jerusalem by the Christians in the first Crusade. I lived through the breaking of the walls. The infidel soldiers like this brute here raged through the streets, hacking at anyone; women, children, old men as well as Allah’s warriors. Heads were piled in every square. It was worse if they did not take your head. They hacked away hands and feet, so you crawled, dying, in your own blood.” Her face was lit with a ferocious hatred Beatrix had never seen. “I hid near the temple of Solomon. There were twelve hundred Jews inside. And the soldiers locked the doors and burned it down in the name of Christ. The stink of burning flesh, the screams . . .” she trailed off, breasts heaving as she gazed down at the tabard that bore the cross where it lay discarded next to the naked knight. “Robert le Blois made me that night; he who ordered all that carnage in the name of God. He found me being raped by various Christian pigs and took me for himself. He too raped me, infected me, and brought me back to France to serve him. He planned to kill me when he tired of me. Stephan won me in a game of dice instead.” She lifted her head, drained. Beatrix saw tears gleaming in her eyes. “That is the way the world
works for those who are not strong. I survived. Now I am the strong one. I will never be a victim again.”

Beatrix was stunned. “I’m sorry, Asharti.” It seemed so inadequate. No one had ever cared for either of them, not even Stephan. “You are right. We must make our own way. But there must be other ways than to indulge in the world’s brutality. Is your experience what we are doomed to re-create for others?” She asked this of herself as well as Asharti
.

“I am not doomed, sister,” Asharti sneered. “I choose my fate. We can be the ones who hurt or the ones who are hurt. I know which way I will go.”

“I cannot go with you.” Beatrix turned toward the doorway
.

“You want to take them with you?” She poked the knight with her toe. “You can.”

“You would let them go?” Beatrix glanced to the barely conscious men on the floor
.

“All you must do is best me. Prove you are the strong one.”

Beatrix felt her heart go cold. So this was it. She hesitated. She could just go. Again her eyes strayed to the men on the floor. Their chests heaved. They were still erect. How could she leave them without trying? She took a breath
. Companion, come to me.
The flash of power rushed up from her heart
.

Asharti smiled. Her eyes narrowed, already red. Her power drenched Beatrix
.

Companion!
Beatrix pleaded. Their power created an electric hum in the air. Beatrix began to tremble. Asharti’s grin widened. Beatrix felt her Companion waver
.

“Ahhhh!” she groaned. Asharti’s power ramped up exponentially
.

Beatrix went still. Her Companion shushed back down her veins. “You win,” she panted
.

Asharti laughed and raised her arms. A red halo pulsed around her. “My power is fed by my hunger for life,” she shouted. “I can do anything!”

Beatrix shuddered
.

Asharti’s red glow faded. She lifted her brows
.

Beatrix glanced, panting, one last time to the men on the floor. They were doomed. Then she whirled and rushed for the door
.

“You will regret this for the rest of your life,” Asharti shouted after her. “Do not think I will take you back after your betrayal.”

That was it. She had never seen Asharti since. She heard things, of course. Asharti had returned to the Levant. She had made a servant, Fedeyah, a eunuch who procured for her. She led a cult of cannibals in darkest Africa. That could not be true, of course. She had thought for a while Stephan would hear of Asharti’s antics and stop her somehow. But he did not. Apparently the Elders at Mirso did not care as long as she was not in Europe.

Beatrix got reports of Stephan from time to time. He had lived in Nepal. They called him something outlandish. Dali Lama? Something like that. He met Cortez on the shores of the New World, which of course was not new at all, since the civilization Stephan then ruled as a god had been there for a thousand years. They provided him blood through human sacrifice. She heard from Khalenberg that Stephan was in Amsterdam now. It did not matter. She was alone, as vampires were required to be. One to a city. One, alone, just as the Rules prescribed.

Beatrix put her head in her hands. The cold from the ground and the stone at her back seeped through her. She had rejected Asharti’s way more than six hundred years ago. She had tried everything since then to find passion and purpose in her life; art, and causes and literature. She had never since taken the last drop of life. If she killed it
was in battle. She had used the money which came so easily to take in orphans after the endless wars in Europe, and start hospitals. What had it gotten her? The good she did was a drop in the ocean of man’s inhumanity to man. Power and politics no longer interested her. Even art had paled of late. It couldn’t keep the memories at bay. Music faded. Witty conversation wasn’t. She would never hold salons in Berkeley Square again. She could not imagine making the effort to speak to His Grace of Devonshire or stave off the attentions of the Prince Regent.

She had no hunger for life.

She had been very near wanting something again. Three weeks ago she had wanted Langley. And he had left her. Casually. Without even regret. Did these memories of Stephan and Asharti haunt her because she had let herself be intrigued by Langley and been betrayed? It was, after all, when Stephan betrayed her that she had run amok with Asharti. Or maybe Langley was the cause of the visions, not the respite from them she had thought God! She didn’t know! She only knew she couldn’t lose control again. She would
not
become like Asharti.

There was only one answer for protection from the memories, and the darkness and from becoming like Asharti. Mirso Monastery.

Time to pack.

Thirteen

John bowed with too much grace over the hand of the Comtesse de Fanueille. She was not what he expected. “How can a poor merchant express his present honor, my lady?”