It had never been enough, had it?
Truth was, he didn’t know if he was ready to go back. Unwilling to dredge up the ghosts of the past. They were hungry too. Locked inside in his head, the door rusted shut from long disuse. If he were to prise it open …
‘If I’m going back to San Michon,’ he finally declared, ‘I’ll need a drink.’
Jean-Fran?ois snapped his fingers. The door opened at once, that thrall woman waiting on the threshold. Her gaze was downturned, thin red braids draped across her eyes.
‘Your will, Master?’
‘Wine,’ the vampire commanded. ‘The Monét, I think. Bring two glasses.’
The woman met the Dead boy’s eyes, a sudden flush rising in her cheeks. She dropped into a low curtsey, long black skirts whispering as she hurried away. Gabriel listened to her retreating down a stone stairwell, glanced towards the now-unlocked door. Faint sounds of life drifted up from the ch?teau beneath – tromping feet, a snatch of laughter, a thin, warbling scream. Gabriel counted ten steps from his chair to the door. A bead of sweat trickled between his shoulderblades.
He saw Jean-Fran?ois was illustrating the company of the Grail, now. Père Rafa in his robes, the wheel about his neck, the priest’s warnings echoing in Gabriel’s head. He saw Saoirse with her slayerbraids and hunter’s stare, the she-lion Phoebe beside her like a red shadow. Bellamy with his rake’s cap and easy smile, and at the front, little Chloe Sauvage, with her silversteel sword and freckled cheeks and all the hope in the world shining in her liar’s eyes.
The vampire glanced up. ‘Ah, splendid …’
The thrall stood at the doorway, holding a golden platter. Two crystal goblets sat upon it, alongside a bottle of fine Monét from the Elidaeni vineyards. A vintage like that was rare as silver these nights. An emperor’s fortune in dusty green glass.
The thrall placed the two goblets on the table, poured a generous helping into Gabriel’s. The wine was red as heartsblood, its perfume a dizzying change from mouldy straw and rusted iron. The second glass stood empty.
Wordlessly, Jean-Fran?ois held out his hand. The silversaint watched, mouth running dry as the woman sank to her knees beside the monster’s chair. Her cheeks were flushed, bosom heaving as she placed her hand in his. Again, Gabriel was struck by the notion that she looked old enough to be the vampire’s mother, and his stomach might have soured at the lie of it all were it not for the thought and thrill of what was to come.
The vampire looked to Gabriel as he raised the woman’s wrist to his lips.
‘Pardon,’ he whispered.
The monster bit down. The woman moaned softly as ivory daggers slid through her pale skin and into the supple flesh beyond. For a moment, it seemed all she could do just to breathe, fallen into the spell of those eyes, those lips, those teeth.
The Kiss, they called it – these monsters who wore the skins of men. A pleasure darker than any sin of the flesh, more honeyed than any drug. Gabriel could see the woman was lost now, adrift on a blood-red sea. And awful as it was, a part of him remembered that desire, pounding hot at his temples, down between his legs. He could feel his teeth growing sharp, a needle-bright stab of pain as he pressed his tongue against one canine.
Under her lace choker, he spied the old bite scars at the woman’s neck. His blood stirring as he wondered where else she might hide the marks of their hungers. The woman’s head sank back, long tresses flowing down her bare shoulders as she pressed her free hand to her breast, lashes fluttering. Jean-Fran?ois’s eyes were still fixed on Gabriel, narrowing slightly as a tight gasp of pleasure escaped his lips.
But then the monster broke his unholy kiss, a thin, ruby string of blood stretching and snapping as he pulled the woman’s hand away. Eyes still locked with the silversaint’s, the vampire held the thrall’s open wrist above the empty glass and the blood spilled, thick, warm, crimson into the crystal. The scent of it filled the room, making Gabriel’s breath come quicker, his mouth now dry as tombs. Wanting. Needing.
The vampire sliced the tip of his own thumb on his fangs, pressed it to the woman’s lips. Her eyes flashed open and she gasped, suckling like a starving babe, one hand pressed between her legs as she drank. When the goblet was full, drip, drip, drip, the vampire lifted the woman’s wounded wrist. And like a forgetful host, he offered it to Gabriel.
‘We could share her? If it please you?’
The woman’s eyes flickered to his, chest heaving and fingers strumming as she drank. And Gabriel remembered then – the taste of it, the warmth of it, a dark and perfect joy no smoke could ever match. The thirst reared up inside him, a thrill pulsing from his aching crotch all the way to his tingling fingertips.
And it was all he could do then to hiss through clenched and knife-sharp teeth.
‘No. Merci.’
Jean-Fran?ois smiled, licked the woman’s bleeding wrist with a bright red tongue. Easing his thumb from her mouth, the monster spoke, thick and heavy as iron.
‘Leave us now, love.’
‘… Your will, Master,’ she whispered, breathless.
The woman rose on trembling legs, steadying herself against the monster’s chair. With the wound at her wrist already closing, she sank into a shaking curtsey, and with a final wanton glance to Gabriel, slipped from the room.
The door locked softly behind her.
Jean-Fran?ois lifted the blood-filled glass. Gabriel watched, fascinated, as the vampire held it against the lanternlight, twisting it this way and that. So red it was almost black. The monster’s lips curled in a smile, eyes still on the silversaint’s.
‘Santé,’ Jean-Fran?ois said, wishing him health.
‘Morté,’ Gabriel replied, toasting his death.
The pair drank, the vampire taking one slow mouthful, Gabriel downing his entire glass in a single draught. Jean-Fran?ois sighed, sucking the plump swell of his lower lip and biting gently. Gabriel reached for the bottle and refilled his glass.
‘So,’ Jean-Fran?ois murmured, smoothing his waistcoat. ‘You were a fifteen-year-old boy, de León. A frailblooded Nordling brat, dragged from the squalid mud of Lorson to the impregnable walls of San Michon. They made a lion of you. They made a legend. A foe even the Forever King learned to fear. How?’
Gabriel lifted the goblet to his lips, downed it with a long gulp. A trickle of wine spilled down his chin, and as he wiped it away, he looked at the wreath of skulls tattooed atop his right hand. Those eight letters etched across his fingers.
P A T I E N C E
‘They didn’t make a lion of me, coldblood,’ he answered. ‘Like my mama said, the lion was always in my blood.’
He closed his hand slowly, and sighed.
‘They just helped me turn it loose.’
I
AUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS
‘HALF A YEAR had passed since I was sworn as an initiate of the Silver Order, and every day of it, Frère Greyhand had worked me to the fucking bone.
‘As Aaron de Coste had promised, the Gauntlet was the fire in which I was to be forged, or melted to slag. The dance was different every day, and for months on end, I was put to the test by my master, or by ingenious devices built by the Brothers of the Hearth.
‘There was the “Thorned Men” – a knot of ever-moving training dummies that could strike you back when you hit them. “The Thresher” was a rotating series of oaken poles, thirty feet off the stone – one slip during a spar meant you’d be nursing broken bones for the rest of the day. The shifting obstacle course called “the Scar”， the speed run named “the Scythe” – all designed to make us harder. Faster. Stronger.