The only living person left in the clearing was the woman. Taras walked over to where she lay and watched the subtle rising and falling of the artery in her neck. She was already unconscious. It would be easy. He leaned over her, his hunger raging through his body. The roar in his ears drowned out most everything but her heartbeat, which still came in a slow, steady thump. He leaned in and put his mouth on her throat.
The woman spasmed, and started to scream through her gag again. Taras pulled back and saw she had regained consciousness. Her eyes went wide as she looked at his face, and Taras couldn’t help but notice the shade of her irises. They were a deep brown, like a chestnut.
Like Mary’s.
Taras stumbled back, falling over backwards in his haste to get himself away from the woman. Gods, he almost killed her! He’d been so close. He would have to be careful. Men like Hio and Grummit deserved to die, but she was a victim. An innocent. She did not deserve this.
Mary would have wanted him to help her.
She continued to scream her muffled scream, and Taras rose to his feet. He walked back over to her and grasped the spike in the ground. It came up easily, and he tossed it to the side. Then he pointed to the knife in Hio’s hand.
“It’s sharp,” he said. “Use it on your ropes.”
With that, he turned away from her. He wanted to stay and make sure she made it to safety, but the sound of her blood pulsing through her veins called to him, and he forced himself to keep walking. If he stopped again, he would kill her. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself.
He passed Grummit’s body and looked down. The bandit’s flesh looked sunken and dry, as though he’d been dead for months instead of minutes. Taras tried to feel remorse for killing him, but it wouldn’t come. Grummit had been a vile man bent on doing vile things. So were Hio and the other two bandits. In Jerusalem, in the days immediately following his death, Taras had killed without malice, pity, or reason. But this was different. Taras had simply meted out justice. That he had been able to satiate his gnawing hunger in the process was a bonus.
Taras stopped in his tracks, turning an idea over in his mind.
Maybe he didn’t have to die, after all.
Men like Grummit and Hio were everywhere. Antioch was full of them. So was the rest of the world. He knew; he had traveled through most of it in service to Rome. People everywhere murdered for money, or fun, or no reason at all. Men found sport with unwilling women, often beating or killing them in the process. Robbers would steal the bread from an honest man’s table. Powerful men and women stepped on the throats of the innocent. And there was worse. Much worse. All of them deserved justice, and Taras could deliver it to them.
He walked out of the clearing and into the woods, headed back to Antioch with a newfound strength and skip in his step. He had finally figured out what the gods wanted of him.
Maybe when the time came for him to die, he would get to see Mary again, after all.
THERON
Athens, 33 A.D.
Home. Theron stepped out from the deep shadow between the two buildings, wiped the blood from his chin with his sleeve, and looked around the city. He took in the many buildings and monuments, most of which had changed dramatically in the 900 years since he’d left. Statues of heroes and gods were everywhere. The Greeks loved statues, they dotted the city like flies on a corpse, but few of them remained from when he lived here last.
Acropolis still stood in the center of the city-Athens had literally grown up around the great mound of stone-but the structures atop it were different. Gone was the ancient temple of Athena from Theron’s youth, replaced by a building of white stone columns and a triangular roof the locals called the Parthenon. Supposedly, it was intended to honor all the gods, but from what he’d been able to gather, the building was now a treasury of some sort.
Behind him, Theron’s latest victim lay unmoving, hidden deep in the shadows as rats and other vermin tended to what remained of her body. The last of her blood spotted his sleeve, and the coins from her purse now mingled with his own.
Athens was much larger than he remembered. In his years with the Bachiyr and as an agent of the Council of Thirteen, he had never once come back to his homeland. He only returned now because he could not think of anyplace else to go. He had dwelt within the walls of the Halls of the Bachiyr for nearly a millennium, and before that he’d spent most of his life in Athens, having come with his family from Macedonia as a boy.
Theron had died here, killed by a Bachiyr woman named Adonia before he had reached his twenty fifth year. The two were lovers, or so he thought, right up until the moment she sank her teeth into his neck. His father buried him in the northern section of the city, under the shadow of Acropolis so that Athena could watch over his grave. Theron had awakened underground with a coin in his mouth, and started to scream.
Adonia had been waiting, and she dug through the dirt with her hands until he was free. When she saw him she smiled, and Theron saw her fangs for the first time. In life, he had loved her fiercely, following the scent of her jasmine perfume anywhere she led him. As he woke to learn her true nature, he felt no fear. If anything, the sight made him want the raven-haired beauty even more. He took her hand and rose from his grave, spitting out the coin his father had left in his mouth for the ferryman.
Living as a vampire had taken some getting used to, but even then Athens was a large and sprawling metropolis, with plenty of people on which to feed. He and Adonia ruled the night, fearing nothing, and feeding as they pleased. For a young Bachiyr, it was an idyllic life. The pair indulged in the pleasures of the blood and of the body whenever possible, with no worries of disease or aging to get in the way. Then an ancient Bachiyr named Ephraim appeared in the city and invited Theron to join him in the Halls.
That was nine hundred years ago. Despite his enviable lifestyle, Theron had gone to the Halls gladly, leaving Adonia behind to stew in her jealousy. He had traveled the world at the service of the Council, visiting places that he would never have dreamed existed as a boy in provincial Macedonia. There was a whole other world across the ocean that no one knew existed, its knowledge a secret known only by those who lived there and the Bachiyr. He had seen wonders few men could dream of and been party to events that mystified the world, all in service to the Council.
And now he was back in Athens, and it wasn’t even home anymore.
“That damn rabbi,” he growled under his breath. “This is all his fault. He should have just died and been done with it.”
He looked at his right hand, at the black flesh there. He’d burned it when he struck Jesus in the Roman dungeon in Jerusalem. In the two months since, the charred flesh had healed, and the hand did not pain him anymore, but the black coloring remained behind. He’d tried forcing blood into it, reciting a healing psalm over it, and had even rubbed a blood-based salve onto the skin, but nothing worked. None of the healing methods he knew of could restore the color to his flesh. It remained black as freshly burned skin, a permanent reminder of his failure, and an easy method by which any other Bachiyr could identify him.
After his humiliating mistake in Jerusalem, Theron had left the city, headed east to avoid the Council’s minions. On the road he encountered several followers of the dead rabbi, and had killed every one of them. It wasn’t easy. Many of them possessed the glow which marked them as faithful servants of God, but he forced himself to operate past the discomfort and feed anyway. It was worth the pain to see the looks on their faces when they realized their faith was no match for his anger, and the fear added to the heady spice of their blood.
The farther he traveled from Jerusalem, however, the fewer such people he met. Now, in Athens, no one possessed the glow. It was as it had been before Ephraim’s betrayal, with hordes of potential victims everywhere he looked. As he watched the ordinary people pass in and out of his view, he could almost believe Jerusalem had never happened.