Carlos raised an eyebrow and started laughing, bellowing shocks like a gale against a plate glass window.
"You have an ax to grind?" I prompted. I was quaking inside.
He lowered his laughter to a seismic chuckle. "You bet I've got an ax to grind, and when it's good and sharp, I'd like to bury it in that bastard's skull."
"Why?" My voice did not shake, though by rights it should have.
"You wouldn't like the story very much. Or understand it. And if I take you into my confidence, daylighter, I cross a line most of my kind would find unforgivable."
"I can't ask you to jeopardize yourself for my client's sake." I started to get up, relieved to have an excuse to leave.
"What do you plan to do with this information you're seeking?"
"Raise trouble."
Carlos frowned in thought. I shuddered at the rolling weight of his mental processes grinding over me. The Grey had been an encroaching sea near Alice. It was an inescapable drowning pool in his presence.
"You will tell no one what you learn from me."
I fought the compulsion to agree. "I will tell my client, if he needs to know, and I will use whatever I have to to get to Edward."
His stare ripped into me. "The details shall not go farther than this room until you face Edward."
I swallowed dust and shuddered. "Yes. All right." I sat back down, my knees shaking and my heart thumping weird syncopations.
Chapter 21
Carlos leaned across the desk and pinned me to the chair with his gaze. He spoke in a low, intense voice that enthralled and smothered me. "It's not mere blood that sustains a vampire, but the life force that flows with the blood. Our own is weak. We must take this life force from others or we fade to crippled shadows, fall into madness, and drown by slow agony to the true death.
"The most vital and powerful of creatures offers the greatest quality of life. That is why we prey on daylighters, like you. You offer us so much that we need not hunt too frequently and death is not always necessary to acquire what we need. A vampire uses this energy to replace what he cannot produce himself. All creatures need it. Some rare few can give up this energy by will and use it for other purposes. When it is given up, it eats your own life as well. If the power required is great enough, it may devour every shred of life and death within you. You must have other lives—other blood—to draw upon. If the undertaking requires great power, it may require many lives. Or the blood of a vampire, which commingles life and death. Neither blood nor this power are to be coerced or commanded. The price for them is too high. But Edward demanded them—ripped then—from me.
"We met in Lisbon. Edward was still young, but his ambition burned like an equatorial sun. He schemed and clawed to raise himself, but only antagonized the rest of our kind. He had few friends but I—fool—was among them."
His voice fell into older rhythms as he spoke, and I felt the past rise around us in a Grey curtain I could not turn back.
"He had a plan to destroy his enemies at a single blow, but it required that power which he, himself, did not command."
His words began to press on me.
"He brought his plan to me. I told him it was too risky. The blood required, the deaths, would be noticed, and the spells were dangerous. We argued over it. I would not give up blood for him—nor would any other—but he agreed to a smaller conflagration bought with mere human lives.
"I went a safe distance, to Seville, and began gathering the men and women we would need, the materials, the place… I kept our prisoners and began to craft the great spell into the very walls. Edward arrived and I helped him to build the machine until I was near exhausted. He sent me away to rest until we were ready."
Something half memory and half vision coiled around me. I shied from it, but it clutched me. I could see shadowy faces of the men and women in eighteenth-century rags and feel his labor burn in my own muscles.
"On All Hallows Eve, he came for me. We walked to the cathedral and descended into our cellar near La Giralda. New symbols lined the walls and floor in chalk and charcoal, gold and blood. I did not study them, for I was distracted by the sight of what we had built."
Excitement. A hundred arcane words and shapes hemmed me in, hammering on dark stone.
"Deeper in the cellar, the two dozen men and women—all children of the streets, the unnoticeables, the lost—knelt on a platform, bound within the machine which poised silver blades to their necks, holding them in the spell, directed toward a single instant and purpose." Cold, the edges kissed the back of my neck and the hair rose.
"They would know no pain nor the horror of watching their fellows die. I did not require torment, only death. Some had whimpered and moaned in distress as we entered, but they fell into enthralled silence when Edward passed them. Such has always been his power. We walked into the center of the room, to a place in the floor which was the focus of the machine and of the spell's power. All the symbols in the room led to it and from it and already it throbbed with the potential of magic."
I felt the humming of it in my bones, the sudden calm of the men and women smothering Carlos's anticipation and creeping unease.
"He stopped beside a rope which hung from the ceiling, well away from the machine, leaving me to stand at the focus.
"A few of the glyphs disturbed me—black things, like mourners at a wedding feast—but I had no time to protest.
" 'Begin! he commanded.
"I spoke and the threads of the spell wove together, ghostly, in need of power. I opened my arms to the machine and Edward pulled the rope."
Power thrummed and shook, then roared, and I felt the quick shock of the blades.
"Their heads tumbled and the hot, liquid force of their lives gouted forth, drenching me. My skin drank them, my body and mind absorbing them in life and death conjoined in that shocked instant. Their unvoiced gasp pushed into me and out my own mouth, staggering me, shivering through my flesh. The power of them flooded me and I reached into the spell, giving it their life through me."
I trembled with his memory, quivered with the orgasmic flow of life and death through a body that was and wasn't mine—then shocked into pain and despair.
"The ecstasy of their swift, clean deaths shattered as Edward drove a blade into my back. He spoke a word and flung the black blood which welled from my wound into the focus. The final, dark symbol flared and I fell to my knees.
"Edward stood above me and plunged his knive into my chest."
"I cried out and the newly murdered cried within me. He twisted the knife, ripping into my heart which beat with them." Agony. No way to scream. He continued.
"I screamed and died for them. Died each death at once, more horrible than they had died, each screaming, all screaming. Their blood, now my own, poured out again. And the power of their souls flashed like white fire, flooded into the cellar, blazed into the symbols, and the cellar erupted in the phosphor white burn of the spell, blinding me as it spent." Silence.
"I felt something break within my chest. Darkness shrouded me, but I heard him, moving, laughing. He knelt beside me and touched my head.
"'You have done very well, he said. Even blinded, I could see the fleeting nimbus of his stolen power pulsing around him.
"I reached for him, and agony tore through my chest. I fell to the floor like an injured babe, unable to move or speak.
" 'I shall always be in your heart. He laughed again and left me." The touch of his telling began receding, draining me as he finished.
"I was awakened by the earthquake and the pealing of La Giralda's bells as the tower shook. The sun had risen, shining through rents in walls and ceiling. I crawled to a niche in the basement to hide from the overwhelming fury our spell, powered by their deaths and my blood, had poured into the earth. It was far more, far worse, than I had meant. It was a grandiose and pointless rage of destruction fit to Edward's own spite. Lisbon collapsed beneath the earthquakes, flood, and fire that swept it. Sixty thousand of your kind and mine ceased. And all for naught. Those of our kind who remained in Lisbon left the city and Edward was king of nothing.