I shook my head as I passed him, bouncing off the other monks like a ball as I struggled into the failing building. The doorway led into a staircase that ran steeply up to the main floor and into a small room that finally led into the side aisle of the great, falling church building.
The roof along the central beam of the main aisle began crumbling, plaster and stone tumbling into the nave ahead of me. A carved grotesque plunged from high on the wall to the ground, striking a monk down and shattering the floor tiles where it hit, throwing up a spray of blood and a cloud of sharp stone shards. I felt their sting as several nicked me. I dodged to the side, cowering against the sturdy curtain walls that had withstood the earth’s rage, and waited for the shaking to stop.
It seemed forever before the earth subsided, but not knowing how long I had until the aftershocks would hit, I ran from cover and toward the highest ground I could find, willing to risk another tumble rather than be embedded in the floor when I emerged. I nearly tripped over the dead monk crushed by the carving, his blood sinking into the ground where the tiles had been cracked open like the thinnest sheets of ice. Layers of Grey fog lay across the point where the monk had fallen, turning the ground into a carpet of broken silver, and I stumbled to my knees, falling hard against the small chapel doorway from which the monk had come, the niche above it now hollow. I picked myself up and staggered over the broken floor, rushing from column to column for safety as the ceiling continued crumbling down.
I struggled up to the altar, to the highest point I could think of, and threw myself out of the temporacline, hoping I was high enough for safety.
I fell again, but not quite so far, and hit the ground with a little less force, rolling into a long, narrow patch of grass that now grew between the main columns, dividing the ruins into the nave and side aisle with strips of tended green. The nave and aisles were paved in the ubiquitous white stone tiles. The roof gone, there was only the night sky above, with a crescent moon and stars shining down through the skeletal fingers of the side arches. The devastated church appeared empty but for me and the dark shapes of archeological displays along the side aisles.
I shook from the fading adrenaline spike as I picked myself up and dusted off my limbs. My hands came away sticky with blood from scrapes and nicks. I stumbled onto the firmer paving stones and began searching for Carlos among the memorials and relics arrayed around the edges of the vaultless church. I blundered into tombs and statues and tripped over the iron uprights of displays, biting back my curses with every new injury and disappointment in discovering another shape that wasn’t Carlos.
I found him in a niche that must once have been a small chapel. At first he was only a dark shape in the shadow of the wall, the light picking out only a small gleam of white within the blackness. I shuffled toward it, picking my way through a collection of heavy stone objects until I could see that the white telltale was a reflection of moonlight off the surface of his open, staring eyes.
Utter stillness and silence are no great feat for a vampire, but the feeling of the space as I drew near was colder than all the surrounding silver mist and stone of the Grey. A familiar tangled web of energy lay over the place like a shroud as white as bone. Carlos did not move or make a sound. A glimmer of bright metal shone at the side of his throat. He appeared to have been crushed and thrown down as easily as a rag doll, as Griffin had nearly done to Quinton.
The spell was better constructed this time, and I couldn’t draw closer to Carlos with the mesh of energy around him, so I began tearing at it and shoving it aside, interposing my limbs and shoulders where I had made a hole. Then I forced my way in until I could use my whole body to heave the mass, which sizzled against me with a stinging pain, making my body quake and my sight fade toward blackness shot with points of glittering, colored light.
When I had pushed aside enough of the veiling magic to kneel down in the clear beside Carlos, he didn’t respond to my presence, but seemed to collapse a bit as if the energetic web that had covered him had also held him in shape and he was now decaying before my eyes. A black, insubstantial haze rose off him through the glimmering fog of the Grey, faltering and thinning into smoke that spiraled up toward the sharp sickle of the moon.
“Blaine. . . .” It wasn’t his voice, exactly, but more like the echo of it in my head.
The vaporous black pall drew together for a moment, taking a vague resemblance to Carlos, before it drifted apart and began, again, to flow away in streamers of darkness. I felt the sharp pang in my chest that told me he was dying—if you can say that about the undead.
It did not occur to me that without him, any chance of stopping Purlis was remote at best, nor did I think for an instant of Amélia’s bizarre behavior or of all the incidents when Carlos had brought death, madness, or pain. I didn’t pause to consider all the times he’d caused me grief. I could have stood back and let him pass away into the restless mist of the Grey world, but I threw myself at the dissolving shreds of night-black soul and tried to capture them, force them back into the strangely broken shell they were escaping. But they slid away, eluding my grasp.
I touched the metallic gleam at his neck and found a dagger hilt, the blade driven through this throat from side to side. Whoever had taken him down had known what they were up against and stopped him from speaking any sort of spell. The dagger radiated a dread, black aura—a dark artifact—and the touch of it against my skin felt like ice that was cold enough to burn. I yanked it from his neck and threw it down on the ground. It clattered on the marble and slid away into the grass, but still Carlos didn’t move.
I grabbed his arm and felt no shock of nausea, pain, and horror as I usually did, only a low, disturbing static that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. I shook him, as if he were only asleep and my desperation alone could wake him. “Hang on,” I begged.
Carlos frightened me—he always had, even as we’d become reluctant allies and, eventually friends of a sort—but I didn’t recoil or think for more than an instant about what I was about to do. I shoved back my sleeves and dragged him to a more upright position against the wall, which was pockmarked with tombstones. Then I sat beside him, right arm holding him up, and I pressed the thin-skinned underside of my left wrist to his mouth. I might have cut my arm instead, had I thought of it, but I just hoped there was enough survival impulse left to make him bite.
For a second, nothing happened and I thought I’d left it too late. Then I felt the sharp tearing of my flesh as he bit.
The pain wrenched through me, making me buckle and cry out. My cry turned into stifled screams and gasps for air as he gnawed and sucked at my arm. My stomach lurched with nausea from the agony and the sudden, flooding odor of vampire. In stories, the bite of a vampire is a sensual thing, soporific and addicting to mortals who succumb, but to me it was anguish. He had once told me there was more than bloodlust in the vampire’s need to feed from humans; there was some intangible life force within us as necessary as blood itself. My senses reeled in torment, and I thought I could feel the blood and life flowing out of me, torn away as if every corpuscle fought and clung with barbs of steel to my tortured flesh.
I started to yank my arm away, but his hands flew up and gripped my forearm, pulling me closer to his cutting teeth. I thrashed, feeling weakened and faint as I tried to escape.
“Stop,” I gasped, twisting feebly. “Carlos, you’re killing me. Please . . .” My free hand groped for anything I could use to make him stop, to strike him or cut him, as I prayed I wouldn’t have to use it. I felt myself draining away so quickly. . . .