Or should I call him Grigori?
I sat up. Heavy-headed. Awkward. Not gonna lie, with my hands tied together, and a mental fog I’m guessing was borne of a concussion, it took a couple tries. And once I finally succeeded, the damn boat rocked so hard I thought I’d puke or fall out or both.
By force of will or maybe just dumb luck, I didn’t do any combination thereof. I wondered if maybe that meant my luck was on the mend. The very notion made me laugh. Laughing made my head hurt so bad, I damn near passed out. That sounded more like my kinda luck.
Now that I was sitting up, I realized I was bobbing in the center of the underground lake, water dark and still as glass all around. Yefi’s torch was a pinprick of orange against the black, its glow scarcely reaching me, but illuminating him well enough to see. At his feet, I saw a pair of oars, no doubt taken from this very boat. Looked like if I was getting out of here, I was gonna hafta swim.
“You’ve an odd sense of humor, Frank,” called Yefi. “I understand why I am laughing — I have bettered my opponent, and played him for the fool. You, on the other hand, don’t seem to have much cause.”
“Sam,” I called back. The volume of my own voice hurt my ears.
“Excuse me?”
“My name ain’t Frank, it’s Sam. Figured you oughta know.”
“I confess, I fail to see why that’s important at this juncture in our relationship.”
“Seems to me a fella oughta know the name of the guy who’s gonna end him.”
Not gonna lie, I said that partly cause it sounded badass. Also a little cause I meant it. But mostly I said it because I had to keep that fucker talking while I worked at the knot that tied my feet together.
“Really? Then by all means, do call me Grigori. Tell me, Sam, how do you propose you’re going to — as you so charmingly put it — end me? There are a few hundred tons of stone and earth between you and the nearest viable vessel, which might make locating it a bit difficult. And at present, you’re lying bound and adrift atop an underwater lake, while here I am, lounging comfortably on dry land.”
“For now.”
“Now is all that matters,” he replied airily. “Now is all I need.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come now, Sam. You don’t really think this was my master plan, did you? To leave you tied up in this place forever? Of course it’s not. I’ve had other plans in motion for quite some time, plans which will soon come to fruition. The fact is, I never expected you to find this little village of mine; its protections are not insubstantial. Your arrival forced me to improvise. To neutralize you for a time while my siblings held up their end of our bargain.”
“You mean Drustanus, Yseult, and Ricou.”
“How adorable,” he replied. “You’re using their names to demonstrate to me you’ve done your homework. Of course, if your homework was worth a damn, you’d know Ricou hasn’t been in any state to make or keep bargains for quite some time.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning my dear brother is, to put it mildly, no longer home. He was the first of my kind to be driven mad by the cost of what we’d done; the lives lost to the Great Flood, and by the cold, dark reality of our eternal hunger. You see, my kind has a constant need for living sustenance. Blood, brain, or flesh will do, to varying degrees. Its life-force invigorates us and fuels our magicks, as well as our transformations. I’m sure you’ve noted in your hunting — for I hear you’ve been a busy boy indeed — that we Brethren have, shall we say, drifted from the norm of human appearance.”
I thought back to the freaky, patchwork hand-beast that was Magnusson; the spindly stick-bug beneath the desert floor, known as Jain; the half-glimpsed wolf-creatures of the Colorado wilds. “Yeah,” I said. “You could say I spotted that particular trend.”
“Do you know why?”
I sighed theatrically, as if annoyed to be playing along with his Bond-villain monologuing. In truth, I was through two knots on the leather straps around my feet, and my tweezing fingernails — cracked and bleeding — had just found purchase on a vulnerable loop of the third and last. “I suspect you’re gonna tell me,” I said.
“In fact I am. My old friend Charles-Louis Montesquieu once observed that if triangles had a God, they would give him three sides. A lovely sentiment, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I said. “Pure poetry. The hell’s it got to do with your little pack of weirdoes?”
“Everything, my poor, dear Samuel. Everything.” His words had turned now. Where once was maniacal good cheer, now there was only naked menace. “You see, on that fateful day we Nine gathered to cast off our bonds of slavery to hell, we accomplished more than we dared imagine. We did not simply free ourselves, we made ourselves anew. We began that day as Collectors. We ended it as newborn Gods. No longer were we shackled by the confines of our Maker’s design. We were free to become something better. Something stronger. Something of our own design.”
“Must be why you’re all so pretty,” I said.
He shook his head. “I confess, not all of my siblings were strong enough to handle the gift that they’d been given. To control it, as I can. For with me, as with demonkind, you see only what I wish you to.” His form rippled, shifted, flickering for a moment past a twisted mass of naked flame-scarred flesh before settling once more. Now he appeared a gaunt, berobed man with high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, long black hair pulled back from his face, and a long scraggly beard to match. Another flicker past the nightmare beast beneath, and he was suddenly a squat, towheaded child, no more than ten years old. Yet another, and my own meat-suit stared back at me. And after one last, brief glimpse of monster, the man before me was young, handsome Yefi once more.
“Neat trick,” I said.
“And handy, too,” he replied, ignoring my biting tone. “Although it does have its limitations. Unlike demonkind, my power lies not in altering my own appearance, merely your perception of it. For that reason, reflective surfaces are to be avoided, for they reveal to the onlooker my true visage. And the ability to project the appearance of one’s choosing requires discipline, commitment — two traits some of my siblings seem to lack. In fact, their varied countenances have proved in many ways a window to their souls. Simon, who feared senescence, wound up a withered, aged husk of a man. Jain, Lukas, and Apollonia feared giving into their hunger, and became little more than animals. All but Drustanus and Yseult — and, one hopes, Thomed, though no one’s seen him in so long, it’s hard to say — ended up a slave to their urges, and those urges in turn shaped the beings they’ve become, Ricou most of all. As another great thinker once chastened, ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’”
“Huh,” I said. “Wouldn’t have pegged you for a Vonnegut fan.”
“One benefit of eternal life is that it affords one no small amount of reading time,” Grigori replied. “It’s a shame your meddling in Brethren affairs will rob you of the pleasure of finding out.”
“I didn’t meddle in your goddamn affairs,” I said, “you all meddled in mine. I was minding my own fucking business when your brother Simon kidnapped me and tried to shelve my ass by drugging my meat-suit into oblivion.”
“Ah, Simon, you damned fool,” he said, voice tinged with wistful exasperation. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved the man, but we never did see eye-to-eye. He was infatuated with modernity, whereas I prefer the old ways: magic, not medicine; influence, not outright power. Hell, I haven’t even seen Simon since that glorious summer we spent together in Geneva, feeding, dancing, laughing. 1816, this was, before the world caught wind of our kind. It was Simon’s idea to burnish our legend by filling our fellow revelers’ heads with such wild dreams of our exploits. I rather hoped one of the poets with whom we whiled away our days — Byron or Shelley — would write of me, but instead my tale was told by that damn-fool doctor Polidori. Simon, for what it’s worth, fared better. Who knew Percy’s wife would prove such a writer? And anyways, that Stoker fellow embellished upon the idiot doctor’s mangled version of my story quite nicely some years hence. Still, I’ve always regretted giving in to Simon’s insistence that our stories should be told. It’s proved more trouble than it was worth, and more embarrassment, as well. If you ask me, the modern iteration of my own myth is downright shameful. I mean, look at me. Do I appear as though I sparkle to you?”