Free Of Masques and Martyrs by Christopher Golden Page A

being a woman.
    “But in order to do that, a message must be communicated from the brain to the body, and passed from cell to cell through synaptic messages. The serum I’ve developed inhibits the chemical transference of those messages. You can’t change anymore, Erika. You can’t communicate with your bloodkin. You’re going to grow old, now. Eventually, you’ll probably die the true death. You still need the blood, you still have the strength. But you won’t heal anymore, either.”
    The girl stared at him, horrified, and he couldn’t help but laugh.
    “Come now, my little one,” he said. “It isn’t as bad as all that.”
    “You’re everything I swore I’d never be,” Erika whispered, under her breath. Of course, Hannibal heard.
    “Let’s put that to the test, shall we?” he asked. “You see, there is an antidote. There is a way to give you back the power that makes you a vampire. But if you want it, you will have to pledge your fealty to me, and to this coven.”
    She opened her mouth to reply, to rail at his suggestion, to berate and condemn him. But she closed her mouth again without uttering a word. That’s when Hannibal knew he had her.
    Erika quivered with anticipation and, Hannibal thought, self-loathing, as she crept forward on her hands and knees. She dipped her mouth to the throat of the still-unconscious man bleeding on the concrete floor. Her hands and knees were stained by his pooling blood. Tears of blood ran down from her cheeks and mingled with the man’s own blood as Erika ripped his throat out and drank deeply, her feeding punctuated by heaving sobs of profound remorse.
    Aroused by her despair, Hannibal looked down and was pleased to find himself hard. Remembering a promise made just a while before, he glanced back at the cooling corpse of the woman on his bed. His breath came faster as he returned to his victim and took her as his lover.
    His triumph was so sweet.
     
    The interior courtyard of the Ursuline convent—where the coven of shadows who followed Peter Octavian made their home—was awash in the colors and scents of flowers and fresh earth. Despite the threat they lived with each day, Peter and the others had made it their business to bring beauty to their home. It had rained a bit during the day, but now at dusk, as darkness fell, the sky splashed vivid shades of red on the horizon. As if the heavens were a garden all their own. And perhaps they were, Peter thought.
    He strolled a path that wound through the garden. Sweet floral aromas rode the breeze that brushed across his short, ragged-cut hair. Peter had a great deal on his mind. He was torn, within and without, drawn in so many directions. His instincts were splintered and thus inaccurate. He had never felt so desperately nostalgic in his centuries of existence. Peter was certain that at another time in his life, he would have seen the circumstances of his friends, his coven, with more clarity. Would have known immediately what actions to take.
    Peter Octavian was a man, and a monster. Dead and yet somehow not. Shadows were both demonic and divine. Peter, himself, had lived as a warrior, and now wanted only peace. If he would allow himself to be overwhelmed by the aggression he felt toward Hannibal, it might drive him to do something unthinkable. To take lives, to forcibly create new shadows to combat the vampires of Hannibal’s clan.
    He wanted to do it.
    He really did.
    And so he refused to even think about it. Instead, Peter hid those urges away in his mind somewhere, hoping they would stay there. They were the thoughts of the warrior prince he’d once been, not the man he’d become in time. Peter could be brutal when it was necessary, when he was forced to it. But, not for the first, he wondered if that moment would arrive too late.
    Hannibal’s numbers were growing.
    There was more to it, however. He was torn not only by his past and present, his dual nature, and the dangers his people faced. He was torn by