How shocking must thy summons be, O Death!
-Robert Blair
Vienna in 1912 was very different from Paris a mere twenty years before. The streets were full of motorcars and bicycles during the day, and at night the whole city glowed with electric lights. Phones rang and elevators whisked the bourgeoisie up the floors of their rent palaces along the Ringstrasse, where the walls of the old city had once been. Sigmund Freud had published Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie already and Carl Jung was just about to publish Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. The modern age was well under way, and everyone believed themselves to be marching forward to a better tomorrow. But prostitutes still prowled the ground where gallows had once hung, willing to lie down on top of tombs with a man for the price of a newspaper. Other things prowled there, too. Vienna was a city with its lights on, and no one wanted to acknowledge what happened in the dark.
Lucien Moreau strode through the night streets in his buttoned-up black sack coat, Elisabet beside him in a beaded, high-necked lace dress, all cream and gold and black. Gavriel was on the other side, in a charcoal coat that nearly matched Lucien's own.
They were gorgeous creatures, wholly fascinating, and unequivocally broken, Lucien mused as they walked.
They were also likely to be executed before the night was out, all because of him. A vampire was supposed to seek permission before creating progeny, and he hadn't. He would never have received it, not for either of them, unstable as they were.
Gavriel was half in love with death. He'd lost a lover to it and put his own brother in a grave, so maybe it was no surprise that he stalked murderers through the city streets, sinking his fangs into their jugulars and gulping down their blood. Every night, it was as though he avenged his brother by killing some stand-in for himself.
And one only had to look to see the madness that glittered behind Elisabet's eyes. Lucien had discovered her in Portugal, on trial for the murder of her husband. He'd been impressed with the way she spat on the ground and declared that not only she'd done it, but if the Lord raised him back up in that very courtroom, she'd do it again. He and Gavriel broke her out of the prison that night; she'd gone with them without a single look back. When she hunted, she used a razor instead of her teeth and attacked her victims with a ferocity that would have been unnerving in a man twice her size.
And now he would have to mourn them. He tried to say amusing things as they walked through the streets, tried to pretend that it was possible for the Spider, ancient and terrible as he was, to let them live, but Lucien knew his progeny would, in all likelihood, be destroyed. Ancient vampires ruled over their portion of the world like feudal lords, favoring the same sorts of punishments. Perhaps Lucien should have told them to run, but he knew that neither Istanbul nor Shanghai nor any other place was far enough to hide from a creature like the Spider, who could pull at his baroque web of connections to cause the fall of the banks in Luxembourg or a revolution in Spain. If they ran, he would track them across the world.
Besides, if they ran, it would get Lucien in a lot of trouble.
Elisabet flashed him a fierce look. "We should kill the Spider," she said. "Kill him and drain him. His blood would grant us all his centuries of power. Even shared, we'd be able to make the rules instead of listening to them."
"Don't be stupid," Lucien snapped, although in truth, he had heard that there was a Spider before this one, killed in the way Elisabet proposed. "If you make a single move against him, we'll all be dead. It's important that you show him that I've taught you the proper respect for your elders."
"Then perhaps you should have," said Gavriel in his soft, self-possessed voice.
Lucien shot him a sharp look. One of the things that had drawn him to Gavriel was that as lost as Gavriel was in his morass of grief, there were times when he was unnervingly clear-sighted. But he didn't like to have that sharp sight turned on him.
He knew what he was, what depths of depravity and cruelty he had plumbed, what ambitions drove him. He prided himself on knowing those things-but that didn't mean he needed anyone else to see them as well.
They made their way to a walled manor in the old city, the facade all carved marble and stone. The gates stood slightly ajar, and Lucien slipped inside, past carefully shaped hedges, toward a large, red double door with a brass knocker in the shape of an agonized woman's face. As Lucien lifted it, he realized that the hinge of the knocking mechanism was between her teeth, making it appear like a riding bit.
Gavriel raised both his brows at Elisabet. She rolled her eyes.
It should have pleased him, the way they truly behaved like siblings, but he resented it. It made him feel that, though he ruled over them, they still had secrets. "He'd like to see you like that, I'll wager," Lucien said just to watch Gavriel look embarrassed, to watch Elisabet snort, just to show them that everything, even their jokes, belonged to him. Death might steal them soon, but until then, they were his.
A few moments later, a stoop-shouldered woman came to the door. She was wearing a dark-colored dress, her graying hair pulled back into a braided bun.
"Guten tag," the woman said, and ushered them inside. Following her, they passed through many rooms with painted fresco ceilings depicting battles, the dead and dying looking down at them from gilt-lined recesses. Electric globes hung like fruit from chandeliers, reflected in mirrored panels. They passed red brocade couches and tables with carvings as elaborate as the plaster moldings on the walls.
She led them to another courtyard, this one with a single hawthorn at its center. A few of the Spider's personal guards, rather pretentiously known as the Corps des Tenebres, stood around conspicuously in their long robes. Standing beside the tree was a very tall and thin vampire in a charcoal sack coat with a waistcoat and trousers. A watch fob ran from his pocket to underneath his vest, and a red-gold intaglio signet ring, still choked with wax, shone in the glow from the gas lamps. His hooded red eyes regarded them from a saturnine face with a high forehead and a poisoner's mouth. There was no mistaking who he was, despite his ordinary dress and demeanor. He exuded a kind of power that had almost a gravitational pull.
Elisabet was staring at him with a terrible kind of fascination. And Gavriel seemed to be trying not to look anywhere at all.
"Ah, Lucien," said the Spider, walking toward them, taking his hands out of the pockets of his trousers to scorch the end of a cigarette with a bright gold lighter. His fingers ended in long, yellowed, hooked nails like the talons of some great bird, and Lucien wondered how many more centuries it would be before he woke up with hands like that. "So good of you to come."
The servant woman, with a worshipful glance toward her master, withdrew.
"I am ever yours to command," said Lucien with a short bow. He hated the antiquated vampires, hated their silly palaces and their airs and the way they expected one to bow and scrape. Here, among all the trappings of modern Vienna, one might be tempted to think the time of monarchs was past, but whatever revolutions happened elsewhere in the world, none was likely to occur among the shadowy governance of vampires.
The Spider snorted. "You're an apple farmer's son from a little town in Normandy, no matter how much you play at consequence."
Oh, and had he mentioned how much he hated their ridiculous obsession with ancestry, as though it mattered what blood ran through one's veins when all of it was stolen? He bit his tongue and said nothing.
The Spider turned to Gavriel, pointing at him with one clawed nail, making him flinch. "At first glance, they do not seem so unworthy for you to have hidden them from me, Lucien. Why did you not present them as you should have? Is there some reason I would have forbidden you from turning them?"
Only that one is a psychopath and the other has what Freud would call a powerful death urge? But which one is which?
"I am impulsive," Lucien said, readying himself to make a speech of contrition. "But I meant no harm. I taught them how to hunt and kill, to leave little trace of their passing through the world. They've done nothing wrong save being born-and in that, too, they are innocent. I am their maker. That crime is mine."
"Yes," the Spider said.
Lucien would have said more, but that one word halted him. He'd never thought he would receive any real punishment. He glanced surreptitiously toward the two Corps des Tenebres in plain sight and reconsidered Elisabet's plan. No, still better to run.
"Lucien Moreau, I accept your confession. Our power comes from our small numbers, from our secrecy, from our adherence to what few rules we have. Your death is a just one, for it will warn off others like you who are equally impulsive." The ancient vampire set his clawed hand lightly against Lucien's shoulder. Lucien turned and looked into the Spider's face, puzzled for a moment. But then a shudder went through him. Because he saw, in that moment, that all of the Spider's fine clothes and civilized words were just a mask. Beneath it was something ancient and savage, something that feared nothing and only hungered. Lucien felt his knees buckle as though some unseen force bore down on him. He went to the floor with a groan.
Gavriel gasped.
"No," Elisabet shrieked, throwing herself down beside Lucien in a sea of skirts and crawling toward the Spider. "No, please spare him. He is our father, our brother, our master. He is the one who gave us life eternal. Please!"
The Spider held up a hand and she subsided. For the first time in a hundred years, Lucien was truly afraid. "Let one of you take his place then. Will you?"
For a long moment, Lucien's progeny were silent. He closed his eyes, cursing them both in his thoughts.
"It is right and good," said the Spider. "For a parent to die before his child. You are right to leave him to his fate."
"No," Gavriel said. "Wait. I will take his place. Get up, Lucien."
Lucien looked at Gavriel, black curls spilling over his cheeks, and thanked whatever wisdom had made him turn a man who availed himself of every single opportunity to throw his life away. Lucien hoped he wouldn't have to watch the execution.
"You're certain," said the Spider, his greedy gaze boring into the boy, stripping him raw.
Gavriel nodded quickly, clearly steeling himself. He began to kneel.
The Spider shook his head, smiling. "You may remain standing. You're loyal and courageous, two qualities not often found among our kind. What a waste to cut down such a rare creature. No, my sentence is that you will hunt for me-you will hunt our own kind. You will be one of my Thorns, and your term of service will be your entire illicitly born life."
"I'm not to die?" Gavriel asked, clearly puzzled. He looked toward Lucien, but Lucien was powerless to speak, possessiveness lighting through him like a flame. Gavriel was his, made from his blood, alive by his whim, his to jeer at or adore or destroy. And if Gavriel wasn't to be his, then Lucien would rather he was razed from the earth.
"No." The Spider took a long drag on his cigarette, looking like a very modern sort of monster, despite his years. Despite what Lucien had seen in his face. "Oh, no, you're to give me the gift of all that loyalty."
What Lucien hated the most about ancient vampires, he decided, was the way they had studied cruelty for so long to know just how to hurt you best.
It won't always be this way, Lucien vowed.
And it wasn't.