Chapter Four #10
Emerick gazed up at the celestial bodies looming over them.
The gilded halos glistened and danced in the light of the fire and candles.
Despite the numerous chandeliers in the house, Mihaela had noticed how her hosts preferred the flickering light of a fire, rather than the cold electric glow of a bulb.
The only light she had ever taught herself to avoid was that of the sun.
“My advice to you is to restrict the search for God to the realm of the academic,” he said, still staring at the ceiling.
She could not tell if he was pleased or laughing at her.
She could never tell. It was never easy to read him.
“As for a comparison, you can start with The Golden Bough[11]. If you have the patience.”
“You don’t believe there is a higher being?”
“Oh, most certainly there is. But why should I devote eternity to it? Why should I pray to it?”
Mihaela turned his words over very slowly in her head.
The matter of God, Christian or otherwise, had surfaced before during their lessons.
It was impossible not to. Then there were the swords and all the angels and saints peeking from every corner of the house.
At what altar do you worship in this tower?
Mihaela mirrored his frown and tried to keep still in an attempt to coax him into talking, to share anything.
But Emerick’s beautiful face was a mask of disgust and disappointment.
Her question had made him frown, lips crinkle, and his silence and refusal to elaborate further unnerved her.
She expected a sharp retort or a mocking remark to follow but he remained silent.
Every vampire started as a human, a mortal with a life, family and loved ones.
Who, she wondered, had her hosts been before the Blood found them—before they were the Marquis and the Comte?
She licked her lips unsure if she wanted to voice her questions.
Who were you before you were turned? How long have you been alive?
Emerick smiled at her. She disliked the way he looked at her.
She liked that smile even less. It was a smile that pulled you under, either enticing or dooming.
Now, in this room—in this tower of wonders—she could not tell which it would be.
It was worse when he spoke: the singsong quality of his voice reverberated through the halls of her mind setting every nerve in her body alight with terror.
Emerick had been inside Mihaela’s mind more than once and she regretted getting used to the sensation, but she always remembered the first time he did it.
As an immortal she had nothing to fear, and in the beginning Mihaela took grim comfort in knowing that death was not going to find her.
Death would not come, but Emerick Gabrielli might.
She had never asked, but Mihaela had a feeling he had been the one to find her in Sofia, hunting her down.
It had been the nauseating presence of his being, slithering in her mind, pulling her towards him and his master.
The Comte dragged her across Europe so she could be brought to the court of an undying father, while her parents rotted in falsehood, alone, left without answers, without their child.
That same Comte now entertained her as a guest in his home only at the behest of his lover.
Silvio did not fear Emerick, and for Mihaela that alone was cause for alarm.
“You can browse and take note of what I have,” Emerick was speaking, dark eyes never leaving Mihaela’s face. Something began to tap at her knee, like a hand creeping. “But I believe you will find them unsatisfying. Our friends in Antalya may have far better charts. You did want to visit them.”
“Yes,” Mihaela nodded passively.
She looked from Emerick to the warrior in the stained glass, then to the devils and their halos overhead.
The memory of the fountain in the bathhouse wove itself among these faces.
The features of the male faces overlapped in her mind.
The resemblance was so eerie and unsettling she almost spoke it out loud.
Every painting, every sculpture in the house bore Emerick’s likeness. It was as if the house had never been intended to serve as a home, but a mausoleum.
“Have you seen her? The vampire mistress in Greece?” Mihaela asked, forcing herself not to make any sudden movements. Her voice trembled a little, but she blamed the crawling sensation going up her chest, reaching towards her face.
The Comte shook his head and his mouth formed the word No, but he did not say it out loud. She heard the echo of it, followed by more words—more assurances and more promises.
Just like that time he had spoken to my parents.
A startled sound tore from Mihaela’s lips, as she began to remember. At the corner of her eyes the window frame tilted and the glass mosaic made as if to engulf her. To her left the colours of the room began to pale, oozing into the lighted corridor of a flat.
Her parents’ flat.
It was said that the worst thing for a parent was to bury a child, to outlive the life they had created.
But what of the child who buried their parents and along with them a part of themselves?
What of the child who died within a parent’s memory and was still bound to walk the earth?
For this was what they had done to Mihaela by erasing something so raw and painful.
The memory tore and reformed in her mind, slowly… like hands caressing her. Her body weightless as if sinking in sand.
Sand…
Her mind felt rearranged. She could not tell the real memory from the lie—or if she had fabricated the false memory herself. Did it really happen, or do I believe it did?
Mihaela saw herself standing at the doorframe of her parents’ flat in Sofia, so many years ago, watching as Emerick unmade her from her father’s mind. She saw him walk among the made-up frescoes and broken statues of her remembrance.
How did one say goodbye to the living… her throat tightened, and Silvio’s hand locked on her shoulder. He pushed her through the door, forcing her out of sight as Emerick moved next towards her mother. Out into the streets of snow and blood, and fireworks and drunken cheer.
“Do you want to see her?”
A hand wiped at the tears running down her face. She was crying, the rivulets of blood oozed from her eyes into her mouth, and dripped on the pages of the forgotten book in her lap. Mihaela jerked back from Emerick’s hand, but there was nowhere to go.
“Do you want to see her, the Basilissa?” he repeated, and his black eyes locked her in. The familiar pull and scrape against her mind no longer frightened her. He had taken that fear first.
In the same way he had taken all her memories and will.
“Yes,” Mihaela heard herself say.
“Then you should ask your father for permission.” The Comte’s smile widened, and she could see his teeth glisten with saliva.
MIHAELA, 2017
Mihaela’s stay with the Basilissa and the Patrikia left her hungry for more.
She had entered the Regent’s territory on a quest for answers, and had returned to Berlin reeling under the weight of the unknown.
Vampires continued to be a mystery. Each territory and coven had its own set of peculiarities, often verging on the grotesque.
Passing through the familiar marble columns and halls of the Berlin Coven, Mihaela made her way up to Ingenuar’s study.
The Basilissa, old as she was, did not know how Ingenuar had been made, how he had come into being.
Scarlett had described him as the First of their kind. No one had come before him.
“So he just popped up into existence one day? Like the fish who walked out of the ocean billions of years ago?” Mihaela had flung her hands in the air, making the Greeks laugh.
“Or like a mole he dug his way from the wet, warm embrace of the earth,” the Patrikia had offered without a hint of seriousness, playing along with her guest’s theories.
Hunger.
It had been the hunger for blood that had driven all of them to crawl from the darkness and walk in the shadows of the living.
Back in Berlin, Mihaela revisited the archives and libraries, read the books with a fresh set of eyes, her mind readjusted to better accept, or reject, the knowledge.
The German language no longer an obstacle, but a welcome lilt after spending so long abroad.
Latin also helped; the little volume of Virgil’s poetry always tucked in her suitcase, its margins overcome with scribbles.
On the back cover she had written Memento Amerigo as a reminder of his lessons.
Mihaela hoped Emerick never saw the booklet and how horridly she had misspelled his name.
Or how shaky and broken her handwriting looked.
Learning the Coven’s history and its masters was impossible, Ingenuar had not kept a written record.
At a loss of how vampires came to be, Mihaela first travelled to Greece and was now preparing for Turkey.
While in Athens she had received a letter from the Sultana—she would allow for Mihaela to visit, but only if she was alone, and she must not bring anything back with her.
Like a traveller in the fae-land she must not touch or disturb this enchanted realm, or she would answer to a faceless ruler.
“I hardly see you anymore,” Ingenuar welcomed her into his study, closing the door after her. Her father was wearing a suit in the usual red for him; the tones reminded her of rust and red wine dried at the bottom of a glass.
He had lit the fireplace, and dimmed the overhead lights so the room had comfortable but dry warmth.
His desk was littered with papers; a laptop screen flickered.
Mihaela stopped herself from making a comment: most vampires either rejected technology entirely or tried to incorporate some aspects of it into their routine.