They lunged for him again, and Fray Juan cried, “No, let him go.”
Ricardo pushed away from them. He pressed his back to the wall and couldn’t go farther. He could smell the blood soaking into the blanket at his feet. He covered his face with his hands; he could smell the blood on his breath. He wiped his mouth, but could still taste blood on his lips, as if it had soaked into his skin.
He had an urge to lick the drops of blood that had spilled onto his hand. He pressed his face harder and moaned, an expression of despair welling from him.
“You see what you are now?” Juan said, without sympathy. “You are the blood, and it will feed you through the centuries. You are deathless.”
Ricardo stared at him. The blood flowing through his veins now was not his own. He could feel it warming his body, like sunlight on skin. Sunlight, which he would never see again, if Juan spoke true.
He drew a breath and said, “You are a devil.”
“We all are.”
“No! I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I am not one of you. I would rather die!”
Juan, a pale face in lamp-lit shadows, nodded to his four henchmen, who backed toward the ladder, which lead to the trapdoor in the ceiling. One by one, they slipped out, watching Ricardo with glittering, knowing eyes. In a moment, Juan and Ricardo were alone.
“This is a new life,” Juan said. “I know it is hard to accept. But remember: You have received a gift.”
Then he, too, left the room. The door closed, and a bolt slid home.
Ricardo rushed to the door, and tried to open it, rattling the handle. They had locked him in this hole. A damp chill from the walls pressed against him.
Ricardo lay back on the bed, hands resting on his chest. Eventually, the lamp’s wick burned down. The light grew dim, until it was coin-sized, burnished gold, then vanished. Even in the dark, he could see the ceiling. He should not have been able to see anything in the pitch dark of this underground cell. But it was like he could feel the walls closing in. He waited for panic to take him. He waited for his heart to start racing. But he touched his ribs and could not feel his heart at all.
Hours had passed, though the time moved strangely. Even in the darkness, he could see shadows move across the ceiling, like stars arcing overhead. It was nighttime outside; he knew this in his bones. The night passed, the moon rose—past full now, waning. The way the air moved over his face told him this. Eventually, near dawn, he fell asleep.
He started awake when the trapdoor opened. His senses lurched and rolled, like a galleon in deep swells. He knew—again, without looking, without seeing—that Juan and his four caballeros had returned. They had a warmth coursing through them, tinged with metal and rot, the scent of spilled blood. The thing inside him stirred, a hunger that cramped his heart instead of his belly. His mouth watered. He licked his lips, hoping for the taste of it.
Shutting his eyes, he turned his face away.
Another, a sixth being, entered the room with them. This one was different—warm, burning with heat, a flame in the dark, rich and beautiful. Alive. A heartbeat thudded, the footfalls of an army marching double-time. A living person who was afraid.
“Ricardo. Look.” Juan stood at the foot of the bed and raised a lantern.
Ricardo sat up, pressed against the wall. Two of the caballeros dragged between them a child, a boy seven or eight years old, very thin. The boy met his gaze with dark eyes, shining with fear. He whimpered, pulling back from the caballeros’ grasp, but they held fast, their fingers digging into his skin.
Juan said, “This is one of the things you must learn, to take your place among my knights.”
“No.” But the new sensations, the new way of looking at the world, wanted this child. Wanted the warm blood that gave this child life. The caballeros hauled the boy forward, and Ricardo shook his head even as he reached for the child. “No, no—”
“You cannot stop it,” Juan said.
The child screamed before Ricardo even touched him.
It was not him. It did not feel like his body. Something else moved his limbs and filled his mind with lust. His mouth closed over the artery in the child’s neck as if he kissed his flesh. His teeth—he had sharp teeth now—tore the skin, and the blood flowed. The sensation of wet blood on tongue burned through him, wind and fire. His vision was gone, his mind was gone.
This was not him.
The blood, life giving and terrible, filled him until he seemed likely to break out of his own skin. With enough blood, he could expand to fill the world. When they pulled the dead child away, he was drunk, insensible, his hands too weak to clutch at the body. He sat at the edge of the bed, his arms fallen to his sides, limp, his face turned up, ecstatic. He licked his lips with a blood-coated tongue. But it was not him. His eyes stung with tears. He could not open them to look at the horror he’d wrought.
He was not so cold anymore. Either he was used to it, or he could no longer feel at all. That was a possibility. That was most likely best. Even if this were not hell, what they had forced him to do would surely send him to hell when he did die.
If he did.
“It is incentive to live forever, is it not? Knowing what awaits you for these terrible crimes,” Diego said with the smile of a wolf.
The friar had shown him what horrors this life held for him: he brought Ricardo a cross made of pressed gold. He kept it wrapped in silk, did not touch it himself. When Ricardo touched it, his skin burned. He could never touch a holy cross again. Holy water burned him the same. He could never go into a church. His baptism had been burned away from him. The Mother Church was poison to him now. God had rejected him.
There were rewards. Juan kept calling them rewards. Mortal weapons could not kill him. Stabs and slashes with a sword, arquebus shot, falls, cracked bones, nothing would kill him. Only beheading, only a shaft of wood driven through the heart. Only the sun. He was immortal.
“You call this reward?” Ricardo had shouted. “To be forever shut out of God’s heavenly kingdom?” Then he realized the truth: This was no tragedy for Juan, because the friar did not believe in God or heaven.
“Did you ever believe?” Ricardo whispered at him. “Before you became this thing, did you believe?”
Juan smiled. “Perhaps it is not that I don’t believe, but that I chose to join the other side of this war between heaven and hell.”
Which was somehow even more awful.
Ricardo stood at the church wall one night. The moon waxed again, past new. Half a month, he’d been here. He didn’t know what to do next—what he could do. They held him captive. He belonged with them now, because where else could he go?
They told him that the blood should taste sweet on his tongue, and it did. He still hated it.
Perhaps he looked for rescue. When he did not report to the governor, wouldn’t a party come for him? A troop of soldiers would come to learn what had happened, and Ricardo would intercept them, tell them the truth, and he would help them raze the church to the ground, destroy Juan and his caballeros.
And then they would destroy him, stake his heart, drag him into the sunlight, for being one of them. So perhaps Ricardo wouldn’t help them, but would hide.
Did he love existence more than life, then? More than heaven?
A jingling of bridles sounded behind him. Ricardo did not have to look; he sensed the four men approaching with the horses.
“Brother Ricardo, it’s good you’ve finally come into the air. It’s not good to be cooped up all the time.”
“I’m not your brother,” he said. His voice scratched, weak and out of practice. He had taken breathing for granted, and had to relearn how to speak.
Diego laughed. “We’re all you have, now. You’ll understand soon enough.”
“He has lots of time to learn,” said Octavio, one of the four demons who had once been men, who followed Juan. Rafael and Esteban were the others.
