He turned his attention back to his mirror image. “You didn’t answer my other question. Who are you? And don’t tell me ‘I’m you.’ I can see for myself that you have assumed my guise, but that alone doesn’t make you Alexander of Paris.”
“You say your name as if it means something. But it’s merely a collection of syllables, sound that is produced, then echoes for a instant or two before dying away. Hardly worth perceiving in the first place, let alone remembering.”
Alexander refused to rise to his double’s bait. “You still haven’t answered my question. Or are you just another aspect of this dream, no more real than this sky, this sea and this boat?” Something kept him from including the gliding dim figures in his list, as if by mentioning them he risked making them more real than they already were.
“If you truly believed I was illusory, you wouldn’t inquire so persistently about my identity. That should tell you that—on some level—you recognize I am real. At least, as your kind so imperfectly defines the term.”
Alexander sensed the truth of the doppelganger’s words. While everything else here might be no more substantial than night fog, he—or it—was a separate entity. “Let us say for the moment that I acknowledge your reality. That still doesn’t tell me who you are and why I am here.”
“If I had a name, I would tell it to you. I have been present in the land you call Livonia since before the sire of all your race slew his brother, and I shall be here long after the sun is nothing but a dead black cinder in the heavens. As for what you are doing here, you are here to receive a message.”
“From you?” Alexander was a master at playing games of all sorts, but right now he was rapidly tiring of his double’s game of semantics.
Once again the other gestured toward the surging waves. “From them.”
One of the dark forms swimming near the boat lifted its head above the surface. It was human—a woman—with smooth grayish-blue skin and round black fish eyes. Still, Alexander recognized her despite these changes. It was the laundress he had fed upon—the one he had drained and discarded before speaking to the traitor Rikard. She was looking right at him, and he forced himself to meet her gaze, though he was unable to read any expression or even acknowledgment of his existence in her piscine eyes. She held his gaze a moment longer before slipping back beneath the waves and resuming her circuit around the boat.
Other heads broke the surface now, all with the same slick gray skin and dead black eyes. Alexander recognized them all—Lorraine, Olivier, Margery, Lucien, Renaud… Then more of the dark figures stopped swimming, and dozens, hundreds, thousands upon thousands of heads rose out of the water—no, not water; he could see that now. It was an ocean of dark red blood… Some of the beings were Cainites, but most were mortal women that had once been in love. But no matter what they had been, they all now possessed the same fishy skin and lifeless eyes. All of them—those close up and those so far away that their heads were nothing more than tiny dots on the horizon—glared at him and opened their mouths to reveal row after row of serrated shark’s teeth.
“Do you understand what you’re looking at?” the double asked.
Alexander, as is the way of dreams, knew precisely what he was looking at, though how he had come by that knowledge, he couldn’t have said. “They are all my…” He couldn’t bring himself to say victims. The word was overly dramatic, and it didn’t come close to communicating the enormity of the sheer number of beings that surrounded him. Everyone he had ever killed to feed upon or slain in the thick of battle, for revenge, for amusement, or simply out of boredom, was here. Men, women (mostly women), children, Cainites, Lupines, demons—the intensity of their collective hatred pounded into him like a tidal wave of emotion. But mixed in with the hate were feelings of excitement and anticipation. He realized the blood-swimmers were waiting impatiently and with great eagerness for something to happen.
“They’re waiting for you to join them,” the other said. “The first has been waiting for two thousand years, and the last only a handful of hours. But no matter how long they’ve been waiting, they all sense the same thing: The time is nigh.”
Alexander turned to his double. “What are you saying?”
The doppelganger frowned. “Don’t be dense. Must I explain it to you as if you were a child? The Final Death will soon be upon you, Alexander of Paris—and for all your years of existence purchased with the blood you stole from others, for all you experience and power, there is nothing you can do to stop it. Nothing at all.”
Alexander told himself that this was only a dream—well, a nightmare now—and that he shouldn’t take the other’s words seriously, but he couldn’t help it. He had been born as a mortal into a culture that believed in signs, omens and portents, and no matter how much he wished to, his couldn’t dismiss his double’s words. In fact, they shook him to the very core of his being.
Still, he was Alexander of Paris, and he wouldn’t permit himself to show his fear, no matter what. “If I cannot change my fate, if—as you hint—I am to be defeated by the Mongol Qarakh, then why bother telling me? It will happen soon enough on its own.
As I said before, I’m delivering a message
