The True Blood of Martyrs Read online

  He was humming, music so faint I felt it rather than heard it; a tune I remembered from centuries ago. I smiled and turned my face into the hollow of his neck. Our bodies melted together, and we danced slower now, slower, until we were standing still, clasped together like lovers under the moonlight.

  I raised my head. Jinx’s lips met mine in one gentle, sweet, empty kiss. I tasted memories on his tongue, but they weren’t his own. He had fed on a woman, and for a blinding instant I hated her enough to kill her again.

  "It’s nearly dawn," he said.

  "No." I held on to him when he tried to let me go. "Jinx, tell me what you’re doing. Tell me."

  His eyes met mine, and centuries passed between us. Thousands of deaths. Blood flowing in rivers. What were we? Devils? Damned? We’d never found an answer to the question. But Jinx had continued to ask. His courage, at least, had never failed.

  "I’m going to sit down," he said slowly, "and I’m going to wait for dawn. It’s that simple."

  I laughed. Threw his hands away from me with contempt. The fool. I should have stayed home.

  "Wait for dawn?" I repeated. "Jinx, you’re madder than Luther. It isn’t possible. We’ve all tried it. If it was as simple as that, there’d be nothing but ashes left of any of us!"

  We were not able to abide the sun, that much was true. Either we sought out shelter and darkness, or we suffered an intense, maddening agony for the instant of the sun’s touch, and then we misted away.

  And at sunset, we misted back. Whole. Untouched.

  Jinx knew that.

  "Have you tried?" he asked. Jinx, who never raised his voice, was almost sharp with me. "No, Helen, have you tried? Because I have. For the last two years, I have tried and I have failed, but I’ve been burned. You simply have to refuse to mist. You have to will yourself to burn, and you have to do it until you are gone."

  "It’s impossible."

  "No. I’ve stayed in the sun for as much as three hours, but it wasn’t enough. But this time – this time I will do it. I will stay in the sun the full turning of the earth, until the sun goes down, and I will die." Jinx searched my face. "You believe me?"

  No one could do it. No one ever had.

  "Yes," I said in a whisper. There was something in his eyes that forced me to believe it. "You don’t have to do this. Wait a little. One more dance. What’s another year or two?"

  He regarded me quite seriously. Touched my cheek with fingers that were too gentle for someone who’d spent centuries killing.

  "I lose time, Helen. Hours. Sometimes days. I realize suddenly that the world has moved on and left me behind, and I know that one time I will sink into that sleep and I’ll be like them. If I don’t die, I will be Frozen." Jinx raised my fingers to his lips. "Help me."

  The party was ending. Some of the picnickers had already misted away, bored with deathplay; a few lay tumbled in various stages of disarray on the lawn. Luther was still there; his laughter guided us through the tangled trees, into the clearing already taking on the colors of the day world. Dawn was coming.

  "Charming party," Luther said. He checked the drape of the lace at his cuffs, flicked drops of blood from his fingers. Charity lay still embraced with the vampire child at his feet. They were both dead, their throats torn. "Really must be going, my dears – places to go, people to eat. Do let me know if you manage to die, won’t you? Rap on a table. Send me a spirit message."

  From behind me, Jinx said, "Luther." He received Luther’s complete attention, the pale blue eyes suddenly very serious.

  "Have you ever thought," Luther said, "that this is God’s will? What did you do to deserve this, Jinx? You, Helen? I know what I did, and I can tell you, I’m not so very eager to face a God who made me."

  His seriousness dropped away like a shed cloak, and he made a kissing sound toward me. "Helen, dearest, do keep in touch. My door is always open, et cetera, et cetera. We might have quite a lot of fun, you and I. Like the old days."

  He misted away in a showman’s puff of fog before the words were even complete, a ghost among ghosts, and when I closed my eyes I felt his chill pass through me.

  Good bye, Luther. I was done with him. With all of them. Was this how Jinx had survived for the past five hundred years, with this curious aching emptiness? No wonder he was peculiar.

  They were all gone. The sun was coming, like a pressure against my chest, pushing me away. One by one, the bodies of the dead faded like smoke, some into the ground, some into the air.

  But not the Frozen. There were five I could see, more I half-glimpsed in the trees. They waited silently, growing ever fainter as the light rose, but never quite gone. They had found shelter, and they were waiting.

  Jinx took my hand and sat down on a headstone big enough for two; we perched there together, companionably silent, as birds began to wake and sing, the air to grow warm on our faces.

  "Helen," he said as the first crescent of the sun appeared in the distance. "I don’t believe I ever said that I love you."

  Fire. Fire poured through my veins, into my flesh, eating me alive from within – a pain beyond any mortal pain, beyond death, a pain that had no ending.

  I endured it for as long as I could, holding Jinx’s trembling hand. Our skin was blackening, crisping away from us. Tears boiled unshed in my eyes. I felt myself being stripped away, layer by layer, a cruelty that was beyond anything I had ever known.

  I do not know how long it was before I let go. Not so long. Perhaps ten minutes. I heard Jinx cry out in despair as he felt me slip away – he reached for me with burning arms but I couldn’t stay, I spread myself wide on the air and felt, if not peace, then at least an end to pain.

  My last sight, before I faded entirely, was of Jinx, a burning torch, his eyes the only thing of him still recognizable. And around him, bearing silent witness, the milky shadows of the Frozen.

  I misted back at nightfall, within touching distance of where I had vanished. Cool moonlight. Silence. Around me, the unmoving white glimmer of the Frozen. None of the others had bothered to come back.

  He’d failed, of course. No one could bear that agony, no matter how pure their desire. I saw him sitting exactly where I’d left him, on top of a weathered old tombstone large enough for two.

  "Jinx," I said. He looked whole again, though the experience had left him looking oddly –

  I took a step forward as he turned his head toward me, and smiled. Really smiled. The joy in his eyes was heartbreaking.

  "Jinx," I whispered. I closed my eyes and tasted him on my tongue, ripe with life, heavy with blood.

  Not dead.

  Mortal.

  I almost fainted when he touched me; the ecstasy of that was more than I could stand. He was every need I’d ever had fulfilled, every desire consummated. I wanted him in ways I could not begin to comprehend.

  I wanted to drink him down like a flood. I knew how his life would taste, so rich and delicate; the rarest of wines. The food of God.

  His warm, warm hands brushed my cold face. I turned blindly into his touch, breathed deep of his pulse point, heard his heart laboring in my ears. Oh, Jinx. You magnificent fool.

  "You see?" he said. "I waited for you. I knew you’d come back."

  I couldn’t answer. He guided my lips to his wrist, and as I kissed the thin skin I felt him shudder against me, as transported as I. We were one, Jinx and I. We had always been one.

  "Drink," he whispered.

  I did.

  The blur of his life gathered me in its embrace, whirled me into the blaze that was Jinx, brilliance and compassion and hunger and need, the cold fire of a love he could neither have or forget. My face was the only light in his darkness. And at this moment, when our souls merged and flowed together, we were at peace.

  His heart fluttered. I would have pulled away, but his warm hand held me in place, and I couldn’t stop myself, drawing him into me further and further, consuming him whole.

  Dead weight in my hands. I cried out, but it was on
ly a shadow of the anguish I felt; I had not meant to –

  -- to kill him –

  Oh, Jinx. I had been a knife aimed at his heart by his own hand.

  I held him in my arms, rocked his limp body through the long, long night as cold stars watched.

  Just before dawn, a cold hand brushed my cheek, and I looked up to see the moonstruck face of a Frozen. With slow, deliberate care, he reached down for Jinx.

  "No," I said. His face was completely unmoving, but I thought I saw a flicker of compassion in those dead eyes. "Not yet."

  I cradled the body close. He had cooled during the night, as flesh does, but under my own skin I still knew warmth, and sunlight, and joy. In my veins, I was Jinx.

  "The sun’s coming," I said to Jinx. He was so heavy. So very real to me, more real than anything had been in the world for hundreds of years. "You didn’t tell me how long it would take."

  His blood told me it would be a long death. I was prepared for it this time. Jinx had endured. How could I do less?

  As the sun’s corrosive light touched me, I kissed Jinx’s cool lips one last time, and gave myself up. I braced myself for the fire, but instead –

  -- instead, my skin tingled with the touch of clean warmth. Pale skin shading to palest pink.

  In the utter silence, I heard my heart begin to beat. The clock of life, counting down.

  Jinx’s gift of blood and life. I was mortal.

  I kissed Jinx again in silent gratitude, tears streaming down my cheeks to glitter on his cheeks. I closed my eyes to the brilliant dazzle of morning and listened, rapt, to the beating of my heart.

  Forgiven.

  And now I know my path. I will sit here, like Jinx before me, in the full warm embrace of the sun. With nightfall the Frozen will return, and I will offer my blood, and with my blood, the gift Jinx brought us at such great cost.

  Death.

  As I listen to the beating of my heart whisper his name, I know, without any shadow of doubt, that he is waiting for me beyond the sun.