Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(8)

Someday, he heard her say. Someday.

? ? ?

He didn’t see her for another three hundred years. Wars had raged; he’d seen kingdoms rise and fall, and tens of thousands bleed to death in needless pain over politics and faith. He’d followed Amelie from one haven to the next, until they’d quarreled over something foolish, and he’d run away from her at last to strike out on his own. It was a mistake.

He was never as good when left to his own devices.

In Canterbury, in England, at a time when the young Victoria was only just learning the weight of her crown, he made mistakes. Terrible ones. The worst of these was trusting an alchemist named Cyprien Tiffereau. Cyprien was a brilliant man, a learned man, and Myrnin had forgotten that the learned and brilliant could be just as treacherous as the ignorant and stupid. The trap had caught him entirely by surprise. Cyprien had learned too much of vampires, and had developed an interest in what use might be made of them—medical for a start, and as weapons for the future.

Confessing his own vampire nature to Cyprien, and all his weaknesses, had been a serious error.

I should have known, he thought as he sat in the dark hole of his cell, fettered at ankles, wrists, and neck with thick, reinforced silver. The burning had started as torture, but he had adjusted over time, and now it was a pain that was as natural to him as the growing fog in his mind. Starvation made his confusion worse, and over the days, then weeks, the little blood that Cyprien had allowed him hadn’t sustained him well at all.

And now the door to his cell was creaking open, and Cyprien’s lean, ascetic body eased in. Myrnin could smell the blood in the cup in Cyprien’s hand, and his whole body shook and cramped with the craving. The scent was almost as strong as that of the hot-metal blood in the man’s veins.

“Hello, spider,” Cyprien said. “You should be hungry by now.”

“Unchain me and find out, friend,” Myrnin said. His voice was a low growl, like an animal’s, and it made him uneasy to hear it. He did not want to be . . . this. It frightened him.

“Your value is too great, I’m afraid. I can’t allow such a prize to escape now. You must think of all there is to learn, Myrnin. You are a man with a curious mind. You should be grateful for this chance to be of service.”

“If it’s knowledge you seek, I’ll help you learn your own anatomy. Come closer. Let me teach you.”

Cyprien was no fool. He placed the cup on the floor and took a long-handled pole to push it within reach of Myrnin’s chained hands.

The red, rich smell of the blood overwhelmed him, and he grabbed for the wooden mug, raised it, and gulped it down in three searing, desperate mouthfuls.

The pain hit only seconds later. It ripped through him like pure lightning, crushed him to the ground, and began to pull his mind to pieces. Pain flayed him. It scraped his bones to the marrow. It ripped him apart, from skin to soul.

When he survived it, weeping and broken, he became slowly aware of Cyprien’s presence. The man sat at a portable desk, scratching in a small book with a feather pen.

“I am keeping a record,” Cyprien told him. “Can you hear me, Myrnin? I am not a monster. This is research that will advance our knowledge of the natural world, a cause we both hold dear. Your suffering brings enlightenment.”

Myrnin whispered his response, too softly. It hardly mattered. He’d forgotten how to speak English now. The only words that came to his tongue were Welsh, the language of his childhood, of his mother.

“I didn’t hear,” Cyprien said. “Can you possibly speak louder?”

If he could, he didn’t have the strength, he found. Or anything left to say. Words ran away from him like deer over a hillside, and the fog pressed in, silver fog, confused and confusing. All that was left in him was rage and fear. The taste of poisoned blood made him feel sick and afraid in ways that he’d never imagined he could bear.

And then it grew worse. Myrnin felt his arms and legs begin to convulse, and a low cry burst out of his throat, the wordless plea of a sick creature with no hope.

“Ah,” his friend said. “That would be the next phase. How gratifying that occurs with such precise timing. It should last an hour or so, and then you may rest a bit. There’s no hurry. We have weeks together. Years, perhaps. And you are going to be so very useful, my spider. My prized subject. The wonders we will create together . . . just think of it.”

But by then, Myrnin could not think of anything. Anything at all.

The hour passed in torment, and then there were a few precious hours of rest before Cyprien came, again.

The day blurred into night, day, night, weeks, months. There was no way to tell one eternity from the next. No time in hell, Myrnin’s mind gibbered, in one of his rare moments of clarity. No clocks. No calendars. No past. No future. No hope, no hope, no hope.

He dreaded Cyprien’s appearances, no matter how hungry he became. The blood was sometimes tainted, and sometimes not, which made it all the worse, of course. Sometimes he did not drink, but that only made the next tainted drink more powerful.

Cyprien was patient as death himself, and as utterly unmoved by tears, or screams, or pleas for mercy.

Time must have passed outside his hell, if not inside, because Cyprien grew older. Gray crept into his short-cropped hair. Lines mapped his face. Myrnin had forgotten speech, but if he could have spoken, he would have laughed. You’ll die before me, old friend, he thought. Grow old and feeble and die. The problem was that on the day that Cyprien stopped coming and lay cold in his grave, Myrnin knew he would go on and on, starving slowly into an insanely slow end, lost in this black hole of pain.