The Gathering Dark by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page A

harder than ever before and tried to tunnel beneath them. That was our job for a time . . .”
    Our job . Faces flashed across his mind, images of friends who had been dead many hundreds of years and yet for whom his heart still ached.
    “We were supposed to keep the Turks out,” he said, a rasp in his voice that he did not like.
    His eyes opened and he glanced over at one of the canvases propped against the wall. It showed the ships in the water of the Golden Horn, feeding the assault on Constantinople, their bone-white sails pregnant with the wind, as though God himself were spurring them on to the city’s destruction.
    Peter shook his head. “They did the impossible, you know. The Turks, I mean. They could not pass the barrier the Emperor had placed to guard the entrance to the Golden Horn and so the Sultan ordered his armies to transport their ships across the land.” He stared at the priest. “Across the land, Jack. Do you have any idea of the enormity of that?”
    “I can only imagine.”
    The mage laughed then, a long, hearty sound that surprised him as it came out. He gazed longingly at his paintings again and then back at the priest.
    “No. You know, you really can’t. It was 1453, Jack. You don’t have a clue. Another world, not just another time. And so to your suggestion that I was a soldier I say, yes, I suppose in your terms I was a soldier. But we were a city at war and I was an able-bodied man in service to my Emperor, my father. I was a warrior, Father Devlin.
    “A warrior.”
    Peter hung his head a moment and took a long breath. Then he took another and looked up again.
    “Look, you came here for a reason. I don’t want to waste your time.”
    “You’re not,” the priest said quickly, and apparently with great sincerity given the expression on his face. “Please go on.”
    He sipped thoughtfully at his tea. “I wanted to kill Turks. As many Turks as I could. They were destroying the empire, destroying my home and my friends and the women I had loved or had wanted to love, and they were tearing apart my world. I wanted to kill them with a passion that is yet another thing I’m afraid you cannot possibly imagine.
    “But the city was falling, you see. It was only a matter of time. I don’t mean weeks, I mean hours.” Peter pointed to the easel, to the painting he had just completed. “That is the night, right there. Those trees and the roses in early bloom and nightingales singing and a man came to me who was not a man and he offered me a chance to become a far greater warrior, an invincible warrior who might slaughter Turks by the hundreds.”
    Peter leaned forward and set his teacup on the floor. He had lost his desire for it entirely. He gazed steadily at the priest.
    “What else was I to say? He took my blood and gave me his, and in all the ways that really mattered, I died. My name then was not what it is now, as I’m sure you know. He gave it to me, the one who made me a vampire.”
    Though he had been unable to stop Constantinople from falling, Octavian had spent years killing as many Turks as he was able, a new family around him. He remembered how it had changed him, had brought him to the point where killing seemed all he knew how to do, where it had seemed like a good idea.
    “I allowed myself to be lulled into the belief that I was not a warrior, but a hunter,” he said.
    “A vampire,” Father Jack whispered. “You were a vampire.”
    “Yes,” Peter replied. “And back in the day, that meant all the things we thought it meant. All the rules, all the bullshit, all the . . . all the cruelty and bloodshed . . .”
    He waved his hand as if brushing it all away. “Bullshit,” he said again. “There’s no such thing as vampires, Jack. Not the figures painted by the legends of myth and pop culture. You know that or you wouldn’t be here. But call them that if you want, for lack of a better word. I was one of them, but I became tired of killing. It wasn’t what I wanted,