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

not what I signed up for.”
    A bitter laugh escaped him.
    “I changed my life, left the others who had become like a family to me but now hated me for pointing out what they already knew. It was evil, what we were doing. We didn’t have to live like that. And so I didn’t. Then I found out the truth.”
    On that last word his gaze fell upon the priest again, and though he knew this man was not of the same church, not one of the men who had wrought so much evil in the past, still he could not help but feel fury boiling within him.
    Peter could see Father Jack’s Adam’s apple bob as the priest swallowed nervously. The man knew what Peter was speaking of, but it was a dangerous subject. For almost by chance, some years past, Peter had been the one to discover that vampires were not evil, but only supernatural. That of all supernatural creatures they were the only ones whose nature was a combination of human, demonic, and divine. That from the earliest days of the Roman Catholic Church, its hierarchy had conspired to use magick to control all supernatural creatures and that vampires were the only creatures they had not managed to bend to their will.
    He had learned the truth. That the limitations upon their ability to shapeshift, to alter their bodies on a molecular level, and most of the traditional weaknesses—to the sun and to garlic and to the cross—had been implanted in the minds of a few of his kind and then spread like an infection, the church fathers knowing that creatures with total control over their molecular structure would burn in the sunlight if they believed that they would, and would be scattered to dust by a stake through the heart if they believed that they would.
    But Peter had created of the truth a kind of antivirus, and it spread just as quickly.
    “You discovered that the Church was about to make a final purge to try to wipe your kind from the earth forever,” Father Jack said.
    The room fell silent then save for the sound of the priest trying to catch his breath and the burbling of the little fountain, and the distant noises of the city beyond the little basement apartment on West Fourth Street.
    “All of this is documented,” Peter reminded him.
    And it had been. Exhaustively. What Peter had learned set off a series of battles between humans and vampires, and among the vampire clans themselves, that laid waste to Venice and Salzburg and part of New Orleans. Vampires had learned the truth, that they did not have to be monsters, did not have to be predators, that they had a choice in the matter. But some had wanted to stay in the shadows. Some embraced that new truth, but others ignored it.
    “I lost a lot of friends and a woman I loved very much. I spent the better part of a thousand years in Hell, learning sorcery and losing my sanity. When it was all over and done with, nearly every vampire in the world was dead.”
    Father Jack stared at him. “And you were human.”
    For the first time, Peter glanced away, unsettled. He looked at his hands, pictured his own mirror image, the one he saw every morning, the one with the graying hair and the lines around the eyes and mouth.
    “Yes. I lived. I found a way to exorcize the demonic and the divine from my body. I could have had one of the survivors change me back, make me a vampire again. But I chose to stay like this. To live.”
    The priest set aside his own tea and gazed at Peter as though they were in the intimacy of a confessional. “And it haunts you.”
    Peter did not like the sound of that. He narrowed his eyes, ran his long fingers over the paint-spattered legs of his jeans. “Let me tell you now what you don’t know.”
    “Please.”
    The mage turned his hands over, and when he did, there was a tiny ball of green fire burning in the center of each palm, a pair of glaring, verdant suns that cast their glow upon the entire room and threw sickly shadows across the face of Father Jack Devlin, across his suddenly wide eyes. Peter could