nbsp; “So I gathered. When I came here I’d hoped to learn more.”
“So do we.” The Abbot gestured to the figure at the lectern. The Scribe, who turned, drew a book off the shelf behind them, set it on the stand, flipped pages to the front, and smoothed out the parchment. “We have your history. We gave you your own book some time ago, when news of you started to reach us. We weren’t sure at first you’d need it—most of our kind are never more than footnotes in their Masters’ books, you see. But you . . . were always an odd one.”
“My own book?” Rick said, wanting to laugh. “All for me? There isn’t that much to tell, surely.” He was staring at the shelf behind the Scribe, at all the other heavy, leather-bound books lined up. Dozens of them. Who else was written up there? Mercedes? Arturo? Alette? Yes, of course. Elinor, Catalina, Edward Alleyn, Anastasia . . . and Gaius Albinus. That was why Rick was here.
“There are some gaps we’d like to fill,” the Abbot said. “You have been very mysterious, Don Ricardo.”
Rick, he started to insist again, and didn’t. He felt out of place here, his sense of time slipping. Maybe he shouldn’t have left Denver. “I mostly tried to keep to myself.”
“Please, take off your coat and sit. This may take some time. Scribe?”
Rick lay his coat over the back of a straight wooden chair and sat.
The Scribe read. Blindfolded, and they still read. Perhaps their fingers that brushed over the page were sensitive enough to feel the ink. Perhaps they had the book, and all the other books, all the histories of all vampires, memorized.
Their voice was a neutral alto, the accent flat enough to almost be American. “In 1522 Ricardo is born in Avila, Spain, to minor nobility. Arrives in the colony of New Spain at the age of seventeen to seek his fortune, participates in Coronado’s expedition to the northernmost reaches of Spanish territory. After, stays in Mexico to work as a government courier. He is thirty years old when the vampire Fray Juan finds him and turns him against his will. Ricardo manages to destroy him and his entire band.”
“How?” the Abbot asked flatly. “Just a few days a vampire and you simply murder your own progenitor who possessed centuries of power—”
“I didn’t know it couldn’t be done,” Rick said, ducking to hide a smile. “I had luck. Planning. Help.” He’d rescued the village Fray Juan and his band preyed upon. They had been grateful. They had shown him he did not have to kill to feed and that had changed everything. “Perhaps you can tell me why it seems to happen so often that men of the cloth become . . . what we are? Or is it the other way around, that vampires become men of the cloth later?”
The Abbot leaned back. “It is easier to hide old things in the Church. Scribe?”
The Scribe had paused, finger upon the place they left off, and now continued. “In 1620 the Master of All Spain sends Mistress Catalina to rule Ciudad de México. She does not expect to find a European vampire already living in her new territory. Ricardo de Avila y Zacatecas declines the invitation to become part of Mistress Catalina’s retinue.”
“I’ve met Mistress Catalina. She would not have been happy about that.”
“She was not,” Rick said.
“And again, you destroyed one of the ancient, powerful vampires she sent to bring you to heel.”
Rick supposed it did start to look ominous when you lined it all up like that. “Again, I had help. I gave my estancia to my human servant, Henri, so the vampires could not enter.” He had always had help. Human, mortal help. He wasn’t sure the Abbot would understand.
“Scribe?”
“That is in the record, reported by Mistress Catalina and her people. After, Ricardo flees north.”
“Then, there is more than a century’s gap in our record of you, Don Ricardo,” the Abbot said.
“When is my next appearance in your book?”
“You were counted in the party of Pedro Vial that reached Saint Louis in 1792. That makes you one of the trackers who helped established the Santa Fe Trail.”
The situation had been a lot more complicated than that—he had known Pedro for a long time, they ran into each other with startling frequency given the vast distances they covered. He’d only joined that particular expedition en route, when Pedro got in trouble and Rick helped him out. He hadn’t thought the episode made it into any histories at all. “I worked as a tracker and translator for many of those years, yes. You see, not so interesting.”
“You disappear again, until 1848.”
“I moved around a lot. After 1800 or so, after the Louisiana Purchase, things in the region changed quickly. Blink of an eye. For three hundred years Spain had tried to colonize those borderlands, and in fifty years—the Anglos claimed it all. It became American.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“Spain, France, England—that land was only ever a colony to exploit. Those countries never looked on the New World as part of their own nations. Not really. But the Americans—they wanted it all. They took it. I struggled to find my place in that new country for some time.”
“But you wouldn’t leave.”
“No. By then, it was my home.”
“1848,” the Abbot said.