Shutting his eyes, he turned his face away.
Another, a sixth being, entered the room with them. This one was different—warm, burning with heat, a flame in the dark, rich and beautiful. Alive. A heartbeat thudded, the footfalls of an army marching double time. A living person who was afraid.
“Ricardo. Look.” Juan stood at the foot of the bed and raised a lantern.
Ricardo sat up, pressed against the wall. Two of the caballeros dragged between them a child, a boy seven or eight years old, very thin. The boy met his gaze with dark eyes, shining with fear. He whimpered, pulling back from the caballeros’ grasp, but they held fast, their fingers digging into his skin.
Juan said, “This is one of the things you must learn, to take your place among my knights.”
“No.” But the new sensations, the new way of looking at the world, wanted this child. Wanted the warm blood that gave this child life. The caballeros hauled the boy forward, and Ricardo shook his head even as he reached for the child. “No, no—”
“You cannot stop it,” Juan said.
The child screamed before Ricardo even touched him.
It was not him. It did not feel like his body. Something else moved his limbs and filled his mind with lust. His mouth closed over the artery in the child’s neck as if he kissed his flesh. His teeth—he had sharp teeth now—tore the skin, and the blood flowed. The sensation of wet blood on tongue burned through him, wind and fire. His vision was gone, his mind was gone.
This was not him.
The blood, life-giving and terrible, filled him until he seemed likely to break out of his own skin. With enough blood, he could expand to fill the world. When they pulled the dead child away, he was drunk, insensible, his hands too weak to clutch at the body. He sat at the edge of the bed, his arms fallen to his sides, limp, his face turned up, ecstatic. He licked his lips with a blood-coated tongue. But it was not him. His eyes stung with tears. He could not open them to look at the horror he’d wrought.
He was not so cold anymore. Either he was used to it, or he could no longer feel at all. That was a possibility. That was most likely best. Even if this were not hell, what they had forced him to do would surely send him to hell when he did die.
If he did.
“It is incentive to live forever, is it not? Knowing what awaits you for these terrible crimes,” Diego said with the smile of a wolf.
The friar had shown him what horrors this life held for him: he brought Ricardo a cross made of pressed gold. He kept it wrapped in silk, did not touch it himself. When Ricardo touched it, his skin burned. He could never touch a holy cross again. Holy water burned him the same. He could never go into a church. His baptism had been burned away from him. The Mother Church was poison to him now. God had rejected him.
But I do not reject God, Ricardo thought helplessly.
There were rewards. Juan kept calling them rewards. Mortal weapons could not kill him. Stabs and slashes with a sword, arquebus shot, falls, cracked bones, nothing would kill him. Only beheading, only a shaft of wood driven through the heart. Only the sun. He was immortal.
“You call this reward?” Ricardo had shouted. “To be forever shut out of God’s heavenly kingdom?” Then he realized the truth: This was no tragedy for Juan, because the friar did not believe in God or heaven.
“Did you ever believe?” Ricardo whispered at him. “Before you became this thing, did you believe?”
Juan smiled. “Perhaps it is not that I didn’t believe, but that I chose to join the other side of this war between heaven and hell.”
Which was somehow even more awful.
Ricardo stood at the church wall one night. The moon waxed again, past new. Half a month, he’d been here. He didn’t know what to do next—what he could do. They held him captive. He belonged with them now, because where else could he go?
They told him that the blood should taste sweet on his tongue, and it did. He still hated it.
Perhaps he looked for rescue. When he did not report to the governor, wouldn’t a party come for him? A troop of soldiers would come to learn what had happened, and Ricardo would intercept them, tell them the truth, and he would help them raze the church to the ground, destroy Juan and his caballeros.
And then they would destroy him, stake his heart, drag him into the sunlight for being one of them. So perhaps Ricardo wouldn’t help them, but would hide.
Did he love existence more than life, then? More than heaven?
A jingling of bridles sounded behind him. Ricardo did not have to look; he sensed the four men approaching with the horses.
“Brother Ricardo, it’s good you’ve finally come into the air. It’s not good to be cooped up all the time.”
“I’m not your brother,” he said. His voice scratched, weak and out of practice. He had taken breathing for granted and had had to relearn how to speak.
Diego laughed. “We’re all you have, now. You’ll understand soon enough.”