Chapter 376 - In Transit part 13

"We're here," Sam said, throwing the Aston Martin into park.

It was a moment before Nora came back to the present. She saw that they were parked before a colonnaded wall in the center of an open courtyard. The stone columns were old and gray. A few of them had buckled and lay in untidy jumbles, like chunks of petrified wood. Flurries of snow twirled in the headlights. The ruins of the medieval monastery had no charm in the moonless dark. Just hulking shapes, edges obscured by snow.

Nora could feel the other immortals who were waiting here for them. Justus. Apollonius. And one other. An immortal whose mind she could not penetrate. Justus's Eternal companion Agnes, perhaps? Nora did not know for certain, and did not have time to probe the vampire's mind more thoroughly. Her fellow travelers were already clambering from the vehicle, eager to be free after the long drive across the Rhineland. Few vampires could tolerate confinement for very long.

Nora unclasped her seatbelt and got out of the car. The wind caught her hair and whipped it into Gorgon coils. She drew her coat more tightly around herself, though the cold could not harm her. One of the benefits of being a vampire.

"So this is it?" the American, Sydney Meadows, said as he and his new-blooded companion climbed from the car behind her.

"Engel Abbey," Nora said. "Lair of the immortal Justus."

Engel Abbey was a sprawling utilitarian compound. Built in the mid-16th century, it housed a self-sufficient community of some two hundred monks until the Second World War, when the German army confiscated the property to use as a supply post. It was attacked by Allied bombers towards the end of the war and the outer wall and several of the interior structures had been blasted to rubble. The Church had never bothered to reclaim the abbey and it sat derelict for nearly thirty years before a reclusive millionaire named Jules Benedict purchased and partially restored it. Jules Benedict was the alias of the five-hundred-year-old vampire Justus.

Brother Justus.

A former Benedictine monk, Justus came across Gon in the Croatian village of Getvar in the early 1550's. He had been dispatched there by the Ordo Lucis to investigate claims of vampire activity. Gon had been dispatched to Getvar for a similar reason. The Court of the Night's Watch had learned that ghouls were plaguing the town. Ghouls were degenerate vampires—mindless, destructive, and nearly insatiable—and Gon had been sent to destroy them before the situation got out of hand.

During the course of their individual investigations, the two men met, became lovers, and rooted out the vampire infestation together. Unfortunately, Brother Justus was mortally wounded at the climax of their adventure, and Gon had forced the Living Blood upon the scholar to preserve his new friend's life: the only mortal the oldest living vampire transformed against his will.

The Strix made Brother Justus a powerful vampire, though he would always bear the stigmata of his catastrophic injuries—several thick, runneled scars on his throat, and a distinctive tracery of black striations that spiraled up his neck and across his cheeks. His disfigurement was both repulsive and beautiful, for it looked as if a pattern of Arabesques had been tattooed on his face.

He came out to greet them as Nora and her companions debarked from the Aston Martin.

As he walked through the swirling snow in the headlights of the car, Nora was struck by his beauty. Justus's features were finely made and perfectly symmetrical. Lush mouth. Large, winsome green eyes. Hawkish nose and strong, masculine jaw. His disfigurement only served to enhance his beauty, for he might have been too perfect were it not for the scars.

No wonder Gon seduced the fellow, she thought. She would have done the same had she met the mortal man.

He normally dressed in the distinctive black habit of his religious order, even now, hundreds of years after he was made an immortal, but he had clothed himself this night in more contemporary apparel: denim trousers, boots, a white shirt and heavy winter coat.

Justus dropped to his knees at Zenzele's feet. "Mother," he said, and there was such grief in his voice that Nora's heart broke for him a little.

Nora watched, fascinated, as Zenzele lifted the man into her embrace. "It is not too late to save him," the goddess said, cradling the back of the man's head. "We will convince him to live. And if we cannot do that, we will see him off from this world. We will not let him slip away without knowing how much he is loved."

"Yes, Mother," Justus said, nodding and wiping his eyes. He withdrew from Zenzele's embrace and turned to greet the rest of them. As he did, Apollonius and one more blood drinker, a tall, slender female in a billowing white cloak, came up behind him.

Nora had met Apollonius in passing, once, many years ago. The favored son of the oldest living vampire, Paulo was the Greek god incarnate: golden curls, eyes as blue as the summer sky, perfect in every way. He had come all the way from Karpathos to stop his father from ending his life, had set out in pursuit of his maker before Nora even sent out her summons.

The female in the billowing white cloak was unknown to her, and strangely unreadable. Though Nora was perhaps the most powerful telepath on the face of the earth, the figure in the white robes was a tabula rasa, as silent to her mutant ability as a marble statue.

From Justus's mind, she confirmed the immortal's identity. It was indeed his former mortal companion Sister Agnes. Gon's bloodthirsty new fledgling had forced the Living Blood upon her, had made her into a powerful Eternal.

An elderly woman when she was transformed, she had long silver hair and a thin bony frame and heavy-lidded gray eyes. She was toothless but for her vampire fangs and had flesh like crinkled onionskin paper, and yet she was beautiful in her delicacy, a creature of spun glass rather than living stone.

Though they were all lovers or the immortal children (or children of the immortal children) of the vampire Gon, many of them had never met in the flesh. It was a big world and the oldest living vampire tended to wander. They introduced themselves to one another with embraces and kisses, paid homage to the Eternal Zenzele, who was nearly as ancient as Gon himself, and then Justus invited them into the church to discuss their plans before they continued on.

"We must wait just a little while longer," he explained, leading them through the cloister. "If we pursue him too closely, make our move too soon, he will realize what we mean to do and hurry to his doom. We must act at precisely the right moment. All other timelines lead to his destruction."

"So you have seen a future where our father survives this night?" Nora asked, once they had passed into the temple.

Inside, it was warm and bright. Candles and recessed lights cast a golden glow to the arched ceiling, onto the Christ figure hanging in the apse. Nora had always found the resemblance between Christ and her maker somewhat suspect.

Justus looked at them grimly for a moment, then spoke with a sigh: "In truth, I've had no visions in which our maker survives the night. This course, this timeline, is the only one in which we reach him in time to stop him. Where we even come close enough to speak to him. Beyond that…" He shrugged.

"You have seen no future in which he lives?" Apollonius demanded, frustration making him unkind.

Justus looked at his brother. "I see no future at all," he said. "Darkness falls over my vision."

"What does that mean?" the American, Sydney, drawled, looking from one to the other.

"It means," Justus said, "that I may perish tonight." A wan smile touched his lips at the gasps of his co-conspirators. "But the future is not set in stone," he went on, squaring his shoulders, drawing himself up. "Time is like a drop of water running down a window pane. Its course shifts according to the microscopic imperfections it encounters. That is us. We are those microscopic imperfections. Our actions, or lack thereof. Normally, if I concentrate very hard, I can see not only the most likely course that drop of water will take, but alternate ones as well, futures in which the drop runs left instead of right, or vice versa. But those ghostly futures are falling into darkness now, one by one, as we continue on this course of action. I can get us to our maker in time, while he still lives, give us a chance to appeal to him directly, but after that I see nothing. Just the face of his infernal fledgling. I see him laughing at me, the gleam of madness in his eyes, and then darkness. Cold, soundless, insensate darkness."

Nora looked at his companion Agnes, but the old woman's face betrayed no emotion. She stood at his side, a fragile hand upon his shoulder, her faded gray eyes dispassionate.

"If that is what you see then you must remain behind," Zenzele said imperiously.

Justus turned to the regal figure. "If only I could, mother. There is but a single moment in which we have our chance, and I must be there to signal it to you, otherwise he dies. If I do not go with you, Gon is dust by morning light."

"You cannot expect us to sacrifice you for the chance—the mere chance!-- of speaking to Gon," Nora said angrily.

"I may not die," Justus said. "My visions have gone dark before. I am not all-knowing. During times of war or great upset, when a great many decisions are made in a very short span of time, there are simply too many variables to glean the likeliest outcome and I am rendered blind. This may be one of those moments. All I am telling you is that I can get us there. I can divine the path. Give us a moment to speak to him. A chance to convince him to turn from this course. But I cannot see the outcome. My vision fails at that moment, that precise moment, when he decides whether he will live or die."

"Do we even have the right to intervene?" Apollonius asked. "Our father wishes to die. He has longed for death for a great many years. Now he's found a means to do it, and we've set ourselves at odds with him."

Justus shrugged. "That is something we must each decide. But do it quickly."

"I will let him die if he is certain of it," Apollonius said. He glared at them defiantly, arms crossed. When no one disparaged him, he relaxed and went on: "Gon is my father. I love him as I have loved no other man. If this is what he wants then I will respect his wishes. I will let him go. I just want to see him one last time. I want to make sure this is really what he wants. If he's just sad because he's been alone too long, which has happened in the past, then I will take him home to Karpathos and find a way to make him happy again. We will make him happy again. My family and I."

"And I," Zenzele said. "I cannot help but feel this is partially my fault. I have been away too long. The years pass by so quickly."

"Everybody needs somebody, I guess," Sydney said, and he looked at his new fledgling and smiled. Miranda snuggled up to his side, laying her head against his shoulder.

"So we are in agreement," Justus said, not so much a question as a statement, for the resolve on their faces was obvious. He nodded as if they had answered in the affirmative, continued on: "We must depart from here soon. I can feel the timelines converging, focusing on the next few hours. We must proceed as a group, move as stealthily as possible. Gyozo-- Gon-- must be ignorant of our presence until the final moment. We must wait at the foot of the mountain, just beyond the range of his senses, until I give the signal, then we make our way up as swiftly as possible. Only then, if we reveal ourselves at the precise instant, will we have a chance to plead our case."

He looked at them all, shifting his gaze from one face to the next. There was no dissent in their ranks, not a single objection given voice.

Nora could feel their love as if it were a physical force, an invisible energy field, swelling out to enfold them, joining them together for the first and what might turn out to be the last time in all their combined histories: the most precious of the oldest living vampire.

She was a little overwhelmed by the intensity of their feelings and started to draw away, as she usually did from such powerful emotions, but then she changed her mind, dared to lower her barriers completely. For a moment, she allowed the power of their kinship to wash over her. For a moment, she immersed herself in the gestalt mind without reservation.

It was a wordless chorale, a soundless attestation of unity. They were all there in her thoughts: Samuel and John and Paulo, Justus and Sydney and Miranda, even Zenzele and Agnes, their souls bared to her for a single shining instant.

For that timeless moment, she was part of a greater whole, a resplendent and perfect collective, but she did not feel diminished by it. No, not diminished at all.

She was… transcendent.

We are his tribe now, she thought.

"It is time," Justus said, and then he led them from Engel Abbey.