Embrace the Night

"The cellars are intact, I believe?" Mircea inquired.

"Yes, yes. Plenty of wine." Horatiu just stood there. So did Mircea. "Do you want me to go get some?" the old man finally asked.

"That would be nice," Mircea said politely. Horatiu tottered off, still muttering to himself, just loudly enough to be understood. Mircea sighed and started searching a squat cabinet in a corner.

"It is an ouroboros, though, right? The order's symbol?" My eyes had wandered back to the tapestry. The dragon's scales were green, and its eyes, picked out in gold thread, seemed to move in the low light of the fire.

"Yes, I suppose," Mircea said absently. "It is an ancient protection symbol, of a girdle of power encasing something precious. And that's what they were trying to do—guard Europe from Turkish invasion. Why?"

"I keep seeing it lately, everywhere I go. It's starting to weird me out."

Mircea laughed. "The ouroboros is the mages' emblem. It is ubiquitous in our world."

"But they just use a plain silver circle," I protested. I'd always thought it showed a real lack of imagination. The oldest magical organization on earth, and that was the best they could do?

"The older version of their symbol was an ouroboros. It was stylized over time into something easier to reproduce. They say they chose it because it is the alchemical symbol for purity, and silver stands for wisdom." Mircea's tone left no doubt as to what he thought of that claim.

"Protection, purity and wisdom." A lot of things came to mind when I thought of the Circle. Those three weren't on the list.

Mircea held out a dusty bottle. "Burgundy," he said triumphantly.

"But you just sent Horatiu for wine."

"Yes, a fact he'll remember for perhaps five minutes." He filled a couple of glasses that looked reasonably clean and passed me one.

"Thanks." I took a sip. It was good. "What happened to him?"

"Horatiu?" I nodded. "I am afraid I did."

"What? But isn't changing someone that old considered kind of…inadvisable?"

"Very much." Mircea ignored his wine in favor of rummaging around in the wardrobe. He soon produced a paper-wrapped package that smelled like sandalwood. "Yes, I thought I would have another." He lifted up a corner of the paper. "And it's in white."

I narrowed my eyes at it. Ming-de's little gift, I assumed. "You look better in color," I snapped.

He sent me a sultry look over his shoulder. "Really? Most women think I look better in nothing at all."

I backpedaled fast. "So why did you change him, then?"

Mircea shrugged. "He was my childhood tutor. I visited him on his deathbed, to find his skin as pallid as the sheets but his mind as sharp as ever. He knew he was dying, and he was highly incensed about it. He lay there, his body failing, and demanded that I do something, in the same voice he'd used to terrorize me as a child—"

"And you caved?"

"I agreed to his proposition," Mircea said with dignity.

"You caved."

He sighed and pulled on the shirt. "I'm afraid so."

"But why is he like that? If you turned him, shouldn't he have vampiric sight?" Not to mention hearing, sense of balance and the ability to cross a room faster than a meandering caterpillar.

"Normally, yes. But Horatiu was dying when he went through the transformation; had I hesitated at all, he would have been gone. And changing someone in such extremely poor health is, as you said, inadvisable."

"Then why do it?" An eternity like that wouldn't have struck me as a great gift.

Mircea poked at the fire, not that it needed it. The room was already warming up nicely. "Because I did not know what I was doing," he admitted, having tortured the logs to his satisfaction. "You forget, I was not chosen for this life; I received it because of an old woman's hatred for my family. I was cursed."

"What does that have to do with Horatiu?"

"Everything. I had no one to advise me, dulceata?. No one to give me any knowledge of my new state. Perhaps in another time it would have been different. Today, the Senate itself oversees such masterless vampires as are created, few though they are. But then…nothing was so simple then. I didn't know this would be his fate."

"I never thought about what it must have been like for you," I said slowly, "to suddenly wake up changed."

He smiled grimly. "It did not happen as quickly as that. It was a week before the transformation was complete, and even then…Such things were fables, stories told to frighten children! How could such a thing have happened? To me, a good Catholic?"

"But vampirism is a metaphysical disease. It doesn't have anything to do with—"

"But I didn't know that, Cassie. I didn't know anything. I could enter a church, pray the rosary, do things I had always been told were impossible for the damned. And yet the sunlight I'd walked in all my life suddenly burned me, the food of my youth no longer nourished me, and even my body was changing in ways that, at the time, appalled me. I did not wish to see more than everyone else, to hear things better left unknown, to toss and turn in my bed, feeling every heartbeat within a mile calling out to me…"

"You accepted it in time, though."

"I don't know that that is quite the word I would use," Mircea said dryly. He unself-consciously stripped off the bedraggled trousers, laying them on the bed, where he tackled them with a brush. "I was in denial, refusing to admit, even to myself, what was happening."

"When did that change?"

"When the nobles caught up with me. Ours was an elected monarchy—anyone with the correct bloodline was a candidate—and they had decided to support a rival branch of the family. And in those days, the common way of changing power was to kill the ones who currently had it."

I'd heard the story of his change long ago, but he'd made it sound like a grand adventure. It wasn't sounding so much like that now. I was begi

"They killed Father first. He'd sent me on an ill-fated crusade against the Turks, and despite the fact that the troops I led had acquitted themselves well, we lost the war. I was…less than popular…thereafter, with nobles who had not bestirred themselves to help in the fight. Making me watch his death was intended as retribution."

He paused to tackle a particularly tough stain, then continued. "They scalped him, a trick we'd learned from the Turks. It involved peeling away the skin of the face while the victims still lived, torturing them and making them unrecognizable at the same time. When they finished, they blinded me with hot pokers so his mutilated body would be the last thing I ever saw. Then they buried me alive."

"Oh, my God."

"I lay there, hearing the clods of earth falling onto my coffin, and assumed it was the end," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull his trousers back on. "I waited for my air to run out, for death, for judgment, for something…but hours passed and nothing happened. Nothing except that my eyes mended, allowing me to see despite there being no light. I finally had to face the fact that something a little…strange…was going on."

"What did you do?"

Mircea shrugged. "I dug my way out. It had rained overnight, making the ground soft. Otherwise I might not have managed it. Afterwards, I lay on the wet earth, gulping in air that I clearly no longer needed, and wondered what to do. I was a monster; I'd finally accepted that. But I was a damn weak one. I hadn't had any nourishment since the change and my body had had to repair considerable damage from the fight and the torture that followed it. I knew I was in no fit state to face them again."

"How did you survive?" I asked urgently. I really wanted to know. Our situations weren't identical, but there were enough similarities for me to hope for a nugget of wisdom. Mircea hadn't known how to be a vampire any more than I knew how to be the Pythia. Yet he'd managed.