The Immortal Conquistador Read online

  They waited. Always the waiting. Maybe Juanito would hold on for another day. Maybe he would pass while Ricardo slept out the daylight hours. He hoped not; he wanted to be there. To witness.

  “Ricardo. You still haven’t eaten,” the soft voice came from the bed.

  “I told you not to worry about me.”

  Grumbling, Juanito settled back against the pillow.

  “This way, this way . . .” Imelda’s voice carried down the hallway. Two sets of footsteps approached, and then a man in a black cassock, wooden cross hung prominently around his neck, appeared in the doorway.

  Ricardo leapt from the chair, hands clenched. “We did not call for a priest!”

  Eyes wide, the priest stepped back, straight into Imelda, who pleaded, “But señor, your friend, I only thought—”

  “You!” The priest had managed to get a look at the room, past Ricardo, who was trying to block his way while avoiding coming close to that cross. Ricardo looked at where the priest pointed angrily—at Lucinda.

  “Yes, me!” she said, grinning. “How are you, padre?”

  “Señora Imelda, I can’t be in the same room with that woman.”

  “But Father, this man is very ill, and you know Santa Lucinda knows better than anyone how to comfort the sick—”

  “She isn’t a saint!” the priest declared.

  “Out, both of you, out.” Ricardo crowded the doorway and herded them into the hall. “Imelda, I did not ask for a priest.”

  “Yes, but under the circumstances . . .”

  “Señor, I am Father Diego, and you are?” He was slender, his hair shaved into a thin tonsure. The crow’s-feet at his eyes were faint. He seemed very earnest.

  “Not overly fond of priests.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. Perhaps we could speak together. You could come to the chapel for confession—”

  Ricardo laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be harsh. But you’re not welcome here.”

  “Ricardo!” Imelda said, aghast. “Your friend should see a priest!” Diego nodded, head bobbing like a bird’s.

  Ricardo managed not to yell. Took a breath so he’d have enough air to speak with. “Can you wait here a moment?”

  The sick room no longer smelled as sour as it had. Sage, herbs, steam—a comfortable warmth instead of a sticky heat. Lucinda sat quietly, wholly involved in her knitting. Giving Ricardo and Juanito space, and peace. He knelt by the bed.

  “Juanito,” he said softly. When his friend’s eyes opened, Ricardo didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. He wanted his friend’s pain to end. And he didn’t want his friend to leave. “A priest is here. If you want to see him, I’ll show him in. If you don’t, I’ll send him away.”

  Juanito nodded, and his voice scratched. “Maybe . . . maybe I should see the priest. Ricardo . . . when I confess my sins, I will not tell him about you.”

  “You consider me one of your sins?” Ricardo said, smiling, and Juanito chuckled.

  “No, no, not like that. But I do not think a priest will understand you.”

  Ricardo touched his arm. “You should tell him whatever you need to be at peace. Don’t worry about me.”

  The priest was waiting in the hall with Imelda, who was wringing her hands.

  “Juanito will see you, Father.” Ricardo stepped aside.

  It was likely Ricardo’s imagination that the priest nodded smugly at him. Imelda turned her gaze skyward and whispered a prayer. Ricardo left them both and went to the courtyard. The house had become rather crowded.

  Midnight was coming on; the streets had emptied, the lanterns put out. In the dark, the stars blazed in the desert sky. The same stars he’d always seen, so at least that was a comfort. He could stay in one place and the world would move on around him, but the stars didn’t care.

  Lucinda came into the courtyard then, stepping softly, wrapping her shawl tight over her shoulders. He glanced at her, then back to the sky.

  “Got tired of Father Diego giving you that look?” he asked her.

  “Diego and I have known each other for years, he can’t get rid of me so easily. I just needed fresh air, like you.” He didn’t need air at all, really, but he nodded. “I have only known him an hour, but I think your friend Juan is a good man.”

  “One of the best,” Ricardo said. “And I have known many good men.”

  “Do you have him under a spell or did he choose this path?”

  “Did he choose to follow a demon like me, is what you mean?” He shook his head. “I’m not sure. I’m never sure. I tell myself that they choose to stay with me. Then I decide they’re just being nice and I should send them away. But it turns out I like having friends.”

  “You’re very strange.”

  “I hear that a lot.”

  “How old are you, demon?”

  He chuckled. “I was once told never to say my age. But that was a long time ago—”

  Just then a man came to the courtyard gate and paused, hand on the adobe wall, looking in. He pursed his lips, seemed to make a decision, and stepped in, nodding politely at both Ricardo and Lucinda. He appeared to be in his thirties, weathered and strong. Skin like burnished sandstone. One of the indigenous peoples, but not local. He wore a cotton shirt, a wool jacket over it, wool trousers and worn boots, a couple of cords of beads around his neck, a band of cloth around his head, pressing back his black hair.

  He approached Ricardo and spoke a rapid staccato of a language Ricardo didn’t know.

  “That’s Navajo,” Lucinda said. “Do you know it?”

  He shook his head and tried a couple of languages he did know. Pueblo, and the man shook his head. Then, Apache. “I don’t speak your tongue. Can you understand me?”

  “Yes,” the man answered in Apache. “I’m looking for El Conquistador. Are you him?”

  Ricardo felt a vague foreboding. He tried so hard to remain unnoticed, to avoid attention. Didn’t seem to be working. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “You’re in danger. You and everyone around you.”

  He supposed he should have expected that.

  “How many languages do you speak?” the Abbot interrupted.

  Rick needed a moment to respond, his narrative disrupted; his memories had taken him to a far-off place. “How many do I speak now? Or how many have I ever spoken? Spanish, of course, a bit of Latin and French. Some Nahuatl. I’ve lost much of the Apache, I’m afraid, and the Pueblo, though I’m picking it back up again. The Internet has been wonderful for practicing languages. I never did learn much Navajo, but I spoke passable Lakota Sioux. The English came relatively recently.” One of those vast, quick changes. In only a hundred years, English became the language he spoke most.

  “But it’s such an odd smattering,” the Abbot said. “All of it so . . . local.”

  “It was what I needed. I was a guide and translator on the Santa Fe Trail. What else was I supposed to speak?”

  “Is it true that you never once returned to Europe?”

  “It’s true. I never even went east of the Mississippi, except for a trip to New Orleans.”

  “Why did you stay in that part of the world?” the Abbot asked, and the Scribe’s pen scratched.

  Rick said, “Have you studied what modern medicine has discovered about human blood?”

  “Science has little to do with our kind,” the Abbot said, sniffing.

  “At higher altitudes, the air is thinner. The blood develops more blood cells, to better carry oxygen. Some athletes train at high altitude, to strengthen their blood’s efficiency. The blood there becomes richer. So. In the Rocky Mountains and high desert in the southwest of the North American continent, our kind requires less blood to survive.”

  The Scribe’s pen stopped, and they stared at Rick. The Abbot’s mouth opened, disbelieving.

  “You’re making that up,” he said.

  Ricardo shrugged. “I also like the scenery. There’s enough space to hide.”

  They exchanged names,
or tried to. The Navajo man said, “Call me John.”

  Ricardo chuckled. “Is that really your name?”

  “It’s what you can call me.” He was a medicine man, he said. A monster slayer, though Ricardo wasn’t sure he understood the concept correctly. There was a term in there that didn’t translate, he suspected. Maybe what he meant was closer to a spy? Whatever he was, he had one foot in the supernatural world and kept track of the dangers lurking there. Like vampires.

  Lucinda offered the man a drink. He accepted water, and they sat on a wooden bench in the courtyard, among pots of herbs and flowers, under the stars.

  “What exactly is going to happen?” Ricardo asked John.

  “Santa Fe is at a crossroads,” he said.

  “Yes, I know—”

  “Not just in space but in time. If I knew exactly what would happen I would stop it myself.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Not sure. But it’s your people who bring the threat. You know them, the rest of us don’t.”

  The rest of us. The natives, the settlers, the medicine men, the curanderos and curanderas. All the traditions that had grown up without the rule of vampires lurking beneath them. He was the only vampire in this part of the world. At least he’d thought so.

  “The Families are moving into Santa Fe,” Ricardo said. “Is that it? The Santa Fe Trail, the migration from America—it’s opening territory to them that hasn’t been available before.” There hadn’t been enough people in the West, concentrated in enough cities, to support more than a few solitary vampires. That was changing. This man had felt it. Ricardo—he hadn’t wanted to admit it.

  “So you do understand,” the medicine man said. “The stories of El Conquistador say you are a monster but that you help people. I thought you’d like some warning of what’s coming. So you can help.”

  “Dammit,” Ricardo muttered and scrubbed his scalp, mussing his hair.

  “What did he say?” Lucinda asked in Spanish.

  “He suspects the whole region is about to be overrun with demons like me, and he expects me to do something about it.”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “And will you?”

  “I can’t protect my own friends, much less the town, or the whole territory,” Ricardo replied in Spanish, then said the same in Apache.

  John seemed unsympathetic. “At least you have some warning now. We didn’t have any warning, the first time you came here.”

  “You mean ‘you’ as in ‘you people.’ Not me personally.”

  “You’re called El Conquistador for a reason, aren’t you?”

  What exactly did the people telling these stories think they knew about him? That first expedition had been an army with swords and arquebuses, totally mundane weapons. No—wholly supernatural to a people who didn’t have forged steel and gunpowder. A troop of vampires might be less frightening. Stopping them wasn’t impossible. Just difficult.

  Ricardo gazed skyward. “So what, I need to start teaching everyone how exactly to kill me?” He ought to leave. He was supposed to be riding to Bent’s Fort by now, with Juanito. This wasn’t his responsibility.

  John looked out over the courtyard’s low wall. “Someone’s coming.”

  Ricardo felt it the next moment: a chill, a tension in the air like lightning about to strike. No, not this, not now. He didn’t want to deal with it. It had been decades since he’d chanced upon another demon like himself, another vampire. New Orleans, back in 1790. There had been far too many vampires in New Orleans, and they had all wanted to see him, to speak with him, as if he was some kind of legend. El Conquistador, who had been in the Americas a century longer than any other of their kind. Ricardo had explained himself as little as possible and then left. Vampires were exhausting.

  “They’re here,” he said to John. Then in Spanish, “Lucinda, don’t let anyone in the house. If anyone comes here wanting to be invited in—do not invite them. Not anyone. Keep everyone inside. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Ricardo went out into the street, tracking the chill that spiked the air.

  Imelda’s house was a few streets away from the plaza, but the main road leading to the center of town ran close by, and it was here Ricardo encountered a troop of twelve men on horseback. Five of them were vampires, the rest human, leading packhorses, carrying weapons. They were dusty, sweaty, as if they had been on a long journey.

  Standing in the middle of the road, Ricardo waited. They must have sensed him. Would they be surprised? The troop came to a shuffling, disorganized stop. Yes, they were surprised. Hands tightened on reins, touched weapons.

  “Who are you?” the leader of the troop called. A woman. One of the other riders had a crossbow in hand, a wooden bolt loaded. Ah yes, he would be careful.

  “I am Ricardo de Avila,” he said.

  “Ricardo? Dios, you’re still alive?” She dismounted. The woman wore trousers and a buckskin jacket. Her thick hair was tied back in a tail and tucked under a bowler cap.

  Ricardo stared. “Elinor?” She was a beautiful woman, and he’d admired her the first time they met. Two hundred years ago was it? That seemed outrageous, but here they were.

  “Elinor was alone?” The Abbot interrupted, again. Rick was more than willing to tell his story, but he wanted to get it over with. This was taking much longer than it needed.

  “No, she had an entourage, a few younger vampires, lieutenants and such, human servants. People like her are never alone.”

  “Anyone of note? Anyone older than her?” he asked, with an urgency that seemed out of place. This had happened almost two hundred years ago. What could it matter now?

  “No, no one. At least not that I could tell. They all deferred to her. What are you trying to learn, Sir Abbot? What mystery about me are you trying to solve with these questions?”

  “I’m only trying to draw out the complete story—”

  “No. Then you would simply let me tell it. This is more. If you just tell me what you need to know—”

  “And have you tell me what you think I want to hear? Oh no. Tell the story, Don Ricardo.”

  Her smile seemed pleased. “You remember me! I’m glad.”

  “How are you?”

  “I have to admit, I’m a little stunned. What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask the same thing,” he said. “Could you perhaps ask your man there to lower the weapon? I know how slippery the triggers can be on those things.”

  “Xander, it’s fine,” she said over her shoulder, and the man—who appeared young but that meant nothing—lowered the crossbow. Didn’t put it away, though. Hand on her hip, she considered Ricardo, her gaze narrowed. He knew better than to look into her eyes. The lock of hair framing her cheek was enough.

  “You’ve been traveling,” Ricardo said. “When did you leave Ciudad de México?”

  “It’s been a while,” she said. “Ricardo, tell me what you’re doing here in Santa Fe. Be specific.” She sounded urgent. Panicked even, if he didn’t know better.

  Ricardo decided to tell the truth. “My friend is dying. I’ve only stopped here to witness his passing.”

  “Your friend,” she said, as if she couldn’t believe him having one. “You could save him.”

  “Saving. Why does everyone call it saving when they know better?”

  “Are there any other of our kind in town? In the region?”

  “Not that I know of. Are you looking for someone?”

  She glared. Yes, she was.

  “It’s none of my concern,” Ricardo said quickly. “I’m only curious.”

  “You’ve met no one?” she said. “You’re still solitary, even after all this time? You should be ruling this territory by now.”

  He chuckled softly. He’d heard this before. “I only want to be left alone. Myself and my friends, that is.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged, using his whole arms. “I can’t help that.
”

  “Ricardo. The Master of Spain has been overthrown. La Reina Catalina has declared independence from his successor and will not defer to him. And now Dux Bellorum is coming, to occupy the territory to the north in an effort overcome her.”

  War, Elinor was speaking of war. Was such a thing—a war between vampires—normal? Common, even?

  “What . . . who is Dux Bellorum?” Ricardo asked.

  She laughed. “How can you be three hundred years old and still such a ninny? You really haven’t heard of Dux Bellorum, in all your years?”

  “No.”

  She hesitated a moment, then repeated, “I don’t believe you.”

  He almost walked away but for his suspicion that this was about to get ugly and he still didn’t know enough.

  “This Dux Bellorum—he’s here?” Ricardo asked. “Or he’s coming here. And you come to make war on him. Is that right?”

  “How can you not know this?”

  “Because I don’t care to! Leave me out of it. I do not know this Dux Bellorum, I want nothing to do with him or you.”

  “You won’t have a choice! If he hasn’t already found you, he will, and he will demand that you serve him or he will kill you!”

  This just made him tired. “He frightens you. You’re terrified!”

  “Dux Bellorum is the monster that vampires tell stories about to frighten one another. He means to conquer us all and unite us under his banner. To hold all our power for himself.”

  Rick chuckled. “Like what, some Alexander the Great of vampires? Master of all? Why?”

  “Why not? What else should he do with his time?”

  “Good night, Elinor. Good night to all of you. I will not interfere in whatever war you have brought to Santa Fe, and do not expect me to participate. Good night.” He gave them a mock bow, doffing an imaginary cap, and walked away.

  “Ricardo!” Elinor called after him, but he did not stop.

  He also did not go straight back to Imelda’s. Instead, he went in the opposite direction, turned down a couple of stray corners, and found a shadow to wait in, to see if he was followed. And he was, by one of those strong young vampires who rode in Elinor’s train. They might have been her own progeny, made to serve her. Ricardo didn’t breathe, kept himself stiller than death, quieter than darkness, in the shadow of an adobe wall. The man likewise traveled silently in shadow; Ricardo never would have seen him if he hadn’t been watching. But each sensed the other, that hard chill of the undead tainting the air.