The Immortal Conquistador Read online

  The men did not argue.

  They began to circle him, jackals moving close for a kill. They watched him, and their eyes were fire. He had to run, grab his horse and fly from here, warn the governor of this madness.

  It was madness, for Diego lunged at him, weaponless, with nothing but outstretched arms and a wild leer. Ricardo held out his sword, blade level and unwavering, and Diego skewered himself on the point, through the gut. Ricardo expected him to cry out and fall. He expected to have to fight off the others for killing one of their own. But the other three laughed, and Diego kept smiling.

  Ricardo held fast to the grip out of habit. Diego stood, arms spread, displaying what he’d done. No blood ran from the wound.

  Ricardo pulled the sword back just as Diego wrenched himself off the blade. Still, the man didn’t make a sound of pain. Didn’t fall. Wasn’t bothered at all. Ricardo resisted an urge to make the sign of the cross. Holy God, what was this?

  “This is why we follow Fray Juan,” Diego breathed. “Now, will you join us?”

  Ricardo cried out a denial and charged again. These were demons, and he must flee. He crouched, grabbed a handful of dirt with his left hand. If he could not cut them, perhaps he could blind them. He flung it at the man behind him, who must be moving to attack. In the same motion he whirled, slashing with his blade, keeping some distance around him, enough to clear a space so he might reach his horse. He did not wait to see what happened, did not even think. Only acted. Like those old days of battle, fighting the natives with Coronado’s company. That had been a strange, alien world. Like this.

  He’d have sworn that his sword met flesh several times, but the men stood firm, unflinching. Ricardo might as well have been a child throwing a tantrum. They closed on him without effort.

  Two grabbed his arms, bracing them straight out, holding him still. A third wrenched his sword from him. His captors bent back his arms until his back strained and presented him to Diego.

  Ricardo struggled on principle, with no hope. His boots kicked at the dirt.

  Diego regarded him with a look of amusement. He ran a gloved hand along Ricardo’s chin, scraping his rough beard. Ricardo flinched back, but his captors held him steady. “You should know that you never had a chance against us. Perhaps you might take comfort in that fact.”

  “I take no comfort,” Ricardo said, his words spitting.

  “Good. You will have none.” He opened his mouth. They all opened their mouths and came at him. They had the teeth of wild dogs. Of lions. Sharp teeth meant to rend flesh.

  And they began to rend his.

  He couldn’t move. He’d been on a very long journey, and his limbs had turned to iron, chilled iron, that had been left out on a winter’s night and was now rimed with frost. That image of himself—stiff flesh mounted on a skeleton of frosted iron, a red body fringed with white—struck him as oddly beautiful. It was an image of death, sunk into his bones. Memory recalled the ambush, arms clinging to him, breath leaving him, and the teeth. Demonic teeth, puncturing his flesh, draining his blood, his life. So he had died.

  His next thought: What had he done to find himself relegated to hell? What else could this be? As in Dante’s ninth circle, where the damned lay frozen solid in a lake, he was left to feel his body turning to frost, piece by piece. He tried to cry out, but he had no breath.

  A hand rested on his forehead. If possible, it felt even colder, burning against Ricardo’s skin like ice.

  “Ricardo de Avila,” the devil said. “You hear me, yes?”

  Nothing would melt his body; he could not even nod. Struggling to speak, he felt his lips move, but nothing else.

  “I will tell you what your life is now. You will never again see the daylight. To touch the sun is to burn. You are no longer a son of the Church. The holy cross and baptismal water are poison to you. From now on you are a creature of darkness. But these small sacrifices are nothing to the reward: from now on might be a very long time. You belong to me. You are my son. With your brothers, you will rule the night.”

  Ricardo choked on a breath that tasted stale, as if he had not drawn breath in a very long time. His mouth tasted sour. He said, “Is this hell?”

  The devil sounded wry. “Not necessarily. In this life, you make or escape your own hell.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You know me, Ricardo. I am Fray Juan, and I am your Master.”

  He shook his head. It wasn’t that the numbness was fading. Rather, he was getting used to the cold. This body made of iron could move. “The governor . . . the king . . . I am loyal . . .”

  “You are beyond them now. Open your eyes.”

  His lids creaked and cracked, like the skin was breaking, but he opened them.

  He lay on a bed in a dark room. A few lanterns hung from hooks on the walls, casting circles of light and flickering shadows. Fray Juan sat at the edge of the bed. Arrayed elsewhere stood four men, fierce looking. The demons.

  He felt trapped by the shadows that had invaded his dreams. They would destroy him. In a panic, he waited for the jolt of blood, the racing heartbeat that would drive him from the bed, allow him some chance of fighting and escaping. But he felt nothing. He put his hand around his neck and felt . . . nothing. No pulse. He wanted to sigh—but he had not drawn breath. He had only taken in enough air to speak. Now, the panic rose. This could not be, this was impossible, dead and yet not—

  This was hell, and the demon with Fray Juan’s shape was lying to him.

  “Diego, bring the chalice,” Juan said, not with the voice of a sympathetic confessor but with the edge of a commander.

  A figure moved at the far end of the room. Even as Ricardo prayed, his ears strained to learn what was happening, his muscles tensed to defend himself.

  “Hold him,” Juan said, and hands took him, hauled him into a sitting position, and wrenched back his arms so he could not struggle. Another set of hands pinned his legs.

  His eyes opened wide. Three of the caballeros braced him in a sitting position. The fourth—Diego, his old comrade Diego—brought forward a Eucharistic chalice made of pewter. He balanced it in a way that suggested it was full of liquid.

  Ricardo drew back, pressing against his captors. “You wear Fray Juan’s face, but you are not a priest. You can’t do this, this is no time for communion.”

  Juan smiled, but that did not comfort. “This isn’t what you think. What is wine, after the holy sacrament of communion?”

  “The blood of Christ,” Ricardo said.

  “This is better,” he said, taking the chalice from Diego.

  Ricardo cried out. Tried to deny it. Turned his head, clamped shut his mouth. But Juan was ready for him, putting a hand over his face, digging his thumb between Ricardo’s lips and prying open his jaw, as if trying to slide a bit in the mouth of a stubborn horse.

  Juan was stronger than he looked. Ricardo screamed, a noise that came out breathless and wheezy. The chalice tipped against his lips.

  The liquid smelled metallic. When it struck his tongue—a thick stream sliding down his throat, leaving a sticky trail—it tasted of wine and copper. With the taste of it came knowledge and instinct. Human blood, it could be no other. Even as his mind rebelled with the obscenity of it, his tongue reached for more, and his throat swallowed, greedy for the sustenance. Its thickness flowed like fire through his veins, and something in him rose up and sang in delight at its flavor.

  The battle was no longer with the demons holding him fast; it was with the demon rising up inside him. The creature that drank the blood and wanted more. A strange joy accompanied the feeling, a strength in his body he’d never felt before. Weariness, the aches of travel, fell away. He was reborn. He was invincible.

  And it was false and wrong.

  Roaring, he shoved at his captors, throwing himself out of their grasp. He batted away the chalice of blood. They lunged for him again, and Fray Juan cried, “No, let him go.”

  Ricardo pushed away from them. He pressed his b
ack to the wall and couldn’t go farther. He could smell the blood soaking into the blanket at his feet. He covered his face with his hands; he could smell the blood on his breath. He wiped his mouth but could still taste blood on his lips, as if it had soaked into his skin.

  He had an urge to lick the drops of blood that had spilled onto his hand. He pressed his face harder and moaned, an expression of despair welling from him.

  “You see what you are now?” Juan said, without sympathy. “You are the blood, and it will feed you through the centuries. You are deathless.”

  Ricardo stared at him. The blood flowing through his veins now was not his own. He could feel it warming his body, like sunlight on skin. Sunlight, which he would never see again, if Juan spoke true.

  He drew a breath and said, “You are a devil.”

  “We all are.”

  “No! I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I am not one of you. I would rather die!”

  Juan, a pale face in lamp-lit shadows, nodded to his four henchmen, who backed toward the ladder, which led to the trapdoor in the ceiling. One by one, they slipped out, watching Ricardo with glittering, knowing eyes. In a moment, Juan and Ricardo were alone.

  “This is a new life,” Juan said. “I know it is hard to accept. But remember: You have received a gift.”

  Then he, too, left the room. The door closed, and a bolt slid home.

  Ricardo rushed to the door and tried to open it, rattling the handle. They had locked him in this hole. A damp chill from the walls pressed against him.

  Ricardo lay back on the bed, hands resting on his chest. Eventually, the lamp’s wick burned down. The light grew dim, until it was coin-sized, burnished gold, then vanished. Even in the dark, he could see the ceiling. He should not have been able to see anything in the pitch dark of this underground cell. But it was like he could feel the walls closing in. He waited for panic to take him. He waited for his heart to start racing. But he touched his ribs and could not feel his heart at all.

  Hours had passed, though the time moved strangely. Even in the darkness, he could see shadows move across the ceiling, like stars arcing overhead. It was nighttime outside; he knew this in his bones. The night passed, the moon rose—past full now, waning. The way the air moved over his face told him this. Eventually, near dawn, he fell asleep.

  He started awake when the trapdoor opened. His senses lurched and rolled, like a galleon in deep swells. He knew—again, without looking, without seeing—that Juan and his four caballeros had returned. They had a warmth coursing through them, tinged with metal and rot, the scent of spilled blood. The thing inside him stirred, a hunger that cramped his heart instead of his belly. His mouth watered. He licked his lips, hoping for the taste of it.

  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.”

  “He has lots of time to learn,” said Octavio, one of the four demons who had once been men, who followed Juan. Rafael and Esteban were the others.

  Diego said, “Ride with us. We hunt tonight, and you’ll learn at our side.” It was a command, not a request.

  He followed, because wha
t else could he do? Except perhaps stand in the open when the sun rose and let it burn him. But suicide was a sin. Even now, he believed it. He would show that he did not forsake God. He would ask for forgiveness every moment of his existence.

  Diego seemed to be Fray Juan’s lieutenant; he had been the first of them turned to this demon life, years ago now. That was why he looked no older than he had when they returned from Coronado’s expedition.

  He explained what they did here. “Each of us is as strong as a dozen men. But there are still those who know how to kill us. Those who would recognize certain signs and hunt us down.”

  “Who?” Ricardo asked. “What signs?”

  “Secret members of the Inquisition for one. And what signs? Why, bodies. Too many bodies, all drained of blood!” They all laughed.

  “New Spain is the perfect place for us. There are thousands of peasants dying by the score in mines, on campaigns, of disease. Out here on the borders, no one is even looking much. If a whole village dies, we say a plague struck. We take all the blood we need, and no one notices.”

  At the mention of blood, Ricardo’s mouth watered. A hunger woke in him, like a creature writhing in his belly. Each time Diego said the word, his vision clouded. He shook himself to remain focused on the hills before them.

  “I know how it is with you,” Diego said. “We all went through this.”

  “Though the rest of us were perhaps not so holy to start with.” Again they laughed, like young men riding to a night of revelry. That was what they looked like, what anyone who saw them would think. Not that anyone would see them out here. That was the point, to feed on as much blood as they wished without notice. A land of riches. Diego had not lied.

  “It’s eating away inside me,” Ricardo said under his breath.

  “The blood will still that,” said Rafael. “The blood will keep you sane.”

  “Ironic,” Ricardo said. “That you must become a monster to keep from going mad.”

  “Ha. I never thought of it like that,” Diego said.

  He is already mad, Ricardo thought.

  They rode for hours. They could not go far—half the night, he thought. Then they must go back, to take shelter before dawn. He could feel the night slipping away in his bones. It was the same part of him that now called out for blood.