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  He was a little taken aback by her unfriendliness and by the determined way she spoke, as if it didn’t occur to her that he might disobey. But he quickly realized that it was a front, a defensive mechanism to fend people off.

  “This is a public space,” he said, and even now, even after all this time, a voice inside his head corrected him— it was his space, belonging to him by right, just as all the land hereabout belonged to him.

  She changed her tactics, but it was clear she didn’t want to talk to him. “Maybe it is, but it’s not a good place for you to be. You should go home to your parents.”

  Her tone was mocking and full of contempt, but he ignored it and said, “What do you mean, it’s not a good place? Have you seen anything strange down here?”

  “Yeah, loads of things, so you know what? Go home, get a life.”

  She was definitely mocking him, but as ever, it was taking him a little while to get used to the words and rhythm of the language. As he tried to understand what she’d said, he noticed her shiver slightly.

  “You’re cold.”

  “It’s a cold night—it has been known in November.” Will nodded. He was conscious of the crispness in the air, but didn’t feel it in his bones as he would once have done. She tried another tactic, saying, “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but please just leave me alone.”

  “Of course. It wasn’t my intention to intrude.” He took a step backwards, but before turning he said, “And I’m an orphan.”

  “Oh.” She seemed to think about it a second before saying, “How long?”

  “A long time.”

  The girl nodded, still not giving any ground, but said, “That’s too bad.”

  Will turned and walked away. This wasn’t the right time, but she had at least spoken to him and he would have all the time he needed. It was unfortunate that she’d been so unfriendly because he’d liked the way she looked—if it hadn’t been for her scent, he might even have taken her for one of his own.

  More important was that her picture had been on Jex’s wall, and that Jex had talked about a girl immediately after he’d spoken of Lorcan Labraid. So possibly it was no coincidence that Will had found her. If greater powers were at work, maybe there would be no more coincidences—he had been lured to the river, and he had found a girl there.

  A fire engine had reached the warehouse and was in the process of putting out the fire, which was intense but contained at the far end. He put his dark glasses on and, as he passed, one of the firemen turned and laughed, saying, “Too sunny for ya?”

  Will paid no attention and walked on. It was one of his curses that men like that would talk down to him because he was a boy. If they knew only a fraction of the truth, about his age or his power, they would bow down before him no less than their long-distant grandfathers had done.

  He returned the way he’d come and entered the church through the side door. He’d been away nearly two hours, but there were still people in there, even if the music had now stopped and the cavernous silence had once more returned. Perhaps the woman who’d shouted at him was among them, sensing that something important had happened earlier in the evening, but unable to remember what.

  Later, when the church was quite empty, Will would go to the office and take spare keys for the crypt and the side door, a more practical and speedy method than constantly relying on his powers over the inanimate. For now though, he descended to his lair, sat down in an ornate wooden throne, and started to read greedily.

  Sadly, much of what Jex had written was nonsense, composed under the power of some drug or other, but in places it was quite different, almost as if written by another hand, and in those passages it took on the tone of prophesy.

  Even then, little of it made sense readily, but Will pored over it, absorbing phrases and fragments—his enemies will be legion; the circle is broken and is made complete; Asmund waits with the spirits; from four will come one; the church will speak, that has no people; the Suspended King calls across the ages.

  There was much talk of a Suspended King, a phrase he couldn’t begin to understand. As of his last counting, there had been twenty-eight kings and six ruling queens in his lifetime, but he couldn’t see how any of them might have been “suspended.” Unless, as he hoped, this was a different kind of king; unless it spoke of and promised that second encounter with the one who had bitten him.

  He turned another page and found a pencil portrait of the girl by the river. There was a beauty about her, and perhaps Jex had merely been infatuated. But after hearing him speak the way he had, it was a puzzle to find her here in this book as well as on his wall. Everything tonight had been a puzzle, a maze of words and oddities, with the girl appearing at every turn.

  Will continued to leaf through the book and finally found the page that had first surprised him earlier that evening. It was all at once strange and terrifying and full of promise, a promise that this prison, its walls made of time itself, had all been for some purpose.

  Was it possible he had a destiny to fulfill? For all these centuries he had considered himself cursed, a victim, and the fantasies he had entertained on and off had been of vengeance, not of fulfillment. Even now, it was the thought of a confrontation with the creature that stirred him most, but he couldn’t help being drawn to the siren call of destiny, to the suggestion that his existence had meant something.

  And it could not be simply the ramblings of a madman or a student of the history books because none of Will’s ancestors, nor any of the usurpers of his brother’s line, had ever borne his name, and so he alone knew that his name and that title had belonged together for more than seven hundred years. Nevertheless, the inscription in Jex’s book was clear:

  William, Earl of Mercia, will rise again.

  5

  One of the many mysteries that have plagued me through the years of my sickness is the question that surrounds the circumstances of my burial. By the time I first emerged from my slumber, my father and brother were already dead, the latter having lived a long and fruitful life, so there was no one from whom I might have discovered the details.

  They buried me beneath the city walls, I know that much to be true. For many years I slept as my wooden casket slowly rotted and crumbled around me. It’s hard for me to describe the terror I felt upon waking because I knew only one thing and knew it instantly, that I was in the grave.

  I had no idea of the time that had elapsed, nor of the powers I had developed. All I knew in that moment was that I had been buried alive, and the fear and panic of that realization was like nothing I’d known before or since. My body threw itself into a terrible spasm, kicking and tearing at the crumbling walls of my coffin, so desperate was I to be free.

  The first to give and break apart was on the right side, and as the soil spilled in, my violence became even more frantic. My fingernails had grown long and broke now as I scrabbled at the earth that entombed me. The hollow left by my coffin had not completely collapsed, so I was fighting through a shifting and unstable tunnel of dirt, but still I screamed and clawed like an animal in a trap. I screamed so loud, I wonder if a passerby in the world above might have heard me and feared for his life, thinking some monster or demon was about to spring forth from the earth.

  At last, my hand clawed at the soil and touched stone, the foundations of the city walls, and the feel of them brought a calm over me, so powerful that I at once came back to myself. Here were the solid stones of my beloved city, and with them as a guide, I knew I could dig my way free.

  I can’t explain what I did next. All I can suggest is that my instinct was already reversed, that in my bones I already knew that I had more to fear from the day than from the night, from the living than from the dead.

  I dug along the face of the stones, but instead of climbing upwards, I burrowed deeper until, under the wall’s very foundation, the earth gave way beneath me and I fell into a small rocky chamber.

  After the shock and alarm of finding myself buried, after the physic
al exertion of digging my way free, imagine the renewed surprise of discovering these chambers ready furnished, containing chests laden with garments and objects of use.

  At first, I thought I’d stumbled into someone else’s subterranean lair, and only little by little did I realize that these chambers had been prepared for me. That’s the puzzle of it all—someone had known that I would be buried in that place; someone had spent considerable time and energy ensuring that I would have somewhere to live and things to live by.

  The tunnel and the other chambers, the stairs to the floor of the crypt, all were much the same then as they are now. I have added furniture and comforts, most of them removed from the church above during our long shared history, but much was already there.

  Yet for all the efforts that had been made on my behalf, no word had been left for me, no guide to tell me what I’d now become or how I would live, what powers were mine, what dangers lay ahead. As I look back, I can only conclude that my ignorance, too, was part of the design, that it was always intended I should find my own way.

  As I bathed in my pool for the first time, I slowly began to take note of the changes that had taken place in my person. For one, the functions of my body seemed somehow suspended. I felt no hunger for food. Nor, for all my exertions in freeing myself, was there any odor about me.

  My hair and nails and my canine teeth had all grown, though the rest of me remained as on the day I’d fallen sick. And then I saw the source of my sickness, the faint scars on the inside of my forearm where once there had clearly been puncture wounds, as if some animal had bitten me.

  I rubbed at the wound, which was already a ghost of itself and has now long since disappeared. Then I bit lightly on the back of my hand and saw the indentations left by my own teeth. I understood immediately that I had not been bitten by an animal, but by a person, and that whatever kind of person had bitten me, so that was the kind of person I had now become.

  I had been made a demon, that was how it seemed to me, and I thought back to the strange atmosphere that had pervaded the city on the night the witches burned and in the weeks building up to it. It was as if the Devil himself had walked abroad that night and taken me for one of his own.

  Many centuries passed before I first saw references to my own kind. Much of the detail was wrong, and is wrong even to this day, but there could be no mistake that the superstitions and Gothic stories referred to people who had been struck down by this very same sickness.

  I do not like the name vampire—it seems so melodramatic, so fanciful. I have long preferred the word undead , and have thought of myself in that way for at least two hundred years. Is it not what I am? I have been treated as someone dead—buried, my death recorded—yet here I am, still alive, suspended in time.

  I am the undead Earl of Mercia. I try to live as well as I can under difficult circumstances. I didn’t choose to be this way, and for most of what I can only call “my life” I considered it no more than an unfortunate accident—only now am I coming to understand that although I did not choose to be undead, I was indeed chosen.

  In the time after my first awakening, I thought it would be a matter of only days or weeks before I met the demon who’d so chosen me, who’d punctured my flesh and infected me with sickness. When he did not appear, I came to believe that I was of no interest to him, that he had selected me at random, but I still lived in the hope that one day we would encounter each other.

  But we didn’t. The centuries progressed and I must confess I often harbored violent fantasies about this creature. I imagined countless ways in which I might repay him for the torment I have suffered.

  Even now, with the promise that this was not all for nothing, that my curse has been part of some greater plan, I pray that the discomfort in my arm is a portent, telling me that I will soon meet him whose actions sentenced me to this eternal half-life.

  And I think I must kill him if I am able, if for nothing else, for my honor and the honor of my family. But above all, even above the need for revenge, I wish to ask him one simple question: why? Why me? Why then? Why all of this?

  6

  The church was not in total darkness. There were no lights on inside, but the glow of the floodlights illuminated the stained glass of the windows and filled the interior with a grainy twilight. It looked almost as if a thin mist hung in the air.

  Will crossed the nave and climbed up the small spiraling stone staircase to the caretaker’s office. He took a spare key for the crypt gate and a large iron key for the side door, probably the same two keys he’d returned in 1989 before taking back to the earth again.

  He slipped the keys into his pocket, descended the steps, then opened up one of the storerooms, the door to which stood nearby, almost opposite the door up into the organ loft. He took two large candles, not because he needed them just yet, but because it was better to take little and often—things were less likely to be missed that way.

  He closed the door and stood for a moment, looking down the length of the nave. It was very still, the air hazy with the strange light from the windows, but there was a troubling feel about the place and Will couldn’t quite work out what it was.

  He heard something behind him, nothing distinct, but turned casually to look in that direction and immediately jumped in shock. One of the large candles dropped from his hand and rolled across the floor.

  The woman who’d tried to throw him out earlier that day was standing just a couple of meters away, staring at him with an expression that was somehow blank and intense at the same time. But something was very wrong.

  It was the same woman in almost every regard—the short gray hair, the tweed skirt and knitted sweater, the neatly laced leather shoes—but her scent was different. He could smell people the same way people could smell freshly baked bread. Earlier, this woman had been unmistakably human, but that presence had gone.

  He didn’t have time to react. With a sudden burst of violence, the woman jumped into the air and he felt her foot hit him square in the chest with the power of ten men. He flew backwards and knew that he would land awkwardly, but was too amazed to try to save himself— no one had ever struck him before, certainly not with a force like this.

  He landed with a crunching thud on the floor, his head hitting the stone. He felt the blow without registering any pain, but it left him disorientated for a second. He’d heard the keys fall out of his pocket as he’d landed, but astonishingly, he still clutched the other candle in his hand.

  Will tried to sit up, but was once more briefly shocked by the realization that he’d been kicked maybe six meters down the nave. His attacker was walking towards him with a look of violent determination.

  She was almost upon him and he knew he wouldn’t have time to get to his feet. Instead, he stayed on his back and curled up into a ball, springing out of it as she reached him, planting both feet into her chest, just as she had done to him.

  He scrambled upright as she shot backwards, keeping his eyes on her all the time. He was unnerved, perhaps even afraid, for the first time in centuries because he didn’t know what this was. The woman flew through the air, as far as he had flown himself, but he’d kicked her at a slight angle and her body smashed into one of the stone pillars, bouncing off it before hitting the floor.

  At that second, in the moment of impact, something even stranger happened. Her entire body seemed to melt into itself, forming a dark void, and as it landed on the floor, it was no longer a woman, but a wiry black dog.

  He recognized it immediately as one of the dogs that had slept by Jex’s stove, but he no more believed the vision before him was really that dog than he believed it was the woman he’d seen earlier in the day. The dog shook itself as if pepper had been put on its nose, and transformed again, shifting through a state of liquid confusion and emerging once more as the woman.

  Whatever creature this was, Will couldn’t understand why it was so intent on doing him harm, nor could he imagine how to defend himself against it. For eight cen
turies he had been at the top of the food chain, fearing nothing, because no other living thing had ever matched his powers.

  He could only assume that all these things were connected. One divine power had led him to Jex, to the notebook that might prove the key to his existence, but another had sent this demon to attack him, perhaps to destroy him. And he didn’t know how to fight it.

  The woman started towards him and immediately broke into a run. Will thought of the keys and scooped them up off the floor. She was almost on top of him when he clenched his hand around the larger key, the one for the side door of the church, and held it out directly in front of him like a dagger.

  She leapt for him, but he stood firm, even as he felt the force of her body crashing into his hand. He heard a tearing crunch, felt the shuddering impact, and then her face stopped at arm’s length from his, her expression still stubbornly blank.

  He looked down. The large black key was embedded up to his knuckles in her chest. No blood came from the wound, but around it the flesh appeared to be turning fluid, just as her entire body had turned fluid after hitting the pillar a minute before.

  Will looked back at her face. Slowly, her mouth opened, and then in a detached voice, like the echo of someone talking in another room, she said, “The cathedral’s closed, I’m afraid. From six o’clock on winter Tuesdays.”

  “Who are you?”

  She smiled and once more said, “The cathedral’s closed, I’m afraid. From six o’clock on winter Tuesdays.” But this time he could hear another voice whispering behind hers, and as she repeated the phrase yet again, he clearly made out the words, “Death to you, William of Mercia.”

  He didn’t have the chance to ask his question again. The woman’s form turned transparent, becoming some liquid element of darkness. Then, as silently as she’d first appeared, so she had gone, into the air itself, leaving the key clenched uselessly in his outstretched hand.