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 back 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.