Darkness Falling Read online

  When he did, that was when the truly strange things began. He raised his head slowly. There was, as yet, no sound from the audience. It was obvious that he was as lost as Sebastian in regard to what had just taken place. With an almost superhuman effort, he managed to ignore his confusion and lift his gaze to scan the crowd. He may not have remembered what just happened, but he was still the consummate performer, and he wanted to know how the song had affected the crowd.

  His head jerked to a halt, and he stared, unmoving, at a point near the base of the stage. The faintest stirring of sound rose from below, accentuated by the echoing, brooding silence of moments past. The sound built rapidly, a clap or a sigh leading to another, a scream to another clap, until the applause was deafening. Sebastian thought of an avalanche, a rolling, falling torrent of stone and rubble that would send them crashing down on the mass of people below in a shower of crumbling stone.

  He stumbled clumsily out from behind his bank of keyboards and made it to Klaus' side. He wanted to see what his friend saw.

  He followed Klaus' dazed gaze, and there she was. It was the same woman. As before, despite the blinding light, this time reversed, they saw one another clearly. She was beautiful, flame-red hair billowed about her seductively aquiline face. She wasn't looking at Sebastian, though. Her gaze was locked on Klaus. His eyes, in turn, were glazed and lost in a trance. Sebastian reached out and touched Klaus' shoulder lightly – no reaction.

  He felt a touch on his own shoulder. Peyton had moved up to stand on Sebastian's right, shaking his huge shaggy head in confusion, but grinning despite it all. Damon came up on the other side of Klaus. Nobody spoke. The cries and applause were beginning to crack the thin veneer of other-worldliness that bound them. They saw nothing but a multi-colored blur of moving bodies, but they could hear them clearly. The crowd was nearly out of control, wild with adulation. Sebastian looked at Peyton, who shrugged back. The only figure clearly visible was that of the woman.

  Then there were more. The tall, dark skinned man and the woman with the long, back hair materialized from the crowd to stand at the red headed woman's side. She tore her eyes from Klaus, releasing him so suddenly that Sebastian and Damon had to catch him to keep him from stumbling back and falling over his own microphone stand. The three figures below exchanged words, all of them glancing quickly up at the stage, and then the two women were alone. Sebastian squinted against the shadows, and could just make out the retreating figure of the dark man as he slipped back through the security gate and disappeared into the shadows. The tall, arrogant blond-haired man was nowhere to be seen.

  Meanwhile, Klaus recovered rapidly and making up for lost moments. He waved to the crowd below, his old grin spreading across his face and his eyes gaining intensity and life with each passing moment. The sound from below had not lessened in volume. Even with his microphone, he had a hard time quieting them long enough to tell them goodnight. There were screams for more, for an encore, but it was just not possible. Finally, giving them a final wave and a shrug, Klaus turned on his heel and headed for the back of the stage. The band followed.

  The moment had passed. It was over. They descended the shadowy ladders and stairs as rapidly as they could, intent on putting as much distance between themselves and the stage, with its ocean of fans beneath it, as possible. Somehow, though they had paid their money to come and be entertained, it did not seem as if the show had been for them. Not this time. Usually they were everything – their pleasure and the intensity of their emotion the gauge upon which the band judged the quality of their music.

  Not this time. The fans had been no real part of what had just happened. Not on any level that mattered. They were like the sound system, or the instruments. Without them, it would never have been possible, but they were only there to make what really mattered possible – the performance. The music was nothing without an audience, and the music was everything.

  Klaus turned aside and left them behind as soon as they reached the ground. He didn't speak, nor did he turn to acknowledge the others. He walked toward the mountain, took a trail that snaked upward from the main road and quickly disappeared into the night.

  "Klaus," Peyton called after him irritably. "We have to go to the damned party! Every promoter in the business is in that bloody Inn waiting for you . . ."

  "Let him go," Sebastian said, remembering the short conversation he and Klaus had shared before the show. "We can handle them at the party 'till he gets back. It's not like we've never done it before."

  Peyton wanted to argue, it was plain to see, but he didn't. The three of them turned. Damon gripped the handle of his guitar case tightly – as if it were his security against some unknown danger, and Peyton shook his head like a large, irate dog.

  Sebastian, who'd been staring after Klaus, turned just in time to catch a movement in the shadows. It was the dark man that had accompanied that strange woman. He emerged from the trees just beside the trail that Klaus had taken. For a moment Sebastian thought the man would follow Klaus, but he only stood and stared up the mountain for a moment, and then headed back toward the village. Sebastian turned to tell Peyton what he'd seen, but the big drummer and Damon were halfway to the Flagon and Barrel, and Sebastian had to run to catch them. By the time they'd reached the door to the Inn, even Klaus was almost forgotten.

  Chapter five

  Copper stood and stared up the winding trail that led to the mountain. His intuition told him the young man, Klaus, would not be back for some time. The heightened awareness that his slowly changing metabolism brought him sensed a wave of deep melancholy and longing rolling off the mountain like stale syrup. Copper wondered if this was all Rosa's doing, of if there was an even deeper shadow behind the wave of emotion?

  It didn't matter. What mattered was that he return to Rosa with his information, and that he return to Alicia. All through the performance she had remained at his side. She had been attentive, and charming, and it made Copper's skin crawl with nervous fear. It didn't matter that he was nervous. He could not have resisted Alicia's advances any more than he could ignore Rosa's orders. His body would have answered, even if the very core of his soul had protested, and of course, it didn't.

  He wanted Alicia more than he'd wanted any single thing since his birth – more even than he wanted Rosa, and at this he marveled. There had been moments over the past few years when his desire for his mistress had been so overwhelming that he'd thought he might die of deprivation. Those had been the times, far too few, when Rosa had granted him to feed her himself. Those moments were also the beginnings of his transformation.

  With Alicia, it was different. He melted into the shadows as silently as he could and returned the way he had come.

  ~*~

  "So," Rosa said after hearing Copper's report, "he has gone to the mountain. It is better than I could have hoped for. You have done well, Copper. I think that I will have to follow my young maestro and introduce myself. You will see me before morning, of course, but don't look for me before then. There are things I must do, things left undone for too many years. I trust that you two can find some way to amuse yourselves?"

  Copper trembled. Alicia's hands rested lightly on his shoulders in a possessive caress. His knees felt weak. Neither of them spoke, but he detected the tension in Alicia's touch, and the need. It spoke to him more eloquently than any words could have. Still, he kepth is gaze fastened on Rosa. Such good humor was not normal for her, and too many times he had presumed to understand what she felt, only to find himself on the wrong end of her wrath. She was explosive, violent, and very, very dangerous.

  Rosa laughed. "Dear, dear Copper," she soothed, reaching out and running her long, sharp nails through his hair in a soft caress that brought a wave of desire so hot it burned. "Do you fear me so, after all this time? I suppose it's my own fault. I do have my moods, don't I?"

  Copper said nothing. All moisture had fled his lips, but he avoided the urge to lick them. He had feared such a moment since laying eyes on
his mistress years before – a moment where, for some reason, he did not seem as ‘necessary' to her as he'd always been. She hadn't said this was so, and yet there was a different feel to the air. Her eyes spoke volumes. Copper the half-human manservant was no longer on the list of must have items. Something had changed.

  "You really must develop a backbone, dear, if you are to join us," she said finally. "I can't have a companion of mine cowering like a child. You two run along. We have centuries to straighten out the details. And Copper, dear, keep this one thing in mind, won't you?"

  He still held his breath, uncertain that she wasn't playing an eerie game of cat and mouse with him. It was so much that she offered, his only dream. It all hinged on her words, and her mood.

  "Remember that I promised, and I kept my word. One day I may ask you to repay the favor."

  Then she turned, and she was gone. He wasn't sure if she'd stepped into mist, or become one. He didn't care. All that mattered was the tightening of the grip on his shoulders, and the heat that flowed steadily, pumping through his veins. He would have screamed with the release of the moment, but when he turned, Alicia's mouth was on his, smothering sound and stealing breath. Breath he would not need after this night.

  Alicia pulled him toward the forested mountain, physically dragging his much larger form with the ease of a parent carrying a recalcitrant child. He tried to help her, to push himself onward, but she was so insistent that she robbed him of his balance. They tumbled through the first of the tangled branches and fell to the ground, twining limb with limb and tongue with tongue. She moaned aloud, ripping at the collar of his jacket and the white silk shirt beneath. He wrapped his arms about her neck and pulled with all of his strength, trying to force himself against her.

  She slid her teeth lightly over his throat, teasing him. He thrust at her, trying to break his own skin and trap her in the taste of the sweet, warm blood beneath, but she held him at bay easily, tormenting him. He whimpered. She ran her tongue the length of his throat and up to his ear, taking a small nip at the lobe and descending again, tracing the throbbing length of his jugular. He felt her control waver as the heat reached her tongue, but still she held back.

  "Do you love me, Copper?" she asked, voice husky and filled with need. "Truly? Is this what you want – forever?"

  He caught her eyes, deep and smothered in passion, and he held them for the one, fleeting instant. He parted his dried lips and mouthed a single word in answer, forced air through an arid throat to whisper his heart's desire. "Forever."

  She relaxed for just a second and he drove up into her, impaling himself on her waiting kiss – parting his skin on razor-fanged ecstasy. He drained into her and felt her respond. She was trapped now, as surely as he, trapped by her hunger and his flowing blood.

  He embraced the pain and clutched her writhing form tightly. As the last of his life-blood seeped from his now pallid flesh she drew him to her breast and pressed into him tightly. The world shivered and his eyes lost focus. Alicia leaned down and placed her throat against his open mouth. He began to lose consciousness, to drift away toward a strange, burning light, and then he felt that touch, tasted her, bit down and felt his teeth break roughly through soft skin. Not like the swift, sharp punctures she'd given him – his teeth weren't fangs – but he hungered. Eyes closed and body trembling, he drank.

  A taste like fire burned his throat. His eyes shot open, and he arched, every muscle and tendon taut with sudden and uncontrollable energy. He saw her eyes, drowned in them, re-surfaced and dove in again. He fell toward some long-distant darkness, and a strange, oddly compelling chill grasped his limbs. Then she was gone, so suddenly he cried out at the loss, and he was alone. It was dark – so dark that it felt as if the world had receded and he lay alone in the center of the universe. He released all thought and the darkness consumed him. It was very, very cold.

  Chapter Six

  Moonlight draped the mountain in a silver shroud, forming strange shadows along the winding trail. Klaus' thoughts blurred into a surreal panorama that he couldn't seem to quiet into reality. Images from the past rose to walk at his side, hovering just beyond the point where he could bring them into focus.

  His memories of the mountain were vague. He had only been a child. He knew his father had worked on the mountain, hunting when he could and cultivating grapes when it was the season. He knew that his father had walked the same trail that wound beneath his feet, as had his father's father. And he knew that his mother had hated the mountain as much as his father had loved it. The memories twined and writhed, refusing to make sense, and he climbed higher and higher up the trail and away from the chaotic gathering below.

  He was nearly half way to the top of the trail when mist began to seep from the edges of the shadows, twisting about his feet in patterns that swirled in defiance of the wind's control. He didn't notice at first. Small flickers of his past haunted the corners of his sight, teasing him with their reassuring familiarity. He recognized a rock upon which he'd played as a child, imagining himself the leader of a renegade band poised to ransack the village below. He saw a gnarled, forked old tree where he'd climbed and hidden himself often, watching as his father wound his way upward into the forest beyond.

  He knew that the trail would end soon. It would take him to the place his father had called "the shrine," and no farther. Klaus had been too young to understand the idea of a shrine, and his parents had not been inclined to enlighten him, but now he was curious. He remembered tales told by his fireside, tales that were old when his grandfather was young. Always, when the talk had turned to the mountain, the men's eyes had grown far away – as though some memory beyond speech teased at their tongues.

  He remembered with equal clarity the cold, hate-filled fire these stories had lit in the eyes of his mother – and his grandmother. It had only sweetened the taste of mystery for a young boy, fanning the flames of his curiosity. Mysteries shared by the men of the clan.

  Now his parents were gone, presumably dead, though he'd never had the opportunity to say his final farewells, and the mountain felt distant, though he walked its trails again with easy familiarity. There had been a time when it seemed that his father's death had sealed the cover on this chapter of his life, and that he would never return to seek answers to his past.

  He remembered those last days. His father had been off on a two day hunting trip that stretched to a week, then a month, and finally to a tearful ceremony over an empty grave. The old man had loved the mountain and its dark forests, and that was where he would rest, for he had never returned, despite Klaus' mother's anxious prayers and constant hope.

  After the funeral, Klaus' mother had sent him immediately to live with her sister in Hamburg, ignoring his pleas to remain at her side. Soon after he had gone, she disappeared as well. Klaus had always believed that she'd trekked into the wilderness on her own, searching for his father. Neither was ever seen again. As the years passed, they'd become like images in a dream – just like the mountain. Though his memories of them were vivid and still painful, he couldn't fully recall their faces. As he walked, he let his mind slide back to them, and the tears began to flow. The grief had lain dormant far too long, and it demanded release.

  As the line of trees parted and the stone stairs of the shrine came into sight, white and nearly luminous in the moonlight, Klaus finally noticed the mist. Where he walked, it followed. Now that the trail was coming to an end, it flowed ahead until the entire clearing was carpeted in a mass of white, billowing cloud. Where those clouds touched his legs, his skin grew cold, sending a chill upward to root itself at the base of his spine. He didn't stop, but his thoughts settled back in the present.

  Klaus scanned the trees to either side. He had been here a thousand times when he was younger, lounging on the rocks and chasing imaginary foes through the trees, but he had never felt such a presence as he did now.

  I've grown up enough to know what a shrine is, he thought, but now I'm seeing ghosts. His mind continue
d its rational analysis of the strange fear he felt, but his instincts churned on, unheeding.

  There was something in the air, one bit of strangeness element to pile onto an evening of unparalleled weird. As he stepped clear of the trees and stood at the base of the old stone stairs, the hairs actually stood up on the back of his neck, as though craning to see something his eyes were failing to discern.

  "Christ," he said aloud. "It must still be that damned song."

  He could still vaguely hear the strains of the melody running through his mind, but somehow they were different, warped or twisted in a subtle way that made them even more powerful and alluring.

  It was not memory, he realized with a start. The music was coming from somewhere in the woods around him, from a voice so soft it seemed but a whisper on the wind. The notes rose and fell with the breath of the breeze in the trees, flickering over and through the misty fog. The words were not the same, but they very close to those he had written. Turning in a wary circle, Klaus strove to pinpoint the source of the sound, to give it direction.

  He moved slowly, slipping with cat-like grace around the perimeter of the surrounding trees, but he saw nothing but mist, shadows, and the stairs that led to the odd stone altar before him. He nearly screamed when he came full circle to the trail again and his eyes caught sight of the woman.

  It was a revelation of shock and intense emotion – a merging of his memory and his senses. His mind shot like a bolt back to the lip of the stone stage, to the brink of the dream-like melody and eerie harmony of the song he'd sung less than an hour earlier; in another world. His eyes locked with hers as though there had been no break from the moment he'd met her gaze, though this sensation was much more powerful.

  "You sing beautifully," she said, her words shimmering across the silence, somehow blending with it and increasing the magic of the moment. She stepped slowly forward, hands outstretched, and all he could do was stand and stare. "It is an old song – one I have sung over countless years, and yet you have done it new justice."