THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

Rome, Italy

"You've come. I was afraid they had lied." It was the same growling, ephemeral voice Father Christopher had heard whispered over the phone. He couldn't help himself; he decided he would have braved any danger or devastation to hear it again. "You knew the dangers. And still you have come." The voice paused. Thoughtful. Oblique. "As I had so hoped and feared you would."

Christopher shuffled unsurely across the threadbare carpet, approaching the owner of the awesome voice. Through the grey swimming of shadows and the cobwebby gloom of the old row house, a sheen--an eye or fingernail--flashed out to him, drawing him in, close, closer. Come closer, please. Yes.

"Please be seated."

"Could we have some light?" Christopher asked.

"Oh yes. I forgot. Light."

Christopher noticed the heavily brocaded velvet curtains--quite moth-eaten--shrouding out the distant Borgo neighborhood, its aged, mixed architecture, its seedy, after-hours insectlike hum of activity. "Can I...can I draw them?"

"Please no."

"Is it the streetlights--?"

"The cold. You will let it in."

"Oh."

"The Italian weather is unforgivable. And this house does not heat."

"Oh."

Christopher watched the figure rise like an ascending shadow and move with that same shadow-swiftness across the room. There was the spurt of a match and the acrid smell of brimstone, and then Christopher saw the back of the man who had summoned him here. Light, like a flash of yellow wings, suddenly fluttered across the room, illuminating the strangely beautiful decay of the house. The figure kept his back to Christopher as he tended the flame. "I hope you do not object to the lamp," he said. "The house is old--too old for luxuries such as electricity."

The dhampir turned and its astonishing form was caught and haloed in the light. Slowly, robotically, Christopher sank back into his seat. There could be no doubt who he was staring at. That great mane of hair, those delicate features, all of it seemingly chiseled from one piece of raw ice. No flush of color touched any part of the man, no hint of warmth on face or finger. No motion stirred even at the mysterious pits of his empty eyes. This could not be the man who died at the hands of his best student; no preternatural being, no matter how powerful, could kill such a lifeless vessel. How had it happened, that he had died--indeed, that he had even lived to see half a millennium of history, a prisoner of this seemingly perfect, flame-white body? How had it happened, that he stood here now, a miracle of male beauty caught like an insect in amber in the summer of his youth? Christopher drank in the sight of him and still he could not be filled.

"Jesus," he whispered at last.

"Amadeus," the dhampir said. "Jesus would have destroyed you by now."

Christopher flinched. "Why...do you say that?"

"You would not have been able to endure his perfection."

"Oh."

"You seem enamored of that simple expression."

"You are most direct, aren't you?" said Christopher, his courage gathering slowly, too slowly.

"The nature of the beast."

"Excuse me?"

"You are an investigator, a scientist," he said. The dhampir returned to his seat. He stared at Christopher with his glittering sightless eyes. He placed his hands in his lap as a faint smile corrupted his perfectly lifeless face. "But can you write, Father Christopher?"

Christopher bit his lip and said, "Before I joined the Jesuits, I worked on assignment for the Times for four years. I've done gang wars, hurricanes, executions, shark attacks, cannibal feasts and IRA weddings. I even did an expose on Transylvania back in the nineties when Ted Nicolaou was making his vampire movies." He wasn't exactly sure why he had brought that last bit up, except he was working instinctively now--investigator's intuition--on the off chance that such a thing would be of interest to the dhampir.

Apparently it was, for one eyebrow--it was white on white, more like a cartoon line than anything real--arched up just a bit. "And did you enjoy it--Dracula's world?"

"The people were wonderful but the castle was a mess, like a giant Chinese restaurant with too many walls and floors. Like something you might see in L.A. I used to think this vampire thing was nonsense," Christopher babbled.

"I am not a vampire," he said.

"I know."

"I am a dhampir."

"I know."

"And still you have come."

"The Diocese asked me to investigate," Christopher said, wondering why he sounded so apologetic, why he was whispering as if there was something to awaken in this crumbling old tomb of a house. What did you get me into, Father Bertram? he wanted to ask. But he knew the truth. He spoke the truth: "I'd be a fool to refuse them."

"Perhaps you a fool to trust them."

Suddenly he feared. Suddenly he wished he were again sitting in one of the sidewalk cafés at Trastevere, sipping Irish cream and listening to a tambourine street band as his fears chortled away inside of his ears, the way he had been earlier. His fears had never once let him down. His fears had kept him alive for almost forty years. He wished he were anywhere but here. Anywhere but in this depeopled wreck crouching in a forgotten corner of a godforsaken piece of land where St. Peter had found ignoble death in crucifixion. In this place, alone and unchaparoned with this--thing. "No," he answered the dhampir, his voice coming from miles outside of himself. "This is important. We have to know. We have to learn."

The dhampir licked his white teeth with the tip of his red tongue; yet when he spoke, his voice was as calm as before. "And?"

Christopher shrugged, sweating. "I was curious. I have to know."

"Know?"

"If this is real. If you and the Slayer are real. If this world you live in is real."

The dhampir looked strong. But he also looked wearied, like a man suffering under the weight of an enormous burden. "The Slayer would have you believe me a monster and he an angel, but that is only his truth. He too is a monster, only a monster in a beautiful skin."

Christopher swallowed. "Then--you will discount all that came before?" His head swam both with fear and the thrill that always accompanied the advent of the Truth--that pulse-point of absolute focus when nothing else, not even the end of the world, mattered as long as he got the truth down on paper. It was a feeling akin, he now realized, to the day he got this assignment from Father Bertram, via The Vatican Historical Council, otherwise known as the Coven. Cardinal Benedictine himself had spoken to them both that day.

The Cardinal's sublime voice, like a secret: This is not another crying statue in San Miguel, Christopher. This isn't some peasant-stigmata in some God-forgotten third world country. This is not a hoax. They exist. They have a whole world invisible to most eyes. And now, finally, he has been found.

He, Cardinal?

Him. The king slayer. The Covenmaster. The Devil's Advocate. Amadeus.

Amadeus.

The knowledge sat within Christopher with heart-ramming, headachey intensity like a wisdom stone ready to cut his mind apart.

The dhampir made no answer to his question. In his eyes shone a queer mixture of sadness and desire, like a memory forever tarnished in its raw state, something to be embellished instead. "Discount it, no," he said. The dhampir glanced at Christopher's face and throat lingeringly, as if he could really see these things, then rose and moved like a grey spirit across the room. "You are thirsty. May I offer you wine?"

Christopher nodded, then remembered the dhampir could not see him. "Yes," he said. "Grazie." He glanced at the foreign label as the wine was poured. Wine pressed by a Sicilian family that had been extinct for a hundred years. He took the offered glass and sipped it numbly, the harsh sweetness all but unfelt on his tongue and between his teeth. He glanced up and saw the dhampir watching him with mute intensity. He sipped from his own glass, but it was a passionless thing to watch, as if he gained no pleasure whatsoever from his drink. He sat back in his own chair, and though his eyes shone just as bone-white as before, Christopher could see now how they drifted like the eyes of blind men do.

"I can almost wish," the dhampir said, "that you had not come. That your obvious fear had been enough."

Christopher stared at him in surprise. "Will you kill me?"

"If this were but a matter of common seduction and murder, I would not have gone to such lengths to reveal myself." His calm was terrible. He closed his eyes as if to close out a sight that was never his. Motionless, statuelike, he was like a mockery to his own eternal beauty. "If this were a trap, you would not have come. Would you now?"

"I don't know," Christopher admitted. "Why am I here?"

Trouble creased the dhampir's face like a newfound memory. And Christopher realized a simple truth in that moment: the dhampir was beautiful only when contained within his void of passion or expression. Put upon his face a mask of humanity and he became grotesque, like a barely-recognizable deformity under the skin of a stranger. He seemed to wait as though for some portent. But when nothing was forthcoming but the turning hub of traffic far off on distant streets and the ringing open ends of almost perfect silence, he laughed. And of all the creaking, weird private sounds Christopher was aware of in the old house, none rang colder or more alien. Like a great cat growling in the deep of its chest, so did the sound emerge, enormous and cloaking in a room that had suddenly grown far too small for them both.

"I have existed for over five hundred years," he said as if in response to the abiding dark, "and yet never have I felt closer to the life I once possessed. Each year, each hour, has forged a link in the chains I wear. And every living soul, every hungry moment and every drop of blood. Now those chains have dragged me to earth. I stand at the beginning once more."

He paused and reached for his wine. He took a delicate sip and closed his eyes as if in mourning for the taste, the family, the country of its origin. And then, without even the smallest tremor of hesitation, he squeezed his fist with seemingly no effort at all, shattering the crystal and splattering wine at his feet like blood.

Christopher started.

From a far corner of the room came the flutter and whir of wings--birds gotten in through a hole of the roof, perhaps. Christopher wondered what other creatures lurked here in this place, under chairs and between books, what things slithered and crept and wriggled unbeknownst to his night-blinded eyes. The birds settled and silence swept into the house once more like a draft.

The dhampir opened his eyes. In his hands there now clicked the wooden beads of a black rosary. He rolled the beads together like a collection of tiny Ben Wa balls, the sound like tiny bones cracking together.

Christopher leaned forward. "Tell me," he said, commanded.

"Tell you?"

"The story. You must."

The dhampir laughed. "I must do nothing but kill. I must do nothing but obey the creed of my nature." There was silence, and Christopher knew the dhampir was staring in his way of seeing things at his flesh, perhaps past it, to all his creeping inner secrets. But still he waited to see what would become of him, what would become of this night, oddly distanced from his fear.

"Tell me," he repeated, reaching for the briefcase he had brought, snapping it open and removing the small battery-powered laptop. "Tell me how it happened, your life, the Coven, everything. Tell me how you have survived death. I want to know." He paused, thinking of his own life, his past, every ambition he ever fueled with his own passion. He was a scientist. But he was also a man. "I want to know. I do."

Slowly the dhampir began to smile again. "I suppose you do." He closed his eyes as if to savor some ancient image. "Yes," he said, still staring through the void of his own impenetrable dark. "It should be done, it should be told from the beginning, though you may find my story offensive in the extreme."

"It is your story. I judge nothing."

"You have a noble soul. Listen then, and understand."

Christopher cocked his head over the lighted screen of the laptop and let his fingers dance, driven by the music of the dhampir's words, his beautiful netherworldly words.

"I was born Jan Adolph Gottheld Keller, but I have long since ceased to go by that name. I have not heard that name spoken on human lips in so long, I have almost forgotten its sound. I never speak it aloud myself, not even in my intimacies, for it had ceased to be my name while I was still very young. I was born in the February of 1501 in Zurich, Switzerland, during one of the worst winter storms in recorded history. I make no subjective speculations on the storm. My burg, composed primarily of bankers and blacksmiths and district lawyers serving the boyar's needs, were not especially superstitious. The Middle Ages were waning, humanism and logical Greek-inspired thinking sweeping barbaric souls up--mostly--and turning them into Renaissance Men. I was one of a dozen children born that winter, but none were looked upon as portents, not until much later, when certain events had come to pass..."