"Night Lost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Viehl Lynn)

Wheels nearby squealed as they turned; another, heavier load was dumped outside the room, sending vibrations through the wall. Benait smiled as he removed a cell phone from his cassock and dialed a number. Unconsciously he moved away from Gabriel as he spoke in rapid Italian.

Gabriel took advantage of the light to study the unfamiliar place he occupied. No windows, no exits or entrances, save the one open doorway through which the human had obviously entered. The room offered no clues as to exactly where he had been brought; all he had seen above in the moonlight when they had removed him from the truck were the overgrown grounds of some vast property and the outlines of a ruined, ancient structure. The trip fromParis to this place had taken many hours, yet he was fairly certain that he was still inFrance .

Why am I still inFrance ?

That the Brethren hadn't moved him out of the country puzzled him. InParis , he had overheard the interrogators discussing a ring of thieves who had been targeting and looting Brethren strongholds for icons and religious treasures. Evidently while burglarizing such places, they had been lured to several imprisoned Kyn and had released them. When the Brethren had taken Gabriel from the city, he assumed it was to keep the thieves from liberating him.

Freedom might never be his again. Gabriel had accepted this possibility a long time ago. But he had not yet run out of hope that he might reveal to the Kyn what he had learned as a prisoner of the Brethren. That knowledge, too, became as if another curse upon his head.

Unfortunately Benait spoke correctly: Gabriel was presently too weak from blood loss and injury to free himself. His only hope remained a slim chance to use his talent again, or perhaps lure one of the local humans in this new place to himЧor the girl from his dreams. Surely if he kept dreaming of her, it meant that she was real.

Surely he was not mad.

The Brethren assumed that Gabriel had long ago gone insane, in the same way Thierry Durand had inIreland , and often left him unguarded now. It was a pity the last interrogation had reduced him to such pitiful condition, or he might free himself. Neither his old nor new wounds would close, however, until his talent or a human provided him with enough blood to heal them.

Finding the desire to healЕ

Dark and ugly reality gripped him, a merciless gauntlet of iron, smashing the wavering image of the pale-haired maiden of the forest. Such dreams meant nothing. Those Gabriel had loved were dead; his entire family had been butchered by the Brethren. His loyalty and silence had been for nothing; no Kyn had come to fight for him or release him. After two years he could think only that he had been forgotten, given up for dead, or purposely discarded. Even with the burden of what he had learned about the Brethren, the prospect of prolonging his existence, of serving only as a toy for his sadistic captors, no longer appealed to him.

In the end, even the most noble persistence became pointless, as futile as the Brethren's interrogations.

Benait was speaking to him again. "Do you never wonder why they left your face untouched, vampire?"

Gabriel had stopped wondering about most things done to him after his first year in captivity. He would have said as much, but he had stopped speaking to his captors at approximately that same time. Originally he had kept his silence as the only form of defiance left to him. Now it had become his only retreat, his final sanctuary. A fortress of ice made no sound.

He couldn't speak if he wished to; they had gagged him inParis by welding together the ends of a thin band of copper over his mouth. That, too, gave him valuable information about his present state. They had brought him someplace where they could not afford for him to make noise.

Benait stepped closer. "My Irish brothers were under orders not to mar your visage. I suppose they took photographs of you and sent them to your king. Their proof that you were being well treated, at least, from the neck up."

Gabriel heard more sounds of activity on the other side of the wall. Stones hitting stones, water, the scrape of metal against brick. He stared at the glass bowl of the lamp, partly filled with liquid. They had repeatedly burned him with heated rods and irons as well as countless copper implements, but never with kerosene or oil. How long it would take his nearly desiccated body to burn. Hours? Days?

Why didn't he care? Had they drained the last of the terrorЧof remnant feelingЧout of him inParis ?

"Your king never met their demands for your release." Benait's ruddy lips compressed. "Instead he sent his assassin toDublin just after we brought you toParis ."

Lucan.

"He slaughtered every living thing there," Benait continued. "Brethren andmaledicti alike. The security cameras captured it all on videotape."

A woman screamed inside Gabriel's memory, drowning out the human's voice. InDublin , she had cried out repeatedly from a chamber near Gabriel's. He had never caught a glimpse of her, but her shrieks had been in an old tongue, the one the priests could not speak. She had screamed that they were skinning her alive. He had spent the better part of a year replaying the hours of her screams in his head, over and over. He still did not know if she had been a stranger, or his younger sister, Angelica, who had also been captured with him and the Durands.

Had she been Angelica? Had Lucan found her, broken and flayed, unable to heal from the horrors done to her? Had he killed her out of mercy?

Not knowing those answers added to Gabriel's bleak inner winter hourly, one acid snowflake at a time.

"We know from their reports that they were never able to break you inDublin , or convince your king to meet their demands," his captor was saying. "Despite the dedicated efforts of my brothers inParis over the last year, you resisted them as well." Benait set the lamp down on the rickety table near the fireplace and stretched his arms out, groaning with pleasure as a joint popped. "You have proven to be virtually useless to us."

Virtually useless. A condemnation. A compliment. As meaningful as maintaining his honor.