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

No, Gabriel thought.For if I had been broken, I would have betrayed Kyn, and others would have suffered my fate. I was right to resist .

Would the girl from his forest dreams understand, if she were real? Would she forgive him for being unable to go to her?

"No need to be afraid, vampire." Benait turned down the wick so that the light became a softer glow. "You are comfortably situated at your final destination, and I bear the responsibility of performing these last small rites."

Relief and shame set fire to the last of Gabriel's rigid self-discipline and indifference. His head demanded he fight, endure, and survive, but the human's words enveloped his frozen heart. No more endless interrogations, no more pointless torture. No more agony at being abandoned by his own kind, and left alone and wretched in the silent shadows. No more sorrow for outliving every soul he had ever loved. No more surrendering more and more of himself to his talent. No more succumbing to the icy hell inside him only to stay alive. Now this human would mutter his prayers, take out a sword, and cut off Gabriel's head, and this level of hell would be his last.

Done, I am done, it is over.

Everything he had drawn upon in order to keep his silence had been gathering for this moment. So long as he did not beg for his life, it was finished. He had lost, but he had won. They had not broken him. Not once. That much victory he could claim.

She would understand this, his pale maiden. She would let him go into the dark alone and unafraid. ThereЕ there he would wait for her.

Beyond the room a bucket clanged, and someone muttered curses in another language.

"It might have gone differently for you if you had cooperated with us," Benait said, nodding as if in agreement with Gabriel's thoughts as he moved closer. "We would have brought you into the light with us, to fight for God. Eventually you might have redeemed your filthy soul."

The Brethren always felt compelled to make such speeches before they inflicted some monstrous ordeal upon him. Not for his benefit, Gabriel felt, but more to bestow some sort of absolution on themselves prior to committing their atrocities. It did not always work; one of the brutes inDublin had begun to go mad, and whispered of his hallucinations to Gabriel.

Benait took out a Bible, opening it to the last chapter before he began to read a passage. "'Е the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is AbaddonЕ'"

They tried to use the Holy Scriptures as another, subtler form of torment, but Gabriel, named by his father for God's celestial messenger, had long ago made his peace with his fate. He was no angel, but he no longer believed the Kyn were cursed. He had seen too many atrocities in his human and Kyn lifetimes; crimes against humanity far more obscene and brutal than any of his own pitiful sins. The God he had served throughout his human life would not single out a handful of misguided warrior priests for divine retribution while permitting the butchers of millions to grow decrepit and die in beds of gold.

Metal scraped against brick with a softer, more liquid sound.

Benait finished reading the passage from Revelations, closed his Bible, and kissed the cover before setting it aside.

"You never made confession of your sins, vampire, and so there can be no absolution." He removed a small glass vial of reddish liquid from his sleeve and opened it. "But we still have one more use for your angelic face. Perhaps when this is finished, D'Orio will take your head and have it mounted on the wall of his study."

Gabriel's eyes shifted as an old, liver-spotted hand reached into the open entrance to his chamber and spread a layer of mortar onto the floor space between the sides of the frame. The trawl disappeared, and the same hand began laying bricks carefully in the wet mortar. He realized what was being done on the other side of the wall, a horror that swept away all that had been done before this moment. They were sealing the room. Sealing him in it.

He turned his face away and jerked against his chains.

"You would not see the light, vampire." Benait reached up and seized a handful of filthy hair, making Gabriel look at the bricks being stacked and mortared across the threshold of the chamber before he brought the vial toward his face. "Now all that you will know is darkness."

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Chapter 2



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A thousand kilometers fromFrance , within the silent walls of a remote, well-guarded fortress inIreland , another prisoner struggled against her imprisonment. This one did not accept her fate; nor did she retreat into silence. As she had every day since she had been brought toDundellanCastle , Dr. Alexandra Keller fought and shouted.

"I don't want to go in there. I told you, it's not mine. Will you letgo of me, you jackass?"

Richard Tremayne, high lord of the Darkyn, did not set aside the reports he had been studying, but finished reading details of the latest Brethren activity in the south ofFrance . As Alexandra's protests grew closer and louder, he briefly considered the merits of soundproofing and onesided locking mechanisms. Neither would solve the problem of his latest, troublesome acquisition, but they might restore a semblance of peace to his early evenings.