Immortal Sins

He pondered her question for several moments. He had no good answer to give her, at least none she was likely to condone, or perhaps even understand.

"I was born into a noble family, the second of five sons. My older brother, Joseph, became a priest. My brother Paul went off to fight in the Crusades with my father. Mathias was a physician, Joshua, a merchant. It fell to me to look after the family estate, though I had no desire to do so, and no desire to marry. I am ashamed to say that I was not a good husband. My wife and children deserved better than I gave them." He paused a moment, his thoughts turned inward. "I have often wondered if becoming a vampire was some form of divine punishment. It was only after I had been turned that I realized what I had lost."

He sighed with the memory. "My father was killed in the Crusades. Paul brought him home and gave me his sword, saying it was my father’s last wish that I should have it.

"I was one and thirty when Melina made me. For a time, I was able to hide what I had become but…" He shrugged. "As I said, as the years passed and I did not age, my family became suspicious of me. One night I took my father’s sword, kissed my sons good-bye, and left home, never to return."

"That’s so sad."

He shrugged. "It made me grow up. I wandered the world, never staying long in any one place. And then, one night, I met a woman in a tavern. She was young and innocent and all the more tempting because of it. She played the wanton, tempting me, teasing me, even though I knew she had never been with a man."

He paused a moment, as though seeing it all again in his mind. "I knew it was wrong, but I was determined to have her. I took her virginity and her blood and spent three hundred years imprisoned in that accursed painting because of it." Even now, he could remember the way Ana Luisa’s blood had burned his tongue. It was the taste of her blood that would lead him to her now. "You know the rest of the story."

"It all sounds so far-fetched," Kari remarked. "Vampires and wizards and evil curses. It’s hard to believe that any of it’s real."

"Sometimes I have trouble believing it myself."

"Did she know you were a vampire?"

"No."

"How could you take her blood without her knowing, or at least suspecting?"

"I took but a little."

"What did she say when you told her what you are?"

"I never told her."

"So, she still doesn’t know?" Kari shook her head. "That’s hard to believe."

Rourke shrugged.

"Do you think the wizard’s daughter is still alive?"

He nodded. "I know she is." Closing his eyes, he blocked everything from his mind and then he conjured Ana Luisa’s image even as he drew upon the memory of the fiery taste of her life’s blood on his tongue. He murmured her name, felt his senses reach out across endless time and space, homing in on the unique scent of her blood, the slow, steady beat of her heart.

"Rourke…"

"Shh." Concentrating harder now, his senses expanding, he continued to reach out, crossing land and water as he searched for that one scent, that one heartbeat.

It took several moments of intense concentration, and then, as if looking through the wrong end of a telescope, he saw Ana Luisa and the painting that imprisoned her. A unicorn with golden hooves and a golden horn stood in the midst of a field of flowers, its head raised to sniff the wind. Ana Luisa sat on its back, her long blond hair flowing down her back and over her shoulders. Clad in a long white gossamer gown, she gazed into the distance, her luminous green eyes filled with unspeakable sorrow. A single tear glistened like a drop of morning dew on one rosy cheek. He wondered if Vilnius had painted it there, or if it was one of Ana Luisa’s own tears, shed the night her father had found them.

Rourke quietly cursed the wizard’s cruelty. If he lived another seven hundred years, he would never understand how a man could condemn his own flesh and blood to such a horrid fate.

"Rourke? Rourke, are you all right?"

He shook his head. He would never be all right until Ana Luisa had been freed from her prison of glass and canvas. She was so young, far younger than she had professed to be when he seduced her. Had he known she was little more than a child, he never would have touched her. But she had professed to be older and acted far more worldly wise than her years.

"I need to make a journey," he said. "And I need you to come with me."

"A journey?" Kari asked doubtfully. "Where do you want to go? And why do you need me?"

"I need to find Ana Luisa," Rourke said. "And I need you to help me find my way around. There is still much here I am not familiar with."

"But I can’t just take off. I have a job, you know." She frowned. "How do you know where she is, anyway?"

"She is in Romania."

"Romania? As in Transylvania? Are you kidding me? I can’t go running off to Romania."

"Karinna, I cannot do this without you." Had he been stronger, he could have flown there under his own power, but he needed time to regain his full strength, he needed added sustenance to restore his preternatural powers. In his present condition, he could never make such a long journey, let alone bring Ana Luisa back with him. He could wait until his strength and his powers were fully restored, but that might take weeks. Some might say he was being too impulsive. After all, what was another few weeks after so many centuries? But anyone who suggested such a thing had never been confined in a stagnant world of paint and canvas.

"But…"

"She has been trapped in that painting for three hundred years," he said quietly. "I know what she is feeling, thinking. She has no supernatural powers of her own that I know of." True, she was a witch, but if she couldn’t move or speak, she had no way of casting a spell, no way of easing the torment of being immobile year after year. He shook his head. "I cannot leave her there, alive yet lifeless."

There had been a time, soon after the wizard had cursed him, when Rourke had found pleasure in knowing that Ana Luisa had also been cursed. He had blamed her for not telling him how young she was, or warning him that her father was a powerful wizard. But those feelings had soon passed and he had admitted that he was as much to blame for what had happened to them as was she, perhaps more.

"I cannot leave her there," he said again, "not when I have the power to free her."

Kari’s shoulders slumped in defeat. "Where, exactly, do you want to go, and when do you want to leave?"