Part 2 (1/2)
LeBeau's blood had relieved the painful craving enough to allow me to savour the hunt; but as I slowly pressed towards Lyons, the smells awakened my appet.i.te again. There came the smell of copulation, of a dead man's body cooling, of a living man's heated sweat and skin and blood.
I placed my hands, feather-light, atop his shoulders. As he did not face me, there would be no chance to mesmerise-but in my newfound decadence, I had no concern for my victim's comfort.
With swift brutal force I bared my teeth and pierced the skin of Lyons' neck, felt the astringent sting of brine against my tongue.
He flailed backwards, screaming in pain and drunken terror. Zsuzsanna disengaged herself and turned towards us to watch the spectacle, b.r.e.a.s.t.s and legs still exposed as she settled comfortably against the velvet cus.h.i.+ons to watch with sensual approval.
G.o.d help me, I took vicious pleasure in his struggles. I held him fast as he thrashed against me, biting into his neck again, again, again as he fought, until the skin was slashed and hanging, until at last a great vein was pierced and began to spray blood.
It spattered Zsuzsanna's face and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Laughing, she opened her mouth to catch the gus.h.i.+ng blood with the innocent delight of a child trying to capture a snowflake on her tongue. But I soon pressed my mouth over the life-giving stream, pulling fiercely against it, drinking until Lyons grew weak and ceased his struggles. He sagged against me, his heart beating like a trapped sparrow's.
I drank quickly, letting him drop heavily when at last he was dead. Suddenly dizzied, I staggered to the couch and fell against it, letting my head loll against the cus.h.i.+ons; the man's drunkenness made my thoughts reel.
I closed my eyes and fell into a dream. I was no longer a miserable murderer trapped in the Viennese night, but an innocently mortal man bound from Vienna to Buda-Pesth, lying on the rocking train berth beside my wife and soon-to-be-born child. Had I known what had awaited me at home, in Transylvania, I would never have returned, would have fled the continent with them both. Mary, my Mary! Unwittingly I brought you into a den of unguessable evil, and now I can only pray that you and our son are well, and safe from V. ...
In my drowsy vision, I reached towards my sleeping wife. She stirred, and the s.h.i.+ning golden lashes that fringed her pale eyelids fluttered. At last, her eyes opened, revealing that calm gla.s.sy sea of blue, and I wept at the comfort, the love offered there. I reached ...
. . . and found us both trapped in that timeless moment when, amid the screams of horses and snarls of wolves, against V.'s arrogant laughter that soon turned to a cry of dismay, she raised my father's pistol to my chest and stared deep into my eyes.
I gazed back into hers and saw terrible love and pain.Explosion. The acrid sting of sulphur. Pain that pierced my heart.
This time, I did not die but reached-and, in my desperate dream, caught her white s.h.i.+ning arms and sobbed as they reached for me in turn. She was real, solid in my arms, and as I held her, my face pressed to her sweet golden hair, wet with my cold tears, I was consumed by a pa.s.sion greater than any I had known as a living man. Even death could not still my desire for her.
I yielded to her caresses, her coaxing, and took her -or was it she who took me? My ardour was veiled by a strange, sweet languour. And at the moment of my release, her beautiful image wavered and became that of the serving-girl, Dunya.
My cry of pleasure became one of alarm. But the languour overtook me once more; there came darkness for a time, then again I fell into another strange dream of pa.s.sion. Again I reached for my wife; again, I took her, only later to remember that her face was smeared with fresh blood.
Again, I cried out to discover that the woman was not Mary. This second time, to my utter horror, it was my own sister.
My horror grew as the sense of languour evaporated and I realised that, indeed, Zsuzsanna's body was pressed against mine. I pulled away from her in unspeakable revulsion to find that we lay upon the couch; on the floor beside us-oblivious to the stiffening corpses nearby-Dunya lay snoring, her own clothing in disarray.
Zsuzsa sat up and casually began fastening her own dress, but her air of coquettish revelry had vanished; her expression was now solemn, as if for the first time that evening she had committed an act of consequence.
”You,” I choked, my voice trembling with shame and fury as I covered myself, ”you intentionally mesmerised me. You have done this-but why!”
The candles had all burned down; the darkness had eased to the soft grey of approaching dawn. Zsuzsa's preternaturally brilliant beauty was fading with the night. She was still lovely, fetching, but the flashes of electric indigo in her hair, the moonglow incandescence of her skin, the burnished gold in her eyes-all had dimmed so that her beauty, her radiance seemed merely mortal.
After a cautious glance at her sleeping servant, she looked back at me and replied softly, ”To save you. To save us all, Kasha.” And at my questioning gaze, she sighed. ”You are only recently dead; V. says that, for a brief time, you might still be able to produce heirs. A child, Kasha. It is only a child-”
Only a child. I groaned with disgust that my own sister could so casually speak of sacrificing her own child-our child. Did she think that, because it was the product of incest, it was any less human, that I should love it any less? Find it any easier to condemn it to a horrific fate?
At my aghast reaction, her tone grew heated, defensive. ”I was denied many things in my short life; do not deny me this. Or would you rather he tracked down your only son?”
I looked away, too overwhelmed with self-loathing to answer.
”He would have you killed,” she continued quietly. ”He has paid your own man to come after sunrise and destroy you, just as you paid him to destroy your victims.”
”And why not you?” I asked bitterly. ”Why did you not simply kill me as you lay with me, when I was helpless?”Hurt marred her lovely features, but another emotion soon eclipsed it: surprise. ”Then you do not know . . .”
”Know what?”
”He cannot destroy you, Kasha, nor you him. The pact forbids it; we may die only by a human hand.”
I marvelled at this in silence, until at last she said urgently, ”There is no time. You must leave-”
”With you?” I wheeled on her with sudden fury. ”And what fresh deception shall I expect now?”
”No.” She lowered her lovely face, and for the first time, bitterness crept into her tone. ”No, I am not asking that you come with me, or tell me where you are going. But I will tell you this, because whatever you may think of me, the truth is that I still love you.” She looked up again. ”You are too easily swayed, Kasha, too easily controlled. He has found you once, and he will find you again; he is too wily, too accomplished, too strong for you.”
”If that is true,” I said, ”why did he not come for me himself? Why would he send you-a woman?”
”It is the price he paid for making you a vampire: He is trapped now for the span of a generation, perhaps more, on the family property in Transylvania. Nevertheless, you must prepare yourself; for even in this short time, he has taught me tricks that have allowed me to do as I will with you.”
She paused, and a strange light that looked incongruous with her confidence, her beauty, came into her eye; it was only later that I identified it as fear. ”You have heard of the Scholomance?”
”I have heard.”
”It is no myth, Kasha. It is all true. You must go there; he would kill me if he knew I have told you. Go there. Learn, and become as strong as he is, or he will destroy you.”
”If I go,” I said, my face and tone hard, ”I will become stronger than he. And I will see us all destroyed and sent to h.e.l.l.”
Uncertainty and fear flickered over her features once more; she turned away from me and said only: ”Go.”
I left her then, she kneeling over sleeping Dunya to wake her; left my sister with the lonely rooms and the bloodied corpses and boarded the first train for Buda-Pesth that would take me, ultimately, to another train bound further east, for the lands beyond the forest: to Roumania, and Lake Hermanstadt, where the Devil dwells.
Listen: The thunder roars. The dragon himself calls, and I go. ...
Chapter 2.
Zsuzsanna Dracul's Diary 4 NOVEMBER 1845. I came into this world a cripple, with a hunched spine and a twisted leg. Even now in memory I hear the sound that haunted every step I took: the scuffling thump of my uneven footfall as I staggered graceless over the hard stone floors of the family estate.
As a child I knew my mother's tender love-yet knew early that the affection she bore me differed from that borne for my brothers. After she died young, I knew my father's and brother's. They adored me; oh yes, adored the pathetic doe-eyed shuffling creature, with a love tainted by pity.
Pity, that I should be homely; pity, that I would never know any other's love: surely not that of a lover, a husband, a babe of my own. So lonely did I grow that I went slightly mad and in my mind created lovers; created an imaginary companion-my dead brother Stefan, who in reality had been killed as a little boy. But in my mind, he was still alive-and not my brother, but my own child-following me faithfully from room to lonely room as I read aloud to him from books of the life beyond those walls.
For though my body was ungainly and frail, my mind was swift and robust. Thus my life was limited to academic pursuits, to letters and literature. It was uncommon for Tsepesh women to be permitted an education, but my mother was a strong woman of modern ideas, and a poetess. She taught me my letters early; by the age of eight, a few years after her death, I had mastered not only Roumanian but French and German, and Father had begun my instruction in Latin. As we grew older, Arkady and I amused ourselves with word games and conversed with each other in foreign tongues. To hide my diary from prying eyes, I began keeping it in English. And I dreamt and dreamt of the foreign lands I would never see.
How I despised mirrors then! They always revealed a girl sickly pale from never having seen the sun, never having ventured into the world beyond her stone prison. Unlovely- with features aquiline, severe, and large, longing brown eyes. And beneath that desperate face, a crooked body, the hump of one deformed shoulder rising higher than its mate.
I despise mirrors still: for now they refuse to bear witness to my transformation, showing only a void, an emptiness, in the place where I now stand. How I yearn to see my own face, my own form in my stylish new gowns, to admire myself as others do. I am perfect now- with a body straight and whole-and quite beautiful, possibly the most beautiful woman in the world. I need no mirror to confirm it: The answer is all too clearly writ in men's eyes.
Who turned the duckling into a swan?
Vlad, who during my naive human life I thought of as my father's uncle. He was sworn not to Change any of his family into immortals such as he-but he broke that promise for love of me. Love because I openly adored him; love, perhaps, because he saw the spirit entrapped within the body.
He woke me to this new life with a kiss; and paid a price for breaking the covenant-the loss of control over my brother's mind. This put him in jeopardy, for once Arkady became impossible to manipulate, he tried to flee-and Vlad's very existence was threatened.