Part 7 (1/2)
The Frenchman leaned forward to draw a hand across my cheek and whispered, with a lecherous wink, ”Ah, you are a lovely young thing. Best not to tempt me with that question!” And when I recoiled, he laughed.
”/want nothing with you. You are simply a means to an end for me. As I said, your safety is a.s.sured. Those who await you merely wish to ... embrace you into their bosom.”
I pondered this indigestible news a time, then asked, ”Where are you taking me?”
”At the moment? Brussels.” He held me for a moment with his bright blue gaze, as piercing and curious as a precocious raven's. ”Enough of questions for the moment. You are tired.
Rest.”
The suggestion had an immediate effect on me; I realised at once that I was indeed quite drowsy and fell into a doze.
A sharp knock at the door to our compartment woke me sometime later. My companion leapt to his feet, for the first time demonstrating anxiety, and, drawing a small pistol from his coat, pressed against the door. In a voice deep, threatening, and unquestionably male, he challenged, ”Yes?”
I know not how to describe the voice that replied, save to call it masculine and unearthly beautiful; the voice of an angel.
”It is I. The prince.”
The mistrust etched on my captor's face transformed into surprise and awe. He opened the door at once-only a crack, not far enough to permit even a child entry. Nonetheless, the visitor entered, first growing as two-dimensionally thin as a sheet of paper before my very gaze, then slipping through that crack with impossible ease.
How shall I describe him? His appearance was like his voice: angelic, utterly compelling. His hair was raven, streaked with grey, his eyes the darkest green I have ever seen; and his skin was so translucendy pale that the light caught it and glinted pink, pale turquoise, silver, like mother of pearl.
He was, quite simply, magnificent, and neither I nor my companion could take our eyes from him. Yet mixed with that uncorruptible beauty was an aura of sly fierceness, of danger, as though we beheld a bejewelled serpent-graceful, diamond-brilliant, lovely, poiso-nously evil. / An angel, indeed: Lucifer.
”Prince,” my captor whispered, at once lowering the pistol and bowing from his shoulders; then he gestured with his empty hand at me. His demeanour remained one of awe and subservience, but I detected a faint note of fear as well. ”As you can see, I have done as you asked. He is unharmed and well. But I did not expect to see you until-”
A gleaming alabaster hand appeared from the depths of the prince's ebony cloak and sliced the air in a gesture for silence. ”There is no time for the expected.” And he turned and, for a long moment, studied me.
Guessing him to be the instigator of my absurd abduction, I glared back at him with hatred.
But he looked on me with such utter unmasked adoration, such sorrowful yearning, that my fury gave way to astonishment. And then he released a long, low sigh, upon which rode a single word-nay, a heartfelt prayer: ”Stefan.”
Clearly this dazzling stranger knew me; even more clearly, he loved me. Yet his very presence p.r.i.c.ked the skin at the nape of my neck.
Reluctant, he turned from me at last and faced my captor. ”So. The time has come for your payment, then.” And he reached into his pocket and drew forth a black velvet pouch.
The female man recoiled from it with contempt, and though his voice trembled faintly, his posture was one of pure determination. ”Do not insult me with your offer of lucre, sir; you know my price.”
The prince tilted his head and gazed steadily at him with dark glittering emerald eyes; I could think of nothing but that jewelled viper, coiling to strike. I tensed, straining at my bonds, at the sense of imminent violence.
But its eruption was at once halted by the swift movement of my captor. I expected him to fire the pistol; to my amazement, he tore away his starched collar and the top of his s.h.i.+rt to reveal a neck as white and smooth as a woman's, without the slightest sign of an Adam's apple. But its perfection was marred by a small red mark of some kind; from my lower perspective in the dim evening light, I took it to be a razor cut, from shaving-though the skin was free from stubble or any trace of a beard.
”It is this,” my captor said. ”That you finish what you have started. That you grant me immortality.” And he proffered that soft skin to the prince, whose eyes blazed at the sight of it-indeed, literally reddened, as though the blood had rushed there.
With blinding speed, the prince struck-like a serpent, with fangs bared, and fastened his mouth upon the white neck. At that instant, the man cried out softly, indignantly, and despite his earlier willingness, he struggled. But the prince held him fast, and all struggle soon ceased; his breathing slowed, and his eyes glazed, and he soon fell into a trance.
I watched as the prince leaned over his victim, convinced that the chloroform had somehow induced hallucinations-or that I had fallen victim to a brain fever that had fabricated this entire wild episode from my imagination.
Hallucination or no, I stared with horrified fascination as the prince sucked the wound on my captor's neck for an eternity, until the former's pale face grew ruddy, and the latter's white as chalk. I stared until the victim swooned and fell, and stared still as the predator swept him up into his arms and continued to drink.
At last the prince raised his flushed face from the man draped in his arms and laid the body gently upon the seat across from mine.
He turned towards me. I tensed again, expecting the same fate to befall me and knowing myself still too groggy from the chloroform to put up a successful fight.
Instead, he knelt beside me, his face so close to mine that I could smell his warm, blood- tainted breath, and ordered: ”Turn, Stefan. Let me loose your fetters.”
What was I to have done? I turned and felt, impossibly, his cold fingers squeeze between my wrists and the tight manacle that bound me.
He grunted; and with two near-simultaneous snaps, I was free. I faced him again and saw on the seat beside me two steel handcuffs, broken in two.
”What do you want with me?” I demanded with a bravado I did not feel, as I rubbed my tingling hands.
”Just this,” he whispered, and I am not certain what transpired then: only that his eyes loomed larger until I saw nothing else in my line of vision; then they loomed larger still and became the entire world.
Into that world, a flash of metal entered: a small, sharp knife. I remember an eternal instant when that knife poised above my upturned hand, against the backdrop of those dark, compelling eyes. And then the swift pain of a finger p.r.i.c.k, and that finger squeezed, nursed, milked so that it rained bright fat drops of blood upon his waiting open palm.
He licked it-no, that description is altogether inadequate. He partook of it, as though it were the sacred Host, the most consecrated wine. And the look on his face just after: that image shall remain with me forever. With an expression of the most infinite bliss and love and sorrow, he closed his eyes, causing a single diamond tear to course down his cheek.
The knife flashed again; but it was his blood now spilled upon my palm.
G.o.d help me, I drank. Drank, and gagged on the bitter taste of death and brine. But beneath that bitterness had been something sweet and utterly intoxicating.
I stared back at my benefactor, aghast that anyone should love me so fiercely.
”We are tied now, Stefan,” he said tenderly. ”If ever you have need, summon me in your mind, and I shall come. Morning or evening, awake or asleep, if danger threatens and you call, I shall come. No ill can befall you without my knowledge.”
”But I swear most solemnly: As long as you will it, your mind remains your own. I myself have experienced the horrors that another's mental control can produce; never will I violate your privacy without your call.”
And as he spoke, his visage wavered slightly, and his face changed; the features grew less severe, younger, the eyes flecked with brown. Even the silver vanished from his coal-black hair.
”Who are you?” I breathed.
A lightning flash of grief contorted his face; for a moment, I thought he would yield to it and weep. But he composed himself and in that handsome voice at last replied: ”I am your father.”
Chapter 6.
The Journal of Stefan Van Helsing, Cont'd.
I had no difficulty accepting that I was not the son of Jan Van Helsing, for I had always known that he had adopted me, an abandoned infant, out of kindness. My childhood had been pure happiness; yet as a boy, I often wondered about my real parents and dreamt of the day I would be approached by a kindly man with dark eyes and hair who said:Stefan . . . I am your father.
But to hear from this frightening stranger that I was his son-this was much to bear.
Yet I believed him; believed because, in tasting his blood, I felt the depth of his love for me.
Believed despite the strange murder I had witnessed, despite the fantastic tale he told: That we were the heirs of a centuries-old monster from an untamed foreign land, and that that monster sought me in hopes of corrupting me, for my d.a.m.ned soul would purchase his continuance. This was the prince of which my captor spoke; and when my father, then a young man like me, attempted to die in innocence in hopes of destroying the monster, he was transformed by the prince's bite into one himself.
Writing it down, it seems all too wild; part of me rejects it utterly. But then a surge of the love I felt during our b.l.o.o.d.y exchange returns, and I am convinced.