A Dance in Blood Velvet (28 page)

“How did you survive?” said Katti.

“Charlotte saved me. She gave me her blood.”

“Of course. And then you brought Kristian here deliberately?”

“Yes,” Karl said without emotion. “He was so easy to deceive, suspected nothing until it was too late. Once he became too weak to move, I drained his blood to save myself. And when he was paralysed, we cut him to pieces to make sure.”

“God,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t have believed you, if I hadn’t come here myself. This is a terrible place...”

The tunnel was chilly, dank, unpleasant, but the perilous atmosphere felt muted.

“Last time it was far worse. I wonder if the wraiths sated themselves on Kristian; took out their rage on a single vampire?”

A few hundred yards into the tunnel, they rounded a bend to a wider section where the earth floor was churned up.

“This was where we buried him,” said Karl.

“Where?” Katti seemed calm, but a tremor in her voice betrayed her.

“Everywhere,” said Karl. “I told you, we dismembered him.”

As he spoke, he stared at a pile of crumpled blackness lying against the wall, half-buried. It reflected no light from the torch. He bent down to touch it.

Dark coarse material, saturated with damp and mould. Kristian’s coat.

“Dear God,” he whispered.

“You can’t want to do this,” Katerina said faintly.

Karl ignored her. He propped the torch in the soil and began to dig with his bare hands.

Worms, grit, sparkling bits of mica stuck to his flesh; his skin gleamed through the filth like alabaster. He burrowed into the ground, with an image of a vampire digging itself out of its grave; an old superstition that still retained horrible resonance. Katerina watched, wide-eyed, as if she wanted to help but could not move.

He found bones. Soil-caked, no flesh left on them. A skeletal hand with a plain gold ring that fell off as he lifted it; unmistakably Kristian’s. Horror filled him. Kristian’s clothes, wet and rotting... his naked bones...
But his skull, where is his skull?

“Karl, stop!” Katerina’s voice sliced through the freezing veil of mist before his eyes. “Please stop.”

Karl sat back on his heels, hands black with earth. He was gasping for breath like a human; held himself still until the feeling subsided.

“I can’t find his head.”

“It must be here. Oh, leave it, come away.”

“But Katti, don’t you understand? If his skull isn’t here - if some vampire came and took his head - they might have resurrected him!”

“No. No, Karl.” She knelt beside him. “You cut the skull into pieces, didn’t you? How would his acolytes know he was here, and how could they survive this poisonous place to find his remains?”

He let out a deep sigh. A nightmare. But he thought,
I will not give in. I shall be like ice, detached, as I have always been...

Karl stood, lifting Katerina with him.

“Please, let’s leave,” she said.

“Not yet.”

She frowned at him, disturbed.

He said, “Every trace of doubt or dread we feel is a victory for him, whether he is alive or not. We cannot give him that power. There’s something else I want to find before we go.”

He led her onwards, surrounded by hideously vivid memories. Past a chamber stacked floor to ceiling with human bones, brown with age... Katerina wanted to look, but Karl pulled her away. He was waiting for the deathly drop of temperature and the heart-stopping wails of the dead to begin...

Further on, another chamber. Torchlight revealed the bare walls and candle-blackened ceiling of a long-deserted monk’s cell. Karl stared at an ancient table that squatted in the centre.

“It’s gone.”

“What’s wrong?” said Katerina. “What are you looking for?”

“Someone has been here,” Karl said at last. “There was a black book lying on that table. Charlotte and I had no time to look at it. That’s why we planned to come back, to see what the vampire who once lived here had written. Who could have taken it? To my knowledge, only Kristian, Charlotte and I ever saw the Book.”

Katerina walked into the cell and stared at the greyish oblong where the book had lain. “Humans,” she said. “They always leave a trace of warmth behind.”

Karl played the torch over the floor, then flicked it off. Easier to see without the dancing shadows. Footprints in the tunnel floor led in the direction of the manor. He, too, caught the scent of humans... too faint to be recent. “These tracks are months old. So they may have taken the Book at any time within the past year.”

Katerina touched the cracked surface of the table. As she did so, the whole chamber seemed to vibrate with a scream barely inside the threshold of vampire hearing. She shivered.

“Come away,” said Karl. “Don’t touch anything. The presences have lost their potency, but they’re still here.”

The quickest way out was through the manor house. As they made their way towards the steps that led up to the cellar, she said, “Can’t we enter the Crystal Ring?”

“I wouldn’t try it here,” said Karl. “This place seems to exist in both realms. Kristian tried to escape into the Ring, but when I followed, something held us like tar, and the wraiths were everywhere.”

“Don’t,” she said, shuddering. “I believe you. This place is abhorrent.”

They ascended steep narrow steps into the cellar; more memories. Karl noted that the chest he’d left concealing the trapdoor had been moved, the cellar door left ajar... and as they climbed more stairs into the kitchen, he saw that a leaded window had been forced.

“The house is derelict,” he said. “Anyone might have broken in.”

“Let’s leave,” said Katerina.

“Yes...” Karl hesitated, looking around the shadowy medieval kitchen... he recalled the ringing echo of Anne’s and David’s laughter; remembered Charlotte walking fearlessly into the cellar’s depths as if she shared affinity with its secrets...

“You’re finding it hard to be here, aren’t you?” said Katerina. “At least... you wish she was here with you, instead of me.”

Karl didn’t reply. He took her hand, then turned and wrapped one arm around her, feeling her breath against his neck, her hair - not soft like Charlotte’s, but strong and smooth - between his fingers. “Katti.”

“If only she understood how much you love her,” Katerina said against his neck.

“She does.”

“Don’t be so sure. Our minds tell us we can love more than one person, but our hearts won’t believe it; and there’s always one who is more precious than any other. You want to be with Charlotte, and I...” He felt her throat move, suppressing tears. “I want to find Andreas.”

“We will,” said Karl, drawing her into the Crystal Ring.

As the world dissolved to dark silver around them, she said, “Where now?”

“Schloss Holdenstein.”

“Oh, not that place! Must we?”

“It’s almost our last resort. I vowed I’d never set foot there again, but if there
are
any answers, we may find them at the castle. And I’ll call the others to meet us there; Ilona, Pierre, Stefan and Niklas.”

“Karl...”

“If Kristian survived, where would he go, except back to his old lair?”

* * *

That evening, when Charlotte returned to Violette, she went straight into the ballerina’s rooms without knocking. Since becoming a vampire, human conventions often went out of her mind. She sensed two humans inside; the dancer and her maid, Geli.

Violette, in a long dressing gown of mauve silk, was lying on a huge sofa of almost the same shade. The maid sat on a stool beside her, pressing packs of ice onto the dancer’s knees.

She looked exhausted. She pressed one hand to her colourless forehead as if to smooth the lines of tension. A bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and an empty glass stood on a small table beside her.

As Charlotte walked in, Violette raised her head and blinked, arrested by the sight of her. Her lips parted. “I thought you weren’t coming back!”

“Well, I have.” Suddenly she no longer felt calm. She walked to the dancer and stood over her. “Violette, what have I done to hurt you? I’ve stayed in the background, I’ve only tried to help; I’ve never said an angry word! You had no right -”

“I know,” said Violette. “Don’t say any more. I’m sorry. Enough, Geli; take Frau Alexander’s coat.”

The maid removed the ice packs and Violette sat up, swinging her feet onto a footstool to make room for Charlotte on the sofa. As she did so, Charlotte observed that she was slightly drunk.

“Sit down. Will you have a glass of champagne? Geli, open a fresh bottle and bring another glass. Then you can go.”

She had the strangest impression that Violette wasn’t sorry to see her. If anything, she seemed glad.

“Something to celebrate?” Charlotte asked as the slender Austrian girl obeyed her instructions.

“No. It’s just the best way to relax, don’t you find? Doesn’t ease the pain, but helps me not care.” She pressed a hand to her spine. “My damned back.” Geli hurried to bring a cushion and fussed until she was comfortable. Then she curtseyed and left them alone.

The room was like an extension of Violette’s aura; ashen purples, greys, touches of black. Everywhere damask, watered silk, velvet; huge bowls of crimson roses shedding their petals, vases of white lilies. Fringed shawls thrown over the lamps made the light soft and lace-dappled. It reminded Charlotte of the house she shared with Karl.

Charlotte accepted a champagne flute and gazed at chains of bubbles in the straw-gold liquid, while the dancer half-drained her own glass. She seemed tipsy yet too overstrung to relax. Perhaps she was ready for a confrontation at last.

Violette said, “I want to apologise for last night. You’re right, I had no cause to speak to you so harshly. Can we forget it?”

“It’s a little difficult to forget.”

“Then let’s not talk about it.” The dancer began to describe her day’s work, about
Swan Lake
and the technical difficulties of one ballet as compared to another... but her voice was dull, half-hearted. All the time, they were both aware that something more important needed saying. Like trying to catch fish with bare hands; the truth flashed and slithered away between them.

Charlotte could not bear this to go on.

She’d lost control of her own domain, lost Karl’s undivided love. That was why her association with Violette had grown from idle fascination to a central test of her own power. Regaining her true self, by proving she could control the dancer, had become vital; dangerously so. For when Charlotte found she couldn’t work her magic on the ballerina, she’d been shattered.

She wondered if similar feelings had embittered Ilona. For it was exactly this frustration that enabled her, with callous ease, to drink Janacek’s energy and thus condemn him to death.

Now she felt light-headed, as if she were drunk too. She pretended to sip from her own glass, while keeping Violette’s refilled. Violette never refused, only drank with steady intensity. She languished in the corner of the sofa, silk draped over her elegant, muscular legs. Her hair was dishevelled, a grille of black silk through which her eyes glimmered like clouded moons; introspective yet enticing. She was so beautiful. Her loveliness and her self-protective coolness had a stunning effect on Charlotte. Her desire to seize Violette in her arms pulled like gravity, but she held back. She must always hold back.

Suddenly Violette said, “You aren’t listening. Oh, forget work,” she sighed. Then, sharply, “Why are you only pretending to drink?”

The question took Charlotte off-guard. “You’re more in need of it than me.”

“How kind. I don’t ask for this kindness, yet you give it anyway. Why?”

“Don’t you think you are worthy of it?”

Violette looked away, as if Charlotte had touched a long-buried thorn. “Do you know, you never answer a question directly?”

“Neither do you,” said Charlotte.

“Always another question...” She was quiet for a moment, turning the glass flute between her fingers. “I have many admirers, people who shower me with love-notes and flowers. Women as much as men. Famous actresses, some of them; you will know them from the theatre and the movies. They wear men’s suits and look divine and make no attempt to keep their lifestyles secret. They send me violets - for my name, they say, even though I know perfectly well what violets signify. I never respond. I can’t work out why you are different.”

“I approached you as a friend, not a lover.”

“I have no friends,” Violette said. “Professional associates, with whom I perform a social charade.” She slurred the words, laughed at herself. “But no friends.”

“Why not?” Charlotte thought of Anne, and the particular closeness and comfort no male lover could give. She, too, was starved of female companionship. “You need a friend who will support you, not put you under pressure, as Janacek did.”

“I can’t. I trust no one.” Violette leaned her head back; languid, but not as drunk as she wanted to be, Charlotte suspected. “I don’t like men,” she said with sudden passion. “Do you?”

“Some. I loved my father and brother... even Henry, my exhusband, in a way, but they all...”

“Betrayed you?”

“No,” said Charlotte. “I betrayed them, and they never understood why. They couldn’t forgive me. We all hurt each other very badly.”

Violette’s eyes widened. “You are human, then. You have a family.”

“Not any more.”

“Nor me.” Before Charlotte could ask her to explain, Violette said, “How did you betray them?”

“I ran away with a man they disapproved of.”

The dancer laughed. “How banal! I’m disappointed. I thought you were a spirit of some kind, a sylph. Why aren’t you with that man now?”

“I am, but... I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Here we are, then, both preferring to keep our secrets.” Her tone was nightshade-bitter. “What is there to do, if we can’t talk? You’re here only because you’ve fallen out with your lover, and I -”

“What, Violette? Tell me.”

“What’s the point? Confide in someone and you become vulnerable. They use your pain as a weapon against you. I have no friends because I have only one passion: to dance.”

“No, you’re only telling half the truth. You dance to blank out your pain, don’t you? It stops you thinking of anything else.”