A Dance in Blood Velvet (3 page)

“You didn’t deceive me. You aren’t good enough at it. I like you, actually; I can see why David trusts you.”

Her expression captivated him. She looked solemn, her deep-rose mouth turned down at the corners, her glorious eyes smouldering like those of an actress on film.

“I wish I could have bluffed it out,” he said. “You don’t want to be found, do you?”

“How perceptive,” she murmured. Milner smiled. He felt a growing rapport between them, warmth swelling into magnetism. “And I won’t be found. Come here.”

She turned towards him, one hand on the balcony; open, receptive. So she had married one man, run off with another, and now while her lover was out she was trying to buy his silence with seduction! So what? She was lovely.

He went to her, drawn by the curve of her arms. More amethyst than grey, her eyes were expanding to fill his vision. Glittering. Was she crying?

“John,” she said.

He put his arms around her. Christ, she was cold! “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“But I want to.”

“Come inside. You’re freezing.”

“Then warm me.” Suddenly her voice trembled. “Warm me.”

He bent to kiss her but she drew back, avoiding his lips. She opened her mouth as if in pain, and he saw how long and sharp her canine teeth were, seeming to lengthen as he watched. Even then he was too slow to understand.

“This is why he mustn’t find me,” she whispered. She dropped her face onto his shoulder and he felt her lips move against his neck. “This is why!” She was shuddering. The faintest groan came from her throat. “Ohh...”

And she bit him. Not playfully, not even in anger, but with an awful, hungry determination. Her teeth broke through the skin, piercing flesh and muscle and blood vessels. The pain was vicious, frightening, nightmarishly weird. Her mouth was a steel trap on his throat... A sick feeling spread from his stomach to fill his whole body with pins and needles. He was floating and the sensation was unbearable. He was dying.

Lights spun around him, dazzling and blinding. There was a deep, throaty roar all around him, the roar of the Devil as it came to claim his soul. The whole world slopped around him like floodwater. Only one thing remained clear and steady: the woman’s face.

As lovely as the moon, her lips red with his blood, she looked sadly down at him. He clutched at her, but she pushed his hand away.

“I’ll die...” he rasped.

“No, you won’t,” she said calmly.

“I’ll die if I don’t see you again.”

She blinked, her eyes briefly shaded by her smoky lids and luxurious eyelashes. Then she whispered, “You will never see me again. You have never seen me at all. Forget me. Because if you ever tell David, or if you ever cross my path again, I’ll kill you. I promise.”

Who’s David?

He couldn’t even remember the woman’s name. Who was she? She couldn’t abandon him to the Devil who was storming through the night to take him.

“No. Don’t go!” he cried, terrified.

She touched a luminous hand to his hair and said, “I’m sorry.”

She drew away, watching him with sad affection. Then, like the moon passing behind a cloud, she vanished.

* * *

Sometimes Karl would drift through the Crystal Ring at ground level, lost in fascination that another dimension, fitting the Earth like a glove, could exist. A dream-realm that only vampires could enter. To vanish from mortal eyes, and walk unseen through their dwellings... Irresistible, even though reality became a warped ghost of itself, and the only light was a sinister, luminous twilight.

Houses, trees, every barrier gave like cobwebs to Karl’s unearthly body. Even the mountains above the quiet town were like a crust of ash over a dead fire. Nothing was solid here. Nothing could be trusted. At times Karl loathed the Crystal Ring, because it was terrifying, impossible to understand, and yet part of him. Part of the incomprehensible, twisted darkness that had made him a vampire.

For all the freedom the Ring gives us,
he thought,
it exacts payment. No certainty, no comfort, no rest. I resent it because it demands love; and I love its wildness, its refusal to conform to any theory. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps the Devil. Or, as Charlotte asserts, the human subconscious made tangible.

Karl, an eternal cynic, was more inclined to believe Charlotte than anyone.

It was painful to think too deeply, and unwise to keep asking, after all this time, why he’d been chosen to become undead: a creature who stood apart from humanity but needed them to feed his dark appetite. Pointless to worry what the same metamorphosis had done to Charlotte. They’d both known the cost of staying together.

Karl smiled, thinking of her. Hadn’t their glorious, destructive love made any sacrifice worthwhile? Even the sacrifice of the victims Charlotte now needed? In truth, any vampire claiming a conscience was a hypocrite.

The strangest thing,
he thought,
is that she hardly seems changed at all. She insists she’s always been the same inside: amoral. It took only the vampire’s kiss to bring her home. Yet I know she has changed, is still changing... how could it be otherwise? The look in her eyes, the way she is with her victims...

Charlotte had wanted to meet the stranger, John Milner, again. Karl had not.
Was I wrong to let her go alone? To find out what he really wanted, she said. Only that.

Karl moved slowly, thinking of Charlotte and taking little notice of his surroundings. He saw a human walking towards him through the real world; not solid, but a bright corona against the dim folds of the Ring. A signature of life written in crackling energy.

A second later, Karl knew he was being followed.

Held still by a rush of life-or-death peril, he was aware of some
thing
that seemed distant, but at the same time close and threatening. He felt presences, an impression of tall shadows watching him. Their gaze struck through his defences to stir a primeval fear that he thought had died with his humanity.

Instinct took over. Karl stepped out of the Ring, felt the world snap into solidity. He found himself in a narrow medieval street. A human cannoned into him and reeled away with a cry of shock.

A young man with spectacles, oiled hair, the dull look of a clerk about him, stood gaping at Karl, frozen.

Karl’s fear dissipated as he cursed his own carelessness. Normally he would never step from the Ring in clear view of a mortal. It was unlike him to be alarmed by his own imagination, but the wretched man had a worse fright as he took in the vampire’s gleaming skin and uncanny stillness with flat panic in his eyes. Karl regretted the situation, while still finding it faintly, horribly amusing.

The young clerk was backing up, angry now. Also embarrassed, as if caught slipping away from a guilty tryst. He said in Swiss German, “Good God, sir, you frightened the life out of me!”

Karl did not reply. He simply watched the man without emotion, as if watching a bird in a cage. He saw him as a core of frantic life, smelled his salty heat, heard the blood pulsing through his heart.

Karl’s hands shot out and seized the clerk’s shoulders. His coat felt rough, releasing scents of camphor and dust. He struggled ineffectually, without sound, like a comic actor in a film. At the same time, Karl was aware of lighted windows in the old houses, the babble of voices, the banal struggle of life continuing everywhere. Drizzle fell from a strip of wet, slaty sky. But through the soft rain of impressions, the only reality was the ruthless, throbbing heat of his thirst.

* * *

Charlotte spent an hour helping Mr Milner down the forest path and into his car, then driving him to a quiet street near his hotel in Interlaken. Returning to the chalet took minutes. She simply stepped into the Crystal Ring and arrowed back as if winged.

The drawing room coalesced around her. The fire still crackled and lights burned under their Tiffany shades. The man’s smell lingered; a trace of tobacco, hair oil, whisky. And blood. Red stains dotted the carpet by the balcony doors.

She stared at the spots as if in a trance. Although his delicious blood-heat filled her, she couldn’t bear to recall the way he’d looked at her afterwards: with a mixture of terror and obsession, as if she’d become his entire world.

Charlotte wondered how long his madness would last. She had liked him - almost loved him, as she took long exquisite sips of his blood. Although her bite had unhinged his mind, as a vampire’s bite usually did, this didn’t seem to matter. How was it possible to feel both tenderness and indifference, at the same time?

She went to the chair where he’d sat, and picked up both pages of the letter. Kneeling by the fire again, she read the rest.

While I know you didn’t intend to tell your family of your search attempt, I’ve a feeling you might change your mind once I reassure you that she is (to all appearances) well and happy. Even if Dr Neville won’t relent his decision to disown her, it may still have a beneficial effect on his health to know. Even if - from what you tell me of your father! - he won’t admit it.

Anyway, my friend, it’s your decision. I feel I’m very close to bringing you the good news you want to hear.

The letter ended there, halfway down the page.

Charlotte’s hands fell to her lap with the letter held tight. She bowed her head and wept.

In heaven’s name, David, why did you do this? You know what Karl is, and what he made me. You know I can never go back.

Her family had adored Karl, until they discovered the unholy truth of his nature. And for continuing to love him, for consenting to become like him, Charlotte had earned their rejection. She couldn’t blame them, but it was against her will that she’d had to reject them in turn. Now to learn that David was trying to find her, that he still couldn’t bear to give up, caused her anguish. News of her father’s ill health was worse. She was partly, if not wholly, responsible.
How would it help him recover,
she thought,
to hear that I’m still with Karl?

The price of being with Karl was to leave my human life behind. Oh, David, what good could come of you or Anne or Father seeing me again? Gods, why can’t you let go
...
and why can’t I?

But I can. I must.

She crumpled the letter and pushed it into the fire. Flames leapt. With the poker she worried at the paper until it was ash, black flakes spiralling up the chimney. Searing away another link with her family, as she must destroy every link until they were all gone.

Tears blurred the gleam of the red garnet on her wedding finger; the ring Karl had given her. “For eternity,” he’d said. The blood-crystal ring that held her.

A year and a half they’d been together, though their mutual obsession had yet to fade into comfortable familiarity. How could it? The first time she had truly
seen
him, seen the incandescent beauty of danger - that moment sang in her mind forever. And she’d nearly lost him so many times. Now, whenever they were apart, there was always a tug of fear whispering,
you may never see him again.

Then, blessedly, she realised she was not alone.

She sensed Karl’s presence; not warm and messily radiant like a human, but night-dark and self-contained. He placed a hand on her hair.

“Charlotte,” he said. “What is it?”

She sighed. Her tears had ended. Now she felt hollow. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does. How can a piece of paper upset you so much that you burn it? Tell me.”

Not a demand, only gentle concern. Karl had always been like this with her, before she knew he was a vampire and after. Incongruous, that he could be so kind. Part of his fascination, of course.

“A letter I couldn’t allow to be sent.” She rose to her feet, brushing crumbs of ash from her dress. They left grey trails, like tearstains. Not wanting to confess, she made to walk past, but he placed his hand on her shoulder. His fine, long fingers felt warm with stolen blood.

“Did you bring him here?”

A dart of apprehension. She wanted to forget everything in the warmth of Karl’s arms, the ravenous pleasure of kisses. Instead she told him about John Milner and the letter.

As she spoke, Karl took pins from her hair and loosened the waves over her shoulders. She loved the touch of his hands. But he did so almost absently, his expression dark. His disapproval infuriated and distressed her. So lovely, his face; the fine bones of an aristocrat, the beauty of a renaissance saint, large, deep-amber eyes under dark brows. To see anything but love there was a knife through her heart. And if she did overreact passionately to everything about him, she didn’t care; at least she knew she was alive and in love.

As she finished, he glanced at the balcony window. His full, soft hair, almost black in shadow, was sidelit by the fire to auburn and blood red. She knew he’d noticed blood spots on the carpet.

“You were seeing Mr Milner tonight to discover who he was. Not to feed on him.”

“I didn’t kill him!” she said. “I couldn’t let him send the letter, or remember he’d met me. My family have to let me go, as I did them. Do you think I did the wrong thing?”

Karl paused. “It must have been hard for you, dearest. God knows, we are not made of stone.”

“But,” she said sharply. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“We agreed not to prey on guests. We should never feed in our own home. It’s not necessary... and can be dangerous.”

“Do you have to be so calm about this?” Charlotte flared. Since the day she became a vampire, there had been this conflict between them, never fully expressed. “Sometimes I wish you’d be angry with me, so I could argue back!”

“I’ve never noticed you have any difficulty arguing with me,” Karl said drily.

“It’s
your
rule, not to feed on people you know. What difference does it make if you know their name, or even feel affection for them?”

“Did you feel affection for this friend of David’s?” Karl did not sound jealous. Sometimes she couldn’t fathom his emotions at all, which frustrated her beyond reason.

“I liked him. Unlike you, I can’t be impersonal!”