Anno Dracula (69 page)

Gorse crouched, shoulders swelling, jacket-seams parting.

‘Our Holly’s not the only shifter in the room.’

His face expanded, filled out with fur.

Geneviève backed against the unit front door. The wall behind her was more substantial than the partition. A fair-sized animal charging at her would crush her against it rather than shove her through into the courtyard and the swimming pool. She tried to work the door handle, but her smashed wrists rendered her fingers useless clumps. She was bleeding from her sides, where barbs from the Holly thing’s knees had sunk in.

‘Say goodnight, Geneviève,’ growled Gorse.

Kate opened her dry mouth and bit into the British vampire’s ankle, blunt fangs sinking through wool to scrape the skin. She didn’t have the strength to close her jaws. She was choking on an argyle sock.

Gorse looked down at her, surprised and annoyed. A nasty smile played around his fur-fringed lips. He had comical Big Bad Wolf eyebrows.

‘I’d better cut out the bog-trotter’s heart first,’ he said.

He bent down, angling the silver-coated scalpel.

But Kate wasn’t just in her own mind. The golden thread still ran.

Holly’s mind, where Kate nestled as a passenger, was crowded, but there was a serene patch of self, where the real Holly lived, the girl she had been before Dracula found her, before she had even turned.

There was a switch. Kate threw it.

‘Let me go,’ said Kate, through Holly.

Gorse was distracted. He looked across the room at Holly and saw Kate.

The barest pulse of Kate remained in her own form.

‘Now
,’ insisted Holly-Kate.

Gorse moved fast for such a bulked-out vampire, blade arcing ahead of him. But Kate had Holly sidestep. On the pass, she tore at his ribs with six-inch finger-daggers, shredding through his heavy jacket and raking meat to the skin.

The silver scalpel bit into the wall.

Someone in the next unit shouted for them to keep the noise down.

Geneviève could hardly see Holly for Gorse’s huge shape. But the shifter was Kate again, completely this time, with two eyes and the fighting Irish in her. Geneviève held her elbows close to her sides and tucked her injured forearms out of the way. Then she launched a series of kicks at Gorse’s rump, back and head, stabbing higher and higher with her shoe-tip. She was wearing the comfortable sneakers she liked to travel in, but put enough force into the kicks to make them seem like steel-tipped combat boots. There was a crack. Thick red gruel seeped through the mat of fur on the back of Gorse’s skull.

He turned around and stared hate at her.

‘The French they are a funny race,’ he chanted, ‘they fight with their feet...’

Geneviève flew at him, mouth open, fangs extended.

‘...and they fuck with their face.’

He put a meaty palm in front of her chin and braced himself to snap her head off. She slipped round it, incisors sinking into his hand just below the root of the little finger, then scraping over his wrist, clamping tighter, scoring two red lines through his sleeve and arm.

She was inside his guard and could have torn his throat and face if her hands were any use.

Holly-Kate’s hands weren’t injured. She had claws in the soft part of Gorse’s neck, wriggling in deeper past tendon, bone and vein.

Geneviève got her shoulder under Gorse’s chest and heaved him up off the floor, shifting his balance. He pressed down on her, bearing on her spine as Holly had borne on her wrists. New agonies clamoured in the small of her back and up along her spinal cord. If she cracked again, she would be out of the game for good.

Gorse had his scalpel back and his arm raised.

She saw him thinking, deciding which woman was the bigger threat. Holly-Kate won, and the scalpel descended towards the back of her neck. Her hands were deep in Gorse’s throat, occupied.

Geneviève reached up and put her hand in the way.

One advantage was that she hurt so much already that it could hardly feel any worse. No, that wasn’t true.

The silver knife stuck through her palm, and its point slid out between her knuckles. The weapon’s descent was, for a moment, hardly slowed. Geneviève’s useless hand was carried with the thrust, to be pinned against Holly-Kate’s jugular.

Gorse snarled.

The pain in her hand, and the poison shock of silver, was enough to evict her from her own body. She hurtled away, looking down from above into the cramped space where, shoved into a corner, four living dead folk were locked in blood and pain. Then, pulled back, she found herself screaming.

There was serious hammering on the door.

Holly-Kate took one red hand out of Gorse’s neck and held Geneviève’s swollen wrist, gripping to realign snapped bones. Geneviève’s skewered hand was almost black. Holly-Kate put a thumb to the handle of the scalpel and pressed, shoving the entire blade and an inch of handle out through the back of Geneviève’s hand.

Geneviève understood.

Gorse’s jacket hung open. Geneviève roughly angled her hand so the point of the scalpel was over the top pocket of his tweed waistcoat, above the heart. It took all the strength of three women to force the blade through the material, between the ribs. But the silver point sank in.

‘The Devil take all vampire bitches,’ said Gorse.

His mouth opened, drooling red. His fur vanished. He was just a once-handsome middle-aged Englishman, a roguish uncle with cold, cold eyes.

He was a deadweight.

Geneviève’s hand was an inflated horror. She tugged, feeling the handle - unsilvered, so less of an agony than the thin blade - pass between the bones. She pulled away and was free, then collapsed into a chair. Holly-Kate held up the dead vampire, whose face was flaking away.

The door opened. Crosby was there, ahead of a towering warm fellow in a dressing gown. The complaining neighbour.

Crosby gravely assessed the damage to the unit. She smelled all the vampire blood. She saw the stranger holding up a truly dead corpse, the naked human remnant strewn across the floor, and the guest holding a venom-bloated right hand.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

‘I could do with some clean blood,’ said Geneviève. ‘To fend off silver-rot. I’ve hurt myself a bit.’

‘I’ll have some “golden” sent over.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s no problem.’

Crosby led the warm guest away.

Geneviève breathed again, her mind fuzzy with exhaustion but periodically cleared by waves of pain.

Gorse was dropped.

Holly was completely Kate now. Kate in a new body. She stood over the straggle of flesh where she used to live. Then, a shiver came. A flash of Holly’s eyes, but only a flash.

‘I may have to say goodbye now, Gené.’

Geneviève’s vision blurred. She formed an adieu in her mouth, but a pulse of pain stopped her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

She drank half the jug of ‘golden’ Crosby sent over, and used the rest to wash out her wound in the tiny bathroom sink. The hole closed over, but the veins were black. Geneviève’s wrists were better now, but silver-poisoning was serious. She wouldn’t play the piano again soon. She’d taken it up two centuries ago, becoming a virtuoso in thirty years of intense, obsessive work before the craze passed and she more or less abandoned it, save for a brief fling with ragtime in the ’teens. She didn’t think she’d lose the hand, but she’d have arthritic twinges for a long while.

The blood - real ‘golden’, not the commercial stuff sold in cartons -was on the house. Geneviève realised she had a protector. Someone must have put the invitation on her bed. Someone apart from the management of the Le Reve was paying Crosby, who’d also arranged for a ‘cleaner’ - a dapper fellow with a trimmed moustache - to have what was left of Ernest Ralph Gorse quietly gathered up and spirited away, presumably to the nearest drac factory. She was not comfortable to be in debt to an anonymous, if guessable worthy, but the blood was a godsend. Without it, she’d be shopping on Rodeo Drive for a claw prosthesis.

So they’d worked for Dracula after all - disposing of the inconvenient, used-up Gorse. Had John Alucard known that when he had her protected in Baltimore? This was what it was like having a King of the Cats again. Being stuck in a giant web.

She stepped back into the bedroom-living room. The unit was one big space now, with mess on the floor. Holly and Kate lay on the bed in a tangle. They seemed more like Young Kate and Old Kate. The old woman, the original, was comatose, but the copy was alert, active. Kate was struggling to stay in control. Holly was asleep, but stirring.

‘I can’t hang on much longer,’ Kate said.

‘You’re going to have to let go. I think you have to be in your own head for this to work.’

Kate’s face showed distaste. Then it was slack, a Kate mask on Holly’s face.

‘You have something of my friend’s,’ said Geneviève, to Holly. ‘Something she needs back.’

Swiftly, she sat on the bed, her uninjured hand against Holly’s neck. Her pale eyes looked out from Kate’s fading face. She would not be Kate much longer.

Geneviève could kill the woman relatively easily. She had the blessed silver scalpel. But murder would do nobody any good.

Instead, she tore open Holly’s neck with her nails, in the place where she had been ripped earlier.

‘Kate,’ she said, ‘you have to take back from her. Do you understand?’

Kate, single eye bright in the brown-grey of her face, made a nodding motion. Blood fell on her skin, like cream. With heroic effort, she sat up and reached for the throat of the woman who had stolen her form and so much more. She made a fang-mouth and fixed herself to the vampire girl’s wound, sucking, sucking...

Geneviève held Holly down and stroked Kate’s hair as it grew back, transforming from wispy white to healthy red. As she drank, Kate regained substance, face and form. She had the angry wounds the shapeshifter had imitated, still fresh and ugly.

‘Thank you, Gené,’ she said, mouth scarlet.

‘Take more,’ Geneviève encouraged.

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

Kate made a new hole, on the other side of the shifter’s neck, and suckled delicately, more like her old self than the industrial-vacuum-cleaner-cum-giant-leech she’d needed to be to get her strength back. She drank and the scores in her face narrowed to red lines. Her missing eye emerged blinking from a vanishing ball of scar tissue.

‘Am I spoiled?’ she asked.

Faint trace-marks were across her face. Kate had no reflection, so she would never see them for herself.

‘Good as new,’ Geneviève said. ‘No scars at all.’

Kate smiled weakly, her old smile.

‘I’m blind without my specs.’

Geneviève found the glasses, which Holly had worn. One arm was bent, and the lenses were smeared. She did her best to straighten and clean them and handed them over.

With her glasses on, Kate was herself.

‘I’m also naked.’

‘I hadn’t noticed. I’ll get you a robe.’

She opened her suitcase and handed over a green silk kimono. Kate wrapped it around herself and Geneviève showed her how to tie the belt.