Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (58 page)

C
lick. The hammer was drawn back.

Kate didn’t move.

She held Jess in her arms. The girl was in a swoon. She was an awkward weight. In the moment, Kate heard Jess’s beating heart.

Keith helped Fran stand up, get her robe straight and stem the blood pouring from her nose with paper tissues. Kate had another insight. Keith, the callous predator, was more into Fran than she was him.

DeBoys took the gun away from her head and showed it to her. A revolver. The cylinder was full. Matt silver bulletheads. That ammo would settle her hash, all right. He took aim again. His floppy cuffs were damp, stained with his own bloodsweat.

She couldn’t expect help from the others.

Saying anything was likely to annoy DeBoys enough to finish her quickly. He could have Anna bite Jess, then glut himself on the snake woman, so he wouldn’t miss his fix.

The door opened. A figure was outlined.

James Eastman. Not a Black Monk. She was saved.

The newcomer stepped into the room. Lava light rolled over his face. Not James Eastman.

Caleb Croft.

The last person in the world who’d want to save her. Indeed, someone who’d be only too happy to watch her execution. He’d been cheated of it during the Terror.

If DeBoys shattered her skull with silver in front of Croft, it would be like putting a ripe red apple on the Professor’s desk. He’d get a first class degree without sitting any exams.

Kate relaxed and let Jess roll out of her arms. The unconscious girl rucked up the carpet and ended up face-down. Her sacrificial dress was backless. She had fluff and grit stuck to her bare skin and white silk-covered rump.

That might be the last thing Kate ever saw. A Van Helsing’s bum. She would have words with God — if He existed — about this turn of events. Perhaps she’d get a better answer from the Other Fellow.

‘Sir, she’s not worthy,’ DeBoys said. ‘She won’t kill.’

Croft smiled, a matter of a twitch of his dead mouth over jagged fangs. Blue and green blobs of light fought over his face, an eternal yin-yang struggle.

‘Won’t she indeed?’

‘She’s not a real vampire, sir.’

Croft chuckled, a sound like a shower of razor-blades.

Between the beats of Jessica’s heart, between the ticks of Croft’s expensive wristwatch, Kate stood up, shoulder-slammed DeBoys against the wall, took his gun away, rammed its barrel under his ribs, and shot him, firing upwards, bursting his heart with silver.

She let him go.

He took a step away from the wall and turned — red speckles grew in a circle a foot across on the back of his cape, as if the lining were leaking through — then fell.

Anna hissed. Kate pointed the gun at her.

‘You’re not a killer,’ she said, forked tongue darting.

‘I’m not a murderer,’ Kate explained. ‘I don’t believe in capital punishment. I’m not a sadist. I don’t enjoy killing, but…’

‘Kate Reed was — is — a terrorist, space kidettes,’ Croft told his remaining students. ‘If Mr DeBoys had paid attention to my lectures, he’d know that.’

‘I haven’t had to kill anyone since…’

She didn’t need to tell these people that. She had no nostalgia for the Terror or the Irish Civil War.

DeBoys looked like he didn’t believe he could die.

She wanted to kick the smug, dead bastard. He’d made her go against her principles, after all. He
had
turned her into a killer. With that annoying clarity she hoped would soon wear off, she saw she’d served Croft’s purpose too. The Black Monks’ antics brought on him attention he did not seek. She’d ended that. If anyone was Grand Master of the Black Monks now, he was.

Of course, she could shoot him and have done with it.

She’d come up in the dock just after Donna Rogers. With a few character witnesses and equivocal testimony from the other Black Monks — who would, she guessed, feel disillusioned with their masters and mentors about now — she might get away with it. Penny, for one, had skated off after worse. And Geneviève. Lord, what other vampires had done…

But, annoyingly, it remained. She was not that kind of girl.

The doorway behind Croft was crowded. A gunshot always drew attention. Everyone wanted to know what had happened. James Eastman was there, just behind Croft.

Another unwelcome intuition. She’d mistaken Croft for Eastman in silhouette because they looked alike. It wasn’t common, but some vampires could father children on warm women. Eastman called Croft Big Daddy. And hated him. Kate could only guess what the former Lord Charles Croydon, despoiler of warm wenches, had done to some poor Californian in about 1940. She gave Eastman the gun. How he used it was his decision.

Also in the crowd was Nezumi, one sock rolled down around her ankle, scratches on her face, hockey stick on her shoulder. Neither twin was there. Nezumi blew upwards, shifting her fringe out of her eyes. She flicked a glance at the dead man on the floor and nodded approval.

Kate accepted that she had saved herself, and not waited for someone else to do the dirty work. She could live with the guilt. The five or six others she’d killed had all been trying to murder her too. She’d not drunk any of their blood. She would not let being a vampire define her like that.

Now, with an audience, she needed to make a gesture.

She knelt by DeBoys, stuck her fingers in the ruin of his back, and licked them clean.

Images and impressions sparked. A big house, riding to hounds, flogging and being flogged, a
lot
of women, black candles and goat-heads, a beer glass smashing on an old man’s face, pain, pain, blood, blood, blood. and nothing.

She stood.

Anna Franklyn came at her, spitting venom. Nezumi twisted the handle of her hockey stick and drew a steel short-sword from it. She placed the edge of the blade against the snake-woman vampire’s throat. Anna closed her mouth and shed scales, showing a new, as-yet-unused face. Nezumi nodded, seriously, and Anna stepped away from the sword.

Someone must have called the police by now.

19

K
ate was lucky. Pilcher was in bed, dreaming of hippies jumping off a cliff. The call was taken by Sergeant Lynch at Shooter’s Hill. He rounded up Dixon and Regan, suspended or not, to go to St Bartolph’s.

If Sergeant Choley were on duty, Kate would be in a tumbril.

The drug was burning out of her — she didn’t know how much sharper or more perceptive or monstrous she’d have become if she’d drained Jess dry — but she could still explain what she’d worked out.

Keith, Fran and Anna were in separate interview rooms. Two were murderers, one an accomplice, but it had all been Eric DeBoys’ fault. He had intended that all the Black Monks take part in his blood-and-BOP ritual, binding them to him as accessories to murder if not in some mystic commingling of drugs and human sacrifice.

Obscurely, it was all about Croft, who would walk away free, as usual. DeBoys had been trying to get his loved-hated mentor’s attention, but also hoped to turn Croft back into the vampire he used to be, the unashamed murderer and rapist who inspired the Black Monks. James Eastman wasn’t the only member of the seminar group who saw Croft as the father who must be appeased, pleased, revered, replaced and destroyed.

DeBoys had let Nolan tag along to take photographs Croft would appear in and laid that silly trail with the scarf. It was his way of pressuring the professor. Bellaver often said some fools seemed to want to get nicked. Infusions of the blood-and-BOP mix — which had only been brewed up twice, but now had a street name: Crimson — nourished the rake’s feeling of being beyond the reach of the law.

Anna, who could most easily cut a deal, kept schtumm. She resented the way Kate had been bumped in front of her — the next victim should have been hers, though her venom in Jess’s wounds would have tipped off Dr John Hardy at the autopsy. Keith and Fran were in a classic prisoners’ pickle — each not knowing if the other had turned Queen’s Evidence. Fran would cut the deal first. Stressing DeBoys’ powers of fascination, she might be able to plead manslaughter through mind-warpery.

The truth would come out, or as much of it as these cretins could give.

DeBoys had nurtured an inflated notion of his place in history. Using Carol as a lure, he’d fascinated Nolan to provide illustrations for his unwritten biography. At that, he’d be successful: someone — not Kate! — would write a paperback about this. No one knew how completely Nolan could be un-addled, though Monserrat was claiming some success with his hypnotic procedures. The snapper was on the party scene again, with a fresh interest in fast cars and renewed enthusiasm for dolly birds.

Kate and Nezumi had to make statements. Nezumi was happy to give details of which hospital — St Swithin’s — she had sent Cathy and Pony to. As a follower of Shinto, she Brownie-swore to the truth of her testimony.

Jessica Van Helsing was in the same hospital. Michael Upton, a medical student who came with the ambulance, said he was more concerned by her drug intake than the cuts and bruises she’d suffered at the mercy of bloodsucking fiends. The side-effects of Bowles-Ottery pellets included acute stomach pains, which proselytisers seldom mentioned could be agonisingly fatal. Upton called vampires ‘bloodsucking fiends’ to her face, the cheeky sod.

Jess came round enough to ask for Paul Durward to sit in the ambulance with her. He’d done it, too. Kate didn’t need a drug insight to see that the nit would stick by the boyfriend who’d been happy to see her killed. She hoped Jess would at least corner the feckless viper into marrying her and then drain
him
of his feeble life essence with her woolly-minded yet steely bounciness.

Inappropriately, before leaving the scene of the crime, Upton asked for Kate’s phone number. Even more inappropriately, she gave it to him. If she wasn’t arraigned for murder, she could look forward to a date in another bloody student bar. This time, she’d get her own drinks in. Medical students had access to drugs which made BOP seem like Maltesers.

At the police station, Kate told George Dixon everything except what she’d guessed about Eastman. If the biker ever assassinated his father, she hoped he’d be out of the country before B Division got on his case.

After they were done, Jack Regan popped his head into the room and said, ‘Own goal, eh? That’ll muck up the score.’ She hadn’t thought of that. It had dawned on her, as she told the story, that Jessica’s granddad wouldn’t be grateful to her for saving the warm girl’s life. much less, bringing in the murderers of Carol and Laura. To the Circle of Light, Enoch Powell and The 98.6, she was still a monster. The vampire community wouldn’t be happy with her either. As a Fearless Vampire Killer, she could get a cross tattooed under her arm.

Dixon bade her good morning and said he’d tell Bellaver how it had shaken out in the end. She promised to go and see the Super, who was pruning his roses and boning up on parking regulations and the
A to Z of Welwyn Garden City.
It was wrong he wasn’t here to see the end of it. She’d report to the Diogenes Club as soon as she was able. If solving the murders served their long-term, mysterious purposes, she supposed she should be happy about that.

Just before dawn, when vampire and warm alike were at their lowest ebb, calls started to come in. The School of Vampirism was on fire. The 98.6 were claiming responsibility. A full-scale student protest, fomented by the
Socialist Vampire,
got in the way of the Fire Brigade. The firemen had been run ragged all night by lesser arsons designed to distract and exhaust them before the big burn-up of 1968. The press were out in force, too. And the members of the Manfred Commission. The Battle of St Bartolph’s was just beginning.

Kate’s ears still rang. If you fire a gun in an enclosed space like a student common room, that happens. She also heard sirens, fire alarms, telephone bells, police whistles, steam kettles, the wireless pips, screams.

As the sun came up, the din got louder.

ANNOTATIONS

A
s with the new editions of
Anno Dracula
and
The Bloody Red Baron,
this section is not exhaustive or definitive. Again, first and foremost, the key source is Bram Stoker: without
Dracula
, derivatives like this series wouldn’t be conceivable. In this book, I must obviously also acknowledge primary debts to the filmmakers Federico Fellini, Maro Bava and Dario Argento, and the authors Ian Fleming and Patricia Highsmith. For more on my sources, see the original Acknowledgements.