Blood Maidens (30 page)

The girl stared at her with horrified eyes, filled with shock and despair. ‘The girl in the attic. The girl who burned up—’

‘You heard about that?’

The cold hands clutched her, their desperation giving them the first forerunners of the terrible vampire strength.

‘I think that has to have been one of them,’ said Lydia. ‘We have a cellar here.’ She guided the girl to the kitchen and opened the half-width door of the narrow stair. ‘There’s a cupboard; it’s not large, but you can remain there, during the daylight hours. Tomorrow – today,’ she added, realizing that it had to be well after midnight, ‘I’ll—’ She stopped, the words sticking in her throat at the sight of those terrified eyes.
What on earth CAN I do today?

I need to speak to Jamie
.

I need to speak to Simon
.

I need to find some way to help this poor child
 . . .

CAN a vampire remain a maiden?
She recalled how Ysidro’s powers to influence dreams, to blind and alter the awareness of the living, even to keep people from seeing his extremely disturbing true appearance – everything a vampire could do, to protect himself as well as to hunt – had waned, during the weeks they had traveled together and he had fasted from human kills. Was it the sheer accumulation of centuries of kills that let Simon – the oldest vampire she knew about – linger awake a little longer before the deathly day-sleep overcame him? Endure for a few seconds the pallid whisper of earliest dawn?

New-made fledglings, he had once told her, were fragile. Most – even those willing and eager to hunt – didn’t survive their first half-century.

Standing behind her on the stair, Evgenia gazed at the dark doorway of the cupboard, hand pressed to her mouth like a frightened child. ‘It’s like a grave.’

‘I’ll find somewhere else that you can go,’ Lydia promised. Razumovsky would return the day after tomorrow. Could she trust him not to ask questions?

She didn’t know.

As they reascended the stairs, Evgenia ventured, ‘Can you bring me a priest?’

Lydia winced at the thought. To bring a priest to comfort this poor child would be to sign the man’s death warrant, if the Petersburg vampires –
when do they all leave on holiday?
– came to hear that the living had proof of their existence. As it was, she knew that Evgenia’s continued presence at the
izba
would put the servants – and herself, for that matter – in terrible jeopardy.

I need to speak to Jamie
 . . .

There had been no word from him for three days, and panic twisted somewhere behind her sternum;
adrenalin flow increased by anxiety
, she noted automatically, and glanced at her watch to time the duration of sensation . . .

For that matter, she reflected as she knelt to prod the coals in the parlor stove back to life, there was no guarantee a priest wouldn’t compound poor Evgenia’s wretchedness by recoiling from her in horror and telling her that yes, indeed, she
was
damned. Many years ago, Lydia had protested in disbelief when her friend Josetta had said that, by and large, most men would blame a woman for being raped.
Getting herself raped
, was how they’d put it . . .
A normal woman WANTS to be dominated
 . . . And fairly recently, she recalled, one of Jamie’s scholastic colleagues had broken off his engagement with his fiancée on precisely those grounds. She could easily see one of those bearded, solemn Orthodox prelates – men who not only didn’t speak against the periodic pogroms that the government encouraged, but approved of them – reacting to the news of Evgenia’s hideous situation exactly as Evgenia had.

That she was damned, through no doing of her own.

Simon will know what to do
.

The thought came to her unwillingly, but she had to admit that she had never seen the Spanish vampire at a loss.

But if Jamie is . . . is in trouble of some kind
– she refused to look at the darker alternative –
would Simon not have written to me? Or let me know
 . . .?

How far away did he have to be, not to be able to read her dreams?

Or was that not something he would do, after their parting in Constantinople?

She walked to the door and opened it, letting the cold flow over her face and trying to gauge by the thin wedding-ring of the new moon how much of the night was left. At this time of the year – it was the twenty-second of April by the Russian calendar, and the sixth of May (if her calculations were correct) in England – barely any actual darkness lay between the last fading-out of brightness from the sky and the first glimmers of dawn. In a few weeks the sky would be soaked with eerie radiance all night. Evgenia had been here—

‘Do you hear that?’

Such was the terror in Evgenia’s voice that Lydia swung around, to see the girl standing by the stove.

‘Calling to me,’ whispered Evgenia. ‘Like the voices in my dreams. Coming for me . . .’

Oh, God
 . . .

Lydia turned back to the door, her heart in her throat.

Motion in the starlit screen of trees.

The gleam of eyes.

TWENTY-ONE

‘Don’t let them take me.’ Evgenia’s hands clutched Lydia’s arm. Lydia could feel her body trembling, pressed against her in the dark doorway. ‘They’ll make me one of them. And then I will be lost indeed.’

‘I won’t let them take you.’ Even as she spoke, sleepiness rolled over her mind like a drug. She backed into the cottage, bolted the door, and ran to the bedroom. From her luggage she yanked the spare garlands she’d woven, garlic and wild roses, as if she were a peasant girl in the sixteenth century instead of a scholar and a physician and a modern young woman of the twentieth. ‘Put these—’ she began to say, but stopped herself, as Evgenia backed away, face twisted with repulsion and fear.

‘It hurts . . .’

‘Good. It’ll hurt them, too.’ Lydia wrapped one of the garlands around the door handle, hung another over the door. There weren’t enough of them, so she ran into the bedroom again and pulled in half the garlands that she had hung above her bedroom windows every night she had slept in the cottage, so that there would be enough for a little to hang over every window in the place. She was so sleepy she blundered into the walls as she moved, her brain fighting the relentless pressure of the vampire minds.

How can I be this terrified and still fall asleep?
‘Who is it out there? Is it Madame?’

‘I don’t know who it is.’ The girl pressed her hands to her temples, her eyes. ‘Voices – it isn’t her. When she held me – when I changed – it was as if she was a part of my thoughts, a part of my heart . . .’

Lydia staggered into the kitchen, pulled open the drawers of the sideboard.
Thank goodness His Excellency would be ashamed to have less than the best silver in the
izba
for his guest
. She fumbled with the kitchen string, dropped the silver forks and spoons as she bound them onto the ends of the broom handle and the poker from the stove. ‘Take this . . .’

‘It burns!’ cried the girl. ‘It burns my eyes, like smoke—’

‘It will burn them where it touches their flesh,’ said Lydia. ‘Can you endure it?’

‘I think so.’ Evgenia looked disoriented, her eyes starting to wander, as if she were having trouble understanding.

‘Listen to me,’ said Lydia. ‘Focus your mind. Try to push past the voices, try to close the door on them.’ She yawned hugely, shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it. ‘This may be your only chance. Remember, it’s not for long.’ She threw a glance at the very un-peasant-like clock in the ‘red corner.’ It was just past two. She took a deep breath. Whoever these were – Golenischev or his rival or those angry young rebel fledglings Jamie had told her about – they would have to leave soon, if they were themselves to reach shelter before the first stain of dawn in the sky. If they were only here to observe, to keep an eye on—

Glass shattered with a splintering tinkle in the bedroom. Lydia dashed in to see shadowy forms draw away from the window sill, unable to bear the proximity of the garlic. At the same moment she heard windows break in the parlor behind her . . .
four rooms, eight windows, two defenders
 . . . and Evgenia screamed. A long pole – from the boathouse, Lydia thought – probed through the bedroom’s broken window, the hook on its end groping and scratching for the garlic wreath. Lydia strode up to the window, stabbed into the darkness with her own silver-ended makeshift weapon, and as the boat pole drew back she snatched down the swags of herbs from that window and the other, threw herself back through the door into the parlor.

‘Gospozha!’ Evgenia was jabbing and thrusting through the window with her own weapon, trying to parry another boat pole. She was too far away to use the weapon effectively – Lydia wound one of the half wreaths around the bedroom doorknob, snatched up her heavy skirts, and crossed the parlor in two bounds. In the dark beyond the window she glimpsed a white face, like a corpse’s, but mobile and soft . . . A woman’s, she thought, as the reflective eyes caught the light.

‘Bitch!’ yelled a voice from the darkness, and another called out something in Russian; Evgenia fell back behind Lydia, clinging to her – another window shattered, at the far end of the parlor, from a billet of firewood thrown like a spear. Lydia ran to the place, jabbed into the darkness, struggling with the near-conviction that this was all a dream and it didn’t matter if she defended the house or not.

‘You have to get close!’ she shouted back at Evgenia.

Grimly, the girl ran to parry the groping boat-hook when it came in again, first jabbing with her silver weapon, then reaching up to grab the boat hook, to try to pull it away from the attackers. The force with which it was jerked back made her cry out.

‘They’re stronger than you!’ Lydia fell back, grabbed the second fragment of wreath and wrapped it around the door handle of the study. ‘We only have to hold them off for a little while—’

A man’s voice called out in Russian again, close this time –
he must be standing on the veranda
. Evgenia shouted something back, then whispered over her shoulder, ‘He says that you will betray me. That, because I’m already vampire, you’ll wait till I fall asleep . . . He says I must, I will, soon. And then you’ll drag me outside, to burn up when it gets light . . .’

‘I won’t.’

Tears were running down the girl’s face, crumpled with grief in the dark frame of her hair. ‘Even though I’m damned? He says, nothing can save me.’

‘You don’t know that,’ said Lydia desperately. ‘A priest will know—’

Another jeering shout from outside. Lydia almost didn’t need the translation.

‘He says, priests lie. All of them.’

‘Do you believe—?’

Something crashed against the door from the bedroom behind them; Lydia swung around. A woman’s voice cursed, cold and silvery – in Russian. Then a third window broke, and Lydia rushed to parry the long hooked pole that came through—

She didn’t know how it happened – true accident or clumsiness engineered, like the sleepiness, from outside – but her feet caught on one of the low peasant stools and she fell. Her head hit the corner of the table with a sickening crack on the way to the floor. At the same instant she heard more glass break somewhere –
the attic
, she thought,
the windows upstairs
, but she seemed to be viewing the room and herself through the wrong end of a telescope.
Get up! Get up!

She managed to roll over, and the pain that axed through her head brought on a spasm of vomiting, excruciating in her corset. Gray swam down over her senses, and she heard Evgenia scream despairingly. Then cold hands dragged her up; she saw eerily glowing vampire eyes as claws ripped at the collar of her blouse.

‘
Vyedyma
!’ The vampire – thin and cold-faced with a cruel slit of a mouth – threw her down, clutching his hand where the welts were already ballooning on his fingers from her protective silver chain. Beyond him, Lydia could see Evgenia backed into a corner by two others, woman and man; the cold-faced man drew back his foot to kick her. ‘
Gryazn
—’

Wait, no, don’t I at least get to see Jamie again before I die?

Something – a shadow – flickered in the deeper shadows of the parlor, and as Lydia’s vision fractured away to nothing she saw what seemed to be a pair of disembodied white hands appear out of the darkness behind her attacker. One – connected by a wrist like whalebone to a grimed and smutted shirtsleeve – wrapped neatly around the vampire’s jaw, while the other molded itself over temple and forehead, but she wasn’t sure.

She recognized the ring on one finger, as with a neat twist Ysidro snapped the other vampire’s neck.