Blood Maidens (41 page)

Even the Department never asked me to use those I loved
.

In fact, it discouraged us from loving anyone at all
.

You cannot serve God and Mammon . . . and if someone could identify which of those two one serves in the Department, would any of us be happier?

Nights without sleep, days without rest or food, had left him feeling bludgeoned, weary beyond reckoning, and he knew that down in the dark of the crypt there had been no right choice. He owed Ysidro Lydia’s life, and the life of their child. Lydia had put the decision into his hand, loving them both, knowing what Ysidro was, and accepting whatever his choice would be. But it was one thing to accept, and another, what she would feel, and dream, and wake up sobbing out in the dark of the night. The Germans weren’t the only ones who gave no thought to what the world would be like after the battle that they so much wished to win. He remembered the pale stillness of her days of grieving for their lost child, knowing it could have been no other way, but so frighteningly distant . . .

If she cannot forgive me my choice
 . . .

He had literally no idea what he would do then.

Lydia raised her head as he came towards her, got shakily to her feet. She was always thin; now she looked as if he could pick her up in one hand, like a red-and-white lily.
I could have returned to Petersburg and found her gone, dead
 . . .

There was more than one gate through which one could pass, never to return.

He said, ‘I couldn’t.’

And Lydia flung herself into his arms, kissed him feverishly on the mouth, and burst into tears of relief.

When Asher returned to the monastery two days later – twenty-four hours after notifying the Okhrana that he had ‘heard’ of fearful things done there, and on the same day he got Razumovsky’s order to destroy the contents of Theiss’s laboratory at the clinic – Ysidro was gone from the crypt. Nor did the smallest whisper of the vampire’s presence trouble his dreams, though for weeks – as he and Lydia journeyed back through Europe – his dreams were not pleasant ones. They stopped in the smaller towns – Minsk and Cracow and Brno – for Asher had found himself uneasy at the thought of spending the night in cities such as Prague or Warsaw.

Of the girl Genia, no trace was found.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE RUSSIAN CALENDAR

When Pope Gregory XIII mandated the switch from the old Julian calendar to the astronomically more accurate reckoning of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, because of religious enmities neither Protestant nor Orthodox countries would follow suit. England and the British colonies in America did not switch over to the Gregorian calendar until 1752 (with the result that most of America’s Founding Fathers have two recorded birth dates, one ‘old-style’ and one Gregorian about eleven days later); Sweden did not make the change until 1753, and Russia did not start using the Gregorian calendar until after the 1918 Revolution that ended the rule of the Tsars. Thus, in 1911, when this story takes place, all dates are different depending on whether the action is taking place inside or outside of Russia, the Julian date being two weeks behind the Gregorian.

Greece did not switch to the Gregorian reckoning until 1924, and many Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar to calculate the date of Easter.