More Than Mortal (13 page)

BOOK: More Than Mortal

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Destry’s breathing stopped altogether, and Marieko knew she was holding her breath, preparing to spring. A final echo from Marieko’s reasoning mind urgently reminded her they were millimeters from losing everything they had planned in one savage, snarling instant of forbidden gratification. Why didn’t Renquist do something? He had precipitated all this. He had created the spectacle. He had to have known they were seeking him, and his psychic pyrotechnics would have a multifold effect on their open and questing minds. He had pushed Columbine into the abyss of violent and vengeful passion and then humbled her in front of her sisters in the troika. Now he seemed to be provoking them all to the mindless extremes of bestial excess by deliberately leading them into the temptation of his blood. Was he testing them, or had he, too, succumbed to a vampire insanity? Marieko’s weakening voice of civilization managed a final whisper. “Isn’t existence little more than a series of tests?”

Was that it? Renquist was leading them to the old and cruel precipice, risking himself to see if they could summon the mastery of themselves and step back in the final instant? Destry’s sinews were bunching and tensing. Her fangs were extending. She was never going to step back. If anything was to be salvaged, Marieko had to stop this disastrous sequence of events, but she, too, was all but hypnotized by Renquist’s bleeding hand. She was immobile, unable to speak. His appearance and the aftermath had been too fast, too unexpected, and too powerful. She was almost incapable of thought. She merely and starkly hungered.

Marieko was not a great believer in external rescues in the nick of time, so when a door to normality was
opened at the far end of the room by the wholly mundane figure of the thrall-butler Bolingbroke, she could scarcely believe it was not just another symptom of the madness.

“Bolingbroke?”

The appearance of the human, even such a degraded creature as the troika’s thrall, created an instant transformation.

“There is a chauffeur at the door, my ladies … .”

Renquist whirled round so his bloody hand was not visible to the man and, at the same time, whipped a black silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and wrapped it around the wound. Destry’s fangs retracted as her predator tension relaxed and dissipated. Without the direct sight of the blood, the spell was broken. Columbine tottered two paces backwards and dropped into a convenient couch in what looked to be a partial swoon. It took Marieko’s presence of mind to assume control and use the interruption to restore both the contemporary and the ordinary. She found, somewhat miraculously, she could instantly adopt a normal tone of casual domestic authority. Perhaps her training went deeper than even she imagined. “A chauffeur?”

“He has Mr. Renquist’s luggage.”

“Thank you, Bolingbroke. You may take the bags to the room that was prepared for Mr. Renquist.”

As Bolingbroke made his characteristic groveling exit, Destry actually laughed. Her powers of recovery were equally formidable. Marieko may have restored a sense of civilization, but it took Destry to break the impasse. “So what do we do now? All smoke cigarettes and avoid each others’ eyes?”

“I fear I may have gone a little far.”

“The word that springs to mind is
overkill.”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly, you say? First you stalk us, then you give us an Armageddon mindfuck of a psychic firework display,
and finally you greet us in Latin. Is this your normal modus operandi, or did you have something to prove?”

“Perhaps a measure of both, coupled with a need to restore drama to a monochrome world.”

Destry laughed, but Marieko remained politely accusatory. “Or maybe you thought you would catch us off guard, and we’d reveal some terrible secret or malign design?”

Renquist nodded. “That also crossed my mind.”

If Renquist hadn’t felt so relaxed and comfortable, he might never had admitted such a thing, but as he sat back in the leather armchair beside the fire, with an IV feed of whole blood flowing into his left arm and a balloon glass of superior cognac in his right hand, he felt at his most expansive since he’d left California. The ghost energy of the transfusion tingled softly through his now-weary metabolism, and the situation was further eased by Columbine deciding to sequester herself in another part of the house, declaring that she’d had quite enough of Victor Renquist for one evening. Renquist was now well aware the centuries had done little to mellow Columbine, and she was still a dangerous—even deadly—child he had now antagonized all over again, and he was relieved to have her at least temporarily at a distance. She had departed with a warning exit line delivered for full effect from the doorway. “Be careful of him. He’ll try to win you over with his charm and cheap tricks. He’s millennium slick.”

After the fortuitous interruption by the thrall, the Oriental woman, Marieko, the one in the futuristic attire and with one breast exposed, took charge of the amenities and conventions of hospitality. Once Columbine had flounced from the room, she had approached Renquist and bowed. “
Fratri in sanguinem,
I am Marieko Matsunaga. We spoke on the telephone.”

Renquist also bowed, but carefully so as not to bend
quite so low as Marieko had. “
Konnichiha,
Marieko-san.”

With the formalities properly observed, Marieko turned to the matter of Renquist’s welfare. “Does your hand require attention?”

Renquist shook his head. “No. It’s already almost healed.”

Now the other one joined her, the tall female with the chestnut hair, who wore a man’s black tuxedo with satin lapels and high, scarlet heels. “But you’ve lost blood.”

Renquist couldn’t deny this, or that he was feeling a certain weakness. “That’s true.”

“It should be replaced.”

Renquist was at something of a loss to locate the woman’s accent. English was her first language, but the vowels were either Australian, or from one of the former British possessions in southern Africa. Perhaps Kenya or Rhodesia, but much modified by considerable travel. “Won’t that put you to some considerable trouble?”

She had a hard and direct practicality, as if she had spent at lot of time moving among military men, perhaps mercenaries or guerrillas. “We can’t offer you live prey tonight, but if a blood pack from County General would suffice, that’s easily done.”

“A blood pack would be perfect.”

The tall woman paused at the door before going about her errand. “The name’s Destry Maitland, by the way, and yes. I’ve been all over. Not for as long as you, but I’ve seen my share.”

Renquist made a mental note to maintain caution around Destry Maitland. Admittedly he was tired, but she had just scanned his mind without him knowing, and that was no meager trick. She returned in a matter of minutes with a plastic pack of thawed blood, the needle, the tubes, and the rest of the modern paraphernalia. Apparently the Ravenkeep troika’s survival system was nearly identical to the one maintained by the colony in Los Angeles. By some probably criminal maneuver, they
obtained packs of frozen blood from a local hospital, but also regularly hunted live prey, to head off the perilously psychotic, killing-hunger that triggered the uncontrollable phenomenon known as Feasting. As Marieko rigged the transfusion, Destry went to what could only be a conventional liquor cabinet. “Can I pour you a brandy, Victor? You don’t mind if I call you Victor, do you?”

“Not in the least.”

“So?”

“Yes, I’d like a brandy.”

“You drink alcohol regularly, or are you just being polite?”

“Quite regularly. I enjoy the sensation.”

“Good on you, Victor. I like a man who drinks.”

Renquist found Destry Maitland highly refreshing after the hothouse, self-indulgent theatrics of Columbine. “If it’s not an inappropriate question, when you do take live prey—”

“Where do we go for it?”

Destry smiled, swirled the brandy in her glass, and inhaled the bouquet. “Well, of course, Mistress Columbine has her playthings, her gilded young men. Which I suppose can be a hazardous flirtation, but she manages to get away with it.”

Marieko’s face was impassive. “Columbine has an almost supernatural propensity for getting away with it.”

Destry continued. “Marieko and I, on the other hand, usually head north in the night.”

“North?”

Marieko explained. “A number of depressed industrial towns within easy enough reach for hunting.”

“We cull the unhappy of the herd. The unemployed and Maggie’s Girls.”

“Maggie’s Girls?” Renquist had never heard the expression.

“It’s a colloquial legacy of the eighties. Bottom-rung street prostitutes. Maggie’s Girls from northern towns so
decimated by the late Lady Thatcher’s economic policies they never recovered.”

“And how do you dispose of the dead?”

Marieko’s expression and aura were unreadable. “We had a full crematorium furnace installed in one of the cellars a number of years ago.”

“Indeed.” Renquist was impressed. It would make a lot of sense to have something similar at the Residence in California.

“We are reasonably well organized.”

Renquist looked around the room and then sipped his cognac. “So it would seem.”

“But like all nosferatu, we collect things.”

“You should see my library.”

Marieko inclined her head deferentially. “I would very much like to see your library if ever that was possible.”

Destry again inhaled her brandy, as if she enjoyed breathing the spirit rather than actually drinking it. “Marieko is our resident academic.”

“I have already admired her calligraphy.”

Marieko covered her face in a gesture of modesty. “I am but an amateur.”

Renquist gestured to Marieko’s extensive tattoo of waves and sea demons that ran from her right wrist, over her shoulder, and down to her tiny breast. “You’re tattoos are very beautiful. They remind me of the work of the great Yoshiwara.”

Marieko laughed a trifle nervously. “That is possibly because they were drawn by his grandson.”

Renquist realized the laugh contained what might be a warning. Even if it was only Yoshiwara’s grandson who had created the body art, she would still have survived those chaotic times of brutal Japan civil-strife of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which he himself had once been briefly but bloodily embroiled. He knew nothing of this female’s background, not even her age, but it was possible they had been with different warring factions. It seemed, this early in their acquaintance,
probably a good idea to avoid the subject of their individual histories in the long and troubled time that followed the Onin War. He decided it was time to change the subject, not only as an exercise in mannered delicacy, but also because the time had come to raise the subject of why he was there in the first place. “On the subject of calligraphy, you said in your third letter that these human archaeologists, the ones conducting the excavation at Morton Downs, had discovered a fragment of mica?”

“That is correct.”

“And it bore a single character of the flame script?”

Marieko and Destry looked at each other, both hesitating before Marieko answered. “A single
nya.”

Renquist pretended he hadn’t noticed the hesitation. “Any writing on mica has, by definition, to be very old indeed. Possibly from the lost ages of the Nephilim and the Original Beings. A full fifteen thousand years.”

The two females again seemed reluctant to reply, and Renquist looked at them questioningly. “Would you be more comfortable talking about this if and when Columbine finally rejoins us?”

Destry and Marieko stared at each other. He could tell from their auras a silent debate was taking place, but good manners dictated he neither probe nor scan. Finally Destry voiced what was obviously a mutual decision. “Columbine is responsible for her own behavior. We can at least fill you in on the details. It seems only fair after you’ve come all this way.”

Marieko glanced briefly at the beamed ceiling, as though she knew Columbine was almost certainly somewhere upstairs eavesdropping on every word. “The mica fragment was clearly a shard of a much larger piece. Its triangular shape suggested it was a corner fragment from a larger rectangular sheet.”

“Do you have the fragment?”

Marieko shook her head. “I had the chance to remove it, but to do so seemed unwise. The humans have no
idea what it is, but they are well aware it’s an anomaly, an object that definitely doesn’t belong in any Bronze Age burial site. To steal it would have been too obvious, and the police would almost certainly have become involved.”

Renquist allowed his aura to indicate that he agreed Marieko had made the most sensible decision, but he still regretted that such a relic should be in the hands of humans. “And no other fragments have been found?”

“Not as yet, but the humans still have not penetrated that far into the mound.”

“So there may be more?”

“I would expect so.”

BOOK: More Than Mortal

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