Mozart’s Blood (35 page)

The ancient bobbed her head, once. “Sssssing.”

Hélène stared at her, oddly touched. “Yes. I will sing. But tomorrow, not tonight.”

The ancient nodded again and started the laborious movement of turning. Hélène said, “Wait. Anastasia.” The creature's head swiveled painfully toward her. “Why do you call me that? Vessel?”

Anastasia's mouth flexed horribly as she said, “Lasssst.”

Then she was gone, leaving Hélène in her cooling bath, staring in confusion at the flames flickering in the grate.

 

There was a pianoforte at the opposite end of the parlor where Hélène had met the ancients for the first time. When the moment came, Hélène found that a generous fire had been laid in a yawning fireplace, and the end of the room that had been entirely in shadow now glowed with light. An assortment of furniture had been arranged in a semicircle around the pianoforte. Eusebio, Henri, and Anastasia were already there, each with their layers of clothing folded and draped around them.

Hélène expected the pianoforte to be dusty and out of tune, as neglected as the rest of the parlor. She opened the lid of the instrument and touched the keys. She struck a C chord, and then G, the dominant. Eyebrows lifted, she rolled the subdominant, F, with both hands now, and then again C.

Ugo, taking a chair nearby, chuckled. “I told you,” he said in an undertone. “Music is their only remaining passion.”

Hélène pulled out the stool and sat down. She had no score, but of course she needed none. She glanced up at Zdenka Milosch, who sat on an eighteenth-century French love seat, turned so that her half of it faced the pianoforte.

“I never really learned to play,” Hélène warned her. “I know only the music that Mozart knew. And knowing it and being able to play it properly are sometimes not the same thing.”

The Countess's voice vibrated with anticipation. “An accompanist is not possible.”

“Of course.” Hélène looked around the little circle of her audience, at the firelit parlor with its semblance of social nicety, of a
salon
concert about to begin. Candles had been lit in the wall sconces, and the bent little manservant had laid trays of glasses and decanters on scattered low tables. The ancients leaned forward, their faces shadowed by hood and hat and drifting gray hair, their bizarre teeth glimmering when a twig occasionally blazed up in the fireplace. The grotesquerie of the scene was intensified by its pretense of normality.

Hélène looked to Ugo. She saw in his parted lips, in the gleam of his dark eyes, that he, too, awaited her music with eagerness, though not so overt as that of the ancients. She knew he cared about music, about her singing, but this avaricious look startled her. Her eyes passed over the ancients once again. She half expected to see saliva dripping from their tusks, like dogs awaiting a tidbit dropped from the table.

She drew a deep breath, trying to banish the gorge that threatened to rise in her throat. She would give them what they craved. Then, perhaps, she could leave, she and Ugo.

Because she could play it, because she could remember the piano reductions, she gave them Mozart. She sang “Laudate Dominum” and “Abendempfindung.” She sang “Exsultate, Jubilate,” and she sang a fragment from the Great Mass in C minor. She sang the Countess's arias, and Pamina's.

They did not applaud, her bestial audience, but they breathed. It was evident, each time she played the final cadence, that their combined breaths came faster, whistling through fragile and failing larynxes, rattling in decrepit lungs. Zdenka Milosch patted her knee with a sound like that of bat wings in the trees. Ugo sat back in his chair, his chin on his fist, his eyes closed.

Hélène was done. She was tired. With a decisive movement, she closed the lid of the pianoforte and pushed her stool away from the keyboard.

One of the ancients, Henri, she thought, lifted his trembling head to fix her with a rheumy gaze. “Mozaa-aaa-rt,” he stammered. “Blood.”

Hélène's mouth dried as she stared at him, and her skin prickled.

Eusebio gave a shaking nod and repeated Henri's words, less intelligibly. “Blood…Mozaa-aaa-rt.”

Anastasia made a terrible sound that Hélène feared was meant to be a laugh. Hélène looked to Ugo, then to the Countess, for explanation.

The Countess stood up and inclined her head as if she were bowing to one whose title exceeded her own in importance. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. They know about you, Hélène. It was important for them to hear you. They know you shared the bite with Mozart.”

“So did you,” Hélène said.

Zdenka waved a negligent hand. “I have no musical ability. No voice, and no skill.”

“But there must be others. Others I…that I…”

Zdenka's lip curled at Hélène's inability to speak the word. “That you, shall we say, infected?” Something flickered in her eyes, and her lips parted as if she would say something more, but she closed them again and shook her head. She said only, “No.”

Something kept Hélène from asking again, some dread she couldn't face.

Ugo opened his eyes gingerly, squinting against the light. He flexed his toes and his fingers and painfully moved his ankles and his legs. He had no scars, no wounds he could sense, but his body was stiff with cold. He drew a ragged breath and rolled to his side before he struggled to sit up. He bent his knees and wrapped his arms around his legs, trying to warm himself while he looked around to discover where the wolf had carried him this time.

Until the current fiasco with Domenico, it had been a very long time since the wolf had emerged. Zdenka Milosch's bargain had been a good one.

She had taught him, those first months he spent behind the ivy-hung walls of her compound, just how wide the elders' network was. He learned for himself, when he went out to do her work, how eager the recruits were to do whatever was asked of them. They were convinced, each one of them, that the translation of their mortal state into that of the near immortals was a mere matter of obedience and dedication. They found each other, these hopefuls, and banded together in New York and Rome, London and Paris, Berlin and Riyadh. They gathered in taverns, in underground catacombs, in secret upper rooms where they attempted rituals they had heard of, chanted offices they found in arcane manuscripts, cut themselves, branded each other, anything they could think of to attract what they craved.

Their credulity caused Ughetto to feel pity at first. He resisted lining them up for La Società like calves for the butcher's knife. But decades of suffering the gullibility of fools eroded his sensitivity until the last of his empathy scarred over and disappeared.

The Countess took him out into the compound one day, leading him between clumps of yew and browning spruce yearning upward in search of sunlight. It was a huge garden, crowded with trees and shrubs. Ughetto recognized the heart-shaped leaves of linden trees, and the palm-shaped ones of oak. One of these had grown into the stone wall, pushing the stones aside to make room for its trunk. Its branches hung low on both sides, inviting squirrels to run in and out at will.

The Countess gave no sign that she cared about the state of the garden, except for a small space of earth that had been cleared of low branches and vines so that it was filled with sunshine. It looked out of place, a neatly tilled and weeded spot in the midst of a riot of unchecked vegetation. A double row of perennials thrust up into the sunshine, vigorous stems that came almost to Ughetto's waist and bore dark violet flowers. The Countess stopped and turned to be certain Ughetto was paying attention.

She put one slippered foot into the carefully raked soil and lifted one of the violet flowers with a fingertip. “This is
aconitum lycoctonum
still growing. I thought you should see it before it has been dried. Some call it northern wolfsbane.” She stepped back, dusting her hands together. Ughetto bent to sniff at the blossom. “I've had it planted here specially for you, Ughetto.”

He gazed into her expressionless face. “I have to come here for it?”

Her lips curled in her sparse smile. “No. I mean to help you, as you will help me.” She turned away from the cultivated plot, back toward the house. “
Aconitum vulparia
has a different flower. Yellow, quite pretty. Less reliable in suppressing the wolf.”

He walked on behind her, pondering the possibility that he might never have to transform again. They passed through the high-ceilinged kitchen with its pitted stone sinks and enormous pantry. The Countess pushed open the door of the pantry and pointed to bundles of herbs hanging from drying racks. Ughetto recognized basil and chives, thyme and oregano. On a separate dowel, away from the edible herbs, he saw sprigs of
aconitum lycoctonum.
The violet flowers had gone gray, and the leaves were curled and dry.

“Take some,” she said. She went into the pantry, reached up and broke off a stem. “You will be able to test it at the next full moon.” She turned to him and held out the herb on her palm.

Ughetto didn't take it. “How do you know this works?”

She blinked once, slowly. “You're hardly my first
lupo mannaro,
Ughetto.”

“There are others?”

“There were.”

“What happened to them?”

“Dead. Killed.”

He took a half step back, reaching the support of the wall. “How?”

“The transformation is dangerous. Men hate wolves, and with good reason. Any self-respecting householder will kill one that gets close to his property.”

Ughetto stared at her in wonderment. “So, if I'm not killed that way, then…how long will I live?”

Her gaze drifted away as if the conversation had become tedious. She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Who knows? None of the others lasted for long. But it may be you could live as long as we do, if you can keep yourself safe. All the more reason to learn to use the herb.”

Ughetto learned little else from her. He tried asking her in different ways. He thought of catching her in a better mood, but such an event never came to pass in his presence. He tried tricking her into telling him more, asking oblique questions, even attempting to get Kirska to talk to him, but his efforts bore no fruit.

He had to discover on his own, through trial and error, how much of the wolfsbane to take, and how long it would last. Sometimes it made him sick, and he threw up what he had taken before it could work. Sometimes he didn't take enough, and the unimpeded light of the full moon proved it.

The catalog of places the wolf left him continued to expand. Once he ran out of his herb in the wilds of America's West and came back to himself on a high plateau where nothing moved but mountain sheep and a sharp, incessant wind. Another time the wolf left him, naked and confused, in Fort Tryon Park in New York. He woke beneath the stone wall surrounding the fort with soldiers marching guard above his head. When traveling by ship, he awoke one night deep in the hold, where cattle were chained in noisome rows. One was dead at his feet, its heart and half a rear haunch consumed by the wolf.

And now, abandoned once again in a winter forest, Ugo shivered in the cold. Across a shallow valley, snowy peaks speared a clear blue sky. Beneath his feet, the ground fell away in a gentle incline. The wolf had slept beneath a boulder, in a little nest of dirt and moss and alpine bracken. A bit of filthy cloth lay among the litter. Ugo shook it out and laughed when he saw what it was. He could use it, at least what remained of it. One leg of the borrowed trousers was missing, and the other was shredded to the knee, but he could at least cover his privates.

Shrugging, resigned, he pulled what was left of the garment up to his waist and started down the hill to see what might be at the bottom.

 

Early darkness was already falling, making it hard to see his way. Footsore, miserable with cold, he watched the lights of an unknown city spring to life through the evening gloom. The glitter of civilization promised warmth and shelter and food. All he had to do was find something, or steal something, to cover himself decently. Perhaps he could steal a little money while he was at it.

He pressed on, skidding down piney grades, treading gingerly where deadfall and bracken bit at his bare feet. He saw the lights of aircraft blinking overhead, descending to some airport. The planes were heavies, big jets, which meant the city twinkling through the darkness must be a significant one. A wide ribbon of darkness wound through its lights, a river cutting through the urban landscape. The headlights and taillights of cars, white and red and amber, crawled along several roadways that circled the city.

In fifteen more minutes, he was crouched above a busy highway. He recognized, now, the outlines of the city that sprawled at his feet. He was not in the wilds of some distant mountain range after all. The wolf had succeeded, at last, in bringing him home.

He saw the silhouette of Prague Castle and the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral, fully lit against the evening sky. It was the Vltava River that curved through the city, lights glimmering from the stone bridges that arched above the slow-moving water. He couldn't make out the tower for the Astronomical Clock, but he knew it was there, set into the Old Town wall.

Somewhere below this hill on which he crouched was the elders' compound. The home of La Società. The only place in the world where the wolf felt safe.

Ugo sighed and got to his feet. He would have been pleased never to enter the gatehouse of the Countess's dismal mansion ever again. But he was naked and alone, and he needed help to get back to Milan, and Octavia. Uncomfortable it might be, and oppressive, but on this night, it was the safest place for him, too.

Feeling his way in the dark, he scrambled down the slope to the road beneath. He climbed over the concrete barrier and struck the pose of a youth in trouble, in need of a ride. He put out his thumb and waited, shivering, for someone to take pity on him.

 

Octavia stood tall as the door to the gatehouse opened and the stooped, faded figure of the servingman peered up at her. He looked little different from the way he had a century before, slight and gray haired and somehow desiccated, as if there weren't enough flesh under his skin to fill it out. The vertical wrinkles in his lips lengthened as he folded his upper lip over his teeth. She let him gaze at her for several seconds before she said, in the tone of one who expects to be obeyed, “You know who I am. Take me to the Countess. It's urgent.”

He didn't speak. In fact, she had never heard him speak. Perhaps he couldn't. Perhaps the Countess had seen to it that he couldn't.

He stepped aside so she could enter and closed the door behind her. He gave her a wide berth as he passed by to lead the way through the gatehouse, out the back door, and down the path toward the house.

Octavia had to duck hanging branches and step over roots pushing up from beneath the cracked and crumbling paving stones. The grounds were more jungle than garden, as if the hulking, dim-witted Tomas had given up completely.

When she came out of the wilderness of overgrown yew and bedraggled spruce, the house loomed before her. The ivy had evidently been allowed to grow without restraint, so that it smothered the foundation. The windows had all but disappeared beneath its persistent branches. Even the chimney was nearly swallowed by dark green leaves that seemed more to repel sunlight than to absorb it. It was a miracle that the place hadn't crumbled to dust beneath the onslaught of vegetation.

For a nasty moment, Octavia thought of turning on her heel and fleeing back to the road.

She resisted the urge and held her ground as the servingman opened the door of the house. She followed him into the dim interior. The moment her foot touched the floor, two servants working in the entryway faded into the shadows, like cockroaches scattering when a light comes on.

The servingman disappeared into the bowels of the house, and Octavia walked on alone into the parlor to await the Countess.

She didn't have long to wait. Zdenka Milosch appeared promptly, clicking into the cavernous room on a pair of stiletto heels. She wore a lightweight black sheath dress that had the look of Gaultier. Perhaps, Octavia thought, she had gone shopping when she was in Milan. Around her neck was a long string of pearls, and she had cut her hair into a bob that just reached her chin, accentuating the arch of her nose and the sharpness of her cheekbones. “Teresa,” she said, without inflection.

There was a susurration in the shadows behind the Countess, and Octavia, with a quiver of nausea, saw that the ancients had also gathered. She sensed them more than she saw them, shadowy figures wavering in the background, bending slightly forward to peer at her.

She stiffened her neck and faced the Countess. “It's Octavia, of course,” she said. “As you know very well.”

“Oh, yes. The name slipped my mind. It's the surprise of seeing you here, I think.” The Countess waved at one of the couches and settled herself into one opposite. “Why have you come? I've never had the impression that you enjoy our company.”

Octavia remained on her feet. “Something's happened,” she said. “I've come to explain.”

The ancients moved forward a little, curiously, avid in their rusted way. One of them was leaning on a stick. He tapped it against the hard carpet as he shifted his weight, and it made a rubbery thud in the silence.

The Countess gave the slow blink that always made Octavia think of a snake deciding whether or not to strike. She said, “Yes. I know.” She lifted one languid hand. “A member of La Società called this morning from Milan. It seems one of your colleagues received a strange injury.” She let her hand drop, as if it were too much effort to hold it up. “But he didn't die, this young man. Everyone at the opera is relieved, of course.” She blinked again. “I'm not. He should have died, Octavia. I thought you understood that.”

Octavia's heart clenched. It was all she could do not to press her hand to her breast. “You didn't—tell me you didn't give the order to—”

She broke off, realizing she no longer had the Countess's attention. The Countess's gaze slid to the doorway, though there had been no sound, no announcement.

Octavia watched Zdenka Milosch stiffen and stare. Her upper lip began to curl. She rose to her feet as smoothly as a serpent uncoiling, and demanded, “How did you get in here?”