The Hunger (32 page)

It was with no surprise that he saw a slighter form than LeFèvre’s silhouetted in the opening door. He caught his breath as Quintoc walked into the cell. The knife in his hand glinted in the torchlight.

Quintoc placed the torch in the holder and turned to John, grinning. “So, shall we try again? I think we will dispense with the bath. I’m feeling a bit bestial tonight. I’ll take you in all your dirt.” He ran his thumb over the knife edge. A drop of blood oozed from the cut. He put his thumb to his mouth and sucked. His flushed features looked demonic in the torchlight.

“Cuts might be conspicuous,” John said with more bravado than he felt.

“Not if I open wounds she already made,” he said. “She’ll just think you’re healing poorly. LeFèvre put me in mind of that strategy.” His eyes glazed with red film.

John felt the compulsion shower over him. It made him gasp. He tried to gather himself as he had before. His will fluttered at the edge of the pounding compulsion. A gleam in Quintoc’s eyes said he knew John was no match for him now. He stalked forward.

John felt the telltale rising of his cock. Damn the devil! He pushed out with his mind as hard as he could, groping for purchase against the compulsion, but it was no use. He
was definitely weaker. Quintoc knelt before him as before an altar and used his knife to open a long, half-healed slash Asharti’s teeth had made across John’s breast. He held John still with a mental grip that felt like steel while he licked at the welling blood. A feeling of revulsion engulfed John, but it did not matter. He could feel his hips moving, his cock now hard.
God in heaven, help me
, he thought.
I can’t bear this. I know I can’t bear this
.

Quintoc slit open a cut on his thigh and suckled there as John trembled violently. Quintoc’s hands moved over John’s body. He shifted his attention to John’s hip. The pain of the knife was lost in the horror of what would happen next. Quintoc suckled at his hip, the hand with the knife brushing lightly over John’s erection. John fought against the compulsion, breathing hard now. But he was too weak. Quintoc would have his way.

He turned John over, stroking his buttocks. The pain of the knife. The drawing of Quintoc’s lips. John thought he could feel his mind going.
No!
he shouted silently. He couldn’t bear this, but he couldn’t let it drive him insane, either. He would think of Beatrix, the revisionist Beatrix, the one who loved him. He would not think about this monster who was about to rape him, or the demon’s mistress who would return and make him betray his country once again while she too raped him and fed on him. He wouldn’t think. John’s mind grasped at Beatrix before it slipped away to somewhere else. As from a distance, he saw Quintoc unbutton his breeches . . .

The coach clattered over the bridge across the moat-lake of the chateau at Chantilly. Beatrix glanced out to the woods that coated the undulating hills. Far away the lights of the town of Chantilly twinkled, and beyond was the Forest of Givenchy. That would serve her purpose. She turned back to the chateau. The slitted windows that faced the drive were dark. They looked like empty eyes. She
dreaded what she might find here. Incipient anger turned her stomach sour.

Beatrix leapt out and tossed too much money to the coachman.
“Merci, mon homme très gentil,”
she said. “Please take my bags to that inn we passed, the Grapes.” He touched his cap and drove on. If she needed to escape quickly, with, God willing, someone else in tow, a coach would never keep ahead of the kind of pursuers she might acquire.

She stalked up to the great wooden doors, under the staring eyes of those blank stone slots. Inside there were vampires, she could not say how many. But their vibrations were slow and new. Asharti was not here. She must hurry, before they sensed her own presence. She drew her Companion. Once inside, she saw her way quite clearly without a lamp. The house was warm. Asharti had always craved warmth. Her heightened sense of smell picked out the scent of new wood, the soot of lamps recently lit, and underneath . . . sulfur? Strange . . .

She tripped lightly up the stairs to the first floor. No gleam of light along the corridors. She was looking for a servant, someone who might know where unwilling guests were kept. She trotted up the back stairs. Voices came to her faintly. Servants; not vampire.

But no. Vibrations shuddered along her senses behind her. Slowly, she turned . . .

The hulk of a man came round the corner, drawn, no doubt, by her own vibrations. He stalked forward, silent, glowering. He was Jerry’s description of his maker, exactly.

“LeFèvre,” she said. “I might have expected you.” That drew him up short.

“How do you know my name? Who are you?” he growled.

His consternation gave her time to draw her Companion. The hum of power up her veins gave her confidence. This one was no match for one born to the blood during
the Crusades. “I am your master, LeFèvre,” she said, and let her power shimmer out through her eyes.

He struggled only for a moment, swaying on his feet. Then his eyes glazed over.

“I would know if you have an English prisoner here, John Staunton, Earl of Langley.” All depended on his answer. Beatrix held her breath.

“Yes, he is here.”

Beatrix’s heart fluttered. Oh, God! “Alive?” she breathed.

“Yes. The mistress wants him alive when she returns.” His voice was flat.

“Where?” she hissed.

“In the cells, down in the hypocausts.”

Beatrix’s mind raced. Hypocausts—of course—to feed Asharti’s love of warmth. “Show me.” She motioned down the stairs.

In the great entry hall, he pointed to a heavy wooden door. “There.”

Beatrix hesitated. “Is he alone?” She felt other vibrations, but she couldn’t locate them.

“Quintoc is there. Quintoc wants use of him before herself returns.”

Beatrix’s heart went cold. She whirled away, dragging LeFèvre with her, and threw open the heavy wooden door with a single jerk. Her throat swelled as she ran down the steps, LeFèvre stumbling after her. Damp heat, passageways everywhere, a glimpsed maze of hypocausts with tiny towers of stacked tiles. No burning coals, but pools of hot water between the tiles. Chantilly was heated by hot springs. The smell of sulfur suffused the air now.

“Which way?” she hissed to LeFèvre. He resisted for long moments then finally pointed. She pulled him after her. To her right through another door she saw a river of steaming water under a little bridge. How far to the cells? Had LeFèvre misdirected her? She blocked out LeFèvre’s
heavy steps behind her and used her senses. Under the sulfur, under the faintly mineral smell of the water, what was that? Blood. One of her kind could always smell blood. Blood and groaning. Quick breathing.

She did not need LeFèvre’s slow directions anymore. She turned left through a low passage, following the sounds and the smell of blood. She burst into an intersecting corridor. Her anger rose and her Companion coursed along her veins. Three cells, but she had attention only for the center one, with the door open and the smell of blood oozing out. A low moan from the cell wrenched a cry from her own throat.

She pulled the door open. Its metal hinges creaked and broke. It swung at a crazy angle. She let go of LeFèvre and darted inside. The sight that met her eyes checked her. John lay, almost insensible, turned on one hip, and chained to a ring set into the stone. He was naked, pale and sweating, bleeding in a dozen places. He had an erection. His buttocks and back were covered by a young man, fully dressed, who stopped the thrusting of his hips and looked up with startled eyes. Beatrix felt his vibrations and smelled the stink of his particular version of cinnamon and ambergris. An animal growl issued from her throat as she lunged forward. She pulled the man off John and threw him against the wall. His gaping breeches revealed his own erection. His head thunked sickeningly against the stone. But he was vampire. He merely shook his head and lunged up at her. Behind her, LeFèvre joined the attack.

She swung round and LeFèvre thrust a pike at her. Where had that come from? She ducked to the side, but it caught her in the shoulder. Her midnight-blue dress ripped away. Quintoc grabbed her other shoulder and tore her away from the point of the pike. His hands groped for her neck. She knew he meant to tear her head off. LeFèvre’s pike found her side. She groaned.
Companion!
The single thought was desperate enough to bring her
partner surging up with its last bit of strength. She pulled away from the pike and Quintoc’s grip and lunged at LeFèvre, her fingers cupped upward.

LeFèvre’s eyes bulged as her nails cut the skin of his throat like butter. Blood spurted everywhere. She gripped, and ripped at flesh. LeFèvre staggered back, gurgling and clutching his throat. But Quintoc was on her from behind with a shriek of fury. She twisted round and thrust the heel of her right hand at his chin. She could feel the snap of his neck. He fell back.

Even a broken neck would be healed by the Companion within minutes. Her earlier compunction about killing was drowned in the surge of her fury. She hardly thought, but gripped Quintoc’s head in both hands and, with a wail rising up the scale, twisted. A spatter of blood and she was holding a bulging-eyed head, its baby lips still moving in a fading protest.

She tossed the head aside and rounded on LeFèvre. He held out one hand in defense, shaking his head as blood welled through his throat. Beatrix felt her Companion slide back down her veins. The killing urgency went with it.

“Go!” she hissed. “Tell her Beatrix Lisse has taken back what was mine.”

LeFèvre scrambled backward until he could turn and stumble heavily up the stairs.

John’s comforting distance from himself vanished. Beatrix. It was Beatrix standing there over Quintoc’s headless body. He blinked as though to dispel a dream, but she remained, her breast heaving, eyes glowing red, blood soaking her dress at shoulder and side. Her face was spattered with it. Quintoc’s blood. She had torn his head from his body with her bare hands.

He took a shuddering breath. She was strong . . . like them? Beatrix was a monster like them! It took all his strength to pull himself up to sit. She stood like a statue
of vengeance over him while the red slowly faded from her eyes. He became aware of his nakedness. His erection was subsiding, but she had seen it. Shame filled him. She had seen it all. And she was like them.

She must have seen the horror in his eyes, for she made small, soothing sounds and stepped forward, her hand out as to a wounded animal. He shrank away. Would she suck his blood? Would she force him . . .? He had gone to bed with her when she was like Asharti!

She lowered her hand, but her voice still soothed as she approached. That she moved at all with such bloody rents in her body only served to underline her alien nature. She knelt beside him. He trembled as she touched his face, but he was too weak to escape.

Her eyes filled. “My poor John,” Then with some of her former ferocity, “I will never forgive what she has done to you.” She put her fingers to the pulse in his neck. “We must get you away. There are others in the house and Asharti might return at any moment.”

He wanted to leave this hellish place more than anything. But that was not possible. He moved to let his chains clank in illustration. She calmly took hold of the iron ring with both hands and jerked. With a squeal of stone against metal and a puff of dust, the ring came free. John stared at the hole in the stone with widening eyes, then glanced up to her in fear.

She sat back on her heels and looked seriously at him. The dreadful wound in her shoulder did not seem to be bleeding so much. Somewhere he heard running feet. “Now, John Staunton, they are coming, and there is only one way out of here. You must trust me.” She sidled in to sit next to him, her body pressed against his. Even in his weakened state, he felt her warmth, the thrumming, vibrating life that always seemed to surround her, the cinnamon scent. A brief flash of fear shot through him as he realized why she smelled like Asharti, and even, in some
twisted way, Quintoc. It wasn’t that they used the same perfume.

“No, no,” she shushed, as she felt him stiffen. “Let me hold you, thus.” She pulled him close, held his body against her bleeding shoulder. He felt her blood, hot, mingle with his own. “There will be a little pain as we leave,” she murmured.

He relaxed against her, he was not quite sure why. The vibrations that seemed to surround her cycled up some scale. The cell was filmed with a red haze. He saw Quintoc’s headless body and the head staring in blind shock from the corner. There was the familiar torch, now blood-red, the heavy table. Then the red film grew darker. The vibrations became almost unbearable. Through the doorway with its dangling door burst LeFèvre and three others. How could the man live with his throat torn so? The room went almost black. The vibrations shuddered into some realm almost beyond consciousness. A stabbing pain flooded his body. He cried out. It was if he was turned inside out. And all sense left him.

Beatrix and her burden reappeared in the Forest de Givenchy a mile, perhaps even two, from the chateau. A stiff breeze ruffled the treetops of the oaks and the birches above, but below all was quiet with the soft, rotting damp of last autumn’s leaves to cushion them.

Beatrix looked down to where John lay in her arms. He had lost consciousness. Just as well, for she must draw the power again and again to get him away from here. She did not worry about outwitting LeFèvre, but Asharti might return at any time, and she knew only too well what a wily and relentless adversary Asharti could be. All thought of confronting Asharti was banished. Beatrix must get John somewhere he was safe from her.

Now she must think what to do with a naked, bleeding man in the middle of a country where her adversary held
political as well as personal power. Her thoughts were a little muddy with the pain of her wounds. A country inn, a tavern; one with a stable perhaps, out of the way but not too far. The Companion would heal her wounds shortly. But her strength for translocating was limited now, especially with John as a burden. She pictured the map around Chantilly in her head. Neuilly-en-Theille? Not the least likely refuge, but not the most likely, either. Neuilly-en-Theille, then. Find an inn, leave John in the stable. Then translocate with John into the room she was given. Clothes. He would need clothing, even if it was rough or simple. She would have to steal or coax it out of the landlord or a likely-sized guest.