The Kindred of Darkness (38 page)

But the utter stillness of the night raised the hair on his nape, and morning's nearness after the short summer night was a goad even sharper than the pain in his ankle.
She's meeting Zahorec here with the books. They're upstairs now
…

He dragged himself up the first two steps, strained his ears to listen. A woman said something, indistinct through the intervening stone and wood. Another voice, also a woman's, replied.

Then like the stab of a silver knife into his flesh a child's voice: ‘Go home …'

‘Hush,' snapped an alto voice, with the slight inflection of speech that Asher recognized as characteristic of American southern blacks. ‘We gonna take you home soon, honey.'

The sound of his daughter's voice heated every atom of his flesh, as if he'd drunk brandy. Wild and murderous rage …

They're waiting for him. He must have gone to kill. With dawn this close, he'll be here very, VERY soon
…

By putting his shoulder to the paneling on the stair, and keeping his weight on the risers, he was able to climb, more or less steadily, and without a sound.

‘… all depends on what your daddy's gonna say about that little girl,' continued the black girl – Hellice, Lydia had said her name was. ‘You say she's this Charlene Savenake's baby given over into your care – though I never heard Lady Savenake had no other daughter but Sylvie—'

‘Whose daughter she is, is none of your business, Hellie,' said a lighter voice – like a soubrette who'd had elocution lessons. ‘She's in my care—'

‘Then why keep her secret from your daddy? Why send me out here with her all today? I'm not sayin' you're wrong, Miss Cece. I'm just sayin', your daddy could fire me without a character, and then where'd I be?'

The upper floor of Stenmuir was far more ruinous than the lower. Much of the roof was gone, and the walls of several of the rooms. When the clouds shifted Asher saw the tower rising above them, little more than a hollowed shell, floors broken away and inner doors opening into nothing. None of the banister that once had circled the gallery above the hall survived. The hall below was a pit of night.

Keeping to the wall where the stronger flooring would take his weight without creaking, Asher angled his head to look through the door of one of the few intact chambers that opened from the gallery. By the light of a single lantern, Cecelia Armistead had to be the dark-haired young lady in a flame-red walking costume more stylish than practical. Hellie – what Americans would call an octoroon – stood beside a camp chair in a corner where a couple of carriage rugs had been thrown.

Miranda sat curled into the corner on the carriage rugs. Her red hair was tangled and uncombed, her dress dirty, but she watched the two women without fear, as if she were just calculating her moment to run. Asher could almost hear her thinking,
I'm only a baby, how far can I get and is it worth getting slapped if I get caught?
Her face was bruised: someone had slapped her recently and hard.

Smoothly, Hellie continued, ‘I just want a guarantee, Miss Cece—'

Through the door, Miranda's eyes met her father's, widened in shocked joy—

And she didn't make a sound.

A stride took Cece to her servant and she caught Hellie's arm. ‘Don't you try to blackmail me, you black bitch—'

Miranda bolted for the door as Asher stepped around the doorpost, leveled the shotgun on both women as they turned. ‘Stand right where you are.'

Both Cece and Hellie expressed their feelings in a way that Lydia's Aunt Lavinnia would have deemed only to be expected of Americans. Miranda grabbed his leg and pressed her face to it. ‘Papa'. He could feel her shaking.

‘Your mama's downstairs,' he said quietly. ‘Go quickly – stay by the wall …'

We're going to get out of this after all
…

Behind him in the dark Lydia screamed, ‘Jamie, look out!'

A
sher turned his head and Hellie grabbed her mistress and shoved her at him, the American girl's weight catching him on his right side and collapsing his weakened leg like the blow of a hammer. He tried to roll clear, but Cece wrenched the shotgun from his hands and reared herself back, fired it at him as he threw Miranda out of the way – to his life's end he was never sure how he managed it in the confusion. Ricocheting pellets tore his arm and scalp; he heard both Miranda and Cece scream. As he tried to get to his feet someone flung herself past him, almost tripping over him in a rush of skirts.

The next instant a numbing kick to the ribs sent him almost over the edge of the gallery. He grabbed the broken stub of a baluster, dragged his legs back from over the black drop, and saw, by the flaring glow of the lantern, Damien Zahorec at the top of the stair, holding Lydia by the waist and one arm.

Cece, on her knees and clutching a bleeding arm (
the ricochet must have caught her, too, and serve her right
), sobbed, ‘Kill her!' A revolver lay near her on the floor (
Lydia must have had it in her hand
) and Cece grabbed for it. In the same instant Miranda wailed, ‘Mama!' and ran toward Lydia with arms outstretched.

Lydia twisted in Zahorec's grip and smote him across the eyes with the silver chains wrapped around her left wrist, lunged for her daughter when the vampire dropped her with a shrieked curse. She might have reached her, had not Cece fired at her – missing her by yards, but Lydia dodged aside, and the next instant, with the near-invisible swiftness of the Undead, Zahorec had overtaken her, knocked her spinning with a sidelong slap, and scooped up Miranda in his arms.

The child screamed, bit, thrashed like a demon, but the cold clawed hand wrapped around her throat and Zahorec shouted, ‘Stay back!'

Lydia, halfway to her feet with a look in her eyes that Asher had never seen in his usually matter-of-fact young wife, froze, crouching. Cece swung the pistol toward her and Zahorec shouted again. ‘Drop it!'

Such was his power over the American girl that she too stood still, though she didn't let go of the weapon, or lower its aim.

‘Cecelia,' said the vampire softly. ‘
Caro
. I have told you I have need of this woman – stay where you are, Lydia,
meine Liebling
… This is your so-brave husband?' The blue eyes flickered down to Asher, who had got his elbows under him and was struggling to breathe. In the soft old
hochdeutsch
of the Empire he continued, ‘Don't be foolish,
mein Held.
I want your beautiful one alive and willing, and if you make me kill you then I shall be obliged to kill her also, and your lovely child. Surely you have seen how it is, and what it is that I need.'

‘And what,' panted Asher, ‘do you need?' He could probably, he calculated, reach the vampire if he lunged for him, but if he did so he knew Miranda would die. Lydia, too, the moment Zahorec took his attention from the hysterical girl with the pistol.

Watch for it
, he thought.
You'll only have a split-second
…

‘I need what all men need,' replied Damien gravely, ‘living or dead. I need my freedom.' In the lamplight he looked far worse than Ysidro had, skeletal and alien, with his dark hair falling over his eyes and his powerful form bony and shrunken. The silver chain on Lydia's wrist had left a suppurating welt across his forehead, as if he'd been struck with a red-hot rod. He did, in fact, bear a superficial resemblance to Noel Wredemere. Asher wondered for how much longer he would have been able to muster the strength to maintain the illusion. How much longer he'd have been able to make love to Cece Armistead in her dreams.

‘For three hundred years I have been a slave – three hundred years! Suitable penance, my old confessor would say, for one who used to boast that I could enslave any woman whose eyes met mine …'

His glance returned to the dark-haired girl in crimson, her revolver still trained on Lydia, but her eyes on Zahorec's face: suspicion, incomprehension, jealousy, adoration.

‘A jest worthy of the Devil himself. They said Ippolyta Vranica, sorceress and heretic and ruler in her own right of the mountains beyond Zara, had a heart of obsidian, impervious to the smiles of a man. Of course I had to have her. Never did it cross my mind to wonder at it, that I never saw her save after the sun was down … too late I found the reason. Queen of the vampires of the Dinarics, she would not let me go. What would you have done, Englishman? With the life bleeding from me, drop by slow drop, she dangled me over the abyss of death and offered me the choice: to be her creature, her servant, her lover for eternity. What would you have done?'

Asher dragged himself carefully to a sitting position. ‘I've met the lady,' he said. ‘But if it's freedom that you seek, what need have you of Lydia's services, or mine? What need of the London nest, or the
Book of the Kindred of Darkness
? Where did you get it, by the way?'

‘In my days of daylight and breath,' replied the vampire, ‘I was a scholar of sorts. I read it as I read
Pantagreul
and
Utopia
and the dialogs of Plato, and thought of it no more than of those other fairy tales. It was in my house in Venice. I recalled it with bitter longing, all those years of enslavement in the mountains. When the soldiers came and Ippolyta fled, it was the first place I made for. Like everything else it had been sold …'

‘What are you talking about?' Cece moved closer to him, the revolver still aimed at Lydia's heart. ‘I brought you the books, all of them. And I got Noel here. He's back at the Hall, he'll marry me tomorrow … Why isn't it “possible” to get rid of her now?'

‘Beautiful one,' said Zahorec gently, ‘I have need of her—'

‘Why? What can she give you that I can't?'

‘
Ein Gehirn
,' muttered Zahorec,
sotto voce
, but replied coaxingly, ‘She is a scholar, beautiful savior. She has skills that I need.'

‘I can learn them.' The American girl's eyes were wide with the burning focus Asher had seen in soldiers going into the veldt. ‘Is it true what she told me? That you've gone to her as you came to me? That you kissed her as you kissed me … Made love to her as you made love to me …?'

‘Honestly,' protested Lydia, ‘I hardly asked him to—'

‘You shut up!' Eyes blazing, the American girl swung to face her demon lover. ‘Did you promise her what you promised me? That she'd be yours forever? Did you tell her you love her, as you told—'

Asher heard nothing, but Zahorec's head turned with a snap. Following his glance, Asher saw the maid Hellie, still standing a few yards away, even as her knees buckled, and a ribbon of blood uncurled down her shoulder and breast. Without an instant's hesitation Asher flung himself at Zahorec's legs, knocking him over, rolling. He heard Miranda scream and Cece's revolver fire and felt rather than saw Lydia lunge, too.

Her feet hammered the wooden floor, fleeing from the gallery through one of the black doors. Claws sank into the back of his neck and a knee ground his spine, but after that first split-second of pinning him, Zahorec didn't move.

Asher smelled blood, a lot of it.

He knew what had happened as he looked into the blackest corner of the gallery, and saw the maid Hellie slither, dead, to her knees and then to the floor.

The woman who straightened up behind her faced Zahorec across the body, proud pale aquiline face calm as marble and streaked with blood. The dark dress she'd worn in the Roman ruin last night glistened with it; besides the gunshot wounds in neck and breast, her flesh was crossed with the slash-marks of claws.

She must have met Ysidro
…

Ippolyta kicked Hellie's body casually over the edge of the gallery. Asher heard the meaty smack as it hit the stone floor below. A glance – with Zahorec kneeling beside him, crushing him to the floor, he couldn't see much more – showed him no sign of Lydia or their child.

‘Damien.'

Zahorec loosed his grip, and stood. ‘My lady …'

In the old high German of the Empire, she said, ‘Thought you to leave me?'

Cece fired, emptying the rest of the revolver – Asher didn't think the bullets even hit their target. Ippolyta turned towards her with eyes like the sun in eclipse. ‘Little whore. Kill her, Damien. I want to see you do it.'

She still spoke in
hochdeutsch
, but when Damien turned toward Cece the girl saw in his face what he meant to do. She screamed, ‘Damien, no! I love you!'

He stopped, features convulsed with pain. ‘Don't you understand,' he whispered, ‘that the love of the Undead is not like the love of the living?'

A statement not entirely accurate
, reflected Asher.
They look identical so far
.

Damien sprang toward the girl, but either because he was unwilling despite the force of his master vampire's command, or because the elixirs he'd been taking had eroded his speed and skill, Cece saw him coming. She fired the empty pistol at him, then flung the weapon in his face, doubled from his grab and darted into the blackness of another of those blank-eyed gallery doors. Asher heard her footfalls clatter on the ancient floors, searching a way downstairs.

‘Fetch her.' Ippolyta's guttural voice was cold.

Damien averted his face as if from a physical grasp, and as if physically dragged looked back to meet the black glow of her eyes.

‘Bring her back here. I'll fetch the other bitch. I want to see you kill them both.'

Damien moaned, ‘No …'

‘Do it.' She walked toward him, stopped beside Asher and looked down into his face, then smiled. ‘And we'll kill the little girl, too.' And she kicked him over the edge of the gallery.

He was half-ready for this, and if she'd been a living woman he'd have grabbed her ankles or her skirt, to drag her over after him. As it was he grabbed for the stumps of the burned and shattered balusters; he heard Damien's footfalls, bodiless as the scratching of a wind-blown tree, as the vampire darted away to catch Cece, but only felt Ippolyta's going.