The Third Section (56 page)

It was a reasonable turnout; a good military presence, a large contingent of Svetlana’s family, and even a few from Dmitry’s – cousins with whom, she discovered, he rarely communicated. A few months before she would have had so many questions for them, but now there was little she did not know about the deaths in 1812 and 1825 and Aleksei’s involvement in them. She could have told his family that, despite his exile, he was a hero, but soon she would have the honour of telling Aleksei himself, face to face.

Svetlana had been polite, almost effusive towards Tamara, considering how icy their last encounter had been. At least Tamara had bothered to come. There were few other representatives of Dmitry’s friends in Moscow.

‘Actual State Councillor Yudin asked me personally to send his apologies,’ Tamara said, by way of explanation. ‘He has so much to do with all the reforms His Majesty is putting into place.’

‘I know. I know,’ said Svetlana. ‘He organized all this; paid for
it
. It’s so like Vasiliy Denisovich to hide away from the occasion itself.’

It was a simple mistake over the patronymic – Denisovich for Innokyentievich. Svetlana had clearly been thinking of another absentee: Vasiliy Denisovich Makarov. One had organized this funeral; the other managed the rental of her former home. And yet neither had made it here.

The most surprising face Tamara saw was that of her brother, Rodion Valentinovich.

‘You knew Dmitry?’ she asked.

‘Very slightly. Years ago, when he was young and I was younger – before you were born. He used to visit with his parents. Mama insisted I come here. To honour Grandpapa. He and Aleksei Ivanovich were so close.’

Rodion left soon after, saying he had to be back on duty. Tamara didn’t even have a chance to thank him for giving her the name of her nanny.

She left Petersburg on the train the following morning. Konstantin was not in the city, but she would not have tried to contact him even if he had been. That could wait. For now there was only one thought on her mind: the return of the Decembrists.

There was no music. There was no light. There was neither cold nor warmth, neither pain nor comfort, neither pleasure nor sorrow. The only sound was that of a sudden, laboured breathing; of lungs that had lain empty for days at last filling. The only knowledge was the understanding of the mind of another.

The breathing was Dmitry’s own. This had been no gradual restoration to life, no transition from death to slumber and from slumber to wakefulness. His body’s need for air had arisen in the same instant as his mind’s awareness of it. The first few breaths were desperate and deep, accentuated by the emerging sense of enclosure. An early thought was that there was little air for him to breathe; a later one that he had little need for it.

His next perception was Raisa’s mind. A human child might look forward to a decade and a half in which his parents would pass down the knowledge learned from their own parents, plus a little more that had been accumulated during their lives. They
might
even employ others to assist in the process. A
voordalak
could not risk such a slow transference of information so vital to survival; it was like a newborn foal that must learn to stand on its own feet within hours, or perish. Thus the mind of the parent vampire was shared with that of the child.

Like him, Raisa was awake – newly awake as night had just fallen. She was in a dark place, as was he. She knew he was there. She was in a coffin. She hungered. The wood of the lid above her face meant that she could feel the warmth of her breath blowing back on her. Dmitry could feel the same. She pushed at it and it yielded. Dmitry pushed, but there was no movement. He tried again, but still his coffin remained a prison. He prepared for that awful sense of being trapped to come upon him – the claustrophobia he always felt when his sizeable frame could not stretch to its fullest. But the sensation did not come. Instead he felt … safe. He searched Raisa’s mind for help, back to the time when she had first awoken as a vampire, after Tyeplov had made her into one. In understanding her first moments of this new life – her rebirth – he hoped to better make sense of his own.

Raisa was walking now, down a flight of stone steps and into a dark, low corridor. She offered no resistance to his mind, as she had done when last they had been together. Even that, she revealed to him, had been longer ago than he would have guessed. He had been dead for three weeks – buried for two. But his curiosity was directed towards the past, not the present. He searched her mind for the memory of her own rebirth.

Weeks turned into months and months into years, and yet still he could not locate the moment of her resurrection. He quickly found the cemetery in Klin where he had seen her dead. She remembered waiting there, standing beside Tyeplov as they both watched. Then she had seen him – Dmitry – and they had moved swiftly. Tyeplov had bitten at her throat and she had cut his chest. Each had smeared the other’s blood across their mouths, steeling themselves against the repugnant taste of the blood of another vampire. Then Raisa had lain down on the grave, in desperate concentration to prevent her wounds from healing, waiting for Dmitry to arrive. She had heard noises, but could not make sense of them. It was only when Tyeplov had kicked at her prone body
that
she had opened her eyes and seen Dmitry unconscious beside her. She and Tyeplov had fled.

She had been a
voordalak
even then. She had been a
voordalak
when Tyeplov and Mihailov had confronted her at the brothel, when she had first met Dmitry, when she had first met Tamara, when she had come to Degtyarny Lane.

Years rolled back. 1848 – the cholera – the famine – the foreign revolutions. 1831 – the Polish uprising – a revolution against the Turks. 1826 – Nikolai’s coronation. Even 1825 and the Decembrist Revolt; she remembered it, though she had not been there. And soon before that deep in a cave – a chain around her neck – his father’s face! And then at last he found the moment: her sense of the new, her search for the mind of the one who had created her. Dmitry recognized him – Kyesha, the vampire he and his father had hunted in Moscow; the one who had transformed Raisa into a creature like himself.

And then knowledge poured in. Everything had been intended to deceive him. It was no lie that she was a vampire, but not for a matter of mere months; her transformation had occurred thirty years before. Everything that had taken place between her and Dmitry had been to that one end: to persuade him to become like her – persuade him because he could not be forced; only the willing would receive that which they desired. And yet, the prime motivation had not been hers. It had come from a man who had watched even as Kyesha had drunk her blood and she his; a man she had known as Cain. But now he was no longer a man. He was a
voordalak
too. And his name was no longer Cain; it was Yudin.

Dmitry had been deceived; tricked, seduced and exploited. Raisa had been the primary agent of it, but its cause and its motivation had been Yudin. His reasons were a closed book to Dmitry; Raisa did not know them, and Dmitry had no power to perceive what she could not. And yet he felt no sense of betrayal at any of it. He was not happy to be in his present state, but neither was he disturbed by it. It was what he was, and to reject it would be to reject himself. He knew with utter certainty that the Dmitry of before would have been sickened to know what had become of him, but that was not enough to make him care. The Dmitry of old was like a former friend; a friend who had been close, but for
whom
one little cared. If he despised the new Dmitry then it only demonstrated what a fool he had been.

Raisa had now come to a wooden door. She had a key to it, which she hesitated to use. Her hunger overwhelmed her, but she knew how wonderful the cessation of that hunger would be. She did not want to rush into it. Dmitry felt the same hunger, but had none of the desire to delay its sating. He kicked hard at the wooden lid above him, again and again, and eventually it splintered. He revelled in his new-found strength, and began to beat against the wooden lid with his feet and knees. Soon it was a mess of shards. Some of the earth above fell into the coffin, but it did not matter. In moments he was digging his way through it, ever upwards to the surface, pushing earth aside like a mole, unconcerned as to the lasting integrity of his tunnel.

At last he was breathing the cool night air. That it was cool was of no greater cheer to him than that it had been warm below – it merely gave him a greater sense of where he was, and of where his prey was. The scent of human blood wafted to him on the breeze. It was everywhere – a hundred odours merged into a single melange. He knew that he must learn to distinguish them.

In his hunger he had forgotten his exploration of Raisa’s mind, but now it forced itself upon him in a single image – one that was both surprising and familiar. That Raisa should have held in her memory the distant image of Dmitry’s father from years ago made some sense. They must have met. Dmitry felt confident that he would, on further reflection, understand it fully. But that his mother’s aged face should at this moment be in the forefront of Raisa’s mind was a matter of complete puzzlement.

It was of little concern. Hunger was an issue of greater immediacy. Through the tangled mixture of scents, the blood of one now stood out. Dmitry could only determine that it was human; male or female, young or old, he could not tell. He felt sure that such discrimination would come to him with practice, but for now the scent only told him that the body which carried that blood was close. And he was oh, so hungry. He paused, listening for the sound of any music that his mind might generate to accompany the sensation, but none came. It was unnerving, but
he
would get used to it. Hunger was a more beguiling seductress than any music he could conjure.

He scuttled across the graveyard, his nostrils leading him where they would.

‘Did you have to kill him?’

Tamara remained on the stairway, fearful and ready to run. There was still some daylight up above, though whether it would be enough to protect her, Tamara could only guess. It was only a guess that Raisa could not throw herself across the room in the time it took for Tamara to climb but a few steps. Then there would be nothing to save her from the same fate that had already befallen Dmitry.

‘Who?’ asked Raisa. She was sitting in Yudin’s chair, her feet up on his desk, reading some document she had picked from it. She didn’t even look at Tamara.

‘Who do you think?’

‘I’ve killed so many,’ replied Raisa.

How many was that, Tamara wondered. It had been only a month since Tyeplov had made her a
voordalak
. How many souls could she have consumed? One a day? It was conceivable. She had gone through men at a higher rate in Degtyarny Lane – though Tamara could hardly censure her for that. But it might hint at how Dmitry could be so easily forgotten among them – among either group.

Tamara had not come to see Raisa; finding her here in Yudin’s office was as surprising as it was inexplicable. Tamara had come to see Yudin – or perhaps to see Makarov. She had little doubt now that the two men were one and the same. Svetlana’s faux pas at the funeral had set off the train of thought. The fact that Yudin and Makarov shared the same Christian name could be mere coincidence, but the fact that they seemed to fulfil similar roles in Dmitry’s life was more suspicious. Makarov had disappeared from the official record soon after the Decembrist revolt – just as Yudin had appeared. Yudin could be the same age as Makarov. He looked younger, but that merely went to show that he hid it well.

‘Did all of them love you quite so much?’ she asked.

‘
Love
me?’ Raisa’s confusion would have fooled most. ‘Do you mean Mitka?’

‘Are you suggesting he didn’t love you?’

Raisa shrugged. ‘He thinks he did, but it’s hard for him to know for sure. But I didn’t kill him – not really.’

‘Not
really
? I watched them bury him.’

‘These things take time,’ said Raisa. ‘Or didn’t you know that?’

‘Time?’

‘He’s been reborn for a week.’

Tamara felt a sickness in her stomach – greater than she had been experiencing already. In the belief that Dmitry was dead she had been able to pray for mercy on his soul, and to pour her hatred upon Raisa. From somewhere she had convinced herself of the idea that the transformation from human to
voordalak
would be a rapid one, virtually instantaneous. So it had been with Raisa herself.

‘You’ve spoken to him?’ asked Tamara.

Raisa swung her feet down from the desk and stood up. Tamara tensed. Raisa began to walk across the room, not towards Tamara, but putting herself within easy reach. ‘Spoken?’ she said. ‘There’s no need for speech between us. We know one another’s minds.’

‘Then I pity him,’ said Tamara.

Raisa cocked her head towards Tamara, but didn’t rise to the bait. ‘He used to pity you,’ she said. ‘But not any more.’

‘Me?’

Raisa now spoke in a singsong voice, like a child. ‘Poor lost little girl, looking for her mama and papa, all alone in the woods.’

She knew, thought Tamara. Of course she knew; she knew Dmitry’s mind and Dmitry had written to Tamara that
he
knew who her parents were. That was if any of it were true. Even the fact that Dmitry had risen as a
voordalak
came only from Raisa’s lips, and was therefore best treated with contempt; but that did not make it false.