Blood Maidens (39 page)

‘I was arrested in Köln. I think someone must have recognized me. It happens. The town’s filled with Foreign Service men, on account of the new fortifications.’

She drew back, put on her spectacles, and studied his face and cropped head. ‘I don’t see how they could have, but all right, if you say so. Jamie—’

She gripped him again, tighter, more desperate, and for some minutes they clung together like drowning swimmers in the candle’s wavering glow. Then the light jerked and dipped with a sudden draft, and Petronilla’s rich contralto laugh shivered the darkness. ‘Well, ’tis an evening for journeys’ ends and lovers’ meetings, isn’t it?’ Asher saw their eyes flash in the gloom.

‘Herr – Filaret, I think you told Sergius your name was? Though I imagine it’s really Asher, isn’t it, unless our good little English virgin is a great deal naughtier than she’s painted herself. Whoever you are, if you’ll be so good as to take off those silver chains you’re wearing. And don’t make Texel shoot you,’ she added. ‘The fact that the bullets in that gun are silver doesn’t mean they can’t kill you just as dead as lead—
Verdammung
!’ she added, clutching at her wrist as if at the bite of an insect.

She fell back a pace, kneading at her arm as if in sharp pain. Texel did not take his eyes – or the gun – from Asher. After a moment, unwillingly, Asher complied.

‘Have the lovely Frau Asher put them in my pocket,’ ordered Texel. ‘Silver doesn’t burn the way it did – poor old Theiss really was onto something there. Not that anything would induce me to take that filthy serum four times a day the way Madame does—’

‘It’s only the after-effects of the first batches,’ Petronilla retorted, with a glance of contemptuous loathing. ‘Benedict told me it would fade.’ She rubbed her shoulder, kneading as if at a violent itch.

‘But what did he know about it, really?’ demanded Lydia. ‘The man wasn’t running any sort of controlled tests. For all you know, you could start turning into one of those things like that poor boy Kolya, and I don’t think even your poor sweetheart is going to be able to overlook that—’

‘You,’ said Petronilla quietly, ‘keep your tongue between your teeth, girl. There’s a little debt owing to you – and to your sweetheart – that it will be a pleasure to pay out.’ She moved forward, and Asher fell back a step, shielding Lydia with his body. ‘Oh, don’t be melodramatic. What on earth do you think you can do against us?’

She was perfectly right about that, but at that point Asher could think of very little he had to lose. He dove at Texel, twisting sideways to avoid the gunshot that echoed like thunder in the crypt, hoping Lydia had the good sense to run for the door that the vampires had left open behind them. It was, he knew, madness to take on a vampire physically; the strength of Texel’s blow sent him sprawling against the wall, stunning him, and he heard the tiny pat-pat-pat of Lydia’s bare feet stumble, heard her cry out.

Texel caught him by the throat, and he felt the rake of the vampire’s claws, on his chest, on his hands; Texel tore away his jacket, thrust him against the wall, and clawed him deliberately, back and forth across his ribs and on his back. Then he stepped away, and Lydia was flung down beside him, gasping, bleeding where her flesh, too, had been gashed.

Petronilla licked the blood from her nails. ‘I’m going to enjoy this.’ She glanced around her at the half-seen forms, sleeping in their niches in the darkness. ‘In an hour they’ll be waking. My little blood maidens. They usually don’t open their eyes until it’s full dark outside. If we can ever locate that
beschissen
Spaniard –’ she threw another murderous glare at Texel – ‘I shall have to ask him if that’s an effect of their maidenhood.’

‘I think we’ll find that out,’ responded the German, ‘a good deal quicker than we’ll be able to flush him out of hiding. I put one of these into him.’ He gestured with the pistol. ‘He can’t stay hidden forever. And in a few days –’ he gestured, as she had, back towards the unseen niches, the pale sleepers – ‘these will be strong enough to help us bring him in. Do you think they’ll know by instinct how to kill? Or will you have to show them?’

She smiled. ‘I look forward to finding that out.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Texel took the candle, just – as Ellen would put it – to be bloody-minded.

The moment the door closed Lydia whispered, ‘Do you have anything else in your jacket?’

‘Some twine, the rest of the matches, and about seventy-five roubles.’

‘Can you make a picklock out of the frame of my spectacles?’

‘Not for the lock on that door. Stay where you are for a minute.’ He groped on his knees, feeling in the direction of where Texel had thrown the rags of his jacket, until he found it. Returning to her, he wrapped it around her shoulders, her flesh cold to his touch and her blood sticky on his fingers. Then he took her hand and edged cautiously to the left until his other hand came in contact with a wall, then followed it, passing the niches where the blood maidens slept.

Lydia whispered, ‘Is there anything we can do?’

‘Not much. Stand here, by the door, and hope it’s thick enough that she doesn’t hear us breathing through it. If she doesn’t have Texel with her when she comes back, one of us may have a chance. We slip past her – if we can – and split up—’

‘Here.’

He heard the rustle of her fumbling in the dark, and a moment later she pressed a handful of roubles and half a dozen matches into his hand.

‘We try to find Don Simon,’ said Lydia firmly. ‘He’s out there somewhere, and if he’s on his feet, he’ll be looking for us.’

‘How badly was he shot?’

There was long silence. Then she said in a tiny voice, ‘I don’t know.’

Then silence, dense and endless as the night after Judgment Day, when all the living souls have departed and the dead world is left to its long emptiness. Asher put his arm around his wife, felt her trembling with cold or exhaustion or fear.

Even he could smell their blood.

A voice whispered somewhere in the darkness, ‘Yuri?’

Damn
—

‘Sonia?’

‘What is that?’

‘There’s someone here. There by the door.’

‘Blood—’

A girl’s voice said – like the others – in the rough peasant Russian of the slums, ‘Don’t.’ And then, in French: ‘Madame Asher, is that you?’

Besides the voices there wasn’t a sound, but Asher knew, as if he felt it through his skin, that they were moving up the room towards them. Lydia said, ‘Genia, it’s me.’

And then, shockingly close, the voice of Genia said in Russian, ‘Don’t, Alexei, stop it!’ There was a sharp rustle, like moths – Asher felt the stir of air, movement, as if someone had been pushed away.

‘It’s all right,’ whispered a boy’s voice, almost in Asher’s ear. ‘It will save them from their sins, the same way the Lady saved
us
by drinking
our
blood.’

‘That’s what she said.’ Another boy, terrifyingly close. ‘In my dream St Margaret said so. She appeared to me, Genia! She had the Lady’s face! They are sinners, they can only be saved through us—’

‘It’s a lie!’ cried Genia desperately, and Asher nearly jumped out of his skin at the brush of a death-cold shoulder against his arm. Another almost soundless rustle, the movement of bodies. He could smell their clothing, old sweat and carbolic soap, though their flesh was odorless. ‘If we drink their blood we’ll be damned!’

‘You’ve got it wrong, Genia,’ said Alexei, and now there was frantic urgency in his voice. ‘You’ve got it backwards.
Everyone
is damned. It’s the blood that damns – and the blood that saves . . .’

And someone else, another girl, very young by the sound of her voice, echoed fervently, ‘It’s the blood that saves . . .’

Behind them, the door fell suddenly open and lamplight streamed through. Asher barely had a moment to glimpse the ring of white faces, gleaming vampire eyes, less than two feet away from them, before he grabbed Lydia and dragged her through the door, almost stumbling into Sergius von Brühlsbuttel on the threshold. Lydia caught the lamp as von Brühlsbuttel dropped it; Asher slammed the door to, shot the bolt, twisted the key.

The gentle nobleman seemed paralysed with shock at what he, too, had glimpsed in the lamplight beyond the door. Then he seemed to rouse himself, stammered, ‘She’s on her way.’

‘Help Lydia.’ It seemed a safer division of labor than trusting him with the lamp. ‘Do you have the key to the front gate?’

‘Here—’ Von Brühlsbuttel reached out, as if to pluck at Asher’s sleeve as he led the way through the corridor he remembered, up a flight of steps. ‘Those things in the chapel – what are they? What is
she
? I had never seen her in daylight . . .
Herr Gott
, when we crossed the courtyard—!’

‘They are vampires,’ said Asher grimly, counting doorways, counting turnings, as he had counted them when Texel had brought him down. At least, as a
Junker
– a country aristocrat – von Brühlsbuttel would have grown up with the legends. ‘
She
is a vampire—’

‘And is making a damn good attempt,’ added Lydia thoughtfully, ‘at taking over the position of Master of St Petersburg. I’m Mrs Asher, by the way, sir . . . Jamie, I don’t imagine any interloping fledgling has ever come up with the idea of creating ten fledglings of her own all at once before. They’ll immediately outnumber both local nests put together, even if Golenischev and Prince Dargomyzhsky weren’t gone for the summer—’

Von Brühlsbuttel halted in his tracks, staring in horror at this matter-of-fact recital, and Asher caught the man’s arm in his free hand, dragged him on. ‘We know the Undead,’ he said. ‘We’ve fought them for years.’ Which sounded better, he supposed, than saying,
We’ve had a vampire friend since 1907
 . . .

‘
Du Gott almachtig
 . . .’

Wide stairs debouched into the covered walk that surrounded the courtyard. The silver-barred grille that guarded the archway stood open. Even in the lamplight Asher could see Lydia’s face was chalky under the streaked blood, and von Brühlsbuttel looked scarcely better. The German whispered, ‘How could I have been deceived in her?’

Checking the courtyard, watching for signs of movement – not that anyone could see a hunting vampire move – Asher replied, ‘Deceit is what they do.’

‘And even they, like everyone else,’ said Lydia, ‘have two sides to their souls. You were her friend in Berlin?’

‘I was.’ Von Brühlsbuttel let his breath go in a little sigh. ‘I thought . . . She has changed. She was not like this a year ago.’

‘It’s the serum, I think,’ said Lydia, and she leaned back against the frame of the arch, struggling to get her breath. ‘Dr Theiss said so, anyway. The serum they were working on, so that she could walk around in the daylight. It’s why she made new vampires – to get vampire blood. I think it affects her mind. And it’s had some shocking effects on some of the maidens he tested it on. Texel keeps away from it, but he’ll go back and get some if he has to, to pursue us into daylight. I’m all right now.’

She was lying, thought Asher, but it was a gallant lie. The moon had set. The sky above the walls was not black, but a velvety blue, a few shades lighter than royal, and pinned with stars that barely showed against the atmosphere’s ambient brightness. She was right. Dawnlight wouldn’t save them.

He took her hand. ‘Let’s go.’

The courtyard was about sixty feet by a hundred, and from where they stood in the arch it seemed like a mile and a half to the gate.

They ran.

And Petronilla Ehrenberg dropped from the balcony above the outer gate, weightless, like a great pale bird.

For a moment she only stood facing them, the lamplight glowing back from her eyes. Then she stretched forth her hand and said, ‘Get away from them, Sergius.’

‘And what?’ Sergius von Brühlsbuttel stepped out from between Asher and Lydia and stood before them, between them and the vampire. ‘Watch you kill these people? Petra—’

‘You don’t understand.’ She flinched, clutched at her arm again as if the pain there had returned. In the wavery lamplight Asher saw the small red spot he had noticed on her neck had widened to the size of an American dollar, and her whole body gave off a strange, sulfurous smell. ‘I swear to you I don’t do this often . . .’

‘Petra,’ said von Brühlsbuttel gently, ‘I think I do understand. Your heart longs for the daylight – you remember what it was like, to love. As I remember. You wanted to open up the door again into the world of the living, and to pass freely back and forth. To have sunlight and love in the world of the living . . . and power in the world of the night.’

She turned her gleaming eyes on him, and Asher saw something change in them, as she looked back through the door of which he spoke. Tears of regret filled her eyes, for all that she had lost, and she cried, ‘Is that too much to ask?’

‘Yes,’ said von Brühlsbuttel, his voice infinitely sad. ‘Yes, my love, I think it is.’

Lydia shouted, ‘Look out!’ and Asher saw movement in the central doorway of the monastery: Texel raising his gun. Who his target was Asher never knew; von Brühlsbuttel gasped, ‘Petra!’ and seized her, thrusting her out of the line of fire, just as the sound of the shot split the night. The German let out a cry and crumpled into Petronilla’s arms.