Blood Maidens (40 page)

‘Sergius!’ Petronilla held him up easily, but Asher could see the wound was mortal. He caught Lydia’s hand, ran two steps towards the gate, but Texel was suddenly in front of him, covering the distance with a vampire’s eerie, floating speed. Blind to everything around her, Petronilla sank to her knees on the pitted brick pavement, Sergius von Brühlsbuttel’s body in her arms. ‘Sergius!’ she called again, pressing her hands to the wounds where the silver bullet had torn through his body, blood pouring out over her white fingers.

Blood streamed down her shoulder where the exiting bullet had struck her as well, but for that first moment she seemed to feel nothing –
as I would feel nothing
, thought Asher,
if Lydia had been hit
 . . .

Von Brühlsbuttel’s hand groped for a moment; Petra’s met it, clung to it. He whispered, ‘I am sorry, my love.’

She called out his name one more time, then her whole body shuddered, and she let him slide to the pavement as she clutched at the wound in her own shoulder, sobbed once – twice—

Then screamed, as the stench of burning suddenly filled the court.

Asher caught Lydia, dragged her a step back from the vampire and her lover; Texel only stood, staring in shock. It seemed to Asher that the flame started from the dark sore on Petronilla’s neck and from the one on her hand, as much as from the wound in her shoulder where the silver bullet had gone in, as if all the stored combustion of weeks and months of accumulated daylight were reacting at once. Petronilla screamed again and tried to rise, beating at the flame with her hands, and this time Texel leaped back, face aghast—

Another thing
, Asher found himself thinking,
that he hadn’t bothered to learn about the vampire state, the powers of which he had so coveted
.

What it was like when they died.

Her skirt was burning – beneath it her legs must have erupted into flame – and she fell, crawling, rolling on the courtyard bricks. Oily smoke and the abominable stench of roasting flesh. Even when her sinews were consumed to the point that she was unable to crawl she was still conscious, screams transmuting into noises more horrible . . .

Did the ancient man who first invented the concept of Hell do so after seeing a vampire burn?

Somewhere the men and women she has killed down through the years are watching
.

When at last she was silent, Asher looked up and met Texel’s eyes across the flickering pile of ash.

The German’s face hardened, and he gestured back towards the monastery door with the gun. ‘Get inside,’ he said. ‘
Herr Gott
, that I only took one dose of the stuff . . .’

‘Yes,’ said a quiet voice from the dark archway of the monastery door. ‘Do come inside James, Mistress. I think it would be best, though, Hugo, if you remain outside till daylight – drop the gun. Drop it—’

Hugo Texel stood trembling, the pistol leveled at Lydia’s head; then with a clatter the weapon fell to the ground, as if his hand had opened of its own accord. Asher stooped at once to pick it up. In the archway he could just make out Ysidro’s pale face and colorless hair, and the cold gleam of his flesh where it showed through the holes of the decaying black robe.

‘She didn’t tell you about this part of being a vampire, did she?’ Ysidro’s voice was so soft that Asher, when he and Lydia reached the Spaniard’s side beneath the dark archway, could barely make it out, but Texel screamed at him:

‘
Teufelschwanz
!’

‘I don’t suppose she was ever willing to admit that that old Jew in Köln had the power over her, to make her come and go at his bidding . . . or stand still.’

Texel’s face worked indescribably, his mouth like some gaping theatrical mask. He tried to move, clawing all around him with his widespread hands, but when he took a step he fell to his knees, as Ippo the student had in Lady Eaton’s house, when his master had so commanded. ‘When the light comes up you’ll burn, too, you devil!’

Ysidro only folded his thin arms, never taking his eyes from the man in the courtyard – and Asher knew that Ysidro, in fact, would have several minutes in which to find shelter in the dark of the crypts. The new-made fledglings were fragile, as he had said.

‘I’ve taken the serum as well! The sun will do nothing to me . . .’

Ysidro made no answer.

Softly, Lydia said, ‘He’s bluffing. I don’t know how long a single dose lasts—’

‘Then be sure to make notes, Mistress. Yet I would ask of you, whatever else you choose to do here after full light comes, destroy this serum that Dr Theiss has made. All of it, every drop. Burn his notes. Fascinating as it may be for you to study his experiments, yet I have a grave mistrust of fate. Only in the flame is there safety.’

‘For God’s sake, man, come to Germany with me!’ Sheer panic at what was coming – at what he had seen coming – edged Texel’s shriek. ‘The Kaiser will cherish us both! Anything we ask for, out of the world that will be Germany’s—’

Ysidro lifted his voice just slightly, still without change of expression. ‘Think you I do this for power alone?’ He asked as if he genuinely expected an answer, and as if surprised at his fledgling’s naivety. ‘Friends among the Undead are rare enough, in all the centuries of living in darkness. You have killed one of mine. I expect you to make her your apologies, when you see her.’

There was a scent in the air, the wind turning over the Gulf of Finland; seagulls set up a great yammering in the paling sky.

Texel screamed, ‘I am of you! I am in your soul as you are in mine! You will feel it – inside, you will burn if I burn!’

Whether he spoke true or not, Asher didn’t know. When Texel’s flesh first spotted with flame, then surged into a blazing torch, his eyes were drawn to the shrieking, staggering thing in the courtyard; it was some moments before he thought to look back to see Ysidro.

And when he did, Ysidro was gone.

TWENTY-NINE

There were ampoules of silver nitrate in Dr Theiss’s laboratory. Asher injected the nine maiden fledglings he found asleep in the crypt with it before he dragged them, one by one, out of the darkness. They all caught fire at the top of the steps, without waking up, the moment he pulled them through the door into the vestibule where the gorgeous brightness of the dawn sky glimmered. Ysidro had been right about how fragile they were.

Lydia said, ‘It isn’t fair. They never harmed anyone.’

‘No,’ agreed Asher. ‘Can you guarantee that they would not?’

She, too, seemed to hear again the whispering voices in the dark of the crypt and said no more, even offering to help him drag them. He refused. Exhausted as he was himself, Asher did not like the whiteness of his wife’s lips and the way she sat down quickly on the steps. When he had dragged out the last of them she said, ‘That’s only nine. There were ten in the crypt.’

‘I know.’

‘I didn’t see Genia. The girl who tried to keep the others from us. She was the one who escaped and came to Razumovsky’s
izba
Friday night – who inadvertently led the others to me.’

‘We need to find her,’ said Asher wearily. ‘But first let’s deal with the laboratory. The police will be here—’

‘Actually, they won’t,’ said Lydia. ‘Petronilla was paying someone high up in the police for protection. But you’re right. Let’s not push our luck.’

It was full daylight by that time, and Asher worked quickly, breaking up the equipment and piling it in the sinks. Lydia poured away every phial she found – blood, serum, filtrates – and combed both the laboratory and Theiss’s little office in the chamber next door for notes. These she heaped in another sink and set fire to them.

‘I’d rather we didn’t have the Fire Brigade to deal with,’ said Asher.

Lydia didn’t ask him why. By her silence, she knew.

They took lamps and searched the crypt, and around noon they found Ysidro.

He’d taken refuge in one of the inner catacombs, where the bones of long-dead monks still occupied the low brick niches along the walls; skulls grinned from ossuary lofts overhead. Through the torn black robe he wore, Asher could see the bullet-wound in his shoulder, black, burned-looking, and oozing, but because he had not – unlike Madame Ehrenberg – been accumulating the effects of repeated exposures to sunlight in his flesh, the damage seemed to have gone no further. Nearby Asher found a gold penknife monogrammed IE, clotted with blood, and the silver bullet he’d removed with it before sleep had claimed him.

His face was relaxed, enigmatic in sleep as in waking. He had taken off his gold signet-ring and laid it on the stone beside his head, as if he knew they would come.

And so here we are
, Asher thought.

There were two syringes of silver nitrate in his jacket pocket, and he carried a hammer and two hawthorn stakes he had found in a lower drawer of Theiss’s desk.

Where we all three of us knew we would one day be
.

He glanced sidelong at Lydia’s face, white with exhaustion, spectacles reflecting the lamplight like insectile eyes and hiding whatever she felt.

Were it not for Ysidro, she would be dead. And with her – she had said – the child she carried.

Lydia’s child. My child
.

He tried not to hope, or to feel the delirious joy he’d felt last time and the time before . . . and failed in the attempt. It was apparently the province of the living to hope.

It seemed that the Dead did indeed have gifts to give to the living . . .

He will kill when he wakes
. Asher looked down at the calm, sleeping face, the straight white eyelashes, the waxen, awful scars that nobody saw when the vampire was awake to trick their minds. He would have to kill, to speed the healing of his wound; to renew those mental powers that gave him mastery over the minds of the living. That let him seduce through dreams.

Asher knew what needed to be done, as if he had sworn an oath to that old man in Prague. Yet – feeling stupid even as the words came out of his mouth – he asked, ‘What do we do?’

Lydia turned her face away. In a small voice she said, ‘He didn’t kill Margaret Potton.’ As if, out of so many, that mattered.

‘I know.’

She looked back at him, lips parted to speak, and he went on, ‘He asked me not to tell you.’

She didn’t ask why, but he saw her brown eyes swim with tears.

‘He is what he is, Lydia. He cannot be other than that. More than anyone, he knows that that door is shut.’

It was her turn to say, ‘I know. But more than anyone – of all the vampires, and I think of anyone still living as well – I think he was the only one who understood – or
would
have understood – that Petronilla Ehrenberg did what she did because she was in love with a living man. That she wasn’t working out of . . . of loyalty to the Kaiser or desire for an unlimited supply of trussed-up German Socialists or whatever the Kaiser would have paid her with. Simon was the only one who knew that the way to stop her was to break the tie between her and her dream. Her hope of being able to live with the man she loved.’

She wrapped her arms around herself – it was cold in the catacomb – and looked down at Ysidro’s face again.

Asher wondered if the vampire could hear them, sunk in the sleep that he had often said was not like the sleep of the living.
And what
, he thought,
does HE hope?

‘’Twere best the dead were dead utterly, he said, and life left to the living,’ she went on after a moment. ‘It was he who telegraphed poor von Brühlsbuttel, you know. Or, anyway, he got some poor beggar-woman to do it . . .’

‘The way he got me to come with him here.’

They are seducers
 . . .

Every kill he makes henceforth will be upon your head . . .

A lake of blood indeed.

Asher felt numb inside, and cold to the core of his bones.

‘You decide,’ Lydia whispered. ‘I’ll be upstairs.’

‘Will you be—?’

‘I’ll be all right. It’s not far.’

It wasn’t. It was the searching that had taken time, backtracking with the aid of Asher’s twine, seeking out the hidden crypt.

She picked up one of the lamps, the shadows moving over Ysidro’s sleeping face like half of a ghostly smile. ‘There’s nothing in the darkness now.’

She was sitting in the covered walkway around the courtyard when he came up half an hour later, in a patch of sunlight, like a ragged beggar-child in her grimy nightshirt, his bloodied jacket, and Ysidro’s trousers and shirt. Her arms clasped about her thin knees, she gazed through the nearest archway into the courtyard, where two grisly piles of ashes still smoked.

I should never have dragged her into this.
Asher leaned against the archway, shivering with fatigue, wondering how it was that they had both survived this.
It was inexcusable, to expose her to this. To put her in danger as I did
.