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Authors: Mick Farren

BOOK: More Than Mortal
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“That is certainly true.”
She crawled across the swirl of rumpled untucked sheets—paused for a long moment and then placed her bare feet on the floor and attempted to stand. “I’m not sure I can.”
“Can what?”
“Stand.” She stood swaying uncertainly. “Is it really dawn?”
“Not quite, but close.”
“Let me look.”
She stumbled in the direction of the nearest window. Renquist moved with nosferatu speed. “Don’t—”
“Don’t what?”
Instead of saying anything, Renquist steered her away from the curtains. He didn’t want her to see that the
drapes concealed foil and tape that blacked out the windows. “You’ve only got to make it down to the third floor.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
Of course he was trying to get rid of her, and for that she should be profoundly and mortally grateful. It was only his circumspection with regard to hunting in an unaccustomed environment that had saved her life.
“Discretion is the better part of passion.”
The blonde Swede had at least started looking round for her clothes. She stopped and stared at him blearily. “I thought that was valor?”
“The same applies.”
“So, passion is spent, and I am dismissed? Is that it?”
Renquist’s expression was friendly but hard. He played the unashamed philanderer she imagined he was, the character she’d wanted when she’d first flirted with him down in the bar. “We both knew it was to be that way from the start, didn’t we?”
“It’s nice to pretend for a while.”
“I don’t think we have the time for pretense.”
If Frieda did but know it, the entire night had been a pretense. The supposed passion she believed had left her satiated to the point of walking unsteadily had been largely chimeric—most of it completely in her own mind, with Renquist needing only to read her most covert fantasies to make them seemingly happen. The objective truth was he had only stared coldly as she lay on the wide bed of the room in the luxury hotel. She’d gasped and contorted, in the grip of mindbending and salacious illusion, while he watched with little more than an academic amusement at what he could achieve without laying so much as a hand on her. The mildest caress of her mind and memory raised sighs and shudders to full muscle spasms of repeated, wordlessly keening orgasm. Her hips twisted as she moaned and crooned in her native tongue and finally in no language at all. Her makeup ran as sweat beaded her face, and a fall of lusttossed
Nordic-blond hair half hid an expression of feral and greedy desire. When he decided the moment was appropriate, when she was totally beyond awareness of her surroundings, he sprang the small steel spike he always carried with him.
The coupling of the physical act of piercing her flesh with the roller coaster of sexual hallucination on which he had set her all but threatened both her life and sanity. As her lips shaped wordless obscene and ecstatic syllables, as her head thrashed from side to side, threatening to dislocate the vertebrae of her neck, he found he had to forcibly hold her down in order to feed, and he wondered if he had perhaps overdone the intensity of suggestion. Then he felt her energy gradually dwindle, and he knew that she was drifting toward death. He quickly removed his mouth from her throat, sealing the wound with a flick of his tongue, and moved back from her, out of her mind, allowing her to wake, shaking and completely disoriented but believing that she had just been through one of the most memorable physical encounters of her life.
Renquist reflected, as Frieda shakily dressed, how she would never be consciously aware of what had happened to her in this stranger’s hotel suite, or in what grotesque and outlandish way she had been used. When she left the room and returned to her bright and social consumer world, she would have no inkling she had ever been the partial victim of a nosferatu, a creature she had always believed, in her material rationality, was a thing of myth, legend, and low-budget movie. Only the dreams to come might hint at what had passed between her and Renquist; the dreams would almost certainly haunt her sleep from then on, maybe to the end of her short human life.
She slipped on her shoes, fluffed her bed-tousled hair, and made a more determined move toward her exit. Renquist assumed she was going to the door, but instead she turned and went into the bathroom. He might have followed her, except the bathroom had mirrors that would
necessitate specially created illusions of his reflected image. He heard the sound of running water and then rummaging in a purse. He assumed Frieda was in cosmetic repair. When she spoke, it was in disjointed phrases, as though she was distracted by the effort of applying lipstick or mascara. Her tone now had the acidic edge of someone beginning to view herself as a discarded sex object. “Didn’t someone say the real reason men pay prostitutes is not to fuck them, but so they’ll go away afterwards?” Frieda emerged from the bathroom with her trophy status fully restored. “I’d kiss you good-bye, but I’ve just done my makeup.”
Renquist nodded. “I understand.”
“I’ll let myself out.”
“Yes.”
The door of the suite closed behind her, and she was gone. Renquist sighed and sat down on the bed, profoundly glad he wasn’t human, and hadn’t been for close to a thousand years. As a species, humans were so childishly complicated, with their lack of emotional logic and their erratic mood swings, especially where the ecstatic, erotic, and economic were concerned. Even though he’d fed, he hardly felt energized. The partial feeding had taken almost as much effort as it had generated, and he was more than ready to sleep away the dangerous daylight hours. At that precise instant, as though to confirm his original reserve that this solitary and impulsive journey to England had perhaps not been such a good idea, the telephone rang.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Renquist?”
“Yes.”
The Savoy operator’s voice was unmistakable. Renquist had insisted his incoming calls be screened. “A Ms. Dashwood wishes to be put through.”
Renquist smiled. Ahhh.
“Would you please give the lady my apologies? I can’t speak to her right now, but take her number and
tell her I will contact her. And ask for all the appropriate codes one needs to dial. The English telephone system has changed greatly since I was last here.”
“I’ll convey your message, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Columbine Dashwood—the dear girl was as impulsive as she had ever been. He would make her wait a little longer. Dawn was close, and he wanted nothing better than to retire. Columbine would wait until after sunset. Perhaps well after sunset. She could look on it as the penalty for making importunate telephone calls.
Renquist went to one of his trunks, extracted the large fur rug, and spread it over the hotel bed with a bullring flourish. He took the fur on all his travels; his one concession to a sense of continuity in the places that he slept. He drank another long draft of water and arranged himself to dream through the deadly sunlit day.
Columbine Dashwood surfaced from the dreamstate, but only by a major effort of will. Despite her protestations to Marieko and later to Destry, she had, in fact, slept. Indeed, she had slept deeply, but as she surfaced in the waking world, she knew sunset was still hours away. It wasn’t her mixed emotions at being reunited after all this time with Victor Renquist forcing her to wake so frustratingly early, as her feline-uncharitable companions might have suggested. The dream had returned, vivid, intense, at greater length, and as disturbing as ever. For a while, after communication had been established with Renquist, the incessant nightmares had abated, but now the visions had returned with a vengeance. She sat up slowly on the circular bed of satin and velvet draperies, wafting gauze, and scattered Arabian cushions that was the central focus of the exotically cluttered room, but amid all the romantic and alien finery, her mood was as bleak as the dream. “Fuck. I swear I can’t tolerate much more of this.”
Anger forced bleakness aside. Columbine wanted to
scream out loud but knew that to do so would wake the entire house. She didn’t need the attention. Instead she hugged her fury to herself, clasping her knees to her chest with encircling arms as if to physically contain it.
“Did the dream have to come back today of all days?”
She was unsure which was the primary cause of her vexation. Was it the return of the dream when she’d believed she had it under control or the shame of challenged pride?
“Today of all days!”
How could she confront Victor, with all his superiority and perfect arrogance, when she must look so obviously hollow, hagridden, and drained by visions of some stupid bloody ancient apocalypse? Or maybe what upset her most was its ability to affect her. She maintained her shallow and petulant exterior, all the flouncing silliness and headstrong caprice, as a lace-and-lavender sheath for a rapier-steel will. Even before her Change, she had grown to girlhood amid the dizzyingly multiple social standards that allowed the English aristocracy of the late eighteenth century to embrace both courtly manners and thug brutality. Epicene young fops who held scented handkerchiefs to their noses when among the common herd were also quite prepared to kill or maim in violent duels with rapiers or pistols over the most insignificant drunken trivia. Columbine’s class hunted with hounds and flogged their servants but could, at the same time, smoke the finest East India Company opium and write romantic sonnets as cloying as syrup. The young ladies of her generation saw no paradox in private conduct that employed the schooled and skilled depravity of the most costly harlot in Mayfair coupled with an indecency of imagination to rival Donatien de Sade and the simultaneous public social charade of fan-fluttering virginal sensibility in which to blush, flutter, and swoon were all expected tricks of the trade. In comparison to the French, of course, the patrician English had been relatively well behaved. The French aristos had so indulged
their unchecked libertinage that the common people had turned on them and dragged them to the guillotine.
The combination of such a human upbringing and the gift of remorseless nosferatu power had endowed Columbine with a mind of diamond hardness. No being would have ever dared to forcibly enter her mind while she was awake. That such a thing should happen while she slept was both unprecedented and disconcerting, and yet something, some entity, appeared freely able to penetrate her rest, to invade her dreamstate at will. The dreams caused her more distress than she cared to admit. In commonday parlance, they were starting to get to her, and she had begun to wonder just how long she could tolerate the constant and chronic interruption of her slumber patterns. She sincerely, if not too logically, hoped the arrival of Renquist might somehow diminish the nightmares’ frequency and intensity. This tenuous hope also did nothing to improve her disposition. Columbine loathed Renquist, but, to be unmercifully honest with herself, she also desired him, if only to ultimately humble him and bring him to his knees. To be forced to manipulate him as a means to an end was irksome, but to secretly hope he might also prove the savior of her sanity was nothing short of humiliating.
She unclasped her knees and threw herself indignantly back amid the cushions, arms exasperatedly outflung, and stared up at the dark-mirror ceiling. She was not, of course, able to see her own reflection. The mirror had been installed so she could draw back the silk cover, and watch the humans as they contorted under her hands, her mind, and finally, her mouth and fangs. In the early stages of her more prolonged games, they might wonder and ask why their unbelievable paramour was invisible in the marbled glass, but when they did, she would either create an illusion, or if she was close to the point of revealing her true nature, she would merely laugh. “It’s
a magic mirror, my love. A special spell for your personal narcissism.”
Usually, by that point, the pretty boys were so ensnared they’d believe and agree to anything. She wished she hadn’t so flamboyantly renounced keeping a young man in attendance when they had agreed to the mission and the appeal to Renquist. At the time, she had decided a grail quest for unknown power required some nosferatu vow, a semblance of bizarre chastity, a resolve to forgo distractions by restricting her hunting to the fast and the practical. In this wide-awake afternoon, however, she found herself yearning for a smooth and vapid boy. If she couldn’t sleep, she wanted to feed, but that was impossible. With no gilded youth in residence, she had to go outside to hunt, and outside, the English countryside was basking in a mellow early autumn sun. The leaves on the trees had yet to turn, but summer had definitely expired. Of course, more than two hundred years had passed since Columbine had seen the autumn sun, but she could sense enough to know how it was. Birds were singing, the grass was long with a scattering of poppies, the trees in the overgrown orchard were heavy with fruit, and the daytime servants, the ones she never saw, were at work in the house and in the Ravenkeep garden.
Ravenkeep Priory was an eclectic disturbance of architectural styles from a dozen different eras, attempts at alteration, and from the many different functions the structure had served through the centuries. The only attempt at any standardization was the late Victorian faux-Gothic arches, spires, and gargoyles added by Enoch Jarman, the Midlands munitions baron who had made the place a rural retreat from his dark and decidedly Satanic mills and foundries. The man had made gold-standard millions by supplying components for small arms and light artillery to the Empire-on-Which-the-Sun-Never-Set, but the effort had left him with an atrophied facility for the aesthetic. Large on money but small on taste, Enoch Jarman’s efforts had only added to the confusion.
Set in the lee of a low escarpment amid softly rolling woods and fields, some form of habitation or fortress had existed on the same site since prehistory, but the foundations for the presently enduring structure had been laid by Roger le Corbeau in the early twelfth century, when the Norman invaders were consolidating their hold on the Saxon underclass, and guerrilla bands like those of Robin of Huntington were maintaining a stubborn resistance in the deep forests.

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