Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

OLD LOVES

Genevieve could look after herself and Bond was trained for this sort of thing. Beauregard told himself he shouldn't worry about them. It was probably not worth Brastov's while to have them liquidated, as they said in these jargon-happy times. At the very least, Winthrop would insist on reprisals  -  murdering their top man in London, probably  -  and that was how cold wars heated up. Unless someone did something stupid, they'd be back before dawn.

Of course, there was always room for stupidity.

He remembered Genevieve hauling him out of Buckingham Palace in 1888, after they had delivered to the Queen the instrument she would use to free herself from Dracula, the silver scalpel of Jack the Ripper. He was badly wounded, and they were surrounded by the most dangerous creatures in Europe. They'd had help, of course, inside and outside the palace, but had only barely escaped.

He'd thought he was going to die. At thirty-five, he'd been better prepared for it than he was now.

'Charles, I can save you,' she'd whispered urgently, before biting into her wrist and bringing forth the bright blood. 'Charles, darling, drink... Turn, and live.'

That was the closest it had come. Her blood spilled on his lips. That alone had probably given him an extra twenty years of youth. It would've been so easy to drink. He didn't even know why he hadn't.

'You don't have to be like him,' she said, meaning Dracula. 'You don't have to be like me. You just have to live...'

He gurgled a farewell, 'I love you forever.'

And she repeated, 'Forever?'

Then, with dutiful anticlimax, he got better. He didn't die and return as a vampire. He just survived his wounds, got on with the work of booting Dracula out of Britain, rose in his profession, fought other battles, got old, got tired, tried to keep up, came to Rome...

Why?

Because of him. Dracula.

It was his duty to stay close to Dracula, to guard against his return to power. When he died, others  -  Winthrop, mostly, perhaps Genevieve  -  would take over the task, and perhaps keep il principe off the world stage forever.

Forever?

Was anything forever?

He had loved Genevieve in 1888, and he still loved her in 1959. That seemed like forever. Yet he'd never stopped loving Pamela. Loving the dead did not preclude loving the living.

This close to the end, he was still learning. Through reason and emotion, he'd settled an old quandary. Whatever might be true for most of vampirekind, Genevieve was alive in every sense that counted. And she was not alone. Kate too could grow to be that kind of elder.

He wasn't leaving the world to the walking dead.

Over the years, Genevieve had bled him, passionately at first, tactfully of late, never again pressing her blood upon him. Once, as Genevieve had offered herself to him, he had offered himself to Kate. During the First World War, when she was bled dry, he had given her his wrist and said, 'Go ahead, pretty creature, drink.'

Then, in 1918, Genevieve was on the other side of the world. At least part of the reason he let Kate bleed him was that he'd missed the sensation, the commingling and draining. He could admit that now. It did not feel like faithlessness.

The communion, renewed on occasion, had given him strength, and Kate too. To her he owed the most, for she'd always jostled for a place in his life, never quite coming to the front. If it hadn't been for... he and Kate might have...

As much as the Queen, Kate needed to be freed. To be free of him, of his distracting presence. Without him, she would grow. Perhaps, of their group, she was the only real hero, because everything was difficult for her.

The strong-arm creature had struck him across the face, probably no more than a swat. It didn't even hurt. But Beauregard's brains had taken a good shaking. The lights were going out.

All this thought of the past.

That was dying. This was what dying was like.

At last.

'I suppose I'm the last woman you expected to see, Charles.'

Pamela?

He opened his eyes and found he was still in his body, in his chair, in his flat.

'That French person is clearly an inadequate housekeeper.'

She stood at the doorway of the study, looking with distaste at the knocked-over bookcases, the scatter of golem detritus, and the disarrayed furniture.

Not Pamela.

'Penelope. Penny.'

Every time he saw her, it was a shock. Very slowly, she'd lost her girlishness, had sharpened and grown sleeker, into the image of her cousin, his wife. He understood why he had nearly married Penelope, and why that would have been a very great unkindness.

She had fed recently. He could tell from the colour in her cheeks and on her lips.

Had his neglect, as much as Godalming's blood, turned her into a predator?

She stepped into the room and right-sided some chairs.

'You are very old, Charles. I should have expected that.'

She picked up the bookcase and propped it in its place. Then, with undead swiftness, she put books back on the shelves, in any old order. She just wanted them off the floor, to look neat. He would have to rearrange them later.

No.

He wouldn't.

'I'm dying, Penny.'

She paused and looked at him. 'And whose fault is that, Charles? No one need die. Not really.'

'No, Penny. I'm dying now.'

A wash of expression disrupted Penelope's red-lipped primness. With her startled eyes, she looked like a little girl again, arranging her dolls because there was safety in tidiness, retreating from chaos that might hurt her.

'I am sorry, Charles.'

She was like a schoolmistress, conventionally sympathising with a charge whose tears are his own fault and who will have to learn to sleep in the bed he has made for himself.

'No, I'm sorry,' she continued, actually flustered. 'I didn't mean that. It's difficult for me to mean what I mean. That sounds absurd. It is. I'm not a monster. I've tried to be, but I'm not. I feel for you. As much as I can.'

He wanted to touch her, to lay a hand of comfort on her. But he could not lift a hand.

Penelope was in the middle of the room, away from all the walls, alone. Her hands rose to her face. Books fell from her grip, very slowly. He did not hear them thump on the carpet.

She uncovered her face. Her eyes were red, her fangs extended. She looked at once fiendish and sad, a little girl playing the devil.

'I don't know when I stopped wanting you to turn,' she said.

When they were engaged, she was a warm girl, desperate for them both to become vampires, to advance themselves in the world Dracula had shaped. She was dispassionate and matter-of-fact about it, unexcited by immortality or blood-drinking or all the senses of the night, but certain rising from the dead would secure invitations to the best houses, would excite the envy of friends and admirers.

Of all the vampires he had known living and undead, she had changed the most. She'd sought out Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, and taken his blood, transforming herself. Then, learning fast, she'd purged herself of her ambitions, her limitations. Beauregard remembered her discovering how much of a monster her father-in-darkness had been and vowing to be a monster herself.

For a while, she was mediaeval, glutted on stolen blood. She turned sons- and daughters-in-darkness, creating a coven for herself.

'They're all gone,' she said. 'My get. I turned my lovers, but the weakness of will that made them susceptible to me made them poor vampires. I was taught as a little Victorian girl to prize strength of character. But everything I have done, I've done through weakness.'

Beauregard wanted to contradict her, but couldn't.

'You want to speak and can't,' she said, sorry as much as triumphant. 'How I would have adored that in a husband, once upon a damned time. It was me, that time. You knew that.'

He did.

Penelope was his third vampire lover. Shortly before the turn of the century, with the Terror just over and the business of putting the country back together as yet undone, he'd been accosted one foggy night in Chelsea, dragged into a dark place between two buildings, and bitten. Raped, he supposed. He remembered sharp teeth savagely tearing open the wounds Genevieve had made gently, and thinking he was to be exsanguinated completely and left to die. There were still vampires like that in London in those days, stranded by the withdrawal of their King-Emperor, preying on the unwary.

'I had planned to take you to the point of death and make the offer of the Dark Kiss. I imagined you begging me for life-giving blood, then becoming my slave. By turning you, I could have had you, owned you. But you don't only take blood when you drink. You take all sorts of things. With the taste of you on my tongue, I knew you would have turned me down. As you turned down others. You would have died.'

He had recovered. He never even told Genevieve he suspected he knew who had assaulted him.

Vampire kisses were more than wounds. Some called those distinctive scabs the Seal of Dracula. Fangs weren't darts, but hooks. Invisible threads led back to the creature who bit you. And the line ran both ways.

Penelope took his hands and looked at him, close up. She was struggling to remain in control.

'Katie was never in the contest,' she said. 'And I could have bested the French person. You don't think so, but I could have. She's not a goddess. It was Pamela. If it hadn't been for her, we would have been together. You've never seen me as me. If you ever loved me, it's because I was her reborn, back from the grave. All your women die and come back.'

He tried to say he was sorry. He had known she was in pain, but had done nothing.

'Do you know why I went to Art? To seek the Dark Kiss?'

He shook his head. It was a supreme effort.

'Because he was the closest I could get to Dracula. I wanted to give myself to the vampire you hated most. I would have become one of the Prince Consort's mindless mistresses. If you wouldn't rule my life, then he would. He could have been like you. He is more like you than you know.'

All their lives had been a dance with Dracula. What had Kate called it, 'the Dracula Cha Cha Cha'?

'At last I have fulfilled my mother's expectations, Charles. I have made myself useful. I am part of a Royal Household. There are dreadful things about the position. This wedding is a nightmare. Princess Asa is a witch. Dracula will wake. It'll start all over again. The conquest. And I'll be part of it. You didn't stop him forever, you just set him back a century.'

That was what he was most afraid of. Was she being sincere or cruel?

'The world needs you, Charles,' she said.

For the last decade and a half, he had remained alert almost solely to keep close to the monster. When Dracula was found a seaside palace, in reward for his services in the war, Beauregard followed him to Italy. He had hoped they were both in permanent retirement, a slow slide to eternity.

'I need you too, but that's beside the point. I've fed tonight. A young man, an American. He thinks he's clever, but he's an amusement for all that.'

She unbuttoned her blouse. Underneath, she wore a black brassiere. Her white bosom still bore the circular scars left years ago by leeches.

'I'm going to finish what I started, Charles.'

She drew a fingernail across her breast. A line of blood welled. Bright scarlet, with a coppery tang.

Perhaps this was for the best  -  to have no choice. To be forced to life. He could not struggle. He could barely move. Penelope would suckle him into a new life.

'Penny?' someone said, from across the room.

Penelope closed her blouse, flushed with embarrassment.

He felt the moment slipping away. And was not sorry.

The newcomer was Kate. He could imagine how upset she must be, on several levels, to walk into such a scene.

'Penelope Churchward,' Kate said, sternly. 'What exactly do you think you're doing?'

Penelope stood straight, determined to see it out through hauteur. Blood seeped through the thin material of her blouse. She looked across the room at Kate, eyes burning, fangs sharp.

'You know exactly what I'm doing, Katie. It is what you, or the other person, should have done long ago. Very well: if your consciences bother you about saving a life, I shall step in. I have no such encumbrance. We can all debate about what a monstrous harpie I am after I've given Charles what he needs to live.'

Good God, she even sounded like Pamela now.

He remembered Pamela at the last, ordering the doctor to let her die and save the child. If Beauregard hadn't hesitated, hadn't urged the incompetent butcher to save both, perhaps his son would have lived. And perhaps the sight of him would have given Pam heart, forced her to rally, to strangle death. Perhaps.

'Penny, I know how you feel,' Kate said, eyes watering. 'But you can't...'

Kate stepped forward. Her fangs extended too.

'Katie, me darlin',' Penelope said, in the imitation brogue she had used to make fun of her friend when they were children, 'if I have to, I'll fight you. I admit you're not the drip we used to think you, but I was stronger than you in the nursery and I can destroy you now.'

He tried to protest.

They hissed in each other's faces.

'Yes,' Penelope said. 'I can take you.'

From the doorway, Genevieve said, 'And what about me, newborn? Can you take me?'

Penelope turned, snarling.