Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

FREGENE

Outside the city, Kate encouraged Marcello to let the Ferrari loose. It wasn't a long drive but the roads widened enough to allow the car to get up speed. She wanted to travel fast. Wind hammered her face, pressing her swollen skin with invisible fingers, jamming behind her spectacles into her open eyes.

Her head didn't clear. She told him to go faster. Ever the willing slave, he obliged. Sheep scattered. It was hilarious. A shepherd's curses were lost in their wake.

They rounded a corner. The Palazzo Otranto stood on its promontory peak, suitably ancient and sinister. A gentle slope led down to the beach. For the Engagement Ball, Dracula had declared a holiday. The town was like a carnival, full of pale people in elaborate costumes.

She ordered Marcello to cruise along the seafront. This was not like Brighton or Blackpool. Vampire women exposed dead-white bodies in swimming costumes that would never get wet. Servants scuttled along with parasols the size of the big dish at Jodrell Bank, keeping circles of safe shadow over their mistresses. There was music and dancing and feeding and drinking. Kate was one of them, a vampire bitch with a human lapdog, crab-crawling across the beach, teeth and claws clicking and clacking, leaving a snail-trail of blood. All faces were skulls, cheekbones and teeth gleaming, eye-sockets empty. All voices were shrill, shrieks of cruel laughter. The sun bleached everything to the colour of sand.

Marcello was afraid of her, could deny her nothing. That made a change. Usually, Kate was the person denying nothing, empty when abandoned. For once, she was free to think only of herself, her desires and dreams. To hang with the rest of the world.

She vaulted out of the Ferrari, limber with the quickness of the blood in her, and landed like a cat, even in heels. She had found a black and tiny Piero Gherardi gown and tossed away most of her lire on it. She wore it with scarlet scarves that matched her hair.

People on the beach took notice of her. Some boys who were hauling a sea creature out of the surf turned to whistle. She posed like Malenka, wind whipping her scarves like squid tentacles. She wanted to roar, like a lady panther. The boys throbbed with blood. If they came near her, she would rip them open with love.

Marcello parked the car, and came after her, one hand cupped around a cigarette. He was being impatient, practical, hustling her on, telling her not to pay attention to the sea-boys. He was acting like her father.

She slapped him, to teach him a lesson. Infuriatingly, he gave her a 'well, if that's how it is' shrug. The slap was a mistake, too obvious. She exerted her control over him, reaching out through his blood, turning his arteries into puppet strings, jerking him to her, inflicting a sharp kiss on his mouth. He surrendered, which irritated her more.

She was tiring of him. No, of this. Her head was spinning. She had been in this whirl for days now. Weeks?

She didn't want to think of loss. She nipped Marcello's neck and scraped some of his blood onto her tongue. The rush made things better again, for the moment.

The boys cheered Marcello. He managed a smile and a wave.

Kate had his complete attention. But he held back something. He surrendered his blood and his body, but a ring of ice surrounded his heart. She knew what he was thinking, but rarely what he was feeling. He must love her. By his actions, by his words, she could tell. His love was a cloak, a protection. She might not want or need it, but it was there.

The boys dragged their sea monster up the beach and dropped it in tribute to her. It was a living wing, with a long, barbed tail. A single eye, lashless and round, looked up at her, clouding over. What did this dying thing see?

She knelt in the fine sand  -  careful of her dress  -  and touched the cold, scaly skin. The creature was aflap with the last of life. Its wriggling, departing spirit disturbed Kate, brushing past her as it fled. Any movement now was mechanical.

'It's dead,' a boy said. 'You can tell by the eye.'

The eye was a white marble.

A spell of dread passed over Kate's mind. She had missed something important.

This was not what she wanted. She was at the seaside, on holiday. She wanted Punch and Judy, Brighton rock, cream teas. She wanted to find fossils, messages in bottles, driftwood carved into exotic shapes. She wanted to be a girl again, at Lyme Regis, wondering what it was her father wouldn't tell her about the gaunt, beautiful woman who stood at the end of the Cobb, gazing out to sea. All these years later, she knew exactly what that nameless woman had been feeling. Love and loss.

Cars passed through the town in a sombre procession. The passengers were the more distinguished guests of il principe and his fiancee, the fashionable and the fierce.

The palazzo cast its shadow on the sea. Kate looked up, shading her eyes from the setting sun. That was where the Devil lived these days.

It was important that she look on her host's face. In all these years, in this century of the 'Dracula Cha Cha Cha', she'd never met him, never seen him. Once, he'd put a price on her head, declaring her a dangerous enemy of the state. But then he had been overwhelmed by a rising tide of more powerful enemies and had (she supposed) forgotten her. She'd felt his touch, though: in the silver sword-scrape sustained in an escape from the Carpathian Guard during the Terror, and the iron treads of the German tank that rolled over her in the trenches. With Charles gone, she was alone in the world with Dracula. They should meet. Perhaps, if things were settled between them, they could both be free. It would all be over.

The uncertain future frightened her. When the music stopped, when the cha cha cha was over, what then?

The blood wasn't burning in her so much now. Blocks of bright colour still overlaid everything, and penumbrae fuzzed around living or moving things. But her mind was coming in to land, plummeting almost.

'Take me to the palace,' she ordered.

Marcello gave a nasty little bow and offered her his arm.