Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

FROM MOLDAVIA WITH LOVE

As evening fell, his blood rose. His eyes clicked open in the dark. Through the afternoon, he'd slept the sleep of the dead in a shuttered room at the Hotel Inghilterra.

Hamish Bond regretted the loss of those periods of half-sleep he had enjoyed as a warm man. After a fine meal, a day of exertion or making love to a beautiful woman, he would relish the slow departure of consciousness. As a vampire, he simply willed himself to rest as if turning out a light. His mind stopped along with his heart. It was compensation that he only needed three or four hours' sleep  -  coffin-time, they called it  -  in a given month.

At once he knew he was not alone.

He had sealed the door and the windows, of course. He would have been alerted if the seals had fallen.

'It's no use lying still, Commander Bond,' purred a silky voice. 'I saw your eyes open.'

The room was pitch dark. His companion was like him, a vampire.

Casually, he sat up in bed, hand closing on the Walther PPK under the covers. He slept in a Japanese pyjama jacket, belted tightly at the waist.

He could see in the dark too.

She was on the other side of the room, breathing smoke through large, elegant nostrils. One of his cigarettes angled like a scalpel between her long, slender fingers.

She was sitting naked in an armchair, one knee demurely propped on the other. Though she had the throat for jade and the earlobes for diamonds, she wore no jewellery. Midnight-black hair grew straight back from a pronounced widow's peak and cascaded over wide shoulders and onto proud breasts.

Her face was broad, Slavic with an almost Mongolian cast. Her fluorescent, violet eyes had suggestions of epicanthic folds. Her face was the beautiful mask of a pagan idol, luxuriant lips parted sweetly to afford a glimpse of savage fangs.

He knew at once she was an elder.

Her crossed legs were long. He appreciated the stretch of velvet-sheathed muscle from hip to knee. Halfway down her shins, flesh and bone thinned, trailing away into a wisp of white mist.

He'd heard of the trick, but never seen it done. She'd willed herself to become living fog, flowed under the locked and trip-wired door, then reassembled herself in his armchair.

The last of the mist coalesced into sculptured white feet.

'Bravo,' he complimented her.

'I don't know why I went to the trouble,' she said, vowels smoothing over an old accent. 'A very expensive Balmain is lying crumpled in the corridor, with a pair of emerald earrings that are sure to be stolen. Oh, and twenty tiny petals of dried nail polish.'

She flicked away the still-burning cigarette and stood, delightfully immodest. She crossed to the windows and opened the shutters. The last light of sunset gave her skin an inviting glow. An inrush of air disturbed her mane. Her hair was full-bodied, heavy. It curled up slightly at the ends, like a row of tiny fishhooks.

'I'm Anibas,' she said, turning to look at him, her right hand pressed to her heart. 'You know who I am.'

He did.

'My great-great-aunt is Princess Asa Vajda, the Royal Fiancee. I'm to be a bridesmaid. You should see the abominable dress they want me to wear.'

He relaxed by the moment, savouring the presence of this wild creature. But he would never be off his guard around someone like her.

Suddenly, she was on the bed, crawling on all fours like a vixen. His hand closed on nothing.

'Looking for this?'

She dangled the pistol from her forefinger.

'You're very fleet.'

She giggled, nastily. 'And you're very fortunate.'

Anibas tossed the pistol across the room and touched his face.

'Your Mr Winthrop said he was sending me a gift,' she said. 'Do you think I'm pleased?'

'You can always throw me back into the sea.'

'I think not,' she said. Nails like razors drew across his face, a fraction of an ounce of pressure away from breaking the skin. 'I think I keep.'

Even a warm woman of Anibas's physique could put up a spirited fight. She had the legs of a runner and the hands of a karate expert. She was a vampire elder, his senior by centuries. She was playing with him. If she meant instant harm, she could have ripped his heart out while he slept.

He'd told Beauregard that Winthrop had people close to Dracula. That was something of an exaggeration. The several vampires of il principe's household who reported to the Diogenes Club were probably doubles, letting slip only what their master wished. But that might be about to change.

This was the woman he was in Rome to see.

Anibas traced jagged scars across his chest, sliding his jacket over his shoulder.

With the marriage, the House of Vajda would be absorbed into the House of Dracula. A pecking-order that had been secure for centuries would change. Genuine discontents were stirring and could be turned to England's advantage.

'My great-great-aunt is a horrifyingly dull woman,' Anibas whispered. 'You would not like her at all.'

'Does she know where you are?'

'Undoubtedly. She's been suspicious forever, always seeing conspiracies against her. She thinks every unfamiliar face is a Jesuit sworn to stick iron skewers through her eyes. She is an embarrassment.'

Of course, Anibas wished to take the Princess's place. The long lives of elders were an inconvenience for poor relations waiting to inherit estates, titles and positions.

'I've signed myself in to the hotel under another name. Sabina. Clever, hein? It's my name in a mirror. Sabina. Anibas.'

Why were vampires so enamoured of that trick? Had anybody ever been duped by an alias like 'Alucard'? If he were to sign hotel registers as 'D. Nob', no one would ever be fooled. Was it an elders' quirk he'd come to appreciate?

'You and I,' she said, face close to his, 'we are to plot, are we not? To scheme and plan like snake and swine. To the ruination of Princess Asa and the abandonment of this unwise match? What need we Vajda of the thin blood of Vlad Tepes? We were ancient and honoured when he was buggering Turks with large sticks. Rightfully, he should crawl to us.'

Winthrop had warned him to watch Anibas carefully. This second, she seemed to have common cause with them. But who knew how things might turn out? And there were always others in the ring.

She was crawling on top of him now, hair hanging in his face, breasts against his chest. She flicked an active tongue over her generous lips.

He understood very well the game being played.

He took Anibas by the shoulders and shoved her down against the mattress. He rolled over onto her, letting his weight lie on her body, his legs pinning hers.

She squealed, pretending to be trapped, and clicked her tongue at him, tossing hair out of the way. Her white throat arched.

He bit savagely into her neck, and drank her elder's blood.

When he came out of the bathroom, towelling his hair, he found her bathing in the moonlight. The doors onto the balcony were open and night breeze cooled the room. The wounds on her neck and breasts faded fast, disappearing as he watched. He would sport the scars she'd given him for weeks, maybe longer.

She had fetched in her evening gown. The backless, strapless dress was hardly more decent than nudity. Her earrings were chunky emerald clusters. In the East, size and intricacy counted for more than taste.

He was full of life. Literally.

Of course, he'd had vampire blood before. That was how he had been turned, in a private hospital near Marble Arch, with a measured amount of Sergeant Dravot's vampire blood exchanged for his warm red stuff. Since then, in the field, he'd killed vampire enemies and glutted himself on their gore, drinking from their gashed throats. They made him stronger, the Chinese doctor and the Jamaican voodoo master. Memories still occasionally bubbled up inside his brain, as if he were the continuance of their bloodlines.

But he'd never tasted the blood of an elder.

It was like a drug, shifting his senses to another plane entirely. Her mind almost blotted his out. He knew much about Anibas that she'd not told him. Impressions from her long life flooded his memory. The freezing palace where she was born, with its filthy floors and priceless tapestries. He felt the mouth of her father-in-darkness  -  an ancient retained by the Vajda to further the bloodline  -  at her throat and his hands under her skirts. He shared the panic of flight from homeland, the stern-faced mob waving torches at their carriage, spade-bearded orthodox priests with silver scythes, burning scaffolds bright in the Moldavian night.

He was tense, when he should have been relaxed.

Not all the impressions were ancient history. She'd had her fun. Now she was to kill him. Her arrangement with Diogenes was not exclusive. She had offered the same services to Moscow, and decided the Kremlin could best help her gain control of the House of Vajda. After all, her ancestral estates were behind the Iron Curtain.

There was a moment of regret. She'd genuinely enjoyed him. He knew that.

She turned from the open window, lovely face stretching. Her mouth widened in a gash, fangs crowding out from her jaws.

He lowered the towel and shot her with the gun he'd wrapped in it.

Anibas was almost faster than the bullet. He'd intended to put silver in her heart, but the red wound exploded in her shoulder.

Damn. He was probably dead.

A hundredweight of angry animal slammed him in the chest, knocking him onto his back and carrying him through the bathroom door.

She was unrecognisable.

A black snout dipped toward his throat. Wolf eyes blazed at him. Clawed forepaws dug into his chest. Her backlegs scrabbled on the tiled floor.

He had one hand on the underside of her jaw. Pine-needle bristles sprouted against his palm. His forearm was straining iron, holding murderous teeth away from his throat.

Blood still poured from her shoulder. Furred skin closed across the wound but melted at once, failing to scab over the silver-gouged divot.

He angled the pistol up, trying to shove the muzzle against her eye. She shook her head and bit the Walther, fangs scoring deep lines in the barrel. He lost the gun, lucky to keep his fingers.

She formed a human face.

'How could you? After what we've meant to each other?'

She exaggerated her plea, a snarl behind the simper.

She was an animal again, more bear than wolf. Her bulk was crushing him. The Balmain was a ragged sash. Earrings still hung from the high, pointed, foxbat-ears. He gripped one and tore it loose, ripping the flap.

Anibas howled.

It was the vanity of elders to wear jewellery with silver settings, to show off their supposed invulnerability to the deadly element. He tried to jam the bauble into the vampire woman's left eye.

He only managed to enrage her.

There was a flurry of movement and the weight was lifted. He almost breathed relief. Wide jaws clamped to his torso, just under his left armpit. Fangs sank in like butcher's hooks.

She was going to tear out his ribcage and eat his heart.

And that would be that.

The grip relaxed and there was a great gush of blood, soaking him completely. A foul stench made him choke. He thought for a moment that he was dead. No, he could sit up.

Anibas's mouth detached from his side and her head rolled into his lap. In an eyeblink, her head turned from cartoon wolf, neck cleanly severed, to a woman's, fan of bloody hair spread out across his knees. Then she was a spilled bowl of mist, flooding away. An inch of white fog settled on the bathroom floor, rippling slowly.

The bitch was dead.

He felt his ribs knitting again.

In the doorway, he saw legs. A well-built man in red tights. From his hands dangled a length of cheesewire, shining silver coated with thick red.

Maniacal laughter filled the room.

He tried to look up to his saviour's face.

Something tugged the man in red away, leading him back into the bedroom.

He was too drained to stand and follow.

The laughter grew louder.

He blacked out, dimly aware of a hammering at the door, of his name being called.