Blood Spirits

by Sherwood Smith

  Gran seemed utterly dazed. “Rose?” she whispered. “Rose, is that you?”

  “It is, Lily. Quelle surprise, eh?” Rose turned her head. “Neatly done, chérie,” she cooed in that distinctive old-fashioned French that Gran had been taught, and that Gran in turn had taught to my mother and me. “Not a drop spilled. Chic alors!”

  At that moment, one of the shadows in the corner moved. Like ink, or lightless fog, it flowed across the room between me and Jerzy, and as every hair on my body stood up, Jerzy let out a long sigh, almost a groan, as a phosphorescent glow glimmered around him and the slim woman in ice blue, like moonlight on water.

  She backed away, her head bowed as Stygian dark covered Jerzy, utterly blocking the light. Terror froze me—I could not have moved as I stared into that blackness.

  Then it swept away from Jerzy’s chair. I caught a brief ruby gleam of red along the inside of a pale, moonlit wrist, then the shadow blended into the darkness of the corner once again. What was that?

  In the chair Jerzy lay, eyes open and reflecting moonlight, breath laboring. His mouth was a rictus, black-smeared in the faint light. “Oh, it’s good! It’s good! I feel . . .” He struggled up. “Oh yes, I feel young.” He flexed his hands. “If I’d had this strength a week ago, that abruti Honoré wouldn’t be running around the city now. Maybe it’s better he’s alive. He’ll taste good.” He laughed. “You first, though, Aurelia Dsaret, you first.”

  He lunged up out of the chair, and reached for Gran. Instinct unlocked my muscles. I hefted my knife, poised on my toes to spring—

  But the slim woman in blue was faster. She stepped between Jerzy and Gran. She brought up her hands. The faint light from the window gleamed along something long and sharp in each fist as, with superhuman strength, she buried one in Jerzy’s chest, and when his body jolted in shock, his hands going to the stake, she drove the other one up under his chin into his head.

  He fell with a crash on the floor as I stuttered to a stop in the middle of the room, knife poised.

  Jerzy wheezed, “What are you doing?” The thing in his throat bobbled obscenely.

  “Keeping my covenant,” the female in blue whispered.

  Jerzy twitched and jerked and writhed, his body bucking like a beached fish as things curled out of his body, like ivy tendrils, only they glistened slick and red-streaked in the moonlight. From his chest, the stake sprouted twig buds. A lump forced up between his ribs, tore through his vest, and curled wetly over his stomach. He began to scream voicelessly, a high, thin, barely audible squeal as another tendril burst out of one eye, waving around slickly. From other parts of his body, tendrils emerged, budding tiny leaves, and seeking light.

  Jerzy gave a long, agonized gasp, and then collapsed, lifeless.

  Gran’s whisper broke the terrible silence as she began saying her rosary.

  I stood there, frozen again, as I tried to gather my wits.

  Good thing? Jerzy was dead. Bad things? I’d blown my surprise, and here we were, Gran and I, surrounded by vampires.

  I turned to the one in blue, still brandishing the chopping knife, and it was my turn to freeze, for I knew that face. It was my own.

  It was Ruli.

  She had become a vampire.

  FORTY

  “WELL DONE, CHÉRIE.” A rustle of silk, and Rose stepped into the soft light. She couldn’t have been over nineteen at most, the soft contours of her face chillingly familiar. Her white satin gown draped in a thirties line.

  She turned back to Gran, and patted her lined cheek. “Oh, how I hated you before you left,” she said. “Why did Mandros choose you over me? Even after you ran away, when he came back, all he talked about was you. The night I married him, he talked about you.”

  “Rose,” Gran murmured. “I am so sorry.”

  Rose laughed softly. “For years I thought about this moment, and how fun it would be to exclaim about how you had aged. So old! But it is not fun, now that I see you.”

  “I am old,” Gran said, hands clasped together. “You are not. Rose, what happened?”

  Rose pointed with a satin-slipper covered toe at Jerzy, whose tendrils’ growth had begun slowing, now that his life force was gone. “His mother. She knew some of the mountain inimasang, cornered me at a Christmas party, and offered my life in trade for certain secrets of Vrajhus.”

  Rose gestured toward the corner where the fulgent shadow—really, the only word for that guy—loomed. “Antonius Augustus said I was too beautiful to be dead, and so I woke up and found myself in this form.” She ran a slim hand from her youthful neck down to her hip. “In my turn, I had no wish to see Ruli dead. Jerzy’s covenant was not made with me, but with Elena, a vampire who had been cut off from her followers when Mandro’s plane closed the portal. Jerzy’s mistake was accepting my offer to complete it, in his hurry to make the Ysvorods his first kills.”

  Gran whispered, “I do not understand.”

  Rose swooped on her. I have to hand it to Gran—she didn’t jump or shriek or recoil as I firmly believe I would have done. She stilled, and I could see her gnarled hands tighten, but Rose just brushed her lips over Gran’s forehead, laughing softly in her throat, then drifted my way. “Neither of us had Mandros very long, did we, Lily? My one comfort is that the salope had him even less. Though it was long enough to produce this.” She nudged Jerzy with the toe of her silken shoe.

  Rose lifted her hand toward the doorway. “We must depart at once. There must be no evidence in this house. As well he insisted that the covenant be completed here, hein? He was so dramatic, wishing the last desecration to be completed in Milo’s home. We shall see that Jerzy takes root in an appropriate garden. Mon ange?”

  The silhouette Rose called Antonius Augustus emerged, light shifting around him in a disturbing way so that all I could see, even though he passed within a yard of me, was a starlit masculine line of shoulder, bending inward to lean hip.

  “You may regard Jerzy as your first kill,” Rose said to Ruli. Then she and Antonius Augustus stooped, and without apparent effort picked up Jerzy’s body, from which the horrible tendrils dangled around his lifeless limbs. “My sister and her granddaughter seem uncomprehending still. Please explain, Granddaughter,” Rose murmured sweetly over her smooth bare shoulder. The moonlight was full on her face as she smiled. “Then join us. Lily, darling, I promise that you and I will have a chat later. Watch for me.”

  They bore their burden out of the room with no more noise than the whisper of silk, and the soft sough as the tall vampire’s tenebrous cloak brushed the doorway.

  The air stirred, bringing a coldness and a musty scent, as of ancient tombs, and the faintest tang of blood, not quite covered by the drift of expensive perfume.

  Then they were gone.

  Leaving Gran and me with Ruli, who sat in the chair that Gran had vacated, her long fingers spread on her thighs. The skirt of her gorgeous dress surrounded her like a rilling stream, glacier pale.

  Gran sank onto the bed, her hands pressed to her heart.

  “Oh, that was . . . wonderful,” Ruli breathed.

  “You’re, um, breathing,” I pointed out brilliantly.

  “Oh yes. The blood does need oxygen. That much is still the same.” She got to her feet and ran her hands down her gown again. The bodice was marred by droplets of black. “Ugh. I did spill. But at least not on the floor. I’ll have to change.”

  “Ruli, what happened to you?”

  She lifted her face. It was my face, heartbreakingly, eerily, my face, but thinner. “Jerzy opened a new portal to the Nasdrafus by offering me as a sacrifice on the twenty-first, on which coincided the solstice and the eclipse. Only inimasang know of this portal as yet. Many will not use it, Rose says, because of the way it was made.”

  “On your death?” I asked, and on her nod, “Rose mentioned a covenant.”

  “Yes, that is what they call it: a treaty, a pact, a covenant. There were two things he wanted.” Ruli’s voice was whispery, slightly eerie in a way
I can’t articulate. Maybe it was the way she consciously took breaths before speaking. “I heard all about it when I woke up on that mountainside, tied up with curtain sashes.” She held up her hand, two fingers separate from the others. “He wanted to be a king, and he wanted to live forever. The vampires would make him one of them. He could make a portal with a human sacrifice on the day of the solstice. If he let them come over the border from the Nasdrafus, he could do what he wanted with the living—call himself king or emperor—as long as he didn’t interfere with the hunt. That meant interfering with the Treaty.”

  “He made this pact with my sister?” Gran asked.

  “No. With another inimasang named Elena. But all are subordinate to Augustus. When I was dying, Rose begged him to turn me rather than let the others drain me to death.”

  “So you were never in the Daimler.”

  “No. The last thing I remember was Alec and me toasting our agreement. Magda had brought in the drinks. I woke up with him patting my cheeks, and telling me that I must be awake for my sacrifice.” Ruli’s voice went whispery with venom. “I can’t tell you how much I hated him for that, and for what he did to Marzio. Because he bragged about that, too.”

  “So the vampires were supposed to make Jerzy a king by killing the government leaders?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And he, in turn, was making a new portal to the Nasdrafus with a human sacrifice?”

  “No. Yes. It is difficult to explain because I am still learning. Blood sacrifice can make a portal for the inimasang. Others will not use such, for there are certain bindings for anyone who crosses over a portal made that way. But Elena was willing to accept those to regain her followers, who had been closed beyond when our grandfather crashed his plane, so the Russians would not find the portal. Tell me, is that new portal closed?”

  “Tony and I closed it,” I said, sorrow crowding my chest and throat at the memory of him recoiling from Jerzy’s bullet, and falling across the table. I took a deep breath.

  Ruli became a little more animated. “I was glad when Jerzy’s scheme at the Council building failed. I was with you when you ran down the hillside to the council building. I kept you safe from the others.”

  I remembered that—the vampire shape nearby, the squeals and hisses of vampire conversation distorted by my crystal protection.

  Ruli gave another angry laugh, a soft, breathy huff. “I certainly had no covenant with Jerzy, and I hoped you would ruin his plan. Why couldn’t he let Marzio and me be together?” She tightened her hand into a fist. “Marzio did love me. I don’t care what anybody says. He did. And now he’s dead.” And another laugh, this one high and eerie. “So is Jerzy.”

  My neck prickled as I said cautiously, “Did he kill Magda Stos and Dr. Kandras, too?”

  “Rose said he poisoned Magda. A fine thing to do to his lover! Though I always hated her. She snitched on me to my mother. But yes, she executed his orders—he told her that you were talking to Alec on the phone, hoping to come here and replace me in a scheme. They had to act first.”

  Wow. So that explained one rumor, anyway.

  “And the doctor?” I began moving slowly between Ruli’s chair and where Gran sat, just in case.

  “I saw Jerzy kill Dr. Kandras. They were at our house. It was very late, the day after Christmas. I was new-made. Mother and Uncle Robert and the rest were at a dinner. Rose was showing me how to use the shadows when we go in and out.”

  Gran was quiet, her head slightly tilted, the moonlight highlighting the tension in her face as she listened.

  I said to Ruli, “So the charms don’t keep vampires out?”

  “Not if it’s your own house. Or if the door is opened to you. Like here!” She flung her hands wide. “Alec brought me here, so I had entrance, and Rose had entrance from her young days. I don’t know how Augustus gained entrance. It was probably centuries ago. It is an old house, under its Georgian façade.”

  “What happened to the doctor?”

  “Poison in coffee. I was packing up some of my clothes—”

  “Where do you live? I mean, as a vampire?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said, and then paused, her eyes wide, the pupils huge in her pale face. “I can’t tell you. A compulsion. How strange!” She flicked her hand dismissively, a gesture that reminded me of Tony. That hurt.

  She went on, “I heard them in the parlor. Jerzy bragged about it as the poison took hold. He said that a man who takes bribes too easily turns to blackmail. He’d done it too many times himself. When Dr. Kandras’s heart ceased beating, Jerzy put him on the tea cart and pushed him out to where the doctor had parked his car. Jerzy drove away. I’m sure the car, and Dr. Kandras, are at the bottom of a cliff somewhere. They were to think he slipped on ice. Just like Phaedra’s parents.” Ruli’s voice was low, almost dreamy. “He bragged about that, killing the twins’ mother, for she had been a Seer, and then he said I wouldn’t live long enough to hear about them all. How he laughed. Then the vampires came to get me.”

  Gran began to whisper. But it wasn’t a prayer.

  “As our blood labours to beget

  Spirits, as like souls as it can,

  Because such fingers need to knit

  That subtle knot, which makes us man . . .”

  Ruli took a step toward me. “Jerzy liked seeing people suffer. He laughed about what he did to Alec, too—he said that father and son were so alike, the same setup must destroy them both. He called that elegant. But Uncle Jerzy is dead now,” Ruli said with morose satisfaction, then turned to me. “And all I feel is strong. It’s just like they say.”

  “So you kill people by drinking their blood?”

  Ruli backed away, gazing out the window. “No! You take enough.” When I swallowed down my revulsion, she turned quickly. “Rose said, before my first time, how is it so different from slaughtering animals to eat their flesh? Our victims shake themselves and go their way. If they are human, they wake up with a headache or think they are ill. Or drunk. But Jerzy was afraid, a little.” She sucked in her breath through her teeth. “His fear made it . . . sweet.”

  “He shot Tony!”

  Ruli’s hand came up sharply. “Tony’s heart is still beating.” She breathed out the words on a sigh. “But the blood is filling in his lung. I can hear it. Beka and Shimon are taking him away.” Ruli hugged herself tightly, twisting back and forth. “Rose said it’s good to be forever young, and thin, and beautiful. I never wanted to have children anyway.” Her voice sank lower and lower, almost a whisper.

  She seemed to flicker, and then she was next to me, a shadow wraith in the weak light. “Kim,” she breathed. Her breath smelled like blood, zinging the primal urge to flee. “Rose said I will come to love existence as inimasang, and that we are not monsters. But I enjoyed killing him.”

  “I saw you in a vision,” I said. “You asked for my help. That’s why I came. Was that you?”

  Her eyes closed. “It was a little like a vision for me, too. It was when Elena first buried her teeth in my neck to give me the kiss of death, and I was so afraid as my life began to fade. I thought you were coming to be with Alec, and I wanted you to come, to help me get away. I was thinking of you, and then I saw you, and I thought, if I could just take your hand, you would save me . . . and then the next thing I knew, Rose was waking me up, and the world was sharp and clear though it was night. And I had to remember to breathe.”

  Ruli gripped both my wrists. “Promise me, Kim. Promise me.” She gazed into my face, her pupils so black there was no sign of the honey brown iris that we shared. “At my funeral. I was there, hiding, and I saw you, and the priest talked about the peace that passeth all understanding. I never listened before. I want that, the peace that passeth all understanding.”

  She was talking so fast I almost couldn’t understand her. “Ruli, what is it you want me to do?”

  “Rose said this was my first kill. I don’t want to love to kill people. Then I’d be a monster. I won’
t be a monster like Jerzy. If that desire comes over me, I want to have the strength to walk into the sun. But not to be dragged, or stabbed with yew, so a tree grows through my flesh. Kim, promise, if I do turn into a monster, and they come after me, you will help me walk into the sun, and you will put me in a garden in Paris. Where I can see the sun again, every day, forever and ever. Promise!”

  Gran whispered, “So must pure lovers’ souls descend. . . .”

  “I promise, Ruli,” I said. “I promise.”

  She released me. “I hope they save Tony.” She sounded fretful, an echo of her old self. Then she sighed, passed through the door, and was gone.

  I turned to Gran, my mind so tangled with enormous subjects, as usual all I could grasp was the most trivial. “That was John Donne you quoted,” I said as I helped her up. “Later I want to know why, but right now I think we’d better get out of here.”

  Her thin hand clung to mine. “I know what to do, but you must help me. No one will listen to an old woman.”

  “An old woman who is a princess,” I reminded her. But she didn’t need reminding.

  She gave me a look midway between tenderness and severity. “A princess who once threw away all responsibility when she was needed most. I hope the people of Dobrenica will have enough charity in their hearts to see me as an old woman, and not as a traitor.” She made a gesture as though pushing that aside. “I know who can help, but we must be fast.”

  “What do you need, Gran?”

  “Sleighs. For a journey.”

  I had a sudden memory of Nat. Here was a wounded dog situation! I didn’t ask Gran why she needed the sleigh, or where she was going. It was enough to know that here, at last, there was something I could do.

  As soon as I got Gran safely to the stairway, where there was light and the noise and warmth of humanity, I leaped down four steps at a time and raced into the dining room, where I found everyone swarming around. Tony and the von Mecklundburgs were gone. So was Beka.