I flinched as I hauled the resisting horse forward, aware that the thumping sounds of the first couple of hesitant steps forward were made by Nikola’s body being dragged across lumps of sod, wood, and rocks, but after the horse shied in protest of the awkward burden he hauled, he walked forward docilely enough.
We’d just made it past a couple of fir trees that seemed to have twined around each other as they grew when there was an angry shout behind us.
“Crap!” I swore, and, grabbing the bridle firmly, bolted forward, praying that I had wrapped Nikola’s head well enough to keep it from being damaged any further.
The yelling was now accompanied by the sound of men running after us. I dodged around another big fir, trying frantically to think of a way to lose them. I couldn’t drag Nikola much farther without risking harming him, and, without help, couldn’t get him onto the horse. As I rounded the tree, moonlight spilled onto the ground in front of me. My heart leaped at the sight of the faintly visible swirling mass of light that seemed to hang in the air in the center of the clearing. “My swirly thing!”
“You! Trollop! Stop!”
I glanced over my shoulder to see the thinner of Nikola’s brothers dashing around trees, a sword in his hand. He was about thirty feet behind us, and I could see, even in the flickering shadow of the trees, the man’s lips pulled back to reveal a horrible grimace of sheer evil.
I ran for the swirly thing, stopping just at the edge of it, and threw myself down at Nikola’s feet, desperately trying to wrench free the cloth I’d tied around his ankle. The weight of his body had tightened the knot, however, making it impossible for me to undo.
“I hope to god our lizard overlords understand why I had to do this,” I told Nikola as I leaped back to my feet and, grabbing the horse by his bridle, ran straight into the middle of the swirling light.
The Incredible Adventures of Iolanthe Tennyson
July 15
The noise was what woke me up. It was a horrible, strangled sort of noise, one that suddenly became very loud and annoying, and disrupted my happy little sleep.
I frowned when the noise increased to a volume that irritated my nerves, frowning even more when the lovely warmth that surrounded me suddenly darkened. I opened one eye and looked up into the disheveled face of a man.
A very handsome man with black hair, and the most gorgeous eyes the color of a pale blue topaz.
A man who looked familiar.
“I bloody well should look familiar, since you were riding me just a few hours ago. Why the devil did you try to asphyxiate me with my own coat? Is it because I insisted that you be the one to seduce me? Or was that your way of starting some very curious form of lovemaking? If it is the latter, I must inform you that I will not have it. I am a fair man, a generous man, a man who is willing to let his woman seduce him if that is her desire, but I do not find having my vision and breathing obstructed in any manner titillating. Henceforth, you will leave off the rough lovemaking, and return to the sort where you apply your naked flesh to mine in a more congenial manner.”
“Nikola?” I asked, as slowly the shadowed recesses of my brain brightened with dawning enlightenment. I opened the other eye and for a few seconds wondered what the hell had happened. I went ahead and asked him. “Why do you look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backward? Why is your face all red?”
“Why did you bind my head and tie me to Thor?” he countered.
“Huh?” I sat up, and immediately the world spun around me. Nikola grabbed my arms and held me for the few seconds it took for everything to resume its proper place. “Oh, man, what was I drinking last night? I have the hangover to end all hangovers.”
“You have not been hung, although I believe I would be within my rights to throttle you. Are you well?”
This last was said with much more concern than the former, and after a minute of letting my brain get back to the business of running my body, I nodded. “Just a bit woozy, although I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about.”
“This,” he said, gesturing toward his boot. The remnants of a piece of white cloth fluttered from his ankle. “And that.”
I looked at where he pointed, and saw a big horse happily grazing a few yards from us, another white cloth dangling from one stirrup.
“That’s…that’s…” I closed my eyes for a moment to try to remember the horse’s name.
“Thor.”
“Thor! That’s right. Oh, holy Jesus!” With the mention of the name, the full memory of the terrifying flight through the woods returned to me. I got to my knees, holding on to Nikola’s arm as I quickly looked around us, half expecting to see one of his horrible brothers lurking in the shadows of the trees.
Although we were in the shade of the trees, the sun was high in the sky, casting its rays down on earth and human and horse alike…and the swirly thing that crested the slight hill about twenty feet away. “The swirly thing is still there, although”—I bit my lower lip as I got to my feet—“it looks different. It looks dimmer, if that makes sense.”
Nikola nodded, winced at the gesture, and put his hand to the back of his head before saying, “It would look different, given its use. I take it that is the object you mentioned seeing before you were transported to me?”
“Yes, and what do you mean—oh, your head! How does it feel?” Gently, I touched his head, finding a small bump where a larger one had been earlier.
“Sore. Someone hit me on the back of it. Yes, that’s the spot. It’s healing now, but when I woke up, I felt as if Alexander had marched his entire army over it.”
My hands dropped, and my gaze skittered away for a few seconds while I fought the guilty thought that I’d made it worse. I cleared my throat. “I’m pretty sure it was one of your brothers who knocked you out. Um. How does the rest of you feel?”
“A bit battered, but improving with every passing minute. I appear to have some ability that allows me to heal at an accelerated rate. I made a few notes about that before you woke up.” He shook out his jacket, and put it on before pulling a small knife from his boot to cut the cloth from first his ankle and then the stirrup. “Why did you tie me to a horse and drag me here?”
“That’s going to take some explaining. The super-short version is that once I saw the swirly thing, I knew I’d have to risk it.”
“Risk what?” he asked, frowning as he bent to put away the knife.
“Bring you through it to my time.”
He stood up and gave me a long look. “You did what?”
“Welcome to 2012,” I said with a smile, spreading my hands. “I think you’re going to like it.”
“I may well like it, but that’s not something we’re bound to find out. We did not travel through time, Io. You simply stumbled over a root or rock and became insensible.”
“You don’t think we came through the swirly thing?” I looked around the clearing, but there was nothing there to offer a clue as to the year. “Why not? You know I came through it to your time.”
“It is impossible because that”—he gestured toward the object in question—“is clearly a portal, and you said yourself it has diminished.”
“Yeah, it does look a lot fainter, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“You drew upon its energy to arrive here. It faded in response. There is not enough energy left in it to transport two people and a horse.”
“Or it sent us back, and what you see is what it looks like after it did so.”
He frowned at that line of reasoning, and was about to argue when I stopped him with a question of my own. “How did you know it was a portal? Did you know this was here all along? I told you that I came through a swirly light thing—why didn’t you tell me this is where it was located?”
“I did not know this was the object that you used to reach me,” he said, giving a little head shake that had a swift flash of pain crossing his face. “I have never seen this phenomenon before, but I know it is a porta
l because that is the exact location that a demon lord named Magoth used when he laid the curse upon me. He appeared out of nothing; thus, he must have used some sort of a portal from a different place to this one. It is only logical to assume that what one man might do, so might another.”
“A demon cursed you?” I asked, my skin crawling at the thought.
“A demon lord,” he said with emphasis. “He told me that he was commissioned to destroy me, but that the method was not specified, so he chose the most heinous punishment he could think of, and cursed me to be a Dark One.”
“Holy freak-out,” I said, unable to imagine how horrible that had been.
“He also took my soul, but I have learned to cope without that,” Nikola added in an offhand manner, just as if the loss of a soul were a minor inconvenience.
“You have got to be kidding…. No, you’re not, are you? You don’t have a soul?”
“No.” He took a look around us, then, putting both hands on my waist, hoisted me up and onto the saddle. “I thought you would have noticed.”
I was a bit taken aback by that statement. “Well, shoot, Nikola, it’s not like I go around checking everyone I meet to see if a devil has taken their soul. But…is that why you’re all angsty inside?”
“Angsty?” He patted his coat and pulled out a familiar notebook. “I do not know the meaning of this word, but assuming you are referring to the emptiness that fills me, then yes, that is due to the loss of my soul.”
“I wondered about that.” I grabbed the horse’s mane when Nikola took hold of Thor’s bridle and turned him, walking back toward the way I’d come through the trees. “I thought maybe it was something I was imagining. What exactly is a demon lord? And why did someone hire him to curse you?”
He was silent for a minute, finding a path for us through the trees, keeping to the shade and holding branches back for me whenever possible. For some reason that, and the knowledge that he really and truly was cursed into being a vampire, tugged at my heartstrings.
“I’ve never been able to find out who damned me to this curse, although I have my suspicions. A demon lord is one of the princes of Abaddon.”
“And what’s—”
“Hell. At least, that’s what I assume, since no one has ever told me differently. When I was cursed, I did some research into the phenomenon of Dark Ones,” he said very matter-of-factly.
I bit back a giggle. Of course he researched the subject—I didn’t expect anything different from Mr. Scientific Reason.
“There isn’t much documented about them, but what I did find reassured me that although Dark Ones are not commonly found, there are others, many of whom are from my native Moravia. I wrote to the society to inform them that I was newly made a member of their group, and received in return an offer of assistance should I have any questions.”
“Vampires have their own society?” I asked, a bit flabbergasted at that. “Do they have local chapters? A newsletter? A Facebook page?”
He stopped, glared at me, and pulled out his notebook again.
I giggled.
“Yes, there is a society for Dark Ones,” he said after tucking away the notebook, and taking Thor’s bridle again. He marched on through the trees. “They did not send me any other letters containing news or otherwise. Years later, after Benedikt was born, I thought of contacting them to discuss his weaning, but my wife discovered that if she gave him a piece of raw meat, he would gain sustenance from that. As he grew older, he commenced to taking blood from living animals, and later to people. It was a most interesting experience, and one I documented fully. Someday, I shall publish my findings.”
“I bet that would make fascinating reading.”
He glanced over his shoulder to me, suspicion evident in his eyes.
“I mean it. I never really thought about what baby vampires eat. I guess I thought they just, you know, ate off their moms.”
“They do. They nurse until they are weaned and then they consume blood. At least, that is what Benedikt did. Imogen was different, but I attribute that to the fact that she very much resembles her mother, whereas Benedikt favors me.”
“That’s really interesting. Do you ever eat stuff that isn’t blood?”
“Not now.” He frowned, and pushed back the low-hanging branch of a giant fir tree. “I tried to at first, but it made me violently ill. I decided that something was not agreeing with me, and systematically began to eliminate those items of food that I could not stomach. After two years, I realized that it was food itself that my body had difficulty with. It would seem that Dark Ones do not digest food the same way as others.”
“Huh. That’s really weird. So you just went on a blood diet?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did Elizabet say that you liked maggoty pheasant?”
He sighed, and avoided a pool of sunlight, skirting it as we continued through the trees. “The servants would have commented if they saw that I did not take any nourishment, so I developed a method of pretending to consume food. Mostly, I had meals in my study. When that was unavoidable, I made sure one of my dogs was in the room with me, and simply slipped the food off my plate to whatever beast was handy. It saved me from attracting attention I prefer to do without, kept the dogs well fed, and made my cook happy.”
“You’re one smart cookie, you know that?” I asked, a warm glow of happiness spreading through me as I watched the back of his head.
“Cookie. Hmm. Cookie. A sweet biscuit?”
“Yup, you got that one.”
“I have a question for you, if it is my turn to ask.”
“Shoot. Er…that means go ahead.”
He stopped in the middle of reaching for his notebook, and asked instead, “I have had the short explanation—if you can call it that—of what actions you took, and now I would like a more detailed version. Why did you tie me to Thor and wrap my head in my coat?”
I sighed. “I had a feeling you weren’t going to let me get away without explaining fully. The truth is that your brothers—how do I say this so it doesn’t sound really circumstantial?—your brothers were planning on killing you.”
“I am immortal,” he said after a few seconds of digesting that thought. I found it interesting—and telling—that he didn’t at all question the idea of his brothers wanting to do him in.
“But you can be killed. You said so yourself.”
“Yes, I can, but it is not an easy task to accomplish.” He was silent again for another minute. “How do you know that they have planned to see that harm befalls me?”
“Imogen told me.”
He shot me a startled look, but kept walking.
“The Imogen in my time, that is. She was very upset, if that makes it better. Extremely so. She refused to even come up to this forest to take pictures because she said it has so many bad memories for her. Oh, holy cow, Imogen! We just left her!”
“We will be home shortly.”
“No, we won’t. Nikola, whether or not you want to admit it, I dragged you through that wormhole or portal or whatever the hell it is, smack-dab into the twenty-first century. It’s 2012 now, and although Imogen is still alive—at least I hope she is…oh, man, if the fact that I saved you messed things up, I’m going to be so pissed—anyway, assuming the lizards haven’t taken over and she’s here, then she’s just fine and dandy. And she did tell me to do whatever it took to save you. She was really insistent about that, so I guess I really shouldn’t worry, although now I feel terribly guilty over leaving her alone in the eighteenth century. That worry is retracted, however, if it turns out she was in with your brothers. Which I don’t think she would be, because honestly, what would she gain?”
“My daughter would never betray me in such a fashion,” Nikola said stiffly. “I make no such claim about my brothers; they have long resented the fact that my mother left her fortune to them in a trust that I administer, and I can readily believe that they would wish to see me gone so they can take over the control of their fortu
nes. However, to suggest that the same might be applied to my daughter is unreasonable.”
“Maybe. Although they did tell that kid named Ted that Imogen was in on the whole thing, but I can see where that might be a red herring.”
He sighed and pulled out his notebook.
“Again, though, I don’t see what she’d benefit from it. If you were to die, your son would get the castle, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“So that’s out, unless Imogen plans to knock him off, too. ‘Knock him off’ means murder, by the way.”
“Thank you, I gathered the meaning of the phrase from the context,” he murmured politely.
“I just hope she’ll be OK with no one to look after her but that crazy woman who sees smut everywhere.”
“Imogen is a woman grown, and capable of taking care of herself in all matters but that of men, and I have placed my trust in Frau Leiven to guard against Imogen being allowed undesired contact with such individuals. My word, as you have no doubt seen for yourself, is absolute. Frau Leiven will guard her from danger on that source.”
I didn’t miss the emphasis.
“I swear to god, if you call me a trollop or strumpet or whore, I’ll deck you,” I growled, waving one fist at him.
He didn’t even look at me. “As for your other statement, I see that I shall have to show to you that based on the state of that portal, what you suggest is just not possible. I don’t suppose you would care to make a wager on the subject?”
“What subject?” I asked, confused.
“Whether or not it would be possible to take two people and a horse through the portal at the center of the Zauberwald.”
“I suppose. What did you have in mind to wager? I wouldn’t have minded one of those da Vinci drawings, but I suppose those are long gone.”
A Tale of Two Vampires Page 16
