The Tsarina gave a stifled cry, while Ambassador Lionel Snelgrove and Nimrod gave gasps of disbelieving horror.
“I’m very sorry, your majesty,” Ulysses said softly, “but you are now my hostage.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Blood Simple
WITH GASPS OF horror, guests began to back away from Ulysses and his hostage.
There was a bustle of confusion and panic, and a barking of orders as the royal guard put lockdown procedures into action and that, Ulysses realised, meant that Prince Vladimir was locked in there with them.
Ulysses spun himself around with the Tsarina clasped in front of him, making sure that any have-a-go-heroes were in no doubt as to what would happen to the Tsarina if they tried anything.
“What do you think you are doing, man?” Ambassador Snelgrove protested
“What are you doing, sir?” Nimrod mouthed at him silently. Ulysses flashed his manservant a look loaded with meaning.
“Listen up, all of you!” Ulysses shouted. “Now I am sure that nobody here wants to see the Tsarina dead, so I would suggest that it would be most unwise of anybody to do anything rash. So, first of all, I want everybody to drop any weapons they might be carrying.”
There came a clatter as the anxious guardsmen shed themselves of their rifles and ceremonial swords.
“And the rest of you!” Ulysses said. “Very good. And now I would like your help with the small matter of an assassination attempt.”
The masked guests looked at him and then at one another in bewilderment.
“I see you are confused. But you see there is a man here who wishes to see Her Majesty dead and I would ask this man to step forward now.”
The atmosphere palpably thickened.
“No? Not going to do the honourable thing?” He sounded almost disappointed. “Prince Vladimir?”
Ulysses hesitated for a moment, giving the Machiavellian schemer a chance to step forward.
He didn’t.
“Well, it was worth a try, I suppose. Then your various majesties, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, I would ask whether you might help me uncover this traitor. Please, take off your masks.”
More murmurs passed through the ballroom but one by one the masks were removed.
“He shouldn’t be too hard to spot. White hair, red eyes; stands out in a crowd rather. Nimrod, take some of these fine gentlemen,” Ulysses indicated the twitchy guards, “and scour the crowds, would you?”
Nodding to a pair of guardsmen, Nimrod did as he was instructed and started moving through the assembled onlookers, searching out their prey.
Ulysses’ attention was directed towards the area beneath a large stained-glass window as guards converged on the spot. Cries of alarm came from those nearby, and a new space formed within the ballroom as the tide of people shifted, desperately moving out of the way of the scuffle.
There were more shouts of protest and then four steely-faced guards, led by a determined Nimrod, frogmarched their white-haired, white-skinned, red-eyed captive towards the spot where Ulysses stood, the Tsarina still in his grasp.
“Ah, there you are, Prince Vladimir – or should I say Tsarevich Alexei Romanov?”
The albino stiffened.
“Alexei?” the Tsarina gasped and, knowing that his work with her was done, Ulysses lowered his gun and released his hold. “Great-uncle Alexei?” The Tsarina took a step towards the captive albino, her scrutinising eyes uncovering the family likeness lurking there.
“You’re no niece of mine. I have no family, pretender!” he spat.
“Search him, quickly,” Ulysses ordered. “He will be armed I can assure you.”
Relief flooded through Ulysses. He and Nimrod had revealed the villain and saved the day – again.
With a crash, the great stained-glass window exploded inwards, a hail of tiny shards of rainbow glass whirling through the air.
Women screamed and men cried out in alarm. There, crouched within the fractured glass remains was something large and lupine. The beast had something slight and limp flung over one massive, muscular and fur-covered shoulder.
In a single bound the werewolf left the ruins of the window and landed lithely in the middle of the ballroom, not ten feet from the captured Alexei.
It was only then that Ulysses could see properly what it was that it had brought into the castle with it.
The feral thing fixed Ulysses with a savage glare, one eye burning an angry red, the socket of the other scarred, the eye it held cataract white. A growl escaped from the monster’s jaws and it almost seemed to Ulysses as if the creature were laughing.
The beast released its hold on the child’s body, letting Miranda fall to the floor.
Ulysses put his hand to the bloodstone hilt of his sword. But in the end it was Alexei, and not the wolf, that made the first move.
With a roar of anger and frustration, Alexei threw off his guards and sprang towards the astonished Tsarina, pulling something from a jacket pocket as he did so.
Ulysses’ horrified gaze darted from the werewolf to the syringe now in the vampire’s hand, saw the fluid contained within, saw Alexei’s thumb ready on the end of the plunger and, in that split second, made his choice.
In a single fluid motion Ulysses turned his gun on the raging madman, and fired.
The was a sharp crack as the bullet hit the hypodermic needle, exploding the glass, and the blood agent it contained.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Kill or Cure
AS DROPLETS OF blood filled the air around them, Alexei and the Tsarina couldn’t help but breathe the red vapour.
The crack of the gunshot had shattered the tension of the moment and people fled from the ensuing chaos, those behind pushing those in front out of the way. Some threw themselves to the ground, but most charged for the doors.
People were crushed in the stampede to escape as they came up against locked doors. Bones were broken. One of the guards died under the press of people desperately trying to force the door. The panicking crowd were now significantly more of a danger to themselves, than either the megalomaniacal vampire prince or his hulking one-eyed Cossack lycanthrope guard.
There was the splintered crash of a door being forced as ornaments and statuary were employed in opening suitable escape routes.
As the screaming guests fled, they left behind them, in the middle of the ballroom, a cluster of eight desperate individuals.
There was Ulysses Quicksilver, rapier blade in hand as he faced the heaving mass of the transformed Cossack, hunkered down over the motionless body of the child. Then there was the quivering wreck that was all that remained of Ambassador Snelgrove, a pool of piss spreading across the polished marble floor at his feet.
Out of the corner of his eye Ulysses saw one of the guards rush to the Tsarina’s side as she coughed and gagged. Nimrod looked on too, trying to work out whether to try to pull the child clear, go to the aid of the choking Tsarina, or take the fight to Alexei.
Which qualified as more valuable, the life of the Tsarina of Russia or the clone-child of the Empress of Magna Britannia?
As Ulysses and the wolf began to circle one another, the Tsarina’s and her attacker’s condition continued to deteriorate. The Tsarina’s breathing had become a rasping gasp, while Alexei was wheezing horribly, the agent working its ill-effects on both of them.
Alexei appeared to be suffering the most. For a second he locked his gaze with Ulysses, a mad look in his wild red eyes, accusing and horrified at the same time.
“Nimrod, see to the Tsarina,” Ulysses said, not once taking his eyes off the werewolf. “You know what to do.”
Nimrod obeyed at once. Kneeling down beside the stricken Anastasia, he pulled his own hypodermic needle from a jacket pocket and – silencing any protests the guard might be thinking of making with a glare – wasted no time in finding a suitable vein.
Ulysses noticed the vampire staring at the unconscious Miranda. His throat tightened in dread.
; Alexei threw himself upon the child and, before anyone could stop him, sank his teeth into her neck. Blood, rich and red, oozed from around Alexei’s lips and, with a great slurping, sucking sound he began to feed.
Ulysses lunged for Alexei, but the werewolf’s swing hit him squarely in the stomach, punching the air from his body and sending him hurtling backwards.
The beast followed him across the room and crouched over him. The feral stink of its blood-matted fur was sharp in Ulysses’ nose and made him want to gag. But the wolf did not finish him. Its snout mere inches from the dandy’s face, its eyes – one seeing, one blind – locked with his, Ulysses could see its lips curling back from its fangs as if it were smiling.
Sword-stick still in hand Ulysses thrust the blade upwards, into the monster’s heaving ribs, hoping to find its heart.
The werewolf gave a savage roar, and then, lashing out, snapped its jaws closed around Ulysses’ head.
Or at least it would have done, had Nimrod not got there first with the cast-iron candelabra.
The wolf bit down hard on the unyielding iron and there was a crack as several teeth broke. The candles spluttered out and tumbled to the floor.
The werewolf yowled again and turned its attention to Nimrod, who was swinging the heavy iron candelabra to defend himself. Against the sheer mass and power of the werewolf Nimrod was losing.
Ulysses was able to pull himself clear and he was on his feet again in seconds.
And then the Tsarina’s bodyguard was there at Nimrod’s side, thrusting the legs of a chair at the werewolf’s muzzle.
With both Nimrod and the bodyguard keeping the Cossack busy, Ulysses turned his attention back to the Tsarina, the child and the vampire.
He noticed then that the Tsarina’s condition thankfully appeared to be improving. She sat at the edge of a dais, staring in horror at the bloodletting of the child taking place before her.
Knuckles whitening around the pommel of his rapier, Ulysses turned eyes blazing with barely-contained anger on the guzzling leech-thing.
Alexei suddenly sprang back from the child, letting her pallid form slip onto the floor. Standing tall, the prince wiped the back of his hand across his blood-stained mouth.
A wild look was in his eyes, and a cruel smile split his face.
“I win! I have done what I set out to do!” he shouted. “The Tsarina is dead, long live the Tsar! Today Russia, tomorrow... the world!”
“Are you sure about that?” Ulysses challenged, nodding towards the recovering Anastasia.
The vampire tensed and a look of panic entered his blood-red eyes
“It must just take a moment to take effect.”
Alexei suddenly doubled up in pain. He fell to his knees and threw back his head, giving voice to an agonised howl, veins throbbing at his temples and in his neck.
“But the cure!” he spluttered.
“Ah yes, you mean the one Nimrod just administered to her royal highness. Appears to be rather effective as it happens. Thank God.”
“But the child...” Gagging, Alexei began to shake violently.
“You’re right, of course, she was the cure, but note my use of the past tense. I’ll tell you what happened, shall I?”
It seemed to Ulysses, as the vampire fixed him with a look of black hatred, that Alexei’s face was swelling like a balloon. His eyes were bulging painfully and his skin was flushed, as if engorged with blood.
“When we found her, after what you and that bastard Pavlov had done to her, she was dying; the blood loss had just been too great. So you know what we did? We had to give her a blood transfusion, or rather I did, to be precise. Took it out of me too, I can tell you, but the blood flowing through her veins now is Quicksilver blood. The last sample of her own blood, the cure, my man just used on the Tsarina.”
“You...” the vampire gasped.
“Bad luck.”
Alexei’s nose began to bleed and blood began to leak from his tear ducts, running down his face in crimson tears. Finally, in a torrent of internal haemorrhaging, filthy black liquid poured from his trousers as blood gushed from his bowels.
“Curse you!” Alexei screamed. His final words were transformed into one protracted howl of pain and bitter hatred.
Ulysses found himself unable to tear his eyes from the vampire as every last drop of blood escaped him, his body withering, white flesh becoming grey as his eyes disappeared back into their sockets before melting and pouring from his face.
As the vampire’s desiccating corpse crumbled into flakes of skin and grey dust Ulysses smiled, the look in his eyes as cold as marble.
“Have a nice death now, won’t you?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Children of the Night
ULYSSES TURNED TO the child lying at his feet and his expression softened into one of almost parental anxiety.
He knelt down beside her. Blood soaked her clothes and matted her hair.
He put two fingers to her neck and waited for what seemed like a long time before he felt the faint flicker of a pulse. He knelt closer, his cheek practically touching her partially open mouth, and felt the faintest breeze of a breath. She was going to live, he was sure of it.
“Over here, your majesty,” Ulysses called to the stunned Tsarina. She stared at him in bewildered shock, but then got to her feet. “I need you to apply pressure to the wound,” he said, taking off his jacket, tearing out its lining and placing the folded pad of silk over the bite.
Moving as if in a trance, the Tsarina made her way over to where Ulysses crouched and did as she was told.
Hearing a crash of splintering wood and a change in the pitch of the wolf’s snarling behind him, Ulysses turned to see the Tsarina’s bodyguard fall back before the cornered beast.
“Bad dog!” Ulysses snarled, as he strode across the room.
The beast turned, fixing him with its single blazing red eye.
“What are you going to do now?” Ulysses goaded. “Your master’s dead and you’ve been a very – bad – dog.”
With one almighty bound, the huge creature launched itself at the wall, its powerful leap carrying it to within a claw’s grasp of the broken window frame and, with another bound, it was gone into the night.
“Come on!” Ulysses ordered his manservant as he started to move towards a door. “We can’t let that thing run riot through the streets of the city. We have to stop it.”
He suddenly hesitated, looking back to where Miranda lay cold and motionless on the floor of the ballroom, with the Tsarina doing her best to staunch the blood.
“Look after her,” he told the Tsarina. And then turned to address the still reeling bodyguard. “Stay with them,” he said. “Keep them safe. And don’t worry, we’ll be back.”
ULYSSES SPRINTED INTO the square to be confronted with the brutality of the werewolf’s handiwork.
The cab they had arrived in lay on its side, the carriage door torn off its hinges. The horse lay dead, still in its traces, its throat ripped out. The driver lay on the grass beyond.
Ulysses ran to the wreck and, pulling himself up on top of it, peered inside. Katarina was gone.
A scream cut through the night.
“This way!” Ulysses said, setting off down the steps that ran parallel to the castle.
He hesitated only briefly at the bottom, scanning the streets around him for any sign of the werewolf. Black blood glistened in the greasy orange gas-glow of a streetlamp.
The two hunters passed the ornamented facade of the High Baroque Church of St Nicholas, past the gently decaying squares and once picturesque palaces, churches and gardens that lay on either side the Mostecká bridge street, until the trail of blood spots and screams brought them within sight of the pitch-roofed towers that marked one end of the Charles Bridge.
A thick mist was rising from the river. Hearing a snarling ahead of him, Ulysses knew they had caught up with the wolf at last.
Through the mist he could now see two shadows circling one another;
one tall and heavily-muscled, the other svelte and female.
Ulysses started to run, Nimrod hot on his heels.
As the dandy closed the distance between them he watched as the wolf made sweeping lunges for the woman as she spun and danced out of the brute’s way. Ulysses heard yowls of pain as the blade in her hand moved in darting, sweeping strokes and stabbing lunges, finding its mark again and again.
With a savage roar the werewolf sprang, catching the swordswoman as she made her own flying leap, bowling her across the bridge.
Ulysses had his own sword in hand now, not daring to use his pistol when he might hit either friend or foe.
There came a sudden savage snarl from the beast which didn’t quite cover the ghastly ripping noise that sounded unmistakably like flesh being torn open.
Slowly the monster rose up on its hind-legs and turned to face the approaching dandy. Agent Katarina Kharkova lay spread-eagled on the cold cobbles and didn’t move.
The Cossack gave Ulysses a bloody smile. Its furious red-eyed gaze seemed to burn through the mist.
Suddenly, to Ulysses, his sword didn’t seem like the right tool to finish the job. He had plunged several inches of its tempered steel into the brute’s chest already and it barely seemed to have bothered it. It certainly didn’t appear to have caused it any lasting harm. But what else was he going to do.
“Come on then, you Cossack bastard!” he shouted. “Let’s finish this right here, right now!”
The beast sprang.
Ulysses was already spinning out of its way as it landed and laid the edge of his blade across its broad shoulders. The wolf snarled in pain and twisted, lashing out at the dandy with raking claws. The tip of one bony talon snagged Ulysses’ dinner jacket, tearing through the fabric.
The beast lunged again and Ulysses took another dancing step backwards, bringing his blade down this time on the monster’s wrist. It howled in pain, but followed with a clubbing swipe of its other meaty paw, that sent Ulysses stumbling into the side of the bridge.
Blood Royal Page 22
