“You might want to watch this,” Roxane told Kiki, who turned her head as far away from Roland as she could. Roxane went to her, took her head in one hand and removed her glasses again, staring into her eyes. When she replaced her glasses Kiki turned her head to look at Roland, and did not look away.
“Last chance,” Roxane said.
Roland lifted his head and glared at her. There was no need for any words. She reached up and drew her forefinger down his torso, from throat to waist, as she had done on his cheek. The blood from that would have coagulated, almost dried. This cut seemed a little deeper, the blood flowed more freely, and Roland writhed and moaned, grinding his teeth together to keep from screaming. Then she drew another cut down him, almost parallel to the first, joined the tops with a quick sideways cut, before sliding her fingernails beneath the flap of skin, teasing it away and taking it between her fingers and thumb. She paused and looked into his face. “Absolutely last chance.”
He looked up and glared at her through the tears filling his eyes and gathered the phlegm in his mouth to spit in her eye. He could hardly miss from there. But he did, again.
She began to tug at the flap of skin and flesh. Slowly it came away from him, blood fountaining everywhere, revealing the muscle and bone beneath, ribs pressing outward as he screamed and screamed and screamed as her hand made its slow way down his torso. As an attempt at skinning him it was crude, inartistic. As a method of torture it set everyone in the room’s heads ringing as though they were a bell that had just been hammered.
Then the noise stopped as Roland lost consciousness.
“Damnation!” Roxane whirled around. “They always do that!”
“Do what?” Call asked, his voice dull, sounding to him as though it belonged to someone else, someone he did not know, did not want to know.
“Lose consciousness just when things are getting interesting.” She drew her fingernail down the right side of Roland’s torso, raising a trail of blood. The vampire stirred and grunted, but did not wake. She reached out to draw another line, only for Call to catch hold of her wrist.
“Always?” he wondered. “How many times have you done this?”
“How many times have I done this?” She sucked on her top lip as though reviewing her memories and counting up the times she had tortured a man by skinning him. Her eyes suddenly turned very bright. “Oh, this is the first time.” He wondered whether that brightness was enthusiasm or mania.
She sketched a brief cut at ninety degrees to the one she had just cut and reached under the flap, even though she had not cut another side. As she began to tug on Roland’s flesh he came awake, screaming.
“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you!” Kiki shouted. “He’s at The Russia House. Rasputin has him.”
Roxane turned towards her. “He would not have done anything to save you pain.”
“I don’t care,” Kiki sobbed, swaying from side to side, eyes closed. “I don’t care what he would have done for me. I just can’t bear his pain anymore.”
Roxane tugged on the flap of skin and sinew. Both Roland and Kiki screamed. Roxane took tighter hold of the skin, only for Call to lay his hand on her wrist.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh, and why not?” Her peevish tone suggested he might be introduced to pain for denying her such small pleasures as torturing a vampire to death.
“We already know what we need to know. There’s nothing to be gained by hurting them anymore. You don’t need to do it. You’re better than that.”
She stared at him, unable to accept what he had just said, unable to comprehend it. “You really think so?”
“Yes you are.” A four centuries old vampire did not need to inflict pain for the mere pleasure of it. Skinning Roland was like a young boy pinning down a beetle, pulling its legs off one by one with tweezers and then burning it to death with a magnifying glass. “That would be wanton.”
“Wanton. What an old fashioned word.”
“Maybe I’m an old fashioned man.” Call was unsure which made him more uncomfortable, what Roxane had done or that he sincerely believed she was better than that.
“You really think I am better than that?” she wondered.
“Yes, yes I do,” he found himself replying before he thought. “Inflicting cruelty for its own sake is just barbaric, even if it is on creatures like these.” ‘Dear Lord’, he thought, ‘I’m worrying about the moral and spiritual well-being of a vampire!’
“What would you do with them?”
He shrugged. “They’re vampires. I’m a vampire hunter. I’d kill ‘em.”
“I am a vampire too,” she whispered after a moment’s silence.
“I had noticed,” he muttered, and then left, hurrying up the stairs. He did not want to witness their deaths. He did not have to see them die. He had seen his bellyful of death and destruction, enough to last him several lifetimes. Perhaps he was getting too old for this shit…
In the kitchen he closed the door behind him and thought of locking it, but that would make no difference. Locks could not contain Roxane. He made a cup of coffee, using the Italian coffee engine that was just about his only concession to contemporary living. He sipped it, savouring its scalding heat on his lips and tongue, and ploughed his way through a substantial bowl of cereal and milk. The cardboard packet would probably have tasted more appetising than the cereal.
She joined him, turning the key in the door lock behind herself. He made no mention of the cellar beneath their feet. “What next?” he asked eventually.
“Kiki said he is in The Russia House.”
“You believed her?”
“A witty man once told me that the prospect of death concentrates the mind wonderfully, or something like that.”
Call’s internal pedant almost took over so he could lecture her on quoting Dr Johnson correctly or not at all. Instead he sipped at his coffee, which was almost drinkably cooler now. He did not offer her any. “As I asked before, what next?”
“We go to where he is and rescue him.”
A thought occurred to him. “When we were in The Russia House, were you aware of his presence there?”
She sipped at her coffee. “Not at all, which is rather concerning.”
“Rather concerning?” Call laughed and shook his head. “There are more cameras in that place than there are in the Bank of England. As I recall, the last time you were there you made something of a flamboyant exit that must have attracted the attention of the security people. The chances of you getting back in there so unnoticed that you’ll get down to the cellars range from slim to vanishing. Me too, seeing as I was in every frame with you.”
She reached out across the table and took his hand. “I had thought about that.” As he watched her appearance changed until it was Rasputin sitting across from him, right down to the moving tattoos on his pate and the mauve spectacles.
“Very impressive,” he said. “What about me?
“Look in the mirror.”
He did. Kirilenko looked back at him. “Oh, wonderful.”
Chapter Seventeen
Deep below ground, in a bedroom on the second level of a huge basement that had been dug out beneath a four storey Georgian townhouse in Belgravia, something made Lucyfer stir in her bed. She did not know exactly what, just that it was ominous.
Rosa Jane whimpered beside her, anticipating the pain of being used for food even asleep. It was her tiny gasps that roused Lucyfer. As soon as she had her wits about her she knew that something, somewhere was amiss, something important. She lay in the heavy, impenetrable darkness and reached out through the house with her awareness. There should be five presences there, but she could detect only three.
Cursing almost silently, she slid out of bed, being careful not to disturb the slumbering child, avoiding the irritation of the mewling she always made when she woke. Soon, now, she would rid herself of the encumbrance, whatever Gabriel said. He might consider himself the alpha male in
their nest but that did not mean she had to follow his orders. She did not bother with clothes. Whatever the temperature down there, she was tough enough to be immune to it.
Her bare feet slapped on the marble floor the previous owner of the house – a Lebanese businessman whose business included doing favours for the Saudi controllers of the heroin trade - had his builders install, before the nest ate him and his family and took over the house. She checked each of the four rooms on that level, the four on the next above and then pulled on a towelling dressing gown before going up into the main body of the house.
It was, after all, daylight out there and just because the blinds and curtains were drawn closed against the sunlight there was still the possibility of a peeper, or possibly a tradesman at the door. Every room on all four storeys was empty, silent, with only the occasional flecks of dust stirring in rogue beams of sunlight she was careful to avoid. She had never really believed Roland and Kiki might be up there, avoiding her senses, but she had to check.
Back underground she tried to shake Gabriel awake. “They’re not here,” she hissed at him. “They have not returned.” She shook him again, not at all gently. He did not respond, and as she stood over him, bunching her hands into fists, she realised she was standing in something cold, wet and viscous. She did not need to switch on the light to know what it was. Why did the stupid oaf have to waste food? Did he imagine he was so formidable, so invulnerable, that he could prowl the streets indefinitely plucking humans from the low hanging branches? She felt for his head, lifted away the duvet under which he was sheltering, and slapped him open handed on his exposed cheek. The blow hurt her but woke him.
“Whaddya want, bitch?” he growled, using the word he knew she despised, turning over and draping the duvet back over his head. She pulled it away again with one hand and switched on the bedside light with the other, revealing his flabby torso with its folds of flesh streaked with the dried blood that had come from the exsanguinated corpse of the rent boy lying on the floor near the bottom of the bed where Gabriel had flung it when sated. He sat up, eyes suddenly blazing with anger kindled from nowhere, his fist raised to strike her. Then he saw her expression and his fist opened and fell to his side. “This had better be good, bitch.”
“I told you, they haven’t come back, Roland and Kiki. Their beds haven’t been slept in.” She did not mention her premonition. Gabriel was not big on things supernatural, even though he was a vampire who might be as good as immortal, or as bad.
“So what? They’re grown up. They’ve been vampires long enough to keep out of the sun. They can look out for themselves.” He reached for the duvet and tugged, expecting it to easily come out of Lucyfer’s hands. She held on.
“What is the matter with you?” he demanded. “Do I look like I give a flying fuck about them, especially her? If she’s got that old one or the Seeker to kill her I want to shake their hands. They’ve saved me the trouble.”
She sighed, shook her head and sat down on his bed, using the sheet to clean her feet of the all but coagulated blood. It wouldn’t be the first time Mrs Blixen had washed up after them, cleaned up after them. Hopefully, it would not be the last. “You promised Rasputin you would bring him the old one’s sister.”
“As I recall, that was your ill-considered promise.”
“Whatever. Do you expect Rasputin to split hairs if he doesn’t get her? If she has killed Roland what chance do we have of delivering her? He was older than us, stronger than us, had killed more than us…”
Gabriel raised his thick forefinger to his lips, and Lucyfer fell silent. “The only important word you have spoken is ‘If’. If she has killed them. If is good. We know nothing for certain.” He dragged his duvet out of her grasp and wrapped it round himself. “Even if she has, there’s nothing we can do about it now, it being daylight out there. Now, if it is all the same to you, I am going back to sleep. We’ll worry about Rasputin tonight.” He switched off the light, leaving Lucyfer to negotiate the pool of blood wishing she had something large and heavy in her hands to beat out his brains. Of course, that would require him to have brains in the first place.
Eventually she returned to her own room, got into bed and gathered Rosa Jane into her arms and began to suck desultorily on the girl’s wrist. As far as comfort food went, it was not that comforting, but it was all she had. She fell asleep, having promised herself she was going to leave this godawful place, go somewhere the sun and the blood was hot.
Chapter Eighteen
Roxane and Call strolled past the house, arm in arm, on the opposite side of the road.
“They are in there,” remarked Roxane, looking pointedly at a house on their side of the road that was painted a sickly mint ice cream green. “We could always kill them in their sleep and save ourselves a lot of bother.”
Call grunted, dismissing the suggestion unconsidered. So far as he was concerned there was no ‘we’ in this equation. Killing vampires was something for which he had not yet recovered his stomach. Even so, his blades hung beneath his jacket, ready for use should the need arise.
They walked on some way in companionable silence, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon, and the almost strange quiet of the streets – London was, after all, like all modern cities, never entirely silent. Eventually they came to a small park overlooking the river, the riverside path before them with its endless grey stone and algaed surfaces, a hedge behind them dividing the park from the row of houses with one of the best views in London. They sat on the grassy bank for a while, saying little, until Call said “I’m not your pet, you know.”
She turned her head quickly to look at him, seemingly startled, her lips moving without actually saying anything. “I never said you were. I never thought you were. I like you just the way you are, troubled, dangerous, conflicted, independent. You make your own decisions. I haven’t met a human being like you in… centuries.” This last word was spoken so quietly he only just heard it.
He laughed. He would have skipped a stone across the river, if he’d had a flat stone and if the tide was not so far out that the mighty Thames was little more than two glistening muddy banks with an oily stream huddling almost out of sight between them. “That’s probably because you’ve been a vampire for those centuries and you haven’t met a single human being who might not more properly have been called ‘lunch’.”
“That is not true!” she laughed, punching him in the shoulder and being very careful not to hurt him. “Being a vampire is not all about feeding I would have you know, Robert Call. As the years pass by and the decades turn into centuries being a vampire becomes less and less about feeding. Cyrano and I have not fed off a human since we returned to London.”
“Oh, that is such a relief for all of us.”
She stared at him, unsure whether he was being serious or merely facetious. Her spectacles slipped down her nose a little but she quickly pushed them back into place. This was not the time for him to see her eyes, to be reminded how different she had become.
Taking hold of his hand she raised it to her lips and kissed the inside of his fingers and his palm, exactly as she would have done had she been his human lover. The sensation of her lips on his flesh was soft, warm and tender. This was not possible. It ought to be impossible. Then she kissed him again and leaned in close to whisper in his ear.
“Nothing is impossible, Robert Call. Nothing.”
She sat back again. “I was once told that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in any of our philosophies.”
“Someone knew their Shakespeare,” he chuckled. “That’s from Macbeth.”
“Actually, it’s from Hamlet, but when Sweet William first spoke those words to me he had not yet put pen to paper.”
“Sweet William...?” Call frowned, and then memory rang. “You knew him as well?”
Roxane closed her eyes for a long while, recalling those few, brief, bittersweet days when she had been Sweet Will’s dark lady in disguise. Her time at Elisabeth’
s court had been as exciting and troubled as it had been brief, when the court had been a pale echo of Henry’s court of wonders struggling to maintain its artistic, chivalrous self amid all the swirls and eddies and cataracts of politics and slaughter; a court of love and sonnets, betrayal and murder, where none were safe, not even sublime Sweet William, not even the queen herself. Sweet William, the funniest, darkest, most challenging man she had ever met.
“Tell me your history,” Call said, lying back on the grass with one hand beneath his head while the other kept hold of her hand. “Tell me about you.”
“We were born just outside York, Cyrano and I, the twin son and daughter of a minor lord who had bought his way upwards by becoming very rich in the wool trade. His name was Richard Mercer; we were named Mary Rose and William Edward, after mother’s mother and father’s father. Mother died having us, as mothers often did, so she was never disappointed to see how we came out. I have no memory of Father ever mentioning her, or of him looking at another woman. He was a particular man, my father, told a lot of jokes that made people laugh without ever hurting or insulting anyone, and he had the ability to make even the most flint-skinned miser open his purse and give Father everything in it on the promise they would be paid back and much more.”
“So your father was a banker, then?”
Roxane laughed so much she ended up with tears coursing down her face and spluttering into several paper handkerchiefs. “Did they not teach you history in school? Usury was forbidden in those days, likely to get you burned at the stake and your possessions forfeit to the Crown. No, Father was not a banker but he did make people richer, even if he never signed a contract in his life. That was why we went to the court. He was invited by someone who had the Queen’s ear and knew she would welcome any man who could help fill the royal coffers. By then William and I were wild, out of control, headstrong Elizabethan versions of what would be called ‘teenagers’ these days. Father wouldn’t trust us to anyone in York, so he took us with him. That was possibly not the wisest decision he ever made. He was impossibly busy and occupied once he got to court, we were just impossibly beautiful and had our choice of Elizabeth’s courtiers. They came from all over Europe, soldiers and diplomats, artists and spies, men who wanted their masters to wed the queen, men who wanted to bed her themselves, men who wanted to kill her. Wherever you looked you saw men of mystery, exciting men, women too. Men who turned our father’s innards to water with their dark, secret ambitions because all he wanted to do was make even more money. Oh, he also wanted to marry off the pair of us, but I think he gave up that as a bad idea pretty soon after our arrival. There was one man who stood out, even in that company, an Italian – or so we thought at the time – who interested our father because he was a merchant dealing in cloth and fascinated us because he was the original tall, dark and dangerously handsome man who had just about every woman at court’s tongue hanging out wherever he went, mine included. The one problem for me, at least, was that the man wasn’t in the least interested in me for the simple reason that he was obsessed with my brother who, of course, led him the merriest and most exhausting of dances until the night the queen held a masked ball at the palace. It was the grandest of grand evenings, exactly the time when the queen allowed her court to become the Doge’s palace in Venice for a night, when wine and licence flowed without let or hindrance. We brought the Italian to a room where we planned to have our wicked ways with him. What young fools we were. We thought we had been playing with him. In fact he was playing with us. There was no way on earth or under heaven we could have imposed our will upon him. He had us sit on the bed we had prepared for our amorous encounter and told us he was not, after all, Italian. Or rather, he was and was not Italian. He was Roman, a soldier of the Roman Empire when that was the greatest empire the civilised world had ever seen, and the city of Rome was the marble capital of that empire, not the heap of overgrown rubble surrounding the Vatican as it was in Elizabeth’s time, and that he was...”
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