They had not taken half a dozen steps when there came a squealing, metallic, tearing sound from beneath their feet, followed by a monstrously heavy, dull thud that seemed to make the building shake. It sounded like an Underground train had just come to an emergency stop down there, but Call knew there were no tunnels beneath this part of the High Street.
It could only be one of the cell doors being opened in an unconventional manner. He stepped forward and lashed out at the Cossacks’ arms. They both yelled aloud, and released Cyrano, who would have collapsed to the floor but for Roxane catching her burden again. Both Cossacks went for their weapons, despite the distraction of their pain, but neither was nearly quick enough to beat Call, who put a blade through each of their throats before they could unclip their holsters.
A quick outward twist of his wrists and their spines were severed. They died with astonishment on their faces, the life fled from them before their bodies could hit the carpet. Call bent down and wiped his blades on their already scarlet clothes, sheathed them and picked up their guns.
They were heavy and looked old fashioned to his untrained eyes, but he had no doubt that a bullet fired from one of those would hurt just as much as one fired from some up to the minute, semi-automatic pistol. Both guns had the name ‘Mauser’ embossed on the square metal bodies. He offered one to Roxane, who declined. She would need both hands free to get Cyrano out of there, so Call dropped one pistol into his jacket pocket and held the other out in front of him, in his right hand.
Another shuddering crash came from beneath their feet. “That was the second door,” he told her, redundantly.
“I thought you killed him,” she gasped as she staggered under Cyrano’s weight. She might be preternaturally strong after all these years, but if she was dense then so was her brother.
“I thought I did too!” said Call, turning around so that he would face the direction from which they had come, staring along the barrel of the gun, ready to shoot at whoever or whatever should follow them, hoping that he would not trip over something he could not see, wondering why Rasputin had not opened the cell doors using the keys he must have.
They came to the stairs up to the ground level and Roxane would have turned straight up onto the staircase had some instinct not made Call turn around, grab her shoulder and hold her back. A number of gunshots passed through where she would have been standing and buried themselves in the walls and woodwork.
“Bullets don’t harm me!” she sneered, turning on Call.
“Maybe not, but they could be the death of me,” retorted Call immediately. Her change of expression told him she had not thought of that, and wanted to apologise for her deficiency, but she did not get the chance as another volley of shots tore apart the silence that had followed the first.
Panic engulfed the upper floors of The Russia House. Elegantly, expensively dressed men and women filled the corridors and staircases, milling this way and that, barging into each other, fighting to get others out of their way, knocking the less nimble and sure footed to the floor, trampling anyone who lay there unable to rise for whatever reason. Everyone dashed for the exits as though they believed their life depended on it and the Devil could take the hindmost.
Call and Roxane waited where they were. A tall, slender, middle aged woman barged past them, holding the undone halter of her dress at her neck and turned up the stairs. There were more shots and she fell backwards beside them, dress spilling out of her hand to reveal one pale breast, the left hand side of her head destroyed by the bullet and a large, downward curving smear of blood, brain matter and crushed bone on the wall showing where the impact had smashed her head sideways at the same time as it had killed her.
Call gawped at the corpse for a moment, before telling himself she was not the first dead person he had seen and wondering what weapons Rasputin’s men must be using to cause damage like that.
Suddenly he heard the breathless, deafening ‘hee-haw, hee-haw’ of a fire alarm somewhere and then all the doors along the corridor crashed open at the same time and the rooms’ occupants stampeded out, oblivious of the woman they trampled into the carpet, catching up Call, Roxane and Cyrano in their headlong rush to the stairs and then up to the ground floor and freedom. Even Roxane could not resist the pressure and Call caught hold of her arm, urging her to go with the flow.
“Keep your head down,” he yelled without being sure she heard, let alone understood him. For a moment he felt panic rise up in his throat when he realised that his feet were not actually touching the stairs, and the crush was so pressing that he could not use his arms to make room for himself. He had no option but to go where he was taken.
The foyer into which the tide spilled him had been transformed from elegance and tranquillity into a literal shambles. The front doors had been torn from their hinges and lay half in, half out of The Russia House, splintered and trampled.
There were more bodies than Call could count strewn around the chequered floor, having suffered all sorts of injuries and there was a shining pool of blood on the floor was looked big enough to have come from more than one person. Call pushed himself free of the crowd and clung to a pillar that looked and felt like marble. He looked around, trying to judge which of the bodies were dead and which might be saved.
At that moment, the fire alarm began to sound with redoubled energy and the fire sprinklers dumped a flood of water onto the already slippery floors. The crowd panicked even more, tearing at each other to get out of there. The club employees, in their Cossack coats and boots, some of them holding the absurdly large weapons Call had wondered about only moments before, stood and watched the mayhem as it turned from inconvenience to raging, unknowable monster in a moment.
They looked at each other and then back to the crowd climbing over itself to get out of the doorway and into the safety of the street. None had the least idea what to do. Nobody had ever rehearsed an actual escape from a real fire with them.
Call saw Cyrano fall to the floor out of Roxane’s arms and would have hurried to help her lift him up had he not seen the ancient vampire scuttle across the floor on his belly until he was lapping at the pool of cooling, watered down blood on the floor as it pumped out of the smashed skull of a young woman lying there, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling six floors above.
“Stop that!” Roxane’s outrage cut through the chaos. “You are not an animal.” She bent down and hauled him back to his feet. “We are better than that.”
Cyrano turned to look up at her, blood dripping down his face where he had lain in it, tongue flickering this way and that to get it into his mouth.
“Better than what, sister dear?” He tried to pull himself out of her grasp and get back to the blood, but she was strong enough to keep him upright. “Better than what?”
She stared at him for a long moment, as though he had just spoken in some foreign language and she was trying to decipher what he had said, and then she shook her head and tried to hustle him towards the doors. Call went over to join them, in case his help was needed, trying to look in the direction of the staircase down to the basement, from where he expected to see Rasputin emerge at any moment.
“Oh, fair daffodils, we weep to see thee haste away so soon.”
Herrick’s words, spoken sweetly but still loud enough to drown the chaos of those few customers who were still in the house and capable of leaving under their own steam making their way to the exit. In the silence that encompassed everything, everyone’s attention was drawn to the figure of Rasputin standing by a previously hidden door near to the shattered front doors to the house.
He needed the assistance of Ivanov to stand, arm around one shoulder and supporting him beneath the other armpit. His face was a mask of blood, still glistening on the left hand side, dry and matte on the right. His right arm hung by his side, limp and useless. Only his eyes, not hidden behind his glasses any more, brimming with venom and malice, did not seem to belong to a man hanging on to life by his fingertips.
&n
bsp; “Of course, you are none of you daffodils, and no-one is hasting away anywhere anytime soon.” The wizard laughed at his own joke, in what should have been a terrifying demonic cackle, only it mutated into a hacking cough that would have doubled him over, spitting blood, had Ivanov not supported him.
Roxane hauled Cyrano to his feet. “Try and stop us,” she sneered at Rasputin, and then had to grab at her brother as he tried to dive for the blood again. Rasputin’s Cossacks opened fire then, and a blizzard of marble chips, pink water and darker pink blood sprayed up into the air from in front of them. Call cowered down, covering his face with his arms.
He didn’t mind the blood and water, but the chipped marble might blind him, or tear open his face. Nevertheless, fragments of stone struck him and drew blood. The gunfire ceased almost as it started, leaving a heavy, torn silence behind filled with echoes. He was amazed to discover he had not been hit.
How was that possible? Neither had Roxane or Cyrano, so far as he could tell. That was impossible, only it was evidently true, like so much else he had recently experienced. As he tried to stand again Call saw Rasputin’s lips moving but could hear nothing the wizard said. Not that he needed to hear him to understand. Snarling just as incoherently and inaudibly, he lifted the Mauser he had taken from the Cossack in the basement, raised it to eye level, his arm held out straight from his body, which was turned sideways, and squeezed the trigger, aiming at Ivanov.
His aim, or perhaps his luck, was perfect, and a blue-black bloody hole appeared in the thug’s forehead, slightly above and perfectly bisecting his eyes. Blood and brain sprayed out from the back of his skull as the impact of the bullet jerked his head suddenly backwards, snapping his neck and lifting him off his feet at the same time.
Rasputin was hurled around as Ivanov fell backwards, and he stood for what seemed an inordinate time, staring down at the bleeding corpse of his lieutenant. This had evidently not figured in his planning. Eventually he turned back to the vampires, supported this time by a Cossack whose huge size dwarfed him. He had a shaven pate, a broad, black spade of a beard and the dullest, most lifeless eyes Call had ever seen, other than in a body that had been dead some time. Leaning on the man, Rasputin pointed at Call with his still sound left hand.
“That is it!” he hissed. “No more games.” He turned to the Cossack. “Kill her pet. Kill her pet human now!”
The Cossack’s expression did not change; he just raised his unimpeded right hand, in which Call saw a dull grey metal tube that seemed to him to have the circumference of an Underground Tunnel. With a weapon like that there was no way he could miss from that distance. He was about to die. He knew it. He closed his eyes.
There was an explosion from where the Cossack was standing, and Call was bowled over backwards by the detonation. Rather than dead he found himself lying on his back on the sodden, broken floor with something monstrously heavy lying on top of his chest, which made breathing difficult going on impossible.
Trying to gasp, he opened his eyes and found Roxane above him, kneeling astride him, protecting him. She smiled when she saw his eyes open and he saw smoke rising from a hole in the back of her jacket where the Cossack’s shell had struck her. She blew him a momentary kiss, and jumped to her feet, turning around to face Rasputin in a single, sinuous movement. Call felt as though he was being pushed into the floor and through into the basements beneath.
“He is not my pet!” she shouted as she stalked towards Rasputin and the Cossack. Her voice made what glass still remained within its frames tremble.
One handed, she removed the weapon from the Cossack’s hands and tore it apart, letting the metal pieces fall to the floor and using the wooden stock to slam into his forehead, as a slaughter man might drive his hammer into the forehead of a steer. He collapsed to the floor, at least stunned unconscious for a long time, probably dead already. She caught hold of Rasputin by the throat with her other hand before he could fall and held him out at arm’s length, his toes a couple of inches off the ground. “Not my pet,” she hissed. “Not my pet.”
“If he’s not your pet what is he?” gurgled the wizard, both hands clamped around her wrist, trying to wrestle open her grip as she – exquisitely slowly – choked the life out of him. His feet kicked and thrashed, but she held him out at the length of her arm and, but for the red glow now coming from behind her glasses, she could have been horribly bored. The patterns on the wizard’s face and skull changed as rapidly as his legs thrashed, nobody could follow them, and then, as he grew quiescent, faded away entirely, leaving him pale and all but lifeless.
The terrifying monster he had presented as himself was nothing now but a pathetic looking, grey faced old man who knew he could no longer evade the Reaper’s scythe. It seemed as though he almost welcomed it…
Suddenly Roxane’s head dipped forward, her fangs extending as she did so, and she sank them into his throat, enclosing his carotid artery. For a moment she paused, savouring the spasm of terror that convulsed him. Then she clamped her jaws together and twisted her head to the side, tearing out the wizard’s throat.
Blood erupted in a thick jet that arced high into the air, propelled by the thunder of his heart, reaching almost as far as Call, only to almost immediately lose its impetus as the life left him, collapsing into a thin stream that flowed out of him increasingly slowly as his heart ceased to beat.
Roxane glanced around the foyer. Her glasses had slipped down her nose, revealing her colourless Medusa eyes. Blood dripped from her fangs. The beast reigned supreme where she stood. All sign of the human being with whom Call had fancied himself falling in love had vanished, leaving behind the centuries old monster, the creature of which he knew almost nothing, only that he could do even less about her.
Cyrano roared to his feet. “I was promised his blood!” he screamed, reaching out to take Rasputin’s corpse from his sister.
She stared at him eyes widening, holding tight to the wizard, as the realisation of where she was and what she had done came home to her. Turning her back on Cyrano, she pushed her glasses back up onto the bridge of her nose, then laid the body onto the floor beside the Cossack Call had killed and then turned back to her brother.
“You were promised,” she said, scorn dripping from every syllable. “You were promised his blood. By whom? Who could have promised you that? Only me, and I do not recall us ever discussing the matter. I do not recall us ever mentioning him at all. So, I ask you again, who promised you the wizard’s blood.”
There was a brief silence as Cyrano appeared to be considering his reply, during which Call scuttled backwards, sitting on his backside and using his hands and feet to propel himself away from the danger zone. All of Rasputin’s minions who were capable of leaving had left.
One or two tardy revellers – dazed or intoxicated or both – picked their way across the foyer littered with broken glass, shattered wood and bodies to where the gaping empty space where the doors had been invited them to leave. It was not an invitation any of them could refuse, even though blue lights and sirens were beginning to gather outside in the darkness.
“I did,” Cyrano shouted. “I promised me. I did and I will not be denied!”
“You promised yourself his blood?”
“Every day I lay there, chained to that stinking cot. Every time he made me drink from that idiot child. Every moment I felt myself becoming less than I was, less than I should be. I promised myself I would drink his blood every second since I came to this hell!”
Suddenly she was behind him, holding him by the scruff of his neck, forcing him down onto his knees. “Well there it is! There is his blood. Go on, drink it, lap it up like the animal you were just now!”
He struggled to free himself from her grip, but could not. She continued to press downwards until his face was all but touching the blood. Eventually she shoved him away from her, disgusted he was not as strong as she believed he should be, frightened she would be no stronger than he was.
The primal joy o
f tearing out Rasputin’s throat still made her tremble, close to ecstasy, his blood still making her lips tingle with anticipation, even though she had determinedly not drink so much as a drop of him.
“We are better than that!” she whispered.
“Who says so, your pet?” Cyrano wheezed, hauling himself to his feet to confront his sister. “We are vampires. We exist to drink blood! What is he but a sack of blood?”
“What is he? What is he?” Roxane hesitated for a moment, searching for the right word to describe Call. “He is my friend. Yes, that’s what he is, my friend.”
“Friend? Friend?” Cyrano fell forward onto his knees, unable to support himself, unable to keep from laughing. “We are vampires, sister, we do not have friends. I am not your friend even though I am your brother.”
Call was struck by a sensation he had never encountered before, as though someone was standing beside him and howling in a desolate, tormented agony that seared his ears like a combination of a child’s mourning for a puppy just killed in a road accident and the lamentation of an old woman who had just discovered her destination was oblivion. Then he realised he was not actually hearing anything at all – not physically – but was experiencing Roxane’s expression of her pain. He moved to take her in his arms, comfort her. He had no conviction the gesture would be effective, but it was all he could do.
Only he found himself run into the immovable obstacle of Cyrano’s outstretched hand firmly on his chest.
“Stay out of this, pet. It does not concern you.”
“Oh yes it does!” He took hold of Cyrano’s wrist with both hands and struggled to move it, even though he knew he had no prospect of succeeding.
The vampire might still be a long way from being as strong as his sister but there was no way he would be moving that hand without a club hammer and a cold chisel, or some explosives. The vampire gave him what appeared to be a gentle push. Call screamed as it felt to him as though his sternum was crumbling under the force of it and he was sent skidding across the floor until he fell backwards over some unseen obstruction.
The Seeker Page 14
