“Were you going to kill her?”
“I was tempted.” Violette opened her expressive hands. “I was very close.”
Charlotte put her hands to her face. “Karl would have loathed you for all time.”
“I think he does, anyway. I don’t suppose he’ll ever forgive me, but I don’t care.”
“Don’t you?” Charlotte flared. “I can’t bear this. You’re both impossible!” When Violette didn’t reply, she continued with less heat, “He wanted to help you. Now you’ve made two more enemies, when you might have had two friends.”
“Oh, should I have left Ilona to her feast?” Violette said frostily. “Can you not understand the reason for my anger?”
“Of course, but Ilona is still Karl’s daughter! He couldn’t stand by and say, ‘She deserves it.’ God knows, it’s hard to feel sympathy for her – but how can I feel any for you, having witnessed what you did to her? If you and Karl go on fighting, it will kill me.”
The lovely eyes widened. “Tell him that. He attacked me, Charlotte! I wouldn’t kill him, for your sake – and how else could I really harm him?”
“You change people.”
“Anything I’ve done to Ilona can only be an improvement, then.”
Silence. Violette turned away. She was beautiful in the half-light, the quintessential ballerina in black. Charlotte worshipped her, even while she felt like strangling her. And she feared her, always.
“Why were you here, anyway?” Charlotte snapped. “Hoping to destroy Josef, whose only crime was to trust me?”
Violette’s eyes and voice softened. She looked down. “No. I came to talk. To see if he really could tell me… what I am.”
* * *
“Leave me alone!” Ilona repeated the words fiercely as Karl helped her along the hotel corridor. But she uttered them as if saying a rosary, trembling and boneless in his arms.
A short man with round glasses emerged from a room, stopped and stared. Karl cursed: he wanted no witnesses to his daughter’s distress. He met the man’s eyes; the man gazed back mindlessly. Then a change, a dreadful realisation, came over his face. Paling, he gagged as if his heart had stopped, and stumbled back into his room.
Karl gained the door to their suite with no further intrusions.
Vampires often fed on each other. This act expressed anything from love to dominance. It could be a divine exchange or savage violation. Karl suspected, though, that Ilona was in distress due to something deeper than blood-loss.
In the room, he let her go and she sat on the edge of the bed, arms folded tautly on her knees. Karl put no lights on. The room was cavernous in darkness, his daughter rimmed by a fragile pearly glow. Karl found a towelling bathrobe and draped it around her.
Despite the state she was in, he felt angry. Decades of pain they’d caused each other. Always this implacable conflict between them. Every time he thought the battle was over, it flared up again.
He sat beside her, pushing his anger aside. “Why didn’t you let us know you were here?” he asked, falling into the Wienerisch dialect of the last century; a language they seldom used these days. A rare intimacy. “Why are you always doing this?”
“What?” Her words escaped through a knot of pain.
“Following us. Saying nothing. Destroying people in order to hurt us.”
“You know why.”
Karl placed his hand on her cheek and made her face him. Her cruel spirit seemed quenched. In her eyes he saw fear, confusion, thoughts dwindling to points of fire in an abyss. The revelation shook him. He hated what she’d become after he transformed her – but seeing her like this was worse.
“Did she take much blood?”
“Enough, thank you, Herr Doktor,” she said. He offered his wrist. She stared at the tender flesh, turned her head aside. “I don’t want yours.”
“But you need it.”
“Not from you. Why don’t you just –”
“Leave you?” He spoke coolly. She could not know the pain she inflicted by refusing his help. “No. Not until you tell me what Violette has done to you.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“I mean mentally.”
Ilona shuddered. “You know why I’m compelled to torment you.” Her self-control seemed to collapse like a dam before a flood. Karl realised that he’d never seen her cry since she was a human child. Never, until now. As she leaned into his shoulder, he held her as if she were a stranger. As if some terrible contagion would soak into him with her tears. “You took my life from me. I wanted my husband and my child. You took them away from me. You even took Kristian! You wanted me to be a vampire, so that is exactly what I became.”
“But Ilona,” he said gently, after a moment, “you had no child.”
“But I would have done. I was pregnant when you came for me. The transformation killed it, of course. You killed it.” And as she spoke she collapsed against him, sobs convulsing her like dying breaths. Karl’s hand played absently with her hair. He felt numb, the revelation a distant thorn-prick.
“You never told me.” His voice was hollow.
“I never meant to. I told Charlotte once, to explain why I hated you so. I made her swear not to tell you.”
“Charlotte knew?” The thorn-prick became an ache. He gripped her arm. “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”
“How could I? I didn’t know what you planned to do, until it was too late. What difference would it have made?”
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I don’t know.”
“None, because you were too wrapped up in what you wanted to consider my wishes.”
“It’s true.” The ache reached his throat and eyes. He could hardly speak. “I was only thinking of myself. I wanted you with me forever, not growing old with some mortal man.”
“Yes, jealousy, too; you think I didn’t know? You didn’t only kill the child I was expecting, but all the potential children. Our descendents. You didn’t ask, you didn’t give me a choice!”
“I know,” he whispered. Ilona had never spoken so openly before. He’d longed for her to confide in him, but now she was doing so, he could hardly bear to listen.
“And my husband – after I became a vampire, I went back and killed him. You didn’t know that either, did you? I sucked him dry, because it seemed the only thing to do. Strangle my mortal connections, cut them dead so I didn’t keep wanting to go back. I can’t remember what he looked like, actually.”
“God, Ilona…”
“But none of this occurred to you. Even if it had, you’d have taken me anyway.”
“Not if I’d known it would cause you such pain, a century later.”
“But it doesn’t.” Her tone was thin, chilling. “Don’t you understand? That’s why I’m crying. Because I feel nothing.”
Karl’s grief hardened. It wasn’t sympathy Ilona needed; she never had. “If that’s true, why do you still want to punish me? I’m hopeless at being a martyr to guilt, however bad a father I have been.”
“Did I spring fully armed from your head?” she cried. “Because you never talk about my mother, never!”
“Would you want me to? When I told you that Kristian had your mother killed, you fawned on Kristian all the more, knowing I’d hate it. There’s nothing to say about our mortal lives, Ilona.”
Her sobs ebbed away. She lay across his lap as if she’d disgorged all her strength. “I’m not weeping for my mortal life, Father. I’m weeping because I swore I’d never tell you these things, and now I’ve broken my oath. It’s the humiliation. This is what Violette has done to me.”
He lifted her up and cradled her against his side. Her slender body fitted along his chest and shoulder. And for once she neither teased nor reviled him, but simply rested there.
“I was wrong to make you a vampire,” Karl said. “But if I hadn’t, you would be dead by now. Perhaps your great-granddaughter would be here with me instead. Would you really have preferred that?”
She gav
e him a poisonous look. “Oh, I’m a consummate hypocrite. You know how I feel about you. Don’t humiliate me more by forcing me to say it. You know.”
“Why is it humiliating to admit you love me? Why does it almost kill you to weep in front of me, or admit that I hurt you? I was your father. You once said we can’t retain human relationships, but I disagree. If you can’t trust me, who else is there? But that’s why you torment me, isn’t it? Because you know you are safe to do so.”
Karl expected vehement denial. Instead, her reaction was a shaky laugh. “You frightened me once,” she said. “The time Kristian brought you back to life and you found that I’d come back to him? You looked straight through me and it was the first time I felt you’d stopped caring. Oh, I would hate it if you didn’t care.”
“And do you think my patience is infinite?”
“No, but I know you’d always save me from danger, as you did tonight. You even braved the Weisskalt to save me!”
“So we understand each other, then,” he said gently.
Ilona raised a hand to stroke his neck. The hand pulled off his tie, undid the collar of his shirt. Like a cat she slid her cheek over his ribs and collarbone, nuzzled into his throat, then bit him. Her canines were so swift and sharp that Karl felt little pain. He let her drink, cradling her, his head tipping back a little, eyelids lowered, lips parted. Not breathing. As he looked down on her raptly bent head, he envisioned a baby’s head, with a mop of the same plum-dark hair, suckling at her mother’s breast. And this grotesque parody represented exactly what they were: a reversal of nature.
When Ilona raised her head, her brown eyes had turned molten, like a sated lover. Her fingers pressed into his neck; her robe and torn dress fell away from her milky shoulders. It took Karl all his willpower not to feast on her in turn.
“I’m going back to Europe,” she announced. “I wanted to prove Pierre wrong about Violette – only to discover that he’s right. She has to be stopped.”
Karl’s mood darkened. Violette had become an insoluble problem. Much as he distrusted her, for Charlotte’s sake he did not want her harmed. In any case, she seemed indestructible. But, he thought, how long can I stand by while she attacks people like Pierre and Ilona? How long before she turns on Charlotte?
“That will only create more trouble,” he said. “More grief.”
“So? I have to prove that she hasn’t changed me, that she can’t turn me to a gibbering wreck like Pierre.” Ilona seemed her normal self again. Karl didn’t know whether to be pleased or dismayed. “Behaving vilely and destructively, tearing apart everyone she meets – that, my beloved Karl, is my job.”
* * *
Sebastian knew that Roberta Stafford lived on Chestnut Street, Beacon Hill. Discovering her address had been simple: after they parted in the Public Garden, he secretly followed her home.
Tomorrow night he would take her out to dinner, like the gentleman suitor he played so well – but tonight he haunted the street outside her house as his true self, a malevolent predator in the darkness. How pleasing, to spy on his prey in her natural setting.
Leaning against a tree trunk, Sebastian felt rain pattering softly through the leaves. The drops wove webs of light from the lamps, made the road surface glisten. A lovely street, with cobbled sidewalks, gas lamps and rows of red-brick houses stepping gracefully up the hill. So quiet, folded discreetly on its riches like a hen on her nest. The lindens, maples and maidenhairs that lined the sidewalks were so lush that the buildings were barely visible. No two houses were alike: each had its own architectural quirks. Robyn’s was particularly charming: four storeys high, tall windows framed by white woodwork and black shutters. A narrow front garden lay behind railings, with vines smothering the lower brickwork, wisteria twining around the arched doorway. The railings were topped with gold leaf, the steps whitewashed. The home of a rich widow, perhaps, utterly respectable.
And yet, defying propriety, this extraordinary woman lived like a courtesan in the grand old style. Sebastian, despite his world-weariness, was intrigued. He wanted to savour this.
He found his way around the row of houses, along an alley and into her walled garden. He noted kitchens on the ground floor, a flight of steps up to a terrace where lights shone from the parlour. Thick lace curtains were ideal to shield a vampire from sight, even if he pressed right up against the glass.
Four people were in the room: a puffy-faced businessman, a middle-aged woman with dark hair, a maid serving a tray of drinks, and Roberta herself. A cosy, happy gathering; even the maid joined in the talk and laughter.
Roberta was seated, facing away from the window. Sebastian took in her sleek brown hair, the curves and angles of her shoulders under the thin straps of her dress… and her neck, peach-soft, pleading for the touch of his fingers and lips.
The anticipation was exquisite.
None of them saw his face, half in shadow under a mass of dark hair, lace-patterns icing one high cheekbone and the sharp line of his jaw, catching one point of light in a darkly introspective eye. They didn’t sense him watching, nor notice him withdraw and vanish. He had learned enough for now.
The business type was called Harold and was apparently one of her lovers. How many does she have? he wondered. The two women were her maids, Mary and Alice. Roberta treated them more as friends than servants. Clearly they were loyal.
Interesting, Sebastian thought. He already knew that his victim-to-be was far from the cold Belle Dame sans Merci whom Russell Booth had described. She was kind to her servants. She was ordinary. Hidden, then, the real poison of her heart.
He began to smile, but his pleasure hardened into black thirst. He’d had too much sadness in the past to feel joy now. He was not a gloating killer. He simply obeyed the grim urges of his nature; his passion for blood was bleak, ruthless and absolute.
Tomorrow. But he would not take her immediately, because he’d learned that her uncle was in town, and that he knew Karl. So he couldn’t fulfil his plan until the uncle and the other vampires left Boston. Still, he had time in abundance. He’d taken a risk, telling her his real name, but a little risk spiced his anticipation.
So hard to wait, so tantalising.
As Sebastian walked down Spruce Street towards the Common, he met an Irish housemaid with autumn hair like Robyn’s. Did she feel safe alone, so late at night? he asked her, effortlessly imitating her brogue. Charmed, she smiled and blushed. Quite safe, sir. I’m only after visiting a friend. But, he said, will you let me walk you home?
She let him, and they talked about Ireland as they went. As always Sebastian felt the strange conflicts of memory. Savage pain no longer… yet there was still something, the deep green pull of the old land and the house…
The Irish girl trusted him, and flirted shamelessly. She led him to the back of a big house on Marlborough Street, more old Bostonian wealth and grandeur. In the shadow of the kitchen door, they stood like young lovers who weren’t quite sure how to proceed.
“Well, goodnight, sir,” she said, looking at him expectantly.
He kissed her. “I’m superstitious,” he said. “I won’t come in until I’m invited.”
Her eyes were huge, dew-soft. He had not mesmerised her. “Would you like to?” she whispered.
They crept along corridors and up the back stairs to her attic room. As soon as the door closed he pulled her to him, scaring her a little. His hands travelled over the cheap material of her coat, ripping off the buttons in his excitement. She was compliant, not as inexperienced as a good Catholic girl should be. If they were really frightened or unwilling, which was rare, he would content himself with their blood. Sebastian was not a rapist – only of their veins, at least.
But she responded eagerly as he pushed her down onto the narrow, lumpy bed, tearing away her skirt and undergarments. He loved physical passion, albeit with a kind of grim detachment. She tried to kiss him but he turned his face away; that was not the intimacy he wanted. She was wriggling beneath him, gasping for
breath.
“Slow down,” she said, voice high and faint. “What’s the hurry? Please, slow down!”
But he could not. All that mattered was his blind urgency as he thrust himself into her warm moist flesh, the shuddering build-up of fire.
How he loved this. Sometimes blood itself was not enough. Blood was the necessity, not sex – but to feed like this, in full, aching possession, gave the act an edge of unparalleled rapture.
His fangs entered her neck and hot fluid surged into his mouth. He was only half-aware of his victim’s mingled pleasure and pain. She was only a vessel, the source of the ruby heat building within him. He raked his hands through her hair and dug his fingers into her skull, imagining…
Imagining that she was Robyn.
“Robyn,” he murmured through the blood. “Robyn.”
His climax was a lava-surge that went on and on as her blood flowed to quench the searing thirst… until it slowed to a trickle of pleasure, and the girl’s body lay cooling beneath him.
Once it was over, he immediately wanted to escape. Leaving the house through the Crystal Ring, he strolled to the Charles River and stood looking across the dark water towards Cambridge. Anyone seeing him would have thought he looked too genteel to harm a soul. He was satiated, at peace; slightly depressed, perhaps, but nothing to cause pain.
The river’s wide flow filled him with tranquillity. Only the faintest ripple of hunger troubled him: the desire not to take a substitute, but to seduce and possess the one who really mattered.
CHAPTER NINE
RED LIKE THE ROSE
“Where’s Ilona?” Charlotte demanded.
She switched on a light as she entered the suite, but Karl was there alone. He stood at the window, looking out at the street. Outside, she glimpsed traffic crawling between tall Victorian buildings, lights flickering on darkness; heard trolley cars rattling, motor horns, drunken voices singing in the distance. American cities never slept, it seemed.
The Dark Blood of Poppies Page 19
