“He attacked us,” the woman said. “It isn’t my fault. I was only protecting myself.”
“And no one is charging you with anything,” Vladimir assured her. “In fact, I’m impressed that a woman was able to stand up to a man so handily.”
“Are you all right?” Lorinkis asked.
“Yes, we’re fine,” the man said. “We were on our way home, and ran into a bit of trouble.”
“It isn’t the first time either,” the woman said, calming down. “The world is not a safe place these days.”
“I would agree,” Vladimir said. “In fact, I would say that it never has been safe.”
“So what are you going to do with us?” the man asked.
“Are you hungry?” Vladimir asked, noting to himself how thin they looked.
“Very,” the man said. “We get what food we can when we have money, but there hasn’t been much of that lately.”
“Then dinner is on me,” Vladimir said. The four of them sat at the table as Lorinkis signaled to the waitstaff. Once their food was ordered, they turned their discussion back to the young couple. They were both clearly English in descent with their brown hair and blue eyes, and he placed them in their early twenties.
“So who are you two?” Vladimir asked.
“I’m William Smith, and this is my wife, Karen,” William said. “We’re originally from Lancashire and met each other in the cotton mills out there.”
“What brings you to London?” Lorinkis asked.
“The famine, of course,” Karen said. “No cotton means there is nothing for the mills to do. Lancashire’s entire existence was based on the cotton industry, and without cotton, most of the town is destitute.”
“I heard that cotton was supposed to come in from the United States to help with that,” Vladimir said.
“Oh, sure, their President Lincoln promised us cotton to help,” William said, “but that was before they started fighting amongst themselves, and now the newly formed Confederate States say they aren’t obligated to honor any agreement that Lincoln made with us. Of course, since they’re at war, their resources are going to be focused on supporting themselves.”
Vladimir was amused at how far-reaching the Civil War of the United States had reached. Slavery was always a point of contention over there, and while he could not take full credit for the war that broke out, he knew that Gin Fringra had been working with his contacts to make sure that battle lines had been firmly drawn over the issue through the years.
“So you came to London looking for a new life,” Vladimir said.
“And found nothing,” Karen said.
“I thought the British government was giving some kind of help to those affected by the famine,” Lorinkis said.
“We applied,” William said, “but we were denied any assistance.”
“Why did they deny you?” Vladimir asked, genuinely curious.
“Because they felt like it?” Karen said. “Because we failed to cross a ‘t’ somewhere? Because we’re from Lancashire? Who knows?”
“Point is that we tried, we failed, and now we’re stuck here with no money, no job, no prospects, and no future,” William said. “The mugging profession seems fairly tempting unless you’ve got a better offer. I will say we appreciate you feeding us.”
“We really do,” Karen agreed. “It has been such a long time since we’ve had a real meal.”
“We do have a proposition,” Vladimir said.
“We’ll take it,” William said.
“Well, it isn’t one you can take lightly,” Vladimir warned. “If you decide to come with us, it is for life. There is no going back.”
“How is that possible?” Karen asked. “What sort of job is this?”
“We’ve all had the world turn against us,” Vladimir said. “The difference is that we’ve decided to do something about it. We’ve been working against the British monarchy for years. They’ve always been on their side. We’re on ours.”
“Where are you from exactly?” William asked. “You sound like you’ve been in England for awhile, but your voices still carry traces of accents of somewhere else.”
“I am Lorinkis, and I come from the French Republic. I would confess, however, that I’ve been in England for so long, that it is more of a home than France.”
“And I am Vladimir. I originally came from a country called the Felletterusk Empire. You’ve never heard of it. No one has. My language was Felletterusk as well, though I’ve spoken Russian, Romanian, German, French, and a couple of others over the years including, now, your English. What I do now is rob from the rich to give to myself, and I do it well. They never miss it. What do I do with it? I work to destroy their power from the bottom up. Most of the riots you’ve heard of in recent years were instigated by either Lorinkis or me. We pay people to lie about other people in order to bring them down. We have politicians in our pockets. I have been looking for someone to help me be in more places at once. What do you think?”
William and Karen exchanged a silent conversation by looking at each other. A series of shrugs, nods, and mumbles followed which Vladimir was completely unable to follow, but that did not matter to him. This couple was desperate for life, and he offered it. Finally, William looked at him.
“Why is it we can never leave the life?” William asked. “Will you kill us if we try?”
“No,” Vladimir said. “The reason is that you will completely change to be a part of us. I am over 450 years old. My country died in 1385. I picked up Lorinkis, here, almost forty years ago, and you can see he certainly doesn’t look that old.”
“How?” Karen asked. Vladimir nodded to Lorinkis who produced a syringe and drew blood from his arm. He injected it into a shot glass on the table. He drew a second syringe and injected it into a second glass. Vladimir pushed the glasses over to the couple who looked at them with a combination of disgust and worry.
“Drink up,” Vladimir said. “You won’t have to finish it. This is an elixir of life. It will give you superior strength and speed and extend your life beyond your years. The choice is yours. Die poor and hungry with the paupers on the London streets or live forever in my service.”
The couple stared at the glasses on the table for a long time. Vladimir was not concerned about how long it took them to commit. He knew they had nothing and that they were already angry. They would decide to take the glasses eventually because they had nothing else. This would be true for nearly anyone else in London during this time, but this couple felt special to him. They would be a valuable asset to his little team of Tepish.
Finally, after exchanging another silent conversation between them, William and Karen each took their glass and held them and they looked into each other’s eyes.
“Together as one,” William said.
“Till death do we part,” Karen followed.
They upended the glasses downing the Fempiror serum in one gulp. They brought the glasses down on the table like men in a drinking game, and only seconds passed before the serum took effect. Each giving a scream, they passed out, leaning on one another’s shoulder.
“I wager that I will find them sickeningly sweet for some time,” Lorinkis said.
“If they continue to function as one, then that could still be valuable,” Vladimir said. “Two are better than one in almost every case, and to be able to send them out as a consistent team would be very useful.”
And useful they were. They purchased the couple a room for the night and claimed they had had too much to drink which satisfied anyone who saw Vladimir and Lorinkis carrying the couple to their room. Once they came around, Vladimir led them back to his home which was just outside of London in the richest part of town.
Although Vladimir identified others through the years that he felt were worthy to his new Tepish Order, including George and Adelaide, these first few were always the best. This is why he had brought them to investigate the bloofer lady about which he read in the papers which had lead to the unexpected discovery of David Ta
ylor whose presence he found more annoying than dangerous.
It was the implications of David’s presence that he found to be the problem. He needed to find out why the lad who used to be closely tied to the Rastem Order was now in London, and more to the point, why Karian had bothered to risk his life to follow him. He had sent William and Karen to follow David, but his new problem had evaded them, which was no surprise to Vladimir. A seasoned Rastem would know better than to make it easy to follow him. He, therefore, did not hold the loss of their prey’s trail against William and Karen because both David and Karian were adversaries that Vladimir, himself, would likely have to take care of.
He knew what he had to do next. He had started investigating this mystery upon hearing of the crash of the Russian ship, Demeter, in Whitby along with a series of mysterious deaths in the coastal town. Finding nothing conclusive in that area at the time, they had returned to London, and then the story of the bloofer lady came out in the papers which led them to the Highgate Cemetery area where they found David.
He knew Karian would not have followed the Rastem unless he was with someone or had something that the old Mutation wanted. London’s climate would be too risky, and a boat ride would have been riskier. He thought it might be some kind of vengeance, but doubted that. Karian was too smart to risk himself for something as petty as revenge.
He sent everyone he had, human and Fempiror, out looking for any sign of David or Karian as well as sending a pair to the cemetery to keep watch there. Everything he had needed to be placed on hold until this matter was resolved.
His mind returned to the Demeter and Whitby. If that was where this began, then the manifest of the Demeter’s cargo or crew might have some kind of clue that the authorities would not have noticed, but that Vladimir would. He would not be able to follow David, but he could follow the trail. A trail that started in Whitby.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
At the Highgate Cemetery on the day after Van Helsing and Seward had rescued a child from the hands of Lucy who had been running across the lawn, Van Helsing and Seward had met once more to have a look in Lucy’s tomb. Van Helsing was insistent they do this during the day so that Lucy would be sleeping, and that they would have to be careful not to disturb her. Due to a funeral occurring during the early afternoon, they waited until after 2pm before approaching the Westenra Mausoleum.
“Please be very quiet,” Van Helsing said. “We are here for your benefit more than for mine. I am sure she’ll be there. I need you to be convinced in order to convince our friend Arthur of this business.”
“I can confirm that I did not see her here last night, and I did see something that looked like her running among the tombstones,” Seward confirmed, “but a large part of me is having considerable difficulty accepting it.”
“And well you should be having trouble,” Van Helsing said. “To your realm of knowledge, this is assuredly illogical. However, from a greater perspective, it makes perfect sense.”
“And you are going to reveal this greater knowledge at some point, I presume?” Seward asked.
“Yes,” Van Helsing sighed. “I fear I will need to very soon. Let us get through this business first, however.”
At the door to the mausoleum, the garlic had been removed which did not surprise Van Helsing at all. He slowly opened the door and stepped into the tomb with Seward close behind him. Seward closed the door as Van Helsing walked softly to Lucy’s coffin. He held a finger over his mouth and gestured for Seward to come close.
Carefully, he opened the lid of Lucy’s coffin, and together, they looked inside. There, sleeping soundly with her chest slowly rising and falling, was Lucy. Seward gasped, but Van Helsing held up a hand to quiet him. He closed the coffin and gestured for Seward to go outside. Seward reluctantly complied, but as soon as the doors were closed behind them, he spoke up.
“She’s alive!”
“She is alive,” Van Helsing confirmed, “which is something I told you already. And yet, she is not really alive as herself any longer. Had we disturbed her, you would have seen a creature that would kill us where we stood. She requires an ingestion of blood in order to survive because the condition we observed during her last days as a human continue now that she is a Fempiror Mutation.”
“I don’t understand how that is possible,” Seward said.
“For now, we must show the others what has happened with her before we can end her suffering,” Van Helsing said. “Arthur must know that she is no longer herself, and not simply buried alive.”
“Why do we not just kill her now, if she is so dangerous?” Seward asked.
“Because I am certain this is not the end,” Van Helsing said. “Remember that she could not have done this to herself. There is another creature out there who did this to her, and we must also find him. The Mutation is stronger and faster than all of you, and it will take all of us to defeat it, I am certain. So not only do I need all of your help and trust with poor Lucy, but I need to have your help and trust to find and defeat the monster that changed her. This is not going to be a one or two man operation. For now…”
Van Helsing removed a string of garlic from the bag he carried. As usual, his eyes watered and turned bloodshot as soon as he placed it. He did his best to ignore it.
“What if someone removes it again?” Seward asked.
“If they do, they do,” Van Helsing said. “They’ll consider it a silly superstition and move along. If we are lucky, it will hold her here.” He turned from the tomb and walked with Seward across the cemetery. “You should rest today, John. I will keep watch, and we will meet with everyone tomorrow night to explain what is happening and bring them out here.”
“Why tomorrow?” Seward asked. “Why would we not finish it tonight?”
“Unanswered questions,” Van Helsing said. “There are some things I wish to learn of this tonight, but tomorrow night, we will attempt to finish it.”
“Arthur will not be happy with this,” Seward warned.
“I am not happy with this,” Van Helsing said. “I would not have wanted this for any of you, and yet, here we are. Sometimes, we have to accept what is happening whether we like it or not. None of you will want to do what we must, but you will find it is for the best when the time comes.”
Seward nodded reluctantly and left Van Helsing alone in the cemetery to sit and watch the door of the mausoleum. Part of him wanted to bring them all together this evening and kill the Mutation that Lucy became, but her actions seemed inconsistent with his knowledge of the Mutation. This bloofer lady business, for example, seemed to indicate that she was gentle with the children instead of acting on pure feeding instinct. He supposed it could be maternal, but there was more to this watch than that. He figured the garlic would hold her, but he also wanted to see if someone else came out to help her leave.
Day passed into night without incident. No one ever approached the mausoleum door, so the garlic remained intact. The first point of interest happened on the other side of the cemetery wall.
He initially heard the footfalls of two people approach, but instead of passing by, they stood just outside the wall. It was not long before the two individuals, a man and a woman, began to talk to each other.
“You really think that fellow will come back here?” the woman said in more of a discussion tone than as a question.
“The boss thinks he interrupted him last night, so it seems likely,” the man replied.
“I hate standing around.”
“It’s supposed to be important.”
“Yeah, important.”
Van Helsing recalled that Lucy appeared to be running from someone last night. He wondered if these two might know anything about it, but then thought better of speaking to them. There was really no telling who they were.
“You know, I heard the boss knew the bloke,” the man said.
“Yeah, from a hundred years ago or something.”
Van Helsing became a lot more interested in their discussion. He
only knew of one race capable of living a hundred years so casually.
“So he was a Fempiror then?”
“One of that other Order he mentioned once or twice. What were they called?”
“Rastem.”
“That’s it.”
Now he knew he had to find out who they were. They were not just a couple of people who had shown up looking for a random miscreant. These were people who not only knew about the Fempiror, but if they referred to the Rastem as the “other order,” that would likely make them Tepish. He decided to show himself.
He walked out of the cemetery to face them and saw they were dressed like the English common folk. In fact, as he got nearer, he recognized them both from newspaper coverage of a scandalous trial only a few years earlier. The woman was Adelaide Bartlett, who was tried for killing her husband, but she had been acquitted primarily because they could not figure out how she would have gotten liquid chloroform into his stomach without burning the sides of his throat and larynx. He had even been called in for an opinion of how it could have been done, but he was unable to offer anything substantial. The public had naturally swayed in favor of her acquittal, so her release was well received. Once the trial was over, his colleague, Sir James Paget, had said, “Now that she has been acquitted for murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it!”
The man with her was the former Reverend George Dyson, who had been arrested, and later acquitted, as her accomplice. The pair was rumored to have been in some kind of love affair at the time which supposedly made Mrs. Bartlett want to kill her husband so that she could be with Dyson. They had both completely disappeared after the trial was over, and now seeing them out here as Fempiror of the Tepish Order, he suspected there was much more to the death of her husband than anyone at the trial could have possibly suspected.
“I beg your pardon,” Van Helsing said. “I didn’t know anyone else was searching this area. Are you having any luck?”
“Identify yourself,” Adelaide demanded. Van Helsing noticed that her hand was resting on the hilt of a sword hanging from her belt. Swords were growing a bit archaic these days, and though he tended to carry a dagger with him, it was more because people did not find them to be overtly threatening.
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