Charlotte believed in ghosts. She believed in them as tangible phenomena that must have a scientific explanation, if only she could discover it. Some interaction between the places where the dead had lived and the minds of the living? She only knew that ghosts were real to the people that saw them. She often felt that her mother was there beside her, like a friend, radiating all the calmness and wisdom that Charlotte lacked.
Her father had never fully recovered from Annette’s death. But at least he had Charlotte, who was so like her.
She could never leave him; he needed her. It was her duty to replace her mother in his heart… She did not articulate these thoughts, they were simply a formless knowledge that always hung inside her, heavy, familiar, sometimes dully painful although she did not know why. She was the photograph come to life, the image that must be kept the same forever.
Charlotte left her bed and went to the window, pulling back the net to stare at the rain-drenched darkness. She felt oppressed, webbed down into the pattern of her life. Her head was full of images. A glowing, sparking laboratory, nothing beyond it. Dark panelled rooms through which the living moved like ghosts and the voices of the dead still echoed. A pale face with amber eyes that looked straight through her…
And the sky… was she seeing things, or going mad? She could see the wind and it was solid, a hill of violet glass that was slowly turning over on itself like a wave, and there were dark shapes on its side. The dark birds of her fever? Not flying, these creatures, but running. Running towards her through the sky.
* * *
Chapter Two
Coils of Ice
The beauty of Kristian’s castle, Schloss Holdenstein, gave nothing away. A mass of brown turrets, dark-tiled roofs, arched windows and balconies edged with ivy, it seemed a natural outgrowth of the sheer wooded gorge on the edge of which it stood, framed against the sky and the steep folds of vineyards.
Below, the river Rhine was a cloud-grey mirror.
Always alive, this river. Kristian leaned on the wooden rail and looked down at the broken reflection of the gorge, soft browns and greens, the subtle hues and details that human eyes could not perceive. It endured forever. Its moods changed continually, but in the end it was always the same, always there.
“Like me,” he said to himself. “Like us.”
When Kristian spoke of “us” and “we,” he meant himself and God.
Inside the castle lay the web of bare corridors, cells and chapels through which his vampire flock moved softly as monks. They numbered only a few dozen; there had been more in the past, but Kristian had had to destroy so many who were not perfect. The ones who remained were obedient. They went away to feed but they always came back to their master, carrying with them the dark aura of what they were; an aura that over the centuries had seeped into the very stone of the walls. Delicious, blood-dark power.
Ilona was in the castle. Kristian had sensed her presence the moment she had arrived. She was like quicksilver, the elusive way she came and went. Humans he could always sense, of course; they were like furnaces, scattering their auras wastefully around them. But vampires were cool as diamonds; some, like Ilona, so transparent as to be almost invisible. Nevertheless, she could not hide from him.
Kristian did not go down to meet her. He was waiting for her to come to him, and as he waited he brooded on Karl.
It was five years since he had confronted Karl in the infernal landscape of the War. It had been a painful decision to let Karl follow his own misguided path for a while longer, but it was for the best. Let him learn by his own mistakes.
“My children all come back to me in the end,” Kristian said softly. Five years… so little time against the great fiery arc of eternity across which he sailed like an ever-rising sun. “My patience is boundless.” Kristian looked up at the clouds. “Our patience, Lord, endures forever.”
Yet the thought of Karl was a stitch in his heart, and each pull filled him with rage. And when the rage rolled away, the emptiness and silence of Karl’s absence were still there.
Kristian gripped the rail, feeling the wood fibres fraying under his fingers. “You presume too much on my mercy, Karl,” he whispered to the air. “If I am forced to harm my angel Ilona, it’s your fault. You have driven me to it. You were warned.”
“Gut Gott, Kristian,” said a crisp female voice. He wasn’t startled. He knew Ilona was there before he looked round to see her in the balcony doorway, gypsy-brilliant against the cool dark interior of the castle. This time she had adopted a Bohemian style, rich embroidered silks and a tasselled shawl, and she had dyed her hair again—no realistic shade, but brilliant scarlet.
Her appearance displeased him. She grinned, all rebellion and bravado, pleased to have shocked him. But her adoration of him was clear in her liquid brown eyes.
“Kristian?” she said. “Are you going to stare at me all day?”
“What have you done to your hair?”
“Don’t you like it?” She stepped forward into the light, daring him to be angry with her.
“This is vanity, Ilona. It is a mortal weakness, to paint and colour yourself in this way. We should be above such folly.”
“It’s not vanity, it’s camouflage,” she retorted. Her rose-red lips thinned slightly. She defiantly shook the offending hair free of her shawl, so that it flowed over her shoulders like arterial blood. However she changed her guise, her face remained the same. A milk-white oval; the perfect features of a statue with dark unhuman eyes, all the more shocking when the expression came to life. Like Kristian’s own face. Like Karl’s. “How do you expect me to move among humans without looking like them?”
“I don’t believe there is any fashion for scarlet hair.”
His displeasure made her defensive. “Since the War, Kristian, anything goes, the more outrageous the better. If you were not such a recluse you would know that. Do you expect me to dress like a nun?” She laughed, revealing small neat teeth; no visible fangs. “Actually, why don’t I? It would be perfect.”
Her mirth was a glittering play of light and sound that struck no chord in Kristian. “You think your irreverence can shock me,” he said. “But the trappings of religion are only another example of human delusion. They imagine that layers of cloth can bring them nearer to God, when in truth they can never hope to know Him. They use cloth to disguise their spiritual emptiness. So your attempt to goad me means nothing, my beloved. It is shallow.”
Her smile vanished, her eyes turned glass-sharp. “Don’t call me shallow, Voter. Don’t ever call me that.”
He let his mouth relax into a smile. He could afford to be indulgent; his power over her was complete. She always tested him, but beneath her brittle surface her love and awe blazed like a sun.
“Then be your courageous self,” he said.
He moved towards her. She folded her arms as if to keep him away. “It would take more than you to frighten me,” she said scornfully. “I’m not afraid of anything. Why should I be, when you’re always there to remind me that I’m immortal?”
Ignoring the barrier of her forearms he placed his hands on her shoulders, kissed her on both cheeks, then locked his arms around her. She resisted him stiffly for a few moments. Then she sighed—half in resentment, half in pleasure—and freed her hands to return the embrace.
Kristian rested his lips lightly on her neck, felt her shiver as he whispered, “You will need your courage.” He opened his mouth, pressed his teeth into the flesh, felt the canines lengthen until they broke through the sweet cool skin. Vampire flesh healed so swiftly that he had to keep his fangs in the wounds, sucking until the slow blood turned liquid.
Kristian never drank from humans. He could not bear to touch them. Everything about them disgusted him—their heavy, hot blood, laced with smoky mortal odours. But vampire blood was clear as crystal, the divine exhalation of rubies.
Just a taste, crisp as champagne in his mouth. Just a reminder; a gesture of affection, really. Ilona tensed and made the
faintest sound in her throat.
Retracting the stabbing teeth into their sockets, he drew back and held her at arm’s length.
“I didn’t need courage for that, ” she said, but her brown eyes had softened and her voice was lazy.
“What kept you away from me for so long, my lamb?”
“Only some foolish young man who was in love with me. Are you jealous? Oh, I forgot, such human emotions are beneath you.”
He nodded, but her frivolity made him want to crush her bones between his fingertips. That made the knowledge of what he had to do easier. “Where is he now?”
She shrugged. “Dead. I grew bored with him. That’s the trouble, they all bore me in the end… “
“All except me,” said Kristian. “Did you miss me?”
“With all my heart.” She drew her fingers across her throat and held them up, smeared with gelatinous blood. The marks of his fangs had already vanished. “As much as I would miss this.”
Absently licking the blood away, she moved across the balcony and sat on the rail, leaning against a pillar. This looked dangerous; the stone was crumbling and the woodwork rotten in parts, but if she fell it hardly mattered. She would land on her feet like a cat, or curl away into the Crystal Ring like a bird taking flight. Cupping her elbows in her hands, she stared at the river curving between the misty walls of the gorge.
She asked, “Why did you send for me?”
“I need you.”
“I am flattered, but if you are lonely it’s your own fault. I don’t know how you can spend so much time here… “
“I always have company.”
“… waiting for the world to come to you, I was going to say.”
He leaned on the edge beside her. “But they do come, don’t they?”
She looked at him with a touch of haughtiness that was almost a sneer. “To the Court of King Kristian. Oh yes.”
He smiled. What she meant as an insult he took as a compliment. “Not the Court, but the Temple. The unseen Church. I asked you to come home for a reason.”
He saw the tension flicker through her. He had not expected her to guess what he meant, and her hair-trigger reaction irritated him. His tone hardened. “I last saw Karl during the Great War.”
“Really,” she said flatly.
“He was beyond the reach of reasonable argument. I decided to leave him alone, until he came to his senses in his own time.”
“A good decision. And final?”
“No, not final.”
Her sweet face became pinched and bitter. “I knew that was too much to ask.”
“He has had time! He has had his freedom. I want him back now.”
“He won’t come.”
“Oh, this time he will. Do you know where he is?” His tone was too urgent.
Ilona tilted her head, looked at him. “No.”
“I shall find him. And you will help me draw him here, Ilona.”
She leapt to her feet in a burst of anger, her hair and clothes a swirl of coloured flames. “Oh, no I won’t! Why don’t you do your own dirty work? Every vampire in this damned world is subject to you! Can’t you bear to let even a single one go his own way?” She released a breath and said thinly, “No. Of course you can’t. That’s just the point, isn’t it? Not a single one.”
Kristian glared at her, anger blowing through him like a steady cold wind. “Now that is blasphemy, beloved. Karl wronged me. He cannot escape vengeance. You hate him! In your heart, I know you want to help me punish him. So why are you fighting me?”
She looked away from him. Her eyes narrowed and moisture gathered on her lower lashes. “Because I don’t want him to come back to you. I never want to see him again. Never, ever. You know that. I don’t know how you can even ask this of me!”
Kristian felt the coil of ice tightening within him. Her objections were an irritation; they meant nothing. “You’ll help me… because you love me, and hate him.”
Ilona turned on him, feverish with rage. “I hate you both, at this moment. If he comes back here, I shall leave! You think you can control everyone, but you can’t have it both ways!”
Kristian clasped her arm. His large hand went right round the slender limb, an iron shackle. The more she protested, the less he cared; his heart felt black, a swollen thundercloud of justified wrath. “It will be as I want it. You’ll bring him back to me.”
“What am I now, bait?” She drew back her lips in scorn. “You don’t imagine my presence could lure him back? My God, such optimism.”
“You are very slow, my beloved.” Kristian let her go so suddenly that she almost went over the balcony. “It is what will happen to you if he ignores my invitation that will lure him.”
She laughed, hard and angry. “Kristian, how can you have lived so long and still be so stupid? He hates me as much as I hate him. He knows you love me; he’ll just laugh.”
“Ah, there you are wrong. There you misjudge him completely. You hate him, but he still loves you. He adores you completely.”
Her expression changed. It might have been his voice, or his eyes, the ruthless passion that radiated from him. Cruelty, humans called it; but Kristian knew nothing of cruelty, only of righteousness.
“What on earth could you threaten to do to me?” she whispered, staring at him. But she knew the answer. She knew Kristian’s ruthlessness.
“Karl is stubborn; he does not respond to threats. The only way to reach him is to do the deed. He’ll be informed of your fate and told that if he wants to save you, he had better come and talk to me.”
“No! You can’t do it!” Her anger and fear made her look enticing. Kristian felt a dark excitement thread through him. She was fire and blood. He reached for her.
Ilona reacted swiftly, almost too fast for him. The instant she realised the danger, she arched backwards over the balcony rail and vanished.
Not quite fast enough, though. Kristian was after her in a split-second. He caught her even as she flashed into the Crystal Ring, and they fell together through the unseen dimension that only immortals could enter.
She fought him violently, but their bodies were rarified in this realm and her struggles only bound her to him. While the world below them turned flat and dark, the sky became a tiered landscape of light and colour. A soft golden ridge arrested their fall. Kristian clutched Ilona to himself and began to climb relentlessly.
The warm lower layers of the air condensed into a chain of hills, gleaming bronze, rising and falling continually like the slow waves of an ocean. Like clouds the hills sailed on air, yet their substance was like honey; dense enough to bear weight, but treacherous, forever changing. They flowed on as far as the eye could see, but there were shifting gaps where they frayed into an indigo void. Although they were in continuous motion, dissolving and reforming, there was a permanence in their fluidity like the ocean tides.
Against the shimmering dappled slopes, the two vampires were delicate ink sketches; almost bird-like, almost human, too strange to be either. Dragonflies spun from black crystal.
Ilona’s struggles hindered Kristian, but she couldn’t stop him. He carried her up towards a ridge from which a wisp of vapour formed a pathway towards the higher levels. Guiding lines of light threaded through everything; a magnetic field made visible, some said, but Kristian scorned scientific rationale.
Some vampires—unbelievers, like Karl—said it was impossible to explain the Crystal Ring. Why should immortals be privileged to step into another dimension, weird beyond human dreams? When they entered it they vanished from the world of mortals, yet its geography corresponded to that of Earth, enabling them to travel unseen from place to place. Like the sky, it enveloped the world in a vast circle of crystal. Its beauty was ineffable. Moving through it—half-swimming, half-flying—was a dizzying rapture. Yet it was far more than a convenience or a delight. Unable to sleep on Earth, vampires must come here to rest. The Crystal Ring held dangers, too, but in some unfathomable occult way it was essential to their ex
istence.
Kristian, however, knew precisely what the Crystal Ring was. It was the mind of God. And God, of course, allowed only His chosen dark messengers to enter His mind; this savage heaven.
Leaving the bronze hills far below, he climbed the path to a colder, wilder region. Overhead a vast range of mountains soared upwards, purple-black and glossy; a paradox, solid yet insubstantial as thunderheads. A rich deep glow spilled down between them, turning their walls to fire. Kristian ascended a floorless canyon, light flowing violet and amber around him. The climb was not easy. The substance of the Crystal Ring was viscous and treacherous to his rarified limbs, now holding him like a fly in treacle, now giving way beneath him so that he slid back. Ilona was beating his shoulders and cursing him all the way.
At last he gained a mountain peak, and went dizzy at the sight of the depthless void flowing away all around him. The atmosphere was dense and cold, heaving like a sea. Even as he paused, the peak was beginning to turn over on itself, threatening to carry him back down to a valley. The next layer, a sapphire plain, seemed miles above them; but through the semifluid air he could swim upwards, guided by the glittering lines of magnetism.
“Damn you. Take me back,” said Ilona. Her voice was faint and she was no longer fighting but clinging to him.
As he forged upwards, he began to shiver. The Crystal Ring exacted a toll of fatigue and cold from those who climbed too high. Even Kristian was not immune to its danger.
He needed warmth. Although their bodies were different in this realm there was still blood within them. He could feel the swell of Ilona’s veins as he pressed her to him. As they reached the plain, he slid his fangs into her throat and sucked until the sluggish fluid turned into a thin stream of fire on his tongue.
The strength it gave would be short-lived but it was fierce, almost intoxicating. He drank to strengthen himself and weaken her.
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