His gaze slid away. He tugged irritably at the empty, flapping sleeve of his shirt.
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, low. “I know this must be painful—”
“It wasn’t,” John interrupted. “It wasn’t painful. Maybe I was already out of it. Or my arm and my head hurt too much for me to notice the rest. But when he bent over me and bit my neck—still bloody talking—I didn’t feel anything except curiosity. It was only later I thought it was fucking disgusting. Sorry.”
The apology for his bad language touched her. Perhaps she was reminding him of his English teacher again. “Show me where he bit you,” she managed.
He reached up quickly, pinching at the vein on the side of his neck. There was no sign of any wound. Elizabeth shivered.
Shaking off her own disturbing memories, she said, “Did you get the impression he meant to kill you?”
John shrugged, an unbalanced gesture that seemed to irritate him, for his frown deepened. “They were still arguing over whether or not to share my blood when the other guy arrived.”
“Another vampire?”
A sardonic smile stretched his lips. “You’re the first who’s actually used that word. Yes, I’d say he was another vampire. He seemed to fall out of the sky, tore the guy off me, and bit him until he sort of . . . disappeared. The other one had started to run, but the new guy caught him and then he vanished too. All I could see was dust. But I know he bit him as well. I saw it, even though they were out of my line of vision—dreaming again, right?” His laugh turned into a shudder. “And then he came for me and I . . .”
“What?” Elizabeth urged gently.
“I started to cry. I don’t know why, except my pals were dead beside me. I was dying too. It didn’t hurt. Just the idea that another of them would . . . Aw, fuck.”
John twisted away from her. Desperately, Elizabeth tried to think of something to say, anything that might help. But he began to speak again, once more curt and matter-of-fact.
“The big guy, this über-vamp, seemed to be some kind of boss. Scary bastard. He was telling them off; he seemed to be telling everyone off, people I couldn’t even see.”
Saloman?
“When he knelt and bent over my throat, I couldn’t move. I was so ashamed I wanted to die—because I was crying, you know? But he didn’t bite me. He licked the wound in my neck, and then he just looked at me. He had these huge, black eyes, like they were all pupils. He told me it was over, that my people were coming for me. Then he looked over my head. I could hear trucks and helicopters. He said he was sorry he couldn’t wait and make it all go away. And then he stood up and vanished.”
He turned his head back and faced Elizabeth with defiance. “And the next people I saw were big Tam McGowan and Charlie Harrison. They filled me full of meds, which at least stopped me havering. For a while.”
He crossed his ankles and regarded her with unnecessary aggression. “Well?”
Elizabeth licked her dry lips. She desperately wanted not to make things worse for this damaged young man. Honesty was what she would have wanted. “I don’t think you’re havering,” she said. “I don’t think you’re talking rubbish at all.”
“Aye, but you’re the nutter here, remember?”
She smiled. “I remember. Look, John, I can’t explain everything that happened to you, but I can tell you some things that might make it easier to understand. It doesn’t matter what other people say, or even what we tell ourselves to feel normal; we both know that vampires exist. They exist all over the world, in every country, to a greater or lesser degree. Recently, a very powerful and Ancient vampire—possibly this ‘über-vampire’ you saw—has made himself overlord and extracted submission from most vampires in the world. But about three months ago, the Afghan vampires rebelled, using the war there to cover their own violence. They went on the rampage, threatening everyone—local civilians, police, Taliban fighters, foreign troops, aid workers. The revolt’s more or less quelled now, but it sounds like you and your comrades were caught in the killing spree.”
He regarded her with curiosity, but otherwise his expression was unreadable. “I suppose you quelled it.” That was definitely a sneer, but Elizabeth chose to take the words at face value.
“Oh, no,” she said ruefully. “I believe the local hunters took out a few, but on their own, they were struggling. Badly. It was largely S—the vampire overlord and his followers who put down the revolt and calmed the violence. There are still rumblings of discontent, of course, but I’m told they’re under control.”
So why isn’t he home? With me? What happened this morning?
Shoving her personal worries aside, she said awkwardly, “I do understand your issues with belief.” And survivor guilt and shame, because it wasn’t all bad, especially with Saloman. She was sure John Ramsay felt all of that and more, but she knew better than to put it into words. He was a very proud young man and he’d already said more than he’d be happy with when he was fully recovered.
“I’m pretty new to this stuff as well,” she confessed. “Obviously I’ve got no experience of war, but I do know the vampire thing gets easier to deal with in your head as time goes by. The first encounter—and I hope it’s your last—is always the worst. You don’t need to admit it to anyone but yourself if you don’t want to, but you’re not crazy.”
John pushed himself up into a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the bed to face her. “First encounter,” he repeated. “Sounds like a film or something.” He touched the side of his neck and let his fingers linger there. “So you’ve done all this too?”
“Oh, I did something much w—” She broke off. “I did something that was considered much worse. I got bitten, yes, but I also awakened an Ancient vampire who was supposed to be dead forever.” She gave a quick, self-deprecating grin. “Victim and perpetrator, that’s me, Consider yourself lucky.”
His lips twitched in response, but his hungry eyes didn’t leave hers. It was as if her belief had opened some kind of a floodgate. “And was it?”
“Was it what?” she asked.
“Worse.”
She parted her lips to answer and closed them again. Was it? Awakening Saloman had been an accident brought about by a combination of her own research and the vampire Dmitriu’s specific information, added to Dmitriu’s carefully planted rose thorn, which had caused her to bleed all over Saloman’s beautiful tomb. Her ancestry was the key; the blood of Tsigana, one of Saloman’s original killers, flowed in her veins. She was one of the few people in the world who could have awakened him, but she’d done it without meaning to, without even believing in vampires. And in return received a whole a lot of trouble, plus the strength of an Awakener, which made her potentially more powerful than any vampire hunter and a match for even the strongest of the undead. She’d unleashed Saloman on the world and found a love she’d never imagined.
Her life was enriched, not worsened, by what she’d done. As for the world . . . But she had to speak or she could ruin everything she’d been trying to mend for John Ramsay. Her head began to ache and she rubbed it distractedly while she let a rueful smile form on her lips. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I haven’t decided yet.”
John said, “When I’m better, do you want to go out for a drink?”
Elizabeth blinked and must have looked startled, because he said hastily, “Just as friends. I’m not daft. I know you’ve got a husband and twelve kids. But I’m glad you came to see me.”
Elizabeth smiled. “So am I. And I’d love to go for a drink as friends, even though I don’t have any kids. When will they let you go home?”
“Soon,” he said with new confidence, and Elizabeth thought that it was probably true now.
She rummaged in her bag for a pen and a scrap of paper. “I live in St. Andrews,” she said, “but I’m away a lot. I’ll give you my number and my e-mail address. If you write yours down for me too, then we can stay in touch. If you want.”
“I want.”
>
Leaving his room, she felt buoyantly hopeful for him. Though she wasn’t quite sure what the hunters had expected her to do, she suspected that if his story was real, they wanted it quashed. It was one of the basic hunter principles: to keep the existence of vampires secret in order to prevent human panic, chaos, and a vampire war that humans couldn’t possibly win. If an encounter couldn’t be kept secret from the victim, then the victim was sworn to secrecy and occasionally even recruited into the hunter network. John Ramsay was in no condition to be recruited, but everything in Elizabeth had rebelled against denying the possibility of his story. He needed to believe in it and his own sanity in order to move beyond it and recover.
Which, she thought tiredly, as she trailed back along the long ward corridor, he would do now. A wave of nausea hit her and she had to pause with her hand on the wall, waiting for the moment to pass.
She should have eaten today, but she’d been too busy rushing off to meet Joanne, and then traveling over to Glasgow. She stared hard at the wall, as if that would throw off the dizziness, but she knew from previous episodes that it would go only in its own good time. In her heart, she knew too that food intake had nothing to do with it. Repressing the familiar surge of panic, willing herself not to faint, she tried to concentrate on her surroundings rather than on the weird, unspecific pain that seemed to grip her entire body, or the exhaustion that made her want to slump to the floor.
She was standing outside the patients’ dayroom. A few people in dressing gowns and a few more fully dressed sat around reading newspapers and watching the television. The screen was full of a fuzzy, shaking mountain, while the announcer reported a major earthquake in a mountainous region of Peru.
That is suffering, Elizabeth told herself severely. Feeling tired and sick because you forgot to eat breakfast is just pathetic. Pull yourself together, Silk.
The pain began to dissipate, the veil of mist to lift from her mind. She was glad to hear, as she eased off the wall and walked shakily down the corridor, that no casualties had yet been reported. It wouldn’t stay that way, of course. In any major disaster, the figures had a horrible tendency to go up and up until they stopped meaning anything comprehensible in terms of human tragedy.
It was raining again by evening, and the gathering gale hurled it at Elizabeth’s living room window with enough force to drown out the sound of the television. Perhaps that was why she kept losing the plot of the convoluted crime drama.
Elizabeth shifted restlessly and wondered how the detective could possibly have come up with so implausible a theory. It didn’t match the evidence, so far as she could recall, anyway, and it was, besides, bloody stupid.
Her hand brushed the envelope lying on the sofa beside her, and she glanced at it in annoyance. Why wouldn’t it just go away? It was addressed to the University of Budapest and contained her acceptance of the lecturing post. She just couldn’t bring herself to send it.
What the hell am I afraid of? Frightening him off ? Cramping his style? Appearing too needy and clingy?
Oh, yes.
The trouble was, she hadn’t seen him since the job came up. It had been a recent and totally unexpected approach by the university, followed by several e-mails and a telephone call before the offer was made. And it wasn’t something she could tell him about telepathically. He was too much in command of that form of communication. He could read everything from her while revealing only as much as he wanted to, and she needed, she really needed, to see his reaction to the idea of her being in Budapest for a whole year, possibly longer if the post was extended. He moved around a lot, but if anywhere was home for him, it was Budapest.
The credits began to roll on the crime drama, adding to Elizabeth’s sense of dissatisfaction. She stood and wandered over to the window. Thick clouds had darkened the night sky further, and the wild, white froth on the heaving sea shone like neon. Waves crashed over the harbor wall, a reminder of the frailty of man and all his works before the awesome power of nature.
Her throat began to ache. She wished she’d gone with Saloman when he’d left Scotland. He’d asked her to and she’d refused, mainly because she wouldn’t reduce herself—in her eyes or in his—to the position of mere follower. She was his companion, but not a blind acolyte, and if she was to do anything useful, if she was to be everything to him as he was to her, he had to acknowledge her as . . . as . . . more. More than an extension of himself, more than his lover.
“But there is no more than that,” she whispered to the rain-lashed window. “How can I reach you if I’m never with you?” It had seemed so simple, that decision she’d made in his arms three months ago to win his eternal love, to do something good for the world, but sometimes it seemed that nothing had changed. They were companions, yet too much apart.
She couldn’t let herself become his slave, which Mihaela had accused her of being already. Was she just proving the hunter wrong? Was this the real reason she didn’t travel with him, why she hesitated over the job in Budapest? Because she couldn’t bear the accusing glares of her friends, to whom she was a traitor?
You chose your path, Silk. See it through; live with it. He’ll come soon. Or at least contact you soon, and then it will be easier.
An echo of the morning’s twinge of alarm came back to her and she shivered. Surely there was no point in worrying over the safety of the most powerful being on earth? Turning away from the window, she threw herself back down on the sofa and changed the channel to BBC News.
Government scandal—yawn. And the earthquake in Peru. Instantly, Elizabeth felt guilty for her self-pity and made a determined effort to throw it off. Compared with an earthquake disaster, her problems were puny.
“However,” the announcer read, “no casualties have yet been reported. The epicenter of the quake was in a remote, mountainous region of the country which is very sparsely populated. Peruvian sources say several scattered villages have been destroyed by the shock itself and by subsequent landslides and avalanches, and it’s possible casualties will still be discovered beneath the rubble by the rescue workers already on the scene. But, as our correspondent in Peru reports, there may be more than a miracle involved for the survivors of this earthquake.”
The screen switched to a shot of carnage, dusty men digging through rubble that appeared to be all that remained of a village. Although a few poorly dressed people stood by, some picking through their demolished homes as if looking for valued possessions, there was, strangely, no grief-stricken wailing, no urgency or desperation about these people’s searches. They were almost frighteningly calm, considering what had just occurred to their village, their families and neighbors.
How could there possibly be no casualties?
The camera homed in on a woman smiling and nodding, with a thin child in her arms. Smug, Elizabeth thought. She actually looks smug.
“The few villagers we’ve met here tell us that no one was left in the village when the earthquake occurred,” the reporter went on. “And the reason for that, they say, is this man.”
A photograph flashed up on the screen, causing Elizabeth’s heart to lurch into her throat. After which it seemed to cease beating altogether. The photograph was of a young, extraordinarily handsome man with long, thick black hair and stunning dark eyes. A faint, sardonic smile played about his full, sensual lips. He looked as if he knew everything and cared for nothing.
“Saloman,” she whispered. “Oh, God . . .”
There were no casualties left in the village because he’d killed them all beforehand? Would he really regard them as of so little account? Her alien, unpredictable lover . . . Jesus, could she really love him after this? Gagging, she covered her mouth with her hand.
“Eccentric Hungarian millionaire Adam Simon,” the reporter said. “He appeared in these remote mountain villages a week ago and somehow persuaded everyone in them to leave before the earthquake struck. One of the young men from this village took video footage at the time, using his mobile phone.”
&n
bsp; Saloman disappeared from the screen, and, as if this granted her permission, Elizabeth began to breathe again. Now a grainy, shaky picture filled the television, showing a ragged line of people, many of them in native Peruvian dress, all carrying small bags, trailing down a mountain track. And there, carrying an old lady on his back and several rucksacks over one arm, was Saloman.
Stupidly, it took several moments to penetrate.
“You didn’t kill them,” she whispered. She wanted to sing; she wanted to throw her arms around the television and hug it. Tears forced their way up her throat, spilled from the corners of her eyes, and trickled over her smiling lips. “You didn’t kill them; you saved them. You saved all of them. My God . . .”
My people had an affinity with the earth that gave them senses way beyond those of humans. . . . The world could use that.
He’d spoken those words in New York during their pursuit of Dante, and only now, at last, did she understand at least some of what they meant. An affinity with the earth. He’d predicted this earthquake and somehow persuaded the people to believe in him and flee their homes.
The reporter’s words broke briefly into her chaotic understanding. “A spokesman for Mr. Simon, whose whereabouts now are unknown, said his boss has opened a charitable fund to help rebuild these people’s homes. Apparently he has also donated a large sum to seismic research.”
This was huge. Bigger than anything that had come before. Saloman was ruthless, pitiless in his extermination of those whose deaths he perceived to be necessary for one reason or another. The reasons weren’t always clear to Elizabeth, but she should have known by now that he would care for the innocent, not exterminate them.
And she’d foolishly imagined she could help the world by limiting him in some way! My God, what she had ever done, what could she ever do, that would even come close to this? And he’d achieved it so casually, fitting it in between a punitive expedition to Afghanistan and a propaganda exercise with the vampire Travis in the United States. To say nothing of his business interests and his befriending of powerful politicians all over the world.
Blood Eternal Page 3
