"Liebchen," he whispered. His arms were around her, his head resting on hers. She pressed herself to him, closing her eyes. So warm, so human he felt. Hold this moment forever. It was the last moment they would embrace each other like this, while she was still mortal; perhaps the last time ever.
She felt his breath in her hair as he spoke. "I shall take your blood and your life-force, but everything I take I shall give back. But if you would rather one of the others—"
"God, no!" she exclaimed. "It must be you. But if I don't come back to life—"
"You will. You must."
"But if I don't, don't blame yourself, Karl. It's what you most wanted and could never have until now, isn't it? My blood and my life. I want you to understand that I give it to you completely, with all my love."
She felt his tears on her face. He so rarely wept. "Yes," he said. "There's nothing for you to fear." His voice was soft, distracted, torn between his dread of hurting her and his desire for her. And so imperative, that desire. She barely understood it yet the heat of his excitement was carrying her with it, melting all instinct for self-preservation. All she craved was the fulfilment of giving such pleasure to him…
She felt him sigh, shudder slightly. Then her throat turned hot under the pressure of his lips and she felt the stab of his fangs, a paralysing wire of pain from her shoulder to her head. She had not expected it so suddenly. It hurt. It was terrible. Yet she gave herself up willingly to it, thinking, Yes, why not now, why prolong the pain of waiting, nothing else to think or say… I've nothing to fear, Karl's the one who's afraid… and she held onto him hard, conveying that she understood, forgave him… that she shared this wanton bliss. His hands—one on her waist, the other cradling her head—felt like trails of fire.
Wingbeats again. Slow and heavy, shaking her apart. Leave everything behind and come out into the darkness…
Her sight and hearing were dissolving into a hissing cloud of silver. She was fainting, she had lost the power of speech. Yet she was still aware… Karl was no longer drinking from her throat but only kissing her there, lips pressed to the wound… Now he was lifting her in his arms and carrying her into the drawing room. Fleeting impressions… Niklas sitting at a table with his elbow bent and his chin resting on one finger, as if he had been posed there like a doll. A thin figure crossing the room in the background, someone who hadn't been there before… no, hallucinating now.
Her head cleared a little and she found herself swaying in the centre of the room. Bleached-pink it looked, expansive. The three vampires surrounded her, stroking her arms and her body; larger than life, unearthly. Karl's eyes were full of anxiety; Pierre looked gruesomely amused. Only Stefan seemed to have any power to soothe her, his eyes sparkling like azure lakes. She focussed on him and somehow she was in his arms and his mouth on her throat… I can't spare any more, if you take any more I'll die…
But she had no will to resist and it hurt less this time. Stefan drank from her with such tenderness, like Karl, but without Karl's passion and anguish… and after a few moments he relinquished her to Pierre.
She felt numb, outside herself, wanting this to end but lacking any power to halt it. Pierre's touch she hated… something too eager in the way his teeth fastened in her, sucking her strength… It was the only false note, the only trace of revulsion she experienced. Dimly she was aware that Karl had to pull him off her. Then there was the heavenly relief of being in Karl's embrace again, his mouth on her throat drawing her along the sweet tunnel of drowsiness. No pain this time. His ecstasy as he swallowed the last drop transmitted itself to her all down the length of their bodies and she gasped, clung to him…
She was falling, all thought and feeling fading into granular darkness. They caught her, let her down gently onto the carpet, but still she did not quite lose consciousness. Part of her was clinging to life and would not let go. This was what Pierre had meant about leaping from the aeroplane… She could not find the courage to let go. She was a child again in the hands of doctors—witch-doctors, these—and she was fighting the anaesthetic with all her strength.
Karl, kneeling behind her head, leaned down and kissed her. She parted her lips to the kiss, felt a sudden bitterness flood her mouth. Her eyes widened. He had bitten his own tongue and let the blood run into her mouth; it jolted her system like poison. He took her left hand, Stefan her right; both linked hands with Pierre so they formed a circle. That was the last thing she saw. All the warmth was being sucked out of her; more than heat, they were taking the intangible energy that animated her. Life. All that was left was frigid emptiness. Impossible to resist because all her spirit to fight it was gone. No feelings now, neither pain nor relief, nothing at all…
As Pierre had said, it was not so terrible. Just a single thrust off the cliff-edge and a short drop into darkness.
***
Charlotte stood on a beach, the barren extension of her soul. The sand was sooty brown, all torn up by mines and barbed wire, the sea turbid as oil, the sky black. There were distant specks winging towards her from the horizon, and she knew that when they reached her something unspeakably evil would happen. She must run. She turned but the air hampered her like water, and there was a figure barring her way.
Fleur. Fleur was dead, yet here she was alive again, staring at Charlotte with watered-gold eyes, her throat torn open and something inside the wound pulsing and glistening like a heart. Charlotte tried to scream, but her breath came out in a soundless rasp. She heard the steady thump of wings behind her. Trapped between the dark birds and the walking dead. And all her family were there with Fleur; Anne, Madeleine, David, Father, Elizabeth, their faces deathly white with terror. This was her fault. She must save them but she could not move, could not warn them. Edward came rushing out of nowhere towards the flying creatures, brandishing his stick, shouting, "Ran! I'll hold them off!" But he was only a small frail sentry against a legion of beasts…
Now Charlotte was lying in the edge of the tide, thin waves washing over her, her life leaching away into the sand. But as her soul dissipated, a new energy flared in with the sea. It entered in a thousand different ways; it pierced her with ruby lines of light, and with coiling white-gold tendrils of fire. It stampeded through her like a vast crowd of people running. It came in like a whisper that grew louder and louder, a single bird singing very far away on a mountain; it blew through her with all the relentless illogic and colour and power of dreams. Dreams… waking and sleeping thought-patterns that symbolised every fear and desire and memory. Fragments of a broken mirror were raining down, each holding an entire image. A brightly lit room full of people which for no reason made her dizzy with terror… Her aunt and sisters in supreme control, looking down at Charlotte as if they possessed some secret of life she was not allowed to share… Edward, face distorted, hoarse cries tearing from his mouth, "Can't you see what he is! Death! Get him out of here!" Closed doors behind which her mother screamed, closed doors that shielded her from the weight of her father's disapproval, from the demands of the world. Alone I can be myself but when I look into that self I see darkness, horror…
Charlotte dared to open a door and through it she saw another world. It was dark but she wanted it… wanted the dissolution into night that was both escape from her fear and into the forbidden paradise of love. She yearned towards the amber, ruby and violet fires she saw moving far away in the forest of darkness, burning in Karl's eyes.
"What are you doing?" said her father.
"I'm turning into radium," Charlotte replied. She felt it to be literally true. She was lead turning back into radium.
"But it's completely against the laws!" he said angrily. "Spontaneous decay does not reverse itself!"
Yet the atomic particles kept flowing into her and as each one struck she glowed brighter. She became a single electron that filled the universe, its energy spreading out in every direction and touching everything—the curves of space-time bringing the waves back to where they began and so 'round again, interfe
rence patterns rippling across each other and on and out unceasingly… And so it is with everyone… We are particles, yet we are waves. Every thought we have is electricity and it releases waves that flow through space forever…
She could see into the structure of matter itself. Not only protons and electrons but other particles of which her father had not dreamed, splitting and joining in an unfathomable dance which in her dream-state made perfect sense. She wanted to share it with him. "Look, Father! You were right, the neutron exists; but there are tinier particles inside it. Can't you see? We must find out what they are!"
"Damn your theories!" he said. "I don't even know you!" And he stared at her with such harsh condemnation in his eyes that she backed away and went running out into the darkness, heart-broken.
And found herself once more on the war-racked beach.
The dark birds were very close now and she was fleeing beside David, filled with terror, knowing that however fast they ran they would never escape. She heard their hissing breath and felt their claws in her hair…
Her fear was like metal hooks through her lungs. Her mouth gaped, her breathing was paralysed. She could not escape. She sprawled forward but the claws closed on her shoulders and she was being lifted into the air. The whole landscape slanted and her head whirled with vertigo. I knew they would come for me, it could never be avoided…
The creatures took her swooping along the wind with them. Euphoria became mixed with her horror. Below, tiny and defenceless and in despair, her family stumbled through the craters and the cruel wire. Charlotte stared down at them and wept.
How can I feel guilt and sorrow at the same time as this elation and freedom? But I can. I embrace everything. Every feeling and every perspective. I see myself from the ground as you must see me, Father, Anne, David, and I see you from above. You are afraid but I want to surround you with love, absorb your fear and take you completely into myself…
The beach heaved and flowed, licked by shades of bronze and red and deep blue. The tilt of the landscape took her breath away. Not desolate now but full of mysterious fire. And the flying creatures no longer seemed hideous but possessed of grace that conformed to no earthly law. Fierce, mystical, laughing. She was just like them. Their long wings were really arms, and they were joined by their hands in a circle through which energy poured like ripples along a rope of light.
They broke the circle and she fell.
***
The jolt of falling that had dropped her into darkness seemed to be the same jolt that brought her back. Like waking from an operation, thinking, But it can't be over, I haven't even slept, I didn't let them put me to sleep! Yet sensing in her bones that the entire world had changed.
Charlotte had thought she was lying down, but now she found herself on her feet. The room was phosphorescent, bloomed with light from an unseen source, as softly coloured as the prismatic sparkle of the chandeliers. She could see so clearly, in such detail, that it was as if she had been looking through frosted glass before.
Only Karl was in the room, watching her from a few feet away, but something else seized her attention. There was a spider walking across the carpet. She could see the way its joints articulated, the marvellous subtle hues of its body, hear the scraping of its tiny feet on the fibres. The smallest sounds were extraordinarily clear, yet they didn't hurt her ears. She could filter the sound from the louder ones of her own clothes rustling, the wind in the trees.
Everything was so brilliantly clear and sharp that she dared not move for fear that it would all shatter around her.
Awe held her motionless. There was discomfort under her ribs, a pulling like the need to draw a huge breath. She filled her lungs convulsively—and it was the strangest sensation, because it came to her that she did not need to breathe, and the breath did nothing to ease the weird longing inside her.
Panic. She tried to turn round, only for the whole room to tip sideways around her. Everything went dark and she was aware of another room rushing at her like a train. Narrow dark walls streaked with light, all the angles askew—she cried out, half-fell and grasped the edge of a table.
The room turned bright and solid again. Even as she hung desperately onto reality, she was aware of the surface of the table under her fingers; the individual fibres of wood beneath the varnish, the last faint echoes of energy in the sap. The awareness of the life-giving fluid struck a harmonic within her, made the pulling sensation worse.
It was the world that was a changeling, not her. It had revealed all its unseen energy to her, all the dancing particles of light and matter with their pent-up pulsing energy. And the world itself was no longer stable but likely to break up around her at any second.
It was as it she had awoken to find herself poised on a wire hundreds of feet above the ground. Horrifying insecurity.
A year seemed to pass before Karl came to her. Even with his hands on her arms, holding her, she felt no safer. Now they were both trying to balance on the wire. But she was distracted from the sense of danger by the first sight of him, in this strange new world. Such incredible beauty. The face of a saint, luminous and serene, like an altar piece illuminated by a single candle. His eyes were exquisite jewels of some unknown fusion of ruby and amber. If he had seemed beautiful before, now he was incandescent.
All she could do was stare at him in this mixture of wonder and panic, like a kite cut loose from its string and blowing helplessly through the sky.
"Help me," she gasped.
"Charlotte, hold on to me." He showed no emotion, no relief that she had survived. He seemed guarded, impersonal, but she was too disoriented to be worried. "It will take time for you to adjust."
"Karl, I can't move, the room rushes away."
"That's because you are aware of the other dimension, the Crystal Ring. You have to learn where to place yourself. Concentrate on me, on the room; push the Crystal Ring away. You cannot fall into it unless you will it. You are safe."
She tried to do as he said. She let the tension fade from her shoulders, tried to accept the glittering clarity of her senses. Leaning on his arm she took an experimental step and the room remained where it was.
"Charlotte, are you aware of what has happened to you?" Karl asked. "Sometimes the induction can affect the memory."
"No, I remember," she said slowly. "I am like you now… " The word vampire did not occur to her. "But I feel as if it happened years ago. I had such a long, strange dream. Father was in it. I thought I had discovered all the secrets of the universe and it was so important that I told him. I was lead turning into radium… but he wouldn't believe me, I couldn't make him listen. It sounds ridiculous now, but it was so very real, so important."
"It was your mind reacting to the change," Karl said. "Everyone receives some vivid impression, each one different. But don't think it was ridiculous, Charlotte. Whatever you saw was profound."
She could not take her eyes off him as he spoke. It was love, this swelling, burning feeling inside her; transcendent love, like that of a saint receiving a divine revelation.
"Walk round the room, if you want," he said. "I remember how it was. I wanted to look at everything."
"I only want to look at you," she said.
He half-smiled, but his expression was still cool, cautious. He put her away from him gently. "If you begin to feel weak or hungry, dearest, tell me."
She walked slowly towards the window, turning like a dancer as she went. "I feel perfect—as if I shall never feel tired or hungry again."
"It is the energy of the transformation still within you. It will fade," he said gravely.
Charlotte drew back the curtain—the velvet prickling her fingers—and looked out of the window. What she saw was almost as much a shock as her first wakening.
Oh, God, London, she thought as the impressions came rushing at her, as if she had forgotten the city existed, never even seen it before. Roofs and smoke, people moving through the streets, rain falling on hatbrims, distant motor horns as reed
y as oboes… It was dark, yet nothing seemed to be hidden from her. The streetlights were diamonds brushing everything with soft colours. Shadows were deep as velvet yet she could see into them quite clearly. Far away beneath the trees she heard and saw a mouse scuffling through fallen leaves and stopping to sniff at a child's discarded mitten.
She was looking at another world. It was not hers any more. But so heart-rendingly beautiful…
Karl was behind her, his hands on her shoulders. "It is easy to lose sight of the price we pay for this," he said. "But I am not going to spare you anything. You are a vampire now."
The torrent of external impressions halted. Her mouth felt strange. As naturally as moving her lips, she could make her canine teeth lengthen into fangs. Dear God, this can't be! She ran her tongue over the small sharp points… so sharp that she drew blood, and the taste went through her like a wave of electricity.
"I feel so strange," she said.
"It is the thirst."
"No, it's not thirst, Karl." She turned towards him, one hand pressed over her waist. "It is like happiness, but it aches."
Shaking his head a little, he drew her towards the chaise-longue.
"Sit down," he said. "The first time is the worst."
"No," she said. She was beginning to tremble. Whatever he was implying she didn't want to know, she wanted to push it away. I'm not a vampire, just… different. "I'm not thirsty. I am all right."
Karl's hand rested on the back of her neck, hypnotically soothing. She wanted to move but she could not; and then the door opened and Stefan, followed by Pierre and Niklas, brought a human into the room.
The dragging ache inside her flared into a corona of fire. Layers of reaction; amazement that she saw the man as human, a different species. He was of medium height and very thin, his face gaunt, purplish shadows gouged under his eyes. His straight black hair and moustache gave him a foreign look. Charlotte stared at the man and realised with incredulity that she recognised him; he had been one of Fleur's artistic and literary crowd. Pushing urgently through these superficial observations was her awareness of the blood branching through his body. He was a fruiting tree of blood…
A Taste of Blood Wine Page 48
