She stood up, a faint dry groan issuing from her open mouth. I know what I want to do and I can't…
"God help me," she whispered.
The man did not look afraid, or dazed. Stefan tricked him here… No, if one. He is here willingly! And the man looked straight at Charlotte and smiled, revealing white, crooked teeth.
"This is Oscar," said Stefan. "It's all right, Charlotte. He won't mind."
"That's right," Oscar agreed. He held out his wrist and she saw the faint silvery fang-marks. He began to walk towards her, a knowing glint in his eye that approached lust. "Feel free, old girl. You look so very charming."
Charlotte gaped at him. My God, he knows! He wants it… For some reason his eagerness made her furious. And the fury swept away any clear thought in her mind and replaced it completely with the thirst. He had simply become the centre, a flower to a bee. She rushed forward to meet him, threw herself on him so savagely that his smile vanished and he cried out, "Get her off me!"
In the same moment she seemed to be watching herself from the outside, outraged in a very cool and British way. What is that demented woman doing?
Then her mouth filled with flesh, and from the flesh sprang honey and brandy and fire to pour into the aching emptiness inside her. Oh God… I've waited so long for this… all my life. Karl, oh please, don't let this stop. Whatever this man was, all she felt for him now was pure, ravenous love.
The room was spiralling round and round. The red peak of pleasure seemed to stretch out forever, but after an undefined length of time it came to her that the victim was on the floor, that she was lying on top of him and that he was no longer struggling…
"Mon Dieu, I think she's killed him." Pierre's voice was distant and unreal, as if on a distant wireless.
Karl was separating Charlotte from the source of life but she didn't resist. The sweetness ebbed slowly, letting her down so gently… and she was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the chaise-longue, while the whole room pulsed softly in and out like a golden heart.
"Oh, he'll be all right," Stefan said dismissively. "I bet he doesn't think you are so charming now, Charlotte."
Pierre was laughing. "My goodness, she is enthusiastic, isn't she? I think you have made her into a monster, Karl. Dr Frankenstein and Ophelia, what an unlikely pair."
"Get out, Pierre." There was a sharpness in Karl's voice that she had never heard before. "All of you, leave us alone."
Charlotte felt the pleasure subsiding into exquisite contentment. She was sated, clear-headed. This was the first time since the transformation that she knew she was still herself, a rational being who understood what had happened and why. She touched her mouth, looked at her fingertips and saw blood on them. She saw the man on the floor, grinning no longer, the mauve tint below his eyes now colouring his whole face. Stefan lifted him one-handed—as if lifting a puppy by the scruff of the neck—and bundled him out of the room. Niklas followed, a door closed, and she was alone with Karl.
Then horror flooded her. She cried out, hid her face. She felt Karl's hands stroking her hair but he said nothing.
Eventually she pulled herself up off the floor and took a few steps away from him, her forearms folded across her stomach. Such colours in my skin, she noticed, looking down at her arms. Stolen blood, blooming through her like the sap in a pink rose.
"I was brought up not to show my feelings." Her voice was low, unsteady. "I thought that meant I was not allowed to have feelings. If I did I felt guilty. Always guilty."
She turned and Karl was watching her, very still and intent. Why doesn't he say something? Just watching, like a huge eye in a microscope… She felt caught in a web of tension.
"I have never experienced anything like that before," she went on. "Never. It was like being thrown off a building, I tried to save myself but I just couldn't stop. I can't go through with it again." Even as Charlotte spoke, she knew she was lying. The revulsion at her loss of control was nothing to the waves of excitement that fanned through her. Yet she tried to cling to her conscience. "I can't accept this! I went out of my mind when I saw that—that man. I can't describe how terrible, how powerful it was."
"You don't need to," Karl said impassively. "The vampire instinct is stronger than anything. If you cannot accept it, you will not survive."
"But that's the awful thing," she whispered, turning to him, aghast at herself. "I don't feel guilty. I hate myself for not feeling guilty."
"It will pass," Karl said mechanically, as if it was not what he really meant to say.
"You don't understand! It didn't feel like hunger or thirst, it was like love!"
A spark in his eyes. "Did I ever suggest to you that you would feel hatred for your victims?"
"You suggested that Ilona did."
That broke the web. That was why his eyes were brooding on her; trying to judge how much she had changed, whether she had become like his daughter. That was why he had reacted so sharply to Pierre's taunts.
For a moment she hated him for it. She cried, "Is this what you want to know? Ilona can only kill by convincing herself that she hates her victims; I can do it quite easily because I confuse it with love. Does that make me better or worse than her?"
Karl stood up with vampire swiftness, only now she perceived the graceful motion as if he had moved quite slowly. He came to her and clasped her right hand, twisted his arm round hers to pull her to him. "If you want an honest answer, I don't care!" His eyes were hard, no tenderness in him at all. "We both wanted this. Well, now we have it. Neither of us has the right to complain that it is not quite what we expected."
For a few seconds his words petrified her. Then she seemed to be rising above the fear, a quiet inner voice reminding her that there was no need to feel helpless any more. It was a habit hard to break. "Then believe your own words, Karl," she said gently. "I know this is as difficult for you as it is for me. Don't pretend it was only my innocence you loved; I know you better than that! I am still myself and I need your help. If you are ever hostile to me again I shall never forgive you."
He released her hand and put his arms round her. "God, is that how I seem to you? Liebling, I am so sorry. I did not know how deep this fear ran in myself; no excuse for hurting you." He was holding her as he had before he took her life, desperately. "When I took your blood it was the most exquisite experience of my life; but it was nothing, nothing when I saw you lying there… dead. I would have sacrificed anything for you to be alive again. I was so terrified you would not come back… and almost as afraid that you would. But I am so glad. Just that you are still here, human, vampire, it doesn't matter. So happy, beloved." He hugged her, drew back and studied her. His eyes were gentle again, seducing her as they always had. Karl, too, was still himself. "Ah, but we say too much. Let us not talk any more. Come with me."
"Where?"
"Into the Crystal Ring."
Karl took Charlotte's hand and she saw the walls dissolve. Giddiness and confusion again; she was in a grey world of impossibilities. But Karl drew her outwards and upwards and she found herself staring up at a sky transformed into a complexity of interlocking landscapes. Such colours, bronze dappled with gold, swirls of palest green and turquoise, rainbow lines threading up towards thunderous purple chasms thousands of feet above their heads.
Too much to take in. Nothing Karl had told her—and he had told her so very little, after all—could have prepared her for this.
She was staring into heaven.
"Oh, but I know this!" she exclaimed, astonished that she could still speak and make herself understood. Karl turned to her and it was another revelation. He no longer looked human. Hard to see him clearly; a slender velvet-black silhouette, cloaked or winged with soft fine leather, filigreed like lace; the burning face of a seraph. Proud, unfettered, subject to no law. She looked down at her own body and saw that she, too, was like him. Wild excitement seared her.
"We brought you here during your transfigurement," he said. "I was not sure yo
u would remember."
"I thought it was a dream. It is a dream," she whispered. Hand in hand they began to climb up through the Ring. They rose through plains that rippled like a sunset ocean, copper and gold; into hills which birthed vast forests then consumed them again as they slowly turned over and over on themselves. And across this insubstantial realm they half-ran and half-flew, as if gravity had loosened its hold on them. "But where are we?" Charlotte cried.
"Kristian says the mind of God," said Karl. "I don't know! But it is like the sky, it is the sky transmuted. Nothing is fixed, nothing could ever be built here. No kingdom of immortals; we are too much tied to the earth. But learn the geography and you can travel anywhere on Earth more swiftly than you would believe. It holds dangers, too, so listen to what I tell you."
From a certain height, Charlotte could see that the flow of the landscape was not random but angled in a constant direction, like a wind current. Even the complex local disturbances, which seemed random, followed a pattern. Like the weather systems of Earth or the storms of Jupiter? she thought.
Strange forces pulled at her. Wires of light threaded through everything, seeming full of significance.
"We use the lines to guide us," said Karl. "You will learn the contours, in time."
"Magnetism," she said, suddenly understanding. "It's the magnetic field of the Earth that we can see and feel."
As she spoke, the surface beneath her turned into cloud and she found herself tumbling through nothingness. Her euphoria ignited into panic. Karl swooped after her, caught her up, came to rest on a lower slope. She held onto him, gasping, "Now I believe it can be dangerous."
"The peril is not in falling," he answered. "You won't hurt yourself, even if you fell all the way back to the surface of the Earth. The danger is in staying here too long. And the greatest peril of all is the Weisskalt."
They climbed the sides of abysses whose substance cascaded slowly downward like semi-liquid amethyst. Shades of violet flooded her eyes; pure elation carried her on at Karl's side through mountains of flowing glass. And from the summit, Karl pointed up through layers of blue, white and silver noctilucence. Miles above, she saw a tear in the whiteness and beyond it a black sky blazing with huge stars.
Charlotte was half-sobbing as she spoke. The glory of it was beyond her. "Can't we go up there?"
"The higher levels are very cold. The highest is the Weisskalt," Karl said. "If you went there, you would never return. I brought Ilona back but it almost killed me… not death exactly, but a hibernation so deep it is almost the same."
"I remember what you told me—about Kristian leaving vampires there as punishment." A breath of winter went through her as the abstract began to take on a profound realism.
"Yes. So don't be tempted by its beauty, beloved. Even the lowest layers of the Crystal Ring will drain your warmth and strength. It is too easy to linger here, bewitched, until starvation sets in. Then you will become dormant and unable to return to Earth unless someone saves you."
"We don't have to go back yet, do we?"
"Not yet. I brought you here to rest. It is the only form of sleep we can enjoy. In time you will develop an instinct for how long to stay; but for now I will stay and wake you when it is time to go back."
"I can't possibly sleep!" she said.
"It is not quite that. Let go, Charlotte. You will see."
At his instruction she lay down, trusting the substance of the cloud-mountain to bear her up like water. She closed her eyes but her thoughts would not cease. She turned and opened her eyes and then…
She was floating face-down on an infinite ocean. A whole world lay below her, painted in ever-changing rhapsodies of colour. A trance-like state fell on her. It was not unconsciousness but it was complete repose. She could still see and hear, but all emotions fell away and there was only the serenity of the Crystal Ring, the endless blue swirl of the atmosphere.
It seemed the hills, with the gleaming ridges and the smoky valleys of shadow winding between them, were the convolutions of a vast brain. The strange visions of her transformation were still fresh in her mind… Unfinished. Something about human thought… every thought generating electrical activity that radiates out forever… and in this realm human thought is real, a great breathing plasma of dreams and fears… the subconscious of mankind made material so we can fly through it as if through palaces of cloud in the sky…
And here is the distillation of the two purest emotions. Fear… Time only passes in one direction. Entropy forever increases. The dead cannot come back! For them to do so is to break the ultimate law of time.
And hope. God grant us life eternal. The only way to bear the fear of annihilation is to believe in heaven. And fear makes us obedient, because we don't want to live forever in hell…
"Charlotte." Karl's voice intruded on her trance and it suddenly came to her that three or four hours had passed. She wanted to stay here, floating on the soft breast of the sky… "Charlotte! Time to go back now. This is the trouble, you see. It is so tempting to linger."
She became fully alert, and the meaning of her waking vision resolved itself into such perfect clarity in her mind that she cried out with astonishment. "Oh, God, Karl!"
"What's wrong?" he said, concerned.
"Nothing—but I've so much to tell you, it's so important."
"Tell me when we are back on Earth." He stroked her head—her refined, unhuman head—with a velvet-soft hand. "We have all the time in the world to talk." Then he kissed her, and the kiss was electric.
Karl seemed to be taken as much by surprise as Charlotte by the sudden compelling force of their desire. He had never answered her question, "Do vampires make love to each other?" and she had never asked it again, but the anxieties had remained in the back of her mind. Will you still desire me when I am like you? Was it anything more than sublimated need for my blood? And it had never even occurred to her to ask whether passion could exist within the Crystal Ring.
But as their limbs twisted together, fierce, devouring each other as they tumbled and floated through the ocean, she knew the answer was yes, and yes, and yes.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-One
Shades of Night
Karl looked out across the shining river, forest-green and timber shading into black; a row of lights on the far bank reflected as sinuous bright snakes in the water. And beyond, the smoky silhouette of the London skyline against the night sky. He was content. After the wildness of the Crystal Ring, all he wanted was to rest in the prosaic arms of Earth.
Yet the Thames seemed anything but ordinary on this enchanted night. Most mortals were in their beds but the city still moved and murmured in its sleep. Never quite silent. And the sounds and life and light seemed to float from a great distance across the arc of night.
Karl and Charlotte sat on a bench on the embankment, watching the lights leaping on the water; resting against each other, wound together in an intangible coil of rapture. Purest pleasure, to have Charlotte with him at last; yet how fragile it felt.
"You are such a pessimist, Karl," Charlotte said softly, laughing. "But there was no need, no need at all." And he smiled and kissed her, no less bewitched by the vampire shimmer of her face and eyes than he had been by her mortal glow.
"I am so glad you stepped through the veil," he said.
"It didn't seem a veil from the other side," she said thoughtfully. "More a chasm. But from this side… yes, like pulling back the net and seeing clearly for the first time."
"There was something you were going to tell me."
"When we were in the Crystal Ring… " She trailed off. "I will tell you later, Karl. It's too much to think about. I just want to be quiet now."
Karl was aware of her moods changing with the swiftness of clouds; from wonder and passion in the Crystal Ring, to the simple joy of walking together through this everyday yet transformed world. How delicious it had been to walk among the human crowds pouring from the theatres, mingling with them while
knowing that he and Charlotte were different, dangerous. Oh, a foolish amusement, yet strangely acute, and innocent. Karl loved to watch Charlotte's myriad reactions as she rediscovered the realm of mortals with vampire perceptions; a delight Ilona had denied him. The headiness of being together and free, for the first time.
Her wonder was inevitably becoming threaded with darker thoughts. As they sat by the river, Karl sensed her growing sombre, withdrawn. Perhaps beginning to weigh the enormity of what had happened to her. After a time she asked, "How often will I feel the thirst?"
She had always wanted honesty, not consolation, from him; even though he had sometimes used the truth to the point of cruelty, a needle to pierce illusions. "Every night," Karl replied, "once, perhaps twice. How you choose to sate it is up to you; but I would advise you not to kill outright, if you can help it. Find two or three victims and take a little from each. You can be as selective as you wish."
"I hope I should not take them indiscriminately."
"Why not?"
Charlotte looked at him in puzzlement. "You said that you tried never to prey on people you know, that it was betraying them."
"Yes, but it is also to save myself pain. I do not want to stare the results of my own evil in the face. Purely selfish. I have known vampires more fastidious than myself, who only prey on those who, they consider, deserve it. Wicked people, criminals. You can do that if it helps you; but I ask, why prey only on the 'evil'? Who are we to make such a distinction, and then where do you draw the line? I think it is better for a vampire to be true to its nature. But you must choose your victims as you think fit, dearest."
Charlotte paused. "And it will make them… insane?"
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