A Dance in Blood Velvet

by Freda Warrington

  The angels had left them. She and Lancelyn were alone.

  Fear gnawed at the edge of her composure.

  “Sit down, beloved lady,” he said.

  “I’m afraid,” she said. But she obeyed, sitting on the edge of the bed, her back straight and her knees pressed together.

  Lancelyn stared at her. Then he came to her in a rush, went down on his knees, and put his arms around her waist.

  “So am I,” he said, laying his heavy, bristly head on her lap. “We’re both afraid, my Sophia. But we’ll guide each other.”

  Then, horribly, she caught the acrid scent of his sweat. He was hot and excited. And his excitement was sexual.

  Sanctification had taken place in the chapel. This was to be the consummation.

  She felt unreal, as if this was a nightmare of being on stage, with no idea which ballet they were performing or what her role was. But it was no dream. She took a breath. How raw and foreign the air felt, now that she no longer needed it. It stirred the thorn in her chest; the beast-like thirst that was slowly destroying her.

  Lancelyn sat beside her and reverently lifted her veil. His crumpled face shone with love. Alarm went through her, like a match spurting and dying. His hands on her arms were clammy, shaking a little. She thought, Don’t touch me! but held back her protest.

  “In the consummation of our marriage,” he said quietly, “all truth will be revealed. Lie down with me, Sophia Nigrans, bride of God.”

  Violette glared at him. The air burned her eyes, but she didn’t blink. She discovered her voice. “It’s dangerous,” she said, not knowing where the words came from.

  “I know the danger.” His hands tightened; she could smell his body. He smelled exactly like Janacek, when he used to paw her revoltingly in the dressing room; the stink of a goat to her sensitive nostrils. “Only the weak and unprepared die. The brave survive.”

  “No one has ever survived me,” she said.

  “Let me be the first, then. All my life has been a preparation for this moment. Let me come inside you, right through the veil of darkness, to the light on the other side.”

  As he spoke, he stood up and began to undress. And there was power in the room, if only generated by his rapt excitement.

  I’ve got to do this, she told herself. I am going to do it. He says, “Trust me.” It’s revolting but that’s only unfamiliarity, I must get used to it. I don’t want to but that’s the point, I’m meant to hate it because it’s my punishment...

  He stood naked before her, hairy and stocky, his grotesque member already erect. It looked absurd and comical. He came to her, took her face between his hands and kissed her lips; if she’d been human, if she’d had anything in her stomach, she would have vomited.

  Then he picked her up in his arms and placed her in the centre of the bed. He lay beside her, pulled her down. He did not command her to remove the layers of black silk, so she did not. She made no attempt to resist; she simply went with him, a straw carried on the wind.

  He began to stroke her through the garments. She felt his damp heat through the delicate material. His hands were all over her; not rough, but hesitant in the most disgusting way, like a gloating schoolboy picking the icing off a cake. He touched her reverentially, but she found his awe vile. He doesn’t see me, she thought. He only sees an image. He’s nothing to do with me... Why am I here, why am I letting this happen?

  He kissed her again. She was so stiff under him that he drew back. “Don’t be nervous,” he said.

  She remembered how kind he’d been in the chapel. He was the only one who understood her. I’m being selfish, she thought; there’s something wrong with me. If I can bear this I’ll be healed. I must trust him...

  Lancelyn shifted to lie half over her, one leg between hers, his weight crushing her pelvis. He was fumbling with her robes, pushing them up over her legs. The angels had left her naked under the black chiffon. She felt the hot scratchiness of his legs against hers.

  Violette turned her head away. Nothing connected her emotions to her will.

  “Don’t turn away,” he said. “Kiss me. You are my wife, Lilith-Sophia.”

  “I don’t want to be evil,” she whispered.

  “You’re not. You are dangerous only to those who approach you without understanding.”

  “I’m not yours to judge.”

  “I do not judge you. You are the judge, Sophia. Let me pass into you and through you into Raqia. We’ll taste each other’s blood and it will be holy transformative wine.”

  His breath condensed with sour warmth on her neck. He slid his hand between her bare thighs. She whispered, “No, I don’t want your blood.”

  He didn’t seem to hear. He went on probing with sightless, rough insistence.

  His fingers hurt her. The intrusion was insufferable, and she couldn’t stand it. Her revulsion became drowning panic and she twisted under him, trying to escape. He stopped, face folding in puzzlement.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The first tenuous connection between her mind and reality became a torrent. “I can’t go through with this.”

  “What are you saying?” His fingers went on moving.

  “I thought I could but I can’t. Please stop. Please!”

  Lancelyn’s expression darkened, as if he finally realised she was serious. His face expressed more than words; he couldn’t believe she wasn’t compliant, that she was about to sabotage his perfect plan.

  He held her down easily because she had no strength to fight him. “You must!” His hard organ pushed at her leg. His sweat grew more pungent.

  “No. I mean it. Get off me.”

  “Don’t be silly. It will soon be over.”

  “This is rape!” she cried. “You’ve no right, no one asked you -”

  “Are you mad?” Lancelyn barked. How cold was his voice; how impersonal, his rutting heat. White-hot anger coursed through her and suddenly she felt centred within her own self again; deranged, perhaps, but no longer indifferent to her fate.

  “No one’s ever done this to me and you won’t either. Get off me, get off!”

  In fury, he forced her down and thrust his full weight onto her pelvis, splaying her legs. His head fell into the hollow of her shoulder; she felt his hot breath, stared at the sweat-slicked hairs bristling on his neck. How rough and disgusting the skin looked, in its endless variety of texture and tint, the tiny capillaries throbbing...

  And then the tide burst over the sea wall. Some force sucked her mouth like a magnet onto his skin. She tasted acid salt. Her fangs slid from their sheaths, unstoppable, plunging through the skin into the fat artery until her mouth was filled with boiling fluid...

  That moment changed everything.

  How vile it tasted, yet how gorgeous. Like caviar, the compelling burst of salt on the tongue. Convulsively she sucked and swallowed... and as she did so she shivered with pure excitement, with the warmth that flowed through every cell... with the memory of Charlotte doing this to her, oh, the lovely tender warmth of it and the sweet-sharp fulfilment that went on and on...

  Lancelyn went rigid. His hands gripped her shoulders, not to stop her but to control her. His seed spilled over her thigh but she didn’t care about that. He cried out, with pleasure at first, then with discomfort, escalating fast to outright pain and fear. He moaned and struggled uselessly. But all this was very distant from Violette, because the blood on her tongue was the universe.

  Electricity, a flood of rose-red sunlight, the most poignant coda ever heard... The room was far away, all sounds echoing faintly, beautifully around her. The stream of red fluid was the centre of everything. Fulfilment... Ah. Images... Charlotte’s hair, Charlotte’s lips... a red desert, clean as rubies. The ecstasy of dancing, but nothing, nothing as complete as this, nothing so dark and so incandescent...

  And now Lancelyn was quivering in her arms, shrivelling like a salted slug. And the bliss had been all hers, not his.

  Violette dropped him and pushed him away. She
didn’t want him near her. She was off the bed and in the doorway before she even realised she’d moved.

  She stood and watched Lancelyn twitching on the azure cover, trying feebly to lift his head, staring at her with pleading eyes. She felt no pity, only a sickening fascination. Horrible, the colour of his face; dead white with blotches of red and bruise-purple. She saw the streaks of blood on his throat, and she shuddered as realisation broke slowly, cruelly over her.

  He made me give in to the thirst.

  “Damn you for what you’ve done to me!” she shouted.

  Lancelyn shook his head helplessly, reaching out to her. “Did nothing,” he slurred. “You wouldn’t let me.”

  “You made me drink blood! You let me become Lilith and now I can’t go back!”

  In the quiet after she spoke, another layer of confusion peeled away and she perceived that some of the madness had left her. The agonising emptiness and hallucinations had gone. The blood made her feel solid and real. She was not Lilith. She was herself again... but that was worse. While she’d been crazed with thirst, she had placed all the horrors outside herself, but now, with the tang of stolen blood in her mouth, she had to absorb and confront them.

  Lilith is a madness that will come upon me every time I need to feed and it won’t leave me until I satisfy this evil lust... Again, and again...

  “Damn you, Charlotte,” she whispered.

  “No, I see it now,” said Lancelyn. He uttered a sound that was part giggle and part hiss. Violette watched in vague horror, caring nothing for him, only disgusted by the state of him. Then a tendril of regret came through. He’d been kind. He’d tried in some way to help her, to offer a future, which in the end she had refused. She’d never meant him any harm, but she seemed to poison them all: Janacek, her father, now this wretched man...

  “Damn you for making me hurt him.” She clutched the thin silk of her dress between her hands. “If I kill Charlotte and the others who did this to me, will that cure me? I have to purge this blood-lust. I cannot be Lilith!”

  Lancelyn rose up on the bed.

  “I couldn’t do what the angels told me,” she cried in despair, tearing at the garment. “They lied! I won’t obey him, now or ever! Damn their God; they lied to me in His name!”

  Lancelyn seemed not to hear her. He swayed, lost his balance and rolled onto the floor. She thought he’d fainted, but he reappeared around the corner of the bed, wriggling on his stomach across the marble flags, hands outstretched towards her.

  “I found the light through you,” he said. “I am become the Serpent of Wisdom.”

  And he came writhing towards her, undulating from side to side like some bloated, mottled worm. His eyes rolled back in his head and his tongue flickered between his wet lips.

  Then Violette knew that he had met, at last, one of the threatened fates of those who dared to unveil the Black Goddess.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “DOES ANYONE KNOW HER NAME?”

  Karl watched the steel-fanged mouth of the tiger closing on Stefan’s neck as if in a nightmare, unable to prevent this horror.

  As revenge this is perfect, Karl thought. Kristian himself would have approved. Forcing me to destroy my own friends...

  “We are not cruel,” Rasmila had claimed. In the three daemons’ eyes this was justice, that Karl should be watching Stefan die in the jaws of a metal beast, that Charlotte and Katerina were struggling painfully for life only to face the same doom when their turn came. Meanwhile the angels merely watched and smiled.

  All the time, Karl was aware of the blood-bond linking him to the daemons and to Ben; an open channel to their will. Like a blood-red cord it was tightening. Vibrations travelled through it, becoming images: a veiled woman rising up like a serpent, expressing denial in a voice like thunder. Surrender, pain, grief, release. The cord began to fray. And then the denial again, slashing like a knife-blade.

  “I cannot be Lilith. They lied. Senoy, Sansenoy, Semangelof, I defy you. I will not obey you, now or ever!”

  The cord snapped.

  Karl felt the break deep inside his mind. It was like a sudden violent haemorrhage, then stillness, freedom.

  The angels’ power over him had gone. And, dear God, he knew why.

  He leapt forward, slammed his hand onto the switch that stopped the tiger. It froze, teeth half in Stefan’s neck.

  “Keep still,” said Karl.

  Stefan whispered, very weak, “I am going nowhere, believe me.”

  Karl slid his hands into the hinged mouth and wrenched the lower jaw clean off, leaving broken wires and twisted metal. Stefan collapsed to the ground, a necklace of deep wounds oozing crimson blood - but they’d heal, Karl knew, and Stefan would live. He turned and, with slight shock, saw Niklas on his knees, holding his own throat, sharing Stefan’s pain.

  The intrusion of the Crystal Ring was fading. Ben could not sustain it on his own. He was leaning heavily on the silver swan’s casing, white with exhaustion. Katti was with Andreas, shaking him, hugging him.

  Karl’s gaze swept to Charlotte, and his soul failed. She was face down on the floor, her hair a bronze cloud tangled with dried blood. He saw the corner of the Book beneath her shoulder.

  He started towards her, but Simon, Rasmila and Fyodor gathered to block his path. Their radiance dimmed until they seemed more human than angelic. Clearly aware their power had gone; they looked at each other in consternation.

  “It has failed,” said Rasmila, plucking at Simon’s arm. He seemed dumbstruck, and even Fyodor’s arrogance had vaporised. Karl felt no sympathy at all.

  There was distant scream. Benedict raised his head, exclaimed, “Lancelyn!” and fled the gallery, taking the spiral stairs three at a time. The three envoys started after him, moving, in Karl’s perception, in slow motion. He went to the nearest tripod and seized the brass censer; a bowl two feet across, heavy, with red-hot embers still smoking within. Barely feeling its heat, Karl flung it at Simon. Scattering ash as it spun through the air, it caught Simon’s skull hard and pitched him onto the floor. Karl was already running towards him, seizing the axe from the hooded executioner as he went.

  The weapon was heavy and sharp. God knows for which of us it was intended. He put his foot on Simon’s back, pressing him down; then he swung the axe at the golden-fair neck.

  The blade struck bare tiles. Karl stumbled in the space where Simon had been. An image lingered, a glowing body-shape fading into the Crystal Ring. Glancing up, he saw Rasmila and Fyodor vanishing, black and a white ghosts, frozen in attitudes of flight; now there, now gone.

  He dropped the axe, and ran down the last stretch of the gallery to Charlotte. Lifting her up, he found her hands crabbed around the Book - but she was alive. Her eyelids fluttered heavily and she tried to speak. He began to prise the Book from her.

  “Let it go, Charlotte. Let go!”

  At last he wrenched the tome from her and hurled it away, straight into the smouldering embers from the brazier. Then he fell to his knees, holding her, his face hidden in her hair.

  He stroked her head, felt her skull smooth and whole under his fingers. The injury had healed. Thank God, or whatever powers rule us. Relief flooded him.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “Liebe Gott, I never meant to -”

  “Karl,” she whispered, “Karl, hush. I know it wasn’t your fault. There’s no need to say anything.”

  “I want to kill those who made me hurt you! But what were you doing with the Book?”

  He felt warmth returning to her hands. Her mouth curved with irony. “Trying to stop you.”

  He shook his head. “Oh, love, I doubt it would have worked; I’m sure the angelic envoys were immune, and I was under their control. But it might have killed you.”

  “I don’t think so. I am not guilty enough.” She sighed. “Yet.”

  As he helped her to her feet, she carefully probed the back of her head. Her eyes misted with disbelief. “Oh lord, it’s healed. How wonderful... how horrible.”
She raised her face to his; still lovely, even after she’d come close to death and sprung back to life, as vampires could. “But what happened? Why did the angels leave?”

  “I have some idea,” he said gravely. “Lilith linked their circle of power, and she could choose to break it - which she did. But let us find out.”

  Stefan came to them, one arm around Niklas’s waist. His wounds were healing - more swiftly than Charlotte’s, but he looked deathly. “You believe in leaving things to the very last second, don’t you, Karl? My God, what in hell were you trying to do?”

  “It wasn’t me, Stefan,” Karl said, gripping his shoulder. “Believe me, I’m so sorry; you know I would not hurt you for the world.”

  Stefan nodded, kissed Charlotte’s cheek and leaned his head against hers. There was no need to speak.

  From the far end of the gallery, Katerina called, “Karl? We should go after Benedict.”

  “Yes, we’re coming,” he said, but Stefan shook his head.

  “Not me. I’m not taking Niklas into more danger. What would he do without me? And if I lost him, I should die. I’m sorry if you think me a coward, but I will not take any more risks with his life.”

  “It’s all right, we understand,” said Charlotte. “Can you enter the Ring?”

  “I think so, now those creatures and Benedict have stopped interfering with it. We’ll see you in London. Be careful.”

  Stefan and his twin vanished. Karl sighed, feeling no resentment at their departure. “I doubt there’s any more he can do here anyway,” he said. “Come on.”

  When they reached the main room with its cathedral windows, Lancelyn’s distress streamed to meet them, a tangible miasma. Exchanging a glance, Karl and Charlotte ran to the door on the far side, following Katti and Andrei, all drawn by the pungency of human sweat and terror. Sensory impressions streamed over Karl. The melting reds, greens and blues of the windows; the weight of stone walls, the grim cold atmosphere. He sensed water rushing through hidden caves far below, stillness outside... Two centres of heat that were Ben and Lancelyn. And a silver-purple storm waiting for them...