A Dance in Blood Velvet
Page 52
She stood, hauled open the glass door, and escaped into the dark brown corridor. Katerina followed, sliding the door shut; cutting off the lure. “What is it?”
“I can’t feed on them, I simply can’t.”
“Well, it’s not a good idea, in broad daylight, with witnesses.” Charlotte didn’t bother to explain her real reasons. “Come along, let’s go to the end, out of sight,” Katerina added. “We could get off at the next station, feed, and then continue.”
“I’m glad I’m not alone,” Charlotte said, clasping Katerina’s hand. “I’m glad we made peace at last.”
The corridor swayed and rattled under their feet as they walked past a row of crowded compartments. Sudden darkness fell over the windows, and the train’s noise was sucked to a different pitch as they passed through a tunnel. Daylight returned, but Katerina seemed arrested by shock. The moment passed and she shook herself. “Foolish ever to have argued. Karl can cope with Violette; she’ll calm down soon, I’m sure. There’s nothing to worry about now. You will see.”
Charlotte smiled half-heartedly. She needed reassurance, needed Katerina’s authority and warmth. Torture to recall the anguish in Violette’s face. And what if she hurt Karl? No, don’t think of it. But God, this need for blood...
At the end of the carriage, where the corridor opened into a space for the outside doors, Charlotte leaned against a wooden partition wall and sighed.
“This was a mistake,” she said.
“No, it was an ideal opportunity.” Katerina slid down the window in the right-hand door, leaned out for a moment. Cold air blew in. Then she turned to Charlotte and rested a hand on her shoulder. “It won’t be long now.”
“I can bear it.”
“Were you feeling sorry for yourself, among those mortal passengers? You don’t want to live their drab lives, do you? See how poor they are, how they struggle to maintain their petty respectability. They get ill, their noses run, they eat and excrete and squabble and die. How could you envy them, when you had Karl? And yet you gave him up for Violette. You don’t deserve him.” Katerina’s tone was gentle, more chiding than critical.
Charlotte said softly, “That isn’t fair. I never gave him up.”
“Never mind. Everything will be as it should.” Katerina’s rose-red mouth widened, and Charlotte saw her pupils expanding in the velvet irises. Suddenly they were black drops of blood; demon eyes. Bitter poison oozed at last though her sweetness. “Just the three of us. Karl, and me... and Andrei.”
Katerina lunged, and her fangs stabbed into Charlotte’s neck.
Charlotte went rigid under the deadly grip. She was lightning-struck by betrayal, by her own blindness. Why didn’t I guess? she cried silently. But she’d been lulled by thirst and complacency, so wanting to believe their rivalry was over...
“I thought...” she trailed off. I thought we were friends. Pointless to say it. The weight of Katerina’s body pressed her against the woodwork and the train’s chugging roared in her ears. She was drifting out of her body. Hallucinating. Weirdly, it was almost pleasant. Sensual. Katerina’s victims must fall willingly...
But don’t panic, Charlotte thought, holding herself still. She can’t kill me. There’s only so much blood she can take and it will hurt, but I won’t die. Be strong. It will soon be over.
The spikes slid out of her flesh, leaving two fire-lined holes. Charlotte slumped in Katerina’s arms, confused by the jolting and swaying of the train. She could hear human chatter all along the carriage, each voice distinct yet meaningless. She couldn’t see properly.
“No more pain,” Katerina whispered. Her voice was soothing but her face was blankly malevolent. “You cannot have Karl. You never could have him.”
She turned Charlotte round, gripped her hands behind her back, and began to push her towards the open window.
She saw trees rushing past on the sides of the cutting, telegraph poles, a signal post, all a grey blur in the mist. Her head was spinning. Katerina leaned around Charlotte’s shoulder to look out, then drew back.
“Yes, perfect.”
“What are you doing?”
“You aren’t well,” said Katerina. “Some air.”
Charlotte thought she was trying to throw her off the train. Instead Katti forced her against the door so that her hips were braced painfully against the frame, her head and torso out of the window. She was held in position by the vice of Katerina’s hands. She tried to fight, but the older vampire was too strong.
She saw the tunnel hurtling towards them. There was barely any clearance between the train and the tunnel’s unforgiving stone edge. Her head would be severed in the savage blow of contact.
She hung in a roaring furnace of terror, waiting for impact and darkness. It was like falling. Terror screamed through her like the onward rush into death -
Something happened that was beyond Charlotte’s conscious will. Her head and neck were bending back in an impossible contortion.
The train slammed into the tube of darkness. In the rush of compressed sound, the flicker of gas-lights, she hung with her neck bent back, sooty brickwork racing past the tip of her chin. All that saved her was the survival instinct of vampires. Katerina’s fury was transmitted to her through the spasm of her hands. The train’s noise changed with a rush of air as they emerged into daylight.
Charlotte still could not move. What was Katerina doing now? Sliding an arm around her, fumbling at the outside of the door...
The cutting flattened into an embankment. Charlotte stared down at gravel streaking past. Then the door burst open, and she and Katerina tumbled out onto the ground.
They rolled down a steep slope, carried by their momentum, but Katerina never loosed her hold. Above them, the train went thundering by in a haze of heated metal and steam.
Charlotte’s searing hunger was overlaid by the throb of bruises and jarred bones. Pain on pain. With vengeful black eyes and Medusa hair, Katerina rose over her and began to drag her racked body up the bank, towards the track again.
They were in a thick patch of fog. Charlotte’s sight was dim with blood loss. All she saw was grass, a few straggling bushes, and the railway line. Otherwise, whiteness. She tried to speak, could not even produce a gasp. No strength to breathe. She was a wax taper, broken and hanging limp on its string.
Katerina went on dragging her, relentlessly mechanical. She felt stones abrading her hands and legs. She felt the hard metal rail scraping down her spine, the roughness of sleepers, then another rail. Katerina was hauling her to the adjacent line.
She managed to whisper, “What are you doing?”
“I told you we’d have to wait for another train, dear.” Katerina’s face hovered over hers, hideous and terrifying. “And wait we shall, for as long as it takes.”
She pulled Charlotte to the outside of the other track and shifted her so that her neck was on the rail. She felt cold wet steel on the back of her neck, felt the ground shaking. Not their train racing away, but another coming towards them.
A film unwound in her mind, a frantic melodrama of a heroine tied to the rail by a moustachioed villain. But this was nothing like that. This was a heavy grey nightmare, awash with treachery and loss.
Katerina held her down, mouth curved with a rictus of determination.
“The driver will see us and stop,” Charlotte said faintly.
“No, he won’t, Charlotte. Not in this fog. Humans don’t see as we do. He won’t stop, dear, he won’t.”
The fog thickened around them. Evening was closing in early. The vibration became a rumble, then a dense thunder of wheels and pistons. Charlotte tried to cry out; terror paralysed her throat. She stared up at Katerina, pleading with wide, frozen eyes.
The face that stared back held no compassion. It drank and relished her terror. And suddenly there was a second face alongside it, someone appearing out of the gloom to look over Katerina’s shoulder.
Violette.
For a second Charlotte thought she was imag
ining it. But no, Violette was real. And the two of them were leaning over her, luminously clear and large in her vision.
Oh God, their faces! Demented with hatred, eyes black with lust for her death. The horror tore Charlotte’s mind and soul to rags; that these people who’d appeared so beautiful and civilised, with whom she’d shared understanding deeper than any between mortals - that they could turn on her with such violent loathing when her only sin had been to love...
To love evil.
She wanted to die. With a bitter groan she turned her face aside and waited for the iron wheels...
Amid the earthquake of the train, she became aware of something happening. A struggle was taking place above her. Violette was pulling at Katerina. Then, with a gasp of effort, Violette dragged both Katerina and Charlotte up at the same time.
Charlotte was flung sideways like a doll. Grass and earth spun across her vision. The fight went on in the corner of her eye, but she couldn’t move, could hear nothing but the train thundering past...
For long moments, the ear-splitting reverberation went on. Then it was gone, sucking air and swirls of leaves behind it. And Charlotte saw Katerina lying by the track, Violette crouching over her. Blood made a crimson smear along the rail. And in the train’s wake, Katerina’s head rolled to rest between the sleepers like a ghastly, misshapen football.
Strengthless, Charlotte lay where she was and watched. In disbelief, she saw Violette seize both head and body and drop them over the embankment. And then she came back, seized Charlotte and flung her over the same drop - a near-vertical valley.
Charlotte rolled through close-growing trees, over tree-roots and rocks, and came to rest amid thick undergrowth.
If the train driver stopped the locomotive and came back to look, he would find nothing. But the train did not stop. Silence fell, and Charlotte lay under a blanket of dead leaves in dense woodland.
She had a flashback of the two faces looming over her. To be so despised...
Then Charlotte understood what it meant to be damned. God had not merely forsaken her; God had never existed. There was no Lucifer, no fallen angels, no one to whom she could appeal. Nothing. Why am I still alive? Is Katerina dead, did I dream it? Perhaps I am as near to death as I can be, and I’ll never move again, only lie here forever in this pain...
She thought of the kindly, ordinary people on the train and wept. To be like them, to live blamelessly and then die at the proper time... how could I have ever thought this was better? I was never like them. But I should have tried.
Time passed, an hour at most. Then she saw headlights on a road far below. If a human came by I’d leap for the blood, she thought - but if no one comes, it doesn’t matter.
The car stopped. Figures climbed up through the trees, but she felt no human auras. These were vampires.
Two tall dark shapes. One came to her, caught her up in his arms, kissed her and held her so hard her body ached. It was Karl. The pain was blissful. She tried to speak but she could only laugh and cry.
Then he put his wrist to her mouth. For a moment she didn’t understand what he was doing; she was weak almost beyond feeding. Then she drew his hand to her lips, kissed the palm and the soft inside of his wrist with overwhelming tenderness. And she remembered a time when she had done this for him... saved his life by giving him her blood, even though it might have killed her.
Gently she bit through the flesh. She tried to drink sparingly, to keep the pleasure at bay - but the feeling surged like a sexual flame. She couldn’t hold back. She shuddered and cried as she drank, until he forced her to stop.
He cradled her head and kissed her. At last she could speak.
“How did you find me?”
“Violette came and told us where you were.”
“Did she? She saved me,” Charlotte said, more to herself than to him. She felt Karl’s blood filling her limbs and moved experimentally. As if a scrim had been drawn back, the murky wood now glowed in colour and detail. Haltingly she told him what had happened. “Violette stopped Katerina killing me...”
“I know,” he said gravely. “That’s what she told us.”
“And did you believe her?”
“I do now. I never dreamed Katti would do such a thing. I thought you were safe with her. If Violette hadn’t found you, one more second...”
“I thought Violette had come to help her,” said Charlotte. “The real horror wasn’t in thinking I was going to die; it was their hatred pouring down on me. To be loathed like that, when I’d thought them friends...”
In response, Karl held her tighter. His arms around her felt wonderful. He rested his head on hers, so she could feel his soft hair, his warm breath. A trickle of liquid ran through her hair, down her forehead and cheek, to the corner of her mouth. It tasted of salt and blood. A red-tinged tear.
Karl, weeping? This astonished her as if she had half-forgotten or never fully believed the depth of his love for her... As if she’d known, yet not known.
“I thought I saw Katerina go under the train... did I dream it?”
Karl’s silence was grim. Then he said, “Do you think you could stand up?”
“I’ll try.”
At last, some feeling in her limbs. Her body was slow to heal; her life hung by a spider-thread of energy. Karl helped, and as she rose to her feet she saw, some yards above them through the trees, Andreas sitting by Katerina’s body.
He sat with his knees drawn up, arms folded round them, head bowed. Every contour of him was taut with misery. They were both half-concealed by undergrowth. Ivy, drifts of dead leaves, rotting branches. Charlotte could only see Katerina’s feet, not the mutilated neck.
“Where is Violette now?” she said quietly.
“I don’t know,” said Karl.
“But why did she save me?” Tears again. “Why?”
“I have no answer, beloved.”
Together they climbed up to Andreas. Charlotte was wary of approaching him, certain he’d reject their concern and blame her. But when she placed her hand on his shoulder, he accepted her touch. He looked up with no rancour in his eyes, only grief. Then she saw he was cradling Katerina’s head in his lap.
Karl saw too. He broke down, quietly and without display. He crouched down by Andrei, leaned his head on his friend’s shoulder, and wept.
She couldn’t bear to watch. She turned away, and to her astonishment found Violette standing a few feet away between two tree-trunks. No longer the Dark Goddess, but troubled, pale with tiredness.
“I thought you wanted to murder me, Violette,” said Charlotte.
“So did I.” A brief, humourless smile. “But I was wrong. I was angry with you, that’s all. I should have been angry with myself.”
“Why did you save me?”
“I wanted to kill you; I had some twisted idea that if I did, it would cure me. But when that woman reached you first, and I saw her trying - I felt different. I wanted you to live. I realised I actually couldn’t bear the thought of life without you... You don’t know what I feel for you, Charlotte. You’ll never know.”
Charlotte longed to embrace her, but as she moved, Violette stepped away.
“Don’t,” said the dancer. “You mustn’t make more of this than it is. And don’t thank me for saving you. I won’t hear another word about it. We’re even now, are we not? Go to your friends.”
“Please don’t leave. Wait a moment.”
Charlotte quickly went back to Karl and found him gazing at the head, eyes calm but brooding. She hadn’t forgotten that if the head was intact, the vampire might be brought back to life.
Softly, she asked, “Karl, will you bring her back?”
Katerina’s face was dead grey-white, the purple lips ringed with blue. Congealed blood clustered like garnets on the neck stump. He touched the left temple, tidying strands of Katti’s hair; and even in that awful moment, Charlotte felt a pang of jealousy. She still resented Katerina, even in death.
“Andrei?” Karl said.
Karl rested his hand along the grey cheek. Charlotte’s heart bled for him. Impossible decision. His face was frozen, his eyes dark.
After a long time, he spoke. “No. Let her rest.”
Andreas’s head dropped in despair. Intolerable enough, Charlotte thought, that this had happened; but when there was a chance she could live again, how much harder to face the loss... A thousand emotions rushed through her. Relief, guilt, infinite sympathy for Karl and Andrei, fear...
Choked, she said, “What if it had been me?”
The merest flicker on Karl’s face. “If it had been you,” he said gently, “I would have done anything to bring you back to life. Anything.”
“But you loved her too.”
“Which is more cruel: to leave her dead, or place your life in danger from her again? Yes, I loved her, but never as I love you. You know this, don’t you? Why do you even ask?”
Charlotte nodded, lowering her eyes. Her bitterness faded and vanished. She understood. Karl would never hold Katerina’s death against her, however much grief he felt, because it wasn’t in his nature - and because she had let him make the decision freely.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“We’ll bury Katerina... not in hallowed ground, but in this wood where she can at least return to the earth. Then we’ll go home.”
Charlotte turned to Violette. “You’ll come with us, won’t you? And then return to Salzburg and the ballet.”
“What is there for me, Charlotte?” Violette said dully. “I’m possessed. Whenever the thirst is on me, I become Lilith. Come back with you, for what? To hunt children?”
“To dance,” Charlotte said softly.
Violette tugged at her long hair, smoothing out the tangles. She said, “I fed on Lancelyn because of the way he approached me; without thought for me, without seeing an individual soul in my eyes. Thinking only of himself. His own lust, his own gain, his own fulfilment. If I could have found one man, one woman who came to me in love, thinking of me and not themselves - but there’s no one. I’ll always be alone.”