Renquist stepped through the gate and a concentric flicker of blue fire momentarily surrounded him but quickly faded and died. Had those inside been alerted, or had the paranormal warning been of too brief a duration? He couldn’t be sure if his surprise was spoiled, but he pressed on. Directly, he was through the gates; he stepped off the driveway and walked on the grass verge so his footsteps made no sound. At the same time, he damped down his aura, embracing it so tightly it hardly showed. After centuries of practice, he could all but make himself invisible even to his own kind.
“Did something cross the threshold?”
Marieko and Columbine stood very still focusing all their concentration. “Nothing as large as a car. We would have heard a car.”
Destry went to the window and parted the thick velvet drapes, just a small six-inch gap that allowed her to see outside. “There’s nothing. No car coming up the drive.”
“An aura?”
“Not that I can detect. I suppose someone could have walked through the gates, but I can’t see or sense them.”
“Victor Renquist wouldn’t have walked here.”
The troika had convened in the large drawing room, where all had been made ready for Renquist’s arrival. The spacious room with its beamed ceiling, paneled walls, and thick Persian carpets covering the stained oak floor had originally been the banqueting hall when Ravenkeep
was the stronghold of the le Corbeau family, and legends recounted how the degenerate Jerome had used it for a wide variety of diverting indoor atrocities. Later, in its ecclesiastical days, it was the Priory’s refectory. After that it had returned to being a banqueting hall, albeit more jovial and Elizabethan in style, and then, finally, Enoch Jarman had attempted and largely failed to turn it into a formal Victorian drawing room. Like Ravenkeep itself, the room was an ill-matched conglomeration of architectural confusion, with an overall impression of an uneven and piecemeal lack of coherent design, and this was not improved by the varied furnishings, objets d’art, and general nosferatu clutter that had accumulated over the years the troika had been in residence. The three females possessed far from kindred tastes, and Destry’s fondness for bold functional starkness clashed wildly with Columbine’s partiality to frill and flounce that, in turn, fought with Marieko’s precise oriental exquisitry.
In anticipation of Renquist, and under Marieko’s supervision, the careful placing of candles and muted electric light had transformed the drawing room into a place of comfortable shadows, disguising the worst of the clutter and the most glaring clashes of discrimination. A roaring fire of aromatic pine logs blazed in the smoke-blackened Elizabethan redbrick fireplace and lent it a sense of venerable security. Not wishing to allow Marieko credit for the entire planning of the environment, Columbine had ordered that one of her most singular and prized works of art, the second, secret version of Philip Burne-Jones’s painting
A Vampire
be hung prominently over the fireplace. The well-known public version of the work had caused enough of a scandal when first exhibited in 1897 for depicting a malevolent, nosferatu-style female figure crouched over the body of the dead or dying painter. Since the vampiress was unmistakably the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (the woman seemed to be everywhere at the turn of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries) all of smart London assumed it was Burne-Jones’s creative revenge for being discarded by Campbell in favor of the sensual attentions of the noted Shakespearean actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson. What few of the capital’s smart set knew, however, was that Burne-Jones had completed a second painting of almost identical composition, only this obscure version had Mrs. Campbell rendered revealingly naked, and the discreet blood in the original was, in the second and more vitriolic work, both explicit and lurid. Columbine had acquired the painting from a decidedly devious source shortly after Peregrin, her human husband, had died, and she hoped Renquist would be at least marginally impressed by its unique and slanderous novelty.
Not that the troika, at this particular moment, entertained any thoughts about late Pre-Raphaelite art. The painting was simply a background to the current concern. The built-in and natural nosferatu alarms had sounded, and the three females wanted to know why. Destry was convinced something had crossed the demarcation line at the gate, and yet no intruder could be discerned on the grounds of Ravenkeep. The inexplicable frustration of the situation was a source of tension and even over-the-shoulder apprehension. Columbine, Marieko, and Destry had prepared long and hard for the arrival of Victor Renquist, and now, at what had to be the very last moment, a mysterious and unnerving strangeness was insinuating its way into their plans. Columbine, with a certain level of denial, searched for an answer in the realm of the mundane. “It could have just been an animal, a fox or a badger.”
Destry continued to peer through the curtains. “I don’t know. Maybe I should go outside and scan more thoroughly.”
Marieko all but snapped. “Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because if Renquist is out there, it will only give the
impression we’re anxious, even afraid of him.”
“But I am anxious.” Destry wasn’t ashamed to admit it when something disturbed her.
“And you want him to know that?”
“Of course not.”
Columbine sided with Marieko. “So come away from the window”
Destry didn’t move. “I want to see if there’s anything out there.”
“You have a mind don’t you? You don’t have to use your eyes all the time. I mean, Destry, you’re not a human.”
Although it might well have changed a little in nearly sixty years, Renquist had once been intimately familiar with the layout of both the house and grounds of Ravenkeep Priory. Indeed, he had known them like the back of his hand in those wartime years when he’d been charged to silently observe de Richleau and ensure his team did nothing to threaten the well-being and survival of the undead in their occult assault on Nazism. The trees, in early autumn, still retaining their leaves, seemed taller and more lush than he remembered them, but that was fully to be expected over the course of some sixty years. Also some trees he thought he recalled appeared to be missing. Either, he guessed, felled, uprooted in storms, or fallen victim to the epidemic of Dutch elm disease that had destroyed so many magnificent trees a quarter of a century earlier. He was both surprised and gratified by how easily the details returned to mind and fitted into place like a self-arranging mental jigsaw. In the distance, to his left, he could see the sinister and crassly ugly Winged Victory statue, erected by Enoch Jarman in apparent celebration of warfare and the profits it generated, and beyond it, Renquist hoped, the geometrically formal rose garden still survived. When the famous Jarman rose collection was in bloom, even at night, the scent was all but intoxicating. To his right
stood the decorative pointlessness of the folly, a Greco-Roman faux ruin, constructed during the eighteenth century when such things were all the rage, atop its own man-made grassy knoll, positioned to overlook the great lawn running down to the equally man-made lake.
A part of Renquist rather envied Columbine and her companions such a historic and imposing residence. His own colony’s dwellings in New York and Los Angeles were both relatively humble in comparison to the monumental estate. The nosferatu realist, on the other hand, was well aware such reckless ostentation could be both a dead weight and a dangerous encumbrance. Places like Ravenkeep could be hard to leave. They created attachments of place and property that, like invisible shackles, could cause one to hesitate in a fatal moment when to flee and not look back was the only difference between continued immortality and oblivious destruction. Maybe in England, where humans still clung doggedly to an outmoded sense of class, such behavior might remain possible for a few more years, perhaps even a few more decades. Sooner or later, though, egalitarianism would come in one form or another and, with it, the dangerous curiosity of those who believed all were equal. Common sense alone dictated the avoidance of human curiosity should be a primary nosferatu motivation.
Renquist was surprised at the lack of precautions the Dashwood troika took to ensure their safety and anonymity. Once he had entered the gates, he had deemed it unwise to simply walk up the driveway to the front door. He had made a turn and followed the boundary wall for maybe twenty or thirty paces, on the lookout for the kind of silent, high-tech laser traps and buried, pressure-sensitive alarms he had ordered installed in the Residence in Los Angeles. Renquist knew he tended to be a trifle excessive in these things, not to mention the American love of gadgetry, but the total absence of any protection could only be judged a dangerous laxity. In all his searching, he detected nothing more than a sprung
and rusted steel mantrap clearly set to catch Victorian poachers rather than any contemporary vampire hunter. Did Columbine really believe English cultural reserves would keep her. out of harm’s way forever, or had he been living too long in the USA with its left-over pioneer fetish for protecting home and hearth? Perhaps, but these women still seemed nonchalant to the point of negligence.
With no apparent technology to impede or give him away, Renquist headed for the house, but still by a deceptively circuitous course. His hoped-for objective was to enter the main building undetected and then appear among them, taking them completely by surprise, aura blazing in the most overwhelming display of psychic fireworks he could muster—and Renquist prided himself, with his infinitely varied experience, on being rather an expert at psychic fireworks. To this end, he skirted the trees that edged the smaller lawn at the front of the house. A red vixen, about her nocturnal fox-business, started at his approach and made off with almost as much stealth as Renquist himself. Moving from shadow to shadow and tree to tree, he could feel the soft vibrations of other nosferatu attempting to detect him, but he had his mind well enough concealed to know he was unobserved. The blue fire must have made the three females aware something had entered the gates, and now they were attempting to locate and identify that something. So far, they’d failed to nail him. He risked a momentary scan of his own, and immediately located three very undisguised and excited auras, gathered in what, if memory continued to serve, was the large drawing room of the house—the same imposing room with the dominating brick fireplace where de Richleau and his gang had brainstormed and strategized.
Animal auras were also visible way over on the other side of the rambling and haphazard structure. The stables; how fluently it all came back to him. Four horses and a half dozen hayloft cats. The well-fed and sleepy
equine vibrations from three of the horses were completely unremarkable, but the fourth was something else entirely. A trace of hellish crimson in that horse’s mind told him that it was a breed apart, an extreme rarity, one of a bloodline that he’d assumed had been extinct at least since the Great Slaughter of 1919, when countless nosferatu had perished in the aftermath of the Great War—and, along with them, a proud breed of arrogant chargers exclusive to the undead. This horse had night vision and a strange fire in its soul. It was undoubtedly from the original line created and bred by Pathan Gash (the Merciless and Eternal) in his Uzbek stronghold, where not even Timur the Lame dared interfere. The legendary butcher, also known as Tamerlane, may have sacked Delhi and taken Samarkand as his own, but he knew better than to mess with the undead Pathan Gash, and, for two uninterrupted centuries, his mares and stallions were supremely prized, and nosferatu horse traders with their gypsy thralls could name their own price for such animals.
Once upon a time, the huge black horses, with their unflagging strength and strange inbred affinity for the undead, had been ridden by nosferatu as far north as the Mongol steppes, all the way down through Persia to Turkey, and back up into the Balkans. Renquist had straddled a charger from the same bloodline in actions against the Turks, when he’d led a company of night-riding boyars, human but savage to the point of insanity, who tied red ribbons to the blades of their sabers and felt honor-bound to hack to death any one of their number who came out of a fight, or even a minor skirmish, with his ribbon intact.
The horse in the Ravenkeep stable was both magnificent and unique, and Renquist was at a loss to know how these females might have obtained such a treasure. It clearly would not do to underestimate their potential resources. If they could get their cold white hands on a beast like this, they were well connected and highly capable.
Also he had to see the horse. Let the women wait. He turned and made his way to the stables. He knew it wasn’t a wise move, but he simply couldn’t resist. Victor Renquist was rarely tempted to self-indulgence, but this was one time when he refused to deny himself. Entering the stable was like stepping back centuries, especially since his too-long sojourn in Los Angeles. The smell was the first thing that enveloped him—a unique blending of hay and leather, manure, saddle soap, wood varnish, and neat’s-foot oil, but above all, the multitude of breathing secretions from the horses themselves. The bricks on which his boots made no sound must have been swabbed a hundred thousand times down the years. The oak beams above him that tied together roof and walls had been the roost of countless generations of pigeons and was coated with an almost geological patina of their droppings. Sleepy birds ruffled their feathers, and some even opened their eyes and blinked as he walked silently below, past the orderly tack room and the rows of stalls and loose boxes, but no pigeon cooed or fluttered in panic. Renquist was no threat to them. One horse whickered uneasily, but he quelled it with a thought. It was not the one he’d come to see. That masterpiece of horseflesh stood and regarded him through the half-barred door to the wide stall at the end of the row.