Julia looked from one to the other. “I’ve never been part of a troika.”
Destry smiled. “You should try it sometime. It’s not all it appears.”
Marieko glanced up. “Sometimes it’s less than it appears.”
Above them, on the second floor of Ravenkeep, a curtain moved and an aura flickered. Columbine, having pleaded she needed to rest after the journey to meet the plane, had left the three of them to inspect Dormandu. Instead of resting, however, Columbine now seemed to be spying on the other three, doubtlessly eavesdropping on their conversation to hear if they were talking about her. Julia frowned. “Will she be okay?”
“When you ask will she be okay, I take it the intention is we all go to Scotland together?”
Julia looked surprised. “What else?”
Marieko nodded. “Then she will be okay.” Even Columbine needed an occasional encouragement.
Having been at least partially reassured about Columbine, an idea seemed to come to Julia. “We should take Dormandu with us.”
The suggestion hit Destry like a small bomb. “What?”
Marieko saw the point. “It is an idea. Mobility in the wild.”
Julia smiled sweetly at Destry. “Think about it. That great horse in the Highlands putting the fear into those barbarians.”
Julia had obviously conjured an epic Valkyrie vision in Destry’s mind. “Could we do it? I mean practically?”
“I’m sure it can be worked out. All it takes is money.”
Renquist failed to notice when a cover was discreetly placed over the Bechtstein. That the piano needed protection should have warned him of the carnage to come, but unfortunately, he didn’t make the connection until the entertainment was well in progress. Unprepared as he was, the start of the proceedings gave him a moment’s pause. He had expected advanced degeneracy, and instead, he was presented with a moment of innocence. Two fiddlers and an accordion augmented the quintet, and the eight musicians launched into sprightly traditional dance music. Renquist knew virtually nothing about Scottish folk-dancing so he could not identify the tune, and even if he had, he probably would have been too distracted by the troop of twelve human dancers, six teenage girls and six teenage boys, presumably all from the village, who came running down the stairs, positioned themselves in formation in the open space between the two lower tables, and commenced to dance.
They looked so neat, so innocently practiced and enthusiastic, virginal, and maybe strangest of all, they looked so alike they could have had common parentage. Only one lacked the standard red hair. Spines ramrod
straight, knees high, feet flying, but with united precision, they danced their hearts out for their laird. The boys and girls were dressed identically—kilts to just above the knee and crisp white blouses over juvenile breasts or hairless chests—but with grave faces, beyond all youth, indicating a subconscious knowledge this night was a fulfillment, and therefore an ending, an ending to a life that had been nothing but a single long rehearsal for this moment of diversion for their lord. Renquist knew it wasn’t
Riverdance
, but to his untrained eye, unable to tell a jig from a reel, it seemed a close approximation. Renquist realized the ultimate outcome long before it was even partially revealed; the only real question was how long Fenrior would drag it out. Once again, he seemed to be leading his people with what really amounted to a lordly sense of showmanship. As soon as the Highlanders began to grow restless with the display, the atmosphere in the hall went through a slow but theatrical change. Candles guttered, the flames in the fireplace leaped higher, as if competing with the dancers, and the lights in Fenrior’s Great Hall grew progressively more dim. The dancers’ firelit shadows grew long and sinister, as did those of the Highlanders who watched them intently. The eyes of the massed nosferatu all but glowed in the gloom, but Renquist had to concede the dancers had been superbly trained. Even as the tension built, their expressions of concentration hardly flickered, except for one of the girls, whose eyes were tightly shut. There was, however, no mistaking the bright fear in their auras and the smell of their dread as they anticipated their feudal doom.
To say who made the first move was hard. The bubble of peace and innocence seemed to burst violently and almost all at once. A Highlander on one side of the hall let out something between a bark and a howl, and one on the other side responded with the same sound. Maybe half a dozen rose from their seats and scrambled over tables, closing on the dancers. In an instant, everyone in
the hall seemed to become part of a single snarling pack. Guests even jumped down from the high table. Dancers were screaming. Shaggy Lachlan was gone like a venerable flash. One of the boy dancers tried to flee up the stairs but was brought down by Theda, whose leather dress was already stained with gore. Renquist saw Duncanon rise from the crimson scrimmage for an instant, his mouth, chin, and throat red with blood. Of course, twelve teenagers among sixty or seventy nosferatu was little more than a token; a communion seemed an apt metaphor to Renquist. As an offering to the clan, they were more symbolic that substantial sustenance, and first one, and then another of the serving thralls were dragged to the killing floor, along with the darklost who had been there all along for the clan’s amusement.
It wasn’t that Renquist felt himself above a blood orgy of this kind or that he didn’t feel his own primitive stirrings. Indeed, when he decided to sit out this phase of the feast, he was glad he had very recently been able to feed on Annie Munro. He had no hunger in him, and thus found it easier to resist what a cockney vampire had once called “wallowing in the claret.” His main reason for abstaining was that he felt it was far too early to get that intimate with the rank and file of the Fenrior Clan. To be in that splattered maelstrom of heaving, ripping, grunting, live and undead flesh, fangs and claws, the cries and moans of the still living and momentarily dying, was hardly the place for a less-than-trusted stranger. The clan’s collective blood was quite literally up, and that, coupled with the effects of the microfungi in the whisky, made them highly volatile and unpredictable. Here and there fights were already breaking out between Highlanders disputing the ownership of prey, and Renquist knew, if he were down there, it would be all too simple for Duncanon or one of his crony boys, to use the cover of the bloodletting to thrust an unseen dirk into his heart.
As the Great Hall grew even darker and the blood
flowed over the flagstones, Renquist turned away and noticed he was not the only one sitting out the entertainment. The musicians had backed off into a corner, protecting their instruments from the spray. The human bass player had vanished altogether. Both Fenrior and Gethsemany had also remained in their thrones, but the Craft-maker was either down in the bloody mosh or had wafted away with her coven early in the festivities. Fenrior and Gethsemany watched the happening with an indulgent and almost parental amusement, but when Fenrior saw Renquist looking at him, he rose from the throne and walked along the dais toward him.
“A little barbaric for your taste?”
Renquist gently brushed a drop of blood from his jacket. “I have a limited wardrobe. I didn’t want to ruin this suit.”
“The lads need their fun. It keeps them in line.”
“I can well believe that. You appear to take good care of them.”
Fenrior shrugged. “I bring them into this world. I am responsible for their management.”
“The burden of leadership.”
“You understand?”
“Of course I do. I have a colony of my own. Smaller in number, of course, but I know what’s required at times.”
“There are some European nosferatu who consider us uncivilized.”
“Rest assured, my lord. I am not one of them. I have never been all that enamored of civilization. Too human a concept.”
“If they think its uncivilized now, they should have seen us in the old days.”
“I can imagine.”
Fenrior nodded. “Aye, you probably can. You have the age on you.”
“I saw the Thirty Years’ War. After that I could believe anything.”
“Some of the old lads had to be weaned of eating the flesh.”
“The Native Americans call them wendigo.”
“I called it bloody uncouth, and had it stopped on pain of sunlight. I also put a stop to the spread-eagle.”
“The spread-eagle?”
“Opening the chest and prying the ribs apart like the wings of a bird to drink directly from the heart.”
“It sounds messy.”
Below Renquist and Fenrior, the supply of humans had apparently run out. Some Highlanders were performing their own shuffling dance, while others beat time on the table with the hilts of their swords. A high keening started from throats just slaked with blood, and Renquist wondered what dementia might follow. Fenrior seemed to sense this and gestured to an exit from the hall behind the high table. “Walk with me, Master Renquist. Walk with me a little. The aftermath is never pretty.”
The Range Rover swung into the parking lot of an international chain motel with perhaps forty-five minutes to spare before dawn. They were somewhere south of Newcastle, according to the road atlas. They pulled up in front of the main entrance, and Julia indicated she would get out and check them all in. “There’s no point in the desk clerks getting a good look at all of us. It’ll be far easier to fog their minds if it’s just me. Also I have platinum credit cards in a variety of untraceable names.”
Destry, Marieko, and Columbine waited in the vehicle while Julia went inside. She had changed out of her leather flying suit, replacing it with jeans, a T-shirt dedicated to the rock band Metallica, a flowing canvas duster coat, and a beat-up straw cowboy hat pulled down over her eyes. The original plan, as Julia and Destry had laid it out was to start promptly at sunset and attempt to make it to Scotland by dawn. Julia and Destry had taken over the planning stage of the journey to Castle Fenrior,
while Marieko said little but reserved her doubts, and Columbine complained and made difficulties. Columbine seemed to be increasingly getting on Julia’s nerves. So far, the new arrival had yet to flash her anger, but Marieko could easily read how an eventual confrontation was building, as the difficulties multiplied and the departure time grew later and later. Getting through to Grendl and Bolingbroke and making it clear to the confused thralls that they were expected to maintain and run the house while their mistresses were away, had proved comparatively easy. A company that specialized in the transportation of valuable horses had been recruited to move Dormandu, but outside problems delayed the arrival of the horse box that was to take the stallion to Scotland and eventually to meet the four of them at a prearranged point near to Fenrior. Columbine had also contributed her share of holdups, and indeed, Columbine appeared to be growing quickly and progressively less stable. Her newest drama was a lengthy procrastination about leaving Ravenkeep. “Leave Ravenkeep indefinitely? How can I leave Ravenkeep indefinitely?”
Finally Destry had to snap at her. “Stop being Scarlett O’Hara, and pack the minimum you think you’ll need.”
Another unplanned pause had occurred when a report of the killing of security guards at Morton Downs appeared on the local TV news. A student, Winston Shakespeare, was missing, but it was unclear if the authorities were treating him as a suspect or a mislaid potential victim. Nothing in the story indicated any connection to Ravenkeep or the troika, and no witnesses came forward claiming the perpetrators were a gang of wild vampire Scotsmen. It still seemed a good time, though, to be away from home. Let the thralls confuse any county CID detectives who might happen by to ask questions.
After Julia had been inside the hotel for a full five minutes, Columbine took it as her cue to start complaining. “What’s taking her so long?”
“You know how long it can take to check in anywhere
these days. Computers are inevitably down.”
“And why’s she doing it, anyway?”
“She has the documentation.”
Columbine was being gratuitously petulant, but she was on a roll and seemingly didn’t feel it safe to stop. “We have our own documentation.”
Marieko knew it was pointless to argue with her when a mood of this kind had hold of her, but she argued anyway. “Why use our documentation when she’s willing to use hers? It gives us three an extra degree of separation.”
“I don’t know. She seems to be taking over. I don’t recall putting her in charge.”
Destry had heard enough. “Columbine, get off it. Stop pissing and moaning, or I swear I’ll damage you.”
Marieko continued to appeal to reason. “Victor is, after all, the master of her colony. It’s only natural she should take a proprietary interest. And besides, she’s German.”
“She doesn’t give a tinker’s cuss about Victor, except as a means to an end.”
“Is that what’s really bothering you? It still starts and ends with Victor?”
“No, but—”
Now Marieko reached her limit. “Shut up, Columbine. I swear, if you don’t stop whining, I’ll let it slip to Julia how you sold out Victor to Gallowglass.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Keep up the negativity and find out.”
Destry gestured for them both to stop. Julia was coming back. She opened the door and showed Marieko where to park the Range Rover. “They claimed they were short of rooms because they had some kind of convention booked in. I had to use my high beams on them.”