Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (66 page)

But what about Greece? I’ll bet you can get it in Greece …’

And there it was:
the
question right there on the tip of his tongue, making ready to blurt itself out:
That friend of yours, the one
who brought it back for you? You wouldn’t happen to know where he got it, would you?
Except he mustn’t ask it! Never! Not if he would be his own man again. She came to his rescue, saying: ‘All I knew was that someone had been into my place. I didn’t think of you at first, but wondered if maybe it had been this organization you worked for. Maybe they were checking me out or something.’

For a moment that caught him off guard; he had quite forgotten the story he’d told her about the Branch wanting him to clear up a point or two. But now she’d brought it all back to mind, and since in fact E-Branch knew nothing at all about her: ‘No, B.J., no one’s out to get you,’ he said. ‘Like I told you, the people I worked for aren’t police, and in fact they’re not even remotely interested in you. Not any longer. Nor in me for that matter. And believe me, I really am sorry I caused you so much concern … ”

They finished the rest of the meal in an awkward silence, just mulling things over. But when Harry finally sat back, he sighed and said, ‘You want to know something? I think this is the first time in - God, I don’t know how long! - that I’ve felt relaxed. Your choice of food was just great. And you … are just great, too. Wrong-headed, maybe, but great. And anyway, who am I to talk?’

‘Who indeed?’ she said, something like his Ma might, but with an entirely different feel to it. ‘Was that a compliment?’

Harry laughed and rubbed his chin. ‘I’m not sure,’ he answered, ‘but it felt like a whole series of them!’

‘Your best line? Your idea of chatting me up? Seduction, even? To tel me that I’m great despite that I’m wrong-headed? Well, I have to say I’ve heard better!’ The way she said ‘Well,’ it really did sound like his Ma.

The idea of red wine was now rapidly receding in the Necroscope’s mind. B.J. had spoken several key words - words that had nothing to do with previous post-hypnotic commands - which Harry had picked up on. And now he realized what else he’d been missing in the last eighteen months, other than his own body.

Taking up the used plates and cutlery, and fumbling it a little, he said, ‘Do you feel cold? Is it cold in here?’ There had been a fire laid in his open fireplace ever since he moved in, but the Necroscope hadn’t felt the need to light it. Normaly he didn’t like it too warm, and perhaps surprisingly the house’s oil-fired central-heating system was working very wel.

She had seen his eyes rove over the hearth and had perhaps read something of what was on his mind. ‘A little chily, yes.’

‘Then toss a match on the fire while I wash up.’

‘Al right,’ she said. ‘And … I’d like to wash up, too.’

‘Ummm?’

The bathroom, is—?’

‘Off the landing, upstairs,’ he answered. “The shower is … very good.”

‘But I bet your bedroom’s a mess, right?’ The direct way was usualy the best and easiest. Even so, B.J. was surprised to find herself breathing a shade too fast.

‘Actualy, no,’ Harry answered, his voice a little husky. ‘No, it’s … prety tidy. I, er, tidied it?’ He paused in the doorway and looked back to where she was standing by the fireplace. Their eyes locked, and for a moment it was like it had been in her barroom. There was this magnetism, which had nothing to do with the art of beguilement… or on the other hand, it was that entirely natural, mutual beguilement, the electric moment, when a man and woman know that it’s going to happen.

‘But now that the fire’s lit,’ she tore her eyes from his, struck a match and tossed it onto a base of crumpled newspaper and kindling, ‘I think I would be just as comfortable … down here?’

And beginning to burn as quickly as the fire, and just as hot, Harry husked, Then after you’ve showered, bring down the quilt and soft top blanket from my bed.’

Then he was off to the kitchen, and B.J. licked her lips. The dog-Lord was right: there were other ways, beter ways, to enthral a man. With the lights off and the curtains drawn, in the red glow of the fire, it would be just like a warm, secret cave in here.

Yes, it would be just like a lair …

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V

ONE OF THE OTHER WAYS.

TRUTHS, HALF-TRUTHS, AND DAMNED

LIES

It was two a.m. before Harry fell asleep in her arms, but the night time was B.J.’s time and she didn’t feel the need. She needed, oh yes, but not sleep. And as the time crept inexorably closer to the full of the moon, that need was ever more insistent. But she had long since learned to deny herself, so that Harry was never in any real danger. Especially Harry, who impressed her more and more as the Mysterious One, Radu’s ‘Man With Two Faces.’

Well, his ways weren’t quite so mysterious now. One facet at least had revealed itself to her. And in his way, he had initiated it. Shy to begin with (scarcely a Don Juan!), his prowess had improved with experimentation. And, unlike most men the first time they are with a woman, Harry had felt driven to satisfy her; he’d quickly discovered her preference.

A moon child, with that of the wolf - a great deal of the wolf - in her, B.J. had ‘submitted.’ And with her breasts flattened to the soft blanket, and her face turned to the red glow of the fire, she’d felt the delicious thrusting, the hammering home of Harry’s turgid flesh in the heart of her womanhood. Oh, he had gone without for … a
long
time, that much was obvious. But so had she, and could take al that he could give. Yet despite the fact that she sucked on him desperately with her sex, still he had held back until he first felt
her
shuddering, and heard
her
moaning, before firing into her his long, hot bursts. And Bonnie Jean Mirlu had never felt so well satisfied. Not in that respect, anyway.

For him, their sex was a jammed floodgate finally opened. Pouring himself into her, the rest of his pain - his grief? -and all of his anxieties and frustrations were temporarily suspended. Time itself seemed suspended, in the oblivion of those briefly blazing seconds as B.J.’s sugar, the searing and singing of her flesh, saturated his psyche and melted in his mind. And the second time he came, such was B.J.’s pleasure that as they disengaged she turned him on his back and kept

his shaft moist and throbbing in the soft sleeve of her mouth … until he was ready again.

But throughout she had been aware of the danger, and mindful of Radu’s warning: ‘Be sure - be absolutely
sure -
that if he gets into you, nothing of you, of us, gets into him!’

Of course not, for he wanted Harry for himself, to use … however he would use him. He wanted him pure, human. At first, anyway. As for Radu’s purpose with Harry:

B.J. knew of it (the dog-Lord had explained something of it, at least) but for the moment did not want to think about it. For the moment she wanted only to lie here, warm and drowsy, with Harry’s arm draped over her and his sleeping, no longer intense but oddly innocent face resting against the resilience of her breasts, and her thigh between his legs where his rod, all flaccid now, twitched occasionally, perhaps from the ‘memory’ of its mounting. For while he had pleasured her with his body, it had not stopped there: he now pleasured her with his presence. Yes, she …
liked
being there with him! And it was also a curiously pleasant thought that he’d shot his seed into her - despite that she had been obliged to kil it.

Contraception? Pills and plastic and senses-stifling rubber? Unnecessary. Her body, her system, was its own protection. There was that in her blood - the same alien essence that defended her against Man’s common ailments, time’s deterioration, and even physical injuries - that would not allow of the invasion of his sperm. B.J. need only call on it, think it into being, and her system would, or had, responded to destroy all of Harry’s myriad squirming tadpoles of generation.

It had taken but a thought, a command issued from B.J. ‘s mind to her own innermost organs and tissues, to the immature leech which she even felt growing within her despite that her Master had denied it:

Other than you, there is that in me which is alive. I do not wish it. Cleanse me of this infestation. So be it.
And it was done.

Except the other way was much harder: to keep that alien essence to herself, and not transmit it, or allow it to transmit itself, into her partner. She wanted him enthralled in the one sense, but not as a true thrall in the other. B.J.

herself,
she
might have wanted him so, but the dog-Lord did not. No, for Radu wanted him for himself. Again, it seemed a contradiction:

That her Master would insist she was
not
Wamphyri, but at the same time worry about her passing on anything to Harry, to his Mysterious One. Herself a thrall
(if
that was all she was), B.J. ‘s bite would make him a moon child - aye, to be stricken by the moon at its ful, and held in awe of unnatural urges - but never a true wolfling. Only by transfusion of Radu’s blood, his saliva, his sperm, his essence, could that be accomplished. Or by his leech or its vampire egg. But surely, during all the years that B.J. had served him, sufficient of her Master must have

Brian Lumley

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348

found its way into her? No, not so; Radu had it that the giving was a one-way thing; B.J. got nothing back …

Oh, really? Then why was it that she always felt - what, an electric
connection?
An inner awareness, anyway - as Radu’s funnel filed and he began to consume her life’s blood? Bonnie Jean knew why, or supposed she knew. But she scarcely dared to admit it, not even to herself. For if she was wrong …

How great his wrath, to discover that she had somehow imagined herself magically endowed - indeed Wamphyri -without that he had engineered it!

Well, he need not worry, for it was not her intention to make a vampire, a wolf, or any other creature out of Harry. It
was
her intention to obey her Master and eventually have him up out of his resin grave; for as much as Bonnie Jean had been the dog-Lord’s champion, she sensed the day coming when he must be hers. The Drakuls and Ferenczys and their thralls were abroad in the world; as yet B.J. was more woman than composite creature; Radu
must
survive, at least until she had learned al she could from him, and with that knowledge became more capable of managing, of engineering …

her own … dynasty?

And so it was out in the open at last, in the open of her consciousness, her self-understanding, at least. Not treachery, but survival! Her own survival. More proof - and possibly the best yet - that she was or would soon be what she’d suspected for the last forty years at least: Wamphyri! So for now, Radu would continue to be her Master, and his word law.

And until he was up again, and for as long as the Drakuls and Ferenczys were a threat, she would suppress it as best she could; and as he had used her she would now use others, and so prepare her own way in the world.

As for the dog-Lord’s plans for Harry - his so-called Mysterious One, his ‘Man With two Faces,’ - B.J. could now look at those in a different light, from Radu’s point of view. For what he would do now, she herself might yet be obliged to attempt in some far-distant future time …

Radu had not gone down into the resin of his own volition. Not entirely. He had thought that he sickened; he had believed that the Black Death held
him
in thrall, and knew from experience that he could not beat it. With his own eyes he had seen his pups develop those hideous black pustules, and die. He
had felt
the disease inside him, and knew the struggle his essence put up against it, in vain. And he’d cursed his leech for its weakness, its idle inefficiency, that it could not combat the creep of this insidious thing.

But the 1340s was a decade not only of plague but of famine and unrest. Simple movement throughout Europe had been the most difficult thing in its own right. Even a rich Boyar’s entourage, fleeing before the all-devouring scourge from the east, could scarcely expect to

find it an easy passage. Radu had got into a fight, suffered a sword thrust in his side. Normally his vampire leech could easily handle, quickly heal a simple wound. But his parasite was already battling the plague within Radu’s system; a fight it couldn’t hope to win, not as long as he was up and about, engaging in other activities.

He had hated it, but there was no other solution. So that finally, in Scotland in 1350, the dog-Lord’s long-laid contingency plan for continuity must be brought into being. The pack had built him a makeshift lair in unexplored mountain heights, and Radu had gone down into the resin.

A drastic solution, perhaps, but this was what he’d seen in precognitive dreams: that he
must
go down for long and long - six hundred years and more - and rise up in a future world, even in another body! Metempsychosis: the passing of his Being and Personality into the body of another. Moreover, he had long dreamed of this Mysterious One, who would be there at his awakening; and of himself as the avenger out of time, destroyer of his olden enemies, burning bright as a star in the final hour of his triumph!

With these things in mind it had been easier to submit to the sarcophagus of soft, suffocating resin. The wine of desert-bred wizards had helped; the coma it induced had been like unto death itself, but in fact was the dawn of a radically extended undeath. And immobile in his state of suspended animation in a gluey grave in the Cairngorms lair, he had commenced to dream.

And now that Radu was no longer active, consuming energy and making demands on his leech, his vampire could concentrate on its real battle, directing all of its efforts to combat the virus raging in the dog-Lord’s heart. Just how that battle had gone … who could say? Radu slept; and even when his mind was awake, still in a way it was detached from his body. He would not know he was a whole man again until the two came together, which would be on the day when B.J. melted away the resin and set him free.