Silk Over Razor Blades (15 page)

‘
But it wasn’t a gift.’ Mosi’s voice
hardened. His right hand made a fist while the left groped over his
shoulder for hair he’d cut long ago. ‘It was a foul trick, which
Saar has since come to use for good.’

‘
How can power and strength be a
trick? You’re weak, Mosi. Seeking trouble where there is none, to
avoid doing what must be done.’

Saar stood.

The abrupt motion cut short Mosi’s
response and caused Kiya to snap her mouth closed.

He waited, staring at each of them in
turn until he felt their unease prickle down the links between
them.

‘
This is a delicate plan,’ he said
at last. ‘We can’t rush. I’ve had months to consider this but you
haven’t.’ He glanced at Mosi. ‘I expect and welcome your
questions.’ Sensing Kiya’s urge to speak, he raised a hand to
silence her. ‘Dear love, you trust me in all things and I’m
grateful for that. But you’re not a soldier. Yes, I need you in
executing this plan, but I must hear what Mosi has to say on the
matter. His thoughts are valid.’

She slumped in her seat, crossed her
arms and said nothing.

‘
Well?’

Mosi sighed. ‘It’s a bold plan. Much
can go wrong. What if the . . . gift . . . can’t be shared any
further, or the results differ? What if it weakens you? And what of
Antony?’

‘
What of him?’

‘
Will you share the power with him
and the queen? Surely Cleopatra should be first in line to receive
such power. It would make her a formidable force if she could bend
the will of men the way you do when she visits Rome.’

Saar snorted. ‘She has power enough in
that regard.’

‘
Maybe, but physical strength would
protect her. And her children. Octavian has the support of the
Senate and I fear you’re right, war is coming.’

Leaving the cluster of chairs, Saar
walked to the window and looked out over Brucheum.

In the warm golden glow of afternoon
sunlight, he saw the bustle of people in the street far below. In
this, the Greek portion of the city, men and women wore expensive
clothes, shoes and jewellery in bright colours. The road, patterned
with small white and blue tiles, led to the pavilion where three
dancers pranced on a high pedestal to the cheers of those watching.
Small children ran through the crowds, and their laughter reached
even this high window in the palace.

The soft pad of footsteps made him
glance over his shoulder.

He saw Mosi approach and stepped
sideways to make space.

‘
I love them too, Saar. This is my
home. And you— before you, I had no hope or life beyond that in
Gyasi’s whorehouse. You saved me from that and I love you for
it.’

Saar smiled.

‘
I would follow you anywhere. Into
any danger.’

‘
I know.’ He shuddered, aware in
that moment that the link between him and his lover had been
reopened. Through it he felt the warmth of pride, respect and
deep-seated need. He chuckled. ‘Do you have somewhere else to
be?’

‘
No.’

‘
Good.’ He turned then, and gripped
Mosi’s face between his hands. The other man was smaller, almost
feminine, but the hands that closed over his were strong. They
shared a chaste kiss.

Then Saar felt slim, delicate hands
brush across his back and knew Kiya had joined them.

‘
I don’t have to like it,’ she
whispered, ‘but that doesn’t mean I won’t join you.’ With that, her
soft lips picked a path down the middle of his back, following his
spine to the tops of his buttocks. Again she lingered over the
curved birthmark on his left thigh. She kissed it.

He groaned and heard Mosi echo the
sound.

‘
We’ll discuss the rest of my plans
later,’ he whispered, leaning forward for another, far less
innocent kiss.

Neither Kiya nor Mosi raised any
objections.

Lenina stood outside her house,
blinking at the warm glow in the windows through diagonal sheets of
rain. She hugged herself and chewed her bottom lip. Though it bled,
filling her mouth with sweetness, an hour of aimless wandering
served to deaden the taste.

Standing over the body, Lenina
had struggled with what to do next. The rational and law-abiding
side of her demanded that she pull out her mobile and call the
police.

The rest of her, coupled with
the fight or flight reflex successfully keeping humans alive for
millions of years, had other ideas. That part instructed her to
hide the body. Anywhere. Quickly.

She wrestled with it at first.
Guilt and fear crippled her thoughts. Then, on the far side of the
park she saw three strangers hurrying through the rain beneath a
trio of umbrellas.

Risk of discovery made the
decision for her.

Lenina grabbed the woman by the
legs and dragged her across the grass.

Her damp, cold hands struggled
with the dead weight, eventually forcing her to heave the woman on
to her shoulder.

That, by contrast, was easy.
Lenina paused to marvel at her new strength.

She hid the body beyond a
cluster of bushes in a corner of the park, pushing it into a deep
hollow that had once formed a pond. Shielded by evergreen shrubs,
she hoped it wouldn’t be found until she could decide what to
do.

The dog she threw in as an
afterthought.

Now, far from the park and back
on the familiar paving slabs of her own driveway, Lenina stared at
her house and wondered if she could enter.

Was it even her house any more?
Did vampires and murderers deserve to live in beautiful,
semi-detached properties in a quiet corner of the East Midlands?
Did they have fiancés? Could they get married?

She didn’t think so, but
neither did she think she could stay outside any longer.

Locking herself in the
bathroom, she peeled off her wet clothes and left them on the
floor, climbing into the bath to stand under the shower. In a
curious mirroring of the night before, she let the hot water sluice
blood and tears off her face and hands.

Steam filled the room, white
and thick, hiding everything until Lenina felt lost and adrift.

The bandage on her neck flapped
loose, useless against all the water.

She peeled it away, puzzling
over how the events of the day had numbed even physical pain. But
when her hands brushed the skin at the base of her throat she
stopped and scrambled out of the bath.

With shaking hands, she cleared
condensation off the mirror, a long smear across the glass through
which she could see.

The bite marks were gone.

Her skin still dripping, Lenina
perched on the edge of the bath and stared at the floor. Despite
the water all over her body, the insides of her mouth felt as dry
as sand.

It took several minutes, but
eventually she convinced herself to have another look.

The result was unchanged.

The skin of her neck and
shoulder were as smooth as they had been at the beginning of the
week. No teeth marks, no bruising. On her face, the faint scratches
from the park woman’s clawing fingernails were gone too. The only
sign of any mark at all, was a thin red scratch from the point of
Jason’s dagger.

In a distant way she recalled
Saar, the Egyptian soldier from her dreams, telling his men that he
could heal any injury. That he was strong and so too were they.

Lenina sighed. Bit her lip.

No more hiding. No more
stalling. She knew what she had to do.

***

Wrapped once more in her big,
fluffy dressing gown, Lenina took her laptop into the kitchen and
put the kettle on.

Minutes later with a mug of tea
at her side and a search engine opened, she typed
vampire
into the search bar.

The search turned up all the
nonsense she expected. Costumes, fan clubs, films, books and songs.
Fictional characters, poetry, accounts of ‘real life’ vampires and
diseases which had once been mistaken for vampirism. Myths, legends
and fables from America, Eastern Europe and Japan. And pictures. So
many pictures.

Red lips, sharp teeth, bloodied
throats and dark handsome men with pronounced widow’s peaks and
sultry eyes. Then came the more contemporary images: pale teenage
boys with moody stares, floppy hair and glittery skin.

The tea grew cold beside her as
the list of useless websites grew longer.

She jabbed her thumb into her
mouth, gnawing the nail until it split and peeled away between her
teeth. The very act reminded her of the dreams. The dreams in which
her voice deepened, her body grew large and strong and her name was
Saar of Egypt. It seemed ridiculous, but the whole situation
resembled something from the script of a movie anyway. She tugged
the laptop closer and typed:
Sar
.

The search engine suggested
several alternative spellings before she could convince it that she
meant what she typed.

The results list comprised a
miserable selection of unrelated businesses, acronyms and partial
surnames. Sighing, she clicked the first suggested spellings,
Zaar
.

The search engine immediately
flipped to
tsar
and began listing biographies of Russian
rulers from Yuri I and Ivan II to Vasily I. Lenina glared at the
screen and tapped her finger to her mouth, trying to sound through
the name in her head. The accents of her dreams resembled nothing
she knew. Long, lazy sounds with harsh consonants and the
occasional dropped syllable.

Instead, she turned her
thoughts to the people. The soldiers used bronze weapons and wore
leather or straw sandals. Men and women wore coloured paints around
their eyes as well as simple linen skirts on their bottom
halves.

‘Shendyt,’ she murmured.

Egyptian soldier Sar
.
Once more the search engine corrected her:
Saar
.

She skimmed the results list
for several pages until one entry made her pause.

. . . Saar’s love affair with .
. . and of course Cleopatra, as Pharaoh of Egypt was known to . .
.

Her fingers hovered over the
track pad. More than once the man in her dream had mentioned
Cleopatra. Swallowing the lump of unease in her throat, Lenina
clicked the link.

The page opened with ominous
music and a tacky animation of a vampire stereotype leaning over a
comic depiction of the last Pharaoh of Egypt. Cleopatra’s large
eyes and thick black hair were unmistakable, synonymous with the
film made famous by Elizabeth Taylor.

Heartened, Lenina began to
read. Her enthusiasm faded minutes later when she realised that the
site, amateur at best, a joke at worst, contained little fact and
more than its share of speculation and make-believe. Some details
tallied with what she knew of the Ptolemaic period, but the rest
came straight from one lonely source text. A book written by a man
who claimed to be one of the world’s first vampires.

Lenina tangled her fingers in
her hair and tapped her foot against the floor. The author, using
the pen name Xerxes XIV, wrote of his ties to the Ptolemaic
vampires in a book named
The Start of It All, The Birth of The
First of Us
. From the blurb, the book appeared to be a
long-winded biography of one Egyptian soldier who served under
Cleopatra before Octavian’s forces made Egypt part of the Roman
republic. Though crazy and probably a waste of time, Lenina
grudgingly acknowledged that this was her only clue. The website
contained a digital version of the source text, compiled from its
original Coptic and made available to download for a small fee.
There seemed little choice in the matter. Lenina purchased the book
and two minutes later, opened the file.

Saar, heroic and loved by all,
knew that we, men and women blessed by Set, are the true rulers of
this world. He created thousands of god-touched warriors to help
him further Set’s plan to make his followers the most powerful
creatures on the planet.

‘Seriously?’ She rubbed her
eyes and skipped forward a few pages.

But Saar could only work with
the raw material he was given. He could not make worthy god-touched
followers from humans plagued by weakness. So he left his Egyptian
roots and journeyed south, seeking others to bless with his gift.
His search took him across the world to many different peoples,
from Mongolians to Japanese samurai, Aboriginal wild men to
European dignitaries. Saar spent years searching for his ideal
human.

Lenina yawned and skipped back
through the text, waiting for something to catch her attention.
When it did, she froze, gazing at a name she knew incredibly well.
It was followed by another.

Mosi was a great favourite of
Saar’s despite his humble and vulgar beginnings. He wasn’t a
special man, nor a particularly intelligent one, but his grasp of
the Five Powers matched Saar’s like no other. For that reason he
quickly became Saar’s right-hand man, second only to the love of
his life, Kiya.

Rain drummed at the windows,
filling the silence with gentle white nose. The occasional rumble
of thunder came with it and a flash of lightning briefly brightened
the kitchen. Normal things. Natural things. Phenomena she couldn’t
possibly hear or see alongside names plucked straight from her
dreams.

Mosi. The man Saar once loved.
The man he battled on the blood-soaked sands outside Alexandria.
The man who betrayed Saar in the last battle against Octavian’s
men.

Kiya. Dark-haired, long-limbed
and beautiful, she had a sharp tongue and a temper to match. The
same woman Saar wept over as her body crumbled into sand.

Lenina pressed her hands flat
to the table, anchoring herself in the kitchen with the touch of
something solid and real.

A deep breath in. Another one
out. Part of her recoiled from the names written in the book. That
same side of her longed to crawl into bed and hide beneath the
duvet, shutting out all the terrible truths of the last twenty-four
hours. The other part of her crowed with vindication and
relief.