The Dark Arts of Blood (44 page)

“And I believe you have the strength to do it,” said Fadiya, coming too close again, as if he had not just thrown a blade at her. “Don’t be angry with me, Godric. I said we would help each other, and we have. I am going to give you Karl.”

“How?”

“By taking away everyone who might protect him.”

“I don’t see how or why…”

She laughed. Her eyes darkened, going brown and soft like a doe’s. “You know a vampire when you meet one, don’t you? You know about Karl, and his lady friend Charlotte who is not so ladylike, and the blond twins, and me?”

He nodded, mindful of the pale glow around his hands and his strange new hyperawareness of the world. He would soon be able to see into other dimensions, into people’s
minds
. Gods and goddesses would come at his bidding.

“But did you notice Violette Lenoir?”

Fadiya’s words floored him. Everything changed again.

“
She
is a vampire?”

“She hides it well, doesn’t she? But she’s no ordinary one, Godric. If you reach your new state of power, she would be the
only
one capable of stopping you, I promise. But she won’t be here.”

“Why not? Why do you care about this? Why are you so interested in helping me?”

Fadiya looked up at the ceiling and gave a long, quiet sigh.

“I
don’t
care, Godric. I could not care less about your life or your plans, nor about Karl or anyone else. But you’ll be of great help to me, by keeping Karl occupied.”

“I see.” He felt a small spark of elation. “You keep Violette away from me, and I keep Karl away from you?”

“Exactly so.” She gave a faint smile, as if relieved he’d finally understood. “I wish you luck in your ambitions: use every weapon you find, use everything
as
a weapon. You’re ingenious enough. But all I care about… is Violette.”

* * *

The sea was like blue silk as their ferry left the French coast, sun casting a glorious misty light across the swell. The golden light made Emil nostalgic for his childhood.

Secretly he was terrified of the sea voyage ahead. His fear stemmed from the Atlantic storm, when he’d thought that both he and Violette were going to drown. However, pride would not let him admit his phobia to Fadiya. Instead he pushed all doubt to the back of his mind, not allowing himself to think or feel anything. He trusted his future to her.

The night had been a long ordeal of trains and taxis. He’d slept through part of it, convinced that Fadiya was no longer with him, waking to realise her absence must have been a dream. Now they were sailing towards the North African coast. Too late to turn back.

The voyage would take over a day. In daylight, the sea was calm, idyllic. He basked on deck in the sun, thinking,
I’ve made the right choice. I can be happy with Fadiya. This is the only thing to do.

As night fell, the sea grew choppy under the dark arch of the sky. The ship – far smaller than the great liner on which he’d sailed with the Ballet Lenoir – began to rear and buck, plunging like a raging sea serpent. Waves crashed over the prow, flooding the deck, receding like a foaming tide.

Emil had no idea whether he was awake or dreaming. In a trance he struggled across the treacherous deck, desperate to save Violette from the skull-headed sorcerer, Kastchei. Although he was helpless with terror, the stoical part of his mind drove him on. He was doomed to relive this over and over again. This was his fate. There was nothing to do but accept it and fight on.

This time the white gelatinous apparition of the sorcerer vanished into the storm. And the woman he caught in his arms was not Violette, but Fadiya. Her face was expressionless but her eyes were huge with fear, no longer soft brown but white as bone. He seized her as the ship capsized and flung them both into the abyss.

They were sinking through darkness. He was drowning. Falling, falling. Blackness suffocated him… he couldn’t breathe yet his consciousness persisted. A succubus held him down, like the hag of death, and he felt the last of his life force concentrated in his groin, in a single blunt point of agonising lust…

Fadiya was on top of him, riding him, gasping her ecstasy. Even as he fell backwards into the chasm, he spilled himself into her, as if dying of pleasure. As if sex and death were natural siblings…

Then she bit his throat.

He fought. He was all blind instinct, with no coherent thoughts left. But she held him down like a dead weight and he felt his blood being sucked into the vacuum of her mouth, blood leaving him with every beat of his heart.

His whole world was hot darkness, roaring with the close sound of his pulse and her heavy animal breathing. The roar of the sea was far away, indistinguishable from the rushing sounds in his ears.

She rose above him. A faint glow outlined her body and he saw her head thrown back, her features distorted with savage, triumphant pleasure. Drops of his own blood fell on to his chest from her lips.

And he
saw
.

She was the same as Violette and Charlotte and Karl. She had the same hypnotically seductive, evil glow. They were vampires, demons… and so was Fadiya. How had she concealed it? And he knew she’d done this before, but his memory had blurred the event so that he rationalised it and then forgot…

“I love you, Emil,” she hissed, with blood still trickling from her lips and her eyes glowing a ghastly jade-green in the darkness. “You’re mine forever. No going back.”

He groaned. Horror suffocated him and he had no breath left to cry for help. He lay paralysed beneath her. He went on falling backwards through the dark waves. Down and down, until sleep or unconsciousness claimed him… a black, watery, smothering world full of writhing serpents.

* * *

Stefan’s grief was unbearable to witness. When he went quiet, though – that was when Charlotte became gravely concerned.

She took him upstairs and told him to undress and bathe. He did as she asked, to her relief: she had no intention of manhandling him as if he were a recalcitrant child. The old Stefan would have teased her and made off-colour jokes about the situation. The new one was as blank as Niklas. He gazed into the middle distance without blinking.

While he lay silent, up to his chin in warm water, she tore up a sheet to make bandages. In a way she was treating him as she would a distraught, injured human. She had no idea what else to do.

Searching in the wardrobe for a fresh suit, she couldn’t tell which clothes were his and which were Niklas’s. There was two of everything, identical. She chose a plain outfit: dark-grey suit and waistcoat, white shirt, navy-blue tie.

He didn’t stir from the bath until she called him, ten minutes later, and averted her eyes as she held a towel for him. How pointless it seemed to worry about embarrassment at a time like this. She did so anyway, from ingrained instinct.

As the towel touched his flesh, he winced.

Charlotte led him into the nearby bedroom and made him sit on the bed while she looked at the cuts Reiniger’s gang had made in his flesh. She flinched to see the horrible pattern of slashed lines, each one made with apparent careless anger, yet forming a symbol. A mark of occult significance, she was certain, or at least a coded message. If nothing else, the rune conveyed utter contempt and menace.

Like the stab wound she’d suffered, his cuts were not healing.

“Darling, sit still. I’m going to bandage you to protect the injuries until they start to knit.”

“Do as you wish,” he muttered. “I don’t care.”

“Well, I do.”

Carefully she wrapped the cotton strips around his torso. Stefan was like an image of male perfection from a painting: slim, with just enough muscle not to appear boyish.
I’d cheerfully strangle whoever wantonly disfigured such angelic beauty.

“Who could do such a thing?” she said under her breath. “Someone jealous, perhaps. Or hell-bent on destroying a vampire. But if Reiniger wants to become one of us, that doesn’t fit. So, he was taking revenge, as Karl said. Or – by means we don’t understand – he was intent on stealing your strength.”

“That’s four perfectly good reasons.” Stefan gave a humourless laugh. “How have I survived this long?”

She knotted the bandage and slipped a clean shirt over his shoulders. “Get dressed,” she said.

“What’s the point?” His eyes lost focus again. She controlled an urge to shake him.

“The point is…” She sighed. “Stefan, if we were human I would have brought you a cup of tea or some brandy, I would have called the police and the doctor, but I can’t do any of that. This is the next best thing. Putting on clean clothes may not help, but neither will staggering around covered in blood!”

“You’re right. Nothing will help.”

“Just do as I say.”

Stefan gave a weak grimace and obeyed. In shirt and trousers, he picked up the tie, only to fling it across the room. He threw it so hard that it caught a candlestick, which fell to the floor with a thud. The tie slithered after it like a snake.

“What—?”

“That’s Niklas’s tie!” he rasped. “How could you? I cannot wear that, it’s
his
! I can’t…”

He sat rigid, head bowed, fists pressed to his knees.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Everything looked the same, I couldn’t tell the difference.”

“Well, I can.”

At a loss, Charlotte stood blotting hot tears from her eyes. She groped for the right words, the right gesture to help him… but there was nothing she could say, nothing at all.

She’d thought she knew Stefan. Seeing him now, she realised she did not know him at all.

“I need to be with Niklas,” he said dully.

“Come on, then.” She held out her hand. “Let’s go back down. Stefan, I know what Karl said, but please don’t hold him to blame for this.”

“Charlotte, I don’t blame Karl. But the bastard who killed Niklas – the Devil had better be making a place ready for him in hell.”

* * *

In the lake room, Karl had covered the body with a white quilt and placed a lit candle on the carpet above the crown of his head. He knelt beside Niklas as if keeping vigil.

Stefan went in slowly and knelt on the other side. He looked stricken.

“I hoped I’d find this had all been a dream,” he murmured. “Or a practical joke.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Karl.

Stefan felt under the quilt and took his brother’s hand. “He feels like frozen wax. I think he’d shatter if I struck him. Was he ever truly alive?”

“That’s hard to answer,” Karl said gently. “I still maintain that what Kristian did was evil, and that the
doppelgängers
he made were a crime against nature. Mine was certainly dangerous. Stefan, I had no choice but to destroy it. But one thing I learned, which you already know, is that because they have no intelligence, they are fragile. Our strength and life force emanates from the mind, not the body. How many times have you fled from danger, in order to protect Niklas?”

Stefan nodded, dropped his head. “Every time.”

“He couldn’t even feed without your help,” Karl went on, his voice kind but firm. “I believe that’s why the attack killed him, while you survived. Reiniger probably intended to slaughter you both. I doubt he had any idea that you were so tough and Niklas so delicate. And I suspect that, even if we immersed Niklas in blood for a year, if hundreds of humans perished in that enterprise, it still would not bring him back. Because he is only a copy. He is not
you
.”

Stefan collapsed again, clinging to his twin. Charlotte put her arms around his shoulders, kissing his hair – as if that could make the slightest difference. It was all she could offer.

Karl added, “Of course, if you decide to take his body somewhere secret and do exactly that, I can’t stop you. But I won’t help you.”

Very slowly, Stefan extracted himself from Charlotte’s embrace and sat cross-legged beside her. He rubbed his tears away, heaved a soul-wrenching sigh.

“I’m not going to do that, Karl. I know you’re right. It wouldn’t work. Not because you’ve told me, but because I simply
know
inside that this is the end. Niklas has no life force we can revive, because he had no soul in the first place. Why am I crying? It’s as ridiculous as weeping over my reflection in a mirror.”

Stefan put his head in his hands. Charlotte watched his shoulders shaking, tears dripping between his fingers, and her heart broke.

“We’ll stay with you,” said Karl.

“For how long?” Stefan said, his voice savage but muffled. “How do we plan a funeral for a vampire? A vampire who never even existed?”

“We’ll stay for as long as it takes,” Karl replied.

Charlotte felt a raging thirst for fresh air. The heavy atmosphere of grief and blood was hard to endure. She got up, opened the doors to the veranda and went outside. There she stood gazing across the lake, breathing the sweet air that swept down off the Alpine tundra. Let air into the chalet, until all stale traces of the party were blown away. The bright blue sky and water seemed to mock her.

Nothing would cleanse the scent of Niklas’s blood.

Behind her, she heard the occasional muffled moan from Stefan. The noises he emitted were quiet but full of anguish, like an injury so painful he could barely move.

What now?

Neither Karl nor Stefan would rest until Godric Reiniger paid for this. For that matter, neither would she.

And yet… Karl was right. Godric had a power over vampires that they didn’t understand. And he had a very particular grudge against Karl. Was it really worth risking their lives to challenge him, when the safest option was simply to vanish?

The air stirred. Violette made a startling appearance on the balcony beside her, as if taking shape from a swirl of frost.

Her long fur-lined coat swung about her like a cloak. Beneath it she was in her practice clothes and her pinned-up hair was coming adrift into a tangle. She swung round to Charlotte and gripped her arms.

“Here you are! Thank goodness – why didn’t you come home? Not that it matters, you can go where you like, but I wish I’d found you sooner. Something appalling has happened… Charlotte?”

She stared at Violette, not comprehending why she was so agitated – unless she, too, had heard Stefan’s cry of anguish through the ether.