The man whirled with an exclamation, but the warm smile that met his sharp eyes startled him into silence. The group halted, hovering, wondering.
“What are you doing out alone, Fräulein?” the man asked. “And what do you mean by stopping us when we are about official business?”
“What sort of official business requires women and children to be marched away with guns, under cover of darkness?” Her voice was sweet, but insistent. The man scowled. The girl may be a beautiful, perfect Aryan, but she was treading on forbidden territory.
“You had best get home, Fräulein, and learn not to ask questions.”
He made to move, but her hand was a vise around his wrist.
“I like questions. And I like answers even more.”
He looked right into her eyes and spoke robotically.
“They have been agitating, breaking laws, as though all our work at Nuremberg was up for dispute. They are to be made examples.”
He didn't notice his hand was losing circulation.
“The children, too?”
“Bad blood runs in families.”
The small group of Jews was too stunned even to gasp as the two
officers fell. Blood flowed into the gutter. Supremely unconcerned, the girl handed the guns to the one man who seemed to sense what she might be. She spoke low and authoritatively.
“Go. Get to a train, go, and don't look back.”
They obeyed, but even as they disappeared, Brigit was struck by the new scent they emitted. They were the walking dead. She'd achieved nothing, except perhaps a small pocket of time for them to head more certainly toward their end. As she dragged the bodies to a nearby incinerator, she had a sense of herself and the other four vampires, gigantic, linking arms to block the relentless march of the Nazis ⦠and being mowed right down. Not easily, perhaps, but inevitably. Even still, she'd never wanted to fight and protect and win in the human world so hungrily. This had all become bigger than herself, than all the vampires, and she was so livid, she thought at that moment she could reach her claws to the German borders and rip the entire land asunder.
Brigit turned the corner and heard the carrying cry of a man. A nighttime rally was under way inside what had been a small, pretty theater. The demon raised its head hopefully, sniffing the air. The man was screaming, a would-be Hitler, assigned to keep the men in the district enthusiastic and on edge. To remind them who they were, and what it meant to be the master race. Men. Men who were being primed for more action. Nothing innocent there. The demon sang and slithered up through her, a cobra dancing to a charmer's music. Now Brigit smiled in earnest.
Yes, my darling demon, I will sate you.
She crept inside. There was one bored guard posted at the door and as he started to order her off, she snapped his neck with a brisk gesture. A giggle swelled inside her, but she held it down, happily ripping off the guard's arms to wedge inside the handles of the double doors, bolting them from the inside.
Reconnaissance, girl, there is a stage door, too.
First, she checked the windows in the cloakrooms. Two men were smoking in the lavatory. They looked around at her in mild surprise, and this time she couldn't help laughing when, after slamming one man's head through the other's throat, the expressions were still frozen on their faces. One was clinging to life, and she pulled off his legs to bar the window. That finished him.
Pausing only to enjoy the scent of warm, oozing blood, she hissed an old enchantment that kept her from being noticed and used her blinding speed to glide through the theater, counting the attendees, assessing the possibilities as she slipped backstage. Two SS flunkies were there, waiting for the orator to finish so they could go home to late suppers. They looked up at her and one started to speak, but she grinned and slammed fully extended claws into both their faces, piercing eyes and brains.
“You haven't seen me.”
Their heads snapped off easily and she chortled. This was fun. She helped herself to their guns, uninterested in weapons, but figuring a bit of change and surprise would be a treat for her audience.
Listening to the orator venting his spleen, screaming about the inhumanity of the Jews and how their human-looking skins concealed ratlike bodies, encouraged her to rip open one of the men and pull out his intestines to use for tying the door shut. She was sorry she hadn't kept him alive to enjoy that, but she'd compensate. She'd compensate.
You've been very good, my beloved demon. You deserve treats.
The necessary prep work accomplished, she hovered at the pass door to look at the audience more closely. They were mostly young, but many were middle-aged and tired-looking. Probably they felt they had to be there; it would look as though they were apathetic or worse if they didn't show their faces at these gatherings. Brigit was disgusted that not a one of them dared say a word against all that they knew was happening, and would continue to happen. She knew there were some who didn't completely approve, and their willingness to bow their heads and simply go as the wind blew roused the demon yet further.
Two well-trained Nachtspeere were near the front, and this unsettled her. It seemed they were everywhere now. Residuals from the business with General von Kassell and the train, she supposed. The Nazis didn't really believe vampires had returned to the Continent, but no precaution was being spared. Besides, the Reich had put a lot of effort into training its hunters. Some had been promoted, were being moved into more active ranks. Others were held in reserve until Britain and Russia were Nazi territory and their vampires thus ripe for the picking. In the meantime, they wanted to feel that they were still useful. Which these two were not, or not
against her. Their weapons could kill only the youngest vampires. They were no threat.
There were upward of two hundred men in attendance. That was a lot, more than she'd tackled in a long time. In fact, the last time she'd taken on so many was with Eamon, fighting for the Yorkists in the War of the Roses. Though York had turned on him as a human, he still loved the city, and the two of them had been brutal as its loyal soldiers. However, she hadn't been a millennial then. The power that she was feeling now was exhilarating. What she was about to do was something only a millennial could do with the grace and completeness she knew she would achieve. This was going to be easy. So, so easy.
She drifted to the back and bent over a man sitting in the last row. She snapped his neck and watched him slump forward, so that his companion nudged him.
“Come on, look alive.”
She bit her palm so that she didn't laugh out loud. Not yet. Her blood was so high, she wanted to scream in ecstasy. She closed her eyes and threw back her head, letting the rush wash over her, regrouping, allowing the heat to give her even more strength.
Three more bodies, still quick, still quiet, each death filling her with erotic giddiness, anticipating that moment, that sweet moment of realization.
The scream.
She had stopped to eat, and looked up from a still-pulsing neck, her fangs at full extension, the tips bloody. Blood stained her plump lips. Her eyes were red, bulging, dripping with delighted malice. Swollen veins bursting from under her skin. Even her curls straightening and rising up from the roots, drunk with energy. That was what the man saw. That, and the livid smile, the talons that had burst through the long fingers and reached for him, snapping his spine as a neat coda to the scream.
And now the wave upon wave of screams, the beautiful chorus, operatic in its heft. She felt as if she were growing taller on its glorious noise, on that rhythmic chaos.
It was a gorgeous, thundering, orgasmic laugh that tore out of her when they rushed for the doors, the stronger crushing the weak in their fearâyes, here was all their great ideal of brotherhood and standing
togetherâthe specter of death showing that the basest desires of humanity would always prevail in the end.
When the doors proved impenetrable, so many of them ran up the disused wooden stairs to the light booth that the stairs collapsed, landing them in an absurd heap of limbs and cries. They retreated to the walls, scrabbling at them, screaming for someone to draw a weapon, to kill the beast. Brigit laughed harder, sank a finger into the forehead of the man nearest her and ran it all the way down through to his testicles, which burst through his trousers with amusing ease. He wriggled, still alive, and she picked him up and wrung him like a rag, sending vertebrae popping into the air like corks.
The screams turned into moans and many men looked to the orator, fruitlessly hoping that he might be able to summon some help, there must be help to be had. Whatever this was that had come unto them, it couldn't be real. It could not be something that the mighty Reich could not control.
The orator stood frozen, swaying slightly, as though trying to decide if he'd fallen into some hideous nightmare. Brigit liked that. Men who want to make living nightmares for others should know one of their own. He was only a foot soldier, true, but she was still saving him for the very end. She wanted him to be nothing but fear.
Jerking into action like a rusty biplane, one of the Nachtspeere seemed to remember what he was supposed to be. He snatched the small crossbow from its holster at his hip and aimed with more care than she might have expected, given he was gray and trembling. He fired, and Brigit caught the sharp little stake with its spear-like tip and rolled it between her palms, sending a sprinkle of wood dust to the floor.
Without seeming to have moved, she was upon him, her hand on his chest.
“Didn't any of your training suggest that such a thing might happen? Don't you know how to fight? Or were you absent the day they went over secondary tactics?”
He gulped. She tugged him with a force that pulled his body closer and sent his head flying across the room.
The other Nachtspeere hadn't moved. A trembling hand reached
for his weapon. Brigit slithered behind him, laying an arm across his chest, her other hand snapping the stake in two.
“What's the matter, haven't you any backbone?”
She laid her hands on his shoulders and pressed them together, snapping out his spine.
“Yes, there it is. Don't you know what they say, âUse it or lose it'?”
And she tore the spine out of him like a whip.
There was a moment of quiet among the men who remained, that ineffable moment at the beginning of realization, when they knew how trapped they were, that they were stealing gulps of air in a futile echo of something that is about to have been.
“Yes,” Brigit informed them helpfully. “You are the past tense now.”
A middle-aged man with a set jaw stepped out from the frightened cluster, and pulled out his crucifix. He began an old incantation for the dismissal of vampires.
Brigit smiled, liking his bravery. She admired his trust in the old ways. And, of course, had there been more of him, and had she been younger, it would have had some effect. In front of all these Jew-haters, it would have given her much pleasure to be Eamon, and show them how little the crucifix could really touch her, but now was not the time to think of Eamon.
She slowed, and felt the glimmer of hope in the room. The catch of breath that meant there was a chance, that this quiet, gentlemanly man, with his little paunch and thinning hair and tired eyes, he could be their savior. She looked in his eyes, reading him. He was a good enough man, ordinary, the sort who did his business, kept his head down, looked after his family, and just wanted to get by. He wanted to enjoy a tranquil life until called upon to leave it. Brigit suddenly felt a new surge of anger. Where was his good-hearted Christianity when all the trouble started, when the words became attacks, when the attacks became banishment, and now, when the banishment was becoming death? How dare he hug his nice life and gentle faith to him and look away from fear and suffering? Even if they were Jews, or Roma, or the disabled, the homosexuals, the communists, the whatever ⦠where did the Bible say their pain should be ignored?
She interrupted his incantation.
“If all of you had risen up, had said no, had used all these good words, I would not be here.”
He stared. There was only the hint of comprehension in him, but it was enough. The smell of shame wafted from his neck. It wasn't enough to sate her, but even still, she would numb the death. She whispered an old language in the voice of seduction, a soft hypnotism and a quick lash.
He fell before the crucifix did.
It seemed to arouse the orator, and he began to scream anew, screaming about the evil among them, how it was real, how it needed to be destroyed, how they would do it.
“How?” Brigit inquired. “How will you destroy this evil?”
She began to sing tauntingly. She leaped onto the backs of the seats and danced across them, whirling like a ballerina. It was mesmerizing and bizarrely beautiful. She pulled out men hiding under the seats as she spun, slashing them through, tossing their bodies aloft with the flair of a juggler.