Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (21 page)

SUNRISE

N
ow, she was prepared to rip off Penelope’s head and stuff it into her chest cavity. After fighting her way out of Brastov’s lair, dragging Bond behind her, and enduring an anxious trudge back to the Via Eudosiana, Geneviève was not in a mood to deal gently with an uppity nosferatu nuisance like Penelope Churchward.

Kate faltered, stepping back, allowing Penelope to hiss at Geneviève. The Englishwoman’s blood was up, her fangs were out and her eyes were wide. She might have frightened an infant who has never seen Mummy pull a face, and was probably strong-willed enough to overwhelm her warm prey. But she didn’t have the mettle to cow an elder.

Geneviève didn’t pop her claws or teeth.

She’d fought enough during the night, and bled several of the Russians. She would not be frenzied, she would be purposeful.

Penelope stepped forward, but Kate put a hand on her shoulder, holding her back. Kate nodded toward Charles, who was in his bath chair, barely alive.

The first pink of dawn slipped into the room.

From Charles’s face, Geneviève knew this was the last day. An icicle transfixed her heart.

She remembered her first sight of him, in a crowded room in 1888, at an inquest. He had seemed untouched by the squalor and violence all around, the only man in London prepared to do something, even at extreme cost, to make things better. Later, she learned he wasn’t a
Boy’s Own Paper
good-fellow, no muscular Christian hero, but a man who tried always to do the right thing even when there were no right things to do.

If men like him had stayed in fashion — if they’d ever really been in fashion — this century would have been happier. Charles had refused to accept Dracula as his Lord, and had never let himself become like Dracula in his attempts to best the King Vampire. Edwin Winthrop and Hamish Bond, his successors, had learned too much from their enemy, had too much of Dracula in them.

There was blood on Penelope’s blouse. Her own.

‘She was trying…’ Kate explained.

‘I know what she was trying to do.’

The anger in Penelope’s eyes swirled and broke apart. She was frustrated and afraid, like everybody else. For a tiny moment, Geneviève wanted to hug her, not kill her.

Then the idiot ruined it.

‘He must be turned,’ Penelope said. ‘He is too far gone to be sensible about it. One of us must become his mother-in-darkness.’

Geneviève went directly to Charles and knelt before him. His eyes were still open. She felt the ebb of him, dwindling, disappearing. But he was still thinking, still determined.

With great effort, he lifted a hand to her face and into her hair. She kissed his palm, her teeth against his flesh. She tasted him but did not break the skin.

Even now, it wasn’t too late.

And even now, he wasn’t afraid to go on.

He’d often said he had nothing against vampires, but just didn’t want to be one. Though she’d long ago got over being ashamed of what she was, she understood.

Geneviève blamed the first dead woman in his life, the one who hadn’t come back. Pamela.

She thought the offer into his mind.

‘Do you want me to?’

A tiny, gracious, grateful shake of his head told her.

Tears started in her eyes.

Penelope and Kate came near, anger subsided, children again. At least there would be no cat-fighting.

Geneviève swallowed her resentment of the intrusion. She had always had to share Charles, with duty, with memory, with others who had a better claim.

She’d lived four centuries before Charles. In that time, no one had come remotely as close to her heart, not her father-in-darkness, not those she had bled pale. She might live another four centuries, or more, after Charles.

Sunlight spilled over the carpet, creeping toward them. She should warn Penelope, who was sensitive to the sun.

Geneviève kissed Charles’s lips.

She couldn’t blame his death on anyone, not Penelope, or Bond, or Brastov’s goon, or Edwin Winthrop, or Prince Dracula. If they had disturbed his last days, then it was her fault for letting them near him, and his for not being able to concentrate on his own life to the exclusion of the world.

She had failed to persuade him to accept the Dark Kiss. But he let her know that she had not failed with him.

His blood sang inside her.

‘I love you forever,’ he whispered, too soft for the others to hear.

‘Forever?’ she prompted.

‘Forever,’ he confirmed.

The sun rose up and bathed them all in stinging warmth. By the time it became unbearable, Charles was cold.

Geneviève knelt again, arranging his blanket around his legs, putting his hands into his lap, brushing back his hair, closing his eyes. It was like playing with a doll. Whatever Charles Beauregard had been was gone.

She stood, walked away from Charles, and snapped a slap across Penelope’s face, fetching the Englishwoman off balance, leaving an angry red mark.

‘That’s for what you did in 1899.’

Penelope didn’t protest, didn’t make fists. Something was gone out of her.

The room was orange with dawnlight, and hazy.

One of them had to cry, so the others could comfort her, could cry themselves. Geneviève had thought it would be Kate, but it was her. From deep inside came sobs that racked her whole body. Penelope, the handprint fading fast, hesitated and stepped forward to embrace her, to whisper soothing nothings. They hugged and cried together, then broke apart and extended arms to Kate, who was more bewildered than bereft.

Kate joined them, letting flow her own tears. They huddled together on a divan, blood and water on their faces, sobbing not for what was lost but for what must stay behind. The room was filled with light that made each random dust mote a spark. The dust danced around them all.

PART THREE

L’ECLISSE

NOTICE OF DEATH FROM
THE TIMES
OF LONDON. AUGUST 1ST, 1959

Charles Pennington Beauregard, 105, died peacefully yesterday in Rome,
writes Miss Katharine Reed.
A distinguished diplomat whose services to his country were rarely recognised in his lifetime, Beauregard was, in a lengthy career, variously attached to the Indian Civil Service, the Foreign Office, the Royal Air Force, and Lord Ruthven’s wartime Government of National Unity ‘think tank’. He was a lifelong member and sometime official of the Diogenes Club of Pall Mall, a private institution that remains club of choice for many public servants.

Born in India in 1853, son of Major Marcus Aurelius Beauregard of the Fourth Bombay Native Infantry and the former Miss Sophie Pennington of Loxley Barrett, Charles Beauregard was educated at Dulwich College and Merton College, Oxford. Briefly married (1882–3) to the former Miss Pamela Churchward, of Chelsea, he had no issue. He twice refused a knighthood. His few publications include two books of verse,
The Matter of Britain
and
The Britain of Matter.
He will be buried privately in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, final resting place of Keats and Shelley.

16

KATE IN LOVE

S
ince the funeral, Kate had been on a blood bender, drunk with red thirst. She’d been back to her
pensione
at least twice in the past week, but had not slept. Even after feeding and lovemaking, she couldn’t drop off, tormented by restless thoughts and persistent memories. Marcello, however, went out the second he was spent, sunk into a torpor deeper than any vampire lassitude. When they were in bed together, he took off his dark glasses but left on his socks. Very romantic, she supposed. Perhaps that was how Italian men won their reputation as great lovers.

They were in his apartment, a modern box in a suburb that was a mess of concrete and glass bunkers set down in featureless grasslands. At its edges, Rome was as distinct from the countryside as a cliff is from the sea.

The flat was fashionably under-decorated, with little furniture and none of the reference books or piles of periodicals Kate expected. Her own rooms were in danger of filling up entirely with paper. Marcello didn’t even own a typewriter. He dictated all his articles, mostly delivering notes rewrite people worked up into actual prose. One room contained nothing but a white dial telephone — the famous
telefono bianco,
once a touchstone of luxury in Italy — on the floor, long golden cord snaking across bare boards.

Though Kate knew Marcello body and soul, inside-out on the deepest level, she was still ignorant of a great many details about his life. She’d found out his surname at some point, but presently it escaped her. Where was he from? Were his parents still alive? None of that mattered. He was a for-the-moment person, a present-tense man, just right for that atomic-age sense of impermanence. He knew as little about her, but had opened himself entirely.

She lay naked next to him as he snored slightly, feeling the swell of fresh blood in her face. It was as if she were wearing a fleshy, pulsating mask. Bloated with his blood, she feared she was growing careless, taking far too much from this one lover.

The light fixture above the bed swung like a gibbet. Was it moving or was her head swimming? It didn’t matter. She wasn’t such a fool as to believe nothing mattered. It was just that nothing mattered for now. Not a fig. Charles was dead and buried. She had to stay behind.

The fact of his death, a sunburst in her mind, had blotted everything else out. She’d planned to help Geneviève with the funeral arrangements and any legal complications, but had instead fled, sought out Marcello, frankly overpowered him, and made him distract her.

By the time of the funeral, she was in a fog of blood.

Had Edwin Winthrop come over from England? She thought so, but hadn’t been able to connect the kindly old man with the clipped white moustache with the cold young maniac she remembered from the First World War.

There were few other mourners. Marcello had propped her up, and she made love to him near Shelley’s ashes. All of the poet but his heart was buried in Rome. That was how she felt, too.

At first, Marcello was shocked, perhaps even unwilling, but she set out to enslave him and, rather surprisingly, pulled off the trick. Without Charles’s civilising influence, she might grow into a proper vampire, a monster of the old school.

Marcello was relieved that she was leaving the Crimson Executioner alone. There had been no more jaunts to I Cessati Spiriti, no more questions asked of suspect persons in threatening locales. The more she became wrapped up in him, the less the big mysteries meant. There had been no new murders, no new clues. The paparazzi had taken dozens of photographs of Sylvia Koscina as Medea, and the material on Malenka was filed away to be forgotten. Other sensations would come along.

She shivered with fullness. Her heart coursed. Colours and shapes floated on her eyes. Her skin felt stretched tight, on the point of bursting. She had drunk so much to glut her red thirst that it came alive again and wheedled inside her, spurring her to action. Her fangs prickled in her mouth, razor-edges cutting her gums as they slid out of their sheaths. There was a little dental sensation, on the edge of tingling, jabbing over the line into pain. Delicious pain.

She wanted to feed again.

With a snort, Marcello turned onto his back and settled between pillows. Crescent grazes on his neck and chest, and other places under the sheets, trickled a little. Her bite marks were all over him. He was growing pale under his tan.

It might even be love. They had shared so much.

And Charles was gone — she was free to love.

She thought she was in synchronisation with Marcello’s beating heart, his gently dreaming mind, his worn-out-by-love body. She’d cut through his pose of indifference and tapped into the real person underneath. There was kindliness in his makeup, passion under his cynicism, secret hurts she could winkle out and ease, and a warm strength that would keep her going.