Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (38 page)

The pillar was in the way.

She felt the impact in her wrists and elbows. Her arms crumpled and her face slapped the stone, hard enough to bloody her nose.

The Executioner dropped her.

She hugged the pillar and slid down it. The blood taste in her mouth was her own.

Her red rage was rising again. She fought it. This was not an opponent who could be beaten by surrender to the animal, who’d be so terrorised by the sight of an enraged bitch vampire that his knees would turn to water.

She huddled against the pillar.

The Crimson Executioner bent and took hold of her hair, hauling her upright. His shining, empty eyes were beacons, close to her face.

Out there in the stands, a thousand thumbs turned down. This had not been much of a show.

The Executioner pressed a thumb against her neck, pinching on her jugular vein. Stolen blood pumped against the pressure but was trapped. Her heart grew swollen, her brain was starved. He could pop off her head like the top of a beer bottle. Bastard.

She tore at his sides, blunting her nails on blood-greased hide and taut slabs of muscle.

He was laughing and so was the audience.

Her fang-teeth elongated, forcing her mouth open, cutting her lower lip. But she couldn’t move her head. She could only bite the night air.

She took his wrist, which was the thickness of a normal man’s thigh, and dug in with hooked thumb-barbs and all eight nail-blades. She worried holes and scratched, hoping to snag a vein or a nerve.

The Executioner felt no pain.

He wasn’t even her real murderer. Just the puppet of the little girl up on the imperial platform. Ghastly, hollow laughter poured out of his grin.

Red lights exploded in her skull.

‘Who are all these
people
?’ Penelope demanded.

An audience,’ Kate guessed. ‘The senate and populace of Rome?’

‘Oh,
them
!’ Penny spat.

Kate saw that the crowd in the stands was mixed. Zombies at the back, faces half off the bone. The bourgeois, isolated and prim in the good seats. The rabble, thronging close to the arena, craning for a smell of blood. There must have been people here she knew but she recognised none.

Except the little girl in Nero’s seat.

Kate recognised the combatants who struggled in the spotlight. This was what she had feared. Penny was appalled and fascinated by the spectacle.

‘Is this some pagan revival?’

‘I think it’s more than that,’ said Kate. ‘That creature is the secret ruler of Rome. She’s taken upon herself the duties of the Emperors. Maybe they were always her duties, and she let the Emperors usurp them for a few centuries. These are her games, at once a gift and a demonstration of power.’

Penelope was catching up but Kate couldn’t hope to explain everything in the time they had. The fight they had come upon was nearly over. The Crimson Executioner held up Geneviève, as a tribute for
Mater Lachrymarum,
awaiting the imperial verdict.

Kate pushed through, making her way down an aisle, toward the arena itself. Penelope followed, pacifying the irritated spectators Kate had pushed aside with a flash of her fangs and a witheringly British glare.

‘Bloody foreigners, eh?’ Penny muttered. ‘With their barbaric bullfights.’

Kate was not about to bring up fox-hunting and pig-sticking.

The cheering and calling subsided. Even the Executioner’s hollow laugh shut off. The monster child pondered the verdict.

Kate vaulted a rail and landed in the arena. Broken pillars were all around. Penelope let herself down gently and brushed dust off her good coat.

‘You,’ Penny commanded. ‘Put that woman down.’

The Crimson Executioner’s head swivelled like a mechanism.

He laughed, a sound hideously familiar to Kate.

She felt cords tug at her mind. If the Mother of Tears had made a puppet of her to destroy Dracula, then she might take hold of her mind now. Having rushed here to help Geneviève, she might be forced to hold Penelope down while the Crimson Executioner finished off her friend.

No. She was not a puppet.

The British vampire Kate knew to be a spy stepped out from behind a pillar and pointed a gun at Kate and Penny.

‘Commander Bond?’ Penelope said.

He was the puppet here. He’d always been a thin character, too easily slotted into a stereotype. That was what made him vulnerable. He was the sort of man who always needed a mother, to cling to and to tidy up after him.

For the first time, Kate wondered who the Executioner really was. A circus strongman? An actor in peplum movies?

Bond levelled his aim between Kate and Penelope.

Penny moved incredibly fast, swifter than Kate could have imagined, and took the gun away from the new-born. She squeezed the weapon in her hand, and it popped into clunky metal components.

Without his gun, Bond was a boy whose favourite toy has been taken away. A command passed from the little girl’s brain to his and he tried to put his fingers in Penny’s neck. She took him by the wrists and threw him away, tossing his flapping form fifty feet or more into the air. He executed an ungainly arc and fell badly. Though broken, he scrambled around. If left alone, he would put himself back together but as a puppet he wasn’t allowed to bother with his snapped bones.

A section of the crowd cheered.

Penelope gave a cheerful wave, like a member of the Royal Family arriving at a Commonwealth airport.

Kate faced the Executioner.

Geneviève’s eyes were bloodied. She looked at Kate, silently imploring her not to sacrifice herself.

The Mother of Tears could not be bested. She was as eternal as the city. She was True Death, who overtakes all living things in time. She was mistress of a million puppets. She was, Kate could admit it now,
a supernatural being.

The Crimson Executioner held out his arm and let Geneviève dangle. He squeezed and Geneviève let go of his wrist. Her bloodied hands flapped by her sides. He managed a full circle spin like a ballet dancer, slow enough to let the audience in all corners of the Colosseum see the defeated elder. He looked up to the child empress.

The little girl stuck out her arm, hand flat, thumb out.

The crowd called for death.

The hand wavered. The thumb turned down.

The crowd cheered like a hurricane.

Kate saw the muscles bunching in the Crimson Executioner’s upper arm, as the message slowly sparked along his nerves, the order to wrench off Geneviève’s head.

Mater Lachrymarum
was undefeatable, above and beyond all human understanding. But the Crimson Executioner was a man in her thrall.

Under her spell, Bond hadn’t been free to look out for himself, even though he’d have been more use to his mistress without the shattered limbs.

There was a weakness there.

When fighting a puppet, the trick was to cut the strings.

Penelope pounced, sinking teeth into the Executioner’s forearm, tearing out strands of muscle, chewing them apart. He didn’t stop grinning, but his grip didn’t tighten on Geneviève’s throat. Penny stuck her thumb in his eye, fishing out a scarlet gout.

The crowd groaned as one, in sympathy. They could take any amount of disembowelment and decapitation, but show them one little gouged eyeball and they wanted to spew.

Kate tackled low, hugging the big man’s legs and throwing a shoulder into his stomach. With three vampire women hanging off him, he overbalanced and fell like a collapsing colossus. The ground shook with the impact. A nearby column fell over.

Penelope was still tearing at his arm and neck and face. The Executioner wouldn’t let go of Geneviève’s neck.

Kate crawled over the fallen man, easing Penelope out of the way. She looked deep into his remaining eye, penetrating his red madness, trying to reach the man he must once have been.

There was only one way.

Penelope was working on his hand, shredding the skin and flesh from his fingers, but still not freeing Geneviève. Her hands and lower face were messy with blood.

Kate scooted around, scraping her knees on rubble, until she was kneeling at the Crimson Executioner’s head, looking down at his upside-down face —
upside-down, like the reflection in the Fontana di Trevi
— and the ruin Penelope had made of his neck. Blood seeped from the wound, slower than it ought to. He was probably dying, but his mistress wouldn’t let him go until the last elder in Rome was dead.

She loosened her collar and stuck a thumbnail into her own neck, opening a rent that dripped blood onto the Executioner’s face. She dislocated her spinal column and pressed her wound to the Executioner’s mouth while fastening her own fangs into his torn-apart neck.

She sucked his blood into her mouth and let her blood trickle into him.

There was an electric connection.

She had a sense of who he had been. An actor. She might have guessed.

His mind was still there, and her blood reached it. If he turned, he’d be her get, a responsibility for centuries. She was taking him away from his mistress. She felt his lips close on her throat. He suckled from her.

The strings were cut. New strings were forming, strings of blood between Kate and the man.

‘He’s let go, Kate,’ Penelope said.

She heard Geneviève coughing.

The sweet strong blood was in her throat. She swallowed some and wanted more. She felt herself pouring out, into her conquest.

She had come to Rome for love. And found it.

‘He’ll turn,’ Penny warned.

That didn’t matter. With get like the Crimson Executioner, she could stand up to the Mother of Tears, could set herself up as Queen-Empress of the Night.

She thought of Charles.

And broke the connection.

She stood up and squeezed her neck-wound shut. Her blouse was stiff with blood. Ruined.

Penelope helped Geneviève, holding her upright as her crushed neck filled out and healed.

‘Hail to
la vampira,’
someone shouted. The cry was taken up. Flowers rained from the sky.

The Crimson Executioner — whoever he had been — was shaking in his death throes. Kate’s blood was in his mouth, but he didn’t swallow. He choked and vampire blood poured out of him. The Mother of Tears had lost her toy but wasn’t going to let anyone else claim him.

A man died. He’d had a name once. A life.

As he died, the crowds left. Kate, exhausted, slumped by him, holding his cooling hand. Geneviève couldn’t speak yet, but was gasping gratitude. Penelope, elegant despite the gore smeared on her face, was still puzzled by the drama into which Kate had impressed on her.

The people of Rome went back to their dreams. Kate saw Inspector Silvestri and Diabolik, Cabiria and Marcello, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Palmiro Togliatti, the waiter from the Hassler and Elsa Martinelli. And hundreds of others, from all walks of life and death. Everyone she had met since coming to the city, and those who had been there but unnoticed. A circus parade and a funeral party, a riot and an orgy, a communion and a community.

Were they even here physically, or had the witch girl summoned their phantasms, roping them in on her private games? This spectacle was shut off from the everyday life of the city, but could not be taken out of it. The city was a great, beating heart, and all hearts need blood as much as any vampire.
Mater Lachrymarum
gave the night-selves of the populace the games, and the memory would not outlast the dawn. But the spilled blood kept Rome alive.

How often did this happen?

Kate felt death as the blood in her mouth went rancid. She spat, and wiped her mouth on her hand. The Crimson Executioner was gone.

Penelope gave Geneviève to Kate. They hugged, fiercely.

Again, all three vampire women were crying.

‘Thank you,’ Geneviève croaked.

‘That’s all right, m’darling,’ said Kate. ‘Least we could do.’

They broke the hug.

The Mother of Tears was with them. Now, she was Viridiana, the saintly adolescent with the glowing face. Her purity was hard, unsympathetic. According to Father Merrin, she told only the truth. Under some circumstances, Kate would have preferred to deal with Mamma Roma, who told only lies.

‘Elder vampire,’ she said, addressing Geneviève. ‘You must still die.’

This thin stick of a girl could pour forth fire.

For the first time, Kate was truly terrified.

Viridiana’s eyes grew, pupils whirling spirals. Geneviève was struck, gripped by an invisible force. Kate tensed, feeling an impulse to throw herself between the two. Was that brave or stupid? She couldn’t decide.

Suddenly, Penelope demanded And who are you to judge, missy?’

Penny didn’t understand who she was dealing with. That made her brave and stupid. She walked towards Viridiana, ready to give this impertinent chit of a monster a good slapping as if she were some careless shopgirl not the secret mistress of an eternal city. Penny would be
destroyed.
Kate couldn’t let her step into the line of fire without understanding.

Kate didn’t think about it. She stood in front of Penelope and Geneviève. It made her calm.

‘You’ll have to get to my friends through me,’ she said.

Viridiana thought about it.

‘Miss Reed,’ she said, ‘the love of your life chose this elder over you, and yet you’re willing to die for her. Miss Churchward, you don’t even like this elder, and yet you’re willing to kill for her.’

The saint was genuinely puzzled, but still cunning. Her shot went straight to Kate’s heart.

‘We’ve been through a lot together,’ Kate said. It sounded feeble, put like that.

Viridiana stepped back into the darkness and stepped forward as Santona. Her
’ndrangheta
servants lurched out of the shadows of the columns.

‘Such feelings will pass, Katharine Reed,’ the fortune-teller foresaw. ‘Vampire elders cannot feel. They are heartless as these walking remnants are mindless. Their souls have flown. As have yours, missies. You only feel out of habit. It will pass.’

The
’ndrangheta
raised silver-tipped spears.