Emma shut her eyes tight against the very stone upon which Markus had stolen that first stormy kiss; nay, the stone upon which she’d received his kisses with hungry reciprocation. Even the memory of it reinvigorated her heart, such was the work of his diabolic influence in her blood. How could she yearn for the beast even after witnessing his bloodiest deeds? It was some hours later when, roused from her brooding, she realized her feet had returned her to Winterthurse. The dark siren song of the wyrm in her veins had called her home.
The only way to be free of him, to be the master of her own destiny, was in death—either hers or his, for he refused to let her go. The cost of her freedom was indeed dear. As she stood ruminating on such morbid and costly matters, a silent warm tear escaped from the corner of her eye to glide woefully down her cheek.
The truth was, Markus’s death scared her near as much as her own; he might not love her, but she had long ago admitted to herself that she loved him. Her sickness was acute indeed. Not even the violent depravity she’d witnessed in the blood memory had robbed her of that accursed love. Even if that were not the case—even if she thirsted for his death—how was such a thing to be realized?
The heart. Ana had been most adamant that his heart was where the fatal blow must fall. But how? His heart is impossible to get at, were I even of a mind to get at it. She let out a sigh and turned to leave. Turned to find her gaze dashed against a pair of fierce black eyes.
The white face wrenched an instant frightful yelp from her throat. “Victoria!” Emma backed away, gasping. The vampyre was staring at her with unbridled and demonic hunger. “If Markus finds you here…” The threat, such as it was, trailed off weakly, for Emma realized she had no notion of the master’s reaction should he find his wayward myrmidon lurking outside.
“His absence,” said the vampyre, “will make my discovery here rather impossible.”
Emma glanced up at the castle as though Markus might suddenly appear at a window and prove Victoria wrong. But the windows remained black and silent. “How can you be sure of that?”
“The same way he knows your whereabouts at all times. The bond. It works both ways now—I’ll wager you yourself cannot sense him near at hand.”
Victoria was right, Emma could not feel his presence nearby. She did not know how she knew that, she just did. She squared her shoulders against the vampyre’s glare. “Are you here to propitiate your master with that sweet disposition or are you here to make mischief?” Emma ventured it was the latter.
“Perhaps I came to discipline the master’s pet, since he has done little to blunt that thorny disposition.”
Emma knew she must reek of that odious terror that seemed lately to have disgusted Markus, yet she kept her gaze locked in battle with Victoria’s, stepping carefully but determinedly around the creature. It struck her that she was treating the woman as she would a feral hound, which, at heart, Victoria no doubt was. “Begone, vampyre.”
Black eyes narrowed into vicious slits. “Careful, mortal, I could end you with no more effort than it would take to pluck the wings from a sparrow.”
“Your master would snap your wretched neck for your trouble.”
“Would he, indeed? How sure you are of him, pet.” Suddenly the blackness cleared from Victoria’s eyes and she smiled almost congenially. “It’s getting dark. Better not loiter out here unprotected, lest your blood prove too tempting to the rest of the beasties hereabout; not all who dwell here exercise the restraint that I do; only ask your sister.” And with a shameless leer, Victoria left her beside the roses with a parting gibe. “Careful they don’t bite you too…”
Emma watched her gliding across the lawn till she turned a corner and disappeared from view. Why had she returned and whence had she come? London? A shiver of revulsion passed over Emma’s skin as she thought of the unsolved London murders.
There was a quiet murmur of leaves in the rose bush that instantly drew her notice. She was thankful for the distraction and drifted over to investigate. Her brow puckered with interest to see a flash of white amongst the dark foliage. She leaned in a little closer, careful of the thorns, and moved a rank branch out of the way.
With a lethal hiss, the white thing flew out of the brambles. It struck her breast through her clothes, the force of the attack felling her instantly. Long fangs were embedded deep in her flesh and ribs before it even occurred to Emma to scream or call out to Victoria. And when she did try, her throat was instantly constricted by clammy scales coiling tight about her neck. Gasping with silent terror, Emma found her gaze fixed to a cold, albino glare. A large, white snake reared up above her.
From somewhere nearby she could hear the muffled, almost subaquatic, sound of a raven cackling excitedly. As the crimson eyes blurred overhead and her vision darkened, it occurred to her that only a raven would laugh at a dying woman.
Chapter Fifty-One
Book of Revelation
Emma did not know how long she’d lain beneath the shade of roses, but it could not have been very long. The sky was still orange, though bruised with a darkling purple. No matter how she blinked, her vision remained dim and watery and her blood thrummed loudly in her ears.
But there was someone standing overhead talking to her. “The beast…harlot…eat your flesh…” What were they saying? Emma blinked, yet still the world remained distorted. She strained her ears and sighed, relieved, as her hearing returned and the voice became clearer, even if her sight did not.
“Kill him,” said the voice overhead. A woman’s. Familiar. Long black hair floated about the head like a murky aureole. No, like a head of snakes. Who did she know with raven hair? It couldn’t be Ana here beside her, so…
“Victoria?” Emma struggled to sit up but found her limbs had grown roots and locked her to the earth. A strange catalepsy had seeped deep into Emma’s marrow. “Help me up, would you?” How ridiculous Victoria must find her, and how ridiculous it was to have to converse whilst on one’s back. Why couldn’t she get up? Why wouldn’t Victoria help her?
“Kill the dragon,” the creature said again. “Kill Markus.” An awful sibilant voice it possessed.
“Snake!” cried Emma. “Why should I kill him? It was not he that slithered each night into Milli’s room to steal the warmth from her veins!”
“And what of your blood?” The woman replied. “Has not the dragon taken you in his coils and sipped from your open veins?”
Like a cold, dead trout, Emma opened and then shut her mouth in quick, sickening succession, mindful of the untenability of her denial. “I…I offered myself willingly, but Milli gave you no such leave.”
“You bled for the creature that bears you no love.” The voice softened and for a moment Emma misgave her there were two voices and two creatures—one light and the other dark.
Emma tried to shake the shadows out of her eyes. “Victoria, help me.”
“His name is Death, he cannot love you.”
“I know that!” Emma needed no one, especially not Victoria, to remind her of that.
Something in the creature’s unearthly silhouette trembled beneath the force of some fulminating pathos. “He will use you ill, eat your flesh, and cast your desiccated bones into the fiery pit when he is through. Kill him.” There was a pause as the shadow crowded, tripled. “Yes, kill him.” The last was uttered in the snake voice again.
Hatred, hot and bilious, surged to the fore and it was all Emma could do not to lunge at the tenebrosity looming over her. The thought of Victoria in Markus’s bed—the idea of his lips caressing her beautiful flesh—sickened Emma. “Get away from me, vampyre! You beastly, wicked thing!”
“Yes, and he made me what I am. You must free your sister from him. Free yourself.”
“So that you may wrap your leaching lips about Milli’s neck again? Go to the devil, fiend!”
“Save Milli. Kill Markus.” The black hair undulated and curled in an uncanny rhythm about the head as though the air was not air at all but some underwater hell
in which even she, Emma, was floating, suspended. The movement of that hair and that swaying shadow was mesmerizing.
Emma’s eyes glazed over and the shadow became three again. Kill Markus. This time the command, roused from somewhere deep inside her own chest, fell so hard upon Emma that she felt her bones shudder with the force, and the invisible roots that held her fast began to slip. Kill Markus. Again, her limbs twitched with a vile, foreign eagerness to obey.
The trees, adjured by the encroaching cloudburst, seemed to threaten closer, menacing and demanding with dark and silent censure. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Thrice more the command was chanted, like a murder of crows circling overhead.
“No!” Emma tried to twist her head away to bury her ears in the dirt, the better to smother their awful song. “No! No!”
“Then you will end up no better than the women in London; or you will die like every other sad creature that dared to love him.”
Swiftly came the image of Death swooping down like a raging carrion bird, cleaving instantly to his prey—to Cleopatra. No matter how fiercely Emma shook her head, she could not oust the visceral flashes of blood memory from her brain; she could no more escape the fervid sounds of his wet supping than if she herself lay dying beneath him. “I cannot!”
“You will.” Victoria’s snake voice was soft and yet it overmastered even the wind and the hideous sucking noises—Markus’s sucking noises. “You mussst trussst usss, thisss isss the only way.” The words slithered their way under Emma’s skin.
Trust anything with fangs and and a hunger for blood? Ha! She could not even trust herself anymore.
“One of you will die,” said the distorted voice with chilling certainty. “It is for you to decide who survives whom.”
Emma blenched, for the eyes, which had remained obscured until now, blazed blood red suddenly.
“The red dragon knows what you are. Why do you think he has kept you alive all this time? He means to fill your scarlet belly with his spawn! Kill him before your golden cup fills with abominations!”
“No!” But even as she cried out, Emma’s hands jerked with a thirstful itch. Stormwater lashed her face like a thousand furious slaps. “No! No!”
“You will.” Though the smile remained invisible, Emma heard it nonetheless. “Or join the heartless corpses that fill the London gutters.”
“The London slayings…they…” She shook her head. “They were his doing?” Despite her chattering teeth and the roar of nature, Emma’s words rang clear with dread. “That cannot be!”
“Can it not? Do you doubt his appetite?” Red eyes narrowed slightingly. “You who have slaked his every appetite.”
“No! Liar! Snake! He could never—”
“What do you think he was doing the night he rescued you? He was hunting! And where was he last night, hmm?” For a moment the eyes flashed crimson as they smote Emma’s midriff. “How you can stand to be the mother of his abominations, I don’t know. I am sure your estimable parents would be only too proud to know their eldest daughter not only bears the mark of the beast”—she aimed a rancorous glare at Emma’s neck as though she could see the bite—“but relinquished her own sister to the devil himself and has made herself his great harlot.”
“What?” Emma shook her head, her eyes flooding with stormwater. “No!”
“Then you shall become the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. You will bear the very spawn your Book of Revelation warns will blacken the sun and devour the world and all those as innocent as your young sister.”
“Enough, I beg you!”
“Or will you be as the woman clothed in white? The enemy of the Dragon. A white queen to save your race of lambs.”
Emma tried not listen, but Victoria’s skewed allegories constricted her heart. And for a moment she was back in London, listening to the rector, his eyes red with flame, his hair all about him while his finger shook at her with damning fury. Over and over, he blamed her for the blackened sun and the moon red with blood and the falling stars. “Stop! I will hear no more!” But the rector only laughed, his eyes suddenly reptilian, his tongue forked—whore of Babylon, he called her. “Enough!” she screamed. But it was too late and she had heard too much; the snake’s venomous sermon had found purchase deep in her heart. Even in the deprecating roar of the wind, she could smell the brimstone, hear the sky belching with fire, see the ocean churning with blood and death.
It was agony to love the Dragon and to know what he was; to know he bore her no love in return; to know that she was fain to die rather than kill him. Fain to die rather than bear his offspring. Fain to die for her sister. It was all too much!
Were it not for Ana’s revelations, she might have better withstood this attack—Victoria’s attack. But she was only a mortal, weak and fallible. There was far too much mounting evidence and testimony against Markus, to say nothing of the Book of Revelation itself.
“Kill him, Emma!” The voice was sharp as flint above the howl of the storm. No longer the rector’s voice but no less disgusting.
Emma answered it with a negativing sob.
“So you will conduce the fall of mankind instead? You selfish little wretch! The beast will eat your naked flesh and cast your desolate body into the fire!”
Emma keened and prayed and wept till her throat was raw with agony, and all the while the shadow watched with cold detachment. That she, Emma, could be the Dragon’s harlot! Just a vessel through which evil could be made flesh to smite the earth. Smite all as viciously as had been done to the women in London.
When Emma’s throat was finally hoarse and silent, though her eyes were drenched still in tears and rain, Victoria knelt down beside her. “His heart,” she said, stroking Emma’s hand with cold, wet fingers, fingers that were hardly fingers at all but claws—scaly and sharp like an animal’s. “He might not love you, but he trusts your weakness; that is your advantage.” The shadow stood upright, suddenly wary. It seemed to peer at the leaden sky. Another flash of red in the face where the eyes should be. Lightening streaked the floating hair with icy white. The storm was passing, dragging with it the pall of clouds in its wake, and dusk had by now completely snatched the fire from the sky. “Good luck, little white queen.” She pressed three cold kisses to Emma’s icy cheek in viperous succession. And then she vanished as though on a burst of white lightning—here one moment and gone the very next. But her voice, the command, lingered and echoed a second longer like smoke from scorched earth. “He is more powerful at night,” it said. “Wait till dawn, then kill him.” Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Kill Markus.
Emma lay still and prostrate, her head turned to the side. She filled her nose with the decay of leaves and earth and drenched roses. Her vision swam in and out for some moments thereafter and it was a long time before it cleared altogether.
“What are you doing?”
Emma peeled her lids open to see Victoria standing above her with a lantern. “Victoria?”
“You’re drenched through, you little fool. Are you determined to die of cold? I promise you, there are more pleasurable ways to die.”
Emma lifted her cheek from the wet earth and then proceeded to test her trembling limbs. She was so unsteady on her legs that Victoria, with an impatient snort, finally pulled her up the rest of the way.
“What on earth is the matter with you?”
She bent Victoria a narrowed look. “You don’t remember our conversation?”
“Of course I do,” said the vampyre, peering at her as though she’d gone a little soft in the head. “Come along, I shall have Skinner draw you a hot bath.”
“I can find my own way to the castle. Release me!”
“Don’t be tedious, you and I both know you’d fall flat on your foolish head if I released you now. Mind you, it would not sadden me a bit if you cracked your head open and spilled your brains.”
“I despise you, why are you helping me?”
“Because,” Victoria replied, “Markus disrelishes his
supper cold and clammy.” She shot Emma an insidious wink. “Best warm you up by the fire before he returns.”
She ignored the gibe, for she became suddenly aware that she was carrying in her skirts more than just the added weight of mud and rain. She delved a hand into the deep pocket of her skirts and felt her fingers curl about something hard and keen-edged. A blade? One that had not been there before. However, she dared not pull it out to look. Not in front of Victoria. Or had Victoria put it there?
So heavy was the weight of its awful presence there that it bedeviled her gait and reduced her to some misshapen creature skulking furtively in the night. Past the black roses she moved, shivering beneath their sharp glares. They understood the blade’s purpose. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. It was as if the roses themselves had taken up the hideous canticle of her strange vision. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Always in threes.
The jarring din of that song came to a sudden halt as she rounded the hedgerow. The lamps either side of the giant double doors glowed suspiciously as she and Victoria neared. Her sodden dress clung to her limbs, heavy as leg irons as she mounted the stairs. She slowed, her bones crippled with impending doom. Fear held primacy even over her desperate need to warm her flesh by the fire. Upon reaching the yawning stairhead she stopped altogether, unwilling to go any further.
“What now?” said Victoria, impatient.
“Leave me,” Emma replied. And there she might have stayed all night, frozen, had not the doors swung apart that instant and the flames guttered fearfully as the great dragon emerged from his lair.
Markus surveyed her from the doorway, his face thrown into shadow as he stood, unmoving, bestial in his stillness. The night air crackled and snapped with the force of his ire. All was silent. Only her heart sustained the morbid canticle—Kill Markus. Kill Markus. Kill Markus—heedless of the dragon’s discerning senses, as though to warn him of all that had transpired, and all that would betide by morning light.
Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1) Page 36