by Amy Cross
Reaching into my pocket, I took out the blue ring. I could still feel home calling for me.
And then, with a loud groaning sound, Chateau Malafort collapsed. The entire roof fell down into the main part of the building, and then a huge cloud of dust rose up into the night air as the walls buckled. I stared with a sense of horror as the place was destroyed, and I watched for several more minutes until the entire building had completely fallen. By the time it was all over, the inferno had been extinguished, the strange calling sensation was over, and my chance to get home was gone.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chloe
“I'm fine!” Hugo gasped, sounding a little irritated as Judith tried to examine another of the cuts on his face. “I'm a vampire, remember? I can handle a few scrapes.”
He turned to me.
“I suppose I owe you my gratitude,” he continued. “When I was battling Zieghoff, I knew that I just needed to keep him distracted until his body was destroyed. I knew he couldn't last long with all that power, with thirteen full doses of the serum in his bloodstream, but for a few minutes there I started to wonder whether I might be destroyed in the process. Klaus Zieghoff was, however briefly, the most powerful vampire that ever existed. That ever could exist. But there's a reason why that much power is never concentrated in one body, and we just saw a perfect demonstration of that reason. But thank you, Chloe. Without you, I would have died with him.”
“Would I have ended up back in my own time, if I'd gone into the light?” I asked. “I had the ring. It fell out of your pocket.”
“That ring acts as some kind of anchor for you,” he replied. “I don't understand it fully, not yet. But to the best of my understanding, yes, you'd have made it home.” He paused. “I'm sorry, Chloe,” he added finally. “If the fire had just lasted a little longer...”
I thought about it for a moment, and then I nodded.
“What's done is done,” I told him, as I looked over at the smoking ruins of Chateau Malafort, “and I made the right decision. I'll just have to find another way to get home. That's all.”
“Stop fussing, woman,” Hugo muttered, pushing Judith's hands away. “I'm fine.”
“What do we do now?” she asked. “Where do we go?”
“I need to study that ring properly,” Hugo replied. “Vampire deaths aren't generally known to act as portals for time travel, so there must be something very unusual about that ring. I'll need some proper equipment, and I'll have to find a place to work where I won't be disturbed, and I'll need access to a library and perhaps to an assistant as well, and of course there's also the question of how I might -”
“Matthias,” I said suddenly, interrupting him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We have to find Matthias,” I continued. “I'm surprised he didn't find his way to us already.”
“Yes,” he replied cautiously, “I'm surprised about that too. I can only assume that something, of some nature, must be keeping him from coming to us.”
“He was in pain,” I explained. “I sensed it. Don't ask me how, because I don't know, but tonight I somehow sensed him screaming. He was alone, and he was scared, and he was angry. That's all I know, but... We have to find him.”
“What's that?” Judith asked, looking past me.
Hugo and I turned, and we both saw that there was an orange glow on the horizon.
“It's Paris,” Hugo said darkly. “Paris is burning. There must be a particularly bad bombing raid tonight. This human war just goes on and on, doesn't it?”
“Are we going back to Paris?” I asked.
“It would make some sense, I suppose,” he replied, “but...”
He hesitated.
“No,” he added finally. “We're going to London.”
“London?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because that's where I can find the resources that I'll need. Anywhere else would either be too far, or too under-developed. Besides, I have some contacts in London, there are some people whose advice I'd very much like to access. Like it or not, London is by far our best shot now. And don't worry, even in wartime I know some people who can help get us there.”
“Then we're going to London,” I said, with a flicker of fear in my chest, as the glow continued to flicker in the distance. “But first, before we do anything else... We're going to find Matthias.”
Epilogue
Chloe
Many years from now...
“And then what happened?” Harriet asked.
I opened my mouth to tell her, but at the last moment I felt a sudden wave of tiredness. I forced a smile, but in truth I was tiring much more easily of late, and it didn't help that I was going over the past in such exhausting detail. Not that I'd ever forgotten what had happened, of course, but it was still strange to have to explain it all. And it didn't help that there were still parts of the story that I didn't quite understand.
“Would you mind terribly if we finish this tomorrow night?” I asked wearily. “There's still quite a lot to get through, and it's almost midnight so this seems like a good point to take a break.”
“But -”
“And I'm exhausted, Harriet,” I added, before reaching out and taking her hands in mine. As I did so, I saw how young her hands looked. “Not a day goes by, that I don't think about everything that happened back in the old days, but it's difficult for me to explain it this way. After all, your mother was never really very interested.” I glanced at the window, and I felt a flicker of surprise that once again he hadn't come. “I rather think that I'd like to sleep now.”
“Okay, fine,” she said with a sigh, “I get it. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be a pain.”
“I'll finish the story tomorrow, I promise,” I replied. “Hand on heart.”
“There's just so much I still don't understand,” she said. “I mean, where was Matthias at the end? I was convinced he was going to come swinging in like a big hero and save the day.”
“So was I, at the time.”
“I still don't even know if it's him you're waiting for every night.”
“I need to tell you the whole story.”
“And Hugo...” She hesitated. “I mean, I'm not saying that I like him, but at least I understand him. And he doesn't seem like the monster you described yesterday, so I guess I don't understand how things could have gone so totally wrong for him. And did you save Judith in the end? Did you change history? Or did she just end up dying another time?”
“That's something I can tell you about tomorrow,” I replied, “or try to, at least. I'm not sure that I truly know everything.”
“And how was I getting Matthias's point of view?” she asked. “It was the same last night, too. While you were talking, I was somehow getting the story through his eyes as well as through your eyes.”
“Storytelling is a strange, often misunderstood process,” I replied, “and this story has vampires at its heart. So I'm afraid that while I don't exactly know how you're seeing all of that, I can only assume that some element of Matthias's soul is lingering in the telling.” I sighed. “Please don't ask me to explain that,” I added, “because I can't. To be honest, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, either. I learned a long time ago that, when you're dealing with vampires, it's sometimes necessary to focus on the parts that do make sense and sort of try to fill in the gaps as best you can.”
She paused, and I felt rather bad for not being able to explain more.
“So you were really in the war, huh?” she asked finally. “Like, you really had to duck because a tank was firing at you?”
“It was a long time ago,” I reminded her. “I was a little more limber back then.”
“It's still pretty cool,” she replied. “Wait, I didn't mean it like that! I know people died, I shouldn't say it was cool. I know people lost their lives and lived through misery, and you knew people who were killed. I really didn't mean to offend you, Gran!”
“Don't worry,” I said, before pausing for a
moment. I was still so very tired, but Harriet had reminded me of something that I suddenly wanted to show her. “Wait right here,” I said, slowly getting to my feet. “I put a box in the cupboard on the landing, just a few weeks ago, and there's something in there that I think you'd very much like to see.”
“I'll get it!”
“No, I'll go,” I replied, gently slipping away from her attempt to support me as I shuffled toward the door. “I haven't been very active today, so the walk will do me good. When you get to my age, Harriet, it's so easy for your bones to feel heavy.” I opened the door, and then I glanced back at her as she sat on my bed. “I'm so glad that you're interested in all of this,” I added. “I just wish I hadn't had to split the story up over three nights. I wish I'd been able to tell it all in a more condensed format. Then again, so much happened. I'm sure I've already left things out, as it is. At the end, you must ask me any questions that you still have.”
“It's cool,” she said with a smile. “Like I told you before, I'm enjoying it. I've always wanted to know what really happened to you.”
Smiling, I shuffled out onto the landing and made my way toward the cupboard at the far end. I was moving so slowly, hunched over and in pain, and it was hard to believe that once I'd been young enough to try escaping from a Nazi prison. I didn't feel old in my heart, of course, even though I was under no illusions about my body. I was frail, and my joints struggled with the most simple of movements, and as I reached the cupboard and pulled the door open I began to think that I should have let Harriet do the heavy lifting after all.
Then again, she wouldn't know what she was looking for.
I quickly found the large box, but then I had to root through all the old items that I'd kept over the years. There were so many reminders of my life in the box, things that I'd kept but which I hadn't looked at for a long time. I'd kept telling myself that one day I'd go through everything and have a good clear-out, but in truth I'd found it rather sad to linger on a bunch of old mementos. I'd lost so many people.
Finally I found an A4 envelope, and I struggled to slide the piece of paper out from inside.
I felt a flicker of shock, and sadness too, as soon as I saw the old newspaper clipping. It was from a French publication, and I'd tracked it down online several years earlier. My French still wasn't particularly good, but I hadn't saved that particular piece of paper for the text. No, I'd saved it for the grainy black and white photograph that showed a smiling Pierre Menard standing next to a truck. The article was about French resistance heroes, and Pierre had been one of the key figures.
As I stared at the picture, I couldn't help but think back once again to the moment when he'd put his arms around that soldier and pulled the pin from the grenade, blowing them both up.
“It's at times like this that you need to keep hope in your heart,” I remembered him saying all those years ago, when I was lost in a different time. “Sometimes hope is the only thing that can keep you going. It wouldn't work if it was easy.”
There had been plenty of times, in the intervening years, when I'd used those words in order to stay strong. I only wished that I could have thanked Pierre, that he and Michelle and the others could have lived to see that their hope had been well founded.
I set the box back in place, and then I turned and shuffled back toward my room. I knew it was perhaps rather foolish to expect Harriet to care about Pierre, who after all had been a side character in the story I'd been telling her. At the same time, she was a perceptive young woman and I had a feeling that she might very well be ravenous for information. I imagined her doing some private research in her own time, and I thought that perhaps she would like to take a closer look at the ring as well. Not that I'd let her keep it, of course. Even though I knew the ring was merely a conduit for what had happened, I still worried that it might retain a trace of its former power.
“I think you'll find this photo very interesting,” I said as I shuffled back into my room. “Think of it as a springboard for any research you might want to carry out. I always thought that -”
Suddenly I froze as I saw him standing by the window.
I'd waited so long, and finally he'd come.
And he was holding Harriet firmly from behind, with a large knife pressed against her throat.
“Hugo,” I stammered, horrified by the sight of him, “what -”
“Gran,” Harriet gasped, with tears running down her terrified face, “help me.”
“Leave her alone!” I shouted, dropping the photo and taking a painful, shuffling step forward. “Hugo, whatever you want, your business is with me! Not her!”
“Is that right?” he snarled, his voice thicker and more agonized than ever before. “You must have expected me. You must have felt me coming.”
“I -”
“You must have known this day would arrive.”
“Hugo -”
Before I could finish, he sliced the knife's blade across Harriet's throat, ripping her flesh open from ear to ear and sending blood spraying across the room.
“No!” I screamed, but I stumbled as I tried to run to her, and I fell down hard on my pained, arthritic knees.
“There's no magical healing paste that can save the day this time,” Hugo sneered, holding Harriet tight as her body began to shudder wildly. A moment later, after twisting the knife around, Hugo began to carve through the rest of her neck. “That's if you even had any, which I doubt you do.”
“No!” I sobbed, staring wide-eyed with shock as I saw blood gushing in torrents from Harriet's body. “I'm begging you! I'll do anything!”
“Anything, huh?”
With that, he cut one final time and then let Harriet's headless body slump down to the floor. A moment later he leaned down and placed her severed head right in front of me, so that I could see the horrified expression in her poor dead eyes, and the blood that even now was dribbling from her mouth and running down her chin. My poor dear darling beautiful granddaughter was dead, and my whole body was shaking with sorrow as I stared at her face.
“I came here tonight to give you another chance to help me, Chloe,” Hugo said, towering above me. “Perhaps you were insufficiently motivated before, but it seems that we might finally have something in common. We've both lost someone we loved very much. So now are you ready to help me go back in time and change the course of history?”
Book Three
The Vampire Rises
Prologue
Many years from now...
“Why?” I stammered finally, still staring at Harriet's severed head. “She was so pure and innocent. She wasn't part of this. Why did you have to kill her?”
“That's funny,” Hugo replied, still towering over me as the clock in the hallway struck midnight, “I once said almost the exact same thing, but about Judith. Allow me to offer you the exact same amount of worthless sympathy that you and Sebastian offered me back then.”
I reached out to touch the side of Harriet's face, but at the last moment I hesitated. Her dead eyes stared back at me, and I couldn't shake the feeling that she was somehow accusing me of letting this happen. After all, I had failed to protect her. I had allowed her to sit with me while I waited for Hugo to arrive, when I should instead have forced her to stay far away. Now she was dead, and it was all my fault.
“I don't really have time to stand around watching you weep, old woman,” Hugo continued, his voice filled with contempt. “And you are old, aren't you? It's strange, Chloe, I knew that you'd have aged, but it's still striking to witness all those wrinkles on your face. The truth is, I very deliberately waited until the end of your life before coming back. You might want to think about that. About why I made that choice.”
“Harriet,” I whimpered, with tears streaming down my face, “I -”
“Stop that mewling,” Hugo said, suddenly kicking Harriet's head across the room, until it rolled to a stop next to her lifeless body. Reaching down, he took hold of my face and then, as he crouched down in front o
f me, he forced me to look into his eyes. “You understand the situation here, Chloe, don't you? Your mind is still sharp. Yes, I killed your precious granddaughter, but I only did it because there's a way for you to bring her back. There's way for us to bring her and Judith back. You refused to help me in the past, but things are different now, so I'm going to ask you again. This is your final chance to do the right thing.”
He leaned closer, until I could feel his breath against my face.
“Come with me,” he said firmly. “Help me change history, so that they both live.”
Staring at him, I was suddenly overcome by the most profound sense of anger. No, anger wasn't the right word. It was fury. Pure, unbridled fury. And rage.
“No,” I stammered finally, shaking my head. “No, no, no, no...”
Suddenly I launched myself at him, slamming hard against his chest and pushing him into the wall as I punched him over and over. I wanted to make him suffer, to make him pay for what he'd done to Harriet, but after a moment I realized that he didn't seem to be in any pain at all. In fact, finally, I pulled back and saw that he was laughing at me. My frail body had betrayed me.
“You killed her!” I screamed. “You're a monster!”
“I killed her,” he replied, “but you're the one who's allowing her to stay dead. So, really, which of us is the bigger monster?” He paused, eyeing me with a hint of curiosity, as if he was searching my eyes for a clue as to my intentions. “We can go back and change things, Chloe,” he continued finally. “You know it, and I know it. Unfortunately, I can't do it alone. Thanks to a very unfortunate quirk of fate, I need you. Evidently Judith's death wasn't enough motivation for you. I thought you liked Judith, but clearly -”