He looked around the room, at the naked and the dead.
He had no friends among them and could afford no trusts or confidences. They looked at him the same way, he was certain: they wanted him dead.
Well let them want, Konrad thought bitterly. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing even a hint of weakness. He would be the complete vampire, lord of his people, master of his house, cruel and callous, driven and decadent, inviolable and immortal.
He dapped his hands and the two thralls bled the woman, eager to satisfy their master’s desire.
He sniffed, nostrils flared, the tang of her fresh blood was heady.
He would deny himself no more.
The pleasure was in the taking.
Konrad fed first, the thralls grabbing her hands, slitting her forearms from her wrists, deep into the hollow of her elbow, dripping the rich nectar down his throat in a luscious fountain. He savoured it as it spilled over his lips and ran down his chin.
“Another!” he commanded, even before this one was bled dry, eager for another flavour to bleed onto his palate. That was the beauty of the human cattle: they all tasted different, their blood reflecting the richness and vitality of their lives, against the youth and inexperience.
The thralls dragged the woman away to satisfy the ghoulish flesh eaters of the undead Count’s hall.
A younger girl replaced her. She was barely a child, her blood innocent, and full of temptation. It was a delicacy that he had come to appreciate.
Konrad leaned back, his mouth open as the leering thrall drew a knife across her wrist.
She screamed as her blood dripped into his mouth. He nodded, and the thrall tossed the girl aside. He had barely tasted her, preferring to give her as a gift to one of his chosen ones. He knew their weaknesses, knew what they hungered for, be it young, old, boy, woman. It paid to know those closest to him, and know them intimately. Those weaknesses could always be turned against him. Onursal, the dark-skinned giant, caught and drained the girl, sidestepping her corpse as it slumped to the floor. He bowed to Konrad. “My thanks, master.”
Konrad indulged the vampire with a wry smile. Yes, he knew his people and their weaknesses.
Around the great hall, other Hamaya feasted with their master.
Not all, Konrad amended, seeing that Jerek had not joined in the feeding.
Jerek.
The Hamaya was not himself, and hadn’t been since returning from the debacle at Nuln. Konrad wanted to believe that his loyalty was not in question, that his youngest brother knew his place, but how could he know for sure? Jerek was von Carstein as much as Fritz or Pieter, or Hans had ever been, as he himself was. The taint of Vlad soiled the Hamaya’s veins. How could he not crave Konrad’s power? It was his blood right: his inheritance. He was von Carstein and now that, of his brothers-in-death, only Konrad remained, how could he not look at the count and crave more? In his place, Konrad knew that it would have been impossible to resist the pull of power. That left him with a problem.
The wolf was the consummate predator, ruthless with its enemies.
Was the wolf his enemy? How could he not be, given what was at stake?
The beauty was in the taking. That was the only truth to life.
Konrad turned away from the traitor, glad to see Skellan drinking hungrily. Over the course of a few minutes, Skellan gorged himself on every flavour of blood available. Konrad watched as he moved in dose to an old woman, skin loose and mottled on her frail bones, and tangled his fingers in the woman’s hair, yanking her head back. Seeing Konrad’s intent scrutiny, Skellan laughed and called, “Doesn’t she remind you of your mother?” as he drew the hag close enough to sink his teeth into her leathery throat.
“Only in as much as she’s just as dead as the bitch, otherwise no,” Konrad snarled. There was no humour in his expression as he sank his teeth into a dead-eyed blonde who had staggered too close to him for her own good. He spun her around and let her fall. “Music!” the Vampire Count proclaimed. “A party needs music. Someone play! I want someone to play for me!”
There were no musicians in his court. They had fed on them when he had decided their tunes did not fit his mood.
“Will someone sing for me? Jerek?”
The wolf could not mask his revulsion. He pushed past one of Konrad’s thralls struggling with a fat-bellied sow of a woman. Both went sprawling across the blood-slicked floor as Jerek left the great hall.
“I think perhaps you have lost your mind, my lord,” Skellan interjected smoothly, halting Jerek mid-step. Skellan let his words hang for longer than was wise. The old wolf is tone deaf and is incapable of carrying a tune. Better, surely, that we make these women scream, as one, and let their terror be music to our ears as we revel in their deaths.”
“As it should be!” Konrad agreed. “Let us savour the agonies of our fodder! Let us drink, not only their blood, for even a bug can do that, let us devour their fear! Let us lose ourselves in their fear. Truly, let us feast!”
And they did, in an orgy suffering. The screams of the dying women shook the hall, folding in on themselves in a spiralling chorus of suffering. It was delicious, dizzying.
It was a rhapsody of murder, and Konrad stood in the centre of it all, lord of his domain, master in his own house, and drunk on the music of death.
He claimed the last for his own, whispering almost tenderly in her ear as he sucked the lifeblood out of her ruined face. There was no simple death for her. He chewed off her nose and sucked the mucus and blood with equal abandon.
Sated, he held her still, surveying the carnage. This was power, here, made flesh.
Dead flesh.
This was the power of death over life.
He caressed her cheek, looking for the one face he couldn’t see: Jerek’s.
Skellan moved up beside him.
“He’s gone, hasn’t he?” Konrad asked. He didn’t need to say who.
“In more ways than one,” Skellan said. “I have marked a change in him since Nuln. Something happened to him there, I fear, and he’s not the same man as a result. Not the same wolf. He’s lost his taste for the kill. You’ve noticed it as well, haven’t you?”
Konrad nodded. “He didn’t feed tonight. Not once.”
“That is troubling, but not surprising.”
“No?”
“No. It was something he said a few weeks ago, ‘A wise man does not drink from the cup of his enemy’, that was it, I think.”
“His enemy,” Konrad mused. He didn’t want to believe it, but all the signs were there: the shift in personality, the introspection and reclusion, the late return weeks behind the few survivors of Nuln, the unwillingness to share blood with his brothers. These were all precursors of the cold hand that was betrayal. “No one, not even the wolf, can offer such a slight and believe himself immune from retribution. I will have his apology and his loyalty, or I will have his tongue.”
Skellan inclined his head as if weighing two equally worthy options. “As it should be, my lord. There is wisdom to such thinking, although I wonder if it will have the desired effect on Jerek, or if your brother is too far gone for such a clean solution. I must confess I rather fear the worst.”
He found Jerek on the roof.
The wind was savage, and the night black. Jerek stood amid a murder of glossy feathered ravens, the birds flocking around him as if he was their messiah. The wolfs face was grave.
Konrad stepped out onto the roof.
“So my company offends you, wolf?”
Jerek did not deny him.
A black knot of hatred twisted in Konrad’s gut. The Hamaya lacked even the courtesy to lie to him.
Jerek turned his back on Konrad, feigning interest in the chimneys of Drakenhof far below.
“Who is master here, Jerek? Answer me that.”
“I did not choose this life, Konrad, and worse, I do not like what I have become. I look about me and see life that I cannot be a part of. I see the people I fought to save f
rom the evil I now am. I am lost, caught between two worlds, but not part of either one. Tell me where the crime is in that? It is not a slight to you. Not everything is about you.”
“You did not answer my question.”
Jerek turned slightly, his wild mane of hair streaming in the wind, “I should not need to.”
“But you do,” Konrad said coldly.
Hatred blazed in the wolfs eyes as his lips curled into a sneer. You are a fool, Konrad. You see enemies where there are none. You make enemies where there were only friends. You don’t know when to hold out your hand, and when others do, you slap them away. Look around you, look at the birds, they fight and squabble over scraps. That is your kingdom, Konrad, a bloody fight for scraps. Your magical new world is built on fear, and fear is like sand, it shifts.
You revere strength, or at least claim to, although it is obvious that it scares you. Make no mistake: strength does scare you, no matter what you would have others believe. Strength in others terrifies you, so you stamp it out, betraying your own weakness, while thinking it makes you strong. A strong man surrounds himself with strong men. A weak man postures in the centre of a circus of simpering fools.
“Believe me, Blood Count, there is always something more frightening to be discovered in this world, if you look hard enough. The secret is, coming to terms with the fact that the daemons you know are always less fearful than the daemons you don’t know.
“You are your own worst enemy, my lord.”
“How dare you?” Konrad said.
There was no anger in his voice, no bluster. Indeed, it was almost a question as opposed to statement, as if the wolfs defiance bewildered him.
Jerek took a step forwards, closing the gap between them.
“How dare I? Where is the dare in telling the truth, Konrad?”
Konrad stiffened. “You risk much, speaking to me this way, wolf. If we were not alone I would be forced to bring you into line.”
“You mean silence me, Konrad. No more lies between us.”
“I still could, wolf.”
“And in doing so, prove my point. Yes, you would be stupid enough to do just that, wouldn’t you?”
Instinctively, Konrad raised his hand, ready to strike.
Jerek did not flinch. He stared at Konrad’s fist as if daring him to do it, to lash out.
Konrad held himself in check, barely. A muscle beneath his cheek twitched. His fist clenched, fingernails digging into his palm. Had the stuff flowed through his veins, his fingernails would have drawn blood.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it, wolf? You want to goad me into attacking you. You want me to fall into a rage and throw myself at you.” A look of puzzlement spread over the Vampire Count’s face. He lowered his fist slowly. “Well, you will have no satisfaction from me.”
The wolf shook his head in disgust.
“You think I have lured you up here to fight you? You truly are a fool, Konrad. My being here has nothing to do with you, but everything to do with what you are.” Jerek laughed, a bitter, bleak sound that was ripped away by the wind. What we both are.” He looked over his shoulder, back towards the sheer drop down the mountainside to the jagged rocks below. “I haven’t come here to challenge you. I have come here to die, Konrad. I have come here to put an end to my own suffering once and for all, but I lack the strength to do it.”
“Oh, it can be arranged,” Konrad goaded, taking a step to match Jerek’s, so there was nothing between them.
The ravens scattered, cawing raucously as they burst into the sky in a flurry of black wings that blotted out the slice of silver moon. The birds buffeted the pair, wings slapping at them, bullying them closer to the edge. Konrad took another step, unclasping his cloak. It fell behind him, only to be lifted by the wind. Billowing out, it sailed over the parapet like his own discarded wings.
“I favoured you wolf, I trusted you. I treated you like the brother you are.”
Jerek shook his head in disgust. “You mean you used me as a tool to do what you were incapable of. You had me remove those you feared and cement your authority by becoming your personal assassin? That’s no act of brotherhood in my world.”
“In your world? You talk as if we exist in different realities. We don’t, Jerek. Your world is my world.” Jerek shook his head, denying the truth of Konrad’s words. “You are more like me than you realise, brother. Together we could have achieved great things.”
“There is no greatness in murder.”
“At my side you could have had the world.”
“At your side I could have butchered the world, there is a difference.”
And there it was, the truth.
“So it is true what Skellan said, you have lost your taste for killing. What kind of beast have you become, Jerek? Because you are surely a wolf no longer.”
“I am not the wolf I was, but nor am I the wolf you would have me be. I am torn in two.”
“Then you are a fool, Jerek, because you can only ever be the killer, as the scorpion can only ever be the scorpion, the lamb the lamb, and the raven the raven. It is your nature just as it is theirs. To deny it is to deny your essence, to deny your soul.”
“I have no soul, our bastard of a father stole it from me!” Jerek’s sudden anger was shocking.
Konrad understood. “You hate him, don’t you? You hate him for what he did, and would undo it if you could. You would renounce his gift, you would sacrifice the power he blessed you with, the life he gave you, and go back to grubbing in the dirt like some pathetic pig.”
“I don’t hate him. I want to hate him, but hate is an emotion, and even something as basic as that is lost to me. I would kill him if I could. I would see the curse of his existence purged from the land, if I could.”
“You would kill me.” It wasn’t a question. Well, wolf, I was right when I called you my truth speaker, although I have little liking for the truth that you offer now. There can be no easy forgiveness, it seems, and there can be no trust, not now. You know what it means, don’t you?” Konrad’s face shifted in the moonlight, his features contorting harshly as the beast within rose to the surface.
He was on Jerek before the wolf had a chance to react, tearing at his face with his claws. Jerek threw his hands up to ward off the attack, the flat of his hand—his burned hand, branded with the rune from the protective talisman that sealed the Grand Theogonist’s grave—connecting with the side of Konrad’s face. The Vampire Count reeled back is if he had been stung, his cry rending the night in two. He dropped into a crouch, snarling, as Jerek surrendered to his own primal monster and wore its face. Only then did the dance begin in earnest.
The birds cackled and shrieked appreciatively, circling overhead.
Konrad lashed out, driving Jerek back towards the roofs edge. Jerek met the blow and matched it, catching Konrad’s fist in his own, stepping in close enough so that the mad Count’s graveolent breath stung his face, and slammed his other fist into his throat. It would have killed a living man slowly, suffocating the life out of him as his windpipe collapsed in on itself and starved him of precious air. Konrad’s head snapped forwards, fangs scoring across Jerek’s wrist as he pulled it back.
Konrad twisted his arm, breaking the wolfs grip on his fist, and even as Jerek struggled to reassert his dominance, the Vampire Count surged forwards, cannoning his forehead into Jerek’s face. The blow shattered the wolfs nose. The wolf staggered back under the sheer ferocity of the blow. Konrad followed it up with a dizzying combination of high left, to the temple, a savage low right, to the kidney, and a devastating second left in the centre of the gaping wound that had been the wolfs face.
Jerek stumbled back, his hands held up desperately in front of his face to ward off another blow.
Konrad spun and kicked downwards, his heel snapping the links between ligament and bone beneath the wolfs knee. Jerek stumbled back, perilously close to the roofs edge.
There could be no mercy for the wolf.
Konrad threw hi
mself forwards.
The birds drove themselves into a frenzy, swarming around the pair.
The slate beneath his feet cracked and broke away, leaving Jerek’s back leg hanging over nothing. Through the ruin of his face, the wolf grinned, and in a last act of defiance, took the victory away from Konrad. His smile never wavered. He looked at his would-be killer, and of all things Konrad saw pity in the wolfs eyes. Then Jerek fell back silently into the endless black and was snatched away by the battering wings of Vlad’s ravens.
Rage seethed within Konrad as he moved up to the edge. He half expected to see the erratic flight of a bat trying to mask itself in the murder of birds, but the birds had all settled on the mountainside, filling every crevice and cranny. He strained to see beyond the ravens, to the teeth of the rocks below. Jerek’s body was little more than a dark stain as it lay unmoving on a splinter of jagged rock. He refused to believe what had just happened. The wolf hadn’t fought for his life, he had thrown it away! That last grin, the deliberate lurch backwards, giving himself to the fall instead of trying to save himself, it had been one final act of defiance, done out of spite and stupidity.
It galled him.
“How dare you?” he yelled down at his fallen brother, the manic pitch of his voice scattering a few of the more nervous birds. They circled the dark stain like vultures. leavens were carrion eaters. Soon they would descend on the wolf and strip his carcass clean. Konrad watched for an age, while the sun rose and his rage subsided, until the remaining birds gave up their vigil. Still, the wolf lay there broken, at the base of the crag. Then and only then did a savage smile spread across Konrad’s face, even as he reined in the beast and shifted back to human form. He might have been robbed of the thrill of the actual taking, but it didn’t matter. What did matter was that he was alone. The Golden One, whoever the hell that might have been, was dead. He was the last von Carstein.
Triumphant, Konrad left the ravens to feed on the wolfs broken body.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ghost World
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 23