The Seeker

by Martyn Taylor

  Roxane had decided against going straight home virtually as soon as the cab had driven away up Camberwell Road. She sensed that something was not quite as it should be and her help might be required.

  She got out of the car just before the junction with Medlar Street and moments later was waiting in the shadows of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral for Call to go past. There were tales that vampires could not bear to be on or near consecrated ground, but they were no more than that.

  She felt no more discomfort in the grounds of the cathedral than she would have done under the portico of any of the houses on the opposite side of Camberwell New Road. It had been her intention to allow him to go past and then fall in and walk alongside him, making polite conversation all the way back to Chelsea if needs be.

  Before she could do this, however, she became aware of the two vampires surreptitiously following him on the opposite side of the road, and paused to allow them to pass.

  Call walked as though he was unaware of their presence, preoccupied, which was not exactly a healthy way for a human to be at that time of the morning with vampires about. Then she realised that she was concerned for him and only just kept herself from laughing out loud. Concerned for a human being. What manner of weakness was that in one such as she was? She told herself it was only her investment in his skills that concerned her. Until Cyrano was restored to her, she could not afford to lose him. She was not sure whether she believed it or not.

  She moved away from the cathedral and followed on behind the three of them, as intensely aware of the vampires as she was of Call. The coloured boy was very cool, unlike his companion. He maintained his glamour so that he might not be observed, whereas she scarcely bothered to disguise herself from the odd human they encountered, regarding them all with lascivious, appraising interest.

  Roxane felt a minor fascination with Roland – yes, that was his name, or at least what he called himself. Unlike most vampires – including herself and Cyrano she had to admit, reluctantly – he had obviously been intelligent before being turned, educated and observant, and so far as she could tell had not lost any of his intellectual acuity since.

  Which was hardly normal behaviour for vampires, who mostly succumbed to boredom or the relentlessly increasing need for danger. He would not be popular in any nest of which he was a member. Doubtless he was feeling her nearby presence as fingernails scratching lightly on his consciousness to which Kiki would be entirely oblivious. He would not know what caused his discomfort, but he would be aware of it and would analyse it. The girl, on the other hand, was scarcely sentient, a barely restrained fire of uncomprehending rage at everything and everyone.

  Whoever had turned her must have been on the border of insanity themselves, and Roxane would not have wanted to say which side of the border. This Kiki would always be a liability to any nest, perpetually on the verge of attracting the attention of the humans down on them when they were least prepared for it. For almost all of her time as a blood drinker Roxane would have killed her out of hand, in the name of self-preservation.

  Not that inappropriate members of her nest were any problem to her now. Nor had they been since she and Cyrano had returned to London to be on their own.

  When Call began to walk as quickly as he could she realised he was perfectly well aware he was being followed. As a hunter he was equipped to deal with Roland and Kiki, whatever they tried to so, so she filtered all three of them almost out of her awareness, remaining sufficiently aware of them to follow without being detected by any of them, and enjoyed the pleasures of the city in the early, dark, almost silent hours, when it was at its best.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When he got back home Call was not such much wet through as steamingly, squeakily damp, as well as having become annoyed at being followed by the two vampires. Right then he could have done without having to place the wards against them on his door and windows before going in.

  That said, as soon as he closed the door he put them from his mind. He almost went straight up stairs to have a shower but, instead, went through into the kitchen and rooted around at the back of the cupboard where he kept his corn flakes and other dry goods, bringing out a half drunk bottle of supermarket generic blended whisky.

  As a rule, he enjoyed drinking a good, mature malt whisky, something that required savouring and rewarded the effort. Tonight, however, was not about taste and enjoyment. It was about drinking himself comatose and forgetting. He unscrewed the top and took a hard, long swig of the liquor. It stung as it went down his throat and gullet, hurting. Well, he deserved it.

  Taking the bottle with him, he went upstairs. He showered, got into bed and emptied the bottle down his throat in several gulps, closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  As a rule Call did not remember his dreams. He was aware that he did dream. Everybody dreamed. Human beings went insane if their brains did not shuffle through the sensory input of the day, filing the important stuff and discarding the rest, unable to cope with the overload. Most of the time he did not think he was mad, and yet he did not remember his dreams.

  As a child the regulation nightmares had kept him awake, or woken him, screaming – the unknown, snuffling, slobbering creature in the darkness under the bed, his dark red eyes glittering, just waiting for him to put an unwary foot on the floor; the endless corridor that became smaller and smaller as he walked along it towards the only way out at the other end until he his shoulders were wedged tight against the wall and the low ceiling pressed his chin into his chest – but as an adult he had been spared them, even after he became the hunter. Other than the faces of his victims, his sleep was untroubled.

  He woke at three in the morning, drenched in sweat, muscles aching that had not ached since the last time he made love, and that was a long, long time ago. As an adult he was not prepared to be led through life by his cock and he was not so desperate for female company that he would pay for it. Besides, he was a romantic.

  It was not sex to him, it was making love, and he knew the difference between the two. Having known love with Marion he was not prepared to accept an inferior substitute, although the whole notion of ‘making love’ was predicated upon having someone you loved to make love with, and he did not. Not now. He could not. To love someone would be to put them at risk from the enemies he had, and he was not prepared to do that.

  Yet he felt physically as though he had just indulged in a bout of strenuous and very satisfying love making. There were fluids drying on his rapidly cooling skin that could only be the result of that.

  Closing his eyes, he slipped back towards sleep and saw Roxane standing beside his bed wearing some sort of sheer silk wrap, her body outlined within it by the bright moonlight pouring in through the window.

  The wrap slid to the floor and she got into bed with him. Then the lovemaking began again, tender and ferocious, giving and taking until there was nothing more to give or take. It was like nothing he had ever known, or ever dreamt of knowing, as far removed from his experience as that was from the squalid commercial transactions taking place all over London.

  When he opened his eyes he was bewildered. He could just about understand dreaming about Roxane. Whatever she was now, when she’d been still human she was a very beautiful, desirable woman.

  While he might chose to be celibate now, that choice did not turn off the autonomic reflexes of his male to her female. But to dream so vividly that he woke up with semen all over his thighs, he hadn’t done that since he was thirteen years old, and even then it hadn’t happened very often. It certainly hadn’t happened in as long as he had been living in that house.

  The slapping sound of bare footsteps on the stripped wood floorboards of his bedroom made him turn over and look towards the doorway. Roxane stood there holding a tray with two mugs on it. Steam rose from the mugs and the aroma of coffee filled his nostrils. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn to the Green Dolphin. She came to the bed, set the tray on the floor and handed one of the mugs to him. He w
as uncomfortably aware that he was covered only by a sheet that reached barely to his navel as he sat up against the bedhead.

  “I had the strangest dream,” he said. “You and I made love…”

  She laughed a little, which put him off his stride for a moment.

  “… even though I’m a human and you’re a vampire, and we can’t … you know…”

  She took a sip of her coffee as though it was perfectly drinkable, although Call could hardly bear to hold his mug anywhere near him, it was so hot.

  “… and when you woke up you physically felt as though it had not been a mere dream?” She raised an enquiring eyebrow and Call felt a stirring response in his groin over which he had no control whatsoever.

  “But it was a dream…” he whispered, afraid that it might have been anything else.

  She reached out and cupped his cheek in a palm that was warm from the coffee mug and soft as the flesh of any woman he had ever touched.

  “Real or imaginary,” she said, gazing into his eyes and seeming to him to see everything about him. “Does it matter whether we actually did make love or you only feel as though we did? Your feelings are just as real, just as valid.”

  All sorts of sensations boiled through him in instants, none of which were of any comfort or reassurance to him, and chief amongst them was an understanding that making love with this vampire was an attractive thought to him, the man who had given up everything he had ever loved or valued to be the vampire hunter he was. He could understand wanting to have sex with her – however improbable that might be – because he knew he was a male animal as well as a human man, and there were needs and forces buried deep inside him, where he was careful never to go, which had been there, untapped and unregarded in him, since the first hominid looked into the other tribe and saw a female there that was finer than any he had ever seen before. But love? Who was he trying to trick in love? Who was trying to trick him?

  She drained her mug and got up of the bed. “Get dressed, there’s something for you to see.” Then she was out of the door, making sure it was closed behind her.

  He got out of bed, scrubbed at his belly, groin and thighs with the tee shirt he had discarded before going to bed, then dressed and hurried downstairs. He didn’t need to call out to know she was in the kitchen. As he went into the long, narrow room he noticed that the door to the cellar was open. The cellar door was never open unless he deliberately opened it. At all other times it was locked, and the key was kept on his key-ring, which was on the floor of his bedroom, in the pocket of another pair of trousers. Yet the door to the cellar was open and the padlock lay on the kitchen table.

  It was then he realised that Roxane was moving about freely inside his house and he had never invited her in.

  She laughed. “That’s just folklore invented for dramatic colour by Mr Stoker. Or it may just apply to creatures less powerful than me. I come and go where and when I please, believe you me, Mr Call.”

  He did believe her, which was no more for his comfort than any other of the discoveries he had made of late.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I wanted you and I knew you wanted me, despite myself. Perhaps I had forgotten that slaughter makes me randy. Perhaps the slaughter made me need the opposite to confirm that life is worth living, worth taking risks to enjoy to the full.”

  Call realised he did not care to examine his own emotions at that moment. With a bit of luck there would be time enough for that later.

  “Shall we go down?” she said. “I have a surprise for you.”

  The surprise was actually two surprises, dangling from pulley wheels set into the ceiling from which an old fashioned clothes dryer should have hung, but now stood against the wall. In its place dangled two vampires, Roland and Kiki, their hands bound together with the cord that had supported the drier and held above their heads. They were both limp, unconscious. Roland’s toes trailed on the ground. Kiki’s were supported on a wooden drinks crate turned on its end.

  “How did they get in here?” he whispered.

  “I brought them in. I thought you might like to have some fun.”

  “Why?”

  “They were following you.”

  He glared at her. “I knew they were following me, and I knew I was safe in here because my home is guarded against vampires...” His voice trailed away as he remembered their words of just a few minutes before.

  “I got in, didn’t I?”

  Call stood in the doorway as the two vampires regained consciousness, became aware of their presence, writhing against the ropes that held them, hissing and grimacing and spitting at him. He hoped the cords were strong enough to hold them. Within those confines, the idea of taking on two angry vampires with his bare hands was not appealing.

  ‘Have no fear, Robert Call,” he heard Roxane laugh inside his head. ‘You are in no danger from them.”

  If they were pissed at him they were royally pissed at her, Kiki especially, who practically levitated in her fury as she fought against her restraints to get at Roxane, baring his fangs and screaming. She only stopped screaming when Roxane stepped forward and slapped her face, forehand and backhand. The blows seemed little more than taps to Call but they still knocked the vamp’s head sideways, one way and then the other, leaving her slumped against the ropes with blood drooling from the corners of her mouth. Roland gazed at her, licking his lips before putting away his own fangs and turning on Roxane.

  “What are you doing with that meat,” he demanded, glaring at Call?” There was so much contempt in his tone the words practically fell to the floor, steaming and hissing.

  She took his chin in her hand and squeezed, gently, pushing backwards until his head was practically at ninety degrees to his body. “Show some respect, child,” she advised him, before releasing his chin. “He works for me, looking for something that foolish people have taken from me.” She looked from Roland to Kiki and back again. There was no doubt who those ‘foolish people’ were.

  “He’s a Seeker,” Roland protested, rotating his neck to ease the discomfort.

  “Who better to find a vampire?” she replied, almost conversationally. “Hmmm?”

  His only reply was to spit at her face. He missed. She might be less than an arm’s length away from him, but she could move faster than he could imagine, and did.

  “I shall ask you this only once,” she said in perfect mimicry of the old television comic Nazi officer. “Where is my brother?”

  “And if I don’t tell you?” Roland sneered. “What then?”

  “Then I shall begin to hurt your friend.” Roxane smiled almost beatifically as she spoke, as though she was reading out something as innocent and wholesome as a recipe for fruit cake. “If that is not successful, I shall begin to hurt you, and go on hurting you until you tell me what I want to know.”

  There was something profoundly disturbing about her manner and her tone, so at odds with the words she was speaking, that Call wondered whether he was required for this interrogation, whether he wanted to witness it.

  “You can hurt her all you like. You can tear her into pieces. She’s no friend of mine.”

  “Spoken like a true vampire,” Roxane said, stepping closer to him. “I have never met a vampire who was not self-obsessed to the point of narcissism.”

  “Excluding yourself, I presume.”

  “Oh no, definitely not excluding me,” she purred. Then she ran the nail of her right forefinger down his cheek, from eyebrow to chin. Blood bubbled behind it as she drew it through his flesh. She swept some up with the fore finger of her left hand and then sucked it clean, smacking her lips like an extravagant wine taster. Then she frowned. “Not a great vintage.”

  He snarled and lunged to bite her. She evaded him easily, again, and laughed at him, the scorn clear in her voice.

  “You know what is going to happen to you. Why not be sensible. Tell me what I want to know and I shall make your second death easy. Do not tell me and I promise you that you will
expire in agony more exquisite than anything you ever dreamed of inflicting.” She took hold of his chin once again and then held it immovably in front of her own, so close she could almost have kissed him. Then she removed her dark glasses and stared into his eyes.

  He squirmed to get out of the line of her stare, but could not. “You think you are such a bad, bad man, don’t you my pretty little Dutch boy, but you can see things in my eyes that turn your insides to water. I have done things that would make you imagine your blood was freezing in your veins. What you can see makes you know intimately that when I promise you pain it will be exactly that, so much pain that there is nothing else in creation. You know it is true.” She gazed at him in silence for a little while. “So, what’s it going to be, pretty boy? What’s it going to be?”

  Roland laughed. “The pain will be over soon enough, and if it isn’t then I’ll go insane, a sensitive soul like mine…”

  Roxane turned to Call. “He’s got balls; you’ll have to give him that. For the moment, at least.”

  Call shook his head. “There’s only one thing I’ll give him. Hang about a couple of minutes and I’ll go and get it.”

  She shook her head. “There is no need for your blades, Robert Call. I have never required instruments to extract information. Torquemada and his minions could have learned from me. Perhaps they did. I don’t remember.” She stood absolutely still for a moment, wrapped in thought. “Or not,” she said eventually. “He was before even my time, wasn’t he? Now, stand back.”

  He did as he was told without ever thinking about it and watched as she stripped the clothes from Roland’s torso with a seemingly gentle sweep of her hands. There was nothing he could do to resist her, however he squirmed and twisted. There was little surplus flesh on him, and he still retained a great degree of muscular definition which, in Call’s experience, was unusual. Most male vampires were lazy, flabby things. Those toned, highly sexed godlings were very much the product of the over active imaginations of American female writers.