by Baker, Scott
My physical discomfort was going away but my confusion was increasing. I walked along mechanically, not paying attention to what I was doing. Things caught my eye—a glowing leaf, my brother's back, a gravestone with its inscription weathered to illegibility—and held my fascinated, uncomprehending attention.
We lowered the coffin into the ground. Cousin Charles sprinkled it with holy water and began the final parts of the funeral service. People threw sprigs of wild rose into the hole. Two servants began shoveling dirt down on the coffin.
I was standing by the hole, watching the servants shovel the silver dirt, when I suddenly sensed Dara somewhere in the woods behind me.
Acting without thought I turned and walked away from the grave into the woods. I saw Dara. She was walking slowly, moving as if in a trance.
I ran up to her and caught hold of her arm. She awakened instantly.
"David!" She looked around. "Where are we?"
I could only stand dumb, clutching at her arm.
"What's wrong with you?" she demanded. "What have they done to you?"
I could only nod and smile, happy to have found her. The forest was beautiful.
The wind brought Cousin Charles's solemn voice to us.
"We can't stay here. Come on!" She began to run. I followed her, happy to be running.
Finally she stopped. "Can you understand me at all?" she asked.
Her words were meaningless. I smiled at her.
"Here." She twisted the Naga off her arm and forced it onto mine. There was a moment's sharp pain, then my head began to clear.
"Can you understand me now?"
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
"What did they do to you?"
I thought about it for a long time. "Dinner," I said finally, trying to tell her about Michael and Uncle Stephen and about the Nagas.
"They've given you some kind of drug. Do you understand me?"
"Yes." The words were beginning to come. "Tripping. Not like—"
"Can you remember things if I tell them to you?"
"Yes." My mind was slowly growing clearer. "Talk slow," I added.
"I am your sister." I nodded. "Our brother Michael is our enemy. Uncle Stephen is our friend. He gave me this ointment."
She took a small metal box out of her dress and showed it to me, then put it in my pants pocket.
"If we get separated lie down in a safe place with your head to the north and rub some of this ointment on your forehead. Then follow the Naga. It will lead you to me. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good. How do you feel?"
"Wonderful."
She frowned. "Can you remember more if I tell you more?"
"Yes."
"We are dhampires. That means our grandparents and now our father as well are dhampires. Michael is a dhampire too. So are our uncles.
"We will not gain our full powers until father has been dead forty days. But when we make love our powers grow. Whenever any two dhampires have sex together, power is generated.
"Michael had been forcing me to have sex with him. There is power in rape, though not as much as in lovemaking. He has been draining me of my power. Do you understand what I've been telling you?"
"Yes."
"You're sure? Don't try to think, just remember."
"Yes."
"Good. Now we must make love. I no longer have enough power to keep us unnoticeable without your help. We need more power to hide ourselves and to overcome the drug they fed you. Take off your clothes. Hurry!"
I began to take off my clothes. There was something I knew I should remember, but I didn't know what it was.
* * *
Chapter Seventeen
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The woods were silver. A three-quarters moon gleamed through the branches. Dara lifted her dress over her head and drew me down beside her onto the damp oak leaves and pine needles.
Part of me seemed to be watching us from the tannic-acid smell of the rotting oak leaves, yet as we held on to each other, as I fumbled with her breasts and tried to stroke her skin, my cock swelled and stiffened with a need for her so desperate and painful that it pushed the last of the impersonal bliss in which I had been floating out of me.
"I can feel them in the woods all around us and I can't keep us hidden much longer without your help. Hurry, David!" Dara said as she pulled me over on top of her.
I pushed myself into her, tried to make love to her. But I could not match myself to her rhythms or find a rhythm of my own, could not regain that sense of tightness and certainty that would have enabled me to shrug off the clumsy weight of my body and lose myself in our interface, in our lovemaking, and as I grew more frustrated, more desperate, I tried to substitute force for the sensitivity I could no longer find in myself, as though by slamming my cock into her with greater and greater violence I could somehow break through to the missing right-ness.
The power swirled through and between us, burned in us, but only in the instant when it leaped the gap between us did we share it, did it unite us. When I held it the woods around us were transparent crystal and it was easy to sense the vampires loosed and searching for us, easy to wrap ourselves in a shining obscurity they could not penetrate. And when the power passed from me to Dara it was as easy for her to make use of it as it had been for me. But the easiness with which I could use it, the ecstasy I felt when it exploded in me, only made it all the more frustrating, all the more agonizing that we could not share it.
But at the same time that the swirling crystal wind was burning in me I was sinking into the rotting darkness that had once been my father. The power that had been his in life was leaving him, a dark sluggish tide flowing from him to us and enabling us to use the luminous energies of the living earth, but he and his power were one and as his strengths became ours we found ourselves trapped with him in his dead unresponding flesh.
He could feel himself rotting and disintegrating, feel parts of himself slipping from him no matter how hard he tried to hold on to them, while new things were springing to life within him, dark cancerous fungi feeding off the man he had once been. He felt a terrible emptiness opening within him, a void he knew instinctively could only be filled with stolen life, stolen blood.
He remembered all those he had loved—Saraparajni, his Naga wife, his brothers Peter and Stephen, his children, Michael, Dara and even myself—with a strange cold petrified love, but while what little remained of the man he had been still hoped for our deliverance, that hope was now the channel through which his new hungers flowed, so that it was we above all others whom he desired to drink and empty, we from whose bodies and beings he needed to gouge-empty replicas of himself, hollow vessels to contain the void within.
And at the center of that void, Satan, around whom the other vampires danced a beautiful, terrible dance that moved in my father with ever-increasing strength as Satan molded and pruned and shaped him. A dance my father could no longer fight, that was claiming him for its own and would soon bring him life and blood and love—
And as he was flooding into us, a river of hungry shadows, we were making clumsy violent love, feeling the power building in us, coming closer, ever closer, to the fusion we were unable to achieve.
And then there was a sudden twisting, a wrenching and a falling, and I was no longer in control. I felt, I participated in my body's actions but they were animated by another's will. My brother's will.
Dara knew the change coming over me for what it was and tried to get away from me, struggling in silence so as not to attract the vampires in the woods around us. Michael held her down and thrust my cock which was his cock was a blunt fist gripping a heavy wooden stake a knife-edged shard of broken glass into her again and again. And though I hated him and fought him and would have killed him if I could, yet he was almost me, was the me I had always rejected and refused and thrust from me, and sometimes I found that it was I who was grinding myself into Dara, I who was glorying in her pain and sharing in my broth
er's laughter. And then Michael had spanned the interface between us, become the interface, so that it was me, helpless, being raped by my brother in Dara's and my interlocked bodies.
And all the time he was bleeding us of the power we generated, taking it into himself.
And then I had pulled myself out of Dara, had turned her over and pulled her to her knees, was gripping her throat tight in my right hand while I alternated strokes between her ass and vagina. Her sphincter muscles were tight and tensed and she cried out with pain each time I thrust myself deep into her ass, yet the strokes in between had become smooth, desperately gentle, futile attempts at transforming what was being done to us, what I was being allowed to do, into lovemaking. And all the power in our love and pain was being drained from us by my brother.
Finally Michael took complete control, pushed me aside to watch from the tannic-acid smell of the oak leaves, to watch and see and know what it meant to be a Bathory and a dhampire.
And then Dara and I were united again and Michael was reaching through our pain and despair into the rotting darkness that had once been our father. He took father's developing hungers and needs and passions for his own, mastered them and broke them to his human will, so that only through him could father feed the void opening within him, so that father could do nothing but what Michael willed him to do. It was cold, brutal, abstract as some sort of chesslike game played with surgical knives in the body of a patient not expected to survive.
Triumphant and tired, Michael began to withdraw from our minds, was suddenly gone. I lay on Dara, exhausted, my softening cock retreating on its own from between her buttocks. We were both too drained to move. Dara was crying softly.
Uncle Stephen stepped out of the forest shadows, holding two flaming dead hands in front of him like torches. He stuck them upright in the ground in front of us and traced a circle around us with his finger. The circle glowed a sullen red. I tried to get to my feet and stop him, found that I was paralyzed, no longer even able to follow his movements with my eyes.
He squatted down in front of the flaming hands and sprinkled something from a vial of shiny black glass onto one of them. The flames crackled and sputtered. He turned to face us. I felt my cock begin to stiffen.
"Dried semen from a hanged man's final ejaculation," he told us, genial and smiling as a furniture salesman approving your taste in upholstery. "It will restore your vitality, so that what you did for your brother you can now do for me. You'll be ready in a few minutes.
"I'm sorry to do this to you," he said with what sounded like genuine regret and I remembered that Dara had said that he was our friend, "but I am fighting for all our lives. When your brother reawakens he will regain control of Dara, and the power I'll have gained from you will be your only hope. I still need Michael's protection—Gregory would kill me if he could and my time has not yet come—but with your help we will soon be free of Michael. And since I need your help and know you will not grant me it freely, I must compel you."
While he'd been talking he'd been taking off his clothes, so that he now stood naked before us, a skeletally thin man whose skin shone a pale silver. He took a human finger bone from the pocket of his neatly folded wool trousers and dipped it in green liquid from a second vial, then traced a complex pattern on each of our foreheads.
He poured the remnants of the vial's contents on the other flaming hand and withdrew, circling around behind us. I could hear his heavy, excited breathing as we found ourselves repeating everything we had done and felt before. There was no third presence in our minds but we were helpless to alter a single action, a single emotion. I hated and fought against a Michael who wasn't there, felt him bleeding us of the power that was building up and up in us, filling us without being taken from us.
I was moving in the same rhythms which my brother had forced on me when he had taken control of father, Dara was crying out again with the pain of her abused sphincter muscles, when I felt Uncle Stephen's hands on me, a sudden tearing pain in my own ass as he thrust himself into me, joined in our agonized rhythm and took the power we had generated for his own, then directed it back through us against my father who, defeated once, was unable to summon up any resistance against him.
Uncle Stephen pulled himself out of me and I lay sprawled once more atop Dara, so exhausted I was unable to see the forest glowing in front of my eyes.
"Sorry again," I heard Uncle Stephen's cheerful voice say as I drifted slowly off into unconsciousness, "but I can't afford to let Michael learn about this just yet. I'm afraid you'll have to forget about my part in this business for the moment."
There was a hissing sound, then I was coughing on thick, rancid smoke. I lost consciousness.
When I awakened Dara was gone. My Aunt Judith, not middle-aged as she'd been when she'd killed herself, but young and beautiful, with great pale eyes and long dark hair, was kneeling over me, her lips pressed to my throat. I could feel the terrible suction as she drained me of blood, was glad somehow, in a childlike way, to see her again after so many years. I tried to reach out and take her hand but didn't have the strength.
I slept.
* * *
Chapter Eighteen
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My father's shadow tides lapped weakly at my mind, cold like the ground beneath me. My heart was beating, I could feel myself breathing, but I could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, and my body would not obey me.
I remembered Aunt Judith leaning over me, her eyes dead sapphires, her cold lips pressed to my neck, remembered the way I'd tried to reach out and take her hand.
I tried to touch my hand to my neck, explore the place where she'd bitten me, but my arm was too heavy and I couldn't move it.
Strength was flowing back into me from my father, but too little, too slowly. I forced myself to try to climb the dark tide to him and take what I needed, but I couldn't get to him, couldn't force my way through the spongy darknesses that separated us. I would have to wait, as I had had to wait at Carlsbad.
I tried to reach through the darknesses to Dara, found only emptiness where she should have been.
Aunt Judith's eyes so cold, so empty. So hungry, where they had once been loving. And they were going to make Dara like that, make me like that. I hadn't been strong enough to protect us, had been too stupid to suspect the Communion wafer Cousin Charles had put in my mouth—
No. I had participated in what Michael had done to Dara, could not perhaps have been used as I had been used had I not been as much a dhampire as Michael, had I not had within me the potential to become what he was.
And what if the only way to defeat him was to make myself over in his image, to become everything that I had long ago, before I'd known what decision it was I was making, refused to become?
But there was still the Naga, the tight spiral of gold I could feel clasping my left forearm. Dara had said to follow the Naga to her.
My vision was beginning to return: I could just make out a faint silvery glow, like a cloud of metallic afterimages. And I was beginning to smell the oak leaves again, hear the branches above me moving in the wind.
I tried to move my hand again, managed to inch it to my throat. The skin around my jugular was bruised but unbroken.
I groped for my pants, jerked them closer. The metal box containing the ointment was still in the pocket where Dara had left it. I had to find a safe place, lie down with my head to the north and rub some of the ointment on my forehead, then follow the Naga to Dara.
A safe place. My truck? No, the snakes in it were too dangerous. Where, then?
The silver glow was getting steadily brighter.
But perhaps I was asking the wrong question. What could I do to make someplace safe?
I thought about Cousin Charles's priestly paraphernalia—his holy water, crucifixes, whatever I could find—then rejected the idea. Not after the Communion wafer. I didn't even know if he was a real priest.
Uncle Stephen would know what to do but I couldn't trust him, not after wha
t I'd overheard him say in the library, not knowing that he'd been the one who'd arranged Dara's and my violation for Michael. Uncle Peter was too terrified of everyone—even me—to be trusted. And the Takshakas, my Naga grandparents, had done nothing to help us. Perhaps I had to follow Dara's instructions before they could do anything.
The woods around me were starting to come into focus. I tried to sit up, was suddenly very sick. I would have to wait a little longer.
I would have to try to make do with garlic and wild roses, hope they'd protect me till dawn. My bedroom had a door that could be bolted from the inside and it was as likely—or as unlikely—to be safe as any other room I could think of in the house.
I levered myself up to a sitting position, managed to maintain it despite the dizziness and the nausea. The moon had set but I could see the forest around me, the trees like silver-spider-webbed volcanic glass, the forest floor a dark lake lit from beneath by a trapped moon. And in the distance, but closer, clearer, somehow than the forest that separated me from it, the house blazed, bright as burning metal.
I got my clothes on, half crawled, half staggered up the hill to the house, stopping only long enough to rip some bright-burning branches off a wild rose bush on the way.
The house was deserted. Everyone was gone or asleep. I got what I needed from the kitchen and workroom, then made my way slowly up the stairs to my room.
I shot the bolt on the door, then nailed a cross of wild rose and a clove of garlic to its solid oak. I hung a second cross and another clove of garlic in the window, rubbed garlic around the crack between the door and the doorframe, then did the same for the crack between window and window frame. I strung all but one of my remaining cloves on a piece of twine which I tied tight around my neck, then ate the final clove.