The Dark Arts of Blood

by Freda Warrington

  Violette doubted that they’d heard her. When she left, they didn’t notice.

  * * *

  Any of them might have located Emil, but – since Violette had stayed behind for a short time, and Charlotte had hurried on to Lucerne – Karl happened to reach him first. He spent the whole day searching: a new morning dawned before he finally he caught Emil’s distinctive red-gold aura among thousands of other humans.

  As predicted, he was in Italy, but nowhere near the family farm.

  Karl located him in Rome, weaving through the edge of a crowd that had gathered to watch a military parade.

  The ground shook in time to the rhythm of tramping boots. Onlookers crowded forward to watch the procession pass. Rank upon rank of soldiers, motorcycles, flags snapping. And at the centre was a stocky figure standing proudly in his grand limousine: their leader, Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

  Karl looked on this display of human pomp with a sense of dismay. The taste of dust and diesel fumes was bitter on his tongue. Sunlight reflected off the buildings, and the crowd’s excitement overwhelmed all his senses. Somewhere, in this immense swarm of people, was Emil.

  This is the past and the future, he thought. Arrogant displays of might, which grow ever grander and more intimidating. When I was a young mortal, the troops had horses. Now there are motor vehicles and tanks, leviathans of war. Who can stand against this? The Great War was not enough. They still want more.

  Karl identified Emil’s aura – a speck among thousands – and began to push his way through the crowd. Not far, a few hundred yards…

  Mussolini’s vehicle trundled towards the place where Emil waited. Karl caught a clear view of the dictator’s face: fleshy, pompous, self-satisfied.

  He thought, This is what Reiniger wanted.

  Karl was running now. He wove and pushed his way through the barrier of humans, ignoring their curses in his wake. He saw Emil, his golden hair distinctive, standing in a grassed area lined with trees. He stood slightly apart, behind the densest part of the crowd, hands deep in the pockets of a long dark coat.

  As Karl struggled to reach him, he saw Emil’s right hand beginning to emerge from the pocket, and the dark shape of a pistol rising to point at Mussolini’s heart…

  Karl barged into him from the side. He caught the wrist that held the gun, shielding it from the view of anyone around them. Emil fought him. His strength was extraordinary, his eyes glazed.

  If the gun went off, even if the bullet hit no one, the game would be over. The crowd around Emil would lynch him.

  As they had his brother.

  Karl struggled to wrench the weapon out of his hand, at the same time forcibly edging him backwards, away from the horde edging the road. He tried to make the struggle discreet – an argument between friends – so as to draw as little attention as possible.

  Emil fought, his face red and distorted with effort. His trigger finger contracted and the gun went off.

  The bullet ploughed into the earth between his feet and Karl’s. The retort was drowned by the crowd’s roar and the noise of the cavalcade passing them. Then Mussolini was gone, his entourage sweeping onwards into the distance as Karl forced Emil backwards through the trees. His hand, still gripping the pistol, went white under the pressure of Karl’s grip.

  Emil stood gasping, red-eyed.

  “Why the hell did you stop me?”

  “What did you think you were doing?”

  “Finishing what Alfonso started!”

  “By taking a pot-shot at your leader? You know you would have been seized and hanged from the nearest tree?”

  “Yes!” Emil snarled. “But if I killed that monster, it would have been worth it. How dare you stop me? This is none of your concern!”

  “I disagree. Do you not understand that Violette offered her life to save yours? How do you imagine she’d react, to learn that you showed your gratitude by throwing yourself away in a rash political gesture? Or that I failed to stop you? You waste your life, I fail Violette… No, Emil. The consequences don’t bear thinking about. I couldn’t let it happen.”

  Emil dropped the pistol. Karl quickly took it and removed the bullets, vowing to dispose of the weapon at the first opportunity.

  “I have no future,” Emil said bleakly.

  Karl put an arm around his shoulders and guided him firmly away. “Why do you say that?”

  “I am a born fool. Violette rejects me. Fadiya renders me a gibbering wreck, so weak and befuddled that I almost lose my life and have to be rescued by women.”

  “No shame in that. I suggest you swallow your pride and acknowledge the magnificence of the women who risked them-selves to save you.”

  “All I had left was to die fulfilling my brother’s brave quest. That’s all. And you took it from me.”

  “Or I’ve given you a second chance. No one need know about any of this. How do you wish to be remembered, Emil?”

  “What?”

  “As a failed performer who was hanged or thrown in prison for a crazed assassination attempt? Or as one of the greatest male dancers in history? You can’t save the world – none of us can – but you can give inspiration to thousands with your talent. I’d choose the latter above anything.”

  Emil was quiet for a long time. They walked until the sun began to set. Karl noticed that broad roads were being driven through places where Roman remains had stood only a few years before. In almost every street he saw evidence of Il Duce’s attempts to use art and film, the press, sport, everything to promote his cause. The sights made him depressed.

  Emil rubbed his face, scraped his fingers through his hair. Eventually he spoke.

  “Is Violette safe?”

  “Yes, she’s safe. Still worried to death about you, but otherwise well.”

  “What happened? I remember boarding a ship with Fadiya. It seemed a wonderful idea at the time, but after that… I can’t claim it’s a blur, because I remember everything, but it’s all in jagged fragments.”

  “Violette can explain better than me what happened, but we need you to come home to Lucerne.”

  “Home?” He laughed.

  “I’m under strict instructions,” said Karl. “Violette wants you where you belong, at the ballet, working with her.”

  Emil gave a disbelieving gasp. “After all this? I don’t know how. It’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  Another long silence. With darkness falling, Karl thought he should take Emil to a café and feed him before he collapsed.

  “You and Charlotte and Violette, Fadiya and all those people in the Algiers house,” Emil murmured. “All vampires. How am I supposed to live with this knowledge?”

  “With complete discretion,” Karl said drily. “Pretend you don’t know. Tell no one.”

  “And the other members of the Ballet Lenoir? Do they know?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Most humans are easily deceived. However, there are a few rare sensitive ones, like you, who see what we are. Can you cope with knowing?”

  “I haven’t coped well so far.”

  “You can learn. Violette has gone to great lengths to keep you, Emil. Do you think you’re in danger from us?”

  “Aren’t I? I’d be a fool to think I’m not, after all that’s happened to me, and I still know almost nothing about you or what sort of monsters you really are. Nothing, except that you drink blood and drain our energy and send us mad.”

  Karl noted his bitterness.

  “I can’t deny that,” said Karl. “I can’t force you to come home. Well, I could, but I won’t. Believe me, though, when I say you’re in no danger from us. Violette would kill anyone who threatened you.”

  “Yes, I think she would. But what are you, when you’re not drinking human blood? I simply don’t know. Does anything human matter to you at all?”

  “Many things. You know how passionate Violette is about her ballet. Yes, we have human interests. We feel love and jealousy…”

  “But what do you believe in? You,
Karl, in particular? God, Satan, what?”

  Karl smiled. “I believe in a quiet life.”

  “You? A quiet life?”

  “And you’ve seen how hard it is for us to attain that – but yes, the more others try to take our freedom, the harder we fight. The more precious it is.”

  “I need a drink.”

  Light and voices spilled out of a nearby restaurant. Emil stopped and stared longingly in through the window. Standing out here in the dark with a vampire, gazing in at the vibrant mortal world…

  “And food,” said Karl, feeling a tinge of regret that he couldn’t share the long-lost pleasure of eating. “Forgive me, I should have thought of this earlier.”

  “I need a glass of wine. Or a bottle,” said Emil. “And everything on the menu.”

  “Whatever you desire.” Karl steered him to the door with a light hand on his back. If they looked too travel-worn to be let in, he was ready to cast his ruthless glamour over the maître d’.

  “What about you? You don’t… eat, do you?”

  “I’ll order something and you can have that too.”

  “I will, believe me. I’ll be able to think clearly once I’ve eaten. No dancer can give his best without fuel.”

  “Perfect wisdom.”

  “Plain old peasant wisdom,” said Emil.

  “So, will you come back to Violette?” Karl repeated.

  “Ask me again,” said Emil, “when I’ve had that bottle of wine.”

  * * *

  The restaurant let Karl use their telephone while Emil was eating. He gave them no choice, since he was not in the mood for arguments and used all the polite sinister charm it took to deflect their protests. He tried several times before he finally got through and – after a frustrating chorus of buzzing and clicking on the line – Thierry answered and managed to connect him to Charlotte.

  He heard her voice on the other end, tinny and far away. “Karl?”

  “Beloved, he’s with me. We’re in Rome. We’ll take the first train we can and we should be back tomorrow, I hope by the afternoon…”

  “Travel safely.” She sounded exhausted, wrung out by anxiety, not herself. “And come back quickly, Karl. I’m with Stefan. He’s… I’m here with him, but please come home as fast as you can.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  UNDEAD

  Stefan lay on the double bed beside what was left of Niklas, naked except for a corner of the sheet across his hips.

  Charlotte was already there, sitting with him, when Karl arrived. A long train journey had delivered him and Emil back to Lucerne: he’d left Thierry to settle Emil in his room and come straight to the bedroom to find her keeping vigil, grief-stricken and desperate.

  “I found him like this,” she said. “You were right, we shouldn’t have left him. Not for a moment.”

  “You did what you had to,” Stefan rasped with all that was left of his voice. “And so have I.”

  He had made cuts all over his own body. Across his windpipe, giving his throat a ghastly red smile. Straight into his own heart. Slashes across his abdomen, long cuts down the inside of his forearms, even into the deep arteries of his thighs.

  The bone-handled Istilqa knife he’d used lay on the bedside table, smeared from hilt to tip with blood. Karl realised, from the way Stefan’s right hand lay curled, wet and red, that Charlotte herself had taken the knife from him. She’d put it out of his reach, and he was too weak to seize it again.

  But his vampire blood oozed too slowly to let him bleed to death: it was more a ruby gel than a liquid. The red slashes were vivid against his blue-white skin. And still he breathed, eyes open, left fist tight on Niklas’s arm.

  “Stefan,” said Karl. Tears burned his eyes. “What have you done? We took our revenge on Reiniger. You enjoyed it. Why would you want to leave such pleasures behind?”

  Stefan spoke in a bubbling whisper. “Without Niklas, it’s meaningless.”

  “We need you,” said Charlotte. “What about us? Darling, please don’t leave us.”

  He gripped her hand. “Charlotte, I’m so sorry, my sweet friend. It’s harder to die than I expected. If you would find a sword or axe to sever my head, it would be quicker. Please.”

  Charlotte and Karl exchanged a look of despair. Stefan was right. If he was determined to die, their intervention would be a mercy. He was in agony. It would not be the first time Karl had struck the head from a suffering vampire.

  But they weren’t in the habit of keeping weapons nearby. Where would he find an axe or a sword here? There would only be theatrical props…

  “No,” said Charlotte. “Look, there is a line between grief and self-pity. You’ve made your point, but it’s time to stop.” Then, “Stefan?”

  He was no longer responding. His face was bloodless, like a carcass hung up and drained in a butcher’s shop. No breath. Karl leaned down and detected no heartbeat, either. And yet… he hung there, suspended between life and death.

  Undead.

  Karl made an instant decision: went into the Crystal Ring, straight through a dozen walls and floors to the kitchens and seized the heftiest implement he could find. A butcher’s cleaver.

  He couldn’t carry such a heavy object through Raqia so he returned on foot, sprinting along corridors and up flights of stairs to the bedroom. A walk that would take ten minutes, there and back, took thirty seconds.

  Nothing had changed. Karl glanced over the ghastly scene in the gloom – Niklas a pallid husk, Stefan like a fresh corpse beside him – then he sealed all emotion away in a casket of ice.

  Charlotte rose to her feet, blocking Karl’s path to him. “Don’t you dare,” she said. Her eyes were wild. There were imprints of Stefan’s blood all over her dress.

  “Charlotte, we can’t leave him like this. If he wants to die, what right have we to keep him alive and suffering? He could stay like this for weeks, months. Forever.”

  “Don’t touch him.” Her eyes grew even wider, ringed with white.

  “Wouldn’t you extend this mercy to me?” said Karl. “He’s nearly gone. It will be quick. Take the pillow from under his head.”

  In response, Charlotte lifted one arm to form a protective barrier over Stefan’s supine form. She was like a marble wall blocking his way and Karl knew, with dismay, that she was not going to move.

  Karl felt that he’d gone mad. The room was full of ghosts. He saw Kristian and Katerina, Robyn, Fyodor, Simon and Rasmila, Niklas… Even the false Charlotte and Godric Reiniger himself, still in his Schmutzli shape. They all looked like smoke. A single blow of the cleaver and Stefan would join them…

  “Beloved, we have no choice,” he said softly. “Leave the room. I’ll tell you when it’s over.”

  She raised her other hand and pointed her forefinger at his heart as if aiming a pistol.

  “Karl, I swear to God, if you touch Stefan, I will kill you.”

  They stood frozen as Karl heard ten seconds tick by on the clock. He counted them. How long did they seem to Stefan as he lay there undying?

  Then he stepped back and put down the cleaver on a chair, facing Charlotte again with open palms to show he was empty-handed. “If not now, we’ll have to do it later,” he said. “Every moment we hesitate, Stefan is in hell.”

  She glared back like the Medusa. “I will not give up on him. I’m going to fetch Violette. On second thoughts, you fetch her. I don’t trust you alone with Stefan.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Karl paused, wondering if Charlotte had finally lost her mind. If she had, he didn’t blame her. He too felt unhinged, like Stefan, like Emil and Violette… Was there anyone sane left?

  “Stefan’s the one who matters, not us,” she said. “So the faster you find her, the better.”

  “Very well, but Violette won’t hesitate to end his misery.”

  “She’ll do as I ask. Just bring her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I refuse to let him go. If it takes three to initiate a vampire, why not thre
e to reinitiate?”

  Charlotte’s voice was level, measured and ruthless.

  “I don’t believe it’s ever been tried.” Karl spoke quietly, caught between the urge to dissuade her and the knowledge that her instincts, however wayward, were usually sound. The spectres faded, except for one smoky shape that stayed in the corner, watching.

  “We are going to be the first to try, then.”

  * * *

  Stefan fought them, rousing from his coma as he realised what they were trying to do. He fought as violently as Violette herself had struggled against her own transformation.

  He truly doesn’t want this, Charlotte thought in horror. Wouldn’t it be kinder after all to let him go, as he wished, to join Niklas?

  It took all three of them carry him into the living room, where there was more space. And more light, although the room seemed dim and foggy despite every light being on. Between them they held his inert body upright.

  Karl was the first to sink his fangs into the torn column of his neck. Then Violette, supporting Stefan from behind, drank from the other side. At that, Stefan went rigid, his whole body a taut bow of pain, his expression wide and blank with inexpressible agony.

  Charlotte stared at the scene of Karl and Violette with their dark heads bent as they fed, Stefan stretched like a martyred saint between them. No one has ever tried to re-transform a dying vampire before, she thought. To kill them again, to fill them with Raqia’s energy again. Is it possible, or are we just prolonging unspeakable suffering? Stefan, I’m so sorry. Perhaps Karl’s right – he’s always right – but I had to try.

  Then Karl caught her wrist and pulled her in to take his place. She found the holes his fangs had made in their friend’s neck and drank.

  She realised how little blood Stefan had left. She sucked hard to draw the last drops. The Istilqa taste was barely there. His blood was like slushy ice, but still delicious, like a strange cocktail of caramel and salt and cognac, yet none of those. She convulsed against him, her appetite on fire, desperate for more – but Stefan had nothing left. Pleasure and misery left her weak-kneed.