But what was this? A dull silver line arcing through the darkness. The edge of an axe.
Karl’s hands wielding the axe. Karl’s eyes fierce, mad with revulsion and pain and cruelty. Surely the others must stop him! But they only stood and watched, gazing down as soullessly as Niklas.
The blade swept down. Kristian felt the savage wrench of pain, felt the blood bubbling in the wound, choking him. Saw the insane glaze of Karl’s eyes, those terrible amber eyes as the axe hacked down again and again. Heard his own spinal column crack, the tendons recoil; felt his own head bounce back a little with the blow and come to rest still staring upwards.
He gazed at his executioners. Now he realised that their eyes were full, not of love, but of twisted hatred. Had he always misread them?
Traitors, all of them. Traitors.
And he parted his lips, and he saw their faces hang with absolute horror as his severed head spoke. The words came out thick and slurred. “This—is how you love me? Even you, Ilona, Stefan? And you—Karl?”
Then the silver line came hurtling towards his forehead, and the blackness split apart and swallowed him.
***
They scattered and buried Kristian’s body in the earth of the tunnel floor, working swiftly in a charged silence. Charlotte felt one step removed from the horror of it, but she was trembling from head to foot. The feelings of the others cut the air like a web of glass. Not jubilation. Grief. It infected her too. This had to be done but no one wanted it, such a terrible thing.
At length they emerged from the ice-house into the sloping mass of trees that concealed it. Night lay on the garden of Parkland Hall and moonlight iced the leaves. Without speaking, Stefan and Pierre shared their blood with Karl, to help revive his strength. And Charlotte looked on as Karl and Ilona gazed at each other, embraced briefly, almost savagely; parted again. Then Karl left them and came to Charlotte.
His face was shadowed, moonlight silvering one cheekbone and catching bronze sparks in his eyes. She had no idea what he would say, could not tell whether his eyes held love or regret. She stared at him, unable to move towards him or away. And she saw doubt in his face and realised that her thoughts were clear in her eyes. I don’t know that I can ever trust you again. I can exist without you. If you are going to reject me again, I shall reject you first!
How pale he looked. At a loss, somehow. Their positions had changed subtly; she was no longer a girl hopelessly in awe of him. Yet his beauty still brought aching tears to her throat, made everything else seem futile. That would never change. To stop loving him was impossible.
He said, “Every time we meet, it seems I have to ask for your forgiveness.”
“Are you—are you asking for it now? You convinced me completely that you no longer loved me. It wasn’t even the first time. It almost destroyed me and if it ever happened again I think it would destroy me. I don’t know whether I can take that risk.”
“Charlotte, it almost killed me to do it! The only way I could take Kristian away was to pretend that he’d won. The only way I could save those he’d threatened was to pretend I didn’t care about them. And I had to convince you of it, because if I had not, Kristian would not have believed me either. You understand, don’t you?”
He held his hand out to her. She clasped it, but didn’t move any closer. How cold their fingers were. She believed him, but part of her still held back. “Yes, I understand.”
“I know what Kristian did to you, beloved, and I am so sorry. But I had to destroy him before I had any chance of saving you.”
“Ilona let me out.”
The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “I know. God, what a mess, all of this. I only sent the message in the hope that you would realise what I intended to do. I didn’t expect you to come here… because I didn’t think you would be able to. And I thought I should die with Kristian, you see.”
“Oh God,” she said, and gave in. He drew her into his arms and they clung to each other for an age. Only the soft movement of the trees around them, and the footfalls of the other vampires, tired of waiting for them, moving away and vanishing into the Crystal Ring. Karl and Charlotte were alone.
“Never do that to me again,” she whispered. “Not for any reason.”
“Dearest, there will never be any need. We may have only a few virtues, but the greatest of them is constant love.”
Arms linked, they began to walk slowly through the gardens as they had once walked before, in another existence. Moonlight silvered the lawns, the fountains and statues; the shadows were jewelled with wondrous colours only vampires could perceive. This garden would always be their own, sacred to them.
Charlotte asked, “But how long had you planned it?”
“It was in the back of my mind since we escaped from the manor, but I never consciously planned it. I only decided to take the chance at the last minute, because I simply could see no other answer. I didn’t know it would work; he might have guessed, or he might have been unaffected. At best I thought we’d both die, but the ghosts took a more thorough revenge on him than on me. And I drank his blood. I think that saved me… No, you saved me. His blood gave me the strength to escape, but without you I would not have had the will.” Karl looked up at the sky. “I did not want to kill him, Charlotte,” he said quietly. “I only wanted him to leave us alone. I took no pleasure in his death.”
“I know,” she said.
“I loathe myself for it, in a way. He was so desperate to trust me that it was almost pathetic. But I let him trust me. Now I know how it feels to betray someone with a kiss.”
“Oh, Karl, don’t. It was terrible, but what choice did he give you?”
They walked on, passing the fountain where Charlotte had once sat in solitude while Madeleine’s party went on without her; where she had first opened her heart to Anne and begun to fall in love with Karl. The memories were all around her, a cocoon of spun silver.
“Kristian was always lost at heart, I think,” said Karl. “He never felt part of life. He had no real inner life of his own so he fed vicariously on other people’s.”
Charlotte said, “Did you love him?”
Karl hesitated, breathed out imperceptibly. “I think perhaps I did. And for the reasons he gave; that he was the centre of things. Never changing. But I could not admit it to myself. By loving him I betrayed Therese, Ilona, I betrayed everything I believed in… and I think that in killing him, I was trying to bury my own guilt.”
The confession shook her so much that she couldn’t respond at first. Eventually she said, “I wonder if I would love you so much, if you did not take out a knife and dissect yourself at every opportunity?”
Karl laughed. “It seems to me that vampires are no different from humans. We need a leader, and once we have him, all we want to do is destroy him. Strange… but I never envisioned outliving Kristian.”
“You aren’t sorry, are you?”
“That I’m still alive? Still walking the Earth, at least.” His hand reached for hers; two pale unnatural hands twisted together like white coral in the moonlight. She moved towards him and his other hand slid beneath her hair to caress her neck. “We carve a path through to what we want, in the end. All I wanted was to be with you, Charlotte. And now we have that, regardless of whom we have trampled over on our way.”
“I wish I could see Anne again,” Charlotte said suddenly. “I tried to explain to them… It was so painful. Worse for them than for me. It will hurt forever, won’t it? All of us.”
Karl made no comment, but she knew he understood. She was glad he didn’t say, “I warned you.”
After a while he said, “I have sometimes wondered if there is not another circle of vampires who have somehow kept themselves hidden from the rest of us, even Kristian. I wonder what knowledge lies inside the strange book we found in the tunnel.”
“Do you want to go back and look?”
Karl smiled sadly. “You would, wouldn’t you? No, Charlotte. Perhaps one day… but not now. I jus
t want to forget. If the book does hold any answers, at this moment I simply do not care.”
But Charlotte’s memory leapt in a thrill of excitement. “But Karl, I was going to tell you about the Crystal Ring! When you took me there I understood; it’s made of the energy of human minds, human consciousness recreating a spiritual essence of the Earth itself; and for some reason we can perceive it as a material realm and move through it. Kristian threw me into a cell for saying that. But when I died and the Ring’s energy replaced my own and transformed me, I knew, I simply knew. Do you believe me?”
There was a sceptical lift to Karl’s mouth, but his eyes were warm. Fascinated. “I have no reason not to. But why should the energy of that realm make us into vampires?”
“What is mankind’s greatest fear?” Charlotte asked eagerly.
“Of death, I suppose.”
“Yes, but beyond that… the fear of the dead coming back. It’s a universal terror, the ultimate violation of nature. And their greatest hope?”
“That there is life after death,” Karl said, smiling.
“Yes. And the two contradict each other, but they are equally powerful. Don’t you see? We are the inevitable creation of people’s most powerful nightmares and dreams. Kristian wanted to destroy mankind, but he never saw that, without them, we could not exist. They created us.”
“Oh, Charlotte,” said Karl. He kissed her mouth, then rested his head against hers. “If what you say is true, we have an answer to the question of immortality. We shall live for as long as the human race continues to fear us and desire us.”
* * *
ENVOI: DARK UPON LIGHT
You’ll find him hard to recognise
Cos he won’t dress in black
He wears a suit of gold lame
With velvet front and back
But he can touch your trembling heart
Can touch your very soul
He’ll take you with him when he leaves
He’ll make your dreams turn old.
He alone can read the signs
And he can read them well
But where he gets his power
There’s no one here can tell
So if you’re out alone at night
Be sure to take a friend
Cos he gets vicious lonely
In a world that never ends…
—Horslips
Ride to Hell
Kristian’s body lay scattered and buried, yet some essence of him was still travelling. Through darkness for a long time… and then towards a single white star that expanded as he rose towards it. The Crystal Ring.
Though he had no physical sensation, somehow he knew he was still within his body. The Ring had drawn his remains into itself and was delivering them up as an offering to God…
Kristian lay in the Weisskalt, drifting under the eye of the Creator. A single blazing cold eye, focussed by the dizzying walls of the aurora that soared up and up towards the glory, like the song of angels made visible… But he could not join them. He could not free his spirit from the frozen ruins of his body.
This is immortality.
“Did I not serve you well, O Lord?” he said. “I have failed. I have brought you only children who turned their faces away from you. I could not make them see the truth. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ you say… but they did not honour me! They have buried me, their creator. And it had to be Karl. The most wayward child is always the most loved… The prodigal son who never returned… “
All around him lay the bodies of other vampires—rows of black crosses against the snow as neat as war graves—sleeping forever in a realm that was too beautiful, too burningly cold for any creature to bear. He had condemned them to this; now he lay among them, like some monstrous dismembered snake on the ice-crust. But with a rush of passionate will, Kristian thought, Perhaps there are others who will not fail, Lord.
He could not even remember now why he had brought them here. For disappointing him, failing him… the reasons now seemed trivial, lost. No crime so great as the one Karl perpetrated against me.
Their bodies were not ruined. They slept, but they were not dead.
“Wake,” said Kristian. His will drove him. “Take revenge. Don’t let them forget me. You are my children. I commanded you to sleep and now I command you to wake!”
And he felt something break and fall away from him. He was relinquishing his power over them; he wanted to set them free, like a flock of dark birds to soar over the Earth. Imperfect envoys… but better than none at all.
But he was losing the battle. His tenacious immortal consciousness was slipping away at last, all the world shimmering and coalescing into a single white circle of light.
Now the eye of his creator was all he could see, blazing frigid silver. Nothing else. There was no anger within him, no pain, no sense of betrayal. No thoughts at all. Stillness.
While all around him, on the crystal-white sweep of the plain, the dark forms of his children were stretching and stirring into life.
Table of Contents
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
PART TWO
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART THREE
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Freda Warrington - Blood 01 Page 57