by Various
Only her training as a slayer prevented her from screaming.
Molly Carrington lay in the coffin’s silken embrace. Her hands were folded across her breast, her eyes closed. Her head was tilted slightly to one side, affording a clear view of the wounds in her neck.
Angelique staggered, feeling as though a stake had been plunged through her own heart. Her friend’s ashen pallor left no doubt that her blood had been thoroughly drained. Angelique knew that Dracula had done worse than kill her; he had turned her. Her body would rise again, but her soul would be replaced by the animus of a demon. The fiend would use the remnants of Molly’s psyche as a template for its own consciousness, but it would not be Molly, any more than one of the wax representations that surrounded them could be mistaken for the real thing. Even so, her soul would echo with the psychic reverberations of her body’s possession. Molly had died the death she had feared the most, one that brought with it the most hideous afterlife imaginable. Until the vampire was destroyed, she would never know peace.
And who is responsible? she seemed to hear the Professor’s stern voice asking. Dracula had performed the unspeakable deed, but who had put Molly in harm’s way in the first place?
She blinked back tears. The only way to make even partial amends was to release her friend from this unholy limbo. She raised the stake.
Plunging it into Molly’s heart was harder than plunging it into her own would be. She watched through tears as the corpse in the coffin transformed to dust and dissipated.
Molly. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. . . .
In her state of utter shock and sorrow, she very nearly did not react in time. He made no sound; it was the movement of air against her cheek that alerted her. Angelique spun about in time to see darkness move against darkness. She saw the pale oval of a face, hideously familiar from her dream, as Dracula came at her with uncanny speed. She barely managed to dodge.
He turned, and now she saw him clearly.
He was younger than she had expected and startlingly handsome, but it was a cold male beauty, with no promise of human feeling in the eyes or the set of the mouth. His face was pallid beneath his black hair, eyes glinting redly, like that of a beast’s. His attire was formal, a cravat and sash adding a continental touch, and he wore a flowing opera cape that seemed almost to possess a life of its own; it followed his movements more closely than a shadow, rippling restlessly even in the still air.
His gaze caught hers. She felt his eyes searing into her soul.
“Foolish slayer.” His voice was almost a whisper, with the faint accent she remembered. “Now you see that I am serious. But now it is too late.”
Angelique tried to move, to leap toward him, to bury the stake in the ruffled shirtfront, but she could not. She was as immobile as the statues all about them.
Dracula moved toward her with silken grace. “I have lived a long life and an even longer death. But I have yet to taste the blood of a slayer. I have heard that it is the finest wine the heart can produce.”
He made a slight gesture, and Angelique, to her horror, found herself tilting her head back, exposing her neck. She fought her rebellious body, but it was futile. And deep within her she once again felt the urge to give in, the attraction to the dark side that she had experienced in her bedchamber the past two nights.
“Why do you resist?” he asked, honest curiosity in his voice. “For friendship? For loyalty? Human relationships are ephemeral, evanescent. I can offer you a true lifetime . . . one measured not by calendars or clocks, but by cycles.”
He stood in front of her now. She noted that his fangs had emerged, though curiously enough, his face had not assumed the monstrous appearance that other vampires did. The Professor will be interested in knowing this, a small, detached part of her mind said, knowing that she would not be the one to tell him.
He took her by her shoulders, lowered his face toward her throat. “Your friend was a mere aperitif,” he murmured. “She but whetted my thirst. Now—”
Molly. The name echoed in her mind, stirring tides of shame, loss . . . and rage. And with the rage came suddenly the return of her will. Angelique hurled the vampire away from her; he staggered back, stumbling into an exhibit of a torture wheel. She leaped after him, ready to take advantage of his surprise and quickly end the fight. But even as she drove the stake toward his heart he somehow dissolved, became insubstantial, a white mist that quickly disappeared.
Angelique stopped, almost unable to credit her senses. She quickly looked about. There was no sign of Dracula.
A cold breeze, as if off a frozen pond, wafted from behind her. She turned . . . and he was there.
With blinding swiftness he struck. It was a backhanded blow, delivered almost languidly, and yet it hurled the Slayer across the room with the force of a catapult. She struck the wall hard enough to break through it, crashing into the adjoining room.
The rich smell of molten wax assaulted her, along with a blast of warm air. She rose, dazed. This chamber was filled with wax-works too, but they were all in various stages of construction. Half-formed statues, human in shape but not in detail, stared eyelessly at her. Shelves lined the walls, filled with jointed wooden arms and legs, busts supporting deathmasks, cans of paint, and all manner of clothing from all eras. In the room’s center was a large vat, simmering over a bank of gas jets. Two workers, wearing heavy smocks and gloves, were adding chemicals to the bubbling mixture. They stared at Angelique.
“ ’Ere, now!” one of them shouted. “What’re you about—?”
His eyes widened, as did those of his comrades; then they both turned and bolted for a door in the far wall. Angelique turned in time to see Dracula stalking toward her, eyes blazing with fury.
She reached for another stake, only to find them all gone. She grabbed an ax from a table of medieval weaponry, but as she lifted it she realized it was merely a wooden prop.
Dracula stopped and raised a hand like a conductor demanding music. Angelique felt herself pulled toward him.
She all but flew across the floor in his direction, as though being drawn by an invisible rope. She had barely time enough to snap the head of the fake ax free from the shaft and hold it out before her.
It struck him full in the chest.
Once again, surprise thwarted his spell over her. He looked down at the makeshift stake protruding from his chest. Then he looked up at her and smiled, and she realized that the strike had missed his heart.
By then she was already in motion. She leaped, twisting in mid air as she sailed over him, and landed on the catwalk surrounding the wax cauldron. Thick waves of heat roiled from it.
Dracula pulled the stake from his chest and cast it away. Then, with a single graceful leap, he was on the catwalk next to her.
“You pathetic fool,” he snarled. “I would have made you immortal.”
The hardest part was knowing that she wanted it, that a part of her, deep down, would always wonder. And that the desire, that dark desire that had kept her quiet about his nocturnal visit instead of telling the Professor, might have made it easier for Dracula to take Molly from them.
“You could have shared the night with me for eternity.”
He stepped forward, one hand thrust out from beneath his cloak, fingers reaching for her throat.
“Forgive me,” she said, thrusting one hand into a pocket, groping for what she had put there earlier. “I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment.”
Dracula snarled and lunged, and Angelique slashed the air between them with the open cruet of holy water.
The drops struck his hands and face, and even over the bubbling of the molten wax she could hear his undead flesh sizzle. With a cry, he staggered back and fell into the cauldron of wax.
On a sudden impulse she threw the phial in after him.
She was blown off the catwalk by a concussive wave of air as the cauldron erupted. Sprawled on her back, stunned by the blast, Angelique watched in mute shock as a column of wax, writhing s
inuously as if possessed of some bizarre life, rose from its center, towering over her. Its plastic surface roiled, and the astonished Slayer saw Dracula’s image take form from it, face contorted in pain, fingers clawing the air as if seeking release. Then the column congealed, as if suddenly frozen by some hyperborean wind. It loomed above her, the face and figure rough-hewn as if by some elemental artist, but still recognizable as the vampire count.
Angelique rose to her feet, moved forward, staring at the formation. She had no idea by what alchemy the holy water and the hot wax had combined to produce so effective a prison for Dracula. But that did not matter. A slayer trusted her instincts.
She found a serviceable shaft of wood among the debris, moved to stand in front of Dracula, and raised it like a cricket bat.
“Rest in peace, Molly,” she said softly as she swung the shaft. It struck the column squarely. The pillar shattered, fragments of wax raining down around her. From a great distance—or perhaps again just from the depths of her mind—she heard a final scream of anger and defeat.
Then all was silent.
Angelique returned to Molly’s coffin, knelt beside it, and wept.
VI
It was dawn when she left the museum. The fog still held London, or at least Marylebone, in its gray grasp. As Angelique walked the streets she might well have been the last live inhabitant of a dead world.
It was certainly how she felt.
Professor van Helsing had been right. She understood now the folly of letting anyone too close to her, of forming any relationships, even platonic ones. Such joys and comforts were not for her. There was room for only one on the path she trod.
She would have to send Patch and Gordon away, she knew. That would hurt—in Gordon’s case, almost as much as driving the stake through Molly’s dead heart. But it was the only way. Her conscience could not bear the weight of another loved one’s death.
She alone can stand against the vampires, the forces of darkness . . .
She wondered if Dracula were really dead, if she had indeed put the Lord of the Undead to rest for the final time. She realized that it did not matter. If he returned, as he apparently had in the past, she would face him again, or some future slayer would. She could not predict how or why. There was only one certainty in her world now: As long as vampires walked the Earth, a slayer would stand against them.
Alone.
Angelique turned a corner, and suddenly a figure loomed in her path. She stopped short, recognizing it immediately. The red, glowing eyes, the taloned hands, the voluminous cloak . . . they could only mean one thing.
Another Tethyrian demon had taken up the mantle of Springheel Jack.
In that timeless moment, as they faced each other, Angelique knew with bitter certainty that this was to be the sum of her future: A lifetime, most likely very short, of battles and struggles, of victories and defeats, of sacrifice and anonymity. A war against the forces of darkness that would inevitably end in darkness. Without friendship, save for her watcher.
And without love.
The Slayer leaped once more into battle, alone.
The War Between the States
Rebecca Rand Kirshner
NEW YORK CITY, 1922
Through the window of the train, a transformation had been taking place. The lazy flats of Carolina marsh had dried away and swollen into rolling green hills, then stretched long into great gapes of land rooted with unfamiliar, proud-looking trees, and now had metamorphosed into ancient towns made of brick and shutters and copper steeples gone green with time and weather. Now she was only a few hours away from New York City. Time passed as the trained chugged forward, and she watched as the sky began to color, brightening into pinks and yellows like fireworks set off in slow motion, and then without ever seeming to reach its apex began to fade away into shades of gray and then blacks, until Sally Jean was left with nothing to watch but her own reflection.
She was a very pretty girl, eighteen last February, with soft brown eyes and soft blond hair that she wore piled on her head like cotton. In fact being soft was as integral to Sally Jean as her family name or their home on the Battery. It was the adjective most likely to be spoken, in conjunction with some feature of hers or another, when castaway beaux remembered their days in Sally Jean’s favor, or when admiring friends sat with her at her dressing table. Sally Jean knew how people thought of her; she knew how the boys brushed their fingers against the skin on her shoulders as if she were made of clouds and spun sugar, things that would melt away if you touched them with your mouth. She knew how the girls admired her, just to the brink of envy, but not beyond. They couldn’t really envy her after all, not in a jealous way, because she was so kind, so generous, so pliable—so soft. Sally Jean knew all of this and yet she held all their compliments at arms’ length, at the length of one pretty, soft, white arm, because she knew that being soft, just like being young and beautiful, was part of her arsenal. A weapon that she could call upon later, when life really began.
Sally Jean sat alone. Her small hand rested proprietarily on the pink-papered hatbox that occupied the seat beside her, making clear to the boarding passengers that she had no interest in company. Ordinarily Sally Jean would have generously made conversation with any sort of seatmate. But this trip was different. It wasn’t that she was afraid of being accosted by an unsavory character with hooch on his breath and bad intentions up his sleeve. And it wasn’t because she had hoped to lie down for a bit during her journey; she was as awake and as happy as she’d ever been. She needed to sit alone because she herself was undergoing a transformation.
Sally Jean felt a certain anxiety that if she didn’t change along with the world, along with the air that was being ripped through with aeroplanes, along with the oceans that were being swum by women covered with grease, along with the country itself that was getting smaller and faster and full of cars, she would be left behind like a moldy tombstone in St. Phillips cemetery. When she was a girl, she used to walk through the cool quiet graveyards, reading the epitaphs until tears would spill down her soft cheeks. Her face would be wet, but she wouldn’t feel sad, just full and proud, as if she understood something. But in the last few years, things had changed. Women could vote now for goodness sake, not that she was twenty-one or had any intention of doing so, but the fact remained that she could do so many things. She was tired of sweet tea, tired of grits, tired of religion, and tired of the past. Maybe if the Confederacy had won its ancient war she could have stayed in Charleston, but it hadn’t, and she was up to her ears with the melancholy of it all. The same languorous, long-rooted world in which she had grown up now seemed hopelessly at the periphery of life.
There were external manifestations of Sally Jean’s transformation as well. With each stop of the train, she compared herself to the new passengers and made adjustments to her attire accordingly. Only a couple of hours into the journey she had realized that her hat, just purchased last week at Berlin’s, was not going to make it to New York atop her head. A clever-looking girl with sleek red hair had boarded in Baltimore, and Sally Jean had immediately felt the frothy thing burning against her scalp. As quickly as she could, she had removed it and pushed it unceremoniously into the hatbox. Soon after, she had unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, and at the next stop, casually removed her white gloves and stuffed them into the hatbox as well. About her hobble skirt and thick cotton stockings, she couldn’t do a thing. She needed a short dress and, if she could somehow manage it, silk stockings.
Silk stockings seemed absolutely necessary, the more she thought about it. She couldn’t hardly exist without them! Her legs began to itch under the girlish, old-fashioned cotton, and she wished that despite the hour the stores would be open when she arrived. How could she afford them though? Half a thought flashed into her mind: Brett. Brett would surely understand and take her to Saks Fifth Avenue.
And then the second half of the thought joined the first with a clap, startling her like thunder: Brett. Tall, han
dsome Brett with his neatly cut uniform and steel gray eyes. Brett whose neck smelled like limes and in whose arms she had danced, night after night, during all the summer dances, two years in a row. Faithful Brett, who had written her nearly daily all through the war. Sweet Brett, who had known her when she was just a girl and had waited for her, who had let her grow up while he fought his wars and earned his money. Dearest Brett, as she had called him when she wrote her perfumed letters back, filling pink pages with vague ideas about love and life that she meant more as musings than as professions. Brett, whose lips had kissed hers on the veranda of her parent’s house late one June evening.
When the first shots of the Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, the good people of Charlestown had sat on their porches and verandas, juleps in hand, and watched as the battle began. And then, some sixty years later, Sally Jean had sat in the very same place and watched with perhaps a similar interested detachment as a young man from Asheville declared that they would spend the rest of their lives together. Whatever she had said that night was true when she said it, but it had felt unreal, as if what she said could go nowhere in that heavy, unmoving air. But now, in the brightly-lit train car, with the city buildings growing sharply outside her window, the whole thing seemed horribly lucid. She was traveling to New York because she was engaged to marry Brett Blakely.
And before Sally Jean could reconcile that solid fact with the new self that was tentatively blossoming inside her mind, she was at Grand Central Station. She had arrived. She made her way through the crowd, hatbox in one hand, suitcase in the other, and though she held her head up proudly, she felt like everyone was snickering. Sally Jean bristled and walked as fast as her long tight skirt would allow. And then again she remembered Brett. She stopped, looked around, scanning the bustling figures for a tall gray eyed soldier. He was nowhere to be seen. Her indignation was tempered with hope. Maybe this was going to be easier than she had thought. As impossible as it was for her to understand how a gentleman would be willing to throw her over, it sure would simplify matters. She did hate scenes.