“Rise and shine, Your Highness,” Roias called his customary mocking greeting. “It’s dinner time.” He crossed the room to unlock the door to Ardeth’s cell. “What do you say, Peterson? I think the Count must be pretty hungry by now. Shall we just take the bitch and toss her in?” Peterson didn’t answer; he wasn’t expected to. Roias’s attack was as leisurely as the vampire’s had been swift—he knew his prey wasn’t going anywhere. He sauntered casually over to Ardeth’s cot, giving her plenty of time to wonder what he had in mind. “Should we do that, eh, Alexander?” His hand closed on her arm, hauled her easily to her feet. “Just toss you in and let His Highness have a little party? I wonder how long he’d make you last.” He squeezed her upper arm experimentally and she gritted her teeth against her wince of pain. “You’ve still got a little flesh on your bones. I bet he could make you last all night.”
He’s bluffing, Ardeth thought. He just wants to make me suffer first. Surely he couldn’t afford to let Rozokov have her so soon. That’s what you thought last night, the voice in her head mocked. She tried not to think about what would happen if Roias really did put her in with the vampire.
He swung her around to face the other cell and held her tight against his chest. “Oh, come on, Your Highness. I know you want it. You wanted it last night,” Roias taunted, drawling out the words to make the most of the mocking double entendre. “Just have a look at what I’ve got over here for you.” His hand, tangled in Ardeth’s hair, jerked her head back so hard she couldn’t stop her gasp. She couldn’t see Rozokov any more, could only stare helplessly at the ceiling as Roias kept her head tilted back.
The chain clattered suddenly and Roias began to laugh. Pain spiked through Ardeth’s scalp and neck as he gave one savage tug on her hair, then she found herself released from his grasp and hurled forward to stumble helplessly into the bars. She caught them to steady herself, sparks scattering behind her eyes as her forehead hit the metal.
Then her head cleared and the vampire filled her vision. He was very close, the feral smile bright with icy fangs, eyes seeming to swim with blood. There was nothing there of the sad, weary creature who had asked her to tell him of the world. She’d cried before she realized it trying to back away from the bars. Hard hands on her shoulders pressed her inexorably forward.
Rozokov’s fingers closed over hers and slowly pried loose her grip on the bars. He drew her arm towards him. Ardeth bit her lip against the pain in her hand, in the body forced against the cold metal, and most of all, against the desire to beg him to stop, to betray everything to spare herself this sudden, shocking assault.
If you do, then Roias wins, she told herself and felt a rush of hatred so potent it dizzied her, even as it closed her throat against her cry of pain.
She heard Roias’s low laughter in her ears as Rozokov turned her arm, baring her wrist. But though his grip on her arm was cruelly tight, the mouth that settled on her vein was gentle, almost caressing.
The seal on her lips broke only once. Ardeth prayed that Roias thought it was a sound of pain.
When Roias ordered him to stop, Rozokov held Ardeth’s wrist for a moment longer, then dropped it so quickly her arm fell lifelessly to her side, banging painfully on the crossbar. He turned his back on both of them.
Roias’s grip shifted to her shoulders and he spun her around, jamming her back against the bars. His face was very close, cold dead eyes holding hers. “Wasn’t that fun, Alexander? Didn’t you like it?”
Ardeth closed her eyes against his and shook her head. It was more than a denial to him—it was a denial to herself of the moment of white-hot pleasure that had pierced her, sharper than vampire’s teeth, at the feel of Rozokov’s mouth on her skin.
“Well, I liked it. I’m going to miss the Count here when he moves on to bigger and better things,” Roias said with a laugh, stepping away from her.
Ardeth’s knees buckled and she almost fell, but caught herself on the bars. “Yeah,” continued Roias conversationally, “His Highness here’s been a bundle of laughs—a lucrative bundle of laughs at that. Works cheap too.” He grinned at her. “Just feed him the leading lady.” He was still laughing as he locked the door and led Peterson back up the stairs. “’Night, children.”
Ardeth closed her eyes and held on to the bars until she heard the last echoes of the slamming door fade. She felt as though she might shatter if she moved, or that the floor might open and swallow her into a blackness that was fearfully inviting.
“I regret if I hurt you. I tried not to . . .” a quiet voice said, too close behind her, and she found the strength to turn around, still clinging to the bars. Rozokov stood a foot away, hands spread a little at his eyes, palms upturned. There was no madness in his eyes now, only a cold and ancient sorrow.
“I thought you were . . .” she stopped, groping for the words.
“Mad for your blood? Not wholly mad, not this time. But I needed it, and they needed your fear.”
“You didn’t hurt me. Not nearly as much as Roias did.” She acknowledged the ache on her scalp, the bruises from her impact with the bars.
“I knew your name. I did not know the others.” There was a terrible distance in his voice, a momentary movement back towards the bright, sheltering heat of madness. “It was easier that way.” She realized then the reason for his anger the night before. He knew her name and her sympathy for him—and he knew he would have to take her blood anyway. Even in her sudden surge of hope she felt an edge of sadness; the price of his sanity was the pain of the knowledge. But the very fact that he cared at all, that ruthless slaughter was not his normal means of survival, meant that perhaps her half-conscious, desperate plan could work.
He was drifting away, she realized, hovering between the sorrow of awareness and the tempting balm of mental and moral oblivion. “Let me see, where were we? Oh yeah, the sixties. They landed the first manned spacecraft on the moon in 1969, did I tell you that?” she said quickly, forcing herself to yield up her grip on the bars.
Rozokov looked up at her in surprise, bewilderment then memory passing like shadows beneath the ice in his eyes. “No,” he said at last, “you had not told me that.”
Ardeth eased herself to the floor, crossed her legs to hide her shaking knees, and began to talk. After a moment, Rozokov settled onto his cot and leaned back against the wall to listen.
Chapter 9
The next night, Roias was too preoccupied to play out his tormenting games. He and Wilkens arrived later than usual and did not bother to unlock her cell.
“Get over there, bitch. You know the routine,” Roias snapped. Ardeth stood up slowly, glancing from the men by the door to the silent vampire. When Roias put his hand on the door of her cell, she moved to crouch by the cell bars. Rozokov stalked over and stood waiting, until she put her arm through. He drank from her inner elbow. Ardeth turned her face away from Roias, pressing it against the cold bars, and closed her eyes. The act had a terrible impersonality about it, as if she were no more than a vessel containing blood, a glass to be drained dry. She would have preferred even the unsettling pleasure of the previous night to this silent, dreadful feeling.
Roias stopped it far sooner than usual, without a word. The cattle prod caught Rozokov on the side of the head, sent him snarling back from the bars. Roias laughed and jabbed at him again, driving him back to the far side of the cell, where he stood beyond the prod’s range, watching Roias with burning eyes.
Ardeth sat back from the bars, cradling her arm against her. She kept her head down. “Jesus!” Roias swore, in anger or disgust, and she heard the rattle as he tossed the cattle prod to the far side of the room. She waited for the door upstairs to close before she lifted her head.
Rozokov had risen and was staring up at the door, body tight and terribly still. Ardeth reached out to the bars to pull herself up again and he looked at her. She almost jerked her hand away when she saw the hatred in his eyes. “Are you all right?”
she ventured carefully.
“Do not ask me that!” Rozokov snapped. “I am not ‘all right.’ I cannot be ‘all right’ here.” His voice was icy with contempt.
“Who can?” she asked, her own voice rising as anger overwhelmed her fear of him and threatened to swamp the calm rationality with which she maintained the fragile bridge she had built between them. “Do you suppose I am all right? You should know the answer to that best of all.”
“I cannot help what I am, what I need to survive. I have not lived for four hundred years to let them starve me to death down here.” There was no apology in his tone.
“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that I want to survive too. They’re not going to starve you to death. If you get too hungry, they’ll just give you another junkie to kill for the camera,” she said bitterly. “What do you suppose they mean to do with me, eh? What are they going to do with me?”
She was crying before she knew it, shattered by the sudden onslaught of all the pain and fear she had kept so carefully controlled over the last days, distracting it with her hopeless flirtation with the thing that would destroy her. Ardeth bent her head against the bars and let the sobs shudder through her. It seemed so much easier to surrender than to go on fighting against the darkness that was all around her.
When his hand brushed her hair, she was too tired to move away, though she knew she should. He could kill you, the voice inside her warned. Let him, she thought and for the moment that seemed the best way out.
The hand settled on her head, and gently smoothed her hair. “Child.” The word was a whisper. “I am sorry. I am selfish—it is my nature—but I am sorry. You have been kind, far kinder than I deserve.”
“I’m not kind,” Ardeth muttered, though she didn’t raise her head. He did not stop stroking her hair.
“I know. You think that you are clever, that you are making an ally of me against them.” Her head moved beneath his hand, the only sign of her surprise. “I would have done the same, had I been sane enough. Now I am . . . almost returned to myself. But I am afraid I am a poor ally. They have kept me too weak to do anything against them.”
For a moment, she wondered if it was all a lie, his remorse, his gentleness, all to persuade her to yield up what he truly wanted. But she didn’t care; hollow or not, his sorrow moved her, and his touch was the only thing of warmth in the coldness of her prison. “You need more.” It was not a question, but she lifted her head to catch his nod. “You could take it. I couldn’t stop you.”
“I could. There might be a time when I would. But now . . .” He paused, watching her, his hand still on her hair, inches from her cheek.
“All right.” She let go of the bars and put her right arm through. Rozokov took her hand, uncurled her fingers gently. He bent his head and kissed her palm. The sudden, unexpected sensuality of it took her breath away. She felt her fingers curl again, to brush one high cheekbone and touch the loose strands of grey silk hair that obscured his face.
“What is it like?” Ardeth asked breathlessly, struggling to be detached, analytical. To be safe.
“It is like food,” he said, pausing to glance up at her, “or love. Some meals are sustenance, some feasts of delight.” He leaned over to put his lips against her wrist, to run his tongue along her vein. “Some acts of love are mere biology, some a sacrament.” She felt his breath against her skin as he spoke.
“What is this?”
“Whatever you want it to be,” he replied before his mouth fastened on the soft inner curve of her arm. Ardeth closed her eyes at the irony in his answer. I don’t want it to be so good, she thought in despair. But it is, oh God, it is.
Ardeth woke up on her cot, with no memory of how she got there. She turned over groggily and opened her eyes. The dim light above her seemed to be glowing through a dense fog and she struggled to blink the haziness from her mind.
What had happened? she wondered. There had been those moments of terrible pleasure while Rozokov drank her blood (even now, the memory left her with a queasy sense of excitement deep inside), then his voice urging her to sleep. She must have crawled back to her cot, though her memory of it was uncertain.
She closed her eyes again, drifting in the lassitude that cocooned her. Everything seemed very far away; the harsh chill of her prison, her life outside, her friends, her thesis. They all seemed light years in the past, fading quickly down the tunnel through which she moved towards the future. There was no light there, at the end.
After a while, she sat up, brushing her hair out of her eyes, and looked into the next cell. Rozokov was on his cot, leaning back against the wall, one leg up, elbow propped on knee. For the first time, the remote stiffness was gone; he looked lazily graceful. When he glanced over at her, she saw that the lines in his face had smoothed out.
“How long have I been asleep?” Ardeth asked, then wondered why she supposed that he would be able to tell time down here any better than she.
“A few hours. How do you feel?”
“I’ve felt better,” she admitted with a shaky laugh. She shifted into a more comfortable position, trying not to notice how the simple movement made her head spin. When she looked up, he was still watching her. She could sense the words of gratitude waiting on his lips. Don’t say it, she thought suddenly. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to remember what it was like.
“So,” she began awkwardly, to deflect him, then shivered in the silence as her train of thought failed and left her with nothing to fill the gap. She caught a question and flung it out, to distract him. “How did you become a vampire? I assume you weren’t born that way.”
“That would have been a grave shock to my mother,” Rozokov agreed seriously, rising to wander over to the bars. He leaned against them and looked past her into the darkness. “No, I was, as I recall, a perfectly ordinary child. I was born in 1459, in what you now call Russia. I went to Germany to study and stayed there, in the hills where I could pursue my work. In truth, I was more a dabbler than a scholar. Astronomy, philosophy, medicine. I tried out each of them.” He laughed softly, but it was not a sound of joy. “We were so innocent then, so eager to believe that all the world lay before our hungry minds. I also dabbled, sometimes, in necromancy, but no great success. Then one night I called and something came. She knocked on my door and stood on the snow like a shadow, and when she came in it was as if a sliver of night had entered, the same way the sun would come through the high windows in the Great Hall.” His eyes were far away, mist over the ice. “I did not know what she was until she smiled, but then it was too late. I woke with the next dusk and for two nights we ran the hills like wolves. Then I told the parish priest where her coffin lay. He drove a stake through her heart and cut off her head, then filled her mouth with garlic.”
“Why did you do that?” His shrug was eloquently, elegantly cynical.
“I tired of her. And . . .” he paused, “there was still enough human in me to hate what she had done. Or perhaps it was the first inhuman act I was to commit.” Bitterness edged the calm voice, the shadows of a darker and, she guessed, more recent sorrow.
“What did you do then?”
“I fled. There was a whole world waiting for me, at least at night, and I fled into it. That was the first law of my new state—keep moving or die. I dared not stay in one place long enough for them to realize I did not age. Of course, I gradually learned the lies to tell, the shells within shells of reality to create, so that I could be myself, then my cousin, then my nephew and on down the years. There are places, I suppose, that are still empty and waiting for a Rozokov to return. Though, from what you have told me of the world, I may not recognize them anymore.”
“They might not recognize you. Things are much more—organized—these days. You need a Social Insurance Number and three kinds of identification to open a bank account. You need a passport to travel. Almost everything you do nowadays leaves a paper trail—or a computer tra
il. Which will be very convenient for historians two hundred years from now, but I imagine it would make things rather difficult for vampires.”
He hesitated for a moment, and she wondered if she had lost him in the flurry of unfamiliar words and concepts. But if he had questions, he didn’t ask them. He just said, “It does seem so. I suspect that now, more than ever, existence would be much easier if all the myths about my state were true.”
“Yes. I noticed you hadn’t turned into a bat and flown away yet.”
“I cannot transform myself into mist either, more’s the pity. Still, I suppose I should be grateful I do not require a coffin to sleep in. They had one here, put in here with me. When I ignored it, they took it away again.”
Ardeth laughed. “It’s probably a prop. For the movies.” That thought started the terrifying flicker of the snuff movie rolling in her head again, and she forced it from her mind. “Is any of it true? The stories about sunlight, and garlic and crosses?”
“As with most myths, there is a small nugget of truth in the dross of invention. The sunlight will not melt me with a single ray, but I prefer not to move about in it. Garlic is unpleasant, but hardly a deterrent. As for crosses, I am no demon, else on so far below God’s notice that he does not bother with me. I have prayed in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and walked through the Vatican without harm. A stake through the heart would probably kill me, as would fire, or beheading, but under normal circumstances, I am much stronger and more agile than a mortal man.”
“Under normal circumstances,” Ardeth began hesitantly, weighing how much she wanted an answer to her next question. But curiosity won out and she continued. “How often do you have to . . .?”
“How often must I feed? After my long sleep, I needed nourishment desperately. That is why they have been able to use that need against me. Normally, I need sustenance once or twice a week. It can be less, but then,” he paused for a moment as if searching for a word, “I must do lasting harm. And that would leave a trail of corpses like breadcrumbs behind me.” Ardeth tried not to laugh at the image, but failed.
The Night Inside Page 9