Anno Dracula (64 page)

‘Impossible.
I
command the Order of the Dragon. I revived it personally. Executing the will of my father-in-darkness. He speaks through me. To defy me is to resist His will.’

Patricia remembered banners unfurling on the face of an embassy, just as they were flapping from the hall in Timişoara. Orlok had been there too.

‘We’ve lost,’ said Czakyr, downing headphones.

‘Nonsense,’ said the Baron, chest puffed with indignation, strands coming loose from his pompadour. ‘These flags, they are in support of us. That must be it. We’ve not lost. We’ve won.’

The doors opened.

He was known at once. This was his castle. He was its master by right of conquest and possession.

Vassals paid attention, then prostrated themselves at his feet. An oriental woman knelt before him, forehead against stone floor, neck exposed for the blade. Czuczron, a captain of the Carpathian Guard, offered his sheathed sword. Elders hung their heads and opened their hands, awaiting punishment.

His women lowered their eyes and stood at his side.

His lieutenants, having trotted at his heels as he made his way through these familiar halls, filtered into the command room. They took over stations the usurper’s people had been manning, picking up telephonic apparatus, glancing over charts and maps, checking audio and visual input.

The Romanian, Crainic, and the Englishman, Gorse, took up phones and gave code-words. The American, Captain Gardner, posted his soldiers throughout the castle, relieving the few who still pledged allegiance to the usurping Meinster. Any disputes were swiftly resolved, with his Bat-Soldiers kicking the red dirt that had been their enemies. Word came down from the battlements that General Iorga, finally doing something useful, had relieved the commandant of the guards of his duties. The elder vampires who had flown in with the helicopter took up their positions, and ran up flags.

In moments, he was again master of this land.

The usurper stuttered in the middle of the room, a popinjay clutching two absurd dogs. He was a girlish boy, caught wearing his mother’s ball gown. Red tears flowed from pale eyes, rouged mouth opened and closed like a fish.

He fixed Baron Meinster with his eyes.

The usurper knew everything at once. Knew him for who he was and who he had been.

Puzzled, the Baron groped deep in his mind for a name.

‘The boy,’ he said, ‘at Dinu Pass. What was your name? Did you even have a name?’

Ion Popescu,
they thought, together.

‘No,’ said Meinster. ‘Not the boy.’

The Baron understood at last what had happened in the Keep, what had been done to set them on the course that inevitably led to this place, to this moment.

He extended his hand to Meinster. The blood ruby glowed on his forefinger. The Baron, sobbing silently, stepped forwards, over his abject people, and made his way to him. He looked up with fear and love and could say nothing.

Meinster pressed his face to the ring and clutched. His dogs fell free.

‘Master,’ he said, acknowledging a truth.

He looked down at the usurper’s shaking back.

‘I didn’t turn you,’ he said.

Meinster squeezed his hand and wet it with tears.

‘My punishment,’ the Baron got out. ‘What is my punishment to be?’

‘You are not worth punishing. You are no martial man, to be sent to honourable death. You are a dog, like your pets. And so it shall be.’

He withdrew his hand. Meinster fell to the floor.

He called the tiny minds of the dogs. Quietly, with no yapping, they came to attention, fixed on white throat, and attacked. Their fangs tore through ruffles and sank into skin and vein.

Spoiled blood spilled.

His women were at his shoulder, watching the usurper suffer.

The Baron’s mind bled out through the rips under his chin, gushing and dissipating. He wondered where the century had gone.

The usurper’s mouth pursed.

‘P-Pat...’

Meinster looked to the woman he had called bride, seeing her face blur and shift. His eyes burned bright for a moment and were dull. He murmured through the hole in his throat and lay still, meat in the shape of a man.

With his passing, the last memory of a warm boy who had met the King of the Cats in a granite keep vanished from the world. Now no one remembered him, it was as if he had never been.

‘Let them know that I have returned.’

‘Yes, Count,’ said Crainic.

He turned to the woman who had shaped herself to get close to the usurper.

In her place, in her clothes, stood a boy with a gun, aimed at his face.

‘Re-ma-ma-re-muh-me-member me, Granpa?’ said Kit Carruthers.

Granpa Munster was going to take a silver slug between the eyes, then his long-dead brains were going to splat out of the flap in the back of his head and redecorate these walls. Kit had seen it before. It always struck him as funny. All that a person was could become grey and red mush at a single trigger pull.

‘Been bidin’ my time ’til now,’ he said. ‘Makes it more special.’

‘Holly,’ said the Englishwoman. ‘Come back.’

‘Holly ain’t home, sweet thing. Just me. The Big Bad Wolf with a Big Bad .44 Magnum, all loaded up for bat. Steel-jacketed silver rounds. One of these pops inside your viper ass and it’s
sayonara senorita
.’

‘Shazam.’

‘That’s for the songbird. Don’t work on Killer Kit.’

Granpa was a picture of rage. He stood tall, just like in the video store. Dressed all in black for his own funeral. His face stretched into a fearsome mask, white as milk with lines of scarlet around his eyes and mouth.

A fancy-pants viper in some kind of uniform made a move, trying to untangle his side-arm from a webbing of braid and sash. Kit swivelled, put a silver starburst in the elder’s heart, and, ignoring the recoil that hammered his wrist and elbow, drew a bead again on Granpa. In the flash of distraction, the old man had taken a step towards Kit, hands raised like the boogedy man, nails thorny diamond barbs.

‘You’d purely like to get your hands on me, wouldn’t ya? Your hands
into
me?’

The dead elder was on his knees, coming apart inside his tunic, black flakes falling away from his bones. His chest cavity was exploded from the inside, as if his heart had hatched into a hand grenade.

Holly was inside him somewhere, his woman like always, back on the team. She had wavered, been tempted away by this mad old man, left Kit for dead. But he had always been with her, small and quiet and healing. They had known they would always be together. Now they were as together as people could be, sharing one skeleton.

Granpa dropped his hands, straightened up.

His backbone was iron. He didn’t know he was broken yet. Kit had met too many like him over the years, starting before Doc Porthos turned him and Holly. All had looked down at him and learned - if not lived - to regret it.

Kit gestured with his smoking Magnum.

‘Granpa, I guess this makes me Master of the Universe.’

Kit decided to get it over with and pulled the trigger.

He was still faster than a speeding bullet, even one fired so close to his face.

He saw the silver point emerge from the barrel of Kit’s typically overgrown gun. He fixed on the killing streak as it inched across the space between them. He put his head to one side, and watched the bullet drill lazily past him, spinning as it travelled.

His hand fastened on Kit’s gun hand, squeezing.

The boy’s eyes were wide in a ‘not again’ expression. Kit’s flesh and bone was crushed, the gun began to buckle. Inside his fist, something cracked.

He reached into the boy’s head and flicked a switch.

Holly looked at him, appalled.

‘He’s gone now,’ he told her. ‘Forever.’

He let her go. The useless gun fell from her hand. She shifted the mangled ruin, fixing everything.

Penny took Holly away. The Englishwoman was shocked, and feared reprisals. When she looked at him, she could peel away the faceskins of John Alucard and Johnny Pop to see Dracula. He remembered Penelope Churchward from the old nights, saw himself in her mind as he had been when weak, exiled, despairing, desiring true death. That Dracula was deleted, wiped off the slate. Now the times were right and he was what he had been. All who had beset him were shrugged off. Here, in this castle where it had all began, he was again King of the Cats.

Music filled the room. Two voices, joined.

‘Imagine...’

Yes, he had imagined. And he had made the whole world imagine along with him. He was master of this land, and of so much more.

‘They need you on stage, Count,’ said Gorse. ‘Now.’

‘Of course.’

John wasn’t himself any more, or he was more himself than Holly had ever seen. She was changed too. Kit no longer coiled in her depths. She was at last free of him, even of the sense of who he had been, what part of her he had fulfilled. He’d gone to another kind of true death.

Captain Gardner had people taking away the bodies. Nikita and the Angel carried the slack Baron Meinster between them, his fat poodles loping at their heels. Czakyr, a sheepish elder, had been given a broom and pan and told to deal with what was left of Lajos Czuczron and several other Meinster supporters who were in the same condition.

At their stations, Ernest Gorse and Crainic were talking with a dozen people all at once, liaising with the world’s media and the coup’s ringleaders. On stage, the Short Lion and Timmy V sung John Lennon’s song. The whole world was watching.

An attendant scurried up to the vampire who had been John Alucard and settled a black, floor-length cloak on his shoulders.

Penny gripped Holly’s arm. She was terrified and struck with wonder.

‘It’s Him,’ she said. ‘He’s come back.’

Holly stroked Penny’s face with her nails.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘He has.’