Anno Dracula (68 page)

The embrace loosened. Kate’s sharp nail slipped against Geneviève’s throat.

Kate struggled with herself.

She would not be a part of this.

Geneviève would see it soon. The French girl had always been a mind-reader, mostly through instinct and long experience.

She clamped her hand on Kate’s wrist, forcing the thumbnail away from her pulse.

Red points sparked in her clear eyes. Understanding.

‘
What have you done to my friend?’

Geneviève gripped the throat of the woman in her room and slammed her back against the wardrobe. Her pretty, mediaeval face shifted into a furious mask. She was enormously fanged, nostrils and eyebrows flared, chin pointed, cheekbones sharp, eyes flames.

‘
Where is she
?’

Kate tried to say, but Holly was too strong. Kate was outside, tapping unnoticed at the bedroom window; not inside, summoning strength for a fight to the end. The thread between her mind and the shifter’s - which had allowed her to be Kate inside Holly inside Kate for a moment -whipped around, tearing at her skull.

‘What have we here?’ asked a man, his hand taking hold of Kate’s neck. ‘Some fools will insist on leaving their bloody rubbish lying around all.’

His accent was English and cruel, like the Black and Tans she’d dodged in 1920. Kate was picked up. Her legs and arms dangled, nerveless.

Inside the room, Geneviève and the Kate-faced Holly turned, attracted by the commotion. Kate saw genuine recognition in her friend’s expression. She looked far less like herself than the woman Geneviève was throttling, but her friend knew the difference.

‘Let’s join the ladies, shall we?’ said the Britisher.

Kate couldn’t see the man’s face. Like her, he had no ghost of reflection in the glass. From the strength of his grip, she knew he was a vampire.

A bad one.

He smashed her head against the window. The glass wobbled in its frame but did not break.

Geneviève was distracted.

The other Kate, Holly-as-Kate, opened her mouth and craned her neck, going for Geneviève’s throat.

The British vampire hammered Kate’s face against the window.

Glass broke.

Blood spilled. Everything went red.

Geneviève lost her grip on the shifting thing that wore Kate’s face. The creature was cut under the chin where Geneviève, fending off her dangerous mouth, had caught her with sharp nails. She pressed a red-lined frill of skin against her neck, smoothing away a messy wound. Her power of recuperation was enviable.

‘Hello again, old thing,’ said Ernest Ralph Gorse through the shattered window, holding what appeared to be a human dishrag. ‘Is this yours?’

She spat mediaeval French at him. During the Hundred Years’ War many insulting colloquial expressions were coined to describe the English. As long as she and Gorse were both still alive, they wouldn’t fall into disuse.

‘Because of my classical education, I know what that means,’ he drawled. ‘Rather, I would if I’d applied myself more. I found it fearfully hard to summon up the
enthusiasm
for cramming. There are always short cuts to favour. I suppose you were a good little girl when you were in school. If they had schools when you were a child. Weren’t you expected to get married at nine or something? Squirt out a tribe of sprogs, then drop down dead from the plague. All very “knights of old”.’

Gorse kicked away the remains of the window and stepped over the low sill into the room. Gripped in one hand hung a creature who might have lived a thousand years the hard way - without turning vampire. The real Kate Reed was more ruined than the shapeshifter’s impersonation. Gorse held a shoulder skinfold in a bunch, pulling discoloured hide tight across Kate’s fleshless body. Her withered face was one-eyed, marked by scratches like those the shifter had faked. This was what Geneviève had glimpsed on Sunset and sensed in the garage. Not a threat, but a friend.

She should have known the truth at once. She wasn’t supposed to go by appearances. She had intuitions.

She swore at Gorse again.

‘Funnily enough, I get your gist,’ he said, arching an eyebrow. ‘Yes, you are quite correct, I’m a complete and utter sod. Unmitigated rotter to boot. With a side order of absolute bastardy. Always was, always will be. Not that you or this potato-peeler are in any state to do anything about it while my changeable chum-ette is around.’

The woman who wasn’t Kate was shifting.

‘How do you like our handy Holly, by the way? Isn’t she a step up from my former protégé, the much-missed Barbara Winters? This one bends a bit more. Thinks for herself. Can be trusted to get the job done. She doesn’t just slay vampires, she vampirises them. In a most interesting way, as you’ve found out.’

It was more than disguise. Holly really had been Kate. It was how she had got in under Geneviève’s radar. When she shifted, Holly assumed an internal shape, rearranging her mind, summoning the original memories and habits. Plainly a risky game: Kate had almost been able to force her hand, take over entirely.

‘They’re digging a Channel Tunnel, you know,’ said Gorse. ‘It’s been one of Ruthven’s pet projects ever since he was warm. He first pitched it to Napoleon. My homeland and yours will be linked by railway. No more risky sea voyages or aeroplanes. Symbolic of something, wouldn’t you say?’

He shook Kate as if wagging a gift dolly to get a child’s attention.

‘Not much left in this old rag and bone, eh?’

Only now did Geneviève realise her shrunken friend was naked, the skin of a great-great grandmother wrapped around the skeleton of a six-year-old.

She was careful not to be too distracted by Gorse. Holly was still here. Her neck-gouge was smoothed now, just like new.

Geneviève looked at the vampire who had tricked her.

Holly took off Kate’s glasses and eyepatch. She was a lightly freckled, straw-haired nondescript
nosferatu.
Fine lashes and pale eyes. Kate’s clothes were tight on her.

Who had this girl been?

Holly gathered herself and writhed, as if trying to work an ache out of her back. Her hair changed colour, her face filled out.

She was another woman, then a young man, then an older man, yet another woman, a little boy. It was a fluid shuffle through selves. Geneviève recognised one of the faces, a singer who had been on the bill at Dracula’s concert. The others were strangers.

‘She’s a proper little Mike Yarwood,’ said Gorse.

Geneviève was puzzled.

‘Weren’t in England in the ’70s, were you? The Yank equivalent would be Rich Little. The impressionist. Still not funny, though? I tell you, it’s wasted over here. They don’t do irony. You used to be sharper, didn’t you? Until America got into your blood and made you thick.’

‘How was prison?’

An irritated pause.

‘Delightful. After an English public school, Alcatraz is a holiday island paradise.’

‘How’s the minion business going?’

‘Can’t get me there, dearie. I’ve no shame. I know a big fish when I see one, and I’m a minnow. Content to swim along in the wake.’

‘A remora, you mean.’

‘Now, now, now. Come, come, come. No need to be nasty.’

Holly was still changing. Geneviève couldn’t see a point to it. Her other selves were second-raters. It must have been easy to overwhelm and drain them. Only Kate had been a challenge and she had escaped.

Reptile roughness spread across Holly’s face.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Geneviève. She took hold of the vampire and threw her against the wardrobe. Wood cracked.

Snaketeeth sprouted and eyes yellowed.

‘This one you’ll like,’ said Gorse.

Holly sprang up, slamming Geneviève against the flimsy partition wall. Lath and plaster gave way. She was shoved into the living room, tumbling backwards over piled cases.

‘Not a lot, but you’ll like it.’

Holly was on top, pinning Geneviève’s ribs with her knees. Her hands were stubby cat’s paws, flicking out yellow garden-fork claws. Her face shifted somewhere between cobra and panther, black and yellow, with a flaring, furry, muscular hood, and a diamond-pattern forehead like multiple widow’s peaks. Her bare arms were sinuous with muscle.

‘This has been in the repertoire for a long time,’ said Gorse. ‘Well before the Count came along. She’s self-taught. Very adaptable.’

Geneviève held Holly’s wrists and tried to keep the claws away from her face. The points came nearer. Her own wrists bent the wrong way.

‘It didn’t matter so much with carrot-top, but you won’t be pretty any more, old thing. Does that bother you? Without mirrors, do you have vanity? Or are all men mirrors? You know what you look like by the way we look at you. Is that deep or what?’

In Holly’s slit pupils, Geneviève saw no remaining humanity. Just cunning and malice.

Resolved, she braced her elbows and locked her wrists. There was an agonising grinding and snapping, but the descent of claws was halted. Holly had good animal senses and understood her hands were out of play for the moment. Geneviève tried to block the screaming pain in her arms from her mind.

Holly still had teeth. And an anglepoise neck.

Her head rose from her shoulders like a snake from a charmer’s basket. Her spine popped more vertebrae, her throat showed more reptile rings.

Holly stretched her long neck. She opened her fang-crowded mouth and gave a tuneless mew. Then she dipped down elegantly and nestled her head on Geneviève’s chest, nuzzling her mouth against throat and chin. A scrape of tongue slithered across Geneviève’s face, leaving behind a stinging secretion.

‘You have to admit she’s extreme.’

Gorse sat on the bed, holding Kate in his lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Holly’s mouth fixed against Geneviève’s jugular.

‘Now this is a turn-up,’ commented Gorse. ‘How many necks have you nipped in your night? Tens of thousands. Is this the first time it’s been someone else’s teeth in you? It’s all the rage now. Bleeding vampires. It was Him, you know. His idea. Giving blood back, selling it. Without Dracula, there’d be no dhampires, no drac trade. None of this lovely mess. He’s modest and likes to keep it to himself, but he had the idea. Back in New York in the ’70s.’

Holly’s mouth stayed over Geneviève’s pulse. Sharp teeth pressed against skin. If Geneviève moved, she would be slashed. Holly would drink.

Then, Geneviève would be like Kate. Someone else would use her face, her person. She wouldn’t even have to yield to this new Dracula. Holly could do it for her. Would that satisfy the Count?

She saw Gorse fanning Kate with a white card. One of the invitations.

Click.

‘You’re doing this on your own,’ Geneviève said.

The card stopped moving. Geneviève took a breath.

‘Dracula wants me alive, to surrender, to kiss his ring. I know that. Someone from the West Coast said as much to me, last year. If anything, I’m under his protection. So’s Kate - she was hurt, but not killed. You’re the one itching for me to die this minute. You’re still a schoolboy, Ernest. You must have your treat now, not later. The Count understands a pleasure stretched across centuries. You don’t. Will he be pleased when he finds out?’

She was talking to Holly as much as Gorse.

The shifted creature couldn’t cope with ideas but had instincts. The wet mouth withdrew a touch, breaking the contact between lips and skin. A breath escaped.

‘And who’s going to tell him?’ asked Gorse, petulantly.

Geneviève was quite relaxed. The weight was off her.

‘You really think he’ll need to be told?’

A doubt passed over Gorse’s face. He was justifiably afraid of Dracula. In the past lieutenants who betrayed the Count, or even failed to carry out any trivial task, suffered undignified and uncomfortable deaths.

‘You’ll look like an ice lolly on a stick,’ she said.

Holly rolled off Geneviève and gathered herself in, shedding her snake-self, becoming the real girl again. Gorse had let her believe she was acting on their master’s wishes. A mistake. Playing with girls’ minds was a habit with Ernest Ralph Gorse. Second nature.

Gorse flung Kate away, letting her fall like an old blanket.

‘I was saving this for later.’

He took a linen-wrapped parcel from inside his tweed jacket. He shook the wrappings loose and held up a scalpel. It shone, silver.

‘Recognise it? You should. It has a lot of history.’

Gorse stood and stepped through the enlarged door.

‘It killed a Queen once. And a King of the Cats.’

She remembered the blade from Whitechapel, from Buckingham Palace, from the Palazzo Otranto. It was an instrument, not a weapon. She used a post-mortem scalpel exactly like it most days of the week. Yet it had become bloody, over and over.

‘I knew you’d like to see this again. I borrowed it from the Count’s souvenir drawer. You have to admit it’s a neat twist. You came into the story because of the silver knife, and now you’re going to make an inglorious exit with it stuck in your tit.’

She stood up. Her wrists hurt. A lot of little bones were cracked or snapped. She wasn’t as swift a healer as Holly. It would take minutes before she was right again.