Covenant With the Vampire (29 page)

“Arkady,” I answered at once, and drew a breath, preparing to launch into a
rational discourse as to why he should open the door. But at the sound of his
voice, so strange and bitter and broken, I released instead a sob, and slowly
leaned against the door, overwhelmed by the horror of our circumstances.

I could not find my voice; could only weep. For a few seconds there came silence - but
then beyond the door came the muffled sound of footsteps, and the creaking of
the bolt as it was pulled back. Slowly, the door opened, and in the wavering
shadows stood my husband, with the pistol held in his right hand.

The sight of him pained my heart. He was rumpled, unshaven, with deep shadows
beneath his tormented eyes, and at his right temple an unmistakable thin ribbon
of silver had appeared in his thick coal-black hair in the hours since I had
last seen him - put there by Vlad, who each day seemed to grow younger.

“Mary?” he asked tremulously, in a voice so childlike, so helpless and broken,
it evoked more tears. He lowered the pistol ever so slightly, and frowned as
he peered at me with red, swollen eyes encircled by dark shadows. His eyes have
always been, I felt, his most handsome feature - in fact, the word “beautiful”
is more appropriate. Like his “uncle” and sister, he has striking, breathtaking
eyes: light hazel, flecked with much green, and encircled by a ring of dark
brown.

Those pitiful, lovely eyes were utterly lost, as bewildered as those of a little
boy wandering dazed through endless forest. He fixed them on me, and I saw them
narrow, saw them flicker with uncertainty as he reached deep into his memory
and tried to recall whether he truly knew me, whether I could be trusted.

“Yes, dear, it's Mary,” I said gently, and took another step closer to the
threshold. He tensed, but did not raise the pistol further; and when I held
still, waiting, he lowered it at last until the barrel pointed at the floor,
but did not ease his grip.

I entered and moved slowly, deliberately beside him as he turned and walked
back towards the casket in the room's centre. Inside, no lamps had been lit,
and the corners were shrouded in blackness. The only light came from great solitary
candelabra, twenty-armed and almost my height, that stood at the head of the
open coffin.

All twenty tapers were lit, and they cast onto Zsuzsanna a wavering golden
glow that imbued her with such stunning loveliness that she seemed unreal as
a statue, a magnificent work of art intended to represent the ultimate quintessence
of Beauty. No living human could ever possess such allure. The sight of her
stole my breath, caused me to raise fingers to my lips. Yet as I gazed at her,
I realised that the effect was due to more than the candlelight; her very being
seemed to radiate with an internal light, and her skin possessed the same peculiar
phosphorescent quality I had first noticed in Vlad“s skin, at the
pornana.
Indeed, it seemed, as I continued to look, to gleam with subtle flashes of pale
silvery blue.

So enchanting was the sight of her that I had to close my eyes and force myself
instead to look upon my husband, who settled into a chair pulled alongside the
casket, the place where he had apparently spent the last several hours. Arkady,
too, gazed upon Zsuzsanna so steadily he appeared entranced; and when I called
his name at first gently, and then more loudly, he never heard, but continued
staring at his sister with the distant, , slack expression of one mesmerised.

I reached down to touch his arm. He whirled, and raised the pistol still clutched
in his right hand, as though he had already forgotten that he had invited me
in. I recoiled, and watched as the fear in his eyes eased, and was replaced
once again by recognition.

“Arkady,” I said softly, and when his expression faintly warmed, I grew bold
and reached again to stroke his shoulder. I was not at all certain, when I entered
the room, what I should say; I knew only that we had both come to a point of
utter desperation, and so I spoke to him from my heart. “Arkady, I need my husband
back. I need your help.”

My words pierced his veil of despair and touched him. Slowly, he set the pistol
down beside him on the chair cushion, and turned to gaze up at me with eyes
that spoke of his fierce struggle to emerge from his interior darkness.

But I saw in that gaze a glimmer of the man I had known, and was heartened.
“Come to bed, darling,” I whispered. “Come to bed. It's time for both of you
to rest.”

He laced his fingers into his newly silvered hair and clutched it, shaking
his head; his voice carried a hint of the anguish which had driven him to madness.
“I can’t… I dare not leave her…”

“There's nothing to be afraid of,” I soothed. “We can have one of the servants
sit with her.”

“No!” He whipped round like a serpent to face me. “We can trust them least
of all!” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, as though afraid
one of them might overhear, but his eyes were oddly lucid. “I trusted them once…
with Father's corpse. If I told you what they did to him…” He shuddered, and
again shook his head. “No. I will trust none of them with her.”

“Arkady,” I said firmly, “you said you have seen terrible things at the castle.
Well, I have seen horrible things here. This house is no longer safe, and I
need you. And not just I… Your child needs you as well.” And I placed his hand
upon my stomach and let him feel the restless child. His expression softened
at that, and for a moment I thought he would weep. But instead, he rose from
the chair and embraced me, clasping me so tightly I could scarcely draw a breath.

Yet I was grateful for that embrace; hot tears spilled onto my cheeks, and
I held him with a desperation to match his own, terrified that if I dared let
go, our little family might never be together again.

“I am so frightened,” he whispered into my ear, our wet cheeks pressed together;
tears streamed down our faces, but I could not tell which were his and which
mine. “So frightened that anything should happen to you or the baby.”

“And I am frightened for your sake,” I said, “because of what has already happened
to you. Arkady, you are not yourself; you are sick with grief. Do you remember
we had agreed to go to Vienna, because the strain was too great? We must do
so at once, before any further evil befalls us.”

“Yes…” he murmured absently. “We should go.” And then I felt his body tense
against mine, and a muscle in his jaw begin to twitch. “But I cannot leave her.
Not yet…”

I stiffened myself, and pulled back from the embrace, though our arms were
still about each other's waist. I decided to try to lead him gently to the truth
of what Vlad really was.

“Arkady… you do see how beautiful Zsuzsanna He sighed, and, releasing me from
the embrace, turned towards the casket to look on her once more with sorrowful
appreciation. ”Yes… Yes, she is beautiful…“ He choked, righting back tears.

I stood beside him, and put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him. “More beautiful
than she ever was in life. But… have you forgotten her spine was curved, and
her leg withered?”

He looked suddenly up at the shadows dancing on the high ceiling, as though
unwilling to confront the memory, as though afraid what contemplation of it
might reveal. His breath began to come quickly, and his shoulders to rise and
fall, as though he were struggling to repress the conclusion reason might bring.

“No,” he said bitterly. “No, I haven’t forgotten.”

I gestured at the body in the coffin. “Look at her, Arkady. Look at her! You
can see she does not look as the dead ought to look after a day's time. Her
back is perfectly straight; she is taller. And look at her legs!”

And despite himself, he looked down at his sister's corpse, and the two perfect,
well-formed legs beneath her gown.

“They are both perfect now,” I continued. “What could cause such a miracle?”

He clutched his forehead. “Insanity! The same insanity that caused me to see
Stefan, to see the wolves spare my life; that causes Uncle every day to grow
younger! And I have done this to you, Mary, to the person I love most in all
the world…” His voice cracked. “I cannot bear to see it happen to you…”

I heard the wildness in his voice, but also the stirrings of unwanted revelation;
I felt I could not afford to desist. Gently, but firmly, I said: “Arkady, I
am perfectly sane; I am the same Mary you have always known, and I tell you
now, you are not mad to have seen these things. Zsuzsanna is perfect now because
she is
strigoi,
one of the undead.” I hesitated. “Did you not see Vlad,
when he came to be with her? His hair is black, where once it was silver; he
appears thirty years younger. How do you explain it?”

His gaze went directly to the small gold cross, which I had thoughtlessly failed
to slip inside my dress before coming to speak to him. His eyes narrowed at
the sight of it, and he lifted his gaze to mine and with horrified revelation
whispered, “Good Lord, you are just like them now, aren’t you? You are as misguided
as they! You would like nothing better than for me to go to sleep, so you can
help them violate her body, just as they did Father”s - !“

The look of hurt betrayal on his face broke my heart. I wound the fingers of
my left hand tightly round the crucifix until it cut into my flesh, and cried
out to think my husband so under the vampire's spell that he was lost to me
forever; to think that the blood which flowed in his veins - and the veins of
our child - tied us irrevocably, eternally to the monster.

To think those bonds of blood could never be loosed, and that my child was
doomed to tread the path of his unhappy ancestors.

Silently, I called upon Saint George, to wield his shining sword, and with
one sweeping deadly blow, sever those crimson ties.

My despair must have shown clearly, for at the sight of it, Arkady choked,
and all the anger seemed to leave him abruptly. He sagged with exhaustion, and
in a low voice full of misery, asked, “Do you have any idea what you imply,
by saying these things are true?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Poor Mary.
My sweet darling, I have tainted you, the one I love most, with the evil here.
I have brought you and our child into a viper's pit. It is all true… Uncle is
mad and a murderer, just like my father, his accomplice, and I am destined to
become like them…” He buried his face in his hands, overwhelmed by the same
vision of bloodstained generations that had visited me, and said, “My child!
My poor child!”

His torment was so keen I felt it, too, and could only stare sorrowfully at
him as we were both stricken
to
silence by the utter cruelty of the
truth. I waited, hopeful that he would come to his senses, that I could convince
him to flee this place with me.

“You are no murderer,” I said, with trembling voice. “But Vlad is
strigoi,
and he controls you. Let me bring you Zsuzsanna's diary. She has written of
how he drank her blood…”

But I had not spent my childhood being taught to love and revere Vlad, and
the vampire's blood did not flow in my veins. It was easier for me, a strong-willed
outsider, to resist Vlad's mesmerism, to accept the truth, than it was for my
poor husband. He raised his face and said hoarsely: “Oh, Mary… Mary… It only
proves that she is as mad as I. Go. Go now! I can bear no more!”

When I hesitated and opened my mouth to contradict him, he raised his voice:
“Go!”
And he went back to the chair beside the coffin, retrieved the
pistol, and retook his place as guardian of Zsuzsanna's corpse - unaware that
by so doing, he served neither reason nor loyalty nor love, but the most malignant
of purposes.

I think his “uncle” - or more likely, his grandfather, removed by two dozen “greats” - has
more influence over him than we shall ever know. At that moment, I saw Vlad“s
eyes in the flickering gloom, heard in my mind his mocking laughter: So we thought
he could be so easily outwitted, did we? So we thought Zsuzsanna was ours to
do with as we wished?

Arkady's expression was hard, unreachable, as he turned his profile towards
me and sat gazing down, grief-stricken, at his sister's voluptuous corpse, radiant
in the wavering candlelight. I knew it would do no good to argue with him then,
and so I left, downcast, defeated, but telling myself that exhaustion would
most certainly claim him later that night.

It did not. He sat with her through the night of the eighteenth, and when,
this morning, I learned from Dunya that he still remained by her side, wild-eyed,
near delirium from refusing food and drink, my heart sank.

The funeral took place at noon. It was the most pitiful of affairs. Only four
of the servants came, as tales of Zsuzsanna having died as a result of the bite
of the
strigoi
had caused the rest to stay away. They came first to
the drawing-room, and stood before the open coffin to pay their dead mistress
a respectful moment's silence, with caps removed. Ion wept, and I thought I
detected in his sorrow a hint of the indignant anger I had seen in Dunya, when
she had first learned of the broken covenant. He tried to slip his own crucifix
into his dead mistress's hands, but Arkady, watching jealously, snatched it
from him. For a moment, I thought my husband would fling it; instead, he thrust
it in his pocket so that it might not be retrieved and shouted at the old gardener
in Roumanian. I felt terribly sorry for the old man, and wished I could speak
his language so that I could comfort him, for he regarded my husband with tearful
bewilderment but replied not a word.

Ilona and Dunya came too, and stood gazing at the corpse with uneasy reverence,
and more dread than sorrow - for they knew better than any the startling changes
which the
domnisoards
body had undergone. The bright fear in Ilona“s
large eyes said that she, too, understood her mistress would rest neither peacefully
nor long, that the casket was a wooden womb which would birth a child perfect,
beautiful, and monstrous.