The Dark Arts of Blood (5 page)

Stefan’s blue eyes penetrated her. “No talk of dying. Charlotte, I don’t know how to help you, but I love you like a sister, with all my heart and soul. I will not allow you to die.”

He straightened up, graceful in the candlelight, and stepped away from the bedside. “You’ll be all right alone for a while?”

“Of course. Where are you going?”

“To find Karl. Rest. Niklas and I will return as swiftly as we can.”

* * *

Some called the house ugly. Even his niece Amy had barely hidden her dismay when she first arrived. In her sweet, shy way, she’d ventured that the rooms were awfully big and cold, the ceilings too high. The pure white marble walls put her in mind of a tomb, she said.

Godric Reiniger indulged her reaction. Bergwerkstatt, which he’d designed himself in the modern geometric style, was not to everyone’s taste, but it suited him perfectly. A house for the future, containing a workshop, film studio, a screening room big enough to be called a cinema, everything he needed.

His headquarters.

There were plenty of bedrooms to house his film crew – both his inner circle, and his general employees – and big reception rooms where he’d allowed Gudrun to add homely Swiss touches. Although they clashed with the stark minimal decor, he let them stay because they made him nostalgic.

Now he walked slowly through the rooms touching each object with a fingertip as if to claim all it represented. Local embroidery, decorative pails and other items carved of wood, even a cuckoo clock; Godric liked these reminders of tradition around him. Past met future here.

In his office there was nothing cosy. The windows were tall narrow oblongs of blackness. He had no curtains, and as little furniture as possible: one desk, one large bookshelf, and four chairs with tall straight backs that recalled prison bars. They were as uncomfortable to sit on as they looked. Two electric chandeliers, like black metal cages, filled the room with light.

Godric prowled around his desk, an island of chaos in its pristine surroundings. He had so many projects in hand that he could barely keep them in order. Manic creative energy kept him from sleep. Sketches, photographs, scribbled ideas for film scripts, books of Swiss folklore and philosophy… he pushed them around with his left hand as if stirring soup. In his right he gripped a cigarette. No one else would make sense of the mess, but he knew where everything was and what it meant.

He glanced at the clock. Past midnight. A touch of concern nagged him: had Amy gone out for dinner with the others, and if so, had she come home?

He stubbed out the cigarette, went out into the grand hall and climbed the stairs. The house was quiet: his crew were either asleep, or out carousing. Insomnia gave him time alone to think, but he sometimes wished he could turn off the flood of ideas.

Branching out from local newsreels into feature films was ambitious, and meant he’d had to take on a throng of new people, not least actors and actresses. Enthusiastic amateurs. Although they shared his goals, he didn’t know them well enough to trust them and his priority was to protect his niece. Just nineteen, she was highly impressionable.

Light shone under the door of Amy’s bedroom. He could hear the murmur of Gudrun’s voice and the scratchy sound of jazz music, which set his teeth on edge.

Gudrun, solid, dour and loyal, had been his father’s housekeeper. After his parents’ early deaths, she had brought him up in her no-nonsense way. She was more housekeeper than foster-mother to him – always had been – but he valued her as the archetypal mother-figure that all women should aspire to be.

His older sister, Amy’s mother, was already married and living in England when Godric was orphaned at the age of ten.

He thought of himself as an only child.

Now in his forties, he relied on Gudrun more than he dared admit. She was the sturdy heart of his world, but not his intellectual equal. His niece, though – despite the irritating caprices of her youth and gender – was a bright spark in his life, a willing audience for his flights of inspiration.

“Amy?”

Godric knocked, but Gudrun answered and blocked the doorway.

“Why is her light still on? Is she ill?”

“No, sir.” She’d always called him sir, even when he was a boy: an imperious, confused, bereaved boy. “A headache. She needs her sleep.”

“Well, then, let her rest,” said Godric, irritated. “Don’t sit fussing over her all night. And make her turn off that damned gramophone!”

“Yes, sir. Isn’t it time you retired to bed also?”

Her tone, like that of a school matron, always awoke the child in him. He obeyed.

He was in no hurry, however. On the way to his bedroom he entered the vast meeting chamber that dominated the upper storey: an impressive space that doubled as a film studio for interior scenes. Deserted, the large echoey space felt haunted. He glanced at the framed pictures hung in an austere row along one wall: stills from his movies, drawings he’d made and photographs he’d taken of the mountains, of Alpine farmers and milkmaids, of folk musicians and revellers dressed up in costume for Christmas,
Fasnacht
and other festivals.

At the far end of the chamber, he unlocked a steel cabinet in an alcove. Inside were thirty numbered pigeonholes, twenty-nine of them containing a dagger resting on a velvet pad. The thirtieth, he carried with him at all times.

His father had left him money, but this collection was the most intriguing part of his inheritance. The spoils of a long-ago archaeological dig near the edge of the Sahara.

Godric intended to take out each
sikin
in turn, to polish it with a soft cloth and replace it in its padded pigeonhole. Before he could begin, he felt the air frosting the back of his neck, every hair standing up as if drawn by static electricity. He
felt
the presence before he turned and saw it.

A column of shadow with glaring eyes.
What the hell… What…
Incoherent thoughts slithered through his mind, not even thoughts but currents of alarm.

A woman. She wore plain modern clothes of a muddy colour, brown or olive, with a close-fitting hat, a single long strand of beads. Her skin was dark and her eyes were exotic, beautiful and terrifying, as if green fire glowed behind the brown irises.

Godric saw at once what she was.
Strigoi
. A vampire.

He used the Romanian term because there was no way to consider a vampire except as a foreign aberration: the undesirable alien.

“These
sakakin
are mine,” she said. Her voice was low, accented, full of menace.

“How the hell did you get in here?” he said through bone-dry lips. “Who are you?”

“The rightful owner of those knives. I want them back.”

For a few breathless seconds, Godric’s head whirled with confusion. Although he knew the
strigoi
were real, he hadn’t seen one for years, still less spoken to one.
She is going to kill me, tear out my throat.

Quick courage came to his defence.

He turned, seized his personal
sikin
from its sheath in his pocket and slammed the cabinet shut behind him. He raised the dagger and pointed the tip at her breastbone.

“Is this what you want,
strigoi
?” he said. “Take it if you can.”

Her eyes widened. Then she lunged.

He swept the blade at her. She leapt clear so fast he didn’t see her move: now she was standing ten feet away, glaring like a snake. Her mouth was open, fangs shining. Neither had broken the other’s flesh. He wielded the blade in a figure of eight, as if weaving a shield to protect himself. Trails of silver light hung in the air; he felt the force keeping her away.

She pointed at the cabinet behind him, but he held it shut with the pressure of his back. Nothing would make him give up his father’s haul, his precious ritual weapons.

“Get out, demon,” he hissed.

Her face twisted with fury and she lunged again. With a cheetah’s speed her hands were on his shoulders, her mouth near his neck. Her grip paralysed him. He waved his knife hand feebly, could not get the blade to connect with her flesh. Her fingernails dug in like claws. She paused, uttered a noise of revulsion in her throat, and pushed him away – thrust him back so hard that his shoulders hit the cabinet, making it shudder.

Again she stood feet from him, thwarted and furious. Her face was the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen, a carnival mask.

“What are you?” He was breathing hard through his teeth. She was plainly repelled by the knife so he brandished it all the more, noticing how its light reflected silver from her eyes. She glared back, but made no attempt to get through his defence. “Who are you?”

No answer.

Instead she vanished. The air crackled. Like breath on a winter morning, she was gone.

Godric became aware he was wheezing from pure fear. He regained control of his breathing, checked every shadow to make sure the chamber was empty. There was no one, nothing there.

He relocked the cabinet, then stumbled in shock to his bedroom and bolted the door – as if that could keep her out. The air stayed motionless, lukewarm… ordinary. He stood guard for a long time before he dared let himself believe she was not coming back.

Godric’s bedroom was another square, masculine room furnished only with necessities: bed, dressing table and a wardrobe of black wood. He took off his waistcoat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, sat on the edge of the bed.

A thousand questions crowded his brain but he put them all aside. The apparition had been some kind of warning, a call to battle. No time for fear. He needed power – more than ever, if the
strigoi
planned to come back.

He drew out his knife and, biting a handkerchief between his teeth, set the blade to the soft flesh just above his elbow. He began to cut a small rune: three vertical lines. The symbol represented the three-fingered salute of the Eternal Alliance: the historic oath that had founded Switzerland.

His hand shook, and the pain made him sweat. A familiar dizziness and tingling surged through him, filling his vision with white stars. Before he’d finished the first line, blood streamed out and he fumbled to press his handkerchief on the wound, cursing. He’d cut too deep again.

Reiniger sank back on to the pillows, gasping. The energy rush was incredible, like a drug.

There were blood drops spattered on the white bedcover and the floor. He was usually so careful not to make a mess. Running his thumb down the inside of his upper arm he felt the scars of older runes, and echoes of the addictive power they’d given him.

With a trembling hand he pressed the blade to his skin and began the next cut.

K
arl forced his way through the tornado that blew up in the skull-creature’s wake. He was somewhere over Switzerland at last, but the ether was so wild he hardly knew which way was up or down. He was dangerously tired, and knew he must drop to Earth and feed, even if it took him the rest of the night to get home.

Then he saw a faint gold coil of energy below: the trace of a vampire he knew.

Two traces, in fact, nearly identical, wading up towards him through the foggy darkness of Raqia’s lower layers.

They were struggling, he realised. Karl swooped down to intercept them. Close to the ground, the world – seen through the distorting lens of the Ring – was a forest of dark, deformed shapes. Karl could not even see the land surface, but had to make a guess as he stepped into reality. The world snapped into three dimensions – timbered houses, lamplit windows – but he was in mid-air, falling, seeing not solid earth but an ink-black lake rushing up to receive him. He braced to hit the water…

Someone seized him. Karl perceived a figure diving through the Crystal Ring, snatching him in mid-air and making an imperfect loop that landed them both in the shallows at the lake’s edge. The shock of hard rocks and the water’s chill rendered Karl helpless. Hands caught his jacket, then took a firm grip on his arms and dragged him on to the paved bank.

He looked up to find two angelic male faces staring down at him, framed by spun-gold hair.

“Karl?” said Stefan. “I hope I haven’t interrupted a midnight swim, but what the hell are you doing?”

“Trying to reach you,” Karl answered. “That was less than graceful, but the Crystal Ring…”

“Is in a hellish mood tonight,” Stefan finished. He looked uncharacteristically grim, almost panicky. “I know, I’ve been hunting you for over an hour. You must come home
now
.”

* * *

Charlotte stood before a full-length mirror, pulling apart the torn fabric of her dress to examine the wound. The bedroom lay in near-darkness, but moonlight revealed every detail to her sensitive eyes. The purple slash near her hipbone wasn’t healing. She could separate the edges and see her unnatural vampire flesh inside, glistening crimson. The wound stung, as if drenched in vinegar. A weak, chilly feeling lingered. She felt strange but calm, as though in a lucid dream.

The attack would have killed a mortal, but vampires were more resilient. The knowledge gave her a thrill of awe, mixed with unease. “We are easy to hurt, very difficult to kill,” Karl had once told her. What kind of weapon could inflict such lasting harm? Nothing made by humans, surely.