The Dark Arts of Blood (67 page)

“But what do you
believe
in? You, Karl, in particular? God, Satan, what?”

Karl smiled. “I believe in a quiet life.”

“You? A quiet life?”

“And you’ve seen how hard it is for us to attain that – but yes, the more others try to take our freedom, the harder we fight. The more precious it is.”

“I need a drink.”

Light and voices spilled out of a nearby restaurant. Emil stopped and stared longingly in through the window. Standing out here in the dark with a vampire, gazing in at the vibrant mortal world…

“And food,” said Karl, feeling a tinge of regret that he couldn’t share the long-lost pleasure of eating. “Forgive me, I should have thought of this earlier.”

“I need a glass of wine. Or a bottle,” said Emil. “And everything on the menu.”

“Whatever you desire.” Karl steered him to the door with a light hand on his back. If they looked too travel-worn to be let in, he was ready to cast his ruthless glamour over the maître d’.

“What about you? You don’t… eat, do you?”

“I’ll order something and you can have that too.”

“I will, believe me. I’ll be able to think clearly once I’ve eaten. No dancer can give his best without fuel.”

“Perfect wisdom.”

“Plain old peasant wisdom,” said Emil.

“So, will you come back to Violette?” Karl repeated.

“Ask me again,” said Emil, “when I’ve had that bottle of wine.”

* * *

The restaurant let Karl use their telephone while Emil was eating. He gave them no choice, since he was not in the mood for arguments and used all the polite sinister charm it took to deflect their protests. He tried several times before he finally got through and – after a frustrating chorus of buzzing and clicking on the line – Thierry answered and managed to connect him to Charlotte.

He heard her voice on the other end, tinny and far away. “Karl?”

“Beloved, he’s with me. We’re in Rome. We’ll take the first train we can and we should be back tomorrow, I hope by the afternoon…”

“Travel safely.” She sounded exhausted, wrung out by anxiety, not herself. “And come back quickly, Karl. I’m with Stefan. He’s… I’m here with him, but please come home as fast as you can.”

S
tefan lay on the double bed beside what was left of Niklas, naked except for a corner of the sheet across his hips.

Charlotte was already there, sitting with him, when Karl arrived. A long train journey had delivered him and Emil back to Lucerne: he’d left Thierry to settle Emil in his room and come straight to the bedroom to find her keeping vigil, grief-stricken and desperate.

“I found him like this,” she said. “You were right, we shouldn’t have left him. Not for a moment.”

“You did what you had to,” Stefan rasped with all that was left of his voice. “And so have I.”

He had made cuts all over his own body. Across his windpipe, giving his throat a ghastly red smile. Straight into his own heart. Slashes across his abdomen, long cuts down the inside of his forearms, even into the deep arteries of his thighs.

The bone-handled
Istilqa
knife he’d used lay on the bedside table, smeared from hilt to tip with blood. Karl realised, from the way Stefan’s right hand lay curled, wet and red, that Charlotte herself had taken the knife from him. She’d put it out of his reach, and he was too weak to seize it again.

But his vampire blood oozed too slowly to let him bleed to death: it was more a ruby gel than a liquid. The red slashes were vivid against his blue-white skin. And still he breathed, eyes open, left fist tight on Niklas’s arm.

“Stefan,” said Karl. Tears burned his eyes. “What have you done? We took our revenge on Reiniger. You enjoyed it. Why would you want to leave such pleasures behind?”

Stefan spoke in a bubbling whisper. “Without Niklas, it’s meaningless.”

“We need you,” said Charlotte. “What about us? Darling, please don’t leave us.”

He gripped her hand. “Charlotte, I’m so sorry, my sweet friend. It’s harder to die than I expected. If you would find a sword or axe to sever my head, it would be quicker. Please.”

Charlotte and Karl exchanged a look of despair. Stefan was right. If he was determined to die, their intervention would be a mercy. He was in agony. It would not be the first time Karl had struck the head from a suffering vampire.

But they weren’t in the habit of keeping weapons nearby. Where would he find an axe or a sword here? There would only be theatrical props…

“No,” said Charlotte. “Look, there is a line between grief and self-pity. You’ve made your point, but it’s time to stop.” Then, “Stefan?”

He was no longer responding. His face was bloodless, like a carcass hung up and drained in a butcher’s shop. No breath. Karl leaned down and detected no heartbeat, either. And yet… he hung there, suspended between life and death.

Undead.

Karl made an instant decision: went into the Crystal Ring, straight through a dozen walls and floors to the kitchens and seized the heftiest implement he could find. A butcher’s cleaver.

He couldn’t carry such a heavy object through Raqia so he returned on foot, sprinting along corridors and up flights of stairs to the bedroom. A walk that would take ten minutes, there and back, took thirty seconds.

Nothing had changed. Karl glanced over the ghastly scene in the gloom – Niklas a pallid husk, Stefan like a fresh corpse beside him – then he sealed all emotion away in a casket of ice.

Charlotte rose to her feet, blocking Karl’s path to him. “Don’t you dare,” she said. Her eyes were wild. There were imprints of Stefan’s blood all over her dress.

“Charlotte, we can’t leave him like this. If he wants to die, what right have we to keep him alive and suffering? He could stay like this for weeks, months. Forever.”

“Don’t touch him.” Her eyes grew even wider, ringed with white.

“Wouldn’t you extend this mercy to
me
?” said Karl. “He’s nearly gone. It will be quick. Take the pillow from under his head.”

In response, Charlotte lifted one arm to form a protective barrier over Stefan’s supine form. She was like a marble wall blocking his way and Karl knew, with dismay, that she was not going to move.

Karl felt that he’d gone mad. The room was full of ghosts. He saw Kristian and Katerina, Robyn, Fyodor, Simon and Rasmila, Niklas… Even the false Charlotte and Godric Reiniger himself, still in his
Schmutzli
shape. They all looked like smoke. A single blow of the cleaver and Stefan would join them…

“Beloved, we have no choice,” he said softly. “Leave the room. I’ll tell you when it’s over.”

She raised her other hand and pointed her forefinger at his heart as if aiming a pistol.

“Karl, I swear to God, if you touch Stefan, I will kill you.”

They stood frozen as Karl heard ten seconds tick by on the clock. He counted them. How long did they seem to Stefan as he lay there undying?

Then he stepped back and put down the cleaver on a chair, facing Charlotte again with open palms to show he was empty-handed. “If not now, we’ll have to do it later,” he said. “Every moment we hesitate, Stefan is in hell.”

She glared back like the Medusa. “I will not give up on him. I’m going to fetch Violette. On second thoughts,
you
fetch her. I don’t trust you alone with Stefan.”

“You don’t trust me?” Karl paused, wondering if Charlotte had finally lost her mind. If she had, he didn’t blame her. He too felt unhinged, like Stefan, like Emil and Violette… Was there anyone sane left?

“Stefan’s the one who matters, not us,” she said. “So the faster you find her, the better.”

“Very well, but Violette won’t hesitate to end his misery.”

“She’ll do as I ask. Just bring her.”

“Why?”

“Because I refuse to let him go. If it takes three to initiate a vampire, why not three to reinitiate?”

Charlotte’s voice was level, measured and ruthless.

“I don’t believe it’s ever been tried.” Karl spoke quietly, caught between the urge to dissuade her and the knowledge that her instincts, however wayward, were usually sound. The spectres faded, except for one smoky shape that stayed in the corner, watching.

“We are going to be the first to try, then.”

* * *

Stefan fought them, rousing from his coma as he realised what they were trying to do. He fought as violently as Violette herself had struggled against her own transformation.

He truly doesn’t want this
, Charlotte thought in horror.
Wouldn’t it be kinder after all to let him go, as he wished, to join Niklas?

It took all three of them carry him into the living room, where there was more space. And more light, although the room seemed dim and foggy despite every light being on. Between them they held his inert body upright.

Karl was the first to sink his fangs into the torn column of his neck. Then Violette, supporting Stefan from behind, drank from the other side. At that, Stefan went rigid, his whole body a taut bow of pain, his expression wide and blank with inexpressible agony.

Charlotte stared at the scene of Karl and Violette with their dark heads bent as they fed, Stefan stretched like a martyred saint between them.
No one has ever tried to re-transform a dying vampire before
, she thought.
To kill them again, to fill them with Raqia’s energy again. Is it possible, or are we just prolonging unspeakable suffering? Stefan, I’m so sorry. Perhaps Karl’s right – he’s always right – but I had to try.

Then Karl caught her wrist and pulled her in to take his place. She found the holes his fangs had made in their friend’s neck and drank.

She realised how little blood Stefan had left. She sucked hard to draw the last drops. The
Istilqa
taste was barely there. His blood was like slushy ice, but still delicious, like a strange cocktail of caramel and salt and cognac, yet none of those. She convulsed against him, her appetite on fire, desperate for more – but Stefan had nothing left. Pleasure and misery left her weak-kneed.

Was this even possible?

Karl drew her away and she tasted the salt of her own tears.

“Quickly,” he said.

They formed the circle of transformation, all joining hands with Charlotte and Karl on either side of Stefan, Violette facing him. Together, the three shifted into the Crystal Ring, hauling Stefan with them.

The world changed. They ascended through layers of purplish fog, upwards into sky until they floated on the rich blue ether. Sunset-golden hills rolled below them. Charlotte saw Karl and Violette altering in form, turning to ebony and lace. She saw her own body change, but Stefan remained the same, his hand skeleton-white in hers. He hung between them like a drowned, floating corpse.

As hard as she pushed away her rising anxiety, it persisted in the back of her mind, pale and terrifying like her lamia. The process wasn’t working. How could it? The Crystal Ring itself wanted no new vampires… or only a tiny, select few.

“No vampire has ever been reinitiated,” Karl had said. And Stefan himself did not want this. Like Robyn, Violette’s lost love, he preferred death.

Energy danced around them, tangible like clouds of fireflies. Charlotte felt electricity flowing from Karl to Violette and then through her own hand to Stefan. There it stopped, where their palms joined, creating a burning build-up of force. Charlotte flinched with pain. The power threatened to push her hand and Stefan’s apart. Her instinct was to recoil and let go, to make the pain stop – but she held on.

Then a storm hit them.

A small tornado spun them round and round in space. They managed to hang on to each other, fingertips painfully interlaced. If they broke the circle, Stefan would die. Or worse… not die. Charlotte had a horrific vision of him floating helpless forever.

As they whirled, a shape rose up into the middle of the circle, a grey comet made of smoke and ice…

It resolved into a clearer form: Charlotte saw a large bony head with a bizarre face, like a medieval image of the devil staring back at her. A long grey face, with tangled white hair and huge spiralling horns. Eyes like bubbles of blood.

The horns and head rose into the space between them and the red eyes burned into Charlotte’s.

“It’s Reiniger.” Karl’s voice was faint and distorted by Raqia’s wild air currents.

“I know,” said Violette. “Determined, isn’t he?”

“Let’s gain height.” Charlotte’s hair – dark tendrils, not her natural hair – whipped across her eyes as she spoke. “Ignore him. Don’t let go.”

She felt Violette’s hand working around hers until they got a firm hold on each other’s wrists. A cloud funnel spun around them, pulsing with red and silver lightning. The demon dropped away as they rose upwards, clear of the storm. Glancing down, Charlotte could no longer see him – but it was hard to see anything in the clouds that boiled beneath them. They rose into the blue void. The storm sank, taking Godric with it.

All she saw, between skeins of hair, was a charcoal blur, as if Reiniger had torn a hole in the Ring as he escaped. Cold shivery dread went into her bones. Again she wondered if this was a mistake, if she should have let Karl grant Stefan his wish after all.