The Path of Razors (18 page)

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Authors: Chris Marie Green

BOOK: The Path of Razors
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They’re all going to see.
Chin up, the
custode
went to the icebox on the other side of the cavelike room with its soldier-simple beds and wiry furniture.
No matter
what
this personal plan was about, it was going to uphold the vow the Meratoliages had made ages ago.
The caretaker only hoped that Della, who was pivotal to making a change Underground, would soon recall all of the implanted tales, that the cleanup could soon begin....
ONCE over four hundred years ago, long before the vampire found himself bloodied and beaten in that cottage in the woods, he took a mistress whom he brought with him to a land not so distant from Wallachia.
A land where a castle lounged on a hill under a veil of night.
In this castle was a countess, and she had invited the vampire and his mistress, who had already disguised themselves as humans, to be her guests. The countess had a shrewd sense of darkness and collected as company those who shared her adoration of the black arts.
Incredibly, the vampires were the tamest of these guests—sorcerers and witches, lovers of pain and torture—yet for a while they found a home among them.
On this night, the vampire’s mistress had decided to indulge in a bath. A special type of bath particular to this vampiress, a bath that was infrequently—but most definitely
—
required to restore the beauty one inevitably lost after the first blush of youth.
A bath that would do more than merely feed the body, as more regular blood meals did.
Falling against the high back of the tub, the mistress reveled under the stream of blood pouring from the human girl whose throat the vampiress had just torn asunder. The prey dangled upside down from a beam, eyes sightless, and the creature drank of her.
But not only via the mouth.
Skin
—
such aging skin—also opened its pores to gulp and savor and replenish.
The mistress was so enthralled with the blood that the sound of a door opening barely registered. Even so, all pores sucked closed, and the vampiress sat straight in the tub.
Around a sheer curtain, the countess herself, with her breathtaking dark hair and pale skin, appeared. She held up a hand as she smiled, her eyes as wide as a child who had discovered an unexpected gift.
“One of my maids saw you bring the girl to your rooms,” she said. “I only wished to watch whatever you had in mind for her, as I have done with our amusements on other nights.”
“And I welcome you to it,” the mistress answered, knowing of the countess’s unfathomable curiosity and hunger for new entertainments. She would not think this bath odd.
Not unless she had seen the skin mouths.
The countess’s gaze lingered on her guest’s breasts, where, under the glow of blood, skin was already softening, smoothing.
“What manner of art is this?” the countess asked, reaching out to touch a breast, to cup it and explore the rounded, slick texture.
The mistress shivered at the contact.
Meanwhile, blood continued to trickle from the girl above them.
The countess turned her palm upward, catching the red spill, her smile widening as she glanced at the vampiress, then at the blood again.
The mistress wished to tell the countess that, perhaps, blood would not provide answers. Certainly, lovers could be stunned into adoring your youthful visage again after a blood bath, yet the glow would always fade. It would not keep those lovers from cavorting with girls whose freshness was real—as the mistress’s lover was doing even now in the dungeons. It would not stop the wrongfulness of loving him.
The glow would last only until the next blood bath and, even then, the change was only skin deep.
The countess licked the blood in her hand, and the mistress only hoped that it would be enough to fulfill her; the other woman’s own pores would not open to drink and bring youth to her flesh, and the vampiress refused to initiate an exchange to accommodate it.
It would be such a responsibility to create a child, the mistress thought. For it would be necessary to leave the countess behind when she departed this castle soon, as planned, while following a great love, winning it time and again, bath after bath....
Yet the countess did seem satisfied, leaning back her head in ecstasy, red dripping from her mouth to her neck. “Oh, how it begins to work.” She opened her eyes, gazing at the mistress. “In return, I have many spells to share with you. Enchantments to bind and create love where it has waned.”
“Spells... ?”
The countess’s smile faded. “I have seen how his gaze wanders. I have seen how it tears at you.”
The mistress said nothing.
Yet... Spells. Would they aid in a lost cause?
With one more glimpse at the countess’s eager expression, the mistress caught a stream of blood from above in her own palm then lifted it to the dark-haired woman’s cheek.
She rubbed the crimson against the countess’s skin, slowly, circling with ever-increasing pressure.
“Yes,” the woman said. “Yes. My flesh drinks it in.”
She leaned forward to scoop blood into her own palms, then splashed it over the rest of her face, her throat. Then, laughing, announcing her intention of finding her own source of blood for a full bath, she finally left the room.
As the last drips from the girl above the tub flicked over the vampiress, the creature leaned back again, pores reopening and slurping until they finally closed in their own contentment.
Then the mistress stepped out of the tub, body shifting back to original form before coming to a mirror. There, the creature touched a soft, refreshed face that was hardly even recognizable, even to the vampire’s own eyes now....
TWELVE
LONDON BABYLON, MAIN UNDERGROUND BELOW HIGHGATE
AFTER Della and her classmates had zoomed away from the hotel and through darkened London, toward Highgate, then to the very edges of the heath where an Underground entrance lay in wait, a fresh batch of images had started creeping in on her.
A tub of blood ... The drip of red from above ...
Now, on her newly assigned bed in the girls’ Underground quarters, the pieces of the scene suddenly crashed into one another in Della’s mind, exploding into a full vision.
Bathing in that blood ...
The mouthlike pores on an unidentified vampire’s body ...
Della pressed her hands over her eyes. She and her classmates could do that, too—drink blood in such a manner. If they wished, they could open their skin and slurp it into their flesh and bodies and-
She shook the thought out. Was her subconscious twining real life and nightmares, holding her accountable for all the terrible things she had done recently?
Across the room, which seemed to Della like a fuzzed, frilly blur of lace and pink paint, the group of girls who had been welcoming Polly, Noreen, and her to their new home stopped gibbering in order to survey Della instead. Little by little, she could see them go from barely defined shapes to sharp, clear entities: girls with long hair, short hair, flounced skirts, smart dresses, wrinkled trousers.
The first time Della had encountered the more seasoned girls who resided in this main Underground, they had been in costume, partaking in a masque. Now they weren’t so much different than she.
Except none of them seemed on the edge of a scream.
After a moment of curiosity, they went back to fussing over Polly and Noreen, who had taken to the rest of the crowd quite easily. Della had been too occupied with the scattered, guilt-induced images attacking her mind.
Yet it was time to mingle, she thought, lest she be marked immediately as an outsider and have to pay for it eons afterward.
She stood as if all was well, then arranged the fluffy furred pillows that had been waiting on her bed. She, Polly, and Noreen had been given a room of their own, as had the other students who had managed to graduate from Queenshill in previous years. Queenshill girls were the more precious type of vampire, fewer in number among the runaways and disenfranchised youth whom the high-class students had recruited from the lower echelons of society.
Yet they all combined here in the Underground, female soldiers-in-training for the dragon’s future armies.
“Della?”
Someone across the room had called to her, so Della gave one last pat to a pillow then turned toward the others.
It was Noreen, who seemed to be a great favorite with the Underground group. One fellow vampire even kept touching Noreen’s red hair as if she had never seen the like.
But Noreen’s tone struck Della as being rather removed, as if she were only seeking Della’s attention because it was wise to do so. She had closed herself off, so Della could not get much of a read on Noreen in general.
“Our new friend Raine,” her classmate said, gesturing to the girl who had been winding her fingers through Noreen’s hair, “has some naughty paparazzi photos of Zac Efron. She copied them from an Internet café aboveground last night while staking out a backpacking tourist.”
“Then I brought the photos with me for inspiration,” Raine said, her pug nose wrinkling as she giggled. “And tonight, we can use them as an appetizer to a meal we’ll get in the common area afterward. They show quite a lot of skin. And what lovely skin, too.”
The group giggled, as well, and Della wondered just how old Raine was—one of the eldest or youngest, just out of her teens?
Della knew only one thing: every single one of them craved the feeling of being as loved and cherished as little girls normally were, before they lost what Wolfie often referred to as their “dewiness.”
He took care of them, coddled them, and several lifetimes would never chip away at the everlasting happiness he would give them.
When Della didn’t respond straightway to Noreen’s invitation, Polly took it upon herself to head toward the door. “Della should probably stay put. She’s awaiting a serious talking-to.”
Violet’s death, Della thought. Polly wasn’t about to let Della forget.
Blast—didn’t Polly recall how Violet had bullied her, the so-called best friend, too?
Unwilling to allow her classmate any leeway, Della joined the group as they followed Polly toward the door. Then, as one, they walked down the rock hallway of the quarters section, which stood apart from the common play areas where the girls laughed, chased dispensable young male prey lured from aboveground, and pounced on their victims when the chasing became utterly boring.
Della caught up to Polly and extended a mind-linked thought. Polly was caught off guard, her consciousness open.
It might be prudent for you to stop chatting to these girls about my talking-to.
Polly lost a step, then answered quickly.
I’ll be quiet about it.
Then she fell behind Della in order, her mouth quite shut now.
A tickle of success feathered along Della’s skin at how easy it had been to put Polly back in line, but the aftermath of it felt heavy, too, as if it had left a mark that didn’t belong on her.
Raine guided them into the common room she shared with at least eleven other vampires. The crowded feel of an activity holiday camp told Della that Raine was one of the recruits, not a former Queenshill student. No, Queenshill girls wouldn’t have these bunk beds, complete with down mattresses of a lower quality.
On those beds, females loitered, all of them of the European stock that Wolfie preferred, their gangly legs hanging, feet encased in Mary Janes and Skechers. Some of the vampirelets sucked on lollipops laced with blood, a treat they had whipped up in the experimental kitchens where some young male prey were kept in confinement. On a higher bunk, Della even saw three girls toying with pretty butterfly knives, playing Truth or Dare with cuts that they cooed over and healed with ecstatic, glowing touches to the flesh.
Della’s own skin tingled with the thought of joining in, playing such games....
But then she saw a curly-haired blonde in a corner, dripping blood from a dainty perfume jar onto her skin and dizzily watching as her pores opened like tiny mouths to sip the sustenance.
A flash of a bathtub, a spill of blood made Della squeeze shut her eyes to flush the image away.
Yet it stayed, hovering just over every giggle, every exclamation in the room.
Raine reached under her lower bunk pillow to retrieve those promised naughty pictures, but they ended up being so innocuous that Della wandered toward the blonde in the corner, with her drip, drip, drip of blood on skin.

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