More Than Mortal

by Mick Farren

• ISBN13: 9780312879013
• ISBN10: 0312879016
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2001-08-11
• Publisher: Tor Books

Summary

Victor Renquist, centuries-old nosferatu leader, is called to England. Some archaeologists are excavating a burial mound, but what they will uncover is no Saxon warrior but the being once known as the Merlin. And he's not the kindly old duffer of The Sword in the Stone.

Author Biography

Mick Farren was born in Cheltenham, England on a wet night at the end of World War II and he has been complaining about it ever since. His fiction received attention in the late punk seventies with The DNA Cowboys cult trilogy. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he tempered cyberpunk with his own post-Burroughs, post-Lovecraft strangeness, while, at the same time functioning as a columnist, critic, recording artist, teaching a science fiction and horror course at UCLA, publishing a number of non-fiction works on popular culture, including a best selling biography of Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and the bizarre-fashion history The Black Leather, and also providing Rock & Roll lyrics for bands like Metallica, Motorhead, Brother Wayne Kramer, and others. With Kramer, he created the off-Broadway musical The Last Words Of Dutch Schultz, and he has scripted a number of TV documentaries. He emerged into the 21st century with the critically acclaimed and suitably unorthodox vampire saga The Renquist Quartet, and the forthcoming alternate world epic Flame Of Evil.

Farren currently lives in Los Angeles. His most recent non-fiction is the autobiographic Give The Anarchist A Cigarette (Jonathan Cape, UK), his most recent novel is Underland (Tor Books US), and his current CDs are People Call You Crazy: The Mick Farren Story (Sanctuary UK) and The Deviants Dr Crow (Navarre US).

Table of Contents

CHAPTER One
 
 
The candles had been made to a formula of her own devising, so rather than giving a soft orange-yellow light, their flames burned an electric blue. Columbine Dashwood had always embraced a passion for games with light and fire. Of the four primeval elements, fire fascinated her the most, even though she was forever denied the most elemental fire of all, the direct radiance of the sun. Perhaps that was the reason. For more than almost two and a half centuries Columbine Dashwood, by her very nature, had been confined to the night, restricted, on pain of her own total and agonizing destruction, to deliberately kindled fire and lights of artificial construct, except for the wax and wane and coldly bruised whiteness of the moon, the starlight and skyshine, the occasional forked lightning of a nocturnal storm, and, of course, that one time in the Western Islands when she had witnessed the aurora. Columbine was more familiar than anyone with the rich strata running through the very core of her character that fervently desired what she couldn't have. She actually admired this in herself. The perverse trait of personality was a guarantee of her existence always being interesting, although, at times it could also make her life frustrating and even dangerous.
The boy lay still, smoothly naked and knowingly vulnerable. He was scarcely more than a teenager, but over his time with her, he had learned a depravity beyond his years. His legs were pressed together, and his arms spread wide, at right angles to his body, like a supine crucifixion One thin white hand gripped the corner of an embroidered Moorish cushion, while the fingers of the other twisted a fold in the burgundy satin sheet that covered the large circular bed. The third finger bore the ring, the one with the large single ruby in an elaborate art nouveau claw setting, which she had given him in the afterglow of their first night together in the cryptic and wafting luxury of her bedroom at the Priory. Like all the others who had been there before him, the boy loved her, and he wanted to be loved by her in return. His aura showed his breathlessly mixed emotions: anxiety and anticipation, but also a definite measure of fear. He wanted to be controlled and led by her, but part of him was apprehensive of where she was leading him. Already she had taken him to the edge of the sensual abyss, and to free fall well beyond. She knew he was aware that, sooner or later, she might conduct him to a place from which he would be unable to return. She had known from the beginning this was both what he desired and dreaded in almost equal proportions. This duality was a part of what had attracted her to him in the first place, along with the more mundane consideration that he also was possessed of a fey androgyny and the sensually geometric features of Michelangelo's David, albeit submissively softened.
Dashwood stood beside the bed, pushed back her long, pure white curls, and looked down at his face. One of the bed's tentlike draperies of the sheerest muslin gauze hung between them, softening the focus and rendering him even more idealized. “You are very beautiful.”
Once, before her training had fully taken hold, he might have replied. Undoubtedly, some highly unoriginal flattery to the effect that she was even more beautiful, but he had soon learned she didn't need or even want him to speak. He lacked the intellect for any conversation she might crave. She required him silent, obedient, and objectified. She leaned forward, pushed aside the canopy, and lightly touched his smooth and completely hairless chest with her fingertips. She was as naked as he, and the blue light of the strange candles gave her death-pale skin an almost reptilian sheen. She smiled sadly and repeated herself. “Yes, my dear, you are so very beautiful.”
As she lay down beside him, stretching in the dim chamber's interplay of light and shadow, her movements were sinuously nonhuman. But this was only as it should be. Columbine Dashwood was in no way human in anything but outward appearance. Of course, the boy didn't know that. Yet. His mind was always open to her, and she knew he considered her strange, but he was too infatuated with the ecstatic illusions she fed him to question the nature or origin of her strangeness. He sometimes wondered why she shunned the sun, but he dismissed it with a young and overwhelmed lover's carelessness as an eccentricity of vanity. His only half-formed theory was that maybe she had a complexion that burned rather than tanned. This would certainly be in line with prematured white hair. At times she found his lack of curiosity irksome, but she supposed it went hand in hand with his passivity, and if it hadn't been for his passivity, he never would have survived to keep her amused for so long.
She moved her body against his. Too bad he had to go. He was gorgeous, stupid, and infinitely malleable, the complete plaything—really all Columbine Dash-wood had needed until this current situation had arisen. Unfortunately, the imminent arrival of Victor Renquist had changed all that. Playthings were extraneous. Her long season of leisure was at an end, and to prolong him made no sense. She must finish him this night. She allowed herself a single wistful sigh; humans wilted in time, anyway, like roses from a transitory admirer. Hundreds like him had served briefly in her infinitely extended existence, and hundreds like him would serve in the future.
The evening had started, at least for the boy, with opium and a chilled white wine. When the crucial time came, he would feel no pain. Respecting his devoted service, she stroked his mind, intensifying his sensation of being blissfully afloat. She kissed his throat, and he groaned softly. At the same time, she slowly extended her fangs, down from the twin cavities in her unusual skull. She knew that many of the supposedly sophisticated kin had forgone their fangs and had them surgically removed. Defanging enjoyed an especial vogue among her American cousins and also those in the Far East, both cultures being so taken with cosmetic surgery. They favored the small blade or steel spike, but Dashwood remained a staunch naturalist in the matter of the kill.
When she struck, the boy felt almost nothing. The penetration was so fast and smooth, he experienced only mild surprise. She drank quickly so as not to prolong his departure, and his strength ebbed with a sense of wondering bewilderment at all the last dying noises and the darkening of the blue light. When his pulse ceased, Columbine's own body convulsed, and she let out two long, soul-deep, heartfelt shudders. At the same time, the blue candles guttered. Her being was permeated with climactic power. Many of her kind might, at such a moment, rise and moon-howl, but that suited neither Dashwood nor English behavior. Concealed responses and near-silent triumphs were long-maintained traditions, and ones with which she had no intention of breaking.
She lay very still as the boy's stolen energy stilled and settled, her own trembling subsided, and her fangs involuntarily retracted. The tiny sounds of the old manor house, the small creakings and creepings, whispered around her, and outside, a breeze rustled the branches of the four-hundred-year-old oak. She raised herself on her arms and gazed at the body of the youth. If anything, in the pure whiteness of death, he was even more beautiful. Hair slightly tousled, ice-blue lips parted, and head a little turned, one hand stretched out, palm up, across the dark satin sheet like a tragic figure in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. She had fed neatly and with care. The wounds in his throat were small, and only a few drops of still-glistening blood spattered one of the multitude of damask pillows. She knew that with his passing, her protracted extravagance of indolence and hedonism was at an end. The lazy cocooned winter was about to explode into active and possibly violent spring. The secret that she had kept so long was, in one way or another, about to be revealed, and she would be compelled to deal with the consequences. The letter she had sent to Victor Renquist had already put the sequence of events in motion. No way remained to halt them.
She rose from the bed and slipped into a silk peignoir, at the same time calling out to the thralls. “Grendl, Bolingbroke, come to me now. I need the two of you to remove this empty thing to the furnace.”
Immediately she remembered the ring. Ecstasy had made her careless, and she turned and eased it from the limp dead hand. Too fine a bauble to be consigned to the fire or stolen by servants. In any case, it made up part of a set, and she would doubtless use it again when the present dilemma had been addressed and resolved.
* * *
A tilting movement and then a slide forward brought Victor Renquist fully and watchfully awake. He could feel the reinforced flight case finally being unloaded. For the eleven hours it had taken to transport him from Los Angeles to London, he had remained in a half-dream, enveloped in a darkness so total even his undead senses could see little except the faintest psychic fluctuations of his own enclosed aura. Some twenty minutes earlier, the jolt as the wheels of the aircraft touched the solidity of an English runway had interrupted his somber nosferatu introspection, but even at that point, he had still not fully given himself up to the consciousness of the moment. The real danger would not come until the ground crew began to unload the small corporate jet's cargo, of which the custom-crafted aluminum flight case was the primary item. Over his centuries of existence, Renquist had taught himself a very complete patience. Anticipating a threat when he could do absolutely nothing about it would be to subject himself to pointless stress.
In theory, no threat should exist. All necessary arrangements had been made, the correct bribes had been proffered and accepted but, humans being what they were, a random danger always remained that some unforeseen error would come to pass, the chance element of ever-assertive chaos, what they called Murphy's Law. The flight case had been designed to look as little like a coffin as possible, but its very dimensions—over six feet in length and some two and a half feet across—still hinted of funeral parlor. The diplomatic stickers liberally pasted to its exterior were supposed to prevent any unexpected opening of the case. In addition, the private airfield to the southwest of London had only a minimal representative presence of Her Majesty's Customs and Excise, which further reduced the chance of the case being unlocked for inspection and its strange contents being disclosed. The small jet's flight plan had been timed so the aircraft would land well after sunset, so at least an unwarranted intrusion would not expose him to sunlight and destruction in sudden and violent conflagration. Should he be discovered, however, he would still find himself subjected to what would undoubtedly be a barrage of unanswerable questions and perhaps a confinement from which he could free himself only with desperate and all too noticeable violence.
The flight case now tilted acutely, moving down what had to be a ramp, but Renquist was held firmly in place by the form-fitted foam rubber. A human would have quickly suffocated in such an enclosed and sealed environment, but Victor Renquist was easily able to compensate for the lack of air by adjusting his nosferatu metabolism. A jarring thud, followed by a regular and mechanical vibration, indicated the case and its occupant had been loaded onto a truck that was now moving away from the aircraft. Renquist allowed his mind to drop back into the semi-sleep in which he'd spent the flight across half the world. He knew he'd be awakened again when the ground transportation reached where it was going.
Even idly drifting in the labyrinth of his almost limitless memory, Renquist found he was still, to a degree, affected by his unseen surroundings. During the previous decade, his duties as Master of the nosferatu colony that had first made its home in Lower Manhattan, and now resided beside the Pacific Ocean in one of the more isolated canyons of the sprawling city of Los Angeles, had precluded all but the most pressing individual travel. He had journeyed once to New Orleans to act as a neutral adjudicator in a potentially messy bayou clan dispute. He had also, a few months earlier, been compelled to make a fast dash to Savannah, Georgia, in the selfsame corporate jet that had just brought him to the United Kingdom, to rescue some very ancient books that should in no way fall into the hands of humanity at large. Previously the tomes had been safe, part of a highly esoteric personal library belonging to a human who could be trusted in his isolated neurosis. After the man's exceedingly messy shotgun suicide, however, the collection, along with all the rest of his personal effects, was slated to be sold at auction by the IRS to cover the eccentric's outstanding back taxes; if that happened, the hand-lettered volumes, with their unique flamelike script, and the arcane and potentially dangerous information they contained could fall into literally anyone's hands. Thus Renquist was forced to make a night flight, commit burglary, and then hightail it back to California before he was caught by the sun.
Aside from these two excursions, the nosferatu colony had been more than enough of a disquieting handful to keep him tied closely to whichever of the two Residences was its home. More than two decades had passed since Renquist had left the continental United States, and it had been longer still since he had set foot on English soil. The last time had been during the so-called swinging sixties, when he had been drawn by the license and laxity of that Western cultural revolution of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. He had also been present for the World War II Nazi blitz when the toga-wearing Hermann Göring and his Luftwaffe had attempted, and failed, to bomb the population into submission. He had been in the city during the 1890s, at the time of both the fall of Oscar Wilde and the Jack the Ripper murders. Before that, some eight decades earlier, he'd enjoyed a passing acquaintance with Lord George Byron. At the end of the seventeenth century, he had been a witness to the Duke of Monmouth's ill-advised and swiftly defeated rebellion; but by far the longest time Renquist had spent in the British Isles was during the embattled reign of Elizabeth I, when he had provided dark, highly secret, and at times, scarcely believable services for Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's genius spymaster and a shadowy grey eminence of covert power.
Of course, by original birth, Renquist was technically himself an Englishman. Almost a thousand years ago, when the world had been so much more empty of men and the great forests still held sway in northern Europe, when bear and wild boar still thrived and deer crowded the thickets, he had been simply Victor of Redlands, the out-of-wedlock son of Roger, Earl of Cambray, and Gwendoline the Saxon maid, turned loose to make his way in the world as a bastard, with only the horse, armor, and sword that were the sum payment of his father's considered debt of paternity. Despite these distant human origins, his arrival by no means represented any kind of homecoming. Perhaps he might have felt some ties to a homeland back in those ancient days of faded unreality, when he had been so young, so stupid, so human: roaming through France, England, and the Low Countries, hiring on with any lord, duke, or baron who would keep him supplied with food, drink, women, adventure, and the opportunity of pillage. Perhaps he might have felt like an Englishman in those troubled years at the start of the hideous idiocy that would become know as the Crusades. Soon after that, though, when only in his twenties, destiny had brought him under the influence of the hypnotic and frightening beautiful being known as the Great Lamia, the immensely powerful female nosferatu who changed him to what he now was. From that fateful day forth, temporal considerations like home and heritage had been consigned to an increasingly hazy past. The Great Lamia had transformed him, brought him across the mortal divide to join the somber ranks of the undead. He had crossed centuries and continents, the perpetual outcast and figure of fear except among others of his own kind, until the recall of his time as human was less than a dream.
Normally Renquist was able to mentally calculate time, almost to the second, without the aid of any timepiece, but for the long flight halfway across the world—and now the journey by road from the airfield into the city—he had tuned back his time perception, just as he had slowed his undead pulse and reduced his strange nosferatu respiration almost to nothing. An unawareness of time was the most complete protection against the boredom of all-enclosing darkness. Thus it came as a mild surprise when the truck carrying his container began making frequent short stops as though moving through reasonably heavy traffic, and he also became aware of the intrusion of minds of humans in massed numbers.
The plan had been a relatively simple one. The flight case in which he was concealed would be delivered to the Savoy Hotel in London's fashionable West End along with the rest of his more conventional luggage. A bribed bellhop would unlock the fastenings that held down die lid, but the man had been ordered to be sure and leave the room without looking inside. Once alone in his suite, Renquist would be able to emerge, shed his traveling clothes, dress for the outside world, leave the hotel, and merely reenter and register just like any much more natural new arrival. The strategy, far from earth-shatteringly complex, could never have been consummated without the Byzantine and globe-spanning network of contacts and the dossiers of human weakness and vulnerability Renquist scrupulously maintained for exactly such eventualities. The aircraft, the carefully timed schedule, the strangely explicit instructions, and the bribery and corruption required to ensure that those instructions were carried out to the letter, with no questions asked, were all a result of favors called in from men and women who owed Renquist either their liberty or their very lives—individuals whose dark secrets ranged from the bankrupting of huge corporations and small countries to deliberately and systematically feeding their heiress spouses coma-inducing doses of insulin or other medications. For the well-organized nosferatu, secret knowledge (and the threats it made possible) was as valuable as industrial diamonds, uncut cocaine, or hard currency.
The truck carrying his aluminum case-coffin came to a more decisive halt. Renquist could only assume that they had reached the delivery entrance of the Savoy. This was confirmed when the case was abruptly dragged to the rear of the vehicle, upended, and lowered. He was moving again, leaning at an angle close to vertical, as through being propelled on some kind of trolley. He was grateful that whatever human underling was overseeing the transfer strictly observed the prominently displayed this way up stickers. He had no desire to make this final leg of his journey humiliatingly upside down. Headfirst might suit a bat, but never a nosferatu. Despite the weight of human folklore, the undead had nothing to do with the subfamily Desmodontidae except an occasional common predator rapport. Of course, he would expect nothing less than perfection in even the smallest details from the Savoy. It was, after all, one of London's most legendary and prestigious five-star hotels.
This inclined forward motion continued for a couple of minutes or more; then, after a series of bumps, it ceased and was replaced by a smoother upward one. He was in an elevator. His destination was close. After a second set of bumps, as the trolley was maneuvered out of the lift, the new, more muffled sound of its wheels told him he was now moving along a carpeted corridor. The trolley halted, a door was opened, and Renquist was moved into a room. The casket was lifted from the trolley and placed on the floor in a way that left Renquist lying flat on his back. One more operation, and his travel plan would be completed to perfection.
He heard a human voice. “All right, Sanji, old lad, You can go along. I've just got one more thing to do here.”
One set of footsteps left the room, and moments later, he heard the click of the first of the fastenings on the case being unlocked. It was followed by the voice that had spoken before, this time talking to itself. “This is a fucking weird one, and no mistake.”
The other fastenings were also unlocked, and then this human made his exit, closing the door behind him. Renquist waited a full thirty seconds and finally, with an almost embarrassing resemblance to the rising vampire in a cheap photoplay, he pushed open the lid of the case and stood up. He stepped from the box and looked slowly round the suite. Again, his instructions had been carried out to the letter. The rest of his luggage was positioned beside the case, and thick metal foil had been taped over all the windows so even the slightest hint of sunlight was rigorously excluded. That a guest at the hotel might obsessively demand the elimination of all outside light might seem a little unusual, but the Savoy was well accustomed to the unorthodox. Down the years, the establishment had catered to the eccentricities of such off-center luminaries as Sarah Bernhardt, Sergey Diaghilev, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, King Farouk, Salvador Dalí, Howard Hughes, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to name but ten. It was also a matter of public record that Elvis Presley had demanded a similar sealing of the windows from his hotels when he performed in Las Vegas or went on tour. A slightly more conventional request by Renquist was for the large jug of ice water—it had been placed by unseen hands on the top of the suite's small bar.
When Renquist had assured himself that all else was to his satisfaction, he picked up the jug and drank from it in deep, wolflike drafts. It seemed, as he grew older, that water became more and more important to his metabolism. He had no explanation for this and did not know if the phenomenon was unique to himself or if it afflicted all nosferatu who reached his advanced age. He, in fact, had no way of knowing. Since the departure of the ancient Dietrich, he'd met absolutely no nosferatu as old as he was.
After drinking, he dressed, but he took his time. He was in a new city and felt it incumbent to present himself with the optimum of grave good taste. A dark silk suit, a navy shirt with a narrow black tie, and slightly pointed-toe, Cuban-heeled boots seemed appropriate, topped off with an almost ankle-length black trench coat, since it never paid to trust the London weather. He considered a wide-brimmed, slight dandified hat, but he was currently wearing his hair long with a slight curl. It hardly suited a hat, and if it should get wet, so be it. It was time for him to merge with the human population. He considered taking the silver-topped cane that also served as a sheath for the secreted blade of the finest and most deadly Milan steel, but he decided a sword stick was unacceptably flamboyant and probably surplus to his requirements.
Renquist was neither so naive nor so ill informed that he stepped out into the London night expecting a Sherlock Holmes pea-soup fog. He was pleased to find he had arrived on a pleasant, if slightly brisk, night and decided, instead of going straight back into the Savoy to register like a newly arrived guest who'd had his luggage sent on in front of him, he would walk for a while and get the feel of the city. London had changed a good deal since he had last been there. To his eye, it had ceased to be as individual and idiosyncratic as he recalled it. It seemed to be succumbing to both the new European homogeneity and the overall multinational uniformity of McDonald's, Sony, and Citicorp. He missed the Dickensian intricacy he'd known in the days of Sir Henry Irving; Lillie Langtry; Eddy, the Duke of Clarence; and Mrs. Patrick Campbell—that same period when Bram Stoker had caused such troublesome reverberations by inventing the wholly fictional but uncomfortably too-believable Count Dracula.
Aside from the Dracula anxiety, the 1890s had been one of his favorite eras in the history of the ancient city, but any nostalgia he might have had for the times past wasn't sufficient to mar his enjoyment of strolling slowly down the Strand, taking in the sights and sounds, the store window displays, the marquees of the theaters, and, most interesting of all, the vast international variety of humanity who thronged the sidewalks. After being isolated in the relatively new and automobile-dominated city of Los Angeles for so long, to be back in a metropolis where crowded streets lived and breathed, and palpably dense history was layered beneath his feet was a positive pleasure. He tuned back the mental auras of the passersby. He had no desire to eavesdrop on the details of their thoughts and feelings, and en masse, humans could be overwhelmingly intrusive on his undead perceptions.
He continued walking west until he was within sight of the circling traffic in Trafalgar Square, the cars, cabs, and red double-decker buses that orbited the tall monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson. Renquist looked up at the stone figure atop its narrow column, the surrounding pools and fountains, and the four guardian Edwin Land-seer statues of couchant lions at the base. Nelson, the nation's great maritime hero, had destroyed Bonaparte's navy in 1805 but was shot down at his very moment of triumph. Poor Horatio. Renquist had never met the man, but the humans with whom he'd had contact on the staff of the Duke of Wellington had assured him the admiral had the ego of a pouter pigeon. What other reason could he have had for parading around the quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Victory, in full dress uniform for all to see, complete with all his medals and insignia, including the Order of the Garter? He had presented too prime a target to any French sharpshooter, and it had been inevitable that one would nail him from the rigging.
By the time Renquist reached the intersection of the Strand and Trafalgar Square, he decided he'd walked enough. He was in no way fatigued—he just couldn't be totally comfortable relaxing and exploring the possibilities of the town until he had completed the process of checking into the Savoy and creating for himself a secure, if temporary, refuge. The cab rank of Charing Cross Station was just across the street, and Renquist decided he would ride the short distance back to the hotel and arrive in a wholly plausible manner, as though at the end of a long journey. A few rail travelers queued for the black London taxis, but cabs were coming and going in a continuous flow, and the fifth one up was his. Once inside, Renquist leaned toward the partition separating passenger and driver, and gave his instructions.
“The Savoy, please.”
“You know you could walk that, don't you, mate?” “I know, but right now I don't care to.”
Renquist occupied himself through the short ride, idly inspecting the man's mind and finding nothing remarkable. The lower levels of the driver's concentration handled the vehicle and the surrounding traffic. The upper speculation was totally centered on later that evening, when he intended to talk his recently acquired lover, a twenty-two-year-old beautician, whose long legs and short skirts belied depressingly conventional sexual parameters, into some elaborate and slightly unorthodox carnal theatrics. The cabbie was at a loss to know what manner of response his suggestion would provoke. He hoped for eager acquiescence but feared angry outrage, her being so young and comparatively inexperienced. His dilemma held Renquist's attention for only a moment or two. The practices in question were hardly extreme, even by human standards, and hardly as uncommon as the driver appeared to believe. When Renquist paid him off in front of the Savoy, he tipped him overgenerously. This had always been his policy when he invaded the minds of servants without their knowledge.
At the Savoy's imposing reception desk, his business was transacted with professional fluidity. He registered under the name Victor John Renquist, using a Canadian passport in that name—one of the five that he carried with him hidden in his luggage. The letter of credit from the private bank in Brunei and the formal instruction as to where to send his bills caused the clerk a moment of pause. He had clearly never seen anything like it before, and he quickly disappeared to check with more senior management. His superior must obviously have set him straight, since the clerk hastily returned to treat Renquist with an even greater degree of respect than previously. Only his final words after all formalities were complete took Renquist by surprise.
“Mr. Renquist, we have a letter for you.”
“You do?”
“I believe it was delivered by a messenger earlier this evening.”
The clerk handed Renquist a small beige envelope with just the two words Victor Renquist written on it in carefully formed calligraphy. Renquist turned the note slowly over in his hands and then slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket unopened. “Thank you.”
“Our pleasure, sir.”
He walked thoughtfully away from the desk. Without having to open the envelope, he knew there would be a very different but equally meticulous calligraphy inside it; the flame-form script of the nosferatu Old Speech. Other letters in the same writing were upstairs among his papers, and their contents had brought him to England in the first place. He wasn't, however, about to open this fresh missive right away. He knew it represented a subtle form of tactical game-playing, and his response would be to ignore it until at least the following evening. He also had more pressing needs. His instinct was to hunt and feed after the confinement of his journey. He surveyed the lobby of the Savoy, and even there, he could see at least eight potential prey. He knew, however, that as a stranger in town, he must be circumspect. He would hunt, and he would feed—but not to the death.
* * *
Marieko Matsunaga watched with an absolute tranquillity as Columbine Dashwood reached the lupine pacing stage of impatience. Marieko's thin, almost boyish body was swathed in her favorite grey silk kimono decorated with the blue-crossed axe symbol of the Yarabachi, her limbs were folded into the physically complex and taxing sinshu, and she held the ceremonial lacquered mask on its slim ebony wand in front of her face. She knew that her detachment and perfect stillness would only serve to increase Columbine's self-generated frustration. It was a part of their long-played and perhaps infinitely continuing game. The acquisition of her impenetrable and armorlike geisha formality had not been without a terrible cost of time and pain, both as human and nosferatu, and she neither wanted to give it up nor, indeed, would she have been able to do so. She could not detach it from her character any more than she could rid herself of the elaborate tattoo of wild-eyed sea demons and Hokusai waves that ran all the way from her right wrist, up the full length of her arm, over her shoulder, and down on her tiny right breast, where it terminated in a tattooed carp with its mouth wide, as though in the act of taking a bite at the nipple. Both were permanent and irremovable, both inseparable and integrated parts of her personality.
Marieko never ceased to be amazed at how Columbine, after surviving more than two hundred years, could remain so overwhelmingly juvenile in her mercurial enthusiasms and inability to wait. Even on the most basic and bestial level, she was supposed to be a huntress and predator, but she never seemed to have acquired the capacity to bide her time, content in the knowledge that everything would ultimately come to her. Columbine had never mastered the technique of the silent cat interminably watching the mousehole. Marieko refused to allow herself to display such raw and unfiltered emotion. Such was a transgression to die for, and many of those with her training and background had done exactly that. Marieko also wouldn't permit herself to fall into the trap of immediately offering advice or instruction to her companion. Marieko knew much of Columbine's seeming capriciousness was far from spontaneous, a designed and deliberate girlish camouflage to disguise devious games fed by fully developed ambitions. Columbine might appear perversely immature, but beneath the facade, she was hard and determined, and more than capable at her own kind of control.
“He should have called by now.”
Marieko didn't reply or even move, giving no indication she'd heard. Columbine hissed at her, a taunt of gratuitous fury. “Do you have to be so damned Oriental?”
The final remark all but tempted Marieko to react and respond in kind. Columbine was crossing a lot of lines. By one set of standards, merely entering the room qualified as an unwarranted interruption, but despite the escalating provocation, Marieko remained as still, silent, and expressionless as a work of art. The medium-size room on the second floor of Ravenkeep Priory had for years been looked on as Marieko's exclusive domain. The austere and almost antiseptic space of polished wood had been remodeled to a mathematic harmony with screens, a lowered ceiling, and false, backlit walls. The furnishings were minimal; a lacquered table supported carefully arranged decorative jars and bottles on its polished surface. The large rectangular sandbox waited so that she might slowly and elaborately rake its contents when in the mood for abstract creativity. A longer and narrower rectangle contained about seventy gallons of clear, pure water. Concealed speakers built into the sides of the tank caused ripple effects on the surface of the water. Right at that moment, they were playing a repeated, eighteen-note, sub-bass melodic figure, so low that it approached the limits of even nosferatu hearing, but in its time, the water in the container had vibrated to everything from Gustav Mahler to The Who. She had attempted to keep fish of various kinds in the tank, but all had succumbed to the damage of the vibrations and died. Now the only creature that lived there was a large, elderly, emerald-green frog who seemed able to survive any audio wave pattern and remain perfectly happy, provided it was fed a pellet of food every day. The koto she now very rarely played rested carefully positioned on its stand. Beyond these things, the only other artifact was the rush mat on which she had currently formed herself into the sinshu.
Under more normal circumstances, it would have been unthinkable for Columbine to enter the room while Marieko practiced her intricate disciplines. But, as Marieko well knew, these were not normal times. Victor Renquist was on his way to them, lured by Columbine's letters and a very partial account of Marieko's own discovery. The dice had been cast. Their plan was in motion. If it succeeded, they would be mistresses of an immense power. If it failed, it could well cost them their very existence, and Renquist was a crucial fulcrum for success. That his arrival in London should cause such overwhelming tension was only natural, and each member of the troika dealt with it in her own way. Marieko attempted to lose herself in the internal labyrinth of sinshu, while Columbine threw fits and trampled their personal protocols.
“Can't you put down that mask and speak?”
Marieko didn't immediately respond. Columbine was obviously having difficulty handling the situation without someone to talk to or, more accurately, someone to talk at, but she couldn't always have everything she wanted the moment she wanted it. Unfortunately, Columbine never saw it that way.
“Talk to me, damn it!”
Marieko finally took pity. She slowly lowered the mask and, with great care, disengaged herself from the sinshu. She stretched slowly but remained seated, her eyes still closed, letting her breathing return to its normal rate before she looked up at Columbine. Finally she stretched and flexed her fingers with their extended and perfectly varnished nails. “Hasn't everything possible been said already?”
“He's in London. I can feel it.”
Marieko now rose to her feet, but again slowly, and with great care. Even for one of her long experience, the sinshu was an extreme physical trial. Legend insisted it went all the way back to the ancient days, when the shape-shifters still walked the night. She would have sat longer, but she didn't like Columbine standing over her. Relative positions of dominance in a troika of females needed to be matters of much sensitivity; careless physical psychology could easily abrade nerves. Again Columbine was exceeding the boundaries. When the two of them were on eye level, Marieko spoke briskly and not without irritation. “London is over a hundred miles away. You can't possibly sense him.”
“It was the arrangement. His aeroplane landed hours ago.”
“So?”
“So why hasn't he contacted us?”
“You know exactly why he hasn't contacted us.”
Columbine grimaced. “Because he's Victor Renquist, the all-bloody-powerful, and he has decided to make me wait. As he has always made me wait.”
“You can't still be venting resentment at a petty slight from two centuries ago.”
“It wasn't a petty slight.”
“Of course it was. He was already the notorious Renquist, and you were a freshly changed airhead. What did you think he'd do, bond with you as a hunting companion the first time he met you?”
“He led me to believe—”
“Oh, please.”
Marieko decided Columbine was being far too self-indulgent, especially since the instigation and a good part of the authorship of the plan was hers. Although, with her superior and painstaking calligraphy, Marieko had been the one actually to write the letters dispatched by special courier to California; Columbine had, with equal attention to nuance and subtlety, devised the wording. The bait on the hook, so to speak. Marieko was well aware that Columbine, at heart, resented Renquist simply because he was Renquist. He was in all ways impeccable, never putting a foot wrong, but with a modesty second only to his secrecy. And yet, despite his efforts at concealment, his reputation grew and grew. Over the last few decades—and especially since he had become a Master of Colony—he apparently had done his best to lead a quiet and anonymous existence, but his more colorful and altruistic deeds, like removing the incriminating books from the DuMont Library or neutralizing Marcus De Reske and the Apogee in Los Angeles, had not only made him visible to his peers, but had also elevated his name to near legend. He was possibly the most powerful and respected nosferatu on the planet, unless, of course, there lurked others so much more powerful they could cloak their very existence. He was also held to be among the most knowledgeable and authoritative historians of their kind. Those were the reasons they needed him so badly in order to achieve their goal, but for Columbine to need anything from the male she saw as the purple betrayer of her first wild days of nosferatu romance angered her deeply. It wasn't rational, but it was Columbine.
“Where's Destry?”
“Destry will tell you the same thing.”
“I just want to know where she is.”
“Riding again.”
Destry Maitland was the third of the troika, the final interlocking piece that enabled the three females to exist in the unusual, but not unique, hunting and survival bond.
“What's with her and that new bloody horse?”
“You know what's with her and the new horse. It's from the rarest of bloodlines. A familiarity with our kind is bred into its genes. That horse is her new pride and joy.”
Columbine sniffed and scowled. “I've heard all about the thing's damned bloodlines. She's talked about nothing else since the beast was brought here.”
“As I said, it's her new distraction.”
Columbine pouted. “But does she have to ride it all the time?”
“She's bonding with the steed.”
“Steed. Did you say steed, darling? Isn't that a trifle archaic?”
“Have you seen it? Have you examined its aura? It's definitely a steed.”
“I don't loiter in stables.”
“But you do loiter here disturbing me.”
“Is that an indirect way of saying you want me to leave?”
“It's almost dawn, Columbine. My intention is to sleep.”
“How can you sleep?”
“You should sleep yourself. Renquist will not make contact until nightfall.”
“You don't think so?”
“He has to make it clear by his silence that he's not rushing to your summons. He will come in his own good time and not before.”
“Damn his insolence.”
“Sleep, Columbine. Conserve your strength.”
Columbine pursed her lips and turned in the direction of the door, but not before emitting a final soft feline hiss. “We'll see about his own good time.”
* * *
“I think I should go.”
“It would probably be a good idea, in case your husband tries to call you.”
“He won't call.”
Renquist turned, faced the women who lay tousled on the ruined hotel bed, and nodded. “It will be dawn soon, and I need to sleep, I have a meeting later.”
“I never fucked anybody in the Savoy before.”
Renquist raised an eyebrow. The remark seemed hard to believe. Her body was as pornographically perfect as the best plastic surgery could make it, and tanned to an even bronze without any white areas created by swim-suits or underwear. She clearly spent much time in the sun, at the beach or poolside, in nude idleness. “Not even your husband?”
“He doesn't count.”
Renquist slowly smiled. “Ah.”
The woman scowled. “Don't ah me. I look on it as a form of virginity.”
“But you didn't fuck me.”
“I didn't?”
“Not in the strictest sense.”
The woman blinked. She didn't have a clue what had happened to her. She was the Swedish trophy wife of a millionaire Venezuelan commodities speculator who had parked her at the Savoy while he went to Paris for three days. He name was Frieda, and she suspected the Venezuelan had a Parisian mistress. She had allowed herself to be picked up over cocktails by Renquist as a form of payback for the supposed marital infidelity, or at least that was what she thought. In reality, from the start of Renquist's first approach and overture, she'd had no choice in the matter whatsoever, but he wasn't about to let her know that. She frowned with the effort of focus through confusion. “It seemed to me like a very fine approximation.”
“That is certainly true.”
She crawled across the swirl of rumpled untucked sheets—paused for a long moment and then placed her bare feet on the floor and attempted to stand. “I'm not sure I can.”
“Can what?”
“Stand.” She stood swaying uncertainly. “Is it really dawn?”
“Not quite, but close.”
“Let me look.”
She stumbled in the direction of the nearest window. Renquist moved with nosferatu speed. “Don't—”
“Don't what?”
Instead of saying anything, Renquist steered her away from the curtains. He didn't want her to see that the drapes concealed foil and tape that blacked out the windows. “You've only got to make it down to the third floor.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
Of course he was trying to get rid of her, and for that she should be profoundly and mortally grateful. It was only his circumspection with regard to hunting in an unaccustomed environment that had saved her life.
“Discretion is the better part of passion.”
The blonde Swede had at least started looking round for her clothes. She stopped and stared at him blearily. “I thought that was valor?”
“The same applies.”
“So, passion is spent, and I am dismissed? Is that it?”
Renquist's expression was friendly but hard. He played the unashamed philanderer she imagined he was, the character she'd wanted when she'd first flirted with him down in the bar. “We both knew it was to be that way from the start, didn't we?”
“It's nice to pretend for a while.”
“I don't think we have the time for pretense.”
If Frieda did but know it, the entire night had been a pretense. The supposed passion she believed had left her satiated to the point of walking unsteadily had been largely chimeric—most of it completely in her own mind, with Renquist needing only to read her most covert fantasies to make them seemingly happen. The objective truth was he had only stared coldly as she lay on the wide bed of the room in the luxury hotel. She'd gasped and contorted, in the grip of mindbending and salacious illusion, while he watched with little more than an academic amusement at what he could achieve without laying so much as a hand on her. The mildest caress of her mind and memory raised sighs and shudders to full muscle spasms of repeated, wordlessly keening orgasm. Her hips twisted as she moaned and crooned in her native tongue and finally in no language at all. Her makeup ran as sweat beaded her face, and a fall of lust-tossed Nordic-blond hair half hid an expression of feral and greedy desire. When he decided the moment was appropriate, when she was totally beyond awareness of her surroundings, he sprang the small steel spike he always carried with him.
The coupling of the physical act of piercing her flesh with the roller coaster of sexual hallucination on which he had set her all but threatened both her life and sanity. As her lips shaped wordless obscene and ecstatic syllables, as her head thrashed from side to side, threatening to dislocate the vertebrae of her neck, he found he had to forcibly hold her down in order to feed, and he wondered if he had perhaps overdone the intensity of suggestion. Then he felt her energy gradually dwindle, and he knew that she was drifting toward death. He quickly removed his mouth from her throat, sealing the wound with a flick of his tongue, and moved back from her, out of her mind, allowing her to wake, shaking and completely disoriented but believing that she had just been through one of the most memorable physical encounters of her life.
Renquist reflected, as Frieda shakily dressed, how she would never be consciously aware of what had happened to her in this stranger's hotel suite, or in what grotesque and outlandish way she had been used. When she left the room and returned to her bright and social consumer world, she would have no inkling she had ever been the partial victim of a nosferatu, a creature she had always believed, in her material rationality, was a thing of myth, legend, and low-budget movie. Only the dreams to come might hint at what had passed between her and Renquist; the dreams would almost certainly haunt her sleep from then on, maybe to the end of her short human life.
She slipped on her shoes, fluffed her bed-tousled hair, and made a more determined move toward her exit. Renquist assumed she was going to the door, but instead she turned and went into the bathroom. He might have followed her, except the bathroom had mirrors that would necessitate specially created illusions of his reflected image. He heard the sound of running water and then rummaging in a purse. He assumed Frieda was in cosmetic repair. When she spoke, it was in disjointed phrases, as though she was distracted by the effort of applying lipstick or mascara. Her tone now had the acidic edge of someone beginning to view herself as a discarded sex object. “Didn't someone say the real reason men pay prostitutes is not to fuck them, but so they'll go away afterwards?” Frieda emerged from the bathroom with her trophy status fully restored. “I'd kiss you good-bye, but I've just done my makeup.”
Renquist nodded. “I understand.”
“I'll let myself out.”
“Yes.”
The door of the suite closed behind her, and she was gone. Renquist sighed and sat down on the bed, profoundly glad he wasn't human, and hadn't been for close to a thousand years. As a species, humans were so childishly complicated, with their lack of emotional logic and their erratic mood swings, especially where the ecstatic, erotic, and economic were concerned. Even though he'd fed, he hardly felt energized. The partial feeding had taken almost as much effort as it had generated, and he was more than ready to sleep away the dangerous daylight hours. At that precise instant, as though to confirm his original reserve that this solitary and impulsive journey to England had perhaps not been such a good idea, the telephone rang.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Renquist?”
“Yes.”
The Savoy operator's voice was unmistakable. Renquist had insisted his incoming calls be screened. “A Ms. Dashwood wishes to be put through.”
Renquist smiled. Ahhh.
“Would you please give the lady my apologies? I can't speak to her right now, but take her number and tell her I will contact her. And ask for all the appropriate codes one needs to dial. The English telephone system has changed greatly since I was last here.”
“I'll convey your message, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Columbine Dashwood—the dear girl was as impulsive as she had ever been. He would make her wait a little longer. Dawn was close, and he wanted nothing better than to retire. Columbine would wait until after sunset. Perhaps well after sunset. She could look on it as the penalty for making importunate telephone calls.
Renquist went to one of his trunks, extracted the large fur rug, and spread it over the hotel bed with a bulking flourish. He took the fur on all his travels; his one concession to a sense of continuity in the places that he slept. He drank another long draft of water and arranged himself to dream through the deadly sunlit day.
* * *
Columbine Dashwood surfaced from the dreamstate, but only by a major effort of will. Despite her protestations to Marieko and later to Destry, she had, in fact, slept. Indeed, she had slept deeply, but as she surfaced in the waking world, she knew sunset was still hours away. It wasn't her mixed emotions at being reunited after all this time with Victor Renquist forcing her to wake so frustratingly early, as her feline-uncharitable companions might have suggested. The dream had returned, vivid, intense, at greater length, and as disturbing as ever. For a while, after communication had been established with Renquist, the incessant nightmares had abated, but now the visions had returned with a vengeance. She sat up slowly on the circular bed of satin and velvet draperies, wafting gauze, and scattered Arabian cushions that was the central focus of the exotically cluttered room, but amid all the romantic and alien finery, her mood was as bleak as the dream. “Fuck. I swear I can't tolerate much more of this.”
Anger forced bleakness aside. Columbine wanted to scream out loud but knew that to do so would wake the entire house. She didn't need the attention. Instead she hugged her fury to herself, clasping her knees to her chest with encircling arms as if to physically contain it.
“Did the dream have to come back today of all days?”
She was unsure which was the primary cause of her vexation. Was it the return of the dream when she'd believed she had it under control or the shame of challenged pride?
“Today of all days!”
How could she confront Victor, with all his superiority and perfect arrogance, when she must look so obviously hollow, hagridden, and drained by visions of some stupid bloody ancient apocalypse? Or maybe what upset her most was its ability to affect her. She maintained her shallow and petulant exterior, all the flouncing silliness and headstrong caprice, as a lace-and-lavender sheath for a rapier-steel will. Even before her Change, she had grown to girlhood amid the dizzyingly multiple social standards that allowed the English aristocracy of the late eighteenth century to embrace both courtly manners and thug brutality. Epicene young fops who held scented handkerchiefs to their noses when among the common herd were also quite prepared to kill or maim in violent duels with rapiers or pistols over the most insignificant drunken trivia. Columbine's class hunted with hounds and flogged their servants but could, at the same time, smoke the finest East India Company opium and write romantic sonnets as cloying as syrup. The young ladies of her generation saw no paradox in private conduct that employed the schooled and skilled depravity of the most costly harlot in Mayfair coupled with an indecency of imagination to rival Donatien de Sade and the simultaneous public social charade of fan-fluttering virginal sensibility in which to blush, flutter, and swoon were all expected tricks of the trade. In comparison to the French, of course, the patrician English had been relatively well behaved. The French aristos had so indulged their unchecked libertinage that the common people had turned on them and dragged them to the guillotine.
The combination of such a human upbringing and the gift of remorseless nosferatu power had endowed Columbine with a mind of diamond hardness. No being would have ever dared to forcibly enter her mind while she was awake. That such a thing should happen while she slept was both unprecedented and disconcerting, and yet something, some entity, appeared freely able to penetrate her rest, to invade her dreamstate at will. The dreams caused her more distress than she cared to admit. In commonday parlance, they were starting to get to her, and she had begun to wonder just how long she could tolerate the constant and chronic interruption of her slumber patterns. She sincerely, if not too logically, hoped the arrival of Renquist might somehow diminish the nightmares' frequency and intensity. This tenuous hope also did nothing to improve her disposition. Columbine loathed Renquist, but, to be unmercifully honest with herself, she also desired him, if only to ultimately humble him and bring him to his knees. To be forced to manipulate him as a means to an end was irksome, but to secretly hope he might also prove the savior of her sanity was nothing short of humiliating.
She unclasped her knees and threw herself indignantly back amid the cushions, arms exasperatedly outflung, and stared up at the dark-mirror ceiling. She was not, of course, able to see her own reflection. The mirror had been installed so she could draw back the silk cover, and watch the humans as they contorted under her hands, her mind, and finally, her mouth and fangs. In the early stages of her more prolonged games, they might wonder and ask why their unbelievable paramour was invisible in the marbled glass, but when they did, she would either create an illusion, or if she was close to the point of revealing her true nature, she would merely laugh. “It's a magic mirror, my love. A special spell for your personal narcissism.”
Usually, by that point, the pretty boys were so ensnared they'd believe and agree to anything. She wished she hadn't so flamboyantly renounced keeping a young man in attendance when they had agreed to the mission and the appeal to Renquist. At the time, she had decided a grail quest for unknown power required some nosferatu vow, a semblance of bizarre chastity, a resolve to forgo distractions by restricting her hunting to the fast and the practical. In this wide-awake afternoon, however, she found herself yearning for a smooth and vapid boy. If she couldn't sleep, she wanted to feed, but that was impossible. With no gilded youth in residence, she had to go outside to hunt, and outside, the English countryside was basking in a mellow early autumn sun. The leaves on the trees had yet to turn, but summer had definitely expired. Of course, more than two hundred years had passed since Columbine had seen the autumn sun, but she could sense enough to know how it was. Birds were singing, the grass was long with a scattering of poppies, the trees in the overgrown orchard were heavy with fruit, and the daytime servants, the ones she never saw, were at work in the house and in the Ravenkeep garden.
Ravenkeep Priory was an eclectic disturbance of architectural styles from a dozen different eras, attempts at alteration, and from the many different functions the structure had served through the centuries. The only attempt at any standardization was the late Victorian faux-Gothic arches, spires, and gargoyles added by Enoch Jarman, the Midlands munitions baron who had made the place a rural retreat from his dark and decidedly Satanic mills and foundries. The man had made gold-standard millions by supplying components for small arms and light artillery to the Empire-on-Which-the-Sun-Never-Set, but the effort had left him with an atrophied facility for the aesthetic. Large on money but small on taste, Enoch Jarman's efforts had only added to the confusion. Set in the lee of a low escarpment amid softly rolling woods and fields, some form of habitation or fortress had existed on the same site since prehistory, but the foundations for the presently enduring structure had been laid by Roger le Corbeau in the early twelfth century, when the Norman invaders were consolidating their hold on the Saxon underclass, and guerrilla bands like those of Robin of Huntington were maintaining a stubborn resistance in the deep forests.
The property had passed to the church, and simple Ravenkeep had become Ravenkeep Priory when the Baron Roger's childless, garishly degenerate, and pox-ridden great-grandson, Jerome le Corbeau, had, in a deathbed panic, bequeathed his estates to the church in the hope of escaping hellfire for a life of creatively abominable deviance. The Priory had remained in the hands of the clergy until the Priors were violently evicted by Henry VIII as part of his harshly hilarious Reformation and the inadvertently intelligent severance with Rome. Henry had awarded the estate, and the title that went with it, to a nondescript earl with few talents save butter-smooth flattery. Even that skill was depleted from the gene pool in a couple of more generations, and by the time of the Industrial Revolution, accumulated debts made sale to a nouveau upstart inevitable. The first plutocrat had been a Liverpool shipping baron in emotional need of a stately home, but when the Manchester Ship Canal bankrupted him, Ravenkeep passed briefly to a textile czar and finally to Jarman, the arms mogul.
Columbine would have been happy to boast how the Priory had been in her family for mortal generations, but in reality, the estate was a comparatively recent acquisition. It had fallen into her hands in the early 1920s, after she had come back from the human horror of the World War I trenches, where she had been known to British, French, and Germans alike as the Black Angel, Pausing only for an excursion to Moscow and a sanguine flirtation with early bolshevism, she had decided to return to England. Disappointed that man and nosferatu had not seemingly been created equal and that the Workers of the World were unlikely to thank her for her unorthodox assistance in freeing them from their chains, she switched sides and became an undead capitalist, resolving to surround herself with as much material security as she could. In addition to her political turnabout, she had also decided that a nosferatu who remained a rootless nomad for too long ran cumulative risks.
Columbine had contracted a mortal marriage to the arms mogul's grandson, the unfortunate Peregrin Jar-man, who had been shell-shocked to the point of dementia on the Somme. By a certain synchronous irony, her brief husband had lost his reason on the same section of the Western Front where she had practiced her depredations. After leading him through a highly sedated wedding, she had maintained him in a state of blissful illusion while she slowly killed him. His death surprised no one, since he wasn't expected to survive his madness for very long. What did surprise the friends of the deceased was the rapidity with which the widow severed all ties, dropped the name of Jarman, returned to her maiden Dashwood, and surrounded herself with a set of the most unacceptable friends including the Aleister Crowley crowd, Tallulah Bankhead, Ezra Pound, Ayn Rand, and the ever-unpredictable Pauline Réage. Oswald Mosley had attempted to crash one of her parties, but she had turned the Blackshirt leader away. She had no time for human fascists and their petty bourgeois bullying. To the outside observer, Columbine appeared to be concealing herself behind a social smoke screen of scandal and depravity. And indeed she was.
The outbreak of World War II had changed everything at the Priory. The parties were killed off by blitz, shortage, and rationing, and the gilded boys went off to die, not in her arms, but in the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the RAF, and in tanks in the Libyan Desert. Although she knew it was irrational, she still harbored a certain vestigial patriotism for Old England, and she had arranged a private meeting with Churchill, at which she had offered the prime minister use of Ravenkeep by any research or planning group from a suitably outré sector of the war effort. Winston, unshockable, already familiar with the dossier on Nazi occult warfare, and willing to try anything, agreed with minimal persuasion. By way of a metaphysical bonus, Columbine had offered Churchill immortality, but he'd declined, pouring himself yet another serial brandy and rumbling that one life would probably prove more than enough. Very swiftly, she found herself playing hostess to a small and exceptionally strange task force commanded by Colonel the Duke de Richleau, who launched remorseless metaphysical attacks on the Nazis in general and Heinrich Himmler and Inner Order of the Black SS in particular. De Richleau and his people were tacitly aware of what Columbine really was, although, in a very English way; no one ever actually mentioned her being nosferatu. Her vampirism didn't bother them in the slightest, though. They and their endeavors were so deeply and ambiguously twisted, she hardly qualified as anything remarkable. In addition, de Richleau's team was special, and thus safe from her potential depredations. Had she victimized any of them, Churchill's personal goon squad, homicidal Old Etonians with old school ties and dead eyes, would have arrived immediately in large, unmarked cars and efficiently terminated her immortality with stake and mallet.
The cessation of hostilities found Columbine alone at the Priory. The ultra-secrecy of the de Richleau operation had endowed the house with a formidable unapproachability that lingered long after he and his people departed. This legacy suited her extremely well; she was able to hunt with a high level of impunity. Less than a year after the end of the War in the Pacific, Marieko had arrived, a nosferatu fugitive seeking a sister's right to sanctuary with one of her own. Marieko had been fleeing a deep and paranormal unpleasantness in the Far East. Columbine had never fully intruded into Marieko's secret past, but she had gleaned the general and somewhat intriguing impression of how the two American atomic detonations, in addition to vaporizing the city centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had also spawned destructive manifestations in spheres far beyond the most sophisticated human awareness. Extradimensional nastiness had leaked, and somehow Marieko had been caught in the backwash and was forced to flee for her very existence by DC-3 and China Sea freighter, Greek tramp steamer and Orient-Express, and finally Channel ferry to the comparative and eventual safety of rural England.
For the remainder of the forties and most of the fifties, Columbine and Marieko had lived as hunting companions—as far as the local humans were concerned, an upper-class eccentric lesbian and her exotic Oriental companion, all very Sax Rohmer, and best kept at a safe distance. Destry had appeared in the early sixties, an undead Amazon adventuress who had grown tired of third-world voodoo colonels, CIA-backed warlords, the fall of empires, and all those postcolonial, machine-gun dictatorships with their one international hotel filled with spooks, KGB, arms profiteers, and adrenaline-addicted mercenaries. Columbine, Marieko, and Destry had decided to attempt a properly constituted nosferatu troika. At first, Columbine had been doubtful about the arrangement of three bonded females. Although she had known threesomes who had made the orchestration work, in too many cases it had been little more than a template for bickering and backbiting, with two picking on the remaining one in a cruelly rotating pecking order. They were lucky in that the early days of bonding had been fully occupied by their inadvertently becoming demigoddesses to a desperate Kali-worshiping human blood cult. For a while the role-playing had been both a fascinating anthropological study and a constant source of nourishment and amusement, but the existence of the cult had unavoidably come, story by story and rumor by rumor, to the notice of the local chief constable, and they had been forced to kill or disperse their devotees and then maintain a much lower profile, particularly with regard to their hunting.
Columbine, however, was not at that moment thinking of either her own past or the past of the house that was her longtime lair. The dreams dominated her thoughts. Over and over she had taken the logically deductive approach. She was certain the dreams that plagued her came from an external source. The content of the dreams seemed to indicate that whatever was routing, projecting, or otherwise broadcasting them had a fixation about a particular period in the human past. In the beginning, they were innocent enough, even a novelty; brief flashes of archaically dressed humans clustered in dark and candlelit ancient buildings or moving in green-day rural countryside. A harper by the fireplace, children on the greensward, lovers in cornfields or the fallen forest leaves beneath translucent sun-dappled trees. Slightly mawkish but definitely coherent glimpses of an unmistakably English locality, somewhere quite near to Ravenkeep, sometime in the fifth or sixth century of the Christian calendar. History had never been of immense interest to Columbine, but she guessed, by the seemingly Romanized clothing and artifacts, these humans existed sometime after the Romans had pulled their legions out of the British Isles, withdrawing to defend Rome itself against the encroaching barbarians.
At first the only puzzlement was why she was being granted such pointless camera-obscura vignettes of fifteen hundred years ago. At other times she had experienced dreams that could only be part of a common nosferatu memory, and she was a definite believer in the undead sharing some manner of universal mind, although others of her kind might argue with her. If that was the case, though, how could she account for the fact that so many of the short vignettes took place in broad daylight, a sight no nosferatu, no matter how ancient, could ever have seen? The only sunshine dreams Columbine Dashwood ever experienced had their roots in her own short life as a human, and as the years passed, they had become increasingly few and far between. A second problem was, when the characters in these dreams spoke to each other, which they did quite regularly, she was completely unable to understand them or even so much as recognize the language they were speaking.
Columbine would never claim any facility for language. With their infinitely extended life span, some nosferatu became almost obsessive about becoming as widely fluent as possible. Marieko was one of these, although primarily knowledgeable in the inexplicable babbling of Southeast Asia. Destry also had a smattering of various Asian languages, as well as a basic Central African pidgin, and, of course, there was always the amost obscene command of tongues on which Victor-bloody-Renquist so prided himself. She almost believed Renquist, dropped into the middle of the Amazon jungle, would be conversant in the unique dialect of the very first tribe he encountered. Columbine took the exact reverse approach, the traditional Anglo-Saxon view that only some massive and primal error had rendered the entire world unable to speak English. Despite her resistance to foreign verbs, nouns, and adjectives, she had, over her two hundred years, motivated by both self-protection and self-interest, picked up a smattering of schoolgirl Latin, a reasonable command of German, some bad French, and worse Italian. She could, however, converse articulately in basic Russian. It had been a matter of survival in 1919 and 1920, before she returned to England to wed the twitching and dysfunctional Peregrin.
Back in the early days when the dreams had been pastoral, insignificant, and at times even pleasant, their inhabitants had embraced, as far as she could tell, two forms of speech. One, exclusive to the ruling and the beautiful, seemed to Columbine an odd mixture of Spanish and Latin, while the rank and file yammered in a dialect akin to Welsh. The inexplicable and endless song of the harper in the one dream certainly sounded Druidic to her untrained ear, but she was so shamelessly ill educated that she found it hard to be precise, even with herself. Educated or not, though, she had been in no doubt that the unintelligibility of the languages was another indication that the source of the dreams was both external and other than nosferatu. Previously, when a dream she'd dreamed could only have emanated from another of her kind, she had always known what everyone was talking about. In these dreams participants either conversed in the Old Speech, which all of the newly undead seemed to receive with all the other alterations to their DNA, or an instant and seamless translation, consciously or unconsciously provided by the mind from which the vision originated.
Columbine had many times experienced dreams that could only have been an inadvertent print-through from Marieko in which Columbine found herself observing agonizing rituals in the black-vault dungeons of pitiless and inhuman shoguns, or hunting with the moon in the flawless pine forests at the foot of the symmetry of Mount Fuji. Such unavoidable intrusions on each other's dreamstates were quite natural when two females lived in such intimate proximity. In the same way, after Destry had joined them, she found herself riding on the side of a captured Sherman tank through cheering crowds in the subtropical midnight as Che Guevara liberated Santa Clara, or scrambling for the last DC-3 out of Léopoldville as the city fell to fire and small-arms slaughter. In every case, Columbine had been able to understand every word.
The next logical explanation was that the dreams were coming from a location rather man any individual. Columbine knew such things were possible. In her waking life, she had more than once observed the palest of psychic fires that remained, imprinted perhaps by either agony or ecstasy, or by the sheer weight of history, long after the individuals who had made that history had perished or fled. If such was the case, Ravenkeep itself had to be the prime suspect. The Devil only knew it had more than enough history. A settlement had almost certainly existed on the site in the fifth century, but that didn't explain why the dreams should so suddenly appear out of nowhere. She could think of no pivotal event or radical alteration to the structure that might have triggered a ceaseless stream of such powerful emanations.
When the dreams became increasingly grim and violent, the puzzle was less a game and more a problem that required a solution. She began to find herself in the middle of mercilessly bloody battles in which warriors afoot, armed with axes and spears and carrying bossed wooden shields, were ridden down by well-organized Roman-style cavalry. Murderous weapons designed to cut and pierce carved hideous wounds in human flesh, slicing bodies and severing limbs. The slaughter was relentless, with neither side willing to give ground in a madness of death-or-glory. The unswerving and formidable infantry made its appearance even more fearsome by the universal adoption of ridged helmets with metal faceplates, masked and anonymous, mouthless and with blank slits for eyes. Some were of plain hammered metal, but others were iron dominoes, fashioned into fantasy faces of incongruously blank and idealized beauty, or the ugly contortions of howling demons from the mythology of the Rhine river cliffs and the Germanic forests. Anyone facing these warriors was presented with a terrible illusion that they might be something other than men. Not that the opposing cavalry seemed to entertain many illusions. They performed and dressed in emulated memory of the cruel professionalism of their recently departed imperial masters. Helms were crested with stiff horsehair, and red battle cloaks flowed behind them over chain mail and bronze breastplates, and while the enemy rushed in a haphazard, hacking and slaying mob, they moved on command with the drilled precision of turn and counterturn, tactics planned first to contain and then to massacre from horseback.
These dreamstate conflicts always seemed to take place in torrential rain with poor visibility. Men and steaming horses, and the huge war dogs-free-ranging mastiffs, heads higher than a man's waist, with wide studded collars, slavering jaws, and even mail coats protecting their shoulders and ribs-all progressively bogged down and stumbling in a sea of mud turning crimson with the blood of the fallen. Columbine was forced to wonder if she was actually seeing the same battle over and over again. The conflict always came to the same repetitive conclusion, another possible indication that she was, in fact, constantly viewing the same fight. At first the horsemen, who Columbine assumed were the military of the Romanized Britons, had mastery of the field, and it seemed me fight could only go their way. Then rain and mud would prove their undoing. Horses slipped and foundered in the bloody quagmire, and the tightly ordered formations disintegrated, enabling the foot soldiers—she supposed a section of the seaborne Saxon invaders of the time—to drag isolated riders from their mounts and hack them to pieces.
A further paradox in the dreams was the way in which Columbine was allowed to view them. She was observing everything through the eyes of a single individual who, on one level, was supposedly present on the scene, to the point of ducking and dodging thundering hooves and berserk Saxon battle-axes, but playing no part in the actual combat, wielding no mace, lance, or sword, and, most perplexing of all, manifestly invisible to those present. The strange observer evidently sided with, or had some relationship to, the mounted Britons, since, when the survivors retreated in disorder, she found herself going with them and then later wandering aimlessly through the aftermath of conflict: the overchurned and rust-colored ground strewn with bodies of men and horses contorted in the agony of death or by postmortem rigor. Crows fed on the eyes of the corpses, and scarcely human scavengers foraged for what they could find amid the overturned carts, the discarded swords, broken spears, and shredded banners.
Of course, the escalating horror of the visions didn't disturb Columbine. She was no sensitive and impressionable human. Blood was her life. She was a killer herself. She had seen modern warfare firsthand, and in the context of the huntress. What she resented was her normally entertaining dreamstate becoming so relentlessly bleak. She was being monopolized by the daily repetition, and, worse than that, with this new phase of dreams she was being defeated in dream after dream, and experiencing all the emotional desolation of being repeatedly routed. It proved enervating, a debility that hung over into her waking days, leaving her fractious, dissatisfied, and drained of energy.
“If these damned visions aren't coming from here, where the hell are they coming from?”
 She had begun to look further afield for a possible source. The nearest candidate, even more ancient than Ravenkeep, was the prehistoric burial mound and the broken circle of standing stones about twelve miles away at Morton Downs. Again, the same problem of the Priory came into play there: As far as Columbine knew, nothing had happened at Morton Downs that might cause visions of the fifth century to descend on her with the sunrise. Only by chance she discovered from Marieko that this was not the case.
“They've been excavating there for two or three weeks.”
“Who's been excavating? Why didn't anyone tell me?”
Marieko had raised her already arched eyebrows. “I wasn't aware you were interested.”
“Well, I am. Who is this they that's digging up the mound?”
“Some students from Wessex University.”
“Students? Are they allowed to do that? Isn't it some kind of desecration?”
“I believe they're led by a Dr. Campion. He's apparently very well respected in his field.”
At this point Columbine, who had previously kept quiet about the effects of the latest round of visions, gave up and told everything to Marieko and Destry. The dreams, the puzzlement, the damage to her sleep, and even how, in the last few days, the visions seemed to have slipped into a brand-new phase, showing bizarre rituals of fire, stimulants, and human copulation amid already ancient standing stones. At least a finger seemed to be pointing in the direction of the burial mound. The other two had, of course, known something was troubling Columbine, but in a troika, one didn't ask. Destry and Marieko were also weir aware that Columbine was a virtuoso of deception and concealment, but Columbine didn't fool herself that they very often fell for her hoopla. What she counted on was their never being quite sure of the exact demarcation between truth and fiction, and that was where she kept her secrets. Thus her total candor in asking for their help and advice impressed them enough to take her completely seriously, and Marieko even offered to make a firsthand inspection of the mound.
Columbine had welcomed the offer. “You think I should go with you?”
Marieko thought about this. “No, it would be better if I went alone.”
Marieko had never been one to delay, and the very same night she had left a little after midnight in the Ravenkeep Range Rover. Columbine knew Marieko's trip wasn't only motivated by her mysterious dreams. All through her wanderings, when not obeying the natural demands or coping with all the other shocks to which her nosferatu flesh was heir, Marieko had maintained a strong interest in human archeology. Under cover of the night, she had observed the places where the short-lived scrabbled in the dirt for physical pointers to their roots, origins, and forgotten past, and was both amused and appalled by their misconceptions and their deplorably narrow perspectives when it came to their own history. Time after time, they used the clues they grubbed from the ground to prove humanity was the only sentient species ever to walk the Earth. Their vanity distorted any scant reality of the past they might discover. Not that Marieko was adverse to humanity wandering in an historical fog, unaware of the origins of its civilizations, or how its very species came into being. The more they floundered in a mass of confused hypotheses, contradictory trivia, and legends entrenched as fact, the easier it was for the nosferatu to operate among them without detection.
As Marieko told it later, she had embarked on this first reconnoiter expecting to find the sight deserted, but for absolute safety, she had parked the truck a distance from the roped-off area of the dig and continued on foot across the short springy downland turf. A brisk breeze had sprung up since the sun had set, and all round her, Marieko had felt the busy stirrings and scuttlings of the rural night. Somewhere she could feel an owl patiently waiting on the routines of field mice. A distant flock of black-face sheep stirred in their sleep, troubled by the sense of a predator but were then calmed by an old alpha ewe who reassured them this predator had no interest in them. Before her perfect nosferatu night vision could detect much more than a dark elongated mound at the crest of a low hill, she perceived a faint but pervasive vestigial aura radiating faintly from the first slit-trench breach dug in the mound.
The flickering trace was of something not strictly alive, neither nosferatu, nor human, nor animal, but far more positive than any residue or ancient imprinting. Marieko had covered the final hundred yards to the burial mound with the utmost caution. Alive but not alive? Or could it be a subtle and specialized lure for the curious? In the long and murderous hostilities between the Yarabachi and the Clan of Kenzu, a number of previously unknown and very dangerous entities had been loosed by both sides as uncontrolled weapons. She'd closely encountered two of the things, and those incidents had been enough to convince her there was definitely more in Heaven and Earth than was dreamed of in nosferatu or human philosophy. While some weapons simply ran amok in snarling frontal attack, others brought destruction, even to the highly wary, by stealth and subterfuge.
She reached the mound without any noticeable alteration in the aura or anything striking at her with paranormal tooth or claw. She had by this point begun to wonder if whatever might be the source of the aura was in a form of slumber, metabolic reduction, or hibernation. A certain slow pulse pattern in the aura tended to indicate as much. Convincing herself she wasn't walking into a trap, Marieko gave the excavation a cursory inspection and found Campion and his students had hardly begun to dig and were nowhere near breaking through into any inner chamber in or under the mound. The overwhelming temptation was, of course, to start digging herself. With just her bare hands and nosferatu strength, she could probably be into the inner chamber of the mound before dawn, but she knew to do so would alert the humans that something was amiss. She had also spent a great deal of time cultivating her flawless, four-inch, ivory fingernails, and one or more of them would undoubtedly be chipped or broken by such an endeavor.
Instead she took the rational if less dramatic course of returning to the Range Rover and driving back to the Priory as fast she could. Columbine and Destry were already waiting in the driveway when she arrived. As she parked the SUV and climbed from the driver's seat, even the unreadable Marieko couldn't keep the excitement out of her aura. Columbine had been as impatiently girlish as ever, all but bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “What did you find? What did you find? Was it something? Was there something there?”
Destry didn't make as much noise. Tall and commanding, with her broad-shouldered, long-legged athlete's body and mane of chestnut hair, Destry was more disciplined and self-contained, but her aura also revealed her curiosity. Marieko carefully closed the door, teasingly making the others contain their eagerness a few moments longer. “I went to Morton Downs.…”
“And?”
“And there is definitely something inside the burial mound.”
“Something?”
“What something?”
Together, the three females walked back to the open front door and the angling serrated rectangle of light that illuminated the steps. Overhead, elongated tresses of pale, wind-driven clouds scudded across a blue-black sky, partially obscuring a yellow and waning moon and adding a perfect backdrop of external drama. As their shoes crunched on the raked gravel, Columbine and Destry interrogated Marieko.
“What do you mean, you don't know? You know everything.” Destry, who was constantly impressed by Marieko's wealth of arcane knowledge, wasn't going to tolerate it failing at this crucial point.
“I know it wasn't human, and it seemed to be in some kind of extended sleep, but its aura was of a kind I've never seen before.”
Destry halted. “Never?”
Marieko also stopped and hesitated. “Never…except…”
“Except what?”
“This is the most intangible of feelings. A theory almost without support.…”
“Yes, yes, we understand.”
“I believe whatever is within the mound is not nosferatu, but it's somehow related. I think it's a distant kin.”
“Not nosferatu?”
“No.”
“Kin?”
Marieko's face was inscrutable, but her aura flickered with equal parts uncertainty and excitement over the potentially important discovery. “I believe that somewhere, in some ancient DNA, mere exists a…link.”
The idea opened such a wealth of possibilities that both Columbine and Destry were at a loss to frame the next question, which gave Marieko a chance to pause significantly before delivering her final observation and repeat her caveat: “Again, this is without any foundation except instinct—”
“We've already accepted the disclaimer.” Columbine hated how with Marieko you inevitably had to wait.
“I suspect whatever is in the mound is immensely powerful.”
“Powerful?”
Marieko repeated herself with added emphasis. “Immensely powerful. It was virtually inanimate, and the aura was little more than a flicker, yet it had a density.”
Columbine wanted to ask more about the potential power of this thing, but Destry retreated to the practical. “This Dr. Campion and his humans, have they penetrated very far into the mound?”
Marieko shook her head. “No, not yet.”
“Perhaps we should do some excavating of our own?”
Again Marieko shook her head. “I was tempted, but the humans would assume it was vandalism. The police could become involved, and I don't think we want that.”
A thought occurred to Columbine. “Could Campion and his delving students be in the process of waking whatever it is?”
Marieko had already considered this. “I doubt they know it, but I think it's a possibility. In fact, for all we know, the humans may have been unknowingly summoned to do exactly that.”
* * *
Even in the comfort, not to say luxury, of the Savoy Hotel, Victor Renquist found he was unable to sleep. He lay flat on his back, in the traditional attitude of repose, legs together and arms across his chest, crossed at the wrists. He slowed his breathing until the black silk of his robe hardly whispered against the fur rug covering the hotel bed, but the best he could achieve was periods of semi-numb daze. The blackouts on the windows effectively cut the sound of the London traffic to a literal dull roar, but that couldn't possibly be the reason total and inert rest remained so elusive. After all, during his long existence, he had slept through air raids, artillery bombardments, and the sack and pillage of cities. He had slumbered in cellars while buildings burned above him and had shared desert caves with a multitude of bats and the keening of the wind across the dunes.
He wondered if this unaccustomed insomnia could somehow be caused by the long flight from California. Human travelers talked of a disorientation they glibly called jet lag, and he had once read a scientific paper on how the time-sense of even rudimentary creatures like bivalves could be confused by fast, long-distance journeys. A batch of oysters from Long Island Sound had been moved by transport plane to Lawrence, Kansas. Once relocated and settled in the laboratory tank that was their new home, they commenced, after a short period of adjustment, to open and close as though the Atlantic Ocean extended all the way to the Midwest and the tides behaved accordingly. Why such a bizarre study should be conducted in the first place had been something of a mystery to Renquist, but he had long since ceased to be surprised at the directions humans might be steered by their insatiable curiosity. Unfortunately, so few nosferatu practiced intercontinental air travel that little data was available to tell him whether he was suffering from some kindred reaction or this jet lag, and he resolved to keep mental notes on his sleeplessness. Sooner or later, the undead would have to come to grips with the jet age.
After about an hour, however, he discovered these spells of drifting were not without their own unique value. He found himself experiencing a new and, as far as he could recall, unique form of perception. For a being of Renquist's age to experience anything curious and original was such a singular novelty that he made no effort to control or thrust it from him. It also helped, of course, that the experience was far from unpleasant. The word cozy sprang to mind, and Renquist allowed himself to glide effortlessly with it. He might not be sleeping, but he was sufficiently relaxed to derive some recuperative benefit. Although the drifting perception was widespread and generalized, and lacked much in the way of precision, it delivered a fairly coherent, hypnovirtual view of the world in which he was now immersed. As during his earlier stroll down the Strand, he was again aware of both the psychic and material density of the Old World as close-packed modernity was layered on millennia of history. Although New York and some of the other cities on the Eastern Seaboard might come close, the United States as a whole seemed positively empty in comparison. Renquist wasn't sure which he actually preferred. Both had their attractions. As the strange demidreaming continued, he found a measure of specificity was possible, and he could exert a certain gentle direction without breaking the condition and returning to full waking. The odd perception also tended toward the two-dimensional. Humanity seemed spread around him like an ethereal and somewhat threadbare billiard table, except it had a distinct curve, perhaps conforming in its insubstantial way to the curve of the earth, or maybe to that of space-time itself.
His first tentative notion was to cast around for traces of other nosferatu, and no sooner had he entertained the idea than he began to notice tiny orange flecks amid the verdance of humans. Some were relatively close. The city of London apparently had its compliment of loners, but no concentration that might tell of a clan or colony. As soon as he could judge distance and direction, he observed a triple trace of tiny stars in the west he knew must be Columbine Dashwood and her two companions, the reason he was in London in the first place. Much farther away, far to the north, he finally spotted the kind of cluster that must represent a substantial community of the undead. Unless much had changed in the British Isles, it could only be the Fenrior of Fenrior who maintained his clan of vassals, henchmen, and bonded companions in the isolated and desolate grandeur of the Scottish Highlands. Renquist knew very little about Fenrior and his people beyond the epics and legends, which were both many and lurid but could not always be trusted. Most accounts seemed to agree that the Clan Fenrior was wild, uncouth, barbarous in the extreme, and conducted themselves as though they had yet to adjust to the sixteenth century, let alone the twenty-first. They reputedly depended on the old and violent blood ties of crag, glen, and tarn to preserve them from widespread human detection and retribution.
Renquist knew that if he was aware of the Fenrior, the Fenrior could well be aware of him, and he wondered how protocol might dictate he act toward them. They were, by all repute, immoderate in the cruelty with which they received strangers in their lands, and yet, by their numbers alone, they qualified as the primary community of nosferatu in Britain. He had been invited by Columbine Dashwood, and etiquette dictated that he must attend her first, but with her requested favor bestowed and his commission discharged, would it be expected of him to pay his formal respects to the Fenrior, or would it be far wiser to respect the privacy of these Scottish nosferatu beyond the Roman wall, not intrude, and leave them well alone?
As Renquist was drowsily contemplating how he should behave, he noticed a fleck of color to which he couldn't put a name, significantly close to the triple pinpoints of Miss Dashwood and her friends. Now what was that? Renquist attempted to see more clearly, but as he did, the perception perversely vanished. The effort to focus had apparently broken the spell. Renquist sighed and ran fingers through the reassuringly familiar fur of the rug.
“No matter how we deceive or congratulate ourselves, the dreaming is never truly ours to command.”
He was now aware, however, something was to hand that Columbine had neglected to mention in her letters.
* * *
On the very day following Marieko's visit to Morton Downs, Columbine's dreams had entered a new and highly disturbing phase—the one that would remain with her all the way through to the long day she waited for Renquist to make contact. One time and, mercifully, one time only, she had all but been dream-blinded by a flash that she knew by unexplained instinct was called the Fire in the West, although the same instinct refused to give up any further information or explanation of the horrendous and all-consuming flame. It certainly made no sense and seemed hardly to fit with what she knew of the sixth century. As she saw it from the point of view of her mysterious observing host, the explosion looked near-nuclear. The host had stood on a grassy hilltop at what seemed to be the moment of impact. Had the fireball first come from the sky? Columbine had entered the dream a fraction too late to be certain. Just in time, in fact, to be rendered sightless by the flash and all but choked by the stench of burned hair and singed clothing as a searing radiant heat swept over the hillside, scorching the grass and causing trees to ignite.
Multiple disasters struck her and her observer like a series of fast hammer blows. First the abominable light, then the heat, and then a shock wave with a sound like nothing she had ever experienced. A scream? A roar? A convulsion of the very earth? An extended thunderclap to herald the Doom of Everything? Finally the wind and a new shriek of universal doom. And yet she knew, again by weird instinct, that she was, in reality, a great distance from the true ground zero of the fiery destruction. In the middle of this off-the-scale violence, way out of both human and nosferatu proportion, she at least had confirmation of Marieko's theory that the thing through whose eyes she watched was massively powerful. He or she could remain standing when living trees were uprooted and swirled into the air and cattle flew like birds. His or her flesh could tolerate heat that scorched grass in an instant. Columbine also realized she was now freely assuming this observer was also the thing asleep in the mound; a long-jump of faith and connection to say the least.
The vision of the Fire in the West may only have shown itself a single time, but what followed was barely an improvement. Instead of peasants and sunshine, the rain and contusion of the battlefield, or the dank and bloody carrion plain that remained in its wake, she found herself in a twilight place of murky desolation where only the closest objects were visible in a choking fine-grain haze, chill but at the same time parched and gritty. Trees had been reduced to naked skeletons, with their bark chewed away, while the hillsides were bare of grass, and hedgerows were naked barbed-wire entanglements of dead brambles. Pale grey ash fell like dusty snow. Birds and animals seemed to be no more, save for hungry and combative rats and wolves. Haggard human survivors, mostly former warriors, with rust on their swords and mail, hollow-skull staring eyes, and weary leather falling away from their shields and helmets, tottered on the final cadaver legs of terminal starvation. Knights whose prized horses had been long since eaten, bowmen for whom no target presented itself, wagoners whose oxen had dropped beneath the yoke, and deserted kings of burned dominions; they all moved aimlessly through an occluded landscape where nothing was to be found except inevitable death. Only her host/observer manifested any real sense of purpose, and he or she seemed only to be seeking some specific if hard to find place of concealment in which to hide or maybe the like everyone else.
“This has to be stopped.”
Unintelligible peasants and endless waterlogged battles were one thing, but Columbine drew the line at visions of an unknown apocalypse. As soon as the sun was below the horizon, she had assembled the others in the formal drawing room. “I'm not exaggerating. It was as though the world was ending.”
Marieko thought about this, a single furrow appearing in her porcelain neo-geisha brow. “But it was still a vision of the past?”
“I think so.”
“Not the present or the future?”
“It looked like the same period as all the other dreams except everything was dead or dying.”
“So you don't think it was some kind of warning?”
“If you're asking me if I've suddenly turned into Edgar Cayce or Saint John the Divine, the answer is no. I don't think I'm having prophetic visions.”
Destry was growing a little impatient. “Really, Columbine, are you telling us you have no idea what this might mean?”
“All I really know is that I didn't like it at all.”
“So what do you want us to do? We decided we should wait.”
Destry was absolutely correct. They had talked almost through the dawn, finally agreeing that their only option was to let Campion proceed with his excavation until more was revealed. After almost twelve hours of nonstop nightmare, Columbine had been more than ready for a radical revision of that idea. “If I have to keep seeing this shit every time I try to sleep, I'm going to lose my mind. I know you two don't have a high regard for it, but it's the only mind I've got, and I need it for thinking and getting me around.”
“I still believe we should wait, and not do anything precipitate.”
“But it's not you having the blasted dreams, is it, Destry? If I were human I could wash down a handful of Seconal with a shot of gin and sleep like a weary dog, but I'm not, and I've never encountered any drug or potion that could knock out one of us.”
It had been Marieko who had given the very first momentum to what would become their plan. “I think we need the help of an expert.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We would appear to have stumbled across something that is not only well beyond the sum total of our own collective knowledge and experience, but can also invade the dreams of one of us at will, leaving us powerless to stop it. I would suggest we need the help and advice of someone who is both highly knowledgeable and unable to resist a mystery.”
“A nosferatu?“
“Of course.”
“She would have to be extremely venerable but, at the same time, still retain a mental flexibility.”
If inscrutability came in degrees, Marieko's expression achieved an unprecedented level of bland knowing-ness. “It wasn't a she I had in mind.”
In an instant, Columbine had seen exactly where Marieko's logic was taking them. “No!”
“I know how you feel about Victor Renquist, my dear Columbine, but—”
“Never!”
“He has all the qualifications.”
“He wouldn't come here.”
Destry began to warm to what Marieko had set in motion. “I think he would. If he were to find out we'd happened across something very old with a nosferatu connection, he'd be here like a shot.”
Marieko, cross-legged on her cushion, sat even straighter. “She's absolutely right.”
Columbine had risen from her accustomed velvet wing chair, walked to a side table, and opened a pink-and-black art deco cigarette box. Smoking cigarettes was a habit she had picked up during her travels with Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), when he had been on his way to become the first infidel to enter the holy city of Mecca. She had convinced herself that a cigarette lent a woman a distinct extra degree of authority. The principle applied to any elevation of rank from trollop to duchess. Since all the mortal fuss about cancer and secondhand smoke, it had become an even more powerful affectation, indicating, as it did, a certain devil-may-care, risk-taking ruthlessness. On a visit to a high-rise domination bordello in Tokyo's Roppongi district in the late 1980s, she had observed that the lace-, rubber-, and leather-clad mistress-sans all chain-smoked to stern and contemptuous effect. Right then, it wasn't authority she needed, and, of course, her nosferatu metabolism derived no pleasure or satisfaction—or harm, for that matter—from the process. It was a device she usually reserved for human company, but, right at that moment, she needed some manual ritual, a practiced distraction to cover her confusion. Of course, Marieko was right, damn her, but the idea of actually seeing Renquist after all this time was singularly disturbing. She flicked the matching table lighter, but it refused to catch, clearly out of fuel.
“Damn that Bolingbroke. Why can't he keep the lighters filled?”
Destry, who had remained standing through the conversation, took a lighter from the pocket of the bush shirt she wore over her usual jodhpurs and tight, high hunting boots. “Come here.”
Columbine had moved to Destry. “He needs thrashing.”
Destry flicked the Zippo she had managed to carry across a dozen war zones. “He enjoys the attention too much.”
Columbine had inclined her head slightly and drawn on the cigarette, at the same time holding back stray ringlets so they wouldn't fall in the flame. “You know what would happen if Renquist came here? He'd try to turn us into the classic foursome. The male master and his three compliant concubines.”
Destry and Marieko didn't seem to respond quite as quickly as Columbine would have expected. “Are you two out of your minds? Are you suggesting you might enjoy such an arrangement?”
Destry, realizing she'd been caught in a fleeting what-if reverie, quickly snapped her lighter shut and put it in her pocket. “Of course not. Would we live like this if we did?”
Marieko smiled with deceptive sweetness. “The presence of a male would, however, be a diversion.”
Columbine had retorted angrily. “Then why don't you go the whole way and move in with Fenrior?”
“Rudeness is hardly appropriate.”
Destry closed ranks with Marieko. “Really, Columbine, after all this time, the nonsense between you and Victor Renquist has to be primarily in your imagination. Even you have to agree you were very young and silly at the time, and he was, and still is, eight hundred years your senior. You've spent the passage of years enlarging and embroidering on the situation. He probably doesn't even remember you.”
Despite herself, Columbine exhaled smoke and pouted. “He remembers me. I'll guarantee you that.”
Marieko pressed their two-to-one advantage. “If you could be objective for a moment, you would realize Renquist is exactly what we need.”
“I don't want him here.” But even as she spoke, Columbine knew her aura was giving her away. A part of her was subversively excited at the prospect of seeing Victor Renquist again.
“Be real, Columbine.”
“You're the one who's complaining about the nightmares.”
Destry glanced at Marieko. “Perhaps she thinks Renquist would be too much for her to handle. Perhaps she's afraid she'll turn into a simpering girl again at the sight of him.”
Columbine knew she was being both teased and manipulated by the other two, but she couldn't stop herself from angrily reacting. “I am not afraid of Victor bloody Renquist.”
Destry pressed home the advantage. “Then act your age, and let's make use of him.”
Columbine wasn't quite ready to give in. “There must be another undead of the same stature.”
“Name one.”
Columbine cast around for a name. “I can't.”
“No, of course you can't. So act your age, and let's make use of him.“
Columbine was effectively outnumbered, but she couldn't surrender without one more turn of the wheel. “Very well, suppose we did manage to get Victor to come here. What then? If there is some potential power in the burial mound, wouldn't we be running the risk of him taking over whatever we might find there?”
“You think the three of us aren't a match for him?”
“No, I don't think that.”
“So?”
“All right, all right, I don't want to see him, but if we can get his attention, I'll go along with it. I'm not so sure he's actually going to be that interested. He's fascinated by nosferatu history, but he's also very circumspect, and protective of his colony.”
Marieko made a Zen gesture indicating the great merit of simplicity. “We send him a letter.”
* * *
By the time the sun had begun to sink over the West London suburbs, Renquist decided he had experienced more than enough of this drifting but not sleeping and resolved, as soon as he had the safety of twilight, to take another walk out in the streets. He needed to move, to stride and to swing his arms, and, after his own fashion, to breathe in his new surroundings. Only after that, when he returned to the Savoy, would he telephone Columbine Dashwood. In the meantime, until the sun was down, he would abandon these attempts at halfway rest and apply himself to a final recap of what he knew so far about the task at hand. He reached for the leather folder in which he'd filed the paperwork relevant to the project, unzipped it, and extracted the letters. The sequence of correspondence and the way it had been couched bore all the hallmarks of Columbine's style and operational approach. She had always fancied herself as the seductive coquette, the incremental tease. Each letter had given away a little at a time, never allowing him to know more until he'd at least made some tentative commitment of interest. He doubted, though, that Columbine was the author of the letters in terms of physically creating them. Unless she had undergone a radical change over the many years since he'd seen her, she was not the kind to labor long and diligently at perfecting the complicated calligraphy of the nosferatu. The flame script, in scarlet ink on the handmade oriental writing paper, had been drawn with a near-flawless dexterity and what appeared to be an ultrafine 00 sable hair paintbrush. The delivery by exclusive courier service had been the icing on an already exquisite cake, and it was enough to convince Renquist the whole presentation was a team effort by the entire troika, and not just some strange, out-of-the-night scheme devised by Columbine acting on her own.
This made him a little more willing to take the information on face value. Columbine Dashwood, up to their acrimonious predawn parting in Brussels, during the grand ball on the eve of Waterloo, had never shown such a capacity for detail. At the time, Renquist had been in the highly covert employ of the Duke of Wellington, and she had been the secretly undead darling of the Anglo-Prussian alliance. She had challenged him to meet her after the battle, but the tide of human events had intervened. He had never kept their rendezvous, and she'd hated him for it ever since with all the ferocity of a scorned female. Over the years, Columbine had made a number of vengeful attempts to lure him into humiliating or dangerous situations, but Renquist's instincts told him the letters were not another of these. It was possible, of course, that she had persuaded the entire troika to assist her in another plot against him, but he thought it unlikely.
The first letter had merely hinted that she and the other two women of her troika had come across some kind of nosferatu artifact and perhaps a correspondence should be initiated. His response had been politely interested, but decidedly noncommittal. The second missive had fed him a little more detail, clearly designed to tantalize. The artifact, still unspecified, was seemingly entombed, beneath a prehistoric burial mound, presumably in the countryside somewhere near the troika's residence. This had both intrigued Renquist, as was intended, but also caused him a measure of hesitation. Although England, especially the counties in the southwest, was noted for its wealth of prehistoric and Roman sites, the country had always been exceptionally short on nosferatu in any period with the exception of a few recent notables like Sir Francis Varney, Barnabas Collins, or Lord Ruthven. At no time had these islands supported a population of the undead to compare with prehistoric India, the Third Dynasty Egypt, China under the Shun, or eastern Europe at any time in the Christian era.
The British Isles were too ordered and contained to be the habitat of more than a handful of the undead. The population was too dense. The great forests had been all but completely felled in between the sixteenth and eighteenth century to build the men-o'-war of the formidable British navy. Since Renquist's mortality, the English had killed off their wolves, their bears, and their wild boar. The English countryside was a place of neat fields, measured acres, and a network of close interconnecting roads where hedgehogs were crushed under the tires of lorries and automobiles, and even the skylarks had been destroyed by pesticides. A few wild areas did remain, primarily the Highlands and Islands in the north of Scotland, but even these seem only to retain their untamed glory by a kind of national consent, as though they had a spurious permission to remain the way they once were because, in reality they could never really be domesticated. By strange irony, it was the highly tamed nature of the domestic United Kingdom that allowed the few like Columbine Dash woodland the Clan Fenrior to survive. No one bothered them, because absolutely no one believed in them.
The third letter had been somewhat more forthcoming. Apparently human archeologists were delving into the mound, and among their finds had been a tiny broken triangle of mica, assumed to be from a much larger sheet. The mica that carried a single but very clear character, the nya of the nosferatu flame script. This information had come close to fully convincing Renquist that the information being fed to him one bite at a time was genuine if maybe considerably less than complete. Any writing on mica had, by definition, to be very old indeed, dating back the full fifteen thousand years to the lost ages of the Nephilim, the Original Beings and Marduk Ra, Nowhere had mica been used as a print medium at any time since. It seemed all but impossible that such a fragment should turn up during a routine excavation of an English barrow, unless the mound had, maybe at some point after its original construction, been used as a place of concealment for some very old, very rare, and possibly priceless nosferatu relics. The suggestion in the letter was that Renquist should perhaps travel to England to investigate.
On this, Renquist had procrastinated for some time, He still considered the colony to be recovering its equilibrium following their hard-won victory over the Apogee cult. He had been loath to leave until the rest of the colony's members had repeatedly assured him, particularly Dahlia, Lupo, and Julia, they could get on very well without his obsessive, hands-on leadership. He had considered bringing Lupo with him, but to bring an escort resonated too strongly of packing muscle, and Lupo had “henchman/protector/bodyguard” written all over him. Born in the time of the Borgias and of the convoluted intrigue and skulduggery among the Italian city-states, Lupo was one of the few nosferatu who had ever exploited his undead attributes by actually marketing them to humans. For almost five hundred years, Lupo had been a nocturnal contract killer for popes, presidents, and prime ministers, captains of industry, bankers, beer barons, and racketeers. In more modem times, as his life continued to extend and extend, he had been content to assist Renquist in the organization and protection of the colony and to allow his fearsome-killer reputation to cool a little. This was not to say he didn't, from time to time, execute a commission for organized crime, who knew him as Joey Nightshade, or for the intelligence community, who claimed not to know him at all. He tended to be sought for the hits that were thought to be impossible, and he charged accordingly, which was a continuing boon to the colony's material liquidity. Lupo had old-fashioned principles and old-fashioned loyalties. He insisted on addressing Renquist as Don Victor, and for Renquist to show up with such an ancient and influential heavyweight at his shoulder would be too much like, as the humans put it, being “loaded for bear.”
Julia had also expressed a desire to go with him, but since Julia Aschenbach always conducted herself strictly according to her own agenda, Renquist had turned her down flat. For him to so much as entertain the idea of traveling overseas with Julia was not asking, but pleading for trouble. Renquist often thought of Julia as a form of personal retribution. She was his own creation: a headstrong Berlin starlet from the National Socialist film industry whom he had brought through the Change mainly as a nasty parting gift for Joseph Goebbels. He had never expected her to survive, calculating that someone in the SS would know enough to drive a stake into her after she'd wreaked short but noticeable havoc. Quite the reverse proved true. Julia had not only survived, but had also honed herself into a remorseless cutting edge of Nordic steel, as some bastard undead conjunction of Marlene Dietrich and Niccolo Machiavelli. Ever since she had tracked down Renquist in the mid-sixties, she had alternated between challenging him, directly or by proxy, for the Mastery of the. colony, or, since the destruction of his still sorely missed Cynara, by attempting to become his consort and pair-bonded hunting partner. Even by nosferatu standards, Julia was dangerous-definitely not a traveling companion he could trust to watch his back or act from mutual interest and common purpose. In addition, while Julia on her own was one thing, the idea that she might easily form an alliance against him with Columbine Dashwood and her two companions was very much another matter. That he might find himself pitted against four hostile and snarling females scarcely bore thinking about. If Renquist was going to travel at all, he would travel alone.
Renquist had become such a virtuoso of rational procrastination that it took a day or so to realize how, in his adamant resolve not to take Julia with him, he had already subconsciously decided he was leaving for England. His course was set; he just hadn't accepted it at a conscious level. The colony really could look after itself for a while. He was aware that he might possibly be walking into some form of trap or risky entanglement, but such was the chance he took whenever he answered any solicitation or enticement to leave the Residence. Such were the risks in the night-milieux of creatures like himself. Any nosferatu who didn't constantly expect the unexpected would never survive a decade—let alone a near-millennium. In the end, the temptation of the letters had proved just too intense. Both his own curiosity and fear of what these human scholars might discover were twin goads to which he couldn't help but respond. Renquist was very well aware that if the humans were to attempt to date and decipher such material, they could learn far more than was good for Renquist, Columbine Dashwood, or any of their kind.
Renquist had methodically begun reestablishing communications, calling in favors, implementing blackmail, and generally easing the way to the final and precise travel arrangements that had brought him to this comfortable suite in the Savoy. The preparation stage was behind him. He was now in a lull before the adventure began in earnest. A part of him, the ever-youthful heart-of-the-flame that still relished the excitement of a quest into the unknown, wanted to cease the game-playing and telephone immediately as the sun had set, but elder pride forbade this. He was Victor Renquist; it was fitting he should maintain a stern detachment. He would walk first, allow himself one more feel of the streets, and telephone on his return.
 
Copyright © 2001 by Mick Farren

Excerpts

CHAPTER One
 
 
The candles had been made to a formula of her own devising, so rather than giving a soft orange-yellow light, their flames burned an electric blue. Columbine Dashwood had always embraced a passion for games with light and fire. Of the four primeval elements, fire fascinated her the most, even though she was forever denied the most elemental fire of all, the direct radiance of the sun. Perhaps that was the reason. For more than almost two and a half centuries Columbine Dashwood, by her very nature, had been confined to the night, restricted, on pain of her own total and agonizing destruction, to deliberately kindled fire and lights of artificial construct, except for the wax and wane and coldly bruised whiteness of the moon, the starlight and skyshine, the occasional forked lightning of a nocturnal storm, and, of course, that one time in the Western Islands when she had witnessed the aurora. Columbine was more familiar than anyone with the rich strata running through the very core of her character that fervently desired what she couldn’t have. She actually admired this in herself. The perverse trait of personality was a guarantee of her existence always being interesting, although, at times it could also make her life frustrating and even dangerous.
The boy lay still, smoothly naked and knowingly vulnerable. He was scarcely more than a teenager, but over his time with her, he had learned a depravity beyond his years. His legs were pressed together, and his arms spread wide, at right angles to his body, like a supine crucifixion One thin white hand gripped the corner of an embroidered Moorish cushion, while the fingers of the other twisted a fold in the burgundy satin sheet that covered the large circular bed. The third finger bore the ring, the one with the large single ruby in an elaborate art nouveau claw setting, which she had given him in the afterglow of their first night together in the cryptic and wafting luxury of her bedroom at the Priory. Like all the others who had been there before him, the boy loved her, and he wanted to be loved by her in return. His aura showed his breathlessly mixed emotions: anxiety and anticipation, but also a definite measure of fear. He wanted to be controlled and led by her, but part of him was apprehensive of where she was leading him. Already she had taken him to the edge of the sensual abyss, and to free fall well beyond. She knew he was aware that, sooner or later, she might conduct him to a place from which he would be unable to return. She had known from the beginning this was both what he desired and dreaded in almost equal proportions. This duality was a part of what had attracted her to him in the first place, along with the more mundane consideration that he also was possessed of a fey androgyny and the sensually geometric features of Michelangelo’s David, albeit submissively softened.
Dashwood stood beside the bed, pushed back her long, pure white curls, and looked down at his face. One of the bed’s tentlike draperies of the sheerest muslin gauze hung between them, softening the focus and rendering him even more idealized. “You are very beautiful.”
Once, before her training had fully taken hold, he might have replied. Undoubtedly, some highly unoriginal flattery to the effect that she was even more beautiful, but he had soon learned she didn’t need or even want him to speak. He lacked the intellect for any conversation she might crave. She required him silent, obedient, and objectified. She leaned forward, pushed aside the canopy, and lightly touched his smooth and completely hairless chest with her fingertips. She was as naked as he, and the blue light of the strange candles gave her death-pale skin an almost reptilian sheen. She smiled sadly and repeated herself. “Yes, my dear, you are so very beautiful.”
As she lay down beside him, stretching in the dim chamber’s interplay of light and shadow, her movements were sinuously nonhuman. But this was only as it should be. Columbine Dashwood was in no way human in anything but outward appearance. Of course, the boy didn’t know that. Yet. His mind was always open to her, and she knew he considered her strange, but he was too infatuated with the ecstatic illusions she fed him to question the nature or origin of her strangeness. He sometimes wondered why she shunned the sun, but he dismissed it with a young and overwhelmed lover’s carelessness as an eccentricity of vanity. His only half-formed theory was that maybe she had a complexion that burned rather than tanned. This would certainly be in line with prematured white hair. At times she found his lack of curiosity irksome, but she supposed it went hand in hand with his passivity, and if it hadn’t been for his passivity, he never would have survived to keep her amused for so long.
She moved her body against his. Too bad he had to go. He was gorgeous, stupid, and infinitely malleable, the complete plaything—really all Columbine Dash-wood had needed until this current situation had arisen. Unfortunately, the imminent arrival of Victor Renquist had changed all that. Playthings were extraneous. Her long season of leisure was at an end, and to prolong him made no sense. She must finish him this night. She allowed herself a single wistful sigh; humans wilted in time, anyway, like roses from a transitory admirer. Hundreds like him had served briefly in her infinitely extended existence, and hundreds like him would serve in the future.
The evening had started, at least for the boy, with opium and a chilled white wine. When the crucial time came, he would feel no pain. Respecting his devoted service, she stroked his mind, intensifying his sensation of being blissfully afloat. She kissed his throat, and he groaned softly. At the same time, she slowly extended her fangs, down from the twin cavities in her unusual skull. She knew that many of the supposedly sophisticated kin had forgone their fangs and had them surgically removed. Defanging enjoyed an especial vogue among her American cousins and also those in the Far East, both cultures being so taken with cosmetic surgery. They favored the small blade or steel spike, but Dashwood remained a staunch naturalist in the matter of the kill.
When she struck, the boy felt almost nothing. The penetration was so fast and smooth, he experienced only mild surprise. She drank quickly so as not to prolong his departure, and his strength ebbed with a sense of wondering bewilderment at all the last dying noises and the darkening of the blue light. When his pulse ceased, Columbine’s own body convulsed, and she let out two long, soul-deep, heartfelt shudders. At the same time, the blue candles guttered. Her being was permeated with climactic power. Many of her kind might, at such a moment, rise and moon-howl, but that suited neither Dashwood nor English behavior. Concealed responses and near-silent triumphs were long-maintained traditions, and ones with which she had no intention of breaking.
She lay very still as the boy’s stolen energy stilled and settled, her own trembling subsided, and her fangs involuntarily retracted. The tiny sounds of the old manor house, the small creakings and creepings, whispered around her, and outside, a breeze rustled the branches of the four-hundred-year-old oak. She raised herself on her arms and gazed at the body of the youth. If anything, in the pure whiteness of death, he was even more beautiful. Hair slightly tousled, ice-blue lips parted, and head a little turned, one hand stretched out, palm up, across the dark satin sheet like a tragic figure in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. She had fed neatly and with care. The wounds in his throat were small, and only a few drops of still-glistening blood spattered one of the multitude of damask pillows. She knew that with his passing, her protracted extravagance of indolence and hedonism was at an end. The lazy cocooned winter was about to explode into active and possibly violent spring. The secret that she had kept so long was, in one way or another, about to be revealed, and she would be compelled to deal with the consequences. The letter she had sent to Victor Renquist had already put the sequence of events in motion. No way remained to halt them.
She rose from the bed and slipped into a silk peignoir, at the same time calling out to the thralls. “Grendl, Bolingbroke, come to me now. I need the two of you to remove this empty thing to the furnace.”
Immediately she remembered the ring. Ecstasy had made her careless, and she turned and eased it from the limp dead hand. Too fine a bauble to be consigned to the fire or stolen by servants. In any case, it made up part of a set, and she would doubtless use it again when the present dilemma had been addressed and resolved.
* * *
A tilting movement and then a slide forward brought Victor Renquist fully and watchfully awake. He could feel the reinforced flight case finally being unloaded. For the eleven hours it had taken to transport him from Los Angeles to London, he had remained in a half-dream, enveloped in a darkness so total even his undead senses could see little except the faintest psychic fluctuations of his own enclosed aura. Some twenty minutes earlier, the jolt as the wheels of the aircraft touched the solidity of an English runway had interrupted his somber nosferatu introspection, but even at that point, he had still not fully given himself up to the consciousness of the moment. The real danger would not come until the ground crew began to unload the small corporate jet’s cargo, of which the custom-crafted aluminum flight case was the primary item. Over his centuries of existence, Renquist had taught himself a very complete patience. Anticipating a threat when he could do absolutely nothing about it would be to subject himself to pointless stress.
In theory, no threat should exist. All necessary arrangements had been made, the correct bribes had been proffered and accepted but, humans being what they were, a random danger always remained that some unforeseen error would come to pass, the chance element of ever-assertive chaos, what they called Murphy’s Law. The flight case had been designed to look as little like a coffin as possible, but its very dimensions—over six feet in length and some two and a half feet across—still hinted of funeral parlor. The diplomatic stickers liberally pasted to its exterior were supposed to prevent any unexpected opening of the case. In addition, the private airfield to the southwest of London had only a minimal representative presence of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, which further reduced the chance of the case being unlocked for inspection and its strange contents being disclosed. The small jet’s flight plan had been timed so the aircraft would land well after sunset, so at least an unwarranted intrusion would not expose him to sunlight and destruction in sudden and violent conflagration. Should he be discovered, however, he would still find himself subjected to what would undoubtedly be a barrage of unanswerable questions and perhaps a confinement from which he could free himself only with desperate and all too noticeable violence.
The flight case now tilted acutely, moving down what had to be a ramp, but Renquist was held firmly in place by the form-fitted foam rubber. A human would have quickly suffocated in such an enclosed and sealed environment, but Victor Renquist was easily able to compensate for the lack of air by adjusting his nosferatu metabolism. A jarring thud, followed by a regular and mechanical vibration, indicated the case and its occupant had been loaded onto a truck that was now moving away from the aircraft. Renquist allowed his mind to drop back into the semi-sleep in which he’d spent the flight across half the world. He knew he’d be awakened again when the ground transportation reached where it was going.
Even idly drifting in the labyrinth of his almost limitless memory, Renquist found he was still, to a degree, affected by his unseen surroundings. During the previous decade, his duties as Master of the nosferatu colony that had first made its home in Lower Manhattan, and now resided beside the Pacific Ocean in one of the more isolated canyons of the sprawling city of Los Angeles, had precluded all but the most pressing individual travel. He had journeyed once to New Orleans to act as a neutral adjudicator in a potentially messy bayou clan dispute. He had also, a few months earlier, been compelled to make a fast dash to Savannah, Georgia, in the selfsame corporate jet that had just brought him to the United Kingdom, to rescue some very ancient books that should in no way fall into the hands of humanity at large. Previously the tomes had been safe, part of a highly esoteric personal library belonging to a human who could be trusted in his isolated neurosis. After the man’s exceedingly messy shotgun suicide, however, the collection, along with all the rest of his personal effects, was slated to be sold at auction by the IRS to cover the eccentric’s outstanding back taxes; if that happened, the hand-lettered volumes, with their unique flamelike script, and the arcane and potentially dangerous information they contained could fall into literally anyone’s hands. Thus Renquist was forced to make a night flight, commit burglary, and then hightail it back to California before he was caught by the sun.
Aside from these two excursions, the nosferatu colony had been more than enough of a disquieting handful to keep him tied closely to whichever of the two Residences was its home. More than two decades had passed since Renquist had left the continental United States, and it had been longer still since he had set foot on English soil. The last time had been during the so-called swinging sixties, when he had been drawn by the license and laxity of that Western cultural revolution of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. He had also been present for the World War II Nazi blitz when the toga-wearing Hermann Göring and his Luftwaffe had attempted, and failed, to bomb the population into submission. He had been in the city during the 1890s, at the time of both the fall of Oscar Wilde and the Jack the Ripper murders. Before that, some eight decades earlier, he’d enjoyed a passing acquaintance with Lord George Byron. At the end of the seventeenth century, he had been a witness to the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-advised and swiftly defeated rebellion; but by far the longest time Renquist had spent in the British Isles was during the embattled reign of Elizabeth I, when he had provided dark, highly secret, and at times, scarcely believable services for Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s genius spymaster and a shadowy grey eminence of covert power.
Of course, by original birth, Renquist was technically himself an Englishman. Almost a thousand years ago, when the world had been so much more empty of men and the great forests still held sway in northern Europe, when bear and wild boar still thrived and deer crowded the thickets, he had been simply Victor of Redlands, the out-of-wedlock son of Roger, Earl of Cambray, and Gwendoline the Saxon maid, turned loose to make his way in the world as a bastard, with only the horse, armor, and sword that were the sum payment of his father’s considered debt of paternity. Despite these distant human origins, his arrival by no means represented any kind of homecoming. Perhaps he might have felt some ties to a homeland back in those ancient days of faded unreality, when he had been so young, so stupid, so human: roaming through France, England, and the Low Countries, hiring on with any lord, duke, or baron who would keep him supplied with food, drink, women, adventure, and the opportunity of pillage. Perhaps he might have felt like an Englishman in those troubled years at the start of the hideous idiocy that would become know as the Crusades. Soon after that, though, when only in his twenties, destiny had brought him under the influence of the hypnotic and frightening beautiful being known as the Great Lamia, the immensely powerful female nosferatu who changed him to what he now was. From that fateful day forth, temporal considerations like home and heritage had been consigned to an increasingly hazy past. The Great Lamia had transformed him, brought him across the mortal divide to join the somber ranks of the undead. He had crossed centuries and continents, the perpetual outcast and figure of fear except among others of his own kind, until the recall of his time as human was less than a dream.
Normally Renquist was able to mentally calculate time, almost to the second, without the aid of any timepiece, but for the long flight halfway across the world—and now the journey by road from the airfield into the city—he had tuned back his time perception, just as he had slowed his undead pulse and reduced his strange nosferatu respiration almost to nothing. An unawareness of time was the most complete protection against the boredom of all-enclosing darkness. Thus it came as a mild surprise when the truck carrying his container began making frequent short stops as though moving through reasonably heavy traffic, and he also became aware of the intrusion of minds of humans in massed numbers.
The plan had been a relatively simple one. The flight case in which he was concealed would be delivered to the Savoy Hotel in London’s fashionable West End along with the rest of his more conventional luggage. A bribed bellhop would unlock the fastenings that held down die lid, but the man had been ordered to be sure and leave the room without looking inside. Once alone in his suite, Renquist would be able to emerge, shed his traveling clothes, dress for the outside world, leave the hotel, and merely reenter and register just like any much more natural new arrival. The strategy, far from earth-shatteringly complex, could never have been consummated without the Byzantine and globe-spanning network of contacts and the dossiers of human weakness and vulnerability Renquist scrupulously maintained for exactly such eventualities. The aircraft, the carefully timed schedule, the strangely explicit instructions, and the bribery and corruption required to ensure that those instructions were carried out to the letter, with no questions asked, were all a result of favors called in from men and women who owed Renquist either their liberty or their very lives—individuals whose dark secrets ranged from the bankrupting of huge corporations and small countries to deliberately and systematically feeding their heiress spouses coma-inducing doses of insulin or other medications. For the well-organized nosferatu, secret knowledge (and the threats it made possible) was as valuable as industrial diamonds, uncut cocaine, or hard currency.
The truck carrying his aluminum case-coffin came to a more decisive halt. Renquist could only assume that they had reached the delivery entrance of the Savoy. This was confirmed when the case was abruptly dragged to the rear of the vehicle, upended, and lowered. He was moving again, leaning at an angle close to vertical, as through being propelled on some kind of trolley. He was grateful that whatever human underling was overseeing the transfer strictly observed the prominently displayed this way up stickers. He had no desire to make this final leg of his journey humiliatingly upside down. Headfirst might suit a bat, but never a nosferatu. Despite the weight of human folklore, the undead had nothing to do with the subfamily Desmodontidae except an occasional common predator rapport. Of course, he would expect nothing less than perfection in even the smallest details from the Savoy. It was, after all, one of London’s most legendary and prestigious five-star hotels.
This inclined forward motion continued for a couple of minutes or more; then, after a series of bumps, it ceased and was replaced by a smoother upward one. He was in an elevator. His destination was close. After a second set of bumps, as the trolley was maneuvered out of the lift, the new, more muffled sound of its wheels told him he was now moving along a carpeted corridor. The trolley halted, a door was opened, and Renquist was moved into a room. The casket was lifted from the trolley and placed on the floor in a way that left Renquist lying flat on his back. One more operation, and his travel plan would be completed to perfection.
He heard a human voice. “All right, Sanji, old lad, You can go along. I’ve just got one more thing to do here.”
One set of footsteps left the room, and moments later, he heard the click of the first of the fastenings on the case being unlocked. It was followed by the voice that had spoken before, this time talking to itself. “This is a fucking weird one, and no mistake.”
The other fastenings were also unlocked, and then this human made his exit, closing the door behind him. Renquist waited a full thirty seconds and finally, with an almost embarrassing resemblance to the rising vampire in a cheap photoplay, he pushed open the lid of the case and stood up. He stepped from the box and looked slowly round the suite. Again, his instructions had been carried out to the letter. The rest of his luggage was positioned beside the case, and thick metal foil had been taped over all the windows so even the slightest hint of sunlight was rigorously excluded. That a guest at the hotel might obsessively demand the elimination of all outside light might seem a little unusual, but the Savoy was well accustomed to the unorthodox. Down the years, the establishment had catered to the eccentricities of such off-center luminaries as Sarah Bernhardt, Sergey Diaghilev, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, King Farouk, Salvador Dalí, Howard Hughes, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to name but ten. It was also a matter of public record that Elvis Presley had demanded a similar sealing of the windows from his hotels when he performed in Las Vegas or went on tour. A slightly more conventional request by Renquist was for the large jug of ice water—it had been placed by unseen hands on the top of the suite’s small bar.
When Renquist had assured himself that all else was to his satisfaction, he picked up the jug and drank from it in deep, wolflike drafts. It seemed, as he grew older, that water became more and more important to his metabolism. He had no explanation for this and did not know if the phenomenon was unique to himself or if it afflicted all nosferatu who reached his advanced age. He, in fact, had no way of knowing. Since the departure of the ancient Dietrich, he’d met absolutely no nosferatu as old as he was.
After drinking, he dressed, but he took his time. He was in a new city and felt it incumbent to present himself with the optimum of grave good taste. A dark silk suit, a navy shirt with a narrow black tie, and slightly pointed-toe, Cuban-heeled boots seemed appropriate, topped off with an almost ankle-length black trench coat, since it never paid to trust the London weather. He considered a wide-brimmed, slight dandified hat, but he was currently wearing his hair long with a slight curl. It hardly suited a hat, and if it should get wet, so be it. It was time for him to merge with the human population. He considered taking the silver-topped cane that also served as a sheath for the secreted blade of the finest and most deadly Milan steel, but he decided a sword stick was unacceptably flamboyant and probably surplus to his requirements.
Renquist was neither so naive nor so ill informed that he stepped out into the London night expecting a Sherlock Holmes pea-soup fog. He was pleased to find he had arrived on a pleasant, if slightly brisk, night and decided, instead of going straight back into the Savoy to register like a newly arrived guest who’d had his luggage sent on in front of him, he would walk for a while and get the feel of the city. London had changed a good deal since he had last been there. To his eye, it had ceased to be as individual and idiosyncratic as he recalled it. It seemed to be succumbing to both the new European homogeneity and the overall multinational uniformity of McDonald’s, Sony, and Citicorp. He missed the Dickensian intricacy he’d known in the days of Sir Henry Irving; Lillie Langtry; Eddy, the Duke of Clarence; and Mrs. Patrick Campbell—that same period when Bram Stoker had caused such troublesome reverberations by inventing the wholly fictional but uncomfortably too-believable Count Dracula.
Aside from the Dracula anxiety, the 1890s had been one of his favorite eras in the history of the ancient city, but any nostalgia he might have had for the times past wasn’t sufficient to mar his enjoyment of strolling slowly down the Strand, taking in the sights and sounds, the store window displays, the marquees of the theaters, and, most interesting of all, the vast international variety of humanity who thronged the sidewalks. After being isolated in the relatively new and automobile-dominated city of Los Angeles for so long, to be back in a metropolis where crowded streets lived and breathed, and palpably dense history was layered beneath his feet was a positive pleasure. He tuned back the mental auras of the passersby. He had no desire to eavesdrop on the details of their thoughts and feelings, and en masse, humans could be overwhelmingly intrusive on his undead perceptions.
He continued walking west until he was within sight of the circling traffic in Trafalgar Square, the cars, cabs, and red double-decker buses that orbited the tall monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson. Renquist looked up at the stone figure atop its narrow column, the surrounding pools and fountains, and the four guardian Edwin Land-seer statues of couchant lions at the base. Nelson, the nation’s great maritime hero, had destroyed Bonaparte’s navy in 1805 but was shot down at his very moment of triumph. Poor Horatio. Renquist had never met the man, but the humans with whom he’d had contact on the staff of the Duke of Wellington had assured him the admiral had the ego of a pouter pigeon. What other reason could he have had for parading around the quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Victory, in full dress uniform for all to see, complete with all his medals and insignia, including the Order of the Garter? He had presented too prime a target to any French sharpshooter, and it had been inevitable that one would nail him from the rigging.
By the time Renquist reached the intersection of the Strand and Trafalgar Square, he decided he’d walked enough. He was in no way fatigued—he just couldn’t be totally comfortable relaxing and exploring the possibilities of the town until he had completed the process of checking into the Savoy and creating for himself a secure, if temporary, refuge. The cab rank of Charing Cross Station was just across the street, and Renquist decided he would ride the short distance back to the hotel and arrive in a wholly plausible manner, as though at the end of a long journey. A few rail travelers queued for the black London taxis, but cabs were coming and going in a continuous flow, and the fifth one up was his. Once inside, Renquist leaned toward the partition separating passenger and driver, and gave his instructions.
“The Savoy, please.”
“You know you could walk that, don’t you, mate?” “I know, but right now I don’t care to.”
Renquist occupied himself through the short ride, idly inspecting the man’s mind and finding nothing remarkable. The lower levels of the driver’s concentration handled the vehicle and the surrounding traffic. The upper speculation was totally centered on later that evening, when he intended to talk his recently acquired lover, a twenty-two-year-old beautician, whose long legs and short skirts belied depressingly conventional sexual parameters, into some elaborate and slightly unorthodox carnal theatrics. The cabbie was at a loss to know what manner of response his suggestion would provoke. He hoped for eager acquiescence but feared angry outrage, her being so young and comparatively inexperienced. His dilemma held Renquist’s attention for only a moment or two. The practices in question were hardly extreme, even by human standards, and hardly as uncommon as the driver appeared to believe. When Renquist paid him off in front of the Savoy, he tipped him overgenerously. This had always been his policy when he invaded the minds of servants without their knowledge.
At the Savoy’s imposing reception desk, his business was transacted with professional fluidity. He registered under the name Victor John Renquist, using a Canadian passport in that name—one of the five that he carried with him hidden in his luggage. The letter of credit from the private bank in Brunei and the formal instruction as to where to send his bills caused the clerk a moment of pause. He had clearly never seen anything like it before, and he quickly disappeared to check with more senior management. His superior must obviously have set him straight, since the clerk hastily returned to treat Renquist with an even greater degree of respect than previously. Only his final words after all formalities were complete took Renquist by surprise.
“Mr. Renquist, we have a letter for you.”
“You do?”
“I believe it was delivered by a messenger earlier this evening.”
The clerk handed Renquist a small beige envelope with just the two words Victor Renquist written on it in carefully formed calligraphy. Renquist turned the note slowly over in his hands and then slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket unopened. “Thank you.”
“Our pleasure, sir.”
He walked thoughtfully away from the desk. Without having to open the envelope, he knew there would be a very different but equally meticulous calligraphy inside it; the flame-form script of the nosferatu Old Speech. Other letters in the same writing were upstairs among his papers, and their contents had brought him to England in the first place. He wasn’t, however, about to open this fresh missive right away. He knew it represented a subtle form of tactical game-playing, and his response would be to ignore it until at least the following evening. He also had more pressing needs. His instinct was to hunt and feed after the confinement of his journey. He surveyed the lobby of the Savoy, and even there, he could see at least eight potential prey. He knew, however, that as a stranger in town, he must be circumspect. He would hunt, and he would feed—but not to the death.
* * *
Marieko Matsunaga watched with an absolute tranquillity as Columbine Dashwood reached the lupine pacing stage of impatience. Marieko’s thin, almost boyish body was swathed in her favorite grey silk kimono decorated with the blue-crossed axe symbol of the Yarabachi, her limbs were folded into the physically complex and taxing sinshu, and she held the ceremonial lacquered mask on its slim ebony wand in front of her face. She knew that her detachment and perfect stillness would only serve to increase Columbine’s self-generated frustration. It was a part of their long-played and perhaps infinitely continuing game. The acquisition of her impenetrable and armorlike geisha formality had not been without a terrible cost of time and pain, both as human and nosferatu, and she neither wanted to give it up nor, indeed, would she have been able to do so. She could not detach it from her character any more than she could rid herself of the elaborate tattoo of wild-eyed sea demons and Hokusai waves that ran all the way from her right wrist, up the full length of her arm, over her shoulder, and down on her tiny right breast, where it terminated in a tattooed carp with its mouth wide, as though in the act of taking a bite at the nipple. Both were permanent and irremovable, both inseparable and integrated parts of her personality.
Marieko never ceased to be amazed at how Columbine, after surviving more than two hundred years, could remain so overwhelmingly juvenile in her mercurial enthusiasms and inability to wait. Even on the most basic and bestial level, she was supposed to be a huntress and predator, but she never seemed to have acquired the capacity to bide her time, content in the knowledge that everything would ultimately come to her. Columbine had never mastered the technique of the silent cat interminably watching the mousehole. Marieko refused to allow herself to display such raw and unfiltered emotion. Such was a transgression to die for, and many of those with her training and background had done exactly that. Marieko also wouldn’t permit herself to fall into the trap of immediately offering advice or instruction to her companion. Marieko knew much of Columbine’s seeming capriciousness was far from spontaneous, a designed and deliberate girlish camouflage to disguise devious games fed by fully developed ambitions. Columbine might appear perversely immature, but beneath the facade, she was hard and determined, and more than capable at her own kind of control.
“He should have called by now.”
Marieko didn’t reply or even move, giving no indication she’d heard. Columbine hissed at her, a taunt of gratuitous fury. “Do you have to be so damned Oriental?”
The final remark all but tempted Marieko to react and respond in kind. Columbine was crossing a lot of lines. By one set of standards, merely entering the room qualified as an unwarranted interruption, but despite the escalating provocation, Marieko remained as still, silent, and expressionless as a work of art. The medium-size room on the second floor of Ravenkeep Priory had for years been looked on as Marieko’s exclusive domain. The austere and almost antiseptic space of polished wood had been remodeled to a mathematic harmony with screens, a lowered ceiling, and false, backlit walls. The furnishings were minimal; a lacquered table supported carefully arranged decorative jars and bottles on its polished surface. The large rectangular sandbox waited so that she might slowly and elaborately rake its contents when in the mood for abstract creativity. A longer and narrower rectangle contained about seventy gallons of clear, pure water. Concealed speakers built into the sides of the tank caused ripple effects on the surface of the water. Right at that moment, they were playing a repeated, eighteen-note, sub-bass melodic figure, so low that it approached the limits of even nosferatu hearing, but in its time, the water in the container had vibrated to everything from Gustav Mahler to The Who. She had attempted to keep fish of various kinds in the tank, but all had succumbed to the damage of the vibrations and died. Now the only creature that lived there was a large, elderly, emerald-green frog who seemed able to survive any audio wave pattern and remain perfectly happy, provided it was fed a pellet of food every day. The koto she now very rarely played rested carefully positioned on its stand. Beyond these things, the only other artifact was the rush mat on which she had currently formed herself into the sinshu.
Under more normal circumstances, it would have been unthinkable for Columbine to enter the room while Marieko practiced her intricate disciplines. But, as Marieko well knew, these were not normal times. Victor Renquist was on his way to them, lured by Columbine’s letters and a very partial account of Marieko’s own discovery. The dice had been cast. Their plan was in motion. If it succeeded, they would be mistresses of an immense power. If it failed, it could well cost them their very existence, and Renquist was a crucial fulcrum for success. That his arrival in London should cause such overwhelming tension was only natural, and each member of the troika dealt with it in her own way. Marieko attempted to lose herself in the internal labyrinth of sinshu, while Columbine threw fits and trampled their personal protocols.
“Can’t you put down that mask and speak?”
Marieko didn’t immediately respond. Columbine was obviously having difficulty handling the situation without someone to talk to or, more accurately, someone to talk at, but she couldn’t always have everything she wanted the moment she wanted it. Unfortunately, Columbine never saw it that way.
“Talk to me, damn it!”
Marieko finally took pity. She slowly lowered the mask and, with great care, disengaged herself from the sinshu. She stretched slowly but remained seated, her eyes still closed, letting her breathing return to its normal rate before she looked up at Columbine. Finally she stretched and flexed her fingers with their extended and perfectly varnished nails. “Hasn’t everything possible been said already?”
“He’s in London. I can feel it.”
Marieko now rose to her feet, but again slowly, and with great care. Even for one of her long experience, the sinshu was an extreme physical trial. Legend insisted it went all the way back to the ancient days, when the shape-shifters still walked the night. She would have sat longer, but she didn’t like Columbine standing over her. Relative positions of dominance in a troika of females needed to be matters of much sensitivity; careless physical psychology could easily abrade nerves. Again Columbine was exceeding the boundaries. When the two of them were on eye level, Marieko spoke briskly and not without irritation. “London is over a hundred miles away. You can’t possibly sense him.”
“It was the arrangement. His aeroplane landed hours ago.”
“So?”
“So why hasn’t he contacted us?”
“You know exactly why he hasn’t contacted us.”
Columbine grimaced. “Because he’s Victor Renquist, the all-bloody-powerful, and he has decided to make me wait. As he has always made me wait.”
“You can’t still be venting resentment at a petty slight from two centuries ago.”
“It wasn’t a petty slight.”
“Of course it was. He was already the notorious Renquist, and you were a freshly changed airhead. What did you think he’d do, bond with you as a hunting companion the first time he met you?”
“He led me to believe—”
“Oh, please.”
Marieko decided Columbine was being far too self-indulgent, especially since the instigation and a good part of the authorship of the plan was hers. Although, with her superior and painstaking calligraphy, Marieko had been the one actually to write the letters dispatched by special courier to California; Columbine had, with equal attention to nuance and subtlety, devised the wording. The bait on the hook, so to speak. Marieko was well aware that Columbine, at heart, resented Renquist simply because he was Renquist. He was in all ways impeccable, never putting a foot wrong, but with a modesty second only to his secrecy. And yet, despite his efforts at concealment, his reputation grew and grew. Over the last few decades—and especially since he had become a Master of Colony—he apparently had done his best to lead a quiet and anonymous existence, but his more colorful and altruistic deeds, like removing the incriminating books from the DuMont Library or neutralizing Marcus De Reske and the Apogee in Los Angeles, had not only made him visible to his peers, but had also elevated his name to near legend. He was possibly the most powerful and respected nosferatu on the planet, unless, of course, there lurked others so much more powerful they could cloak their very existence. He was also held to be among the most knowledgeable and authoritative historians of their kind. Those were the reasons they needed him so badly in order to achieve their goal, but for Columbine to need anything from the male she saw as the purple betrayer of her first wild days of nosferatu romance angered her deeply. It wasn’t rational, but it was Columbine.
“Where’s Destry?”
“Destry will tell you the same thing.”
“I just want to know where she is.”
“Riding again.”
Destry Maitland was the third of the troika, the final interlocking piece that enabled the three females to exist in the unusual, but not unique, hunting and survival bond.
“What’s with her and that new bloody horse?”
“You know what’s with her and the new horse. It’s from the rarest of bloodlines. A familiarity with our kind is bred into its genes. That horse is her new pride and joy.”
Columbine sniffed and scowled. “I’ve heard all about the thing’s damned bloodlines. She’s talked about nothing else since the beast was brought here.”
“As I said, it’s her new distraction.”
Columbine pouted. “But does she have to ride it all the time?”
“She’s bonding with the steed.”
“Steed. Did you say steed, darling? Isn’t that a trifle archaic?”
“Have you seen it? Have you examined its aura? It’s definitely a steed.”
“I don’t loiter in stables.”
“But you do loiter here disturbing me.”
“Is that an indirect way of saying you want me to leave?”
“It’s almost dawn, Columbine. My intention is to sleep.”
“How can you sleep?”
“You should sleep yourself. Renquist will not make contact until nightfall.”
“You don’t think so?”
“He has to make it clear by his silence that he’s not rushing to your summons. He will come in his own good time and not before.”
“Damn his insolence.”
“Sleep, Columbine. Conserve your strength.”
Columbine pursed her lips and turned in the direction of the door, but not before emitting a final soft feline hiss. “We’ll see about his own good time.”
* * *
“I think I should go.”
“It would probably be a good idea, in case your husband tries to call you.”
“He won’t call.”
Renquist turned, faced the women who lay tousled on the ruined hotel bed, and nodded. “It will be dawn soon, and I need to sleep, I have a meeting later.”
“I never fucked anybody in the Savoy before.”
Renquist raised an eyebrow. The remark seemed hard to believe. Her body was as pornographically perfect as the best plastic surgery could make it, and tanned to an even bronze without any white areas created by swim-suits or underwear. She clearly spent much time in the sun, at the beach or poolside, in nude idleness. “Not even your husband?”
“He doesn’t count.”
Renquist slowly smiled. “Ah.”
The woman scowled. “Don’t ah me. I look on it as a form of virginity.”
“But you didn’t fuck me.”
“I didn’t?”
“Not in the strictest sense.”
The woman blinked. She didn’t have a clue what had happened to her. She was the Swedish trophy wife of a millionaire Venezuelan commodities speculator who had parked her at the Savoy while he went to Paris for three days. He name was Frieda, and she suspected the Venezuelan had a Parisian mistress. She had allowed herself to be picked up over cocktails by Renquist as a form of payback for the supposed marital infidelity, or at least that was what she thought. In reality, from the start of Renquist’s first approach and overture, she’d had no choice in the matter whatsoever, but he wasn’t about to let her know that. She frowned with the effort of focus through confusion. “It seemed to me like a very fine approximation.”
“That is certainly true.”
She crawled across the swirl of rumpled untucked sheets—paused for a long moment and then placed her bare feet on the floor and attempted to stand. “I’m not sure I can.”
“Can what?”
“Stand.” She stood swaying uncertainly. “Is it really dawn?”
“Not quite, but close.”
“Let me look.”
She stumbled in the direction of the nearest window. Renquist moved with nosferatu speed. “Don’t—”
“Don’t what?”
Instead of saying anything, Renquist steered her away from the curtains. He didn’t want her to see that the drapes concealed foil and tape that blacked out the windows. “You’ve only got to make it down to the third floor.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
Of course he was trying to get rid of her, and for that she should be profoundly and mortally grateful. It was only his circumspection with regard to hunting in an unaccustomed environment that had saved her life.
“Discretion is the better part of passion.”
The blonde Swede had at least started looking round for her clothes. She stopped and stared at him blearily. “I thought that was valor?”
“The same applies.”
“So, passion is spent, and I am dismissed? Is that it?”
Renquist’s expression was friendly but hard. He played the unashamed philanderer she imagined he was, the character she’d wanted when she’d first flirted with him down in the bar. “We both knew it was to be that way from the start, didn’t we?”
“It’s nice to pretend for a while.”
“I don’t think we have the time for pretense.”
If Frieda did but know it, the entire night had been a pretense. The supposed passion she believed had left her satiated to the point of walking unsteadily had been largely chimeric—most of it completely in her own mind, with Renquist needing only to read her most covert fantasies to make them seemingly happen. The objective truth was he had only stared coldly as she lay on the wide bed of the room in the luxury hotel. She’d gasped and contorted, in the grip of mindbending and salacious illusion, while he watched with little more than an academic amusement at what he could achieve without laying so much as a hand on her. The mildest caress of her mind and memory raised sighs and shudders to full muscle spasms of repeated, wordlessly keening orgasm. Her hips twisted as she moaned and crooned in her native tongue and finally in no language at all. Her makeup ran as sweat beaded her face, and a fall of lust-tossed Nordic-blond hair half hid an expression of feral and greedy desire. When he decided the moment was appropriate, when she was totally beyond awareness of her surroundings, he sprang the small steel spike he always carried with him.
The coupling of the physical act of piercing her flesh with the roller coaster of sexual hallucination on which he had set her all but threatened both her life and sanity. As her lips shaped wordless obscene and ecstatic syllables, as her head thrashed from side to side, threatening to dislocate the vertebrae of her neck, he found he had to forcibly hold her down in order to feed, and he wondered if he had perhaps overdone the intensity of suggestion. Then he felt her energy gradually dwindle, and he knew that she was drifting toward death. He quickly removed his mouth from her throat, sealing the wound with a flick of his tongue, and moved back from her, out of her mind, allowing her to wake, shaking and completely disoriented but believing that she had just been through one of the most memorable physical encounters of her life.
Renquist reflected, as Frieda shakily dressed, how she would never be consciously aware of what had happened to her in this stranger’s hotel suite, or in what grotesque and outlandish way she had been used. When she left the room and returned to her bright and social consumer world, she would have no inkling she had ever been the partial victim of a nosferatu, a creature she had always believed, in her material rationality, was a thing of myth, legend, and low-budget movie. Only the dreams to come might hint at what had passed between her and Renquist; the dreams would almost certainly haunt her sleep from then on, maybe to the end of her short human life.
She slipped on her shoes, fluffed her bed-tousled hair, and made a more determined move toward her exit. Renquist assumed she was going to the door, but instead she turned and went into the bathroom. He might have followed her, except the bathroom had mirrors that would necessitate specially created illusions of his reflected image. He heard the sound of running water and then rummaging in a purse. He assumed Frieda was in cosmetic repair. When she spoke, it was in disjointed phrases, as though she was distracted by the effort of applying lipstick or mascara. Her tone now had the acidic edge of someone beginning to view herself as a discarded sex object. “Didn’t someone say the real reason men pay prostitutes is not to fuck them, but so they’ll go away afterwards?” Frieda emerged from the bathroom with her trophy status fully restored. “I’d kiss you good-bye, but I’ve just done my makeup.”
Renquist nodded. “I understand.”
“I’ll let myself out.”
“Yes.”
The door of the suite closed behind her, and she was gone. Renquist sighed and sat down on the bed, profoundly glad he wasn’t human, and hadn’t been for close to a thousand years. As a species, humans were so childishly complicated, with their lack of emotional logic and their erratic mood swings, especially where the ecstatic, erotic, and economic were concerned. Even though he’d fed, he hardly felt energized. The partial feeding had taken almost as much effort as it had generated, and he was more than ready to sleep away the dangerous daylight hours. At that precise instant, as though to confirm his original reserve that this solitary and impulsive journey to England had perhaps not been such a good idea, the telephone rang.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Renquist?”
“Yes.”
The Savoy operator’s voice was unmistakable. Renquist had insisted his incoming calls be screened. “A Ms. Dashwood wishes to be put through.”
Renquist smiled. Ahhh.
“Would you please give the lady my apologies? I can’t speak to her right now, but take her number and tell her I will contact her. And ask for all the appropriate codes one needs to dial. The English telephone system has changed greatly since I was last here.”
“I’ll convey your message, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Columbine Dashwood—the dear girl was as impulsive as she had ever been. He would make her wait a little longer. Dawn was close, and he wanted nothing better than to retire. Columbine would wait until after sunset. Perhaps well after sunset. She could look on it as the penalty for making importunate telephone calls.
Renquist went to one of his trunks, extracted the large fur rug, and spread it over the hotel bed with a bulking flourish. He took the fur on all his travels; his one concession to a sense of continuity in the places that he slept. He drank another long draft of water and arranged himself to dream through the deadly sunlit day.
* * *
Columbine Dashwood surfaced from the dreamstate, but only by a major effort of will. Despite her protestations to Marieko and later to Destry, she had, in fact, slept. Indeed, she had slept deeply, but as she surfaced in the waking world, she knew sunset was still hours away. It wasn’t her mixed emotions at being reunited after all this time with Victor Renquist forcing her to wake so frustratingly early, as her feline-uncharitable companions might have suggested. The dream had returned, vivid, intense, at greater length, and as disturbing as ever. For a while, after communication had been established with Renquist, the incessant nightmares had abated, but now the visions had returned with a vengeance. She sat up slowly on the circular bed of satin and velvet draperies, wafting gauze, and scattered Arabian cushions that was the central focus of the exotically cluttered room, but amid all the romantic and alien finery, her mood was as bleak as the dream. “Fuck. I swear I can’t tolerate much more of this.”
Anger forced bleakness aside. Columbine wanted to scream out loud but knew that to do so would wake the entire house. She didn’t need the attention. Instead she hugged her fury to herself, clasping her knees to her chest with encircling arms as if to physically contain it.
“Did the dream have to come back today of all days?”
She was unsure which was the primary cause of her vexation. Was it the return of the dream when she’d believed she had it under control or the shame of challenged pride?
“Today of all days!”
How could she confront Victor, with all his superiority and perfect arrogance, when she must look so obviously hollow, hagridden, and drained by visions of some stupid bloody ancient apocalypse? Or maybe what upset her most was its ability to affect her. She maintained her shallow and petulant exterior, all the flouncing silliness and headstrong caprice, as a lace-and-lavender sheath for a rapier-steel will. Even before her Change, she had grown to girlhood amid the dizzyingly multiple social standards that allowed the English aristocracy of the late eighteenth century to embrace both courtly manners and thug brutality. Epicene young fops who held scented handkerchiefs to their noses when among the common herd were also quite prepared to kill or maim in violent duels with rapiers or pistols over the most insignificant drunken trivia. Columbine’s class hunted with hounds and flogged their servants but could, at the same time, smoke the finest East India Company opium and write romantic sonnets as cloying as syrup. The young ladies of her generation saw no paradox in private conduct that employed the schooled and skilled depravity of the most costly harlot in Mayfair coupled with an indecency of imagination to rival Donatien de Sade and the simultaneous public social charade of fan-fluttering virginal sensibility in which to blush, flutter, and swoon were all expected tricks of the trade. In comparison to the French, of course, the patrician English had been relatively well behaved. The French aristos had so indulged their unchecked libertinage that the common people had turned on them and dragged them to the guillotine.
The combination of such a human upbringing and the gift of remorseless nosferatu power had endowed Columbine with a mind of diamond hardness. No being would have ever dared to forcibly enter her mind while she was awake. That such a thing should happen while she slept was both unprecedented and disconcerting, and yet something, some entity, appeared freely able to penetrate her rest, to invade her dreamstate at will. The dreams caused her more distress than she cared to admit. In commonday parlance, they were starting to get to her, and she had begun to wonder just how long she could tolerate the constant and chronic interruption of her slumber patterns. She sincerely, if not too logically, hoped the arrival of Renquist might somehow diminish the nightmares’ frequency and intensity. This tenuous hope also did nothing to improve her disposition. Columbine loathed Renquist, but, to be unmercifully honest with herself, she also desired him, if only to ultimately humble him and bring him to his knees. To be forced to manipulate him as a means to an end was irksome, but to secretly hope he might also prove the savior of her sanity was nothing short of humiliating.
She unclasped her knees and threw herself indignantly back amid the cushions, arms exasperatedly outflung, and stared up at the dark-mirror ceiling. She was not, of course, able to see her own reflection. The mirror had been installed so she could draw back the silk cover, and watch the humans as they contorted under her hands, her mind, and finally, her mouth and fangs. In the early stages of her more prolonged games, they might wonder and ask why their unbelievable paramour was invisible in the marbled glass, but when they did, she would either create an illusion, or if she was close to the point of revealing her true nature, she would merely laugh. “It’s a magic mirror, my love. A special spell for your personal narcissism.”
Usually, by that point, the pretty boys were so ensnared they’d believe and agree to anything. She wished she hadn’t so flamboyantly renounced keeping a young man in attendance when they had agreed to the mission and the appeal to Renquist. At the time, she had decided a grail quest for unknown power required some nosferatu vow, a semblance of bizarre chastity, a resolve to forgo distractions by restricting her hunting to the fast and the practical. In this wide-awake afternoon, however, she found herself yearning for a smooth and vapid boy. If she couldn’t sleep, she wanted to feed, but that was impossible. With no gilded youth in residence, she had to go outside to hunt, and outside, the English countryside was basking in a mellow early autumn sun. The leaves on the trees had yet to turn, but summer had definitely expired. Of course, more than two hundred years had passed since Columbine had seen the autumn sun, but she could sense enough to know how it was. Birds were singing, the grass was long with a scattering of poppies, the trees in the overgrown orchard were heavy with fruit, and the daytime servants, the ones she never saw, were at work in the house and in the Ravenkeep garden.
Ravenkeep Priory was an eclectic disturbance of architectural styles from a dozen different eras, attempts at alteration, and from the many different functions the structure had served through the centuries. The only attempt at any standardization was the late Victorian faux-Gothic arches, spires, and gargoyles added by Enoch Jarman, the Midlands munitions baron who had made the place a rural retreat from his dark and decidedly Satanic mills and foundries. The man had made gold-standard millions by supplying components for small arms and light artillery to the Empire-on-Which-the-Sun-Never-Set, but the effort had left him with an atrophied facility for the aesthetic. Large on money but small on taste, Enoch Jarman’s efforts had only added to the confusion. Set in the lee of a low escarpment amid softly rolling woods and fields, some form of habitation or fortress had existed on the same site since prehistory, but the foundations for the presently enduring structure had been laid by Roger le Corbeau in the early twelfth century, when the Norman invaders were consolidating their hold on the Saxon underclass, and guerrilla bands like those of Robin of Huntington were maintaining a stubborn resistance in the deep forests.
The property had passed to the church, and simple Ravenkeep had become Ravenkeep Priory when the Baron Roger’s childless, garishly degenerate, and pox-ridden great-grandson, Jerome le Corbeau, had, in a deathbed panic, bequeathed his estates to the church in the hope of escaping hellfire for a life of creatively abominable deviance. The Priory had remained in the hands of the clergy until the Priors were violently evicted by Henry VIII as part of his harshly hilarious Reformation and the inadvertently intelligent severance with Rome. Henry had awarded the estate, and the title that went with it, to a nondescript earl with few talents save butter-smooth flattery. Even that skill was depleted from the gene pool in a couple of more generations, and by the time of the Industrial Revolution, accumulated debts made sale to a nouveau upstart inevitable. The first plutocrat had been a Liverpool shipping baron in emotional need of a stately home, but when the Manchester Ship Canal bankrupted him, Ravenkeep passed briefly to a textile czar and finally to Jarman, the arms mogul.
Columbine would have been happy to boast how the Priory had been in her family for mortal generations, but in reality, the estate was a comparatively recent acquisition. It had fallen into her hands in the early 1920s, after she had come back from the human horror of the World War I trenches, where she had been known to British, French, and Germans alike as the Black Angel, Pausing only for an excursion to Moscow and a sanguine flirtation with early bolshevism, she had decided to return to England. Disappointed that man and nosferatu had not seemingly been created equal and that the Workers of the World were unlikely to thank her for her unorthodox assistance in freeing them from their chains, she switched sides and became an undead capitalist, resolving to surround herself with as much material security as she could. In addition to her political turnabout, she had also decided that a nosferatu who remained a rootless nomad for too long ran cumulative risks.
Columbine had contracted a mortal marriage to the arms mogul’s grandson, the unfortunate Peregrin Jar-man, who had been shell-shocked to the point of dementia on the Somme. By a certain synchronous irony, her brief husband had lost his reason on the same section of the Western Front where she had practiced her depredations. After leading him through a highly sedated wedding, she had maintained him in a state of blissful illusion while she slowly killed him. His death surprised no one, since he wasn’t expected to survive his madness for very long. What did surprise the friends of the deceased was the rapidity with which the widow severed all ties, dropped the name of Jarman, returned to her maiden Dashwood, and surrounded herself with a set of the most unacceptable friends including the Aleister Crowley crowd, Tallulah Bankhead, Ezra Pound, Ayn Rand, and the ever-unpredictable Pauline Réage. Oswald Mosley had attempted to crash one of her parties, but she had turned the Blackshirt leader away. She had no time for human fascists and their petty bourgeois bullying. To the outside observer, Columbine appeared to be concealing herself behind a social smoke screen of scandal and depravity. And indeed she was.
The outbreak of World War II had changed everything at the Priory. The parties were killed off by blitz, shortage, and rationing, and the gilded boys went off to die, not in her arms, but in the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the RAF, and in tanks in the Libyan Desert. Although she knew it was irrational, she still harbored a certain vestigial patriotism for Old England, and she had arranged a private meeting with Churchill, at which she had offered the prime minister use of Ravenkeep by any research or planning group from a suitably outré sector of the war effort. Winston, unshockable, already familiar with the dossier on Nazi occult warfare, and willing to try anything, agreed with minimal persuasion. By way of a metaphysical bonus, Columbine had offered Churchill immortality, but he’d declined, pouring himself yet another serial brandy and rumbling that one life would probably prove more than enough. Very swiftly, she found herself playing hostess to a small and exceptionally strange task force commanded by Colonel the Duke de Richleau, who launched remorseless metaphysical attacks on the Nazis in general and Heinrich Himmler and Inner Order of the Black SS in particular. De Richleau and his people were tacitly aware of what Columbine really was, although, in a very English way; no one ever actually mentioned her being nosferatu. Her vampirism didn’t bother them in the slightest, though. They and their endeavors were so deeply and ambiguously twisted, she hardly qualified as anything remarkable. In addition, de Richleau’s team was special, and thus safe from her potential depredations. Had she victimized any of them, Churchill’s personal goon squad, homicidal Old Etonians with old school ties and dead eyes, would have arrived immediately in large, unmarked cars and efficiently terminated her immortality with stake and mallet.
The cessation of hostilities found Columbine alone at the Priory. The ultra-secrecy of the de Richleau operation had endowed the house with a formidable unapproachability that lingered long after he and his people departed. This legacy suited her extremely well; she was able to hunt with a high level of impunity. Less than a year after the end of the War in the Pacific, Marieko had arrived, a nosferatu fugitive seeking a sister’s right to sanctuary with one of her own. Marieko had been fleeing a deep and paranormal unpleasantness in the Far East. Columbine had never fully intruded into Marieko’s secret past, but she had gleaned the general and somewhat intriguing impression of how the two American atomic detonations, in addition to vaporizing the city centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had also spawned destructive manifestations in spheres far beyond the most sophisticated human awareness. Extradimensional nastiness had leaked, and somehow Marieko had been caught in the backwash and was forced to flee for her very existence by DC-3 and China Sea freighter, Greek tramp steamer and Orient-Express, and finally Channel ferry to the comparative and eventual safety of rural England.
For the remainder of the forties and most of the fifties, Columbine and Marieko had lived as hunting companions—as far as the local humans were concerned, an upper-class eccentric lesbian and her exotic Oriental companion, all very Sax Rohmer, and best kept at a safe distance. Destry had appeared in the early sixties, an undead Amazon adventuress who had grown tired of third-world voodoo colonels, CIA-backed warlords, the fall of empires, and all those postcolonial, machine-gun dictatorships with their one international hotel filled with spooks, KGB, arms profiteers, and adrenaline-addicted mercenaries. Columbine, Marieko, and Destry had decided to attempt a properly constituted nosferatu troika. At first, Columbine had been doubtful about the arrangement of three bonded females. Although she had known threesomes who had made the orchestration work, in too many cases it had been little more than a template for bickering and backbiting, with two picking on the remaining one in a cruelly rotating pecking order. They were lucky in that the early days of bonding had been fully occupied by their inadvertently becoming demigoddesses to a desperate Kali-worshiping human blood cult. For a while the role-playing had been both a fascinating anthropological study and a constant source of nourishment and amusement, but the existence of the cult had unavoidably come, story by story and rumor by rumor, to the notice of the local chief constable, and they had been forced to kill or disperse their devotees and then maintain a much lower profile, particularly with regard to their hunting.
Columbine, however, was not at that moment thinking of either her own past or the past of the house that was her longtime lair. The dreams dominated her thoughts. Over and over she had taken the logically deductive approach. She was certain the dreams that plagued her came from an external source. The content of the dreams seemed to indicate that whatever was routing, projecting, or otherwise broadcasting them had a fixation about a particular period in the human past. In the beginning, they were innocent enough, even a novelty; brief flashes of archaically dressed humans clustered in dark and candlelit ancient buildings or moving in green-day rural countryside. A harper by the fireplace, children on the greensward, lovers in cornfields or the fallen forest leaves beneath translucent sun-dappled trees. Slightly mawkish but definitely coherent glimpses of an unmistakably English locality, somewhere quite near to Ravenkeep, sometime in the fifth or sixth century of the Christian calendar. History had never been of immense interest to Columbine, but she guessed, by the seemingly Romanized clothing and artifacts, these humans existed sometime after the Romans had pulled their legions out of the British Isles, withdrawing to defend Rome itself against the encroaching barbarians.
At first the only puzzlement was why she was being granted such pointless camera-obscura vignettes of fifteen hundred years ago. At other times she had experienced dreams that could only be part of a common nosferatu memory, and she was a definite believer in the undead sharing some manner of universal mind, although others of her kind might argue with her. If that was the case, though, how could she account for the fact that so many of the short vignettes took place in broad daylight, a sight no nosferatu, no matter how ancient, could ever have seen? The only sunshine dreams Columbine Dashwood ever experienced had their roots in her own short life as a human, and as the years passed, they had become increasingly few and far between. A second problem was, when the characters in these dreams spoke to each other, which they did quite regularly, she was completely unable to understand them or even so much as recognize the language they were speaking.
Columbine would never claim any facility for language. With their infinitely extended life span, some nosferatu became almost obsessive about becoming as widely fluent as possible. Marieko was one of these, although primarily knowledgeable in the inexplicable babbling of Southeast Asia. Destry also had a smattering of various Asian languages, as well as a basic Central African pidgin, and, of course, there was always the amost obscene command of tongues on which Victor-bloody-Renquist so prided himself. She almost believed Renquist, dropped into the middle of the Amazon jungle, would be conversant in the unique dialect of the very first tribe he encountered. Columbine took the exact reverse approach, the traditional Anglo-Saxon view that only some massive and primal error had rendered the entire world unable to speak English. Despite her resistance to foreign verbs, nouns, and adjectives, she had, over her two hundred years, motivated by both self-protection and self-interest, picked up a smattering of schoolgirl Latin, a reasonable command of German, some bad French, and worse Italian. She could, however, converse articulately in basic Russian. It had been a matter of survival in 1919 and 1920, before she returned to England to wed the twitching and dysfunctional Peregrin.
Back in the early days when the dreams had been pastoral, insignificant, and at times even pleasant, their inhabitants had embraced, as far as she could tell, two forms of speech. One, exclusive to the ruling and the beautiful, seemed to Columbine an odd mixture of Spanish and Latin, while the rank and file yammered in a dialect akin to Welsh. The inexplicable and endless song of the harper in the one dream certainly sounded Druidic to her untrained ear, but she was so shamelessly ill educated that she found it hard to be precise, even with herself. Educated or not, though, she had been in no doubt that the unintelligibility of the languages was another indication that the source of the dreams was both external and other than nosferatu. Previously, when a dream she’d dreamed could only have emanated from another of her kind, she had always known what everyone was talking about. In these dreams participants either conversed in the Old Speech, which all of the newly undead seemed to receive with all the other alterations to their DNA, or an instant and seamless translation, consciously or unconsciously provided by the mind from which the vision originated.
Columbine had many times experienced dreams that could only have been an inadvertent print-through from Marieko in which Columbine found herself observing agonizing rituals in the black-vault dungeons of pitiless and inhuman shoguns, or hunting with the moon in the flawless pine forests at the foot of the symmetry of Mount Fuji. Such unavoidable intrusions on each other’s dreamstates were quite natural when two females lived in such intimate proximity. In the same way, after Destry had joined them, she found herself riding on the side of a captured Sherman tank through cheering crowds in the subtropical midnight as Che Guevara liberated Santa Clara, or scrambling for the last DC-3 out of Léopoldville as the city fell to fire and small-arms slaughter. In every case, Columbine had been able to understand every word.
The next logical explanation was that the dreams were coming from a location rather man any individual. Columbine knew such things were possible. In her waking life, she had more than once observed the palest of psychic fires that remained, imprinted perhaps by either agony or ecstasy, or by the sheer weight of history, long after the individuals who had made that history had perished or fled. If such was the case, Ravenkeep itself had to be the prime suspect. The Devil only knew it had more than enough history. A settlement had almost certainly existed on the site in the fifth century, but that didn’t explain why the dreams should so suddenly appear out of nowhere. She could think of no pivotal event or radical alteration to the structure that might have triggered a ceaseless stream of such powerful emanations.
When the dreams became increasingly grim and violent, the puzzle was less a game and more a problem that required a solution. She began to find herself in the middle of mercilessly bloody battles in which warriors afoot, armed with axes and spears and carrying bossed wooden shields, were ridden down by well-organized Roman-style cavalry. Murderous weapons designed to cut and pierce carved hideous wounds in human flesh, slicing bodies and severing limbs. The slaughter was relentless, with neither side willing to give ground in a madness of death-or-glory. The unswerving and formidable infantry made its appearance even more fearsome by the universal adoption of ridged helmets with metal faceplates, masked and anonymous, mouthless and with blank slits for eyes. Some were of plain hammered metal, but others were iron dominoes, fashioned into fantasy faces of incongruously blank and idealized beauty, or the ugly contortions of howling demons from the mythology of the Rhine river cliffs and the Germanic forests. Anyone facing these warriors was presented with a terrible illusion that they might be something other than men. Not that the opposing cavalry seemed to entertain many illusions. They performed and dressed in emulated memory of the cruel professionalism of their recently departed imperial masters. Helms were crested with stiff horsehair, and red battle cloaks flowed behind them over chain mail and bronze breastplates, and while the enemy rushed in a haphazard, hacking and slaying mob, they moved on command with the drilled precision of turn and counterturn, tactics planned first to contain and then to massacre from horseback.
These dreamstate conflicts always seemed to take place in torrential rain with poor visibility. Men and steaming horses, and the huge war dogs-free-ranging mastiffs, heads higher than a man’s waist, with wide studded collars, slavering jaws, and even mail coats protecting their shoulders and ribs-all progressively bogged down and stumbling in a sea of mud turning crimson with the blood of the fallen. Columbine was forced to wonder if she was actually seeing the same battle over and over again. The conflict always came to the same repetitive conclusion, another possible indication that she was, in fact, constantly viewing the same fight. At first the horsemen, who Columbine assumed were the military of the Romanized Britons, had mastery of the field, and it seemed me fight could only go their way. Then rain and mud would prove their undoing. Horses slipped and foundered in the bloody quagmire, and the tightly ordered formations disintegrated, enabling the foot soldiers—she supposed a section of the seaborne Saxon invaders of the time—to drag isolated riders from their mounts and hack them to pieces.
A further paradox in the dreams was the way in which Columbine was allowed to view them. She was observing everything through the eyes of a single individual who, on one level, was supposedly present on the scene, to the point of ducking and dodging thundering hooves and berserk Saxon battle-axes, but playing no part in the actual combat, wielding no mace, lance, or sword, and, most perplexing of all, manifestly invisible to those present. The strange observer evidently sided with, or had some relationship to, the mounted Britons, since, when the survivors retreated in disorder, she found herself going with them and then later wandering aimlessly through the aftermath of conflict: the overchurned and rust-colored ground strewn with bodies of men and horses contorted in the agony of death or by postmortem rigor. Crows fed on the eyes of the corpses, and scarcely human scavengers foraged for what they could find amid the overturned carts, the discarded swords, broken spears, and shredded banners.
Of course, the escalating horror of the visions didn’t disturb Columbine. She was no sensitive and impressionable human. Blood was her life. She was a killer herself. She had seen modern warfare firsthand, and in the context of the huntress. What she resented was her normally entertaining dreamstate becoming so relentlessly bleak. She was being monopolized by the daily repetition, and, worse than that, with this new phase of dreams she was being defeated in dream after dream, and experiencing all the emotional desolation of being repeatedly routed. It proved enervating, a debility that hung over into her waking days, leaving her fractious, dissatisfied, and drained of energy.
“If these damned visions aren’t coming from here, where the hell are they coming from?”
 She had begun to look further afield for a possible source. The nearest candidate, even more ancient than Ravenkeep, was the prehistoric burial mound and the broken circle of standing stones about twelve miles away at Morton Downs. Again, the same problem of the Priory came into play there: As far as Columbine knew, nothing had happened at Morton Downs that might cause visions of the fifth century to descend on her with the sunrise. Only by chance she discovered from Marieko that this was not the case.
“They’ve been excavating there for two or three weeks.”
“Who’s been excavating? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Marieko had raised her already arched eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware you were interested.”
“Well, I am. Who is this they that’s digging up the mound?”
“Some students from Wessex University.”
“Students? Are they allowed to do that? Isn’t it some kind of desecration?”
“I believe they’re led by a Dr. Campion. He’s apparently very well respected in his field.”
At this point Columbine, who had previously kept quiet about the effects of the latest round of visions, gave up and told everything to Marieko and Destry. The dreams, the puzzlement, the damage to her sleep, and even how, in the last few days, the visions seemed to have slipped into a brand-new phase, showing bizarre rituals of fire, stimulants, and human copulation amid already ancient standing stones. At least a finger seemed to be pointing in the direction of the burial mound. The other two had, of course, known something was troubling Columbine, but in a troika, one didn’t ask. Destry and Marieko were also weir aware that Columbine was a virtuoso of deception and concealment, but Columbine didn’t fool herself that they very often fell for her hoopla. What she counted on was their never being quite sure of the exact demarcation between truth and fiction, and that was where she kept her secrets. Thus her total candor in asking for their help and advice impressed them enough to take her completely seriously, and Marieko even offered to make a firsthand inspection of the mound.
Columbine had welcomed the offer. “You think I should go with you?”
Marieko thought about this. “No, it would be better if I went alone.”
Marieko had never been one to delay, and the very same night she had left a little after midnight in the Ravenkeep Range Rover. Columbine knew Marieko’s trip wasn’t only motivated by her mysterious dreams. All through her wanderings, when not obeying the natural demands or coping with all the other shocks to which her nosferatu flesh was heir, Marieko had maintained a strong interest in human archeology. Under cover of the night, she had observed the places where the short-lived scrabbled in the dirt for physical pointers to their roots, origins, and forgotten past, and was both amused and appalled by their misconceptions and their deplorably narrow perspectives when it came to their own history. Time after time, they used the clues they grubbed from the ground to prove humanity was the only sentient species ever to walk the Earth. Their vanity distorted any scant reality of the past they might discover. Not that Marieko was adverse to humanity wandering in an historical fog, unaware of the origins of its civilizations, or how its very species came into being. The more they floundered in a mass of confused hypotheses, contradictory trivia, and legends entrenched as fact, the easier it was for the nosferatu to operate among them without detection.
As Marieko told it later, she had embarked on this first reconnoiter expecting to find the sight deserted, but for absolute safety, she had parked the truck a distance from the roped-off area of the dig and continued on foot across the short springy downland turf. A brisk breeze had sprung up since the sun had set, and all round her, Marieko had felt the busy stirrings and scuttlings of the rural night. Somewhere she could feel an owl patiently waiting on the routines of field mice. A distant flock of black-face sheep stirred in their sleep, troubled by the sense of a predator but were then calmed by an old alpha ewe who reassured them this predator had no interest in them. Before her perfect nosferatu night vision could detect much more than a dark elongated mound at the crest of a low hill, she perceived a faint but pervasive vestigial aura radiating faintly from the first slit-trench breach dug in the mound.
The flickering trace was of something not strictly alive, neither nosferatu, nor human, nor animal, but far more positive than any residue or ancient imprinting. Marieko had covered the final hundred yards to the burial mound with the utmost caution. Alive but not alive? Or could it be a subtle and specialized lure for the curious? In the long and murderous hostilities between the Yarabachi and the Clan of Kenzu, a number of previously unknown and very dangerous entities had been loosed by both sides as uncontrolled weapons. She’d closely encountered two of the things, and those incidents had been enough to convince her there was definitely more in Heaven and Earth than was dreamed of in nosferatu or human philosophy. While some weapons simply ran amok in snarling frontal attack, others brought destruction, even to the highly wary, by stealth and subterfuge.
She reached the mound without any noticeable alteration in the aura or anything striking at her with paranormal tooth or claw. She had by this point begun to wonder if whatever might be the source of the aura was in a form of slumber, metabolic reduction, or hibernation. A certain slow pulse pattern in the aura tended to indicate as much. Convincing herself she wasn’t walking into a trap, Marieko gave the excavation a cursory inspection and found Campion and his students had hardly begun to dig and were nowhere near breaking through into any inner chamber in or under the mound. The overwhelming temptation was, of course, to start digging herself. With just her bare hands and nosferatu strength, she could probably be into the inner chamber of the mound before dawn, but she knew to do so would alert the humans that something was amiss. She had also spent a great deal of time cultivating her flawless, four-inch, ivory fingernails, and one or more of them would undoubtedly be chipped or broken by such an endeavor.
Instead she took the rational if less dramatic course of returning to the Range Rover and driving back to the Priory as fast she could. Columbine and Destry were already waiting in the driveway when she arrived. As she parked the SUV and climbed from the driver’s seat, even the unreadable Marieko couldn’t keep the excitement out of her aura. Columbine had been as impatiently girlish as ever, all but bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “What did you find? What did you find? Was it something? Was there something there?”
Destry didn’t make as much noise. Tall and commanding, with her broad-shouldered, long-legged athlete’s body and mane of chestnut hair, Destry was more disciplined and self-contained, but her aura also revealed her curiosity. Marieko carefully closed the door, teasingly making the others contain their eagerness a few moments longer. “I went to Morton Downs.…”
“And?”
“And there is definitely something inside the burial mound.”
“Something?”
“What something?”
Together, the three females walked back to the open front door and the angling serrated rectangle of light that illuminated the steps. Overhead, elongated tresses of pale, wind-driven clouds scudded across a blue-black sky, partially obscuring a yellow and waning moon and adding a perfect backdrop of external drama. As their shoes crunched on the raked gravel, Columbine and Destry interrogated Marieko.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You know everything.” Destry, who was constantly impressed by Marieko’s wealth of arcane knowledge, wasn’t going to tolerate it failing at this crucial point.
“I know it wasn’t human, and it seemed to be in some kind of extended sleep, but its aura was of a kind I’ve never seen before.”
Destry halted. “Never?”
Marieko also stopped and hesitated. “Never…except…”
“Except what?”
“This is the most intangible of feelings. A theory almost without support.…”
“Yes, yes, we understand.”
“I believe whatever is within the mound is not nosferatu, but it’s somehow related. I think it’s a distant kin.”
“Not nosferatu?”
“No.”
“Kin?”
Marieko’s face was inscrutable, but her aura flickered with equal parts uncertainty and excitement over the potentially important discovery. “I believe that somewhere, in some ancient DNA, mere exists a…link.”
The idea opened such a wealth of possibilities that both Columbine and Destry were at a loss to frame the next question, which gave Marieko a chance to pause significantly before delivering her final observation and repeat her caveat: “Again, this is without any foundation except instinct—”
“We’ve already accepted the disclaimer.” Columbine hated how with Marieko you inevitably had to wait.
“I suspect whatever is in the mound is immensely powerful.”
“Powerful?”
Marieko repeated herself with added emphasis. “Immensely powerful. It was virtually inanimate, and the aura was little more than a flicker, yet it had a density.”
Columbine wanted to ask more about the potential power of this thing, but Destry retreated to the practical. “This Dr. Campion and his humans, have they penetrated very far into the mound?”
Marieko shook her head. “No, not yet.”
“Perhaps we should do some excavating of our own?”
Again Marieko shook her head. “I was tempted, but the humans would assume it was vandalism. The police could become involved, and I don’t think we want that.”
A thought occurred to Columbine. “Could Campion and his delving students be in the process of waking whatever it is?”
Marieko had already considered this. “I doubt they know it, but I think it’s a possibility. In fact, for all we know, the humans may have been unknowingly summoned to do exactly that.”
* * *
Even in the comfort, not to say luxury, of the Savoy Hotel, Victor Renquist found he was unable to sleep. He lay flat on his back, in the traditional attitude of repose, legs together and arms across his chest, crossed at the wrists. He slowed his breathing until the black silk of his robe hardly whispered against the fur rug covering the hotel bed, but the best he could achieve was periods of semi-numb daze. The blackouts on the windows effectively cut the sound of the London traffic to a literal dull roar, but that couldn’t possibly be the reason total and inert rest remained so elusive. After all, during his long existence, he had slept through air raids, artillery bombardments, and the sack and pillage of cities. He had slumbered in cellars while buildings burned above him and had shared desert caves with a multitude of bats and the keening of the wind across the dunes.
He wondered if this unaccustomed insomnia could somehow be caused by the long flight from California. Human travelers talked of a disorientation they glibly called jet lag, and he had once read a scientific paper on how the time-sense of even rudimentary creatures like bivalves could be confused by fast, long-distance journeys. A batch of oysters from Long Island Sound had been moved by transport plane to Lawrence, Kansas. Once relocated and settled in the laboratory tank that was their new home, they commenced, after a short period of adjustment, to open and close as though the Atlantic Ocean extended all the way to the Midwest and the tides behaved accordingly. Why such a bizarre study should be conducted in the first place had been something of a mystery to Renquist, but he had long since ceased to be surprised at the directions humans might be steered by their insatiable curiosity. Unfortunately, so few nosferatu practiced intercontinental air travel that little data was available to tell him whether he was suffering from some kindred reaction or this jet lag, and he resolved to keep mental notes on his sleeplessness. Sooner or later, the undead would have to come to grips with the jet age.
After about an hour, however, he discovered these spells of drifting were not without their own unique value. He found himself experiencing a new and, as far as he could recall, unique form of perception. For a being of Renquist’s age to experience anything curious and original was such a singular novelty that he made no effort to control or thrust it from him. It also helped, of course, that the experience was far from unpleasant. The word cozy sprang to mind, and Renquist allowed himself to glide effortlessly with it. He might not be sleeping, but he was sufficiently relaxed to derive some recuperative benefit. Although the drifting perception was widespread and generalized, and lacked much in the way of precision, it delivered a fairly coherent, hypnovirtual view of the world in which he was now immersed. As during his earlier stroll down the Strand, he was again aware of both the psychic and material density of the Old World as close-packed modernity was layered on millennia of history. Although New York and some of the other cities on the Eastern Seaboard might come close, the United States as a whole seemed positively empty in comparison. Renquist wasn’t sure which he actually preferred. Both had their attractions. As the strange demidreaming continued, he found a measure of specificity was possible, and he could exert a certain gentle direction without breaking the condition and returning to full waking. The odd perception also tended toward the two-dimensional. Humanity seemed spread around him like an ethereal and somewhat threadbare billiard table, except it had a distinct curve, perhaps conforming in its insubstantial way to the curve of the earth, or maybe to that of space-time itself.
His first tentative notion was to cast around for traces of other nosferatu, and no sooner had he entertained the idea than he began to notice tiny orange flecks amid the verdance of humans. Some were relatively close. The city of London apparently had its compliment of loners, but no concentration that might tell of a clan or colony. As soon as he could judge distance and direction, he observed a triple trace of tiny stars in the west he knew must be Columbine Dashwood and her two companions, the reason he was in London in the first place. Much farther away, far to the north, he finally spotted the kind of cluster that must represent a substantial community of the undead. Unless much had changed in the British Isles, it could only be the Fenrior of Fenrior who maintained his clan of vassals, henchmen, and bonded companions in the isolated and desolate grandeur of the Scottish Highlands. Renquist knew very little about Fenrior and his people beyond the epics and legends, which were both many and lurid but could not always be trusted. Most accounts seemed to agree that the Clan Fenrior was wild, uncouth, barbarous in the extreme, and conducted themselves as though they had yet to adjust to the sixteenth century, let alone the twenty-first. They reputedly depended on the old and violent blood ties of crag, glen, and tarn to preserve them from widespread human detection and retribution.
Renquist knew that if he was aware of the Fenrior, the Fenrior could well be aware of him, and he wondered how protocol might dictate he act toward them. They were, by all repute, immoderate in the cruelty with which they received strangers in their lands, and yet, by their numbers alone, they qualified as the primary community of nosferatu in Britain. He had been invited by Columbine Dashwood, and etiquette dictated that he must attend her first, but with her requested favor bestowed and his commission discharged, would it be expected of him to pay his formal respects to the Fenrior, or would it be far wiser to respect the privacy of these Scottish nosferatu beyond the Roman wall, not intrude, and leave them well alone?
As Renquist was drowsily contemplating how he should behave, he noticed a fleck of color to which he couldn’t put a name, significantly close to the triple pinpoints of Miss Dashwood and her friends. Now what was that? Renquist attempted to see more clearly, but as he did, the perception perversely vanished. The effort to focus had apparently broken the spell. Renquist sighed and ran fingers through the reassuringly familiar fur of the rug.
“No matter how we deceive or congratulate ourselves, the dreaming is never truly ours to command.”
He was now aware, however, something was to hand that Columbine had neglected to mention in her letters.
* * *
On the very day following Marieko’s visit to Morton Downs, Columbine’s dreams had entered a new and highly disturbing phase—the one that would remain with her all the way through to the long day she waited for Renquist to make contact. One time and, mercifully, one time only, she had all but been dream-blinded by a flash that she knew by unexplained instinct was called the Fire in the West, although the same instinct refused to give up any further information or explanation of the horrendous and all-consuming flame. It certainly made no sense and seemed hardly to fit with what she knew of the sixth century. As she saw it from the point of view of her mysterious observing host, the explosion looked near-nuclear. The host had stood on a grassy hilltop at what seemed to be the moment of impact. Had the fireball first come from the sky? Columbine had entered the dream a fraction too late to be certain. Just in time, in fact, to be rendered sightless by the flash and all but choked by the stench of burned hair and singed clothing as a searing radiant heat swept over the hillside, scorching the grass and causing trees to ignite.
Multiple disasters struck her and her observer like a series of fast hammer blows. First the abominable light, then the heat, and then a shock wave with a sound like nothing she had ever experienced. A scream? A roar? A convulsion of the very earth? An extended thunderclap to herald the Doom of Everything? Finally the wind and a new shriek of universal doom. And yet she knew, again by weird instinct, that she was, in reality, a great distance from the true ground zero of the fiery destruction. In the middle of this off-the-scale violence, way out of both human and nosferatu proportion, she at least had confirmation of Marieko’s theory that the thing through whose eyes she watched was massively powerful. He or she could remain standing when living trees were uprooted and swirled into the air and cattle flew like birds. His or her flesh could tolerate heat that scorched grass in an instant. Columbine also realized she was now freely assuming this observer was also the thing asleep in the mound; a long-jump of faith and connection to say the least.
The vision of the Fire in the West may only have shown itself a single time, but what followed was barely an improvement. Instead of peasants and sunshine, the rain and contusion of the battlefield, or the dank and bloody carrion plain that remained in its wake, she found herself in a twilight place of murky desolation where only the closest objects were visible in a choking fine-grain haze, chill but at the same time parched and gritty. Trees had been reduced to naked skeletons, with their bark chewed away, while the hillsides were bare of grass, and hedgerows were naked barbed-wire entanglements of dead brambles. Pale grey ash fell like dusty snow. Birds and animals seemed to be no more, save for hungry and combative rats and wolves. Haggard human survivors, mostly former warriors, with rust on their swords and mail, hollow-skull staring eyes, and weary leather falling away from their shields and helmets, tottered on the final cadaver legs of terminal starvation. Knights whose prized horses had been long since eaten, bowmen for whom no target presented itself, wagoners whose oxen had dropped beneath the yoke, and deserted kings of burned dominions; they all moved aimlessly through an occluded landscape where nothing was to be found except inevitable death. Only her host/observer manifested any real sense of purpose, and he or she seemed only to be seeking some specific if hard to find place of concealment in which to hide or maybe the like everyone else.
“This has to be stopped.”
Unintelligible peasants and endless waterlogged battles were one thing, but Columbine drew the line at visions of an unknown apocalypse. As soon as the sun was below the horizon, she had assembled the others in the formal drawing room. “I’m not exaggerating. It was as though the world was ending.”
Marieko thought about this, a single furrow appearing in her porcelain neo-geisha brow. “But it was still a vision of the past?”
“I think so.”
“Not the present or the future?”
“It looked like the same period as all the other dreams except everything was dead or dying.”
“So you don’t think it was some kind of warning?”
“If you’re asking me if I’ve suddenly turned into Edgar Cayce or Saint John the Divine, the answer is no. I don’t think I’m having prophetic visions.”
Destry was growing a little impatient. “Really, Columbine, are you telling us you have no idea what this might mean?”
“All I really know is that I didn’t like it at all.”
“So what do you want us to do? We decided we should wait.”
Destry was absolutely correct. They had talked almost through the dawn, finally agreeing that their only option was to let Campion proceed with his excavation until more was revealed. After almost twelve hours of nonstop nightmare, Columbine had been more than ready for a radical revision of that idea. “If I have to keep seeing this shit every time I try to sleep, I’m going to lose my mind. I know you two don’t have a high regard for it, but it’s the only mind I’ve got, and I need it for thinking and getting me around.”
“I still believe we should wait, and not do anything precipitate.”
“But it’s not you having the blasted dreams, is it, Destry? If I were human I could wash down a handful of Seconal with a shot of gin and sleep like a weary dog, but I’m not, and I’ve never encountered any drug or potion that could knock out one of us.”
It had been Marieko who had given the very first momentum to what would become their plan. “I think we need the help of an expert.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We would appear to have stumbled across something that is not only well beyond the sum total of our own collective knowledge and experience, but can also invade the dreams of one of us at will, leaving us powerless to stop it. I would suggest we need the help and advice of someone who is both highly knowledgeable and unable to resist a mystery.”
“A nosferatu?“
“Of course.”
“She would have to be extremely venerable but, at the same time, still retain a mental flexibility.”
If inscrutability came in degrees, Marieko’s expression achieved an unprecedented level of bland knowing-ness. “It wasn’t a she I had in mind.”
In an instant, Columbine had seen exactly where Marieko’s logic was taking them. “No!”
“I know how you feel about Victor Renquist, my dear Columbine, but—”
“Never!”
“He has all the qualifications.”
“He wouldn’t come here.”
Destry began to warm to what Marieko had set in motion. “I think he would. If he were to find out we’d happened across something very old with a nosferatu connection, he’d be here like a shot.”
Marieko, cross-legged on her cushion, sat even straighter. “She’s absolutely right.”
Columbine had risen from her accustomed velvet wing chair, walked to a side table, and opened a pink-and-black art deco cigarette box. Smoking cigarettes was a habit she had picked up during her travels with Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), when he had been on his way to become the first infidel to enter the holy city of Mecca. She had convinced herself that a cigarette lent a woman a distinct extra degree of authority. The principle applied to any elevation of rank from trollop to duchess. Since all the mortal fuss about cancer and secondhand smoke, it had become an even more powerful affectation, indicating, as it did, a certain devil-may-care, risk-taking ruthlessness. On a visit to a high-rise domination bordello in Tokyo’s Roppongi district in the late 1980s, she had observed that the lace-, rubber-, and leather-clad mistress-sans all chain-smoked to stern and contemptuous effect. Right then, it wasn’t authority she needed, and, of course, her nosferatu metabolism derived no pleasure or satisfaction—or harm, for that matter—from the process. It was a device she usually reserved for human company, but, right at that moment, she needed some manual ritual, a practiced distraction to cover her confusion. Of course, Marieko was right, damn her, but the idea of actually seeing Renquist after all this time was singularly disturbing. She flicked the matching table lighter, but it refused to catch, clearly out of fuel.
“Damn that Bolingbroke. Why can’t he keep the lighters filled?”
Destry, who had remained standing through the conversation, took a lighter from the pocket of the bush shirt she wore over her usual jodhpurs and tight, high hunting boots. “Come here.”
Columbine had moved to Destry. “He needs thrashing.”
Destry flicked the Zippo she had managed to carry across a dozen war zones. “He enjoys the attention too much.”
Columbine had inclined her head slightly and drawn on the cigarette, at the same time holding back stray ringlets so they wouldn’t fall in the flame. “You know what would happen if Renquist came here? He’d try to turn us into the classic foursome. The male master and his three compliant concubines.”
Destry and Marieko didn’t seem to respond quite as quickly as Columbine would have expected. “Are you two out of your minds? Are you suggesting you might enjoy such an arrangement?”
Destry, realizing she’d been caught in a fleeting what-if reverie, quickly snapped her lighter shut and put it in her pocket. “Of course not. Would we live like this if we did?”
Marieko smiled with deceptive sweetness. “The presence of a male would, however, be a diversion.”
Columbine had retorted angrily. “Then why don’t you go the whole way and move in with Fenrior?”
“Rudeness is hardly appropriate.”
Destry closed ranks with Marieko. “Really, Columbine, after all this time, the nonsense between you and Victor Renquist has to be primarily in your imagination. Even you have to agree you were very young and silly at the time, and he was, and still is, eight hundred years your senior. You’ve spent the passage of years enlarging and embroidering on the situation. He probably doesn’t even remember you.”
Despite herself, Columbine exhaled smoke and pouted. “He remembers me. I’ll guarantee you that.”
Marieko pressed their two-to-one advantage. “If you could be objective for a moment, you would realize Renquist is exactly what we need.”
“I don’t want him here.” But even as she spoke, Columbine knew her aura was giving her away. A part of her was subversively excited at the prospect of seeing Victor Renquist again.
“Be real, Columbine.”
“You’re the one who’s complaining about the nightmares.”
Destry glanced at Marieko. “Perhaps she thinks Renquist would be too much for her to handle. Perhaps she’s afraid she’ll turn into a simpering girl again at the sight of him.”
Columbine knew she was being both teased and manipulated by the other two, but she couldn’t stop herself from angrily reacting. “I am not afraid of Victor bloody Renquist.”
Destry pressed home the advantage. “Then act your age, and let’s make use of him.”
Columbine wasn’t quite ready to give in. “There must be another undead of the same stature.”
“Name one.”
Columbine cast around for a name. “I can’t.”
“No, of course you can’t. So act your age, and let’s make use of him.“
Columbine was effectively outnumbered, but she couldn’t surrender without one more turn of the wheel. “Very well, suppose we did manage to get Victor to come here. What then? If there is some potential power in the burial mound, wouldn’t we be running the risk of him taking over whatever we might find there?”
“You think the three of us aren’t a match for him?”
“No, I don’t think that.”
“So?”
“All right, all right, I don’t want to see him, but if we can get his attention, I’ll go along with it. I’m not so sure he’s actually going to be that interested. He’s fascinated by nosferatu history, but he’s also very circumspect, and protective of his colony.”
Marieko made a Zen gesture indicating the great merit of simplicity. “We send him a letter.”
* * *
By the time the sun had begun to sink over the West London suburbs, Renquist decided he had experienced more than enough of this drifting but not sleeping and resolved, as soon as he had the safety of twilight, to take another walk out in the streets. He needed to move, to stride and to swing his arms, and, after his own fashion, to breathe in his new surroundings. Only after that, when he returned to the Savoy, would he telephone Columbine Dashwood. In the meantime, until the sun was down, he would abandon these attempts at halfway rest and apply himself to a final recap of what he knew so far about the task at hand. He reached for the leather folder in which he’d filed the paperwork relevant to the project, unzipped it, and extracted the letters. The sequence of correspondence and the way it had been couched bore all the hallmarks of Columbine’s style and operational approach. She had always fancied herself as the seductive coquette, the incremental tease. Each letter had given away a little at a time, never allowing him to know more until he’d at least made some tentative commitment of interest. He doubted, though, that Columbine was the author of the letters in terms of physically creating them. Unless she had undergone a radical change over the many years since he’d seen her, she was not the kind to labor long and diligently at perfecting the complicated calligraphy of the nosferatu. The flame script, in scarlet ink on the handmade oriental writing paper, had been drawn with a near-flawless dexterity and what appeared to be an ultrafine 00 sable hair paintbrush. The delivery by exclusive courier service had been the icing on an already exquisite cake, and it was enough to convince Renquist the whole presentation was a team effort by the entire troika, and not just some strange, out-of-the-night scheme devised by Columbine acting on her own.
This made him a little more willing to take the information on face value. Columbine Dashwood, up to their acrimonious predawn parting in Brussels, during the grand ball on the eve of Waterloo, had never shown such a capacity for detail. At the time, Renquist had been in the highly covert employ of the Duke of Wellington, and she had been the secretly undead darling of the Anglo-Prussian alliance. She had challenged him to meet her after the battle, but the tide of human events had intervened. He had never kept their rendezvous, and she’d hated him for it ever since with all the ferocity of a scorned female. Over the years, Columbine had made a number of vengeful attempts to lure him into humiliating or dangerous situations, but Renquist’s instincts told him the letters were not another of these. It was possible, of course, that she had persuaded the entire troika to assist her in another plot against him, but he thought it unlikely.
The first letter had merely hinted that she and the other two women of her troika had come across some kind of nosferatu artifact and perhaps a correspondence should be initiated. His response had been politely interested, but decidedly noncommittal. The second missive had fed him a little more detail, clearly designed to tantalize. The artifact, still unspecified, was seemingly entombed, beneath a prehistoric burial mound, presumably in the countryside somewhere near the troika’s residence. This had both intrigued Renquist, as was intended, but also caused him a measure of hesitation. Although England, especially the counties in the southwest, was noted for its wealth of prehistoric and Roman sites, the country had always been exceptionally short on nosferatu in any period with the exception of a few recent notables like Sir Francis Varney, Barnabas Collins, or Lord Ruthven. At no time had these islands supported a population of the undead to compare with prehistoric India, the Third Dynasty Egypt, China under the Shun, or eastern Europe at any time in the Christian era.
The British Isles were too ordered and contained to be the habitat of more than a handful of the undead. The population was too dense. The great forests had been all but completely felled in between the sixteenth and eighteenth century to build the men-o’-war of the formidable British navy. Since Renquist’s mortality, the English had killed off their wolves, their bears, and their wild boar. The English countryside was a place of neat fields, measured acres, and a network of close interconnecting roads where hedgehogs were crushed under the tires of lorries and automobiles, and even the skylarks had been destroyed by pesticides. A few wild areas did remain, primarily the Highlands and Islands in the north of Scotland, but even these seem only to retain their untamed glory by a kind of national consent, as though they had a spurious permission to remain the way they once were because, in reality they could never really be domesticated. By strange irony, it was the highly tamed nature of the domestic United Kingdom that allowed the few like Columbine Dash woodland the Clan Fenrior to survive. No one bothered them, because absolutely no one believed in them.
The third letter had been somewhat more forthcoming. Apparently human archeologists were delving into the mound, and among their finds had been a tiny broken triangle of mica, assumed to be from a much larger sheet. The mica that carried a single but very clear character, the nya of the nosferatu flame script. This information had come close to fully convincing Renquist that the information being fed to him one bite at a time was genuine if maybe considerably less than complete. Any writing on mica had, by definition, to be very old indeed, dating back the full fifteen thousand years to the lost ages of the Nephilim, the Original Beings and Marduk Ra, Nowhere had mica been used as a print medium at any time since. It seemed all but impossible that such a fragment should turn up during a routine excavation of an English barrow, unless the mound had, maybe at some point after its original construction, been used as a place of concealment for some very old, very rare, and possibly priceless nosferatu relics. The suggestion in the letter was that Renquist should perhaps travel to England to investigate.
On this, Renquist had procrastinated for some time, He still considered the colony to be recovering its equilibrium following their hard-won victory over the Apogee cult. He had been loath to leave until the rest of the colony’s members had repeatedly assured him, particularly Dahlia, Lupo, and Julia, they could get on very well without his obsessive, hands-on leadership. He had considered bringing Lupo with him, but to bring an escort resonated too strongly of packing muscle, and Lupo had “henchman/protector/bodyguard” written all over him. Born in the time of the Borgias and of the convoluted intrigue and skulduggery among the Italian city-states, Lupo was one of the few nosferatu who had ever exploited his undead attributes by actually marketing them to humans. For almost five hundred years, Lupo had been a nocturnal contract killer for popes, presidents, and prime ministers, captains of industry, bankers, beer barons, and racketeers. In more modem times, as his life continued to extend and extend, he had been content to assist Renquist in the organization and protection of the colony and to allow his fearsome-killer reputation to cool a little. This was not to say he didn’t, from time to time, execute a commission for organized crime, who knew him as Joey Nightshade, or for the intelligence community, who claimed not to know him at all. He tended to be sought for the hits that were thought to be impossible, and he charged accordingly, which was a continuing boon to the colony’s material liquidity. Lupo had old-fashioned principles and old-fashioned loyalties. He insisted on addressing Renquist as Don Victor, and for Renquist to show up with such an ancient and influential heavyweight at his shoulder would be too much like, as the humans put it, being “loaded for bear.”
Julia had also expressed a desire to go with him, but since Julia Aschenbach always conducted herself strictly according to her own agenda, Renquist had turned her down flat. For him to so much as entertain the idea of traveling overseas with Julia was not asking, but pleading for trouble. Renquist often thought of Julia as a form of personal retribution. She was his own creation: a headstrong Berlin starlet from the National Socialist film industry whom he had brought through the Change mainly as a nasty parting gift for Joseph Goebbels. He had never expected her to survive, calculating that someone in the SS would know enough to drive a stake into her after she’d wreaked short but noticeable havoc. Quite the reverse proved true. Julia had not only survived, but had also honed herself into a remorseless cutting edge of Nordic steel, as some bastard undead conjunction of Marlene Dietrich and Niccolo Machiavelli. Ever since she had tracked down Renquist in the mid-sixties, she had alternated between challenging him, directly or by proxy, for the Mastery of the. colony, or, since the destruction of his still sorely missed Cynara, by attempting to become his consort and pair-bonded hunting partner. Even by nosferatu standards, Julia was dangerous-definitely not a traveling companion he could trust to watch his back or act from mutual interest and common purpose. In addition, while Julia on her own was one thing, the idea that she might easily form an alliance against him with Columbine Dashwood and her two companions was very much another matter. That he might find himself pitted against four hostile and snarling females scarcely bore thinking about. If Renquist was going to travel at all, he would travel alone.
Renquist had become such a virtuoso of rational procrastination that it took a day or so to realize how, in his adamant resolve not to take Julia with him, he had already subconsciously decided he was leaving for England. His course was set; he just hadn’t accepted it at a conscious level. The colony really could look after itself for a while. He was aware that he might possibly be walking into some form of trap or risky entanglement, but such was the chance he took whenever he answered any solicitation or enticement to leave the Residence. Such were the risks in the night-milieux of creatures like himself. Any nosferatu who didn’t constantly expect the unexpected would never survive a decade—let alone a near-millennium. In the end, the temptation of the letters had proved just too intense. Both his own curiosity and fear of what these human scholars might discover were twin goads to which he couldn’t help but respond. Renquist was very well aware that if the humans were to attempt to date and decipher such material, they could learn far more than was good for Renquist, Columbine Dashwood, or any of their kind.
Renquist had methodically begun reestablishing communications, calling in favors, implementing blackmail, and generally easing the way to the final and precise travel arrangements that had brought him to this comfortable suite in the Savoy. The preparation stage was behind him. He was now in a lull before the adventure began in earnest. A part of him, the ever-youthful heart-of-the-flame that still relished the excitement of a quest into the unknown, wanted to cease the game-playing and telephone immediately as the sun had set, but elder pride forbade this. He was Victor Renquist; it was fitting he should maintain a stern detachment. He would walk first, allow himself one more feel of the streets, and telephone on his return.
 
Copyright © 2001 by Mick Farren

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Excerpted from More Than Mortal by Mick Farren
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.