Anno Dracula (67 page)

For a year she’d lived in something like her European idea of a city -crowded, intense, directed, noisy. A city without a centre is not necessarily a city without a heart, but the pulse of Los Angeles was harder to find than the beat of Baltimore. California was eerily quiet, diffuse as sunset through smog, a desert mirage which would evaporate when the oasis ran dry. The gumshoe once told her LA was called the City of the Angels because it was an afterlife community. As retirees flocked to Florida or young pioneers headed for Oregon, the just-dead came here. He hadn’t only meant vampires. She wasn’t much for graves, but would try to find out where the old man was buried. He’d given her a gentle push at a moment when it would have been easy for her to drift away from humanity.

People filtered onto the street, coming awake. A rag-like human shadow tugged at her attention, but was gone when she looked.

She kept glancing at a blizzard of signage, determined not to miss her turn-off. Even street-names had to compete with ads and announcements. Any available space - bus stops, benches, car-bumpers and doors, loose clothes, bare flesh - bore a commercial, public message or hey-look-at-me proclamation. A vampire woman, an unreflecting Amazon called Illyana, appeared on vast painted billboards not to advertise anything, but to become and remain famous.

Geneviève’s four years in Los Angeles were more vivid to her than whole decades in other places. In modern times, only the years with Charles burned more intensely in her crowded memory. She was here because of a man dead for over thirty years. Charles Beauregard tied her to the world Dracula made far more than the ancient accident of turning vampire. He’d found her in the margins of a changing society and taken her on an uncomfortable journey through it, a path which led inevitably to the Count. Charles had died in 1959, just before Dracula - still fighting the man and the monster. Then again: Dracula was back, and Charles was still dead.

When she left LA, under orders, Geneviève had broken with the memory of Charles. He would have stayed, no matter the cost.

In Toronto and then Baltimore, she’d tried to live as her warm lover would have wished. In Los Angeles, influenced by the gumshoe, she’d worked by herself, for herself, doing good by stealth. Away from this city, she’d rejoined society, taken the courses, got the qualifications, drawn salary, tried to make the system better. As an ME, she didn’t have a badge but she was a police. Sometimes it was frustrating - just as Charles had been politely infuriated by the deviousness and bureaucracy of the Diogenes Club - but the hard-won victories were mostly permanent. If she’d gone after Ernest Ralph Gorse as she had after murderers in Canada and Baltimore, assembling evidence and trusting law enforcement professionals to carry the case on, then perhaps the Overlooker would still be in Alcatraz.

She turned onto Cynthia Street and drove two blocks south, towards Santa Monica Boulevard. She had a ‘unit’ reserved in the name of the Baltimore Medical Examiners’ Office at the Le Reve Hotel, which was actually a motel as opposed to a ‘motor inn’ or a ‘hotel’. ‘77 Units. Rooms & 1-bedroom units with living room; most with gas fireplace. Refrigerator, A/C, C/CATV, movies, radios, phones; 16 efficiencies. Coin laundry, whirlpool, rooftop pool. Pay garage. No pets. Monthly rates avail. AE, CB, DI, MC, VI. Room service avail.’

After parking in the pay garage, an off-street cavern that made her uneasy, she checked in, presenting her Visa (VI) card at reception. She thought of telling someone there might be something in the garage, keeping to the shadows, waiting for a moment to pounce. But the feeling was vague and had been with her even on the plane. It didn’t do to cry wolf; not when there were always wolves.

The girl on reception was a blonde vampire, turned early in her teens. Her tag read ‘Crosby’. No indication whether it was a first- or surname. She wore a green blazer and matching skirt. Her fluffy crimson scarf-cum-choker was another sign, an indication of dhampire-sexual availability or unavailability depending on the side of her throat the knot was tied. Crosby was, quite properly, not in the bleeding business while on duty. She stood on a wooden block to give her the height to see over the desk, but her reach wasn’t quite enough to hand across the key without stretching.

Geneviève’s unit turned out to be a divided space that wanted to be a suite when it grew up. Bedroom, living room and bathroom fitted together as neatly as compartments in a recreational vehicle. She stacked her cases in the living room, filling the gap between couch and television. The TV was on when she stepped into the room. She turned it off. The place was quiet, except for the whirr of A/C and distant city noises. She could live with it.

She didn’t need to sleep but checked the bedroom anyway. It was mostly bed. A wardrobe could be angled down, base sliding up in a cunning levered arrangement like a Murphy bed, and made into a coffin. If she were in town long enough to have a spell of lassitude, she’d use the bed.

On the pillow was a cream envelope with her name written on it in a copperplate hand. Not Kate’s writing - that was an illegible scrawl or, if she needed to communicate, a childish arrangement of unjoined letters. Kate probably had to type love letters and shopping lists.

Geneviève picked up the envelope and slid a thumbnail through the flap.

A red-edged card came loose.

He knew she was here. That was the first message. But she still couldn’t tell who He was. Anyone could call themselves Count Dracula. It wasn’t as if ‘John Alucard’ ever had the ring of being a real name. Whoever he was, he knew they would meet, and wished it to be on his terms.

She considered the bland invitation.

Twice before, she’d been summoned into the Royal Presence. All the world knew how those parties had turned out: with a spark that lit the fire of revolution, and a death that seemed to end the reign of the King of the Cats. This was Hollywood. Dracula was in the movies now. If he wanted to direct yet another remake, he could come up with an ending to suit him this time.

What would Charles have advised? Or the gumshoe?

‘Snap,’ said a voice she knew. ‘I’ve got one too.’

Geneviève turned swiftly. Kate stood in the bedroom doorway. She must be growing stealthy in vampire mid-life, for she’d entered without making a sound. Kate held up her own invitation to
The Rock.

‘Kate,’ said Geneviève, delighted at not being alone.

‘Gené,’ said the Irish vampire, weakly, holding back.

Geneviève advanced to embrace, then saw the change in her friend. Kate’s hair was arranged unusually, blossoming over her forehead and half her face. She swept the hair-mask away, and brought her face into the light for examination. Under her glasses a patch covered her right eye. Red nail-rakes began at her hairline and scraped under the patch and down across her cheek, cutting into her upper lip, drawing her mouth into a half-snarl, and terminating in gouges along her jaw-line.

‘Don’t I look a fright now?’ said Kate.

Geneviève leaked sympathy.

‘You don’t want to know how it happened,’ said Kate, dropping her hair.

Geneviève felt the pain pouring out of Kate’s heart and was dismayed at deeper changes. The mark went beyond the skin, biting into the person Katharine Reed had been. No wonder she had cultivated stealth.

‘Was it Him?’

Geneviève held up the card.

‘Dracula? No. One of his creatures. There are more and more of them. A woman thing. Horrible Holly. She’s always nearby, I think. In the shadows, stalking. A huntress and a shifter.’

‘But he had it done?’

‘That he did. And don’t think I escaped - I was left alive. It’s not enough that we be killed. We have to join his parade. Go to his party. Once before, we had a choice. We could have prospered by declaring ourselves for him. Now, we have that choice again. I don’t know about you, my darling, but I don’t think I can go through it all again. I won’t step willingly into the dark.’ The woman sagged, clinging to the door-frame for support.

Geneviève put her arms around her - Kate had always been tiny, but now she was frail, without weight - and hugged her. Kate began to cry silently, her whole body shaking. Tears of blood welled from her remaining eye and smeared her cheek. Geneviève cradled Kate’s head and held it to her chest, feeling the trickle of her own tears.

She saw the oblong invitations, both dropped to the floor. It would not end here.

Only half of Kate was in the Le Reve Hotel with Geneviève. The rest was outside, looking from a dark place at a tiny arena of light. Ever since the attack in London, she had been split into pieces. Part of her was torn away and beyond her control, mind flapping in the wind.

She had been gutted, her person stolen by the girl-thing who had raked her face and bitten her neck. Nearer death than at any time since her turning, she was tempted to let go and surrender to the siren lure of not-being. Truly dead girls don’t have to worry about the landlord’s complaints or the resurrection of the Prince of Darkness. They just play the harp on a cloud, sleep away the ages or go into the light.

When Dracula’s Bitch sank fingertips up to the knuckles into her skull, Kate dwindled to human stickwood. For a while, she’d been folded up in a travel container, imported to the United States as airmail. She wasn’t a person with a passport, but ‘experimental vegetative matter’. Then, for untold weeks, she’d been stacked in an Alucard-owned facility outside the city, the Alcore Institute.

Now, in this tiny room, Kate looked out of one eye and heard herself telling her friend to give up. Dracula had won, again. In the long run, his will was too strong. If they stood against him, they’d always be on the outside, wounded and weak. The whole world
wanted
Dracula. He was an absolutist tyrant, but if he ran for election he’d get in on a landslide. Transylvanians rejoiced under his rule. Pledges poured into his coffers. He was
Time
Man of the Year.

Next to him, they were two old women.

But she couldn’t really believe it. She couldn’t let go yet. Even on ice, with a drip-feed doling diluted blood into her, she’d known she must fight. She thought of Charles, keeping at the battle ’til the end. As keenly as he fought the obvious enemy, he’d struggled to keep his cause from becoming a dark mirror of the standard he rode against. Kate had eluded Caleb Croft’s Secret Police in 1893, been buried under the treads of a clanking war machine in 1918, woken up covered with Dracula’s blood in 1959, had survived the Black Monk BOP trip of 1968 and dug herself out of a Romanian jail with her fingernails in 1977. A bed of ice cubes in a steel coffin wouldn’t be her final resting place.

Other human-vampire remnants in the institute were maintained at the lowest level of life. More than trophies, they were templates in cold storage. In arctic dark, they whispered their former names: Feraru, Josie, Patricia, Rudolph, Frank. Their persons - everything that made them who they were - had been stolen with their blood. While they survived as intermittent blips on the monitors, their shapes were available to the shifter, Holly. Kate shuddered to realise the dormant Patricia was Patricia Rice, whom she had met (and not liked) at the Embassy siege, reduced to a weathered mummy, a skin-clad stick-figure.

Physically she was in as bad shape as the others. But something independent had remained in her, worm-like. Perhaps because she was fresher than the rest; perhaps because she had a longer, harder history. She’d escaped, disguised as the ‘medical waste’ Alcore dumped in the storm drains. Then, she’d found her way across town, slipping from shadow to shadow like a ghost fleeing the exorcist, following a golden mind-thread that led her, as she’d hoped and feared, to her friend Geneviève. They must know now that she was free. Even if the corpsicle containers weren’t regularly checked, the shapeshifter would know Kate was loose. Holly maintained intimate contact with those she fed off.

Her hand crept up Geneviève’s back. She felt her friend’s heart, her paradoxical
warmth.
She concentrated, cutting through alien fog in her mind, calling the missing half of herself. A curved barb sprouted from her thumb.