The Dark Blood of Poppies (23 page)

“I know. I’m sorry.” The timbre of his voice lulled her towards forgiveness.

“Was he dead when you came to me?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know before anyone else?”

“Others knew,” he said. “They didn’t want to distress the party guests by announcing it.”

This statement didn’t quite ring true, but she let it pass. “Did you know Russell well?”

“As I said, he was a friend. I know nothing about you, Mrs Stafford, except what he told me.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“That without you, he had no reason to live.”

His head was turned slightly away, but looked sideways into her eyes; aware of her, but inwardly distracted. Certainly not attempting to flirt. She was irritated yet intrigued.

He was beautiful, in his understated way, like a creature of another race, another time. Not unlike Karl… different, but with the same ability to confuse and captivate…

Oh, no
, she told herself firmly.
He won’t get me like that. I’m immune.

“Look, Mr Pierse, I know you’re upset by Russell’s death. So am I. I was fond of him.” Half-truths and lies slid out with equal ease. “But our relationship had no future. He was so young. I was hardly the ideal daughter-in-law. So I had to end it, for his sake. I thought he’d get over it, never dreamed he’d…”

Sebastian sat forward, looking straight at her. “Would you have acted differently, if you’d known how desperate he was?”

“Why should I?” A smile iced her lips. “A threat of suicide would have made our liaison no more feasible. I have an aversion to emotional blackmail.”

“Quite so. All the same…” As he spoke, she received the impression that Sebastian Pierse actually did not give a damn about his so-called friend. “I can see why he felt as he did.”

This remark took her off-guard. Not that she was unused to compliments, but she hadn’t expected them from someone so aloof. “I beg your pardon?”

“Now I’ve compounded the sin,” he said. “Mrs Stafford, would you consider forgiving me over dinner?”

His lovely eyes were suddenly all over her. Robyn felt a dart of triumph. It seemed she’d misread him. He was no phantom, only a man, and he was falling for her after all, so predictably, like all the others.

In that moment, a delightful intention uncoiled like a snake’s tongue inside her.
I’ve got him
, she thought.
And he thinks it’s so easy. But I’ll have him, and I’ll make him pay for thinking he can manipulate me.

“I hardly know you.”

“All friendships have to begin somewhere. Please,” he said with endearing sincerity, “let me make amends.”

“Well… all right.” She spoke with careful indifference, letting her eyelids fall. Then she looked up with the innocent, enticing expression that made idiots of most males. “If you think we have anything to discuss.”

“As long as we’ve laid Russell to rest, we can begin again with anything in the world.” He sounded positively tender. “Anything you desire.”

* * *

Alone in his hotel room, Josef felt at home. The solitude of a plain, comfortable room, a lamp pooling yellow light on the desk, an open book; all pleasantly familiar. It was his habit to read long into the night. He sat in shirt-sleeves, reading about the long-haired demon of the night, Lilith.

He felt certain that Charlotte would visit him tonight.

The previous night at the party, she’d admitted that Violette had met Robyn in the garden.

“Nothing happened,” Charlotte had tried to reassure him. “And I’ve told Violette to leave her alone.”

“Will she?”

“Yes. She doesn’t take victims indiscriminately. She has no reason to attack you or Robyn.”

Josef was not reassured. The danger had come too close. Robyn alone with a vampire, all unsuspecting… the thought chilled him. Charlotte’s attempt to placate him only underlined how dangerous she felt Violette to be.

His head ached. He pinched the skin between his eyebrows.
If anything happens to Robyn, if Karl or Violette touches her, it will be my fault! God, how did I get into this?

Everything in his research portrayed Lilith as an uncontrollable, negative force. The dark side of the psyche. How could anyone contain a creature as wild as Lilith, except by destruction? The word of God, or a stake through the heart?

Josef, despite everything, still believed in the forces of good and evil.

He willed Charlotte to arrive, wanting to emphasise his concern for Robyn. She always arrived without sound. He should be used to her by now, yet it was always a shock: the spidery realisation that he was no longer alone.

Now he felt her standing behind him, more tangible than a ghost. He caught a hint of perfume, a soft footstep on the carpet. Without looking round, he drew and released a controlled breath.

“
Guten Abend
, my dear,” he said warmly. “I hoped you would come.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

The voice was not Charlotte’s. It was low, accented, sharp as glass. And her perfume was wrong, too heavy…

He twisted round, one arm gripping the back of his chair. The slight figure at the foot of the bed was Charlotte’s opposite. A bright young party creature, dressed in sparkling crimson. Her face was a bleached heart under a feathery bandeau, but her beauty was distorted by the livid black hunger in her eyes. Dark roses, the same red as her hair, trailed over the shoulders, suggestive of congealed blood and sweet, musky decay…

He’d never seen her before, but she reminded him of Karl. Did Karl have a sister, another member of the dark clan?

Gripping the chair to steady himself, he said, “Can I be of assistance, Frau –?”

“Oh, you’re a calm one, Herr Stern.”

She came towards him. Before he could stand, she somehow twined herself around him and was on his knee. Her hands caged his neck, thumbs on his windpipe. God, how cold she was! When Charlotte touched him her hands were sometimes warm, sometimes cool, but this creature was like iced wax.

And she was heavy for someone so slender, like cold stone leeching his warmth.

“What is this?” Josef whispered.

“I think you know, vampire-lover.” Her smile was a parody of tenderness. She pulled off his spectacles and threw them onto the desk. Because she was so close, he saw her in clear focus. He stared in flat terror and fascination. Flawless, her skin, and radiant. The eyes were drowsily luminous… pupils expanding, drawing him in. Her mouth glistening. When she spoke, he glimpsed her teeth and the red tip of her tongue.

“I thought you were a little old for Charlotte… but no.” Her fingers travelled over his cheeks and forehead, burning him with trails of frost. “You are very attractive, old man, like a magus with your silver hair and troubled eyes. You’ve seen a lot of life, haven’t you? Too much. And now you’re tired. So tired.”

She was hypnotising him, but he couldn’t stop her. A dream-state fell on him. He struggled to move but his body was anchored…

Suddenly she twisted round and slammed one hand onto the book, making him jump.

“What do you know about her?”

One moment, seductress – the next, interrogator.

“Who?”

“Lilith, of course. Otherwise known as our mad genius Violette.”

“Only what’s in the book. Take it, read for yourself.”

She turned back, enveloping him again. “Well, it doesn’t matter. You’ll tell me eventually. Do you love Charlotte?”

He couldn’t hold back the truth. “Yes.”

“And does she do this to you?” With her left hand, the vampire broke the buttons from his shirt, slicing threads with her fingernail. Now her hand was exploring his ribs, sliding down over his lean abdomen, stealing warmth. Her lips touched his cheek, travelling in light kisses towards his mouth.

Josef’s hands came forward to grasp her hips. He couldn’t help it. Fear flowed through him as he realised what a fool he’d been, welcoming Charlotte into his life as if to say, “See how courageous and knowing I am, not like the superstitious fools all around us!”

Because, even though Charlotte was gentle and kind to him, she was still a vampire. She had to restrain her hunger to spare him. And this fiend who now devoured him was the dark side of the same coin. She was the danger he’d refused to acknowledge.

And still he welcomed the pressure of her lips as their mouths parted in a mutual “O” of lust, their tongues meeting, tasting—

She tasted of blood.

Ending the kiss, she whispered into his ear, making him shiver. “You want me, don’t you?”

He nodded, eyes closed, mouth awash with fear and desire.

“On the bed or here on the chair?”

Her matter-of-fact crudeness stunned him. Drugged by the need for release, he tried to say, “the bed,” to maintain at least a semblance of decorum, but before he could speak she swung one leg across to straddle him, her dress ruching around her thighs. Her hands worked at his trouser buttons. Then she slid forward and he felt the naked heat of her.

He groaned. The ache was unbearable.

“You want me,” she whispered into his neck, “even though you know what will happen.” And she laughed, a ripple of malice.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because Charlotte values you. It pleases me to destroy what others value.” As she spoke she lifted herself onto him, sheathing him in her moist, tight flesh. She wasn’t cold there but hot, burning. The pulsing rhythm began and Josef’s head fell back. Couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Only this excruciating ecstasy, building even through the web of terror.

She tore his shirt off his shoulders. Her nails ripped slits in his chest, drawing blood. She licked the drops away. Then she began to bite him, bruising without breaking the skin; pausing now and then to lap at the bloody nail wounds.

He cried out with pain. Heavy agony twisting tighter…

His climax was like an artery bursting. He felt as if he were pouring blood inside her. Turning dizzy, he slumped back, trying to push her away with strengthless hands. He couldn’t breathe.

But he was lost under the fervid bud of her mouth, as it nipped its way towards his neck. She was like a lush jungle vine consuming him, a purple-tongued flower scented with musk and blood…

“Well, that was not your best effort, was it?”

Her voice shuddered with her own excitement. His eyes opened and met her gaze. Her pupils were sightless with thirst, her mouth open, the canine teeth lengthening until they locked into place with a ghastly faint click.

“Relax,” she said sarcastically. “I’m not going to kill you.”

Let it end. Why does she hesitate?

In a final peak of horror, he knew that it wasn’t his throat she wanted. Instead she slid off his lap and knelt between his feet.

“You should have remembered,” she hissed, “to attend to my pleasure before your own. One chance only.”

The vermilion mouth with its ivory daggers came lancing down. Blackness exploded around him like the wings of a thousand crows.

* * *

Violette haunted the alley behind the hotel like a stray cat at the kitchen door. She felt restless to the point of distress. The thirst again, the damned thirst.

Three hours ago, she’d been a swan-queen commanding a stage. Now here she was, huddled in a black coat and cloche hat pulled down to hide her eyes, pacing the backstreets like a vagrant alcoholic.

That’s what I am
, she thought.
An addict.

If the audience could only see me now!

I’ll have to do it. Take a human. I could go to Robyn… no, not yet. I’ll find a stranger.

Or I could resist… Until my control breaks and I take someone at random; oh yes, my male principal perhaps, or another of my poor girls! No.
She bit her lip. The tang of her own blood tormented her.

Do I have to endure this every night to the end of the world? Why can’t I be like Karl and Charlotte? Just… do it.

Or… feed on other vampires. It isn’t the same – but it’s better than nothing, better than this agony.

She looked up at the long rows of windows. Most were dark, but a few showed strips of light between the curtains. She knew which room was Josef’s.

Violette had been furious with Charlotte for bringing Josef, a mortal, to study her like a specimen. Later, though, her anger had faded.

What do I know, after all? I feel Lilith in me like the raging cruelty of nature. The lioness bearing down the weakest quarry. The cuckoo pushing babies from the nest. Nestlings left to die, like little children caught in wars. And through her I remember things that could not possibly have happened. I remember them like dreams with gaping holes where the cold gales of the Crystal Ring rush through.

I know nothing of who I really am. But perhaps Josef knows. Perhaps he has wisdom like Lancelyn… and even though Lilith’s instinct is to mock and revile the wisdom of men, I think that I should swallow my pride and ask for help…

Charlotte and Karl weren’t far away. They’d been out to hunt and were returning to the hotel; she sensed them, faint but clear, drawing closer. She had a few minutes before they appeared: time to see Josef. Not to harm him. Only to talk.

Violette entered the Crystal Ring and floated through steel-grey layers that were the kitchens, the foyer, stairs and corridors. The humans she passed were shimmering hairpins of fire, oblivious to her.

As she approached Josef’s room, she knew something was wrong. The atmosphere warped with a heat-haze of fear, pain and excitement. As she reached the door, the scent of blood uncoiled to torment her. The thirst responded, drawing her fangs to full length against her will.

Someone had reached Josef before her.

The door dissolved, letting her through. As she snapped into the real world, she saw a hideous scene: the human on a chair, head back, hair dishevelled, face contorted – and the vampire straddling him. She was dressed in blood-colours, her face and hands dripping gore.

Ilona.

Violette heard her own father’s voice from years past, “She was a lamia… hair the colour of blood…” She remembered the horrible injury he’d exposed to her in his madness, the mutilation that in the end had destroyed not only his life, but her mother’s and her own.