The Dark Blood of Poppies (63 page)

A long time passed before it dawned on Sebastian that he was acting hysterically. He realised then that Fyodor and Rasmila were helping him, only to prove that it was hopeless.

He lay over Robyn’s body, kissing her waxy cheeks, trying to will the life back into her. She was so white, so heavy. He had done this to her. He began to weep bitterly, his tears running over her closed eyelids and into her open mouth.

“What did we do wrong?” he cried. He glared up at the others. “You – you betrayed me, you bastards!”

Rasmila pressed her hand to his wrist. “Sebastian,” she said calmly, “we did nothing wrong. Sometimes the transformation does not work. You knew that before we began.”

“But why?” He kept staring at Robyn, touching her, sobbing uncontrollably. “Why?”

“Many reasons,” said Fyodor. “She told you it was against her will. I’ve never known anyone resist the transformation by will alone, but –” he shrugged “– there are some the Crystal Ring won’t accept.”

“It’s Violette’s fault,” Sebastian said, his voice hoarse. “She turned Robyn against me.”

“More than that,” said Fyodor, leaning against a bedpost. “The changes she caused as Lilith in the Crystal Ring may have prevented –”

Sebastian leapt up and seized the thin material of Fyodor’s shirt. Fyodor winced, turning his blanched face away. “Is that what it comes to?”

Rasmila tugged at his arm. “What, Sebastian?”

“You
made
this go wrong, to set me against Violette! Killed Robyn in order to use me like your tame warrior in some grand cosmic battle!”

“No, no,” she said soothingly. She went on pulling his arm until he let Fyodor go. “We did not, I swear. Lilith is already ours; we had no reason to harm Robyn!”

But they didn’t care, he knew. He wanted to rip them apart for their indifference. And suddenly he understood. “
You
told Violette where to find Robyn! Jesus Christ! Nothing matters to you, does it? You act but you don’t feel. You are reptiles, not angels. God forbid I should ever become like you!”

“Every pain and every loss you suffer will make you a little more like us,” Fyodor replied.

“Get out,” said Sebastian. He got up and thrust a poker into the embers of the fire.

“You don’t mean this. It’s grief speaking,” said Rasmila. “We warned you about Lilith. We tried to help you. If this is Lilith’s fault, don’t blame us!”

“And she’s going to pay for it,” Sebastian said grimly. “But on my terms, not yours. Now get out of here before I kill you.”

“Don’t send us away. We are forsaking Simon for you!” Rasmila persisted, her tone musical, soothing. “When we take Lilith to Simon, and he is overcome by our dedication and begs us to return, then we’ll laugh and tell him it’s too late, we belong with you instead. How beautiful our revenge will be! You promised us that we three would be together, a trinity more powerful than ever we were with him.”

“I lied. I used you.”

“No,” she said fervently. “Your grief will pass. This is a new beginning, not –”

Sebastian spun round and drove the poker, red-hot and smoking, into Rasmila’s breastbone. She uttered a shriek, the most hideous he’d ever heard, but he bore down with such force that the poker went through her ribcage and into the floorboards beneath. She lay there, pinned, shrieking.

Sebastian grabbed a firescreen, a heavy sheet of brass with embossed patterns and thick, blunt edges. Fyodor flung himself at Sebastian, clawing wildly and screaming curses in Russian. Ignoring him, Sebastian slammed the metal screen down on Rasmila’s throat and saw her head roll aside in a gout of crimson.

Her eyes gleamed up at him. Comets and blue stars, dying. She had meant… something to him.

Sebastian uttered a single sob. And then he saw Fyodor fleeing through the doorway.

Racing after him, Sebastian caught him within six paces. They ran two steps in the Crystal Ring, then Sebastian hauled him back into the real world.

As Fyodor twisted around to fight, Sebastian shoved him backwards into one of the big windows. Glass shattered and rained on the courtyard below. The angel’s thin back caught hard across the window ledge. Sebastian heard and felt the dull crunch as the spine broke. Curses became screams. Crazed, Sebastian shook the screaming vampire. He broke his neck against the window frame, slit his throat on broken glass, dropped him head first so that his skull smashed onto the cobblestones thirty feet below.

Blood oozed, like yolk from a diseased egg, red into the silver hair.

Sebastian stared down at the angel’s corpse, shaken.
I have killed my own gods
, he thought.
So much energy and rage… and none of it has brought Robyn back to life.

Calmer now, he returned to the bedroom, lifted Robyn’s body onto the bed and sat beside her for a long time, stroking her face and talking to her.

“Well, if you weren’t dead, I’d murder you. Look what you’ve done to me. I wanted no company but my own, until I met you. Then you worked on me and turned me against my own nature until I couldn’t exist without you – and then you go and leave me. That is cruelty, Robyn. I thought I was the master, but you’ve surpassed me on every count. I see you’re smiling a little there in your sleep. And you never once told me you loved me. You never surrendered. I admire you for that. So you won after all, and I concede defeat for the first time in my life – but I’m a bad loser, beautiful child. A very bad loser.”

A
s Simon bore Karl to the floor and sank hooked fangs into his neck for a second time, their minds touched.

To Karl, Simon seemed a red-gold entity, a lion-god of ancient power who believed himself omniscient and yet did not fully know himself. Always seeking wholeness through others, never finding it. Forever feeding, discarding the drained husks – Fyodor and Rasmila, Cesare sometime in the future, Karl and Charlotte if he could – but afterwards, always, still hungry.

Clamped in the red embrace, Karl felt Simon’s emptiness but could find no sympathy for such ravening self-obsession. Even to be “chosen” by God was not enough for Simon.

“I thank God,” Karl whispered into the blond hair, “that I am not like you.”

The words fell like drops of acid into milk, curdling passion to hatred. Simon raised his head, fangs slicked with Karl’s blood, his eyes wheels of metal, sparking.

“You had your chance; you are nothing to me now.”

Karl waited, rigid, for him to feed again. Instead, Simon stood up. As he did so he wrenched Karl’s arm and flung him aside.

The pain, as muscles tore and immediately began to heal, was so searing that Karl couldn’t move. Struggling, he turned his head to see Violette being held down by Cesare and John – and Simon poising himself above her in the ultimate arrogant expression of conquest.

Her head was back as she strained to avoid Simon’s mouth, her own mouth open and her fangs extended. Karl willed her to strike, but she appeared defenceless, as if Raqia had withdrawn its fickle strength and poured it all into Cesare’s triumvirate. Her naked grief burned into Karl’s soul.
This obscene behaviour is for humans, for brutes
, he thought.
We should be above it.

With a surge of will, Karl got to his feet. He looked for a weapon against Simon, anything, even a lit torch – too late. Violette vanished into Raqia, and the brutish trinity dived after her.

Simon had taken only a few mouthfuls from Karl, not enough to weaken him. Ignoring the explosions of fire running from shoulder to wrist, Karl plunged into the Crystal Ring.

He saw streaks of darkness against the firmament: Violette was a ragged arrow, with the others nearly close enough to catch her. Yet they did not. They let her flee, as the soot-black fortress above them drew her like a whirlpool.

Karl saw Violette and her pursuers swallowed by a strange forest. Seconds behind them, he plunged between the weird obsidian trees. The surface beneath him was slick yet rock solid, sheened with ruby redness. Glacial air enveloped him. The silence sang.

What is this place
, he thought,
and what’s happening to Raqia?

He lost all sense of time. The pursuit seemed eternal, mythical, taking place on a mountainscape in a dream.

He saw Cesare, Simon and John – three demons, grey, dull orange, crimson – catching Violette at the base of the coal-black wall. She pressed against the wall like a pinned moth, or a crucified figure. They were talking, but he couldn’t hear the words until he almost reached them.

Then he heard Violette say, “Exile,” and Cesare’s cold words, “Go inside.”

Karl made a desperate effort to catch up. But when he reached them, moments later, Violette had gone.

Cesare and his comrades turned to look at him. They appeared dangerous and grimly self-satisfied, triumphant knights who’d taken the first victory in a holy war.

They wanted me to follow them
, Karl thought.
That’s why Simon didn’t disable me completely.

“Always the hero,” Simon said, laughing. “Why are you so frantic to protect the witch? She treats you with nothing but scorn. She would have brought death to all if we hadn’t contained her.”

Karl ignored his taunts. “Where is she?”

“In the darkness, where she belongs.” Simon waved a radiant hand at the wall. “Will you go after her?”

“What is this place?”

Simon only smiled. “Her prison. She brought a tomb into the immortal realm. Now she’s trapped inside. Fitting, isn’t it?”

“You can’t carry out your plan.” Karl spoke quietly, gazing straight at Cesare. “You cannot overrun the world with vampires. Mankind can’t support us. We’re meant to be solitary, unseen predators, not a brazen army. We are Lilith’s children – not yours.”

“Sentimentality traps you in the decadent past,” Cesare replied. “The world is changing, and you can’t stop it. You owe us your life – for murdering Kristian, for defying both Simon and me – but you’re not worth executing. You are pernicious, but weak. The Crystal Ring, the mind of God, favours its chosen ones. Who are you to argue? We have brought vampires back to God and defeated Lilith! We’re going home to Schloss Holdenstein now. You have a choice: come back as our prisoner, or go freely after Lilith.”

Karl knew Cesare was right. He couldn’t defeat them, nor could he leave Violette to face the darkness alone.

“Go,” Simon said with venom. “Then I can have Charlotte to myself.” Karl looked stonily at him and Simon added, “What should I do – send her to you instead?”

Karl thought of Charlotte, coming back to find the dancers gone and no sign of him or Violette, searching, never finding them… But he knew she wouldn’t want him to desert Violette.
She would do the same herself
, he thought in despair.

“Go on, then.” Simon flourished a hand. “Follow her. I said you’d go to hell with Lilith; am I not a prophet?”

Not bothering to answer, Karl touched the wall. Although granite-hard at first, it liquefied under his fingers. Dread chilled him, froze his heart. Whatever lay beyond, he knew he could never go back…

Karl stepped forward into sable nothingness.

For several long moments, the wall held him like a fly in molasses. Then the substance relinquished him. He was inside a space, in darkness so intense that not even vampire sight could penetrate it.

He walked slowly forward, blind. His arm throbbed, but the injury was healing. Pain was nothing compared to his concern for Violette. That, and fascinated terror.

Then he saw faint white flames ahead – Violette’s face and hands. She must have been standing with her back to him, then turned to see who was following.

“Violette!”

Relieved, Karl hurried to her. The surface beneath his feet felt hard but yielding, like wood. Odd illusion. As he faced Violette, her eyes were huge, swimming with light and fear.

Realisation hit them both at once.

“My God,” she exclaimed. “We’re back in human form! But we’re in the Crystal Ring, aren’t we?”

“We were,” said Karl. “Now I don’t know where we are.”

She frowned. “Why did you follow me? I didn’t expect or want you to do so.”

“My choice was between this, or going back as Cesare’s prisoner,” he said patiently. “If I were you, I would rather not be here alone. Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” she said briskly. “I’m cold, exhausted, furious and frightened. Other than that, yes, I’m perfectly all right.”

Karl thought,
I should have learned by now that it’s hopeless showing any concern for her
. “Then we’d better try to find a way out.”

“There isn’t one.” A tremor came into her voice. “That’s the point, there is no way out for me. Nothingness forever. Exile, starvation, but never death. That’s why I’m scared, Karl. I don’t know why you had to walk in after me. That must have delighted Cesare! Why is it I can hurt someone like Pierre, who is nothing to me, yet I can’t touch tyrants like Cesare or Simon? Still, it’s too late to rage about them now.”

Karl looked around. Blackness, in every direction. Terror plucked at him with insistent fingers, whispering inside his skull. He perceived their prison as an infinite construction, groaning under its own weight and age. An oubliette of all human malice and nightmares.