TWENTY-ONE
‘Don’t let them take me.’ Evgenia’s hands clutched Lydia’s arm. Lydia could feel her body trembling, pressed against her in the dark doorway. ‘They’ll make me one of them. And then I will be lost indeed.’
‘I won’t let them take you.’ Even as she spoke, sleepiness rolled over her mind like a drug. She backed into the cottage, bolted the door, and ran to the bedroom. From her luggage she yanked the spare garlands she’d woven, garlic and wild roses, as if she were a peasant girl in the sixteenth century instead of a scholar and a physician and a modern young woman of the twentieth. ‘Put these—’ she began to say, but stopped herself, as Evgenia backed away, face twisted with repulsion and fear.
‘It hurts . . .’
‘Good. It’ll hurt them, too.’ Lydia wrapped one of the garlands around the door handle, hung another over the door. There weren’t enough of them, so she ran into the bedroom again and pulled in half the garlands that she had hung above her bedroom windows every night she had slept in the cottage, so that there would be enough for a little to hang over every window in the place. She was so sleepy she blundered into the walls as she moved, her brain fighting the relentless pressure of the vampire minds.
How can I be this terrified and still fall asleep? ‘Who is it out there? Is it Madame?’
‘I don’t know who it is.’ The girl pressed her hands to her temples, her eyes. ‘Voices – it isn’t her. When she held me – when I changed – it was as if she was a part of my thoughts, a part of my heart . . .’
Lydia staggered into the kitchen, pulled open the drawers of the sideboard. Thank goodness His Excellency would be ashamed to have less than the best silver in the izba for his guest. She fumbled with the kitchen string, dropped the silver forks and spoons as she bound them onto the ends of the broom handle and the poker from the stove. ‘Take this . . .’
‘It burns!’ cried the girl. ‘It burns my eyes, like smoke—’
‘It will burn them where it touches their flesh,’ said Lydia. ‘Can you endure it?’
‘I think so.’ Evgenia looked disoriented, her eyes starting to wander, as if she were having trouble understanding.
‘Listen to me,’ said Lydia. ‘Focus your mind. Try to push past the voices, try to close the door on them.’ She yawned hugely, shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it. ‘This may be your only chance. Remember, it’s not for long.’ She threw a glance at the very un-peasant-like clock in the ‘red corner.’ It was just past two. She took a deep breath. Whoever these were – Golenischev or his rival or those angry young rebel fledglings Jamie had told her about – they would have to leave soon, if they were themselves to reach shelter before the first stain of dawn in the sky. If they were only here to observe, to keep an eye on—
Glass shattered with a splintering tinkle in the bedroom. Lydia dashed in to see shadowy forms draw away from the window sill, unable to bear the proximity of the garlic. At the same moment she heard windows break in the parlor behind her . . . four rooms, eight windows, two defenders . . . and Evgenia screamed. A long pole – from the boathouse, Lydia thought – probed through the bedroom’s broken window, the hook on its end groping and scratching for the garlic wreath. Lydia strode up to the window, stabbed into the darkness with her own silver-ended makeshift weapon, and as the boat pole drew back she snatched down the swags of herbs from that window and the other, threw herself back through the door into the parlor.
‘Gospozha!’ Evgenia was jabbing and thrusting through the window with her own weapon, trying to parry another boat pole. She was too far away to use the weapon effectively – Lydia wound one of the half wreaths around the bedroom doorknob, snatched up her heavy skirts, and crossed the parlor in two bounds. In the dark beyond the window she glimpsed a white face, like a corpse’s, but mobile and soft . . . A woman’s, she thought, as the reflective eyes caught the light.
‘Bitch!’ yelled a voice from the darkness, and another called out something in Russian; Evgenia fell back behind Lydia, clinging to her – another window shattered, at the far end of the parlor, from a billet of firewood thrown like a spear. Lydia ran to the place, jabbed into the darkness, struggling with the near-conviction that this was all a dream and it didn’t matter if she defended the house or not.
‘You have to get close!’ she shouted back at Evgenia.
Grimly, the girl ran to parry the groping boat-hook when it came in again, first jabbing with her silver weapon, then reaching up to grab the boat hook, to try to pull it away from the attackers. The force with which it was jerked back made her cry out.
‘They’re stronger than you!’ Lydia fell back, grabbed the second fragment of wreath and wrapped it around the door handle of the study. ‘We only have to hold them off for a little while—’
A man’s voice called out in Russian again, close this time – he must be standing on the veranda. Evgenia shouted something back, then whispered over her shoulder, ‘He says that you will betray me. That, because I’m already vampire, you’ll wait till I fall asleep . . . He says I must, I will, soon. And then you’ll drag me outside, to burn up when it gets light . . .’
‘I won’t.’
Tears were running down the girl’s face, crumpled with grief in the dark frame of her hair. ‘Even though I’m damned? He says, nothing can save me.’
‘You don’t know that,’ said Lydia desperately. ‘A priest will know—’
Another jeering shout from outside. Lydia almost didn’t need the translation.
‘He says, priests lie. All of them.’
‘Do you believe—?’
Something crashed against the door from the bedroom behind them; Lydia swung around. A woman’s voice cursed, cold and silvery – in Russian. Then a third window broke, and Lydia rushed to parry the long hooked pole that came through—
She didn’t know how it happened – true accident or clumsiness engineered, like the sleepiness, from outside – but her feet caught on one of the low peasant stools and she fell. Her head hit the corner of the table with a sickening crack on the way to the floor. At the same instant she heard more glass break somewhere – the attic, she thought, the windows upstairs, but she seemed to be viewing the room and herself through the wrong end of a telescope. Get up! Get up!
She managed to roll over, and the pain that axed through her head brought on a spasm of vomiting, excruciating in her corset. Gray swam down over her senses, and she heard Evgenia scream despairingly. Then cold hands dragged her up; she saw eerily glowing vampire eyes as claws ripped at the collar of her blouse.
‘Vyedyma!’ The vampire – thin and cold-faced with a cruel slit of a mouth – threw her down, clutching his hand where the welts were already ballooning on his fingers from her protective silver chain. Beyond him, Lydia could see Evgenia backed into a corner by two others, woman and man; the cold-faced man drew back his foot to kick her. ‘Gryazn—’
Wait, no, don’t I at least get to see Jamie again before I die?
Something – a shadow – flickered in the deeper shadows of the parlor, and as Lydia’s vision fractured away to nothing she saw what seemed to be a pair of disembodied white hands appear out of the darkness behind her attacker. One – connected by a wrist like whalebone to a grimed and smutted shirtsleeve – wrapped neatly around the vampire’s jaw, while the other molded itself over temple and forehead, but she wasn’t sure.
She recognized the ring on one finger, as with a neat twist Ysidro snapped the other vampire’s neck.
That scene repeated itself for her a half-dozen times, it seemed, in various forms of dream, until she came to in blackness illumined by a single tiny flame. Damp chill lay clammy on her skin, where her torn blouse exposed her throat. She smelled coals and wet earth. Her feet were raised and lay on what felt like someone’s lap – Evgenia’s, she realized, when she heard the girl speak. We must be in the cupboard in the cellar, in the safety of the darkness . . .
‘Then there is no hope for me?’ the girl pleaded.
Ysidro’s voice – light and soft and disinterested – replied from just behind her head. ‘It depends upon how you define hope, child. Can you become human again? No. No more than you can by effort of will return to the flesh you wore as a child of two. This is not possible.’
‘Am I damned? You who are one of them – you who are vampir – you would know—’
‘I regret to say that I do not, Evgenia. I have been vampire for three hundred and fifty-four years now, and never have God or any of His angels appeared to me to inform me of whether I am damned or saved, or if I am able to alter my state, or even if they care, about me or anyone else. There is no way for any of us but forward, and none – living or Undead – can see through any gate before its portals are passed.’
Very light, very chilly hands passed across Lydia’s forehead. She was lying, she slowly came to know, with her neck and shoulders propped on something – a folded coat? – and her head resting against, but not directly on, Ysidro’s narrow thigh. She groped for his fingers, even as Evgenia whispered, ‘And the one you killed?’ Her voice was thick with sleepiness, already drifting away. ‘Is he now in Hell?’
‘Mistress?’ Ysidro’s grip tightened gently around Lydia’s fingertips.
Silver, she thought. I still have silver on my wrists . . . Or did I take it off?
‘No, child,’ Ysidro went on, ‘my strength is enough to snap our friend’s neck, but not tear his head off – at least, not quickly. But it rendered him unable to move, giving his colleagues the choice of carrying him away to safety – they had bare minutes of true darkness left – or leaving him to burn up where he—’
Ysidro’s voice broke off. Moving her head – Lydia felt as if her own neck had been broken, and she fought to keep from throwing up again – she saw that Evgenia had slumped over in the corner of the crowded little cupboard where they huddled. The girl’s eyes were shut, her pale mouth hanging slightly ajar, like any sleeping fifteen-year-old’s, except for the fangs.
‘Is vampire sleep that much like real sleep?’ she murmured.
‘No, Mistress.’ Ysidro moved the candle. ‘How many flames do you see?’
Lydia flinched, turned her head away, the light painful. ‘Too many.’
‘Then how many fingers?’
‘How do I know?’ she said, her mouth feeling like it belonged to someone else. ‘I don’t have my spectacles. My head hurts.’