gob!” Al peered at the crumbling wall, hoping his dismissal was obvious enough. From the sanitarium’s well-tended garden, he could see Carfax House, the chapel with its cracked steeple bulking darkly athwart the night sky. From the outside, it looked impenetrable, however…
“Oh little boy,” the Lunatic called, sweet-voiced. “Would you like a treat?” He thrust one hand through the bars of his window, fingers pinching at something that wriggled.
“Sod off,” Al seethed as the barking grew more frantic. “Shut it, or that dog’ll wake the whole of Essex!” He glared as the madman started to giggle.
“Think that’s a dog?” Another giggle, and the man howled suddenly, full-voiced and lusty. “It’s a wolf! The Master’s servant, just like me! Like me! And not like you!” The arm thrust through again, bony finger pointing, shaking with rage or palsy. “You wheezing ninny! You’ve not enough lives in you to serve him! You’re pathetic, you hear? Don’t you walk away from me! You forgot your treat! Come back! Don’t leave me alone!”
He burst into tears, and was still wailing when Al scrambled over the wall and out of earshot.
“Quite a piece of work, that one. Bloody barking Limey. Harumph.” Inside the chapel, Al leaned on the huge box and sulked. The answer to his worry was just there, blocked in by a crate he just couldn’t budge. “Ought to cull out Cartley’s tongue.” He grumbled, ” ‘Tongue of fat, buggerin’ bastard’ ought to be an ingredient in some spell or other. First time in his life he’d be useful!” He snickered briefly, wiped grime and sweat from his face, then sighed. “Ballocks.”
Suddenly, Al remembered his Aristotle. He searched the chapel in a sudden fit of motivation. “Leverage!” A fallen roof-timber poked out from under a tattered curtain of cobwebs. Al seized it. “Perfect!” Wedging the board between the wall and trunk, he heaved.
The huge box creaked, shifted. Al held his breath, put a boot against the wall, and shoved harder. Just when he thought his lungs would burst, the crate slid back with a lurch and a shriek of nails on stone. Al scrambled to try the door. “Ahh, not quite— bloody hell!”
Losing the last of his patience, he clambered over the box and slithered into his hiding place, too annoyed to care when he tore his only coat. He found the lamp by touch and examined the door’s lintel. As he’d feared, the chalk was an unintelligible smudge where the trunk slid down the wall. “Dammit, they ruined everything! I knew I should have scratched that glyph into the stone. Blast and damn!”
He turned back to the worktable with a fierce scowl and began digging through the piled volumes thereon. “Now which book did I find that in?”
Drakul fed vigorously that night on grubby street Arabs and opium-dazed Chinese from the far reaches of the English Queen’s empire, like spice and savour to his jaded palate. Even the tame English were a welcome relish after five hundred years of bland Rumanian peasants. Delicate, these English were, and decadent as the soft, green land that spawned them. He thought of Lucy, pink and sweet as the roses in Hillingham’s sprawling gardens, and barked a laugh. A sweetmeat too cloying for every day, that one—better to sip a bit at a time than spoil her worth with greed. Especially with the luxury of variety to be had at no more expense than a brief journey to London.
Besides, he played a delicate game at Hillingham estate—one he had no intention of quitting untimely. Drakul had chosen his first bride, and the chase was exhilarating for all the little obstacles that her caretakers threw in his way. His animal servant had not shirked at their garlic or guards or crosses on the window, and at Drakul’s bidding had opened the way for him into the lush expanse of his bride’s private chamber. He laughed, the memory of Bersicker’s feral joy sparking fire in the back of his brain. This night would not soon be forgotten in the Westenra family, such as remained of it.
The wolf had known his business; to open the way and to terrify. Not like that idiot Renfield, who ranted and babbled and was very nearly more aggravation than he was worth. As he thought of the man, Drakul felt the contact between them flicker to life, though he had intended no such communication. A mo-ment later, the man began shouting his usual promises of loyalty and adoration, flailing his arms through the bars and in general making a canker of himself. With a mental reminder not to drink the blood of opiated Chinese again, the Lord of the Un- Dead wheeled around to approach his sacred earth from the east, with the distant threat of dawn to his tail, and the shrieking lunatic out of earshot.
He came to earth among the weather-tumbled stones of the chapel’s burial yard, long desanctified by blood and fire. Like the chapel in his own castle in the Carpathian Mountains, no prayers had been sung here for hundreds of years, and the only sacred work being done within the crumbling walls was that of the beetle and the fly.
“The perfect place for me,” he said aloud, rolling the English words around his tongue as he had done with the life-blood of the Chinese girl with the flat, glassy eyes and sweet-burning pipe. “From this place of murder and sacrilege, I, Vlad Drakul ride out to meet my destiny as master of this green and pleasant land.” He laughed. “Let any come against me who dare!”
The wind answered with a rush, made the trees in the sanitarium’s manicured park creak and thrash, and left behind a breath of something at once new and familiar. A boy, on the verge of manhood: his scent had haunted the chapel where the vampire’s precious Wallachian earth lay hidden. The nuances were clearer now: the boy was frightened, he did not eat well, and was not at all strong. The scent of his fear was tangible—sharp, but sweetened with an undercurrent of hunger, almost greed. He was also very, very close. Intrigued, Drakul listened, heard the rasp of fingers on paper echoing in a bare stone room, heard a slight wheeze in the boy’s breathing, the hiss of a burning lamp.
One of his boxes had been moved, and behind it, a door revealed. From under this door came both a delicate life-scent and a thin streak of light. Drakul looked in. A lamp’s glow warmed a tiny room, outlining a gangly youth. He sat with his back to the door, hunched awkwardly in a chair too small for him. A table and crate—the only other furniture the cell afforded—were buried under precarious stacks of books, papers, bags, leaves… doctor’s things, but the youth was no doctor. Drakul smiled, sharpened his sight to pick out details that uncertain light might have hidden from any other hunter.
The youth had ruddy hair, coarse and apparently resistant to attempts at England’s respectable grooming. No beard. He wore the threadbare garments of a clerk—junior clerk more likely—or he could have been a shop boy in his Sunday best. But he wore the boots of a peasant instead of the shoes that London’s gentry and all who aped them wore. Drakul liked boots. You knew what to expect from them, and the people who wore them. The vampire absently shifted his earth box out of the way and stepped around the door. The interloper did not so much as twitch. Drakul smiled. Imagine not knowing when one’s destruction stood at one’s shoulder! He cleared his throat.
The boy didn’t move. His breath did not even quicken. The smell of his mortal fear still pervaded the cell, but without the spike of panic that Drakul expected. He took a step nearer and coughed again. Still no stir, still no alarm. Drakul scowled. He was the Hammer of the Turks, terror of his country, the lord of the night, and this intruder ignored him in favour of… what?
He took another step, brought his shoes down on the stone with a clack. Still the youth did not notice, but now Drakul could see why; he was reading. The Count thought about killing him there, in the old way he might have done to a Turk on the battlefield; a quick twist of the head, and a jerk backward so he might be the dying man’s last sight. Then he caught a glimpse of the book and it gave him pause; a familiar pattern, arcane and ancient lay under the boy’s fingers. Scholomancy! Here in this place, this land and time of reason. In the hands of a shop boy. Unacceptable!
“What are you reading?” Drakul growled into the youth’s ear. At last the boy started, ancient book dropping to the flagstones with a flutter and thud. A ragged gasp escaped him as he tried to whirl in his seat, entangling his legs and upending the whole, himself, coat, chair, odds and ends from the table, and half a dozen more books into an undignified sprawl. Drakul did not laugh at the sight, though he wanted to.
The boy opened his mouth to speak, made a noise like a rat, then swallowed and tried again. His voice was tenor and loud with panic. “What’s it to you?”
The youth pressed his lips together, all colour draining from them. His nostrils flared with quick, shallow breaths as he gathered himself into a less precarious seat on the floor.
