additional disgust for the vampire. Merrick knocked on doors three times his height...
... she realised, ridiculously late, that Charles was not afraid of whatever he would face in the Palace. He was afraid for her, afraid of the consequences of something soon to happen. He took her hand and held it tight.
‘Gene,’ Charles said, voice just above a whisper, ‘if what I do brings harm to you, I am sincerely sorry.’
She did not understand him. As her mind raced to catch up with him, he leaned over and kissed her, on the mouth, the warm way. She tasted him, and was reminded of everything...
... her voice was cool in the dark.
‘This can be for ever, Charles. Truly for ever.’
He remembered his meeting with Mycroft.
‘Nothing is for ever, my darling...’
... the kiss broke, and he stood back, leaving her baffled. Then the doors were opened and they were admitted into the Royal Presences.
Ill lit by broken chandeliers, the throne-room was an infernal sty of people and animals, its once-fine walls torn and stained. Dirtied and abused paintings hung at strange angles or were piled loose behind furniture. Laughing, whimpering, grunting, whining, screaming creatures congregated on divans and carpets. An almost naked Carpathian wrestled a giant ape, their feet scrabbling and slipping on a marble floor thick with discharges. The stench of dried blood and ordure was as strong as it had been in Number 13 Miller’s Court.
Merrick announced them to the company, palate suffering as he got out their names. Someone made a crude remark in German. Gales of cruel laughter cut through the din, then were cut off by a wave of a ham-sized hand. The gesture gave the congregation pause; the Carpathian jammed the ape’s face against the floor and snapped the animal’s spine, prematurely ending the contest of strength.
Upon the raised hand, an enormous gemstone ring held the burning reflections of seven fires. She recognised the Koh-i-Noor, or Lake of Light, the largest diamond in the world, and the centrepiece of the collection known as the Crown Jewels. Her eyes were drawn to the shining light, and to the vampire who wielded it. Prince Dracula sat upon his throne, massive as a commemorative statue, his enormously bloated face a rich red under withered grey. Moustaches stiff with recent blood hung to his chest, his thick hair was loose about his shoulders, and his black- stubbled chin was dotted with the gravy of his last feeding. His left hand loosely held the orb of office, which seemed in his grip the size of a tennis ball.
Charles shook in the presence of the enemy, the smell smiting him like blows. Genevieve held him up and looked around.
‘I never dreamed...’ he muttered, ‘never...’
An ermine-collared black velvet cloak, ragged at the edges, clung to Dracula’s shoulders like the wings of a giant bat. Otherwise he was naked, his body thickly coated with matted hair, blood clotting on his chest and limbs. His white manhood coiled in his lap, tipped scarlet as an adder’s tongue. His body was swollen with blood, rope- thick veins visibly pulsing in his neck and arms. In life, Vlad Tepes had been a man of less than medium height; now he was a giant.
A warm girl ran across the room, pursued by one of the Carpathians. It was Rupert of Hentzau, his uniform in tatters, a ruddy flush on his face. The plates of his skull dislocated as he shambled, distorting and reassembling his face. He brought the girl down with a swipe of a paw, scraping silk and skin from her back. Then he began to tear at her back and sides with triple-jointed jaws, taking meat as well as drink. As Hentzau fed he became wolfish, wriggling out of his boots and britches, his laugh turning to a howl. The girl was instantly dead.
Dracula smiled, yellow teeth the size and shape of pointed thumbs. Genevieve looked into the broad face of the King of Vampires.
The Queen knelt by the throne, a spiked collar around her neck, a massive chain leading from it to a loose bracelet upon Dracula’s wrist. She was in her shift and stockings, brown hair loose, blood on her face. It was impossible to see the round old woman she had been in this abused creature. Genevieve hoped her mad, but feared her well aware of what was happening about her. Victoria turned away, not looking at the Carpathian’s meal.
‘Majesties,’ Charles said, bowing his head.
An enormous fart of laughter exploded from Dracula’s jaggedly fanged maw. The stench of his breath filled the room. It was everything dead and rotten.
‘I am Dracula,’ he said, in surprisingly unaccented and mild English. ‘And who might these welcome guests be?’
... his head was in the eye of a nightmare maelstrom. In his heart was steel resolve. All he saw made him
Never entirely a soldier, Beauregard had learned strategy at school and in the field. He knew, without seeming to notice, the relative positions of all in the throne-room. Few of them mattered, but he was especially aware of Genevieve, Merrick and, without quite knowing why, Mina Harker. All, as it happened, were behind him.
The man and the woman on the dais were the focus of his attention; the Queen, whose visible distress gripped his heart, and the Prince, who sat at his ease on the throne, embodying the chaos about him. Dracula’s face seemed painted on water; sometimes frozen into hard-planed ice, but for the most part in motion. Beauregard discerned other faces beneath. The red eyes and wolf teeth were fixed, but around them, under the rough cheeks, was a constantly shifting shape; sometimes a hairy, wet snout, sometimes a thin, polished skull.
A fastidiously dressed vampire youth, an explosion of lace escaping at his collar, mounted the dais.
‘These are the heroes of Whitechapel,’ he explained, a fluttering handkerchief before his mouth and nose. Beauregard recognised the Prime Minister.
‘To them we owe the ruination of the desperate murderers known as Jack the Ripper,’ Lord Ruthven continued. ‘Dr John Seward of infamous memory, and, ah, Arthur Holmwood, the terrible traitor...’ The Prince grinned ferociously, moustaches creaking like leather straps. Ruthven, Godalming’s father-in-darkness, was plainly put out at the reminder of the ghastly deeds in which his protege was popularly believed to have collaborated.
‘You have served us well and faithfully, my subjects,’ Dracula said, his praise sounding like a threat...
... Ruthven stood by Prince Dracula’s side, completing the triptych of rulers, the elder vampires and the new-born Queen. There was no doubt that Vlad Tepes was the apex of this trinity of power.
Genevieve had met Ruthven nearly a century previously, while travelling in Greece. He struck her then as a dilettante, desperately amusing himself with romantic trifles but oppressed by the aridity of his long life. As Prime Minister, he had exchanged ennui for uncertainty, for he must know the higher he was raised the greater was the likelihood that he would eventually be dashed down to the depths. She wondered if any other could see the fear that nestled like a rat in the bosom of Lord Ruthven.
Dracula looked Charles up and down, almost benevolently. Genevieve sensed her lover’s blood boiling, and realised she had adopted an aggressive posture, teeth bared and fingers hooked into claws. She forced herself to stand demurely before the throne.
The Prince turned his attention to her and raised a thick eyebrow. His face was a mass of healed-over scars which swarmed about his smooth features.
‘Genevieve Dieudonne,’ he said, rolling her name around his tongue, trying to squeeze meaning from the syllables. ‘I have had word of you before, in earlier times.’
She held out her empty hands.
‘When I was new to this blessed state,’ he continued, gesturing expressively, ‘you were spoken of highly. It has been a wearisome task, keeping abreast of the peregrinations of our kind. The occasional report of you has come to me.’
As he spoke, the Prince seemed to swell. She suspected he chose to go naked not simply because he was able to, but because clothes could not contain his constant shifting of shape.
‘You counted a distant kinswoman of mine as a friend, I believe.’
‘Carmilla? That is so,’ said Genevieve.
‘A delicate flower, sadly missed.’
Genevieve nodded agreement. This monster’s solicitousness was sickly-sweet, hard to swallow without choking. As fondly and without thought as a master pets an old hunting dog, the Prince stretched out a hand and caressed the Queen’s tangled hair. Panic bloomed in Victoria’s eyes. At the base of the throne-dais clustered a knot of shrouded
