A Taste of Blood Wine Read online

  A TASTE OF BLOOD WINE

  By

  Freda Warrington

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Prelude: Ride to Hell

  Part One

  1. Outside the Rain

  2. Coils of Ice

  3. Seeing through the Veil

  4. Shadow against the Wall

  5. Touching the Light

  6. Pallid Companion

  7. No Spoken Word

  8. Crystal Visions

  9. Into the Darkest Heart

  Part Two

  10. About the Fire

  11. Whispered Secrets

  12. Written in Bones

  13. In the Still of the Night

  14. Dreams and Chains

  15. Someone to Blame Me

  Part Three

  16. Silent All Day

  17. Ghost in the Looking Glass

  18. Come in out of the Darkness

  19. Who is the Beauty, who the Beast?

  20. The Dark Birds and the Walking Dead

  21. Shades of Night

  22. In a World that never Ends

  Envoi: Dark upon Light

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  A Taste of Blood Wine by Freda Warrington© 1992, 2000 'Ghosts,' 'Ring-a-Rosey' and 'Ride to Hell' Copyright © Horslips. Used by permission.

  A TASTE OF BLOOD WINE

  An MM Publishing Book

  Published by Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc.

  PO Box 7

  Decatur, GA 30031

  Editing by Stephen Pagel

  Copyediting, proofreading & interior layout by Teddi Stransky

  Front cover photograph by Michael Trevillion

  Cover design by Kevin Murphy

  ISBN: 1-892065-48-7

  http://www.MeishaMerlin.com

  First MM Publishing edition: February 2002

  Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

  * * *

  Acknowledgements

  For help with research, inspiration, encouragement and friendship; thanks to Keren Gilfoyle, Susan Charlotte Berry, Storm Constantine, Julie Parker, Anne Gay, David Gemmell, Andrew Stephenson, John Richard Parker, Don Maass, and Kathy Gale.

  Special thanks to Caroline Jones and Mark Weatherall, for all their help at Selwyn College, Cambridge; and to Marlene Fleet, for "Der Doppelganger".

  Thanks also to Barry Devlin and Horslips, and to Stevie Nicks, for music that has haunted me down the years… and inspired some of the chapter titles.

  'Ghosts,' 'Ring-a-Rosey' and 'Ride to Hell' Copyright (c) Horslips. Used by permission.

  * * *

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated with love to my mother, Ida Warrington, who let me watch vampire films at an impressionable age…

  * * *

  PRELUDE:

  RIDE TO HELL

  Oh! hateful shadow!

  Oh! pallid companion!

  Why mockest thou my grief and woe?

  —Heine

  "Der Doppelgänger"

  The battlefield was deserted now. The fighting had swept I on into the distance, leaving behind an uneasy lull that lay thick and cold as fog, shuddering with distant explosions. As he moved slowly across the devastated plain, the vampire paused now and then to look up at the sky.

  Shellfire punctured the skin of night. A mile or two away, scarlet spheres of light rose against the blackness, sparks fountained and fell in coloured showers. The vampire was arrested by the beauty of the sight, the trails of yellow and silver fire and the soundless fall of smoke. Beauty, even here. A rocket, drifting down on a silk parachute, lit up the landscape as bright as the moon with a freezing light that filled the shell-holes with phantom movement.

  And underneath the fire of the sky lay the craters, ruined trenches and lines of barbed wire trodden into the mud; and everywhere, the dead and the dying.

  The vampire walked through a no man's land where men had been buried by explosions, thrown up out of their rough graves, half buried again; where the wounded had been left to die because their comrades could not come back for them. He walked silently, an impossible apparition to anyone who was left to see him; too unhurried and reflective to be real. The continual thud of shell-bursts, which drove men mad, did not trouble him. Several bullets had passed through him that night, but his flesh had healed swiftly in their wake. The carnage could not touch him physically, yet his eyes were clouded.

  The dying; he felt them all around him. Through the stink of mud, petroleum and smoke rolled the smell of blood, heavy and sweet; enticing to the vampire and therefore incongruous amid this horror. The thirst rose independent of his will. Thirst and revulsion. Mixed with the vibrant scent of the living, the powerful tang of death and congealed blood weighed coldly in the back of his throat.

  No human could have heard the cries of the injured above the barrage, but the vampire could not shut them out. They were everywhere, directionless; screams and sobs, the last dry groans of those who no longer had the strength to call for help. One voice, more plaintive and piercing than the others, cried over and over again in German for his mother.

  No one would come to help them. No one could.

  Deep in a crater, the vampire found a soldier half submerged in the mud. His uniform was plastered to his body, his face almost black with dirt, but his eyes flickered very white in the bursts of false daylight. An English soldier, this one. There was a great hole in his side through which the viscera gleamed dully. To the vampire's enhanced sight the colours were vivid, the reds and purples of the raw flesh infinitely varied even in darkness. Blood seeped down into an oily pool in the bottom of the crater and made a crimson spiral on the surface.

  The man was in agony almost beyond speech, but he reached out to claw at the vampire's legs. A brave grimace broke like a wound across his face.

  "Knew you'd come if I hung on. It's this ruddy 'elment—can't get comfortable—"

  The vampire knelt beside him in the soil, supported his head and removed the tin helmet. The hair beneath it was baby blond, the face under the grime so young; too young. Surely he had lied about his age to enlist… but perhaps he was considered old enough to die.

  "Thanks, mate," said the soldier. "Where's Harry, have they found Harry?"

  "I don't know," the vampire replied softly. He bent down, looking at the pulse beating in the boy's throat; avoiding his eyes. God, so young.

  "Will they be long with the stretcher?" The young man swallowed drily. "Gawd, it hurts. Will it be long?"

  "No," said the vampire. "Not long."

  The skin of the boy's neck tasted foul, bitter with the ingrained filth of the trenches, with sweat and smoke. But the hot pulse of blood laced the foulness, drawing the vampire on until the skin broke and the incandescent fluid burst onto his tongue.

  Crystal sweetness. A ruby light that outdazzled the battle flares, the two-edged ecstasy of feeding; the compulsion so strong that it almost sickened. Wrong to take pleasure in this death, impossible not to… The vampire closed his eyes in bliss as he drank, but at the back of his throat the bitterness remained.

  Only once the boy cried out, more with shock than pain. Then he sank swiftly into unconsciousness. His heart beat slower and slower but it rolled on tenaciously like the endless rumble of guns, each throb softer and heavier than the last, clinging to life… until at last, there was stillness. One moment of utter silence and peace.

  As the vampire let the boy go, the reality of the battlefield came down around him like a booming tarpaulin. He felt warm, on fire, but the young soldier's skin was icy and his head
hung slackly to one side. Free of pain now, at least.

  The vampire raised his head. He wanted to distance himself from the lifeless victim, but something made him pause; an unmistakable tightening of the ether. No human would have sensed it, but to him it was as sharp and clear as the hiss of an unseen shell to a soldier. The air crystallised for a second into the image of a stained glass angel, stark black and white. Then, stepping out of the hidden dimension, this apparition became flesh and blood; a tall wide-shouldered man with dark hair and waxen skin, a statue carved on too large a scale. The face was too angular and deep-etched to be called handsome, and it radiated a harsh power of personality; the solid conviction of a leader who knows he is never wrong. There was a mole on his left cheek, a black singularity against the whiteness.

  The vampire recognised him with dismay.

  The being looked down at the vampire, his eyebrows contracting into a severe dark line. "I find you in the strangest places, Karl," he said disapprovingly. His voice was deep and resonant. A priest's voice.

  The vampire sat back on his heels. The intrusion both wearied and alarmed him, but he didn't reveal his feelings. He replied coldly, "I didn't ask you to look for me, Kristian. I don't want you here."

  "You don't want me?" There was a keen, sweet menace in the intruder's voice. "You can't deny me, any more than you can deny the air! Not the air, nor God, nor myself. We are all immanent, part of everything. You should not be here, my beloved. I am your master, and I want you back."

  A loud explosion shook the air and the being looked up, distracted for a moment. Shocked, even. His profile was Grecian against the red glow of the horizon.

  The vampire Karl waited for the concussion to roll away. Then he said, "It's four years since we last had this argument. I almost hoped you had let me go. Why confront me here, now?"

  "I'm trying to save you from yourself." Kristian squatted down, eyeing the corpse that lay between them with a mixture of distaste and curiosity. "Did he die fast, or slowly?" Kristian said softly. "Did he suffer?"

  Karl, repulsed by his morbid interest, did not answer. Kristian looked up and spoke in a harder tone. "There's no need for you to be here. There are cities far away, where the lights glitter and people throng the streets, the War no more to them than words in a newspaper. You could feed among them and return to the comfort of Schloss Holdenstein, as do the rest of my flock. Why immerse yourself in this horror?"

  "Why not?" said the vampire Karl.

  "Because it's nothing to do with us, this human mess!" Kristian struck the ground. "We are above it!"

  "Are we?" said Karl. He feared Kristian, but he would never let the fear win. "Why shy away from evil, when we are evil ourselves? You shun it now—but later you will want every detail, vicarious experience from a safe distance. Perhaps you are too horrified to face it because it has proved your equal—or worse than you."

  "Do not speak of evil, Karl." Kristian's dark eyes gleamed. "The only Devil is man. Man is the Devil! This is the folly for which they must be punished. What should I do but watch from a distance and laugh as they destroy each other? Yet you are too horrified not to face it. You may justify it to yourself, but you are like a boy poking a dead rat with a stick to see if it moves. Do you think you are doing any good here?"

  Karl stood up slowly. His clothes and hands were caked with earth, but the chill was nothing to him. He was divorced from the squalor. They both were; two spectral figures in the desolation, ghosts glimpsed only by the dying. "No," he said quietly. "What I do is wrong, no more and no less so than the War itself. But some of them… they're children."

  "Do you think I don't know what you feel?" Kristian came up beside him and rested a heavy hand on his shoulder. "You cannot die, yet you are still obsessed by the idea of death. The further away it recedes, the faster you pursue it and the more it eludes you. But why torment yourself like this, when I have told you the answers a thousand times?"

  "You think you know everything," Karl said wearily. "I don't know how you can remain so arrogant, after you've looked on this."

  "There is nothing arrogant about knowing the truth," Kristian hissed, his grip tightening. "Evil, ha! I could pass along those wretched lines of soldiers like a hurricane, an angel of death worse than any shell-fire. I'll show them war, I am war!" His lips drew back from his long white teeth. " 'The Lord is a man of war'… but I choose to remain outside it because it's nothing to us, a battle in an ant-hill. We have the whole sky, the Crystal Ring. Why obsess yourself with the petty concerns of man? Come back with me, Karl." Kristian's voice became persuasive with a fatherly charm that seemed to promise all. He ran a finger along the vampire's cheek. "You always were such a beauty. You shine like a star in this filth, it can't touch you. It can't touch us."

  The vampire was silent.

  "I can make you come back."

  "I know," said Karl. "But you won't."

  Kristian smiled, but his eyes were cold as poison. "I would rather not, because I am waiting for the happy day when you see God's truth and come back of your own accord."

  "You will have to be very patient." Karl felt trapped by Kristian's domineering power and size, yet the feeling was strangely distant. He said, quietly and rashly, "I look at you and I see no answers. I see only hollowness. God and the Devil… they are just words, attempts to put shapes on the unknowable. They may sound convincing but they evaporate as soon as you speak them and the world is still there, unchanged. Cling to your ideas, if you must have something to believe in. Don't try to impose them on me. They give no shape to this madness."

  Sudden fury congealed in Kristian's eyes. Karl knew he had provoked him, but he was unprepared for the violence of Kristian's reaction.

  "Blasphemy!" roared Kristian. With one hand he held Karl's arm hard enough to crush the muscles to pulp on bone; with the other he tore at Karl's collar and thrust a sharp fingernail deep into the flesh of his throat.

  Gasping at the savage pain, Karl gripped his wrist and tried to pull him off, but Kristian was unyielding as rock. He deliberately kept his nail in the wound as Karl's swift-healing unhuman skin closed around it.

  "I could tear your heart out of your chest!" said Kristian. "How do you think it would feel, to be pulled apart bit by bit when you cannot lose consciousness? To be torn and heal and be torn again, over and over? I've done it to others less wicked than you!"

  Then he ripped the fingernail out of Karl's throat. The wound reopened in a jagged flower of fire, agonizing. By instinct Karl stepped sideways into the dimension from which Kristian had first appeared, the world aslant that only vampires could enter, which they called the Crystal Ring. Karl entered it to escape, but Kristian dived after him.

  To mortal eyes they were now invisible. To their own eyes, the battlefield still lay around them but it had lost perspective, seeming compressed and two-dimensional. The sky, though, unfolded into a new and miraculous realm; a phantom landscape of infinite depth, rolling with fiery colours. The lower air currents solidified into bronze and violet hills that rolled slowly past like clouds. Higher still, mountains towered like thunderheads, gleaming black and deep blue, with crimson light from above washing their sides. They were translucent and they changed shape continually in their majestic drift across the heavens.

  Towards the lower hills Karl fled, but Kristian pursued him, seizing him and trying to drag him back. As the world and the sky had changed, so were their bodies transformed in the Crystal Ring, their human forms attenuated to their very essence. They became slender ebony creatures cloaked in lacy wings. Angel-demons, fighting in a realm that meshed with the sky yet was like nothing of earth; a dream terrain forever flowing like liquid glass. On amethyst-cold slopes of cloud they struggled, Kristian lunging for Karl's throat with bared fangs, Karl thrusting him off with all his strength.

  "You owe me everything!" Kristian's voice was everywhere, like thunder. His face, black and aquiline in this changed form, loomed in Karl's vision with the deep volcanic colours of the Cr
ystal Ring burning behind him. "I made you, you are mine! Without me you'd be dead. How can you look on your creator, saviour, master and not believe in me?"

  Karl broke out of his grip by dropping out of the Crystal Ring and returning to Earth. He emerged into the sky and fell a short distance onto the ground; the impact was painful, but it did no harm. Kristian fell beside him.

  In human shape again, the two vampires picked themselves up from the mud of the battlefield and stood a few feet apart. Kristian radiated anger like a furnace, but Karl stared past him into the distance, feeling empty, only wishing his unwanted companion did not exist.

  "Say something to me, Karl," Kristian said eventually. "To fight me so hard you must be full of anger."

  "Is that all you want from me? A reaction?"

  "Yes! Anything!"

  "Why should I give you even that?" Karl said coldly. "I did not ask to be taken into this existence."

  "Does a child ask to be born? I have made you a feather in God's dark wings. In His name, I have given you eternal life!"

  "How long have you lived, a few hundred years?" said Karl. "You have not the faintest conception of what the word 'eternal' could possibly mean. No one has."

  Karl thought for a moment that he had won. Kristian's luminous rage was born of his inability to shake Karl's indifference. Karl added, "I'll never come back to you, Kristian, because I feel nothing for you. Why can't you accept it? I ask nothing of you except to be left alone."

  Kristian moved towards him, his voice ominously low. "I alone have the power to destroy those I create. You would not be the first to go into the Weisskalt, don't think yourself so special."

  "I believe you would carry out your threat, if I made you angry enough," said Karl. "I no longer care, that's all."