Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [67]
She sang the songs of her long-ago childhood. She did not know if Lily could hear. The waxy red discharge from her ears suggested she might be deaf as well as blind. Still, the sound – maybe the vibrations in the air, or the scent of her breath – soothed the patient.
‘Toujours gai,’ Geneviève sang, voice breaking, hot bloody tears welling, ‘toujours gai...’
Lily’s throat swelled up like a toad’s and brackish blood, brown streaks in the scarlet, gulped out of her mouth. Geneviève pressed the swelling down, holding breath still in her nostrils to fend off the taste and smell of death. She pressed urgently, song and memory and prayer babbled together in her mind, leaking out of her mouth. Knowing she would lose, she fought. She had defied death for centuries; now the great darkness took its revenge. How many of Lily had died before their time to compensate for the long life of Geneviève Dieudonné?
‘Lily, my love,’ she incanted, ‘my child, Lily, my dearest darling, my Lily, my Lily...’
The child’s boiled eyes burst open. One milky pupil shrunk minutely, reacting to the light. Through the pain, there was something close to a smile.
‘Ma-ma,’ she said, first and last word. ‘Mma...’
Rose Mylett or whoever was the child’s human mother, was not here. The sailor or market porter who spent his fourpence to become her father probably didn’t even know she had lived. And the murgatroyd from the West End – whom Geneviève would track down and hurt – was passed on to other pleasures. Only Geneviève was here.
Lily shook in a fit. Drops of sweated blood stood out all over her face.
‘Mma...’
‘It’s mother, child,’ Geneviève said. She had no children and no get. A virgin when turned, she had never passed on the Dark Kiss. But she was more this child’s mother than warm Rosie, more her parent-in-darkness than the murgatroyd...
‘It’s mama, Lily. Mama loves you. You’re safe and warm...’
She took Lily from her cot, and hugged her close, hugged her tight. Bones moved inside the girl’s thin chest. Geneviève held Lily’s tiny, fragile head against her bosom.
‘Here...’
Pulling her chemise apart, Geneviève thumbnail-sliced a thin cut on her breast, wincing as her blood seeped.
‘Drink, my child, drink...’
Geneviève’s blood, of the pure bloodline of Chandagnac, might heal Lily, might wash out the taint of Dracula’s grave-mould, might make her whole again...
Might, might, might.
She held Lily’s head to her breast, guiding the girl’s mouth to the wound. It hurt as if her heart were pierced by a silver ice needle. To love was to hurt. Her blood, bright scarlet, was on Lily’s lips.
‘I love you, little yellow bird...’ Geneviève sang.
In the back of her throat, Lily made a throttling sound.
‘Goodbye, little yellow bird, I’d rather brave the cold...’
Lily’s head fell away from Geneviève’s breast. Her face was smeared with blood.
‘... on a leafless tree...’
The child’s wing flapped once, a convulsive jerking-out that unbalanced Geneviève.
‘... than a prisoner be...’
She could see the gaslight glowing like a blue moon through the thin membrane of the wing, outlining a tracery of disconnected veins.
‘... in a cage... of... gold.’
Lily was dead. With a spasm of heart-sickness, Geneviève dropped the bundled corpse on the cot and howled. Her front was soaked with her own useless blood. Her damp hair was stuck to her face, her eyes gummed with clotted blood-tears. She wished she did believe in God, so she could curse Him.