Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [83]
‘By now my family must have spread over the globe, like Christianity. I expect everybody alive is related to me somehow.’
He tried to laugh but she was serious again.
‘I don’t like myself when I gush, Charles. I apologise for having embarrassed you.’
Beauregard shook his head. Something had broken between them, but he was not sure whether it had been a bond or a barrier.
29
MR VAMPIRE II
Charles’s tear still tingled on her tongue. She’d not meant to taste his grief but had been unable to help herself. In her old age, she was getting cranky and hard to fathom. Most elders went mad. Like Vlad Tepes. From Charles, she had a bubble of memory. The grip of a thin hand, the smell of dying blood, the heat and dirt of a far country, the fierce struggle of a woman to live, to bring life to the world. Alien feelings, alien pain. Geneviève could not become pregnant, could not give birth. Did that mean she was not truly alive? Not truly a woman? It was said that vampires were genderless, the sex of their bodies as functional as the eyes on the wings of a peacock. She could take pleasure in love-making, after a fashion; but it did not compare with feeding.
All this from a tear. She swallowed and licked the roof of her mouth until the mind-taste was gone.
‘We’re nearly at Toynbee Hall,’ Charles said.
They were by Spitalfields Market, in Lamb Street, just around the corner from Commercial Street. The market, open until dawn, was well-lit, and crowded. The noise and smell were familiar.
With a lurch, they came to a halt. Geneviève was thrown forwards, against the wooden shield that fastened over the front of the hansom. Charles caught her and helped her up, but she found herself on her knees in the tiny floorspace. She could not see out of the cab. The horse neighed in hysteria, the cabby trying to rein her in with ‘whoa’ and a hard pull.
Geneviève knew something was wrong.
With a horrid wrench, the neighing abruptly stopped. The cabby swore and bystanders yelped in terror. Charles’s face drained of emotion. He was a soldier moments before the charge. She’d been seeing that expression on the face of soon-to-be dead men for centuries. Her eye-teeth extended, and she salivated, ready for attack or defence.
There was a heavy thump on the top of the cab. She looked up. Five yellow fingers, nails like hooked knives, stuck through the wood. They flexed like bone-jointed worms and a fist ripped away a section of the roof around the trap. Through the splintered slit, she glimpsed a ripple of yellow silk. Her hopping persecutor had returned. A wrinkled face pressed close to the hole, mouth gaping to show rows of lamprey-teeth. It grew and grew, ripping into the cheeks, exposing glisteningly muscled gums. The elder chattered, lips shrivelling to nothing, sparse moustaches sprouting from raw, wet flesh.
Hands took hold of either side of the hole, and peeled away more wood. Layers of varnished carriage-wood shattered, singing like broken violin strings.
Charles had drawn his sword-cane and was looking for a point of thrust. She had to carry the fight to the enemy before Charles tried to be her protector and got himself butchered.
From the floor of the cab, she launched, pushing hard, gripping the edges of the tear and pulling herself up. She burst through the gap, jagged edges ripping her good dress and blunting on her skin. The cab was rocking under the weight of the Chinese, who was balancing on the cabby’s box. She saw the driver sprawled on the pavement a dozen yards away, trying to sit up amid a crowd of gawkers. A cold wind blew her unbound hair about her face and whipped her dress around her knees. The cab wobbled under their shifting weight, anchored only by the dead horse.
‘Master,’ she addressed herself to the vampire, ‘what is your quarrel with me?’
The Chinese changed. His neck elongated, dividing into prickle-haired insect segments. The arms extending from his bell-shaped sleeves were several-elbowed, with