Holding me against my will was problematic now that they knew I could translocate.
Even though it's widely believed that a vampire has the power to become as mist or fog and pass through cracks or keyholes to enter or escape any dwelling or chamber, most of the undead don't really have this particular trick up their rotted sleeves. That's how I took Báthory's minions by surprise the first time. Now that they knew I had the power of a Doman, they had to scramble for a new game plan.
Making it doubly difficult was the fact that I wasn't bound to a coffin or the need to sleep during the day. As long as I didn't have to snooze and they did, I had the advantage.
On the other hand, they had hostages. And human allies who were armed and trained to deal with undead advantages.
Not to mention a pharmaceutical solution to the insomnia problem, as well.
BioWeb, among its other potions, philters, and witches brews, had a broad assortment of tranquilizing agents. Lieutenant Lenny Birkmeister and his quasi-military goons sent me off to dreamland shortly after Báthory and her undead minions retired for the day.
In short order I find myself back in Cachtice Castle, my dream state propelling me four hundred years into the past.
Past the discoveries and arrests.
Past the trial and executions.
The nether regions of my stone-and-mortar namesake are empty, devoid of prisoners.
I wander through Erzsébet Báthory's chamber of horrors and wonder how we could be frightened by thumbscrews and racks in stone-walled cells yet completely relaxed in glass and chromed labs where vials of anthrax and Ebola hibernate in stainless-steel coolers.
Here is the iron cage with the razored bars, spikes and twisted blades turned inward to provide the countess with her showers of virgin's blood. There, the whipping post with troughs to collect the unguents for her beauty regimen. Nearby an oubliette with a platform reminiscent of the autopsy tables in Red Two, the trays for knives and needles toppled to the floor, the instruments of the crimson harvest disposed of—or collected as grisly trophies by the mob that stormed the slaughterhouse beneath the witch's dark tower.
A sound on the stairs and I step back into the shadows. Only there are no shadows: the torches and lamps have gone dark and cold and this is but a dream where I can see with no light and walk with no physical presence.
The witch enters the chamber, runs her hand along the side of the rack in an affectionate gesture. "It was good while it lasted," she says as if recalling a moment of bucolic nostalgia. "Their terror seemed more exquisite back then. Even using the same instruments, duplicating the same settings, doesn't seem to heat the blood quite so eloquently today." She raises her eyes and gazes steadfastly into mine. "The pain, the horror," she says, "enhances the blood. It is like a potent spice that triples—quadruples—the potency of its power. And the taste . . ." I repress a shiver at the smile that curves her lips like a smoothly drawn bow. "Do you have any idea? One sip from a tortured virgin and you'll never go back to the merciful strike, the unconscious prey, the—"
"Okay!" I interrupt, "I get it! You're a cortisol freak. Or is it the elevated histamine levels that floats your boat?"
"My mistake was in using human servitors," she continues. Her eyes drop and she seems to speak more to herself—as if I am a ghostly presence in her dream instead of the reverse. "I subsequently recruited my chief retainers from the undead aristocracy. Peasants may be more overt in their enthusiasm but the highborn understand duty better over the long haul. I was ill-served by this lot but I learned invaluable lessons . . ."
Her eyes rise and lock onto mine again. "What lessons might I learn from you, Dragonspawn? What might you have learned from your Dark Sire?"
I shrug. "You mean beyond 'no good deed goes unpunished'?" I shake my head. "You can forget tracking Dracula down through me. I don't know where he is. I don't even want to know where he is. We don't exchange Christmas cards or share instant messaging, and he's totally out of my Rolodex."
"You share a blood-bond. And he is near."
I think my eyebrows rise: it's hard to tell in a dream, and a drug-induced one, at that. "He is, huh? Well, that's more than I knew."
She extends her hand in languid gesture. "Well, you still have your uses. . . ."
"You sweet talker, you."
"Join me. I have much that I can teach you. Many pleasurable things . . ."
It suddenly occurs to me that Erzsébet Báthory is supposed to be locked up in her tower and not walking about down here on the Dungeon Nostalgia Tour 1712.
"You can't understand until you've tasted the wine of pain," she continues dreamily, reaching out to touch my lips, "the bouquet of sweat and fear, the Bordeaux of blood and bruises . . ."
I slap her hand away. "There's all kinds of tasty, body-amping, mind-blowing poisons in the world, lady, and each one comes with a price tag. There's no point in taste-testing the ones I can't afford."
"I can give you a free sample."
"There's no such thing as a free taste," I say, flexing my knees. "I've got enough regrets without you adding to my list!" I launch myself into the air, passing through the ceiling like an insubstantial thought. I continue to rise into the cold night above the courtyard. I had sampled the illusion of flight in childhood dreams, but the sensation this time is crisp and definite despite the haze of barbiturates in my system. I rise up and up, the black thrust of Erzsébet's tower just a dozen feet to starboard.
I hesitate as I reach the slitted window of the countess' chambers turned prison. My senses grow sharper in the cold, crystal night air. I consider the moonlight upon the dark stone walls around the narrow aperture, how it is contrasted by the lamplight flickering from within.
A face appears on the other side of the mortared slot. A face made familiar by a handful of blurry woodcuts and an ancient portrait in oils. Momentary confusion gives way to epiphany. I continue my ascent, rising up and up toward the brightness of the moon—toward a new understanding of history and the reverberation of conspiracy and deception across four centuries. I rise out of the darkness of dreams and troubled sleep, climbing on a collision course with truth and maybe . . . just maybe . . . four-hundred-year-old vengeance.
I awoke to find a gray-eyed, gray-haired, gray-suited man sitting beside my bed. Behind him and at the foot of the bed—I turned my head—and on the other side, were five no-nonsense humans. Their postures marked them as military even though their clothing was devoid of any markings of rank or insignia. The way they held their weapons suggested they were familiar with preternatural biology and knew exactly what to do if I twitched the wrong way.
I eased my hands up and slid them behind my neck, lacing my fingers together to cradle my head. I stretched a little to wake the rest of my body. "Good morning, General," I said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to wake up to his nondescript face. "Or is it good evening, now?"
"It's good afternoon, Mr. Cséjthe," he answered. If his voice or his face implied any hint of a smile, I had totally missed it. "You've thrown off the tranquilizing agents faster than we anticipated."
"I've always had trouble sleeping in," I said. "By the way, if you're going to have a key to my bedroom, I think we should be on a first name basis. I mean, 'General' is so . . . general. General who? General Electric? General Quarters? General Mills?" I gave him my best "gee whiz" look. "Hey, if you're General Mills, would your headquarters be in Battle Creek?"
His lips thinned into a humorless parody of a smile. "You're a smartass, aren't you, boy? I know your type. Mock authority, scoff at discipline, spit on the flag . . ."
"Whoa there, Hoss!" Apparently I twitched too much: tasers, trank guns and automatic weapons shifted into firing position. "You can cuff me and smack me around and bore me to tears with sappy little speeches about the sanctity of your cause; you've got the men and the firepower and the hostages to keep me from walking out the door. But I won't have my patriotism questioned by the likes of Nazi Fascist traitors like you and your little pseudo-military circle-jerk here!"
He backhanded me but the position was awkward for him: it barely stung, didn't draw blood and I don't believe I even blinked. Hey, I had just given him permission, anyways.
"Mind if I sit up?" I asked. "It might help you get a little more leverage on the next one."
"You have no right to make accusations when you don't know what you're talking about," he said with a mildness that was the most unnerving thing I had experienced so far today.
"I know enough to make some educated guesses." I squirmed up slowly into a sitting position and eased my legs over the side of the bed. "You see, that's the thing about Evil: It always has tunnel vision. You people never seem to get the fact that the expedient course of action is rarely the moral one. For you, the end always justifies the means and collateral damage is always an abstract concept."
"You still don't know what you're talking about."
I rested my forearms on my knees and stared at the carpet between my feet, trying to rally my reserves of anger and energy. "Wrong. I'm talking about genetically tailored influenza viruses. Or something that walks and talks like the flu but packs a punch like an end-of-the-world plague. More importantly, it kills the right people."
"And who are the right people?" he asked, the picture of mildly interested innocence.
"Apparently they're whoever you say they are," I shot back. "Right now it looks like the elderly is one group of the right people—that's your Greyware Project, right? And African-Americans are the second group. Operation Blackout. Concise, descriptive, and clever: not like that baffling codespeak that the real military would use."
"There are higher purposes—"
"Yeah, tell me about your 'higher purposes.' I've got a pretty good handle on the 'what' and the 'how.' It's the 'why' that eludes my intellectual grasp."
He just stared at me and the look on his face suggested I wasn't worth the waste of breath that an explanation would require. Damn! It always worked in the movies: super-villain has hero within his power and gloatingly reveals all the details of his secret plans. Guess I didn't rank high enough on the Nemesis Chart. On the other hand I wasn't strapped to a sliding table with an industrial-strength laser pointed at my crotch.
Since clever and caustic witticism weren't producing the desired effect, I cheated. I gave him a mental nudge. I wasn't sure it would do any good: Faf and Mouse were seemingly immune, but it didn't cost anything to try.
I gave him a second nudge.
Then a gentle poke.
Extended psychic fingers and gave his cerebellum a squeeze.
Bingo; the grunts might be inoculated against vampiric mind melds but the general wasn't.
"Imagine a lifeboat," he said.
"Oh, this sounds familiar," I muttered.
"A lifeboat that has a forty-man capacity," he continued. "Maybe you can haul a few extra bodies aboard, let another dozen cling to the sides; but take on sixty or more passengers in any form and that boat's headed for the bottom. Now put that boat in the water with a hundred people trying not to drown. You can save forty, easy. Probably fifty if some of them stay in the water and hold on to the sides. But everyone's going to want in that boat and—as soon as the magic number is reached—everybody drowns. You can let that happen or you can try to guarantee the maximum possible number of survivors. The only way you can do that is by keeping the ones out of the boat who were going to drown anyway."
"Sort of a modern anti-Noah," I observed, "deciding who lives and who drowns."
"You may not like it, son, but do the math. If unpleasant decisions are not made then something even more unpleasant happens. You can be responsible for everyone dying just because you didn't want to get your hands a little dirty."
"So," I said, "seeing as how we're somewhat removed from the ocean, I'm assuming this lifeboat is metaphorical. An analogy. So, let me guess what we're really talking about. Entitlements? Social Security?"
"I may have misjudged you, son. You're not as stupid as you look."
"Keep calling me 'son' and I'm going to start entertaining thoughts of fratricide."
He smiled. Even getting all loose-lipped under my mental dominance, he was still trying to push my buttons. "Social Security is supposed to be in serious trouble by 2024 or 25," I continued, trying to hide the fact that he was moderately successful.
"It's been in trouble a lot longer than that and we're going to hit the wall a lot sooner than that. Deficit spending and the war on terrorism have drained the entitlements programs ahead of schedule, and Congress can't keep the lid on our pending bankruptcy much longer. When the government checks start bouncing there will be panic, economic collapse, anarchy. What would you do? Sit back and let it happen?"
I still didn't know if this guy was legitimate brass or bogus militia, but his numbers were the real deal. Once upon a time—back in the 1930s to be more precise, less than half of the general population was expected to live past the age of sixty-five. It took sixteen people paying into the Social Security trust fund to pay for one retiree and, given early twentieth-century life expectancy, the ratios worked. Fast-forward to the close of same century and changes in medicine and economics had changed the math radically. Eighty-six percent of the population was living past retirement age and only four people of working age were available to support each retiree.
Now, in the twenty-first century, the baby-boom generation had begun lining up for their retirement benefits and Gen X lacked the population base to fund the growing tidal wave of Social Security claims. On top of that, the cost of Medicare was doubling every ten years and claims to other entitlements were expanding exponentially. The mathematical fix was savagely simple: As long as a worker produces, he or she has value to the system. Once they retire, they not only lose their desirability as producers, they become economic liabilities. The Greyware Project was the simple, direct solution, a biotechnical assist to the Darwinian laws of economic entropy.
There was just one problem with his logic—that is, assuming you didn't find the willful murder of human beings for economic stability to be morally repugnant. The general's equation measured only economic contributions and those within the corporate payroll template. It assumed that "productivity" ended on a certain schedule. It didn't account for the necessities of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents: the guidance and stability they provided for the base unit structures of society—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Families. Neighborhoods. Communities. And this narrow economic definition failed to consider that some cultural contributions aren't possible until enough years and experiences are stacked up in a lifetime to begin great works rather than close out the books on them.
Would the Greyware Virus care that Voltaire was 64 when he penned Candide? What about other literary works, like Zorba the Greek, written when Nikos Kazantzakis was 66; The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White at the age of 70; or The Fountain of Age by Betty Friedan, 72? Would the Social Security Solution take into account the fact that actor Tony Randall was the same age when he founded the National Actors Theatre or that Jessica Tandy won Best Actress Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy at the age of 80? How about Tony Bennet's singing career enjoying a renaissance in his 70s or Grandma Moses starting a serious painting career at the age of 78? Jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and classical guitarist Andres Segovia touring to worldwide acclaim when they were in their 80s?
Never mind the moral repugnance of the Greyware solution—for every Alzheimer-tranced oldster drooling in a private ward in some entitlement-funded facility, there were hundreds of vibrant elders making their greatest contributions yet to the quality of communal life for society as a whole.
But how do you get these points across to the "Bottom Line" Institution? They've already reduced people to commodities long before they reach a certain age. Use 'em up, throw 'em out. They've served their purpose; never mind that the money they're entitled to is the money they've paid into the system over their lifetimes. Once the cow stops giving milk, it's time to make hamburgers.
The general nodded as if my silence indicated consent. "We are talking about the survival of the greatest country on the face of the earth."
"If we're reduced to this then maybe we're not so great as we think we are."
"There are historical and societal precedents," the general argued. "The American Indians—"
"You're going to cite me the example of what some of the nomadic, Plains tribes did when their elderly were too frail and ill to be cared for anymore. This is not the same thing. We're not talking about abandoning the elderly and infirm to live or die on their own: We already do that. We're talking about wholesale generational murder! So don't bring up the Hemlock Society or obsolete cultural groups like the Spartans. The only comparable cultural analogy is Hitler's Final Solution."
"This is nothing like that!" he roared.
"Yeah? The only noticeable differences I've picked up on so far is that you now have the technology to bring the Zyklon-B to the victims rather than the other way around. And no one's mentioned making soap or lampshades out of the elderly." I eyeballed him. "Have they?"
His face was red, now. "We are talking about survival, here!"
Or as a certain contestant on the Vietnamese game show What's My Lai once said: "We had to destroy the village to save it."
"Okay, I get the new Medikill program for the elderly," I replied, "but what's the deal with Operation Blackout? Isn't killing off a significant portion of the population sufficient? Or is it that bureaucratic attitude of a few million deaths here, a few million there—pretty soon we're talking genuine fatality rates?"
I don't know what I expected to come out of his mouth. That Blacks were a "mongrel" race as so many White supremacists were overly fond of saying? Well, that's sort of what it was, only dandified and dressed up as the second round of Useless People Economics 101. The general had more numbers ready and started off with the dramatic racial shifts in prison populations, statistics on crime and recidivism, poverty levels, school drop-out rates, joblessness, drug use, and—before I knew it—we were back to the Greyware issues of welfare and entitlements.
I tuned him out.
There was no point in even attempting a debate, internally or externally. The man was locked into his worldview and a cozy little conversation with moi wasn't going to change his accounting system or the way he crunched his numbers. I was better off nodding and agreeing and acting like a True Believer until I could get everybody to look the other way.
But then what?
Even without a roomful of Marine-wannabes there didn't seem be much that I could do about what I had learned. I felt like Mary Philbin unmasking Lon Chaney, pulling back the spooky veneer and finally getting a glimpse of the true horror underneath that was BioWeb.
The issue here was even larger than the issue of wiping out millions—potentially billions—for the shortcomings of a few thousand. I had used the term "African American" when the truth was this virus wouldn't stop to check your citizenship papers at the borders. If this thing got loose and did what it was designed to do, it would dwarf all of history's past attempts at genocide. It truly would be the end of the world for an entire race, a monumental crime against humanity that would put the death camps of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, China and North Korea—all of history's horrors from the Black Hole of Calcutta to the Trail of Tears to the Bataan Death March—in the category of "felonies and misdemeanors."
And that was just for starters. The follow-up question was: for what degree of ethnicity are you adjusting this virus?
Had the general and his band of brown-shirt patriots considered the fact that issues of racial "purity" and separation of the races were fairytale concepts at odds with the human genome? Perhaps his great-great-grandparents had introduced a little mulatto blood into the family tree. Would he find himself coughing out his last lungful of life alongside his distant cousins in some hospital ward a few months from now? Would we all?
Or was Operation Blackout geared to the genetic subsets for melanin—a different genetic issue than that of "race" or ethnicity?
I was impatient. I didn't want to waste any more time doing a verbal dance with Generalissimo Muscle-ini, here, so I took the direct approach. Probing his mind with mental fingers, I tried to roll his brain—much like I used to turn over stones by the river to hunt for night crawlers.
And, as in my childhood fishing expeditions, I found them: the general was quite mad.
It was a quiet and elegant psychosis, not loud and vociferous like George C. Scott's General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. More of an understated and unconscious, Anthony Hopkins-esque type of lunacy—not in the rabidly self-aware mode of Dr. Hannibal Lector but more along the subtle manners of Corky the ventriloquist in Magic.
I picked up a couple of interesting impressions as I considered the scramble of mentalpedes wriggling about the base of his skull.
First, he wasn't standard Government Issue, after all. Private militia, then—though he retained a strong conviction that he really was working covertly for Uncle Samuel.
Was it possible? Presidents, senators, and congressmen came and went with every election, but generations have whispered of a shadow government—unanswerable to the populace or its chosen but transitory representation. Might other gray men infest the corridors of power in D.C.? Shadowy gray power mongers who knew no masters beyond their own star chambers and secret societies? Might colorless, darkling hearts and minds birth such evil schemes and then entrust them to self-styled patriots-in-exile?
Perhaps. But I could not know the truth from this man's mind. It had been sane, once. Sane in the sense that bigotry and narcissism could rule a man and not impede his rise to power. But he had been twisted beyond his own feeble abilities for evil. The monster who ruled the East Coast undead had used her powers of psychic persuasion to reshape the general to her own dark purposes. A man who fancied himself a commander of men was nothing more than a spear-carrier for a campaign that was beyond his damaged understanding.
I opened my psychic fingers so that everything disappeared beneath the surface again with a little, telepathic "plop."
So it was a waste of breath to argue right and wrong: all I could expect to get out of a debate was an extra layer of security around Yours Truly. If I was to have any chance at throwing a monkey wrench into the works, I would have to act the part of team player.
And figure out how to smile without gagging.
By the time I had considered my real options and brought my attention back to General Genocide, he had finished his statistical analysis and had moved on to cultural comparisons to other disadvantaged groups—essentially how the "chinks" and "gooks" scored higher on the school LEAP tests despite the "niggers" home advantages of language and American culture . . .
I forced a grin. "Really, sir; I was just yanking your chain. You'll get no argument from me about the Black problem."
At least not right now when all the guns were on his side of the room.
"But," I added, "I'm afraid I get a little testy when I think about my dear old grandmother getting a dose of BioWeb super flu."
The general gave me a look that suggested he knew horseshit when he heard it, saw it, or smelled it and he wasn't, by God, about to swallow any of it.
"So, here's one of my negotiating points," I continued. "I sign on with you guys and she gets the vaccine."
"You don't seem to understand, son," he said, missing the whitening of my knuckles on that last word, "your ass is ours and it don't matter whether you decide to cooperate or not."
On that issue he was terribly misinformed: there was a vast difference between them having me and my being "cooperative." I intended to demonstrate the difference in no uncertain terms.
I just hadn't settled on a lesson plan, yet.
"Do you need to use the bathroom, son?"
"Huh? No. Why?"
"Because the countess wants you presentable this evening. She's planning on some formal ceremony shortly after sundown and it wouldn't do for you to soil yourself before I have to deliver you. Then we have a midnight flight to catch: her highness wants you bundled back to her base of operations in New York where her security situation is a lot tighter." A thoughtful look passed across his face—a rather misleading expression from what I had seen so far. "We'll have to trank you a third time, I guess."
"A third time?" I asked.
"The third time will be for the traveling."
"What about the second, then?"
The general's answer consisted of one word and a nod: "Sergeant."
A tranquilizer gun coughed and a hypo-dart smacked into my leg, injecting its dose on impact.
"Looks like you'll be a little late for the ceremony, son," he said, getting up from the chair and brushing himself off, "but I can't have you pulling any shenanigans on my watch. After sundown you're their responsibility."
To use or to lose, I heard his mind echo as he headed for the door.
My eyes started to flutter. This was just great! Unarmed and alone, I had just hours to arrange the fall of this high-tech House of Usher. Never mind that I had no practical plan and now I was going to spend most of that time drugged and unconscious.
Was I ever going to catch a break?
Ah, Lupé, I cried, I'm sorry I never got the chance to tell you how much you meant to me. That I'll never see your face again. That the world may well go down in flames and I won't be there to hold you—
=Hold on there, big guy, the cavalry's coming for you!=
Deirdre?
=Now admit it: Are you really so sorry to have the advantage of a blood-bond under the present circumstances?=
Are you all right?
=All right?= She laughed and my toes curled in a most unnerving manner. =Yeah, I'm all right! I'm not a physical or mental prisoner of Bloody Báthory, I'm not strapped to an autopsy table for Krakovski's amusement, I'm alive!=
You are alive?
=I just ate a cheeseburger—my first solid food in over a year. It was delicious! And now I'm standing outside in the sun. I think I'm starting to tan!=
Pretty amazing.
=You don't understand; I could never tan before I became a vampire!=
Where are you?
=Hiding out at your friend, Mr. Montrose's, place. Did you know he practically has his own Civil War museum? I've never seen so many muskets in my life. It's like an ancient armory.=
How did you wind up there?
=Your other friend, that fortune-teller, she was waiting for me at your place. We ditched the Subaru and she drove me to the Montrose estate. Told me to wait here. She's out, rounding up some of your other friends—=
Other friends?
=I never knew you had so many friends.=
Neither did I.
=She wanted me to give you a message.=
Yeah?
=She said to tell you to remember Ephesians six-twelve.=
That's it? That's the message?
=Yes. What does it mean?=
I have no idea.
Actually that wasn't true.
I hadn't darkened a church door since the deaths of my wife and daughter except to steal holy water from the Catholics. And it had been more than a couple of decades since I'd had to memorize Bible verses for Sunday school. But a few passages had stayed with me down the long years of a secular life lived and Paul's warning to the saints at Ephesus was one of them.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood," the Apostle had written, "but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
=What are you thinking?=
That I ought to give up wrestling and take up bowling.
And that, for a juju woman, Mama Samm seemed awfully conversant with the New Testament. Of course, if you're gonna get down and get jiggy with the end-of-the-world references, the Bible was, by and large, the text of choice for most of North America. . . .
=Well, I'm supposed to wait for her here. And I'm supposed to hide if the police come by.=
Montrose is dead, I told her. My old adversaries-in-arms put an antitank rocket into his truck and blew him up with it. The cops will probably send someone by in the next day or so for a cursory investigation. Since he didn't die at home it isn't really a crime scene but they'll want phone numbers for next of kin, anything that might shed light on relationships . . . business dealings . . . connected to his death . . .
I shook my head, trying to clear it.
Is anyone else there? I sent what I hoped was a clear image of Chalice Delacroix and the Be-bop, re-bop, zoot-suit guy.
=I think I'm alone, but the lock on the back door is broken and it looks like there's been some kind of a struggle.=
I shook my head again. It only served to make the room spin.
=But what is happening? You're starting to fade!=
I've been drugged . . . probably be out until dark. Then they're moving out around midnight. After we're gone you need to get Pagelovitch . . . his people . . . to get their hands on explosives . . . plastique, dynamite, hell . . . make Molotov cocktails if you have to . . . but this place has to be destroyed!
And I told her as much as I could until my brain completely fuzzed out. The next to the last words I heard inside my head repeated her promise to come back and rescue me.
No, I told her. It's too danger . . .
=I'm hooking up with some of your friends. In fact, Mama Samm said Billy-Bob—=
Hello Darkness, my old friend.
>Cséjthe.<
The voice was ancient.
>Cséjthe . . .<
Sonorous.
>Cséjthe!<
And chilling.
>Cséjthe?<
Did I mention familiar? Prince in exile Vladimir Drakul Bassarab was providing narration for my next dream sequence.
It's about time, I answered groggily. Where have you been, Old Dragon?
>Hither and yon, child. My business takes me many places.<
I smiled in my sleep. You lie like a rug! You've been on the run ever since that little mutiny on the East Coast that dethroned you and set up Liz Báthory in your place.
>Ah, Erzsébet! I hear you've finally made her acquaintance.<
Well now, maybe I have and maybe I haven't. Did you actually do the face-to-face before she sent you packing?
>'Ware, Cséjthe; I've impaled entire villages for showing such disrespect.<
Blah, blah, blah. If Báthory's in town, you're probably no farther away than the Eastern Hemisphere.
>You might be surprised.<
Whatever. Look, why don't you make yourself useful for a change. I need a memory.
>A what?<
A memory. Of your last time together.
>Speculation and gossip! Prince Vlad Dracul Bassarab and the Blood Countess never met.<
I saw you together.
>What?<
In her tower. You called her Betya.
>!<
I just want to see her as she was back then.
I had to wait but, eventually, images flitted through my head. Four-hundred-year-old memories. A fall of black raven's-wing hair. Amber, catlike eyes. Skin like fresh milk, white and startling in its contrast to the darkness around her. An exotic, twenty-something, Slavic woman approaching the peak of youthful beauty. She outshone all of the young maidens who had been gathered into her castle, her holding pens. For now, at least. Even her lovely and mysterious young domestic, Katarina Beneczky, whose beauty was said to approach that of her royal mistress. Some would later claim it was Katarina's striking good looks that contributed to the favor she found with the tribunals even as they walled the countess into her chambers and put the rest of Erzsébet's staff to torture and grisly death.
It was hard to tell from Vlad Drakul's remembrances: he had taken no notice of a serving maid. His attention had been focused on the mistress of Castle Cséjthe; Beneczky's image was only a shadow in his memory. And even now those projected memories were peeling away as I awoke to the lurching momentum of a wheelchair.
My wheelchair.
Entering one of the BioWeb elevators.
Five minutes to curtain, Mr. Cséjthe.
Break a leg.
Knock 'em dead.
It's show time!