Chapter 370 - In Transit part 7

The darkness blinded her, but she had the impression that he was carrying her down, deep into the bowels of the tenement. Like hapless Persephone, Nora descended into the earth, passing through musty rooms, labyrinthine corridors and creaking stairs. She smelled wet stone and rot, the dank odor of stagnant water and corpse-white mushrooms growing in black soil. It was a lightless, echoing chamber, and she could hear water dripping steadily into a puddle. The Duke threw her down, tore away the blankets that enveloped her, and began to paw rudely at her breasts.

Nora cried out as he ripped the bodice of her nightgown, and then she felt his icy hands at her bosom. He grasped her nipples and twisted them painfully, then caught her scream inside his mouth, devouring her pained outcry.

He turned his face aside, placing his cheek to hers. "I promised Lord Venport I would not do this again," he whispered in her ear, "but I will not be denied! I must have you!"

So he meant to ravish her! Nora redoubled her efforts to throw him off, but it was like beating her fists upon a brick wall. Duke Crowden wedged his massive body between her knees, pushing the hem of her gown up her thighs. What tiny bit of bravery remained to her evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet. She collapsed back in despair, sobbing like a child.

"It will only hurt for a moment, my dear," the duke said, fumbling with the front of his trousers. "I've watched you a long time. Waited for you to grow up. To blossom into womanhood. Haven't I been patient? Oh, yes, I have! I've been patient as a saint! And now the German comes and thinks he'll spoil my fun? I won't have it! But you will. Yes, you will, my beautiful Eleanora. You will certainly have it tonight!"

She felt his organ, cold and blunt, grinding against the lips of her sex.

"No, please!" she sobbed.

"Quiet!" the duke snarled. "Stop squirming, child!"

And then he spread her brutally open, and it was like being pierced by an icicle.

She howled as he sank slowly inside her, his organ long and stiff and impossibly cold. She was dry, much too small for him, but he was merciless. He wrenched her legs up, drove into her with the weight of his body. It felt like he was tearing her in half.

"Please, stop!" she begged. "You're hurting me!"

"You do not know what pain is," the duke snarled, and then he sank his fangs into her neck.

The agony stole her breath away. She blinked in the darkness, jaw agape, as strange protean shapes congealed in her vision. They were like diagrams she'd seen once of microscopic organisms. Protozoa, she believed they were called. They materialized and dissolved in the darkness behind her eyes, dark red and throbbing obscenely.

The side of her neck was hot and wet.

Blood.

Her blood!

The duke sucked at her neck as he thrust himself crudely inside of her. Doubly penetrated, she was not certain which hurt worse.

Nora tried once more to wriggle out from under him, but her strength was rapidly fading. Duke Crowden drank her blood, was draining it ravenously from her body. Slurping and grunting, he gulped her blood in great draughts, drawing at the wound in her neck so hard she felt her heart contract. Each time he swallowed, he thrust his pelvis violently against hers, driving his manhood deep inside. The rhythm of his assault made it seem a single vicious process. Suck-swallow-thrust. Suck-swallow-thrust.

Please, Lord, she prayed, save me!

She was not certain to whom she was actually praying. She had lost her faith in God the night her little sisters burned to death in their beds, the night her parents perished trying to save them from the flames.

But then he came, and she thought perhaps it was to him she had cried out after all.

Lord Venport, also known as Gon, the oldest living vampyre.

He blew through the lightless corridors of the tenement like some apocalyptic wind, crashing through walls and smashing down doors, knocking down every obstacle that stood betwixt him and his quarry.

Of course, she did not know who or what it was at first, only that it sounded as if the entire building were collapsing down upon them. That would be a mercy. To be crushed beneath all that rotting timber and crumbling masonry, her life snuffed out like an insect crushed beneath a man's heel.

Perhaps the beast would perish with her, she thought, though the image of dying with him inside her was too terrible to bear.

There was a resounding crash, and faint light flooded the basement.

Duke Crowden withdrew his fangs (but not his organ) and voiced an exclamation of surprise. She didn't understand what it was he said, but it sounded Welsh. An instant later, he was yanked violently from atop her body.

Starlight, weak and watery, had penetrated the inky cell in which she'd been taken. Amid a roiling cloud of dust, two figures writhed in the inconstant light. Nora struggled up, clutching the wound in her neck, and watched as Duke Crowden grappled with her savior. The men were locked in hand-to-hand combat, were tossing one another about at the foot of a rickety staircase.

The duke's opponent, she saw, was none other than handsome Lord Venport!

Despite her faintness, she thrilled at the sight of him.

Freshets of hot blood gushed from her neck with each frenzied beat of her heart, spurting from the ragged wound. She pressed down with her palm, trying to staunch the flow. How much blood had she lost, she wondered frantically. She'd quickly bleed out if she could not seal the wound.

No matter how tightly she pressed on her neck, however, her life's blood continued to pour down her forearm at an alarming rate. She could feel it pattering against her bare thighs. A puddle had formed on the cold stone floor beneath her.

She sank by degrees as she watched the two men fight, her head spinning, her strength ebbing. Loss of blood was shrinking the world to a faint gray disk in the center of a void, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Any moment now she would collapse, she knew, and that would be the end of her. So she clung stubbornly to awareness, like a damsel dangling from the edge of a precipice, devoting all that remained of her strength to the task.

Lord Venport was the smaller of the combatants, though the duke's superior size lent him no advantage. Venport was faster than his hulking opponent. Stronger. Nora watched in amazement as Lord Venport smashed the duke from one wall to another. At one point Venport lifted the big man clear off his feet and swung him into a stone support hard enough to make the mortar crack and clatter away. He dodged the duke's retaliatory blows with such speed that Nora wondered if the feeble light were not playing tricks on her eyes. The two men snarled and cursed and hissed at one another like dueling tomcats. Finally, Duke Crowden landed a terrible blow to Venport's chin. Lord Venport went sprawling to his knees. Rather than press his advantage, the duke fled up the stairs. Venport was after him an instant later, moving with the speed of a striking snake. He seized the duke's ankle and caused him to fall, then dragged him howling back into the dark.

Duke Crowden clawed at the stairs as they descended, tearing off several of the rotten planks. His body thumped heavily from step to step as he howled and babbled in that strange foreign tongue. Lord Venport cast his leg down with a fearsome glare and the duke scrambled to cower at his feet.

"Please, lord, forgive me!" he cried in English.

Venport bent and pulled the man to his feet. For a moment, Nora thought he meant to dust the man off and perhaps even go so far as to console him somehow, but then he struck the duke in the face so powerfully his fist vanished inside the other man's skull.

The blow was so swift she didn't even see it. Neither did the duke. Nora screamed as Crowden jittered on the end of Lord Venport's arm, limbs flopping spasmodically. A viscous fluid, too dark to be blood, oozed from the smashed gourd that was now his head. Venport took a fistful of the man's dark hair and withdrew his arm from his friend's cratered skull, scowling in distaste at the little clumps of tissue that dribbled wetly to the floor. Crowden began to slump. Venport seized his head in both hands before he could crumple to the floor, and in one violent motion, severed his head from his shoulders. The duke's great bulk thumped bonelessly to the ground. Venport looked once, regretfully, at his former companion's ruined head, then cast it aside.

"You are forgiven," Lord Venport said.

Nora had sunk onto her back and was breathing raggedly. She watched as Lord Venport turned in her direction. His eyes were luminous in the granular half-light, just as his former friend's had been. He approached and kneeled down at her side. His face descended like a moon falling from the heavens. She was lying on her back, arms sprawled out to her sides, but she felt as though she were still sinking. Sinking into herself. Sinking into the void.

The starlight in his eyes… it was so beautiful.

"You are dying," he said tenderly.

"Yes," she whispered.

"I cannot restore you to health," he said. "It is far too late for that, but I can save you from death."

She could feel the life draining out of her with every heartbeat, and those strange protozoan shapes were still throbbing in the dark, in her mind. A fur of wavering cilia rimmed each one, and inside their cell walls were other quavering forms, spiral shapes and Arabesques, twirling like the gears of a pocket watch.

She was oddly enchanted by the throbbing, ghostly images. She wanted to reach out and touch them, but her arms felt as if they were weighted down with bricks. It was a Herculean effort simply to draw breath to speak.

"How?" she asked.

The world seemed to be moving further and further away. She recalled the day she left Abingdon for London. This was after the funerals, when she came here to the city to live with her aunt and uncle. She had taken the train to London, and stood at the railing of the brake van to watch her hometown recede into the distance, her nose icy and running from the cold, her fingers numb. How strange it had seemed, watching all that she knew shrink into the distance, into the past. It was as if her old familiar life were just a dream, or an image on the surface of a pool. How easily the illusion shattered! Dip a single finger into the water and it was gone.

Dying here tonight would be no different, she realized. Her entire existence—her personality and memories, all her aspirations and desires—were made of the same evanescent stuff, reflections on the surface of a pool, so easily disrupted.

Constancy, that was the illusion!

"You know what we are?" Lord Venport said, sliding his hand beneath the curve of her skull.

She did not, and started to say as much, and then she did.

Earlier that year, Nora had read a short novel by John William Polidori, a gothic romance attributed to Lord Byron. She thought little of the story at the time, a day's entertainment at best, but her brain had filed the details of the novelette away.

Nora had always been an intuitive woman, and often relied on her subconscious to provide insights when she needed them. Now it produced the answer to Lord Venport's question.

"Vampyre," she gasped, gazing up at him with wonder.

"Yes," Lord Venport said.

A tremor shot through her body like an electric shock. In an instant, a thousand fanciful thoughts went flying through her mind. She wanted to question him, ask him how he had become a vampyre, what magical powers he had at his disposal. But she was too weak to give her curiosity voice, and growing weaker by the second.

Vampyre!

She had long suspected the rational world was a thin veneer overlaying a reality that was far more mysterious than humankind suspected, and here was living proof of her suspicions—though perhaps "un-living" would be a more apt description. Too bad she would die here on the cusp of revelation, her questions unasked, her curiosity unsatisfied.

Lord Venport was a vampyre!

And that meant, of course, that Duke Crowden was a vampyre, too!

It was all so obvious now! Duke Crowden had taken her from her bed because he meant to feed on her, drain her of her blood. In doing so, he had broken a vow he made previously to Lord Venport. That was why they had battled. It was why Lord Venport destroyed the rapacious duke. In his final moments, the duke had begged his friend for forgiveness, so these creatures knew right from wrong. Perhaps they were not the soulless monsters myth had made them out to be.

The implication moved Nora to a decision she might not otherwise have made.

"You can save me?" she gasped.

"Yes."

"By making me like you?"

"Yes," he said again.

"Will I be damned?" she asked. "Will I go to hell when I die?"

"I do not believe in hell," Lord Venport answered. "I was ancient long before the Christian faith poisoned the minds of modern men."

"How old?" she asked.

She couldn't help herself. There was so much she wanted to know!

"You haven't the time to quiz me right now," Lord Venport said with a smile. "You are dancing on the head of a pin."

"I'm sorry."

"If I give you the Strix, you will have ages in which to indulge your curiosity," he said. "Or you may give up this reality and seek greater truths in the worlds that wait beyond the veil of death. But make your choice quickly! Your heart has ceased its labors. It is almost too late!"

He spoke the truth. Her heart had given one last fluttering beat and then gone still. It felt as though an iron band was being tightened around her upper torso. She couldn't draw breath. There was a light inside her skull, a brilliant but soothing light. It was tempting to go into that light, but she had not lived enough, she thought, and there were so many things she still wanted to do—sights she wished to see, books she wished to read, questions that needed answers.

"Save me!" she gasped. Her final breath.

"As you wish," the vampyre said, and he inclined his lips to hers.