A Dance in Blood Velvet Read Free Page B

floodwater. Only one thing remained clear and steady: the woman’s face.
    As lovely as the moon, her lips red with his blood, she looked sadly down at him. He clutched at her, but she pushed his hand away.
    “I’ll die...” he rasped.
    “No, you won’t,” she said calmly.
    “I’ll die if I don’t see you again.”
    She blinked, her eyes briefly shaded by her smoky lids and luxurious eyelashes. Then she whispered, “You will never see me again. You have never seen me at all. Forget me. Because if you ever tell David, or if you ever cross my path again, I’ll kill you. I promise.”
    Who’s David?
    He couldn’t even remember the woman’s name. Who was she? She couldn’t abandon him to the Devil who was storming through the night to take him.
    “No. Don’t go!” he cried, terrified.
    She touched a luminous hand to his hair and said, “I’m sorry.”
    She drew away, watching him with sad affection. Then, like the moon passing behind a cloud, she vanished.
    * * *
    Sometimes Karl would drift through the Crystal Ring at ground level, lost in fascination that another dimension, fitting the Earth like a glove, could exist. A dream-realm that only vampires could enter. To vanish from mortal eyes, and walk unseen through their dwellings... Irresistible, even though reality became a warped ghost of itself, and the only light was a sinister, luminous twilight.
    Houses, trees, every barrier gave like cobwebs to Karl’s unearthly body. Even the mountains above the quiet town were like a crust of ash over a dead fire. Nothing was solid here. Nothing could be trusted. At times Karl loathed the Crystal Ring, because it was terrifying, impossible to understand, and yet part of him. Part of the incomprehensible, twisted darkness that had made him a vampire.
    For all the freedom the Ring gives us, he thought, it exacts payment. No certainty, no comfort, no rest. I resent it because it demands love; and I love its wildness, its refusal to conform to any theory. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps the Devil. Or, as Charlotte asserts, the human subconscious made tangible.
    Karl, an eternal cynic, was more inclined to believe Charlotte than anyone.
    It was painful to think too deeply, and unwise to keep asking, after all this time, why he’d been chosen to become undead: a creature who stood apart from humanity but needed them to feed his dark appetite. Pointless to worry what the same metamorphosis had done to Charlotte. They’d both known the cost of staying together.
    Karl smiled, thinking of her. Hadn’t their glorious, destructive love made any sacrifice worthwhile? Even the sacrifice of the victims Charlotte now needed? In truth, any vampire claiming a conscience was a hypocrite.
    The strangest thing, he thought, is that she hardly seems changed at all. She insists she’s always been the same inside: amoral. It took only the vampire’s kiss to bring her home. Yet I know she has changed, is still changing... how could it be otherwise? The look in her eyes, the way she is with her victims...
    Charlotte had wanted to meet the stranger, John Milner, again. Karl had not. Was I wrong to let her go alone? To find out what he really wanted, she said. Only that.
    Karl moved slowly, thinking of Charlotte and taking little notice of his surroundings. He saw a human walking towards him through the real world; not solid, but a bright corona against the dim folds of the Ring. A signature of life written in crackling energy.
    A second later, Karl knew he was being followed.
    Held still by a rush of life-or-death peril, he was aware of some thing that seemed distant, but at the same time close and threatening. He felt presences, an impression of tall shadows watching him. Their gaze struck through his defences to stir a primeval fear that he thought had died with his humanity.
    Instinct took over. Karl stepped out of the Ring, felt the world snap into solidity. He found himself in a narrow medieval street. A human cannoned into him and reeled