Blood and Chrysanthemums Read Free Page B

moonlight, on the mountain, the vampires fed.

Chapter 2
    The stars, wrapped in the gauzy veils of the nebula, burned through the glass. Dimitri Rozokov caught his breath and shifted his fingers slightly, adjusting the lens that brought the brilliant vision into even sharper focus. Copernicus might have sold his soul for this sight; Galileo might have recanted if they had promised him an instrument this fine. God knew, he had lost his own mortality for the promise of a knowledge less fantastic than this, for a science less full of wonder. His eyes traced the filaments of gas between the stars.
    How far away was it? Reluctantly, he lifted his gaze to flip through the book resting on the table by the telescope. Seven million light years from the Earth. For a moment, his mind refused to fathom the number, struggling to fit it back into a universe discovered with Copernicus and last studied when men believed there was life on Mars and there were only eight planets in the solar system.
    Seven million light years. And there were nebula upon nebula, galaxy upon galaxy beyond that, well beyond the range of this telescope, visible only from the great observatories in South America. And beyond the grasp of those lenses, ranks of stars and systems and galaxies fading away into eternity.
    And the world reckoned that he was an impossible thing. Rozokov smiled and put his eyes back against the lens, then swore softly when he discovered a cloud had drifted over the view. He contemplated moving the telescope but after a glance at the sky decided that the cloud would be moving on in a few moments and settled back in the chair. Until he had seen the night sky for the first time through the telescope, he had not realized how much he had missed the stars in Toronto, where the city lights kept out all but the brightest. He had not known how much he needed them.
    On clear nights, there could be a dozen people waiting to glimpse the stars, but they thinned out as midnight came and went and by the usual time of Rozokov’s arrival the observatory was often deserted. At first, the opening of the shed’s roof had made him nervous, but the inhabitants of the house seemed to be accustomed to the sound and no lights ever went on, no one ever came to join his solitary contemplation of the night. Once or twice Ardeth had come with him, but she was a child of a different scholarship, weaned on television documentaries about the big bang, and the view did not intrigue her for long.
    Thinking of Ardeth, he frowned. He understood her current passion for climbing; he had engaged in his own forms of recklessness after his rebirth. She would tire of it sooner or later, no doubt, but he should not begrudge her her enthusiasms.
    She had an eternity in which to experiment with anything she chose. It was when she ceased to want to change that he should become concerned.
    It gave her something to do, just as this place gave him a way to occupy his time. There were other reasons she was doing it, he knew just as there were other reasons he came here. He closed his eyes, shutting out the moon. She is escaping into it, he acknowledged, just as you are escaping into the bright mystery of the stars.
    A month ago, he believed that all the escapes had been made, at least for a while. A century and a half earlier, he had escaped from Paris and the fire that had destroyed his reckless vampire companion Jean-Pierre, and Roxanne, their mortal servant and sometime lover. Victorian Toronto had been his safe haven for almost thirty years when the eccentric millionaire Ambrose Dale had discovered his existence. He had escaped that threat as well, concealing himself in a specially created shelter within the walls of a warehouse. Hidden away, he induced the deep sleep that was the closest to death he could now come. A rest of twenty years had been his plan, long enough for the aging Ambrose to die. When he awoke, almost a hundred years had passed and he found himself the captive of