‘Be careful out there.’ Captain Niles Calvert touched Asher’s sleeve, staying him in the doorway of the wooden hut designated ‘officer’s mess’. ‘Jerry’s getting ready for something – you’ve been hearing that since you landed at Calais, haven’t you? But every wire-cutting party, every listening post, up and down the line as far as Langemarck, reports the same thing: fresh troops coming up, supplies laid in, artillery moving about behind their lines.’ He glanced out past the dim glow of lantern-light through tent-canvas, the glimmer of illumination leaked between cracks in the rough board shanties that had been built over Pont-Sainte-Félicité’s shattered foundations. A machine gun chattered – a German MG-04, by the sound – for the sixth time in an hour, and the rumble of the guns vibrated the ground under Asher’s boots. ‘Can’t tell when they’re going to hit.’
‘I’ll be careful.’
The surgeon’s eyes narrowed as he studied Asher’s face, as if he’d have preferred a reply more along the lines of, Heavens, perhaps I’d better stay indoors …
‘Mrs Asher goes out like that as well – as I’m sure you know. And she won’t be told either. It always worries me sick,’ he added, ‘even before …’ He hesitated, then lowered his voice. ‘I don’t ask you to tell tales out of school, but … I take it you’re from Headquarters?’
‘I passed through Headquarters, yes.’
Like the colonel in St-Omer, this foxlike little surgeon clearly had his own opinions about people who moved about the battle zone with things like ‘at his sole discretion’ and ‘please render all and any assistance requested’ written on their papers. His mouth twisted a little and he drew a last breath of smoke from his cigarette – the air in the mess behind them was blue with it.
‘You didn’t happen to hear anything about these … these whatever-they-are. Madmen—’ His red-gold brows dived down over the bridge of his nose. ‘Only they’re not …’
‘Not mad?’ Asher felt cold to the marrow of his bones.
Calvert’s voice was a whisper. ‘Not men. Not mankind, though they seem male enough. You haven’t heard tell of ’em?’
‘Tell me.’
For a moment Asher was afraid Calvert would balk. It was clear from his eyes that he read absolutely no surprise in Asher’s face, and was angry at it, and no wonder.
Then he said, ‘Night before last a lone Jerry attacked a listening post near Loos. Didn’t even seem to feel the barbed wire. They shot him, but he wouldn’t die, they said. Just hung there in the wire sort of bleating at them like a dying goat, and the smell of him – it – was something fearful, they said, something the like of which they’d never smelled, and after six months in this section, believe me, Major, that’s something. They doused their lantern and didn’t dare put their heads up for fear of his kameraden, but two of them – good men, I know them, and not easily funked – swear his face was more like an ape’s, or a dog’s, than a man’s. By daylight he was gone. There was blood all over the wires, and over the ground. Their bullets had hit him, all right.’
Calvert shook his head. ‘Then yesterday Trent, the head of the stretcher-bearers, came to me saying they’d been attacked out in no man’s land, just before dawn. They go out then, if there’s been a dust-up; less chance of Jerry potting at them. They had a hooded lantern with them. Trent said—’
He winced, and seemed to back himself up on his tracks: ‘Trent’s a good man. Conchy, and steady as a rock. Trent said they’d found a … they’d found a dead Tommy in a shell-hole, and with him what he first thought was a dead Jerry, crumpled up where a shell fragment had hit him. But when they got close, Trent says the Jerry sat up, and came at them – crawling because he’d been blown nearly in half, and his face, when he described it, was like this other thing that Guin from the listening post had seen: ape-like, dog-like, and smelling like Hell doesn’t have words to describe. Trent and his boys were about to go after this … he called it a Jerry … with clubs, when another of ’em came over the lip of the shell-hole. They shot it, but it just got back up again, and I can’t blame ’em for running for it.
‘What is it? What’s out there?’ Calvert’s face had such intensity that Asher almost felt the surgeon was about to grab him by the shoulders and try to shake the truth out of him. ‘Trent and his boys went back just after daybreak – and got shot at by snipers for their trouble – and found the wounded Jerry … not just dead. Half-burned-up, Trent said. He said his sister used to work in a match factory, and had got burned once by the phosphorous there. He said these burns looked like that. He said that by the look of him, the dead Tommy had been torn open and partly eaten.’
‘Did you report this?’ Shit, bugger, damn … Had Asher not been blessed with ears that didn’t turn red with anger, he knew he would have been scarlet to his hairline. Bastards … BASTARDS …
Calvert’s mouth twisted. ‘Oh, aye.’
‘The matter is in hand …’
When Asher said nothing, Calvert pitched his cigarette stub to the mud and ground it with his heel. After a time, in a calmer voice, the surgeon asked, ‘Did Mrs Asher see any of these things?’ He held up his hand, as if to stay Asher’s reply of I don’t know, and said, ‘I just wondered. The way she started getting these “special orders” to come and go, and drivers taking her off down to Arras and Amiens, and I never did quite believe it was all about teaching others to use a fluoroscope, although God knows we need that, too … And I know you can’t say. But looking back, she’d take these walks late at night, like you’re off to do. So I just wonder.’
Keeping himself outwardly calm, as he had long ago learned to do, Asher felt, inwardly, that he was shaking in his whole being like a plucked guitar string. They’re getting out …
What the hell did those idiots THINK was going to happen, if they started farming these things, growing them like a Hell-crop of monsters …?
‘I wonder also,’ he said. ‘And I don’t actually know anything. But tell your stretcher parties – and tell your surgeons – that if they encounter one of these things again, do not make contact with its blood. The condition is transmitted by blood contact, and is irreversible. Those who are infected lose their memories and their minds, and yes, they will eat not only the dead but the living.’
Calvert stared at him: hardened at everything he had seen and done on the Front since the previous autumn, he was still knocked aghast.
‘I hope to catch up with Mrs Asher in Amiens,’ Asher went on. ‘And to find out – I hope – a little more about what’s going on. She may in fact be teaching fluoroscopy.’ He pushed his hat back, and rubbed his face. The thought of fifty miles over the shell-holed roads tomorrow was already a nightmare. ‘If she’s already on her way back – if we miss each other – please let her know that I’m here and I’m searching for her. Don’t let her go off on another of these “special assignments” before she talks to me. And in the meantime,’ he added grimly, ‘I think I need to have a look at whatever she saw out there in the dark.’
The man they got – the revenant they got – had just begun to turn. Looking through the judas into the lighted laboratory, Lydia thought he looked barely twenty, desperately trying to keep his fortitude in the face of his captors and clearly on the verge of vomiting with terror. She saw him reach up repeatedly to finger his face, his mouth, the sides of his skull where the sutures would be just beginning to deform. He looked wildly from Lemoine’s face to Francesca’s, horrible in their absolute impersonality, as if he were indeed nothing more than the chicken they were going to have for dinner, once they’d wrung its neck.
Had Lydia had a gun she’d have cheerfully shot them both.
It was worse, she thought – as the young man balked at the last moment, at the sight of the gas cylinders beneath the grille – knowing that even if he did escape, even if both Lemoine and the White Lady were to drop dead (and go straight to Hell!), he was doomed, damned, infected already with the condition that would eat his brain into nothingness, that would turn him into a walking appetite that spread its horror into any that it wounded but did not kill. Even if I shot them, and Nurse Meagher – who was absent from the laboratory and whom Lydia had not seen all day – I would have to kill him, too.
She leaned her head against the edge of the judas, and discarded the idea of going to hide her head in the pillow of her cot. Jamie’s going to need to know exactly what happens and how long it takes. And I want to know, too.
I’m so sorry, Hans or Gleb or Heinrich – even if you were the person who shot Uncle Richard’s poor footman Ned, I am so sorry …
She timed it. Nearly seventy seconds elapsed from the moment that the White Lady took the young soldier’s hand – gazing into his eyes, whispering to him in German – and the moment that she signed Lemoine to turn on the flame. Longer, Lydia thought, than it had taken for poor Basilio to surrender his mind into hers. But it was less than a minute before he ceased screaming, and only two and a half, before Francesca let go. Her shoulders relaxed just before she did, and her head dropped back a little, as Josetta’s sometimes did when she’d sipped really, really good champagne.
Nothing of the paroxysm that had shaken the whole of her body, with Basilio’s death.
‘How do you feel, Madame?’ asked Lemoine.
Francesca looked at him, and smiled. ‘Not bad at all.’ She moved her shoulders, as if readjusting to the decrease in tension. Ran a hand through her flaxen hair. ‘Certainly I’m not hearing voices in my mind, if that’s what you mean. To be honest,’ she added, ‘’twas a concern of mine as well. Let me—’ Her smile widened. ‘Let me adjust … digest … contemplate …’
‘Of course.’ Colonel Lemoine’s stiffness spoke worlds for his own impatience, his own barely-concealed apprehension that something might still go wrong with his mission, his project—
He turned his head, regarding the burning corpse on its bed of blue flame. ‘And there will be no trouble – no danger – in destroying these things, once the fighting is over?’
‘Mmm … I shouldn’t think so.’ She made a little rippling movement of all her muscles, like a cat stretching, as if feeling for some change within herself. ‘If I am able to control them – as I feel, I think, I must be …’ Her velvety voice was barely audible over the roaring of the ventilator fans. ‘What can be simpler than ordering them all into a walled enclosure open to the sunlight, and waiting for dawn? If in fact,’ she added casually, ‘you want to get rid of them when the fighting is done. Someone in your government might want to keep them around a little—’
Lemoine’s eyes flared wide. ‘Never!’ By the horror in his voice the idea – obvious to Lydia – had never crossed his mind. ‘These creatures – these monstrosities – will be used for one thing only! When we have achieved that victory, we shall ask you to destroy them – all of them!’
‘Oh, peace!’ She lifted one clawed hand. ‘’Tis your endeavor; I’m only your … condottiere. Your helper. You have paid me … amply.’ Smug satisfaction oozed like cream from her words. ‘I am in your debt, I am indeed, Colonel. And I am – agog – to see if in fact your supposition about how these things can be controlled is in fact correct.’
‘Tomorrow night?’ The voice of a man who is trying hard not to nag.
‘Tomorrow night.’
‘I don’t suppose—’
And Lydia, incredulous, realized that the issue of whether or not someone in the government would want to keep a mob of tame revenants when the war was done had already dropped completely out of his thoughts. As if he truly imagined that saying Never and You must destroy them was going to be the end.
As if the truly important thing – the only thing – was victory over the Germans, and not other uses to which such a horror might be put.
He really is thinking no further than that.
‘No.’ The Lady smiled to take the sting out of the word, and reached with a forefinger – with its long, glass-like claw – to flick the surgeon’s cheek. Lydia saw – and she was positive the Lady saw as well – Lemoine stiffen, as if he would have twitched away from the contact, detesting the woman even as they bargained for the victory of France. ‘I will return tomorrow. Ah,’ she added, practically purring as she turned toward the laboratory door. ‘There’s our wandering girl!’
Meagher stood in the doorway.
She’d become a vampire.
Lemoine turned his head, saw her, startled … then Francesca glanced at him, that eternal, pleased smile still broadening her lips, and he relaxed. ‘Would you finish up here, Nurse Meagher?’ he asked, and Lydia realized, shocked, He doesn’t see it. HE DOESN’T NOTICE.
And he hasn’t noticed that she’s probably been missing since last night.
No wonder Graf Szgedny, and poor Antonio, and Don Simon said she was strong …
Lemoine left, probably, thought Lydia, to write up his notes. Francesca and Meagher stood looking at one another in the electric glare and stinking smoke of that charnel house crypt, the light of the dying flame playing across their faces.
‘Is it done?’ Meagher asked, as if she were no longer certain of her voice,
‘Well, he’s done, at any rate.’ The White Lady shrugged peerless shoulders. ‘As for whether I’ll be able to control the whole swarm of them … truly, it remains to be seen. I certainly feel no ill effects. But as for coming to Ireland with you …’
‘I wouldn’t ask you to.’ Meagher put up her hands, to push her black heavy hair from her face, then looked at them, turning them over in the light. Her nails had already grown out to claws. She opened her lips a little, ran her tongue over her fangs. ‘Thank you,’ she added. ‘I can … if you will but teach me how …’
Francesca Gheric regarded her, hugely amused. Like an adult, thought Lydia, listening to a four-year-old’s plans to slay dragons or find buried treasure.
Does Meagher really think she isn’t this woman’s slave now?
Or that, having been deprived of the ability to make a fledgling for the whole of her Undead existence, Francesca’s going to let her new-wrought fledgling go?
‘In time,’ purred Francesca. ‘In time.’
‘When you do,’ said Meagher, her speech still a little fumbling, ‘perhaps we can – we should … The revenants are getting out, you see. I’ve counted them, and … I knew there were a few, hiding in the foundation vaults below the wine cellars, and the drainage passages. But now … I think they’re finding ways outside. Will we be able to … to summon them back?’
The master vampire chuckled. ‘Old Stiff-Rump will have a seizure if we don’t, won’t he?’ She shrugged again. ‘They come back ere daybreak, you know. ’Tis where their hive is. In the meantime—’ She put out a hand, and stroked her fledgling’s cheek. ‘Let me look at you. My pretty, pretty child … You do know that our condition, our state, is one of perfection, don’t you? Physical perfection. The prime of life, if I may so term it. The prime of health.’ She reached up to finger the girl’s black, curling hair. ‘Your handsome soldier – whatever his name is – won’t be able to keep his hands off you when he gets here—’
Meagher shook her head uncertainly, and stepped back from the caress. ‘It’s not … It’s not important what I look like.’
‘Oh, but it is, my sugarplum.’ Her voice turned warm and crooning. ‘We look as we always knew in our hearts that we look – as we look in our sweetest dreams. And we gain strength – we maintain our strength – by the kill. How are you going to get anyone to walk up a dark alley with you if you aren’t the prettiest thing he’s ever seen in his life? We maintain our ability to make the living see what we wish them to see, only by the lives we drink.’
‘I know that.’ The girl spoke unwillingly, as if bracing herself for a horror – like Lemoine facing the burning of that young German alive – that must be got through, to attain the goal. ‘And I will do whatever I need to do, pay whatever price needs be paid—’ The words stammered, learned by rote in another lifetime, and Francesca laughed again, and again patted Meagher’s cheek.
‘And so you shall, my blue-eyed angel. So you shall. But right now, how do you feel?’
Meagher’s eyes met hers at last, and she whispered, ‘Hungry.’
‘I, also.’ Her smile turned dark, gleaming and terrible, and she put a caressing arm around her fledgling’s shoulders. ‘Let us go forth, then, sweet child. And I’ll teach you how to hunt.’