Ardeth came down the scaffold effortlessly, not looking back up at Roias’s body impaled on the glass. She hadn’t bothered to taste his blood; the thought of it nauseated her.
She felt a brief flicker of regret that her anger at him had kept her from questioning him further—but killing him had been so much more satisfying than suffering his revolting attentions.
Rozokov was waiting for her, standing by the bed. She paused, looked at the bodies tumbled around the room. “Are there more?” she asked, trusting his more experienced senses. He shook his head. He was very still but she could feel him trembling on the edge of madness, the killing fury only partially sated by the deaths of their tormentors.
There was a wildness in her too, filling her up with a strength and certainty that was dizzily intoxicating. She stripped off her blood-soaked shirt and tossed it on the floor. There was still blood on her skin, in her hair, but she did not care.
Rozokov’s eyes were bright, brighter than her memory of the sun, as she stepped up onto the dais with him. He reached out to run his hands from her shoulder to her throat, then up to cup her face. She turned to kiss his fingers, dark with blood.
On the bed, beside the blonde’s body, they shared what love they could, the ecstatic mating of wolves after the kill.
Ardeth opened her eyes and saw herself reflected in a dead woman’s gaze. For one terrifying moment she was hypnotized by the glazed, black marble eyes, the dull white skin. That’s me, she thought, that’s what I am. She had a sudden vision of herself through the dead whore’s eyes, two lifeless set of corneas reflecting death back and forth.
Then there was a faint movement behind her and she became aware of the warm pressure against her back, the weight of the arm draped loosely about her waist. She turned to meet another gaze, this one grey and undeniably alive. Wonderingly, she put her hand on the pale, scarred chest and felt the doubt-beat of his heart. He echoed the motion, pressing until she felt the beat of her own heart against his hand as strongly as she felt his.
“Ardeth . . .” he said softly, voice calm and reassured, though his eyes were wary. Ardeth remembered again, recalled all that had happened, all that she now was. She smiled and stretched in his arms, shifting on the red silk of the bed. His hand moved, slid into a caress, then fell away reluctantly. “We must leave, before others come.”
Ardeth glanced over at the dead body on the end of the bed, then around the room. Her eyes rested on Roias’s corpse hanging over the jagged parapet of the window. “Let them.”
Rozokov took her face in his hands and forced her to meet his serious gaze. “Young one, we are not invulnerable. Especially not now. We must be very clever and careful. Did you discover anything of value from Roias?”
“No. I just killed him.” It had been a mistake and she knew it, but the knowledge was not enough to keep the petulant defiance from her voice.
“Who do you think will find this?” Rozokov asked after a long moment whose silence was more eloquently disapproving than any words could have been.
Ardeth frowned, trying to think beyond the triumphant carnage in the room. “Their bosses, or accomplices.”
“Will they report this to the authorities?”
“Not likely. They’d have to explain it then.”
“Good. What about the movies?”
“They’ve probably sold them by now. But no one will believe them anyway. . . .” She pulled from his restraining grasp and bounded off the bed, revelling in the strength and confidence she felt. “What are you worrying about? They’re all dead.” She spun a little to encompass the tumbled bodies about the room in the gesture of her outflung arms.
“Ardeth,” Rozokov explained patiently. “There are many lessons you must learn of this life. But the most important one is caution. The consequences of even one mistake can be fatal.”
She sighed. He was right, of course, but caution seemed alien to her now, an unwanted remnant of a life she’d left buried in a shallow grave in the woods. “There are probably master tapes around here somewhere,” she admitted. “We should erase them.”
“Then we must find them. But first,” Rozokov smiled with sudden amusement, “find yourself some clothes. You are far too distracting as you are.”
She laughed and turned to look at him. He was sitting in the tangled sheets, pulling on his pants. The gesture was so commonplace, so human, it made her heart ache with sudden, undefined longing. “I didn’t think vampires were attracted to other vampires,” she said flippantly, to counter the intensity of the emotion.
“We disproved that theory a while ago. I must confess, I had not expected that.” She could hear the thread of uneasiness under the humour in his tone. Until a moment ago, Ardeth had not thought to wonder at her hunger for him; she had desired him when she was alive, it seemed only natural to want him after. . . . Though the pleasure had been different, lacking either the penetration of human or vampire lovers, it had been oddly satisfying. “Now, we go find some clean clothes. Come back here after and we will find these master tapes.”
She hovered at the edge of the dais for a moment, unwilling to leave him, then stepped down over the actress’s sprawled body and headed for the door.
In the dressing cubicle provided for the actresses, she found a pair of black pants, only slightly loose on her thin form, and a pair of reasonably comfortable short black boots. She surveyed the two tops draped over the chair for a moment, then abandoned them in amusement. There was no way either the black bustier or the leopard-patterned bra top would fit her much smaller figure. She settled for a white shirt she found in one of the other rooms. The room had been Peterson’s, she decided, staring down at the jumble of heavy-metal tapes on the floor. A skeletal face surrounded by tangled green hair leered up at her from the pile. He had a T-shirt like that, she remembered, and the blinding, white-hot fury surged through her again. She kicked the pile of tapes savagely, sending boxes skittering across the floor. The action stilled the rage somewhat and she stood in the centre of the room, breathing deeply, until it subsided.
It was time to get back to Rozokov, to find and destroy the obscene record of his existence. Not that anyone would really believe it, she thought, they’d think it was all just another special effect. But he was right . . . it was too dangerous to leave for either the rest of the gang or the police to find. They would have to destroy the film in the cameras in the studio as well, in case any of the slaughter there had been recorded.
Rozokov was in the studio. He too had found new clothes, the expensive white shirt contrasting with a battered pair of black jeans. He had also thought of the cameras—they lay shattered on the cement floor, nested in a tangle of exposed film. “Will this suffice to destroy these movies—or should we burn them?” he inquired and Ardeth smiled.
“I think that’ll do it. Now we have to find the masters, and any copies. I’d rather just burn the whole place down.” The vision of the asylum flaming against the night sky made her smile again, though not as pleasantly.
“As much as that would please me as well, it would attract too much attention, I’m afraid. So—what do these masters look like?”
She found them in the room next to Roias’s eyrie. Four shelves of videotapes lined one wall, over banks of dubbing and copying equipment. “Sorority Sluts,” “Confessions of a Schoolgirl,” “Robowhore.” There were three identified only as “V1,” “V2,” and “V3.” Ardeth pulled down “V1” and slid it into one of the machines, turning on the television monitor.
On fast forward, the torture of the dark-haired victim looked almost comical, but the Keystone Kops movement did not completely disguise the horror, and Ardeth felt the rage pressing, black and satisfying, against the back of her eyes.
As in the film she had been forced to watch, Rozokov came out only at the end. She let the machine switch back to normal play and stared at the skeletal features and hot, burning eyes. Her first vision of him came back to her and she felt the distant frisson of remembered fear. Rozokov leaned over and hit the stop button. “Enough,” he said, in a low, unsteady voice. “Destroy them.”
Ardeth set the machine to rewind and stared at the blurry images on the screen. They could erase each one, but that would take time. There must be an easier way. Her eyes moved around the room and settled on another machine, which was marked “Videotape Eraser.” She went over to examine it and noted a warning to keep it away from videotape stock to be preserved.
She returned to the VCR, removed the rewound cassette and tried running the tape across the top of the machine. She inserted it back into the VCR, and the tape offered up blank static, broken by the occasional fuzzy image and garbled sound. She smiled narrowly at her reflection in the screen. “That should do it,” she announced and ran each of the tapes over the machine. After a moment, she began to pull down the rest of the tapes as well.
“Are you planning to destroy them all?” Rozokov asked, watching her curiously.
“We might as well. Otherwise the bastards will just make more money from them.” When she finished, some memory of caution made her test each of the vampire tapes. They were all blank. “We should check the control room, just in case.”
With their combined strength, the lock on the doors to Roias’s last, ineffectual refuge shattered and Ardeth entered the booth. Glass crunching beneath her feet, she prowled around, checking machines and cabinets for more videotapes. Satisfied that there was no record of Rozokov’s existence there, she turned to leave, then noticed a black leather jacket hanging over the back of the chair. She spared one glance at the body draped as lifelessly over the window then, smiling, shrugged on the jacket.
Ardeth was preparing to ease back out into the hall when she heard voices. She moved into the doorway until she could see Rozokov standing in her line of vision, starting down the hallway. “I asked,” a voice sounded from beyond her range of sight, “who the hell are you? Where’s Roias?”
“Roias was called away unexpectedly. I am in charge now.”
“Yeah? All right then, I’ve come to collect my fee.” Ardeth recognized the voice, remembered it lying smoothly to a desperate, strung-out young woman.
“Your fee?”
“Yeah. For the girls. You keeping both of them, or what?”
“I see. What fee did you and Roias agree upon?”
“Ten thousand for the two of them. That’s if you keep them. Otherwise it’s one thousand dollars each for the movie—and I want them back.”
“Ah, then you are their procurer. I understand.” Rozokov’s voice was soft and dangerous. “Tell me, do you know what Roias does with the ones he keeps?”
“Uses them in those snuff movies of his, I guess. Look, I don’t give a flying fuck what he does with them. I got places to be. So give me the money or give me the girls,” Greg snapped angrily, but beneath the threatening tone Ardeth could hear a whisper of unease.
“I regret to say there’s been an accident. The women are dead.”
“Then I want my money.” Rozokov took a step forward, disappearing from Ardeth’s view. She tensed, shifting closer to the hallway.
“They didn’t deserve to die. However, you do.” There was a scuffling noise, then Greg’s incoherent shout. The blast of a gunshot launched Ardeth into the hallway, the roaring fury in her mind blotting out the dying echoes of the shot.
Rozokov stood over Greg, staring down at the body, with its head twisted at an impossible angle. The revolver was still clutched in one dead hand. Ardeth slid to a stop and Rozokov looked up. “I am fine,” he assured her, before the question left her lips. There was a faint hole in the shoulder of his shirt, surrounded by a faint stain of red. “It will heal in a few moments.” The red tide in her mind receding, Ardeth considered Greg’s twisted form for a moment.
“Well,” she said at last, “this does solve one problem.”
“Oh?”
“He must have a car. I’m afraid I ruined all the ones that were already here.” His glance was curious. “I didn’t want them to get away,” she explained awkwardly, preferring the rational explanation to the reality of the fury that had blinded her to any kind of logical thought.
“A car . . . you know how to drive one then?”
“It’s been a while, but I’m sure I can get us back to the city. Once I figure out where we are, that is.” She crouched down to search Greg’s pockets, retrieving his car keys and a wallet. A quick thumb through the eelskin case revealed almost one thousand dollars in cash. Ardeth paused for a moment, the ghost of a long-dead morality tugging at her, until the absurdity of her reservations struck her. With a faint smile, she tucked the money into the front pocket of her jeans. She also took his watch, replacing the broken Hong Kong knock-off on her wrist with his heavy Rolex. She glanced around at the dim hallway, and felt a pressure behind her eyes, as if they were glowing. “Let’s get out of this damned place.”