"Hypocrite! Brother Rat! Brother Shit! I have granted you no forgiveness!"
Now my victim, alarmed, cast down his pack and turned to face me once more. "My son, in Our Savior's name I beg of you to overcome this obsession with vengeance. Not for my sake, but for your own. It is your own soul that you are now placing in great peril. Someday you too will perish."
I beg that the reader will understand me. Had this been unctuous hypocrisy on Bogdan's part, it would not have stung me so. I would have taken him in my grasp on the spot, and enjoyed his slow dismemberment. But despite the names I called him in my anger, I could not escape the conviction that the aged, gentle Brother Francis who stood before me was perfectly sincere—or as sincere as any mortal man can be. In fact, Bogdan existed no more, and this was someone else who tried to save my soul. My greatest enemy had escaped my vengeance after all, and it was that I found unbearable.
In my most monumental angers I am often quiet.
"You say that someday I will perish?" I asked him softly. "Nay, that I have already done, as thou must know."
A moment later, in the grip of uncontrollable rage, I struck him down without a moment's warning. Have I spoken yet of the augmented strength I possessed in my new life? Yes, but perhaps I have not made the matter sufficiently clear. I was a strong man in my breathing days, and my body had grown twenty times as powerful since the lust for life and vengeance had brought me back from death.
Under the impetus of a blow from my right arm, the body of Brother Francis flew tumbling into the air, came down at some distance, and only ceased to roll ten paces from where he had been standing. The Franciscan cowl, falling over the crushed skull, was already soaking red when the body came to rest. There was not, could not be, any need to strike again.
Michelotto in the background grunted his awe and admiration. This he followed with a similar sound, softer and more thoughtful, but just as easy to interpret; definitely a criticism. He had understood a few words of the argument, and if this killing was for the purpose of revenge, over some ancient wrong, it certainly lacked artistry.
But I had little thought for Michelotto then. Slowly I went to the fallen body in the monk's habit and stood over it. Bogdan's arms and legs were twitching still, but that meant nothing. Certainly he was dead. Quickly and all but painlessly. All my plans—for how many years had I been dreaming of revenge?—all gone for nothing.
The truth, and I could not escape it, was that Bogdan had escaped me many years ago. This meddling elder, who had counseled me so sincerely regarding the welfare of my soul, was someone else.
Brother Francis.
Now, when it was too late, I could think of a thousand more cunning ways in which I might have proceeded once I had found my enemy. I might have tried to find a way to revive the soul of Bogdan in my foe, and then to ensure his speedy and direct passage to hell. I might have been inspired—no doubt it would have been by the devil—to work some trick, such as a sudden disappearance, to make my enemy think that I was indeed an evil spirit.
But—to meet him, to encounter him at last, and in that moment to realize that I had no plan ready! No plan ready, of all the hundreds, thousands of revengeful schemes, each more painful than the last, that I had dreamt of through the years…
What had I really been thinking of all that time?
I could have improvised. I might have assured the traitor that I had been sent from hell to collect his soul, that he was not forgiven after all, that Brother Francis was a fraud, that he was Bogdan still, and Bogdan, after all, was going with me down to hell. I might have…
But as matters stood, I had simply killed him. I, Drakulya, legendary even in my breathing days for the symphonic fury of retaliation with which I responded to all wrongs—
And every day, for fifteen years, he had prayed for my soul.
I had my full revenge at last. All the revenge on the three traitors that I was ever going to get.
And small satisfaction have I ever had from it.
Chapter 16
The man who sometimes used the name of Matthew Maule picked up one of the lightweight poolside chairs, a folding construction of thin tubular metal and plastic webbing, and carried it back with him into the sheltered aisle behind the row of tall live plants. Carefully he positioned the chair to face the early night's magnificent play of high fog and distant lights outside the forty-fourth-floor windows. "Sit down and rest for a time, Margot." His tone was all tender consideration. "Presently the giddiness will pass."
Mrs. Hassler's response could have been described as a moan, were it not so filled with the tones of contentment and satisfaction. Obediently and rather gracefully she settled her considerable weight into the chair—the chairs looked very comfortable, her companion thought, given the materials of their construction. Next she allowed him to tuck robe and dry towel around her, her face now looked a trifle pale. The air in the natatorium, even here close to the windows, was comfortably warm, and he saw no cause for concern.
"I feel fine," she remarked, as if she found the fact somewhat surprising. "I don't understand what—what happened just now, but I do feel fine." Then, with a note of faint alarm: "Where are you going? Must you go?"
Standing behind the chair, he patted her shoulders and stroked her hair, with very genuine regard and tenderness. "Alas, I must go. And you must stay here for a time and rest. A restful time." His voice was growing rhythmic, soft, hypnotic. "Sleep now for a time, my love. Stay away from your apartment, and from mine, for an hour at least—there." With a final careful glance at the throat of the already sleeping woman—really nothing to be seen there, at least not without a close examination—the gentleman took his silent, swift departure.
His strength had been restored by feeding, and the last traces of the drug were fading from his circulation. With the onset of night, he was no longer restricted to man-form. In order to avoid being seen by several approaching exercise enthusiasts—the fewer people who saw him anywhere tonight the better—he chose to drift in mist-form to a stairway. Then, leaping on four wolfish feet, he darted upstairs to the level of his own apartment.
Clothed in his native shape of humanity once more, he stalked a corridor. The startling sight of the battered front door of his apartment, which obviously had been broken in, then rather clumsily propped back into place, elicited a silent curse. A moment later he was inside, and a moment after that he had materialized just behind the back of an armed breather, who stood holding John and Angie at gunpoint.
The grip of his two hands, left and right, fell on the gunman's elbows. Bones snapped and crumbled with the pressure. It was done quite silently, and with a minimum of fuss, though so painfully that the breather lost consciousness on the spot.
A moment later, the young couple who had been facing the wrong end of the gun collapsed upon a blood-spattered sofa in relief.
Mr. Maule surveyed them with concern—the ruin that surrounded them could wait. Angie was wearing one of his robes and, to judge from the way she clutched the garment together in the front, most likely nothing else. Both she and John were spattered and stained from head to foot with blood, most of it surely not their own. John was dressed as Maule had seen him last, but he had obviously been through a lot since then.
Maule approached Angie. Her eyes closed and she slumped. Gently he examined her, opening her robe with a physician's brisk impersonality, observing the wounds on throat and thigh. To John, who hovered anxiously, he spoke reassuring words in answer to an unspoken question: "She is in no danger of being changed. Not unless she should be bitten again."