‘Aleksei’s gone, Maksim.’ It was Iuda who spoke. ‘Left you all alone with us. And even if he were here, do you think he would care about that?’ Maks looked up at him. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. ‘Did Dmitry?’
‘Aleksei isn’t like Dmitry.’
‘They’re neither of them like you. They both love their country.’
‘Love is a relative concept. They love their fellow man more.’
‘Do they?’ Iuda raised an eyebrow as he spoke the question.
‘Aleksei does.’ Around the hut, the other five Oprichniki had stripped to the waist. Varfolomei was coiling a length of rope. ‘When he finds out what you are, he’ll destroy you. He’ll hunt you down across the face of the earth.’
Iuda gave a brief nod to Pyetr, who hit Maks again, on the other side of his face. Pyetr looked at his hand. There was blood on it – his own blood. He licked it clean, and the wound healed in seconds. Looking at Maks, the cause of the injury was obvious. His glasses were broken. They hung off one ear, one lens intact, the other shattered.
Iuda leaned forward and gently took them off Maks’ face. ‘I think we’d better put these somewhere safe, hadn’t we?’ Maks’ head jerked up. He looked around, his eyes unseeing. He was virtually blind without his spectacles, as Aleksei well knew. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Iuda, as though speaking to a child, ‘you can have them back afterwards.’ He popped them into his inside pocket and patted the breast of his coat reassuringly.
Varfolomei walked over and tied the rope around Maks’ wrists, binding them together. Then he flung the other end into the air. From his vantage point, Aleksei could not see the roof of the hut, but there was evidently something there to hook the rope over. Varfolomei and Andrei pulled in unison, and their combined weight hoisted Maks out of the wooden chair on which he had been sitting. Pyetr kicked it with the inside of his foot, and it hurtled towards Aleksei. He flinched, pulling back from the side of the hut, but immediately realized that the chair had not been aimed at him. He knelt back down and pressed his eye once more against the thin gap between the panels, observing what went on inside.
Pyetr knelt down behind Maks and rolled up the leg of his breeches until it was above the knee. Then he opened his mouth, pulling back his lips to reveal his fangs. His mouth seemed too large to fit into his skull, as though it should protrude like a dog’s snout. His jaws snapped shut and his teeth sank into Maks’ calf. Maks’ head whipped back, and his mouth opened in an agonized scream, though Aleksei heard no sound. Andrei stepped forward, and pulled up Maks’ shirt. His teeth, even larger and more gruesome than Pyetr’s, sank into the side of Maks’ abdomen. Blood gushed out, staining Maks’ skin and flowing into Andrei’s mouth. Soon it was full and the blood overflowed, dribbling over his chin and on to his own clothes.
Iuda walked over towards where Aleksei watched. He knew Iuda could not see him; he was simply coming to retrieve the chair. But as he bent down to pick it up and his face came level with the tiny slit through which Aleksei watched, he narrowed his eyes and gave what looked to all the world like a wink. An expression of cheerful cunning fleeted across his face, but then he disappeared from view. The next Aleksei saw of him was his back as he strolled away towards Maks, dragging the chair behind him.
Maks’ feet swung only inches from the ground on to which now dripped the blood from the wounds to his leg and stomach. Effectively, this made him taller than Iuda, and that was why Iuda needed the chair. He placed it on the ground and stepped on to it. Now his head was, as it would normally be, above the height of Maks’. He bent forward and placed his lips on Maks’ throat. Aleksei noticed, concealed in Iuda’s hand, the double-bladed knife that was his preferred weapon. He was wise to hide it, lest the other Oprichniki should see and realize that Iuda was not one of them – that he was not a vampire. Even as the thought crossed Aleksei’s mind, he wondered how it had come to him. How did he know that Iuda was not a voordalak? How, indeed, did he know that the others were? He would not discover that for weeks.
Iuda lifted his head from Maks’ neck and placed his lips beside his ear. He whispered something and Maks’ response was to grin ecstatically and nod his head with vigorous approval. Iuda smiled and stepped down from the chair. He walked behind Maks. With a swift stroke of his knife, he cut Maks’ shirt in two. With a couple more strokes under Maks’ arms, which cared little whether they cut linen or flesh, he had removed the garment from Maks’ body, except for the sleeves, which still clung to his up-reaching arms.
Iuda stepped back and eyed his victim’s body. He glanced back in Aleksei’s direction, and Aleksei could have sworn that he winked again. Then Iuda issued an instruction to the others, which Aleksei did not understand, and the vampires gathered around Maks, pressing against him, their exposed flesh rubbing against his as their teeth penetrated his body. Aleksei looked up at Maks’ face, but the expression on it was one of laughter, not pain. He looked back at the creatures that swarmed around him. There seemed to be more of them now. They were hard to distinguish, even if their faces could be seen, but the hair on two of them was distinctive. One had long, dark brown hair, almost to its waist. This one had gone further than its comrades, and had stripped completely naked; the tips of its long tresses danced over the top of its buttocks. The figure next to it was much smaller, with hair distinctive not for its length but for its colour – a rich, deep red.
Iuda issued another command, and these two figures turned, revealing their faces to Aleksei. One was Domnikiia, the other Tamara. He looked up again at Maks’ face, a face that was still laughing – but it was no longer Maks. In front of them all, Iuda crouched down and stared directly at Aleksei. He winked again, but did not reopen his eye, staring ahead of him with just the other, on a level with Aleksei’s as he half walked, half crawled towards him.
Aleksei glanced up once more. The laughing figure hanging from the roof had not changed back. It was still himself – Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, laughing in ecstasy as his lover and his child devoured his flesh. Iuda’s single eye came ever closer until it filled Aleksei’s vision. Aleksei tried to join in with his own laughter as Iuda’s eye pressed up against the wall from the other side, gazing into Aleksei’s own, but as he opened his mouth it was not laughter that spewed forth, but a long, deep, terrible scream.
Aleksei’s scream filled the dark wilderness. He sat up. The fire he had made had gone out, but as he reached his hand towards it he felt the warmth of its embers. The high half-moon made it easy to see, but cast eerie shadows through the trees. He had not had that dream for many years. It was a dream he might have avoided if he had actually stayed to witness Maks’ death. Knowledge of the reality of what had happened inside that hut, however terrible, would at least be a certainty into which no macabre speculation could creep. But Aleksei had not stayed; he had ridden away, just as Iuda had told him to. Could he not then dismiss the whole thing as the fantasies of his guilty imagination? How he wished it were that simple, but though he had not witnessed Maks’ death, he had seen enough elsewhere to know that the images in the dream were based on truth.
A few months after he had left Maks to die, in a town south of here, he had witnessed a very similar scene. The victim had been no one he knew, just a serf, whose wife had already met the same fate. Aleksei’s eye, pressed up to a crack at the edge of a barn door, had seen the Oprichniki do to that peasant much what they had done to Maks in the dream.
But what of the end of the nightmare? It had been over five years since Aleksei had last dreamt it, but even then it would end with Domnikiia. Did he still doubt her? Such was the power of the games Iuda had played with him that even now – thirteen years after his death – Aleksei could still be asking himself that question. Iuda had presented Aleksei with a scene: two bodies entwining; a woman exchanging blood with a monster; Domnikiia choosing to abandon all that was good and to become a vampire; Domnikiia choosing to abandon Aleksei.