Twelve

His eyes flicked open. He engaged me in the same dead stare that I had seen in him before and once again hissed the only word I had ever heard him utter.

'Murderer!'

CHAPTER XIX

I WASTED NO TIME IN THROWING MY ARM DOWN TOWARDS THE creature's chest, but a hand grabbed my wrist, and I could not reach my target. Another pair of hands took hold of my left arm and I was dragged away from the coffin and over to the wall. The Russian soldier climbed out of the coffin and approached me.

The two men who had grabbed me relaxed their grip, and the one on my right said to the soldier, 'Hold him.' It was a voice I knew and should not have been hearing; the voice of a creature that I thought I had seen annihilated in a burning cellar many weeks before. It was Iuda.

The soldier pressed his hand against my chest, revealing a tremendous strength, and I found myself unable to move. Iuda and my other captor – as he stepped into the light, I saw it was Andrei – walked to the middle of the room.

'You're surprised to see me, I think,' said Iuda, with the tone almost of a bonhomous host.

'A little,' I replied.

'It must be so irksome,' he continued, 'when you think that you've murdered four of your comrades – men who have willingly come at your invitation to your country to fight on your side – it must be so irritating to find that one of the four has survived.'

I didn't respond.

'It's the same mistake your friend Maksim made,' said Andrei, making none of Iuda's faux effort to hide his loathing.

'So how did you get out?' I asked.

'Can't you work it out?' asked Iuda. 'My good friend Dmitry Fetyukovich rescued me. By the time you arrived, he had already awakened me and helped me to safety.'

'Safety where? You couldn't go out into the daylight.'

'No, of course not, but in these big blocks of connected buildings one can move from one house to the next without ever going outside. Having a little greater strength than living humans helps too. It allows us to knock through the odd wall here and there between houses.'

I had seen examples of these creatures' strength weeks before, and I felt it in the hand that pinioned me against the wall. I wondered what other powers they might possess, and moreover what their weaknesses might be. 'And that's it?' I asked, 'Your strength? Is that the only thing you creatures have that gives you an advantage over us?'

Iuda laughed; I had been very obvious. 'Perhaps you'd like a written list? Three dozen ways that vampires are better than humans? Well, it won't help you, Lyosha. No, our strength is nothing. I think it's just a side effect of the diet. What makes us superior is not something that we have; it is something that we lack. We lack conscience. When we act we are not bound by any rules of what is wrong and what is right. We have no fear of recrimination either on earth or in hell. We can achieve things that you could never dream of because our dreams are not haunted by doubts about our righteousness and concerns for others.'

'And what have you achieved?' I asked him, scornfully.

He chose to ignore the question. 'I can do things of which you would never be capable. When I caught Vadim Fyodorovich following me' (he nodded carelessly towards Vadim's hanging corpse) 'my scruples might have told me to let him go, but I didn't. When he told me he had just been curious to see how I worked, I might have believed him, but I didn't. When he begged me for mercy, telling me about the wife and family that he loved, I could have felt pity, but I didn't. Instead I hung him up on that nail over there, just to shut him up, not so as to kill him; otherwise we wouldn't have been able to taste the fresh blood that we all so much prefer.

'Could you have done that, Lyosha?' Iuda continued. 'Of course not – you wouldn't want to. But you'd like to do it to me now, wouldn't you? And yet still you couldn't. I could just beg you for mercy; tell you about my terrible upbringing in the Carpathians and you'd lose all stomach to do it.'

'So that's why you're so hard to kill?' I said, straightening up. The soldier, listening to Iuda, had relaxed his pressure on me a little. 'It's not your strength, but our weakness?'

'Exactly. We are certainly quite easy to kill. Sunlight. Fire.' He nodded down towards my wooden dagger, which had fallen to the floor. 'A stake through the heart. Decapitation. They're all ways that I've seen it happen. Maybe there are others too. I can't say I'm an expert.'

'You mean you don't know?' I asked. I was surprised, but also attempting to goad him.

'Why should I know? You're not a doctor, are you? You don't know every detail of how your body works, nor do I of mine. We're not going to carry out experiments to find out new ways of killing ourselves.' He smirked suddenly, as if he'd just thought of something very funny. If he had, he did not share it.

'Why not?' I asked. 'You're easy enough to replace.'

Iuda raised an inquisitive eyebrow. 'Easy?'

'Like your friend here,' I said, indicating the soldier who had by now, relaxed by my utter defeat, completely forgotten to restrain me. 'Just a quick bite and it's one less human and one more vampire.'

Iuda chuckled. 'If only it were that easy, but unfortunately we remain a very exclusive group.'

'You have a long list of membership rules, I suppose, to keep out the riff-raff.'

'We have but one criterion. The individual in question must want to become one of us. One would imagine that most organizations offering such a relaxed admission would be inundated with applications, but we are not. For us, self-selection is the ideal approach. You, for example, would not wish to join us, would you?'

'No,' I said, needing no special effort to inject absolute conviction into my voice.

'And so we would not have you. In fact, this gentleman is the only recruit we've had since we arrived in your deeply pious country. Not that we have the opportunity to ask on every occasion.'

'And what happened to him?'

'He ran into Varfolomei. That, by the way, is why he has a particular dislike for you. We're all upset that you murdered Matfei and Ioann, but he regards Varfolomei as something of a father figure. Anyway, there he was, fleeing from – deserting if you will – the field at Borodino and whom should he meet but Varfolomei? They have a little chat and he decides that yes, a life of immortality would be preferable to being a ryadovoy in the Russian army, to be sent to his death at the whim of cowardly officers such as yourself.'

'And so just by wanting to be a vampire, he became one?'

'No, no. There's a mechanism. First Varfolomei drank some of his blood, just enough so that he would die, but not straight away. He then willingly – and it has to be willingly, I'm told – drank some of Varfolomei's blood. It's traditional to drink from a cut to the chest, but I don't think that matters.'

'So you understand that much of how your body works,' I commented. 'How you're created, but not how you are killed.'

He smiled. 'We have an advantage over you in that we can remember the moment, and therefore the process, of our own conception. It makes it so much easier for us the first time we come to do it ourselves, rather than all that messy fumbling about that humans go through.'

'So how many vampire offspring have you produced in your time, Iuda?'

'None,' he replied and then quickly added with a smile, 'that I know of. And I would know. What I have just described could not very well happen by accident. Some of us are different, but I am very like you humans. I like the chase and I like the kill, but I don't want to be concerned with any long-term consequences.' He thought for a moment. 'It's much the same as you feel when you're with that young lady – Dominique. You love the physical experience of her body, but you'd be appalled if your congress with her ever produced a child.' He looked into my face enquiringly and then raised his eyebrows. 'Or maybe not.'