A warm girl ran across the room, pursued by one of the Carpathians. It was Rupert of Hentzau, his uniform in tatters, a ruddy flush on his face. The plates of his skull dislocated as he shambled, distorting and reassembling his face. He brought the girl down with a swipe of a paw, scraping silk and skin from her back. Then he began to tear at her back and sides with triple-jointed jaws, taking meat as well as drink. As Hentzau fed he became wolfish, wriggling out of his boots and britches, his laugh turning to a howl. The girl was instantly dead.
Dracula smiled, yellow teeth the size and shape of pointed thumbs. Geneviève looked into the broad face of the King of Vampires.
The Queen knelt by the throne, a spiked collar around her neck, a massive chain leading from it to a loose bracelet upon Dracula’s wrist. She was in her shift and stockings, brown hair loose, blood on her face. It was impossible to see the round old woman she had been in this abused creature. Geneviève hoped her mad, but feared her well aware of what was happening about her. Victoria turned away, not looking at the Carpathian’s meal.
‘Majesties,’ Charles said, bowing his head.
An enormous fart of laughter exploded from Dracula’s jaggedly fanged maw. The stench of his breath filled the room. It was everything dead and rotten.
‘I am Dracula,’ he said, in surprisingly unaccented and mild English. ‘And who might these welcome guests be?’
... his head was in the eye of a nightmare maelstrom. In his heart was steel resolve. All he saw made him justum et tenacem propositi virum, a man upright and tenacious of purpose. Later, if he still lived, he might succumb to nausea. Now, in this vital moment, he must have complete control of himself.
Never entirely a soldier, Beauregard had learned strategy at school and in the field. He knew, without seeming to notice, the relative positions of all in the throne-room. Few of them mattered, but he was especially aware of Geneviève, Merrick and, without quite knowing why, Mina Harker. All, as it happened, were behind him.
The man and the woman on the dais were the focus of his attention; the Queen, whose visible distress gripped his heart, and the Prince, who sat at his ease on the throne, embodying the chaos about him. Dracula’s face seemed painted on water; sometimes frozen into hard-planed ice, but for the most part in motion. Beauregard discerned other faces beneath. The red eyes and wolf teeth were fixed, but around them, under the rough cheeks, was a constantly shifting shape; sometimes a hairy, wet snout, sometimes a thin, polished skull.
A fastidiously dressed vampire youth, an explosion of lace escaping at his collar, mounted the dais.
‘These are the heroes of Whitechapel,’ he explained, a fluttering handkerchief before his mouth and nose. Beauregard recognised the Prime Minister.
‘To them we owe the ruination of the desperate murderers known as Jack the Ripper,’ Lord Ruthven continued. ‘Dr John Seward of infamous memory, and, ah, Arthur Holmwood, the terrible traitor...’ The Prince grinned ferociously, moustaches creaking like leather straps. Ruthven, Godalming’s father-in-darkness, was plainly put out at the reminder of the ghastly deeds in which his protégé was popularly believed to have collaborated.
‘You have served us well and faithfully, my subjects,’ Dracula said, his praise sounding like a threat...
... Ruthven stood by Prince Dracula’s side, completing the triptych of rulers, the elder vampires and the new-born Queen. There was no doubt that Vlad Tepes was the apex of this trinity of power.
Geneviève had met Ruthven nearly a century previously, while travelling in Greece. He struck her then as a dilettante, desperately amusing himself with romantic trifles but oppressed by the aridity of his long life. As Prime Minister, he had exchanged ennui for uncertainty, for he must know the higher he was raised the greater was the likelihood that he would eventually be dashed down to the depths. She wondered if any other could see the fear that nestled like a rat in the bosom of Lord Ruthven.
Dracula looked Charles up and down, almost benevolently. Geneviève sensed her lover’s blood boiling, and realised she had adopted an aggressive posture, teeth bared and fingers hooked into claws. She forced herself to stand demurely before the throne.
The Prince turned his attention to her and raised a thick eyebrow. His face was a mass of healed-over scars which swarmed about his smooth features.
‘Geneviève Dieudonné,’ he said, rolling her name around his tongue, trying to squeeze meaning from the syllables. ‘I have had word of you before, in earlier times.’
She held out her empty hands.
‘When I was new to this blessed state,’ he continued, gesturing expressively, ‘you were spoken of highly. It has been a wearisome task, keeping abreast of the peregrinations of our kind. The occasional report of you has come to me.’
As he spoke, the Prince seemed to swell. She suspected he chose to go naked not simply because he was able to, but because clothes could not contain his constant shifting of shape.
‘You counted a distant kinswoman of mine as a friend, I believe.’
‘Carmilla? That is so,’ said Geneviève.
‘A delicate flower, sadly missed.’
Geneviève nodded agreement. This monster’s solicitousness was sickly-sweet, hard to swallow without choking. As fondly and without thought as a master pets an old hunting dog, the Prince stretched out a hand and caressed the Queen’s tangled hair. Panic bloomed in Victoria’s eyes. At the base of the throne-dais clustered a knot of shrouded nosferatu women, the wives Dracula had set aside. Beauties all, they rent their garments immodestly, exposing limbs and breasts and loins. They hissed and lusted like cats. The Queen was plainly in terror of them. Dracula’s enormous fingers encircled Victoria’s fragile skull and squeezed slightly.
‘My lady,’ he continued, ‘why have you not come before to my court? We should have welcomed you to our sadly missed Castle Dracula in Transylvania or to our more modern estate here. All elders are welcome.’
Dracula’s smile was persuasive, but behind it were his teeth.
‘Do I so offend you, my lady? You wandered from one place to the next for hundreds of years, always in fear of the jealous warm. Like all un-dead, you were outcast on the face of the earth. Was this not injustice? Harried by inferiors, we were denied the succour of church and the protection of law. You and I, we have both lost girls that we have loved, to peasants with sharpened spikes and silver sickles. I am named Tepes, and yet it was not Dracula who pierced the heart of Carmilla Karnstein, nor that of Lucy Westenra. My dark kiss brings life, eternal and sweet; it is the silver knives that bring cold death, empty and endless. The dark nights are ended and we are raised to our rightful estate. This have I done for the good of all who are nosferatu. None need hide his nature among the warm, none need suffer the brain fever of the red thirst. Daughter-in-darkness of Chandagnac, you share in this; and yet you have no love for Dracula. Is this not sad? Is this not the attitude of a shallow and ungrateful woman?’
Dracula’s hand was about Victoria’s neck, thumb stroking her throat. The Queen’s eyes were downcast.
‘Were you not alone, Geneviève Dieudonné? And are you not among friends now? Among equals?’
She had been un-dead a half-century longer than Vlad Tepes. When she turned, this prince was a babe in arms, shortly to be delivered into a life in captivity.
‘Impaler,’ she declared, ‘I have no equal.’