She inhaled air massively, but before she could scream his chasm of a mouth had clamped itself over the entire lower half of her face. And his tongue also surged, into and down her convulsing throat. While in her mind:
Ah, I see you do know the legend! Well, and now you know the reality. So be it! Inside her body his vampire protoflesh spread into every cavity, putting out filament rootlets which burrowed in her veins and arteries like worms in soil, without damaging the structure. And even before she had lost full consciousness, Janos was feeding.
Tomorrow they would find her here and say she had died of massive pernicious anaemia, and not even the most minute autopsy would discover anything to the contrary. Nor would there be any-progeny — of this most delicious fusion. No, for Janos would see to it that nothing of him remained in her to surface later and cause him problems.
As for the life he was taking: what of it? It was only one of many hundreds. And anyway, what had she been but a whore? The answer was simple: she had been nothing…
Three and a half hours later and three miles due east of Rhodes Town, the Samothraki lay as if becalmed on a sea like a millpond. Quite extraordinarily, in the last ten or fifteen minutes a writhing fret had developed, quickly thickening to a mist and then to a fog. Now damp white billows were drifting across the old ship's decks, and visibility was down to zero.
The First Mate, still tender from his brush with Janos Ferenczy, had just brought Pavlos Themelis up onto the deck to see for himself. And Themelis was rightly astonished. 'What?' he said. 'But this is crazy! What do you make of it?'
The other shook his head. 'I don't know,' he answered. 'Crazy, like you said. You might expect it in October, but that's six months away.' They moved to the wheelhouse where a crewman was trying to get the foghorn working.
'Forget it,' Themelis told him. 'It doesn't work. God, this is the Aegean! Foghorn? — I never once used it. The pipes will be full of rust. Anyway, she works off steam and we've precious little up. So make yourself useful, go take a turn stoking. We have to move out of this.'
'Move?' said the First Mate. 'Where to?'
"The hell out of this!' Themelis barked. 'Where do you think? Into clear water, somewhere where the Lazarus isn't likely to come barging up out of nowhere and cut us in half!'
'Speak of the devil,' the other growled low in his throat, his little pig-eyes full of hate where they stared through the condensation on the cabin window at the sleek white shape which even now came ghosting alongside, her reversed screws bringing her to a dead halt in the gently 1 lapping water.
The grey, mist-wreathed crew of the Lazarus tossed hawsers; the ships were hauled together, port to portside; ancient tyres festooning the Samothraki's strakes acted as buffers, keeping the hulls apart. All was achieved by the light of the deck lamps, in an eerie silence where even the squealing of the tyres as they were compressed and rubbed between the hulls seemed muted by the fog.
For all that the Lazarus was a modern steel-hull, as broad as the Samothraki but three metres longer, still she sat low in the water when her screws were dead or idling. The decks of the two ships were more or less level, and with little or no swell to mention transfer would be as simple as stepping from one ship to the next. And yet the crew of the white ship, all eight of them, simply lined the rail; while her master and his American companion stayed back a little, gaunt figures under the awnings of the foredeck. The cabin lights, blazing white through the fog, gave their obscure shapes silvery silhouettes.
At the port rail of the Samothraki, Themelis and his men grew uneasy. There was something very odd here, something other than this weird, unnatural fog. 'This Lazarides bastard,' Themelis's sidekick grunted under his breath, 'bothers me.'
Themelis offered a low snort of derision. 'Something of an understatement, that, Christos,' he said. 'But keep your balls out of his way and you should be OK!'
The other ignored the jibe. 'The mist clings to him,' he continued, shivering. 'It almost seems to issue from him!'
Lazarides and Armstrong had moved to the gate in the rail. They stood there, leaning forward, seeming to examine the Samothraki minutely. There was nothing to choose between them in height, Themelis thought, but plenty in bearing and style. The American shambled a little, like an ape, and wore a black eyepatch over his right eye; in his right hand he carried a smart black briefcase, hopefully full of money. And Lazarides beside him, straight as a ramrod in the night and the fog, affecting those dark glasses of his even now.
But silent? Why were they so silent? And what were they waiting for? 'So here we are then, Jianni!' Themelis shook off the black mood of depression which had so suddenly threatened to envelop him, opened his arms expansively, glanced around and nodded his satisfaction. 'Privacy at last, eh? In the heart of a bank of fog, of all bloody things! So… welcome aboard the old Samothraki.'
And at last Lazarides smiled. 'You are inviting me aboard?'
'Eh?' said Themelis, taken aback. 'But certainly! How else may we get our business done?'
'How indeed?' said the other, with a grim nod. And as he crossed between ships, so he took off his dark glasses. Armstrong came with him, and the rest of his men, too, clambering over the rails. And the crew of the Samothraki backed stumblingly away from them, knowing now for a fact that something — almost everything — was most definitely wrong here. For the crew of the Lazarus were like flame-eyed zombies to a man, and their master… he was like no man they'd ever seen before!
Pavlos Themelis, seeing the transformation in the face of the man called Lazarides as he stepped aboard the Samothraki, thought his eyes must be playing him tricks. His First Mate saw it, too, and frantically yanked his gun from its under-arm holster.
Too late, for Armstrong towered over him. The American used his briefcase to bat the gun aside even as it was brought into view, then grabbed the man's gun-hand and wrestled the weapon round to point at its owner's head.
Bullet-head didn't stand a chance. Armstrong pointed the gun into his ear and said, 'Hahr And his victim, seeing the American's one eye burning like sulphur — and his forked, crimson tongue, flickering in the gape of his mouth — simply gave up the ghost.
'That one,' said Janos to Themelis, almost casually, 'was a fool!' Which was Armstrong's signal to pull the trigger.
As his head flew apart in crimson ruin, Christos was tossed like a rag doll over the rail. Sliding down between the hulls, his body was crushed and ground a little before being dumped into the mist lying soft on the sea. The hole he made in it quickly sealed itself; the echo of the shot which had killed him, caught by the fog and tossed back, was still ringing.
'Holy Mother of — /' Themelis breathed, helpless as his men were rounded up. But as Janos advanced on him he backed away and again, disbelievingly, observed the length of his head and jaws, the teeth in his monstrous mouth, the weird scarlet blaze of his terrible eyes. 'J-J-Jianni?' the Greek finally got his brain working. 'Jianni, I — '
'Show me this cocaine,' Janos took hold of his shoulder with a steel hand, his fingers biting deep. 'This oh so valuable white powder.'