I do not know where I wandered that night. Every waking nightmare I had experienced on my journey during the day had come true. I felt a strange sense that Iuda had cheated. I had carefully worked out that he could not be in Moscow for several hours – certainly that he could not have arrived before I did. And therefore, if he could not have done so, it followed that he did not do so. Hence he had not just intermingled his blood with Domnikiia's and thereby transformed her into a creature as hellish as himself. It was an argument of perfect logic, except that I had witnessed the occurrence which I had just concluded could not have occurred. Domnikiia had become a vampire, and no amount of appealing to the gods of reason was going to change that.
And after all, it took only a little imagination to come up with a dozen ways in which Iuda could have made it to Moscow before me. How could I apply any physical laws to such a creature? By some legends, he could transform himself into a bat. How fast can a bat fly? It doesn't matter; a vampire in bat form may travel much faster. He could have reduced himself in size to some minute homunculus and been carried to Moscow in my own saddlebag. Preposterous? Who was I to say? Moreover, it did not matter. Somehow, Iuda had got to Moscow. In some way, it had been possible. I had smugly calculated that he could not make it, but I had observed rules to which Iuda had no need to conform. It was like playing chess against an opponent who could suddenly announce that his queen can move in a way that I had never been taught.
Even to invoke the supernatural was unnecessary. All Iuda had needed was another coach and a human driver. He could lie in the back, slumbering in his coffin, protected from the daylight by blackened windows, while his accomplice drove him pell-mell to his rendezvous with Domnikiia. I had already suspected that he might have some human servant, who could perform those daylight tasks that he could not.
There was no need to choose the correct explanation. The problem was that I had not considered the possibilities earlier. If I had not been so arrogant in my belief that I had beaten Iuda, then I could have stopped what had happened. I was horrified by my own stupidity.
But the real horror came in knowing that there had been no coercion on Iuda's part. Domnikiia had willingly done what she did. She did not love me, or God, or even life enough to resist the temptation offered to her of the prospect of eternity, even if that eternity came through eternal damnation. She knew that the Oprichniki were vampires – I had told her. She knew that they were evil. All the times that we had spoken of it – when she had said that living for ever was just a fantasy, when we had laughed together at Iuda's pompous letter – each time she had been hiding something away from me, some secret notion that in reality Iuda was right and I was wrong.
It was that betrayal that was so hurtful to me. If it had been some stranger who had chosen the path Domnikiia had taken, or even someone I knew and even loved, but whom I didn't expect to love me, then it would have been different. I would have felt some passing sorrow that the person was so foolish or so corrupt as to want to become a vampire, but that very revelation of their true nature would obliterate all genuine sympathy. Just as Iuda had said the desire to be a vampire was the only qualification required to become one, so that desire is also a sufficient disqualification from any expectation of the love of the rest of humanity. The convicted murderer cannot expect to be pitied for being what he is, except perhaps by his mother. Even then, is she not asking herself the question, how am I to blame? And so the sorrow I felt was not really directed towards Domnikiia. It was for myself that I wept. As in so many circumstances, my own self-interest was the matter at the front of my mind. It was I who had been betrayed. Domnikiia had chosen Iuda over me. I had failed to do what I could to prevent it. It was vanity, pure and simple. My pain came from my humiliation and from Iuda's ascendancy. Domnikiia was part of the mechanism of it all, but she was not the beginning or the end of my emotions.
And yet none of that was true. It all hinged on the fact that Domnikiia could not be worthy of my sympathy and therefore did not have my sympathy and therefore any sorrow which I felt could not be for her. But it was for her that I felt. I knew her. I knew that her decision must have been some tiny aberration and that somehow the one fragment of her mind that whispered 'yes' had spoken louder than the thousands which had screamed 'no'. Those thousands were now silenced for ever, I knew for sure. I knew because I had stared into the eyes of Matfei and Pyetr and Iuda and others and seen how little was left of them. It had been one, tiny, vociferous part of my mind that had originally persuaded me to visit Domnikiia for that first time, a year ago. The other voices that in unison shouted 'Marfa' had been drowned out then, and by now had been brought round in their way of thinking. From then on, until now, no part of me had seen my relationship with Domnikiia as anything but good and right. Was that how Domnikiia now felt about her newfound state? Did that one taste of Iuda's blood persuade her instantly and completely of the joy of the existence ahead of her, much as my first taste of her flesh had persuaded me?
It was a dangerous path to follow. I might allow myself during that night the indulgence of thinking fondly of Domnikiia and of looking for reasons not to judge her, but in the light of tomorrow I knew that she had to die and that I must be the one to kill her. Hard as it had been to drive out all sympathy for Maks when I had found out he was a spy, it would be so much harder for me to steel my heart enough to plunge a wooden shaft into Domnikiia's own heart – a heart that had so capriciously turned against me. True, a vampire is infinitely more deserving of death than a French spy, but then my love for Domnikiia was infinitely greater than my love for Maks. Not greater – different. Subsequently I had harboured, and still did, doubts as to whether the way I had treated Maks was right. Days, months and years after tomorrow I would wonder whether I had been right to kill Domnikiia. That was why tonight was a time to build up my hatred, enough to ensure that when the moment came, it would be the moment of least indecision. Once I had destroyed her then I could lie back and bathe in the luxury of doubt. It would be too late then to do anything more than to regret.
I found myself back in the churchyard in Kitay Gorod where Dmitry and I had stayed so briefly with Boris Mihailovich and Natalia Borisovna. I was sitting on the ground, the dampness of the snow seeping into me, with my back against a gravestone. I could not remember arriving there or how long I had been there. I was certain I had not been asleep and yet somehow the whole night had passed. The eastern sky had imperceptibly transformed from starry black to a dark, glowering blue, noticed only by me and by the waking birds who began to hail the rising sun. This time, my nightmare did not end as the birds sang to the dawn. It became worse. The horrors I had seen in the night were merely an overture to the horrors that the day would bring. I was going to kill Domnikiia. It was a horror made so much more dreadful in that I would not merely be an observer, but a participant. I could back away at any point and the horror would go away, only to be succeeded by the unthinkable prospect that she would live on. The price of my inaction of the previous night would be paid in the action of today.
But the day was long. There was no reason for me to go now, just as the sun rose. Yesterday I had had eight hours of daylight in which to race from Kurilovo to Moscow in order to save Domnikiia. I had failed. Today I had the same amount of daylight, and all I had to do was wander along a few Moscow streets, climb into a room and embed a wooden blade in a heart that was already dead. I could wait until lunchtime before I set out, complete the task, and still have most of the afternoon to myself.