An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

“Did any send you here, child?” Then she appeared to think better of the question. “Never mind. It does not matter.”

    “Who would have sent her?” asked the gray-haired man, Dickon. He looked round at all of them, then back at Morgan. “What did you mean?”

    Morgan returned his gaze through narrow eyes. “It was in my mind that there may be others who still cling to the old man’s faction. A remnant who have not accepted the fact of his destruction.”

    “Destruction?” Kate’s voice was as clear and loud as it was unexpected by them all. “She’s told you that the old man’s dead? She lies!”

    Poach did something to Kate’s arm behind her back, so she cried out and bent forward over the table. Joe tried to struggle; in a moment he was face down on the table too.

    “What does the girl mean?” asked Dickon in a shaky voice, looking round at all of them again.

    “Mean? To prolong her life, if she can manage it,” Morgan answered calmly. “What else?”

    A woman spoke up now, with timid reluctance, but speaking up to Morgan all the same. “Where is your prisoner being held?”

    “Very well! If you still doubt me. He is miles from here, nailed like an insect to a specimen board. If any of you still doubt that, I’ll fly with you to show—”

    “Dr. Corday!” Kate screamed out suddenly. “Come in and help us!”

    As if by magic blow Kate’s outcry cut across all other voices, even Morgan’s, and wiped them into silence. Looking round him, Joe could see that no one was moving. The pressure of the silence was such that it felt like a growing weight. The grip pinioning his arms, though, did not slacken.

    Someone’s voice began a Latin whisper. It seemed to have no purpose other than to relieve the silence.

    Morgan was looking over Joe’s shoulder. The faintest of smiles was on her lips and her adolescent eyes had an expression that he could not read. Never again, though, would he be able to think of her as young in any sense.

    The whisper had trailed away. The stillness in the room was more intense and ominous than before.

    Poach was perhaps the first to move, letting his grip on Joe’s wrists slacken and fall away. Joe saw Kate raise her head. He followed her gaze, in the same direction to which other silent faces were turning now. All were looking down the long vista of the rooms.

    At the end the drapes were now drawn back slightly from the window. And someone was standing there, a man’s form outlined against an icy city night now cleared of falling snow. The form was motionless as some effigy of wax.

    “I knew,” Morgan murmured. “I think I knew it all along.” Now moving slowly, unsurprised, she turned her back to Joe. She took two steps toward that distant apparition, and her voice rang out boldly: “Come in then, Vlad Tepes! I say it now of my own free will. Enter my house, and we will settle all that lies between us, here and now!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

   Silently, with deliberate strides, the distant figure was pacing toward them.

    Poach moved then, with such quickness that for a moment his great bulk seemed an illusion. Before Joe could react, the giant had reached the fireplace, and in an instant the eight-foot wooden spear mounted above it had come down into his hands. Morgan meanwhile backed up slowly, until one hand extended behind her rested on the table’s edge.

    For a long moment no one else stirred. Then, with a broken cry, gray-haired Dickon broke out of the group and stumbled into the next room. There he threw himself at the feet of the one approaching, who halted rather than step on him.

    “Master!” Dickon cried out. “Master, I have never betrayed you. I would not believe that you were dead.”

    “Stand up, fool.” For Joe’s eyes, the face of the speaker was still in darkness. The voice, resonant and commanding, was like Corday’s and yet unlike. It went on: “This is the new world now, Dickon, have you not heard? Such sniveling ill becomes one who is ready to take his rightful place as member of the superior race of beings.”

    Dickon’s collapse became total. With his face down on the thick carpet, his words fell into muffled howls. The man whose path he had blocked stepped round him, and continued his advance.

    The fashion model was next to fall upon her knees. “Vlad Tepes,” she choked out, “we did not know…we never believed that you were…”

    “When have I ever asked for groveling?” the newcomer interrupted. “From any of you?” He took one more step, and Joe could see that he wore Corday’s face—and yet he did not. Like the voice, the face had been transformed. He who was not the old man Joe had known—and yet was—took yet another step. He stopped there, in a position from which he could see Poach and Morgan both.

    In Morgan’s left hand, held behind her back as if for support against the table, there had somehow appeared a long knife. In the table lights it looked to Joe as if it had been fashioned blade and all from one piece of some dark and oily wood. Near the fireplace, Poach stood poised like a harpooner with his wooden spear. The bloody mark on his forehead was throbbing now, looking almost raw.

    For the moment, the two breathing people in the room were being ignored by everyone else. Joe saw that Kate’s eyes were fixed, calculatingly, on the knife in Morgan’s hand; all right, let Kate do something about that. Joe’s left hand moved out stealthily over the surface of the table in front of him. His