A Matter Of Taste, Fred Saberhagen [love story books to read TXT] 📗

then to ensure his speedy and direct passage to hell. I might have been inspired—no doubt it would have been by the devil—to work some trick, such as a sudden disappearance, to make my enemy think that I was indeed an evil spirit.

      But—to meet him, to encounter him at last, and in that moment to realize that I had no plan ready! No plan ready, of all the hundreds, thousands of revengeful schemes, each more painful than the last, that I had dreamt of through the years…

      What had I really been thinking of all that time?

      I could have improvised. I might have assured the traitor that I had been sent from hell to collect his soul, that he was not forgiven after all, that Brother Francis was a fraud, that he was Bogdan still, and Bogdan, after all, was going with me down to hell. I might have…

      But as matters stood, I had simply killed him. I, Drakulya, legendary even in my breathing days for the symphonic fury of retaliation with which I responded to all wrongs—

      And every day, for fifteen years, he had prayed for my soul.

      I had my full revenge at last. All the revenge on the three traitors that I was ever going to get.

      And small satisfaction have I ever had from it.

Chapter Sixteen

      The man who sometimes used the name of Matthew Maule picked up one of the lightweight poolside chairs, a folding construction of thin tubular metal and plastic webbing, and carried it back with him into the sheltered aisle behind the row of tall live plants. Carefully he positioned the chair to face the early night’s magnificent play of high fog and distant lights outside the forty-fourth-floor windows. “Sit down and rest for a time, Margot.” His tone was all tender consideration. “Presently the giddiness will pass.”

      Mrs. Hassler’s response could have been described as a moan, were it not so filled with the tones of contentment and satisfaction. Obediently and rather gracefully she settled her considerable weight into the chair—the chairs looked very comfortable, her companion thought, given the materials of their construction. Next she allowed him to tuck robe and dry towel around her, her face now looked a trifle pale. The air in the natatorium, even here close to the windows, was comfortably warm, and he saw no cause for concern.

      “I feel fine,” she remarked, as if she found the fact somewhat surprising. “I don’t understand what—what happened just now, but I do feel fine.” Then, with a note of faint alarm: “Where are you going? Must you go?”

      Standing behind the chair, he patted her shoulders and stroked her hair, with very genuine regard and tenderness. “Alas, I must go. And you must stay here for a time and rest. A restful time.” His voice was growing rhythmic, soft, hypnotic. “Sleep now for a time, my love. Stay away from your apartment, and from mine, for an hour at least —there.” With a final careful glance at the throat of the already sleeping woman—really nothing to be seen there, at least not without a close examination—the gentleman took his silent, swift departure.

      His strength had been restored by feeding, and the last traces of the drug were fading from his circulation. With the onset of night, he was no longer restricted to man-form. In order to avoid being seen by several approaching exercise enthusiasts—the fewer people who saw him anywhere tonight the better—he chose to drift in mist-form to a stairway. Then, leaping on four wolfish feet, he darted upstairs to the level of his own apartment.

      Clothed in his native shape of humanity once more, he stalked a corridor. The startling sight of the battered front door of his apartment, which obviously had been broken in, then rather clumsily propped back into place, elicited a silent curse. A moment later he was inside, and a moment after that he had materialized just behind the back of an armed breather, who stood holding John and Angie at gunpoint.

      The grip of his two hands, left and right, fell on the gunman’s elbows. Bones snapped and crumbled with the pressure. It was done quite silently, and with a minimum of fuss, though so painfully that the breather lost consciousness on the spot.

      A moment later, the young couple who had been facing the wrong end of the gun collapsed upon a blood-spattered sofa in relief.

      Mr. Maule surveyed them with concern—the ruin that surrounded them could wait. Angie was wearing one of his robes and, to judge from the way she clutched the garment together in the front, most likely nothing else. Both she and John were spattered and stained from head to foot with blood, most of it surely not their own. John was dressed as Maule had seen him last, but he had obviously been through a lot since then.

      Maule approached Angie. Her eyes closed and she slumped Gently he examined her, opening her robe with a physician’s brisk impersonality, observing the wounds on throat and thigh. To John, who hovered anxiously, he spoke reassuring words in answer to an unspoken question: “She is in no danger of being changed. Not unless she should be bitten again.”

      Maule closed the robe with the tenderness of a mother caring for a child. Then he laid his pale hand on Angie’s forehead. A moment later her eyes opened wide.

      “What’s happening?” she asked, and sat up, almost energetically.

      Mr. Maule spoke to her, and to her lover, words of further reassurance. Then he listened with sparkling-eyed approval to the tale they stammered out, about their fight with two drugged vampire rapists.

      After that he had a couple of gentle questions for his young allies, following which he left the invader’s gun with them in the living room, and chose to spare their tender sensibilities by carrying his prize catch, the still-breathing gunman—whose name they said was Stewart—into his bedroom, behind a closed door, for interrogation. In Maule’s bedroom the signs of violent disturbance were as bad as in the living