Author: C. E. Murphy
Category: Vampires
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I said, “Perhaps,” though I had no intention of falling to the red dragon’s wiles, and then I went inside to make my mother’s dinner.
But she was late in returning, which surprised me not at all. I watched for her at the door as the night grew darker, as dark as it ever did in a Russian summertime, and I was not surprised, again, when a rider came out of the dark.
Not a rider, again, no, nor a dragon to be mistaken for one. Blackness followed this one like an insect’s wings, buzzing and beating the air. He moved quickly, far too quickly for the eye to follow, and that was what lent him the illusion of being a rider’s size. He could be everywhere at once, so that the eye saw him as larger than he was. Not until he stood at the door did he stop his mad flickering motion and let me see him for what he was.
A plain man, not like the blazing sun-red dragon, but then a man of darkest midnight came in cover of darkness and had no need for beauty. “I suppose you wish for me to be a jewel in your crown as well,” I said to him, and he chuckled.
“No. The blood in my veins, perhaps, but not a jewel in a crown. That’s for dragons—” and then he breathed in deeply and murmured, “Dragons,” again. “You know one, then.”
“He has come to me,” I agreed, and the small dark man pursed his lips.
“So high?” he asked, and lifted a hand to the height of the red dragon’s human form. “With copper hair and jade eyes?” When I nodded, he muttered, “Curse him,” and then with wry humor, “at least he’s not at home trying to seduce Vanessa. Though if he knows I’m here he may betray me to her—” He ceased his ruminations and met my gaze again with a trace of amusement. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t be worrying about the woman at home when I have one in front of me.”
“You cannot think to seduce me,” I half-asked in astonishment. “Not when you stand here and speak of the wife at home.”
He winced. “Companion. But no, you’re right. Will you walk with me, Baba Yaga’s daughter?” He offered me his arm, a gentlemanly gesture.
I had known gestures like that in my past life, and now found it left me cold and alone. My answer came slowly, unconsidered enough to surprise me, but not so hasty as to offer insult in return for chivalry. “No. No, I think I will not. There is something you want of me, and I have no wish to play at games. For what you desire, I desire something in exchange.”
“And what is that?”
I extended my wrist, bare and strong. “For my blood, your own. Two sips. One for health, one for life.”
He went still, so very very still. Men did not go so still, could not be so motionless. Even if his fluid motion, his quickness that made him seem larger than he could be, had not betrayed him, the stillness would. It lasted only a moment, but I knew then that I was right, that the hunger for blood was born in him, and that mine was a potent cocktail indeed. So too was his, though, and when he spoke again it was on a breath: “You know a great deal, Baba Yaga’s daughter.”
“I would be no daughter of my mother if I did not.”
He took my hand then, and drew my wrist to his mouth. Not to bite, as I might have thought, but to kiss, soft and sensual and in thanks. Then he moved closer to me, his breath warm on my neck, so much warmer than the dragon, whom I might have expected to be hot-blooded. “Close your eyes, Baba Yaga’s daughter.”
Perhaps I should not have, but I did. Mother’s grimoires claimed no one looked on a vampire in its true, feeding form, and survived. Perhaps the books of magic were wrong, and my blood, exotic mix of royalty and witchery, might be enough to save me. But perhaps not, and in truth I had no wish to see the thing that drank my blood, for all that the pain above my pulse was sweet, and the warmth that flooded me was comforting. Warmth, when I should grow cold, but the vampire grew warmer with each swallow, and I could feel no chill while in his arms.
Only when I was dizzy did he release me, and bend his head to his own wrist. My blood, his own: it welled together and he pressed it to my mouth. One sip for healing : the wounds on my throat were gone before I drew a new breath. The vampire’s blood was sweet, sugar-sweet, and thicker than mortal blood. I licked my lips and drank again: two sips for life. Rarest of gifts, immortality from an immortal. But I lifted my head and spat the last of his blood away, making certain not to swallow, for I remembered what my mother’s books warned: three sips to die.
“A jewel in the crown I understand,” I said then, “but blood is ephemeral, it is renewed and dies within the body. So why?”
He smiled. “Because blood is everything, witch’s daughter, daughter of queens. Humans have never really understood that, but blood is everything. Blood is all. I thank you for the gift of yours.”
He was gone before the words were: they lingered in his wake, and I stood in their portents a long while before I turned back to my duties, cleaning the house and making my mother’s dinner. She looked me up and looked at me down when she returned, then sat and ate her meal before she spoke. “The blazing sun and darkest night have touched you, but I see no mark of the rising dawn.”
Cleverness came into my tongue, and I remembered that I had been thought witty before I died. More than witty: sharp, and even cruel. “The blazing sun is all the power of life, and the darkest night all the depths of treachery. Who I am and who I was have no need for the encroaching light and hope that is the rising dawn.”
My mother said, “Then you are ready,” and slew me with an obsidian blade.
***
She slew me and yet I lived, my heart contracting around black glass. I lay naked, bound with leather straps across the hut’s floor, my ankles and wrists spread wide as if to open me to the rising sun beyond the door.
A thing, a terrible thing, crawled toward me from beneath a blanket. From beneath the baby blanket that had Grigori embroidered on it, and I saw with horror that the hunched and wretched mess approaching me had once been my dear friend.
He bled from so many wounds: gunshot, knife stab, cut throat, unmanned. Poison foamed at his mouth, and drowning water gurgled in his throat. His skull was bashed in, and all of his body was blackened and shriveled with fire: no less would murder Baba Yaga’s son, and now it seemed not even that had been enough. She capered around me, iron teeth clacking and long nails clicking as she encouraged the dreadful thing that was Rasputin to claw his way toward me. Onto me, a sticky cold bloody mass at my ankle and inching its way up my body.
Too late, too late, it took little imagination to understand why Baba Yaga might want a tsarina. Surely if anything might restore her son it might be the very blood of Russia herself, and now that blood had been filled with the magic that Baba Yaga lived by. She crooned, “Yes, and yes, and yes, my son. Crawl within her, have her as your own, seek her flesh with yours and become one, be reborn, my child!”
I should be afraid. Afraid of the coming violation, afraid of the magics worked by a mad witch, afraid of the shambling piece of flesh that had once been a friend. I should be afraid of the encroaching dawn which I so callously dismissed, and afraid of the moment of transition between night and day that will no doubt spell my doom.
Instead I am enraged.
It begins in the core of me, where the vampire’s blood still lends me heat. It begins in the back of my eyes, a white fury that blinds me to all else. It begins in my hands, clenched against their leather bonds as if I might drag them from the floor. It begins in the very soul of me, and it whispers Twice.
Twice. Twice unwanted in favor of a son.
My wrath bursts forth, and a dragon destroys Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut.
***
I was not certain I hadn’t conjured the beast, though at the same time I knew him: my white knight, the rider of the rising dawn, no more a figment of imagination than the red rider or the black. Less so, for my life was his, a gift from a creature so vast it astonished me he had ever noticed me. Yes, even as a tsarina, I could be surprised that I had drawn a man’s eye, much less this man, this beautiful white man with his red eyes and his f
iery breath.
The hut’s straw roof was aflame, the walls scattered and the bones that lay beyond all knocked askew. Rasputin mewled and sobbed, a pathetic lump of dying bones while the white dragon flew into the sky with Baba Yaga in his claws.
And I, I was free, with an ache in my arms and thighs that said I had snapped the leather that still dangled from wrist and ankle. I seized the mortar that was my mother’s flying roost. I lifted it and drove it down once. Again. Again. Again. With each blow the Rasputin-thing became less than it was, a broken bloody smear of white and red. The mortar tugged in my hands, trying to escape, but I held it fast with will and magic, and smashed Rasputin again.
Baba Yaga crashed to the earth beside the ruined hut, splashing so deep into mud and muck that she made a crater of her own, and did not rise from it.
The white dragon flung himself from the sky, and snapped the broken bloody bits of Grigori Rasputin into his jaws. He met my eyes, and swallowed.
For an instant the world was silent. There was nothing in it but myself and my dragon lover, his eyes hot and hungry on mine. I went to him in solemnity, touched his broad white chest and reached for his long whiskered face. He transformed then, a tremendous inward rush of air that left me breathless. We were naked in each other’s arms, eager in the face of death, and he no less claimed me than I claimed him. Raw and perfect passion, long since sparked and only now able to be consummated, for had I been anything less than I was now, he would have destroyed me, and had he been anything more, he would not have given that self up by feasting on Baba Yaga’s son. Even now I felt Rasputin’s power in him, burning hot and fierce but forever contained by a magic wholly different from human witchery. “Rumi,” he whispered against my skin, a name to call him by. A name to possess him by, so that he might retain himself and still contain the warlock within.
“Rumi,” I gave back, and did not say my own name. He knew it well enough, and there would be time enough later, when the rest was dealt with.
They were polite enough not to arrive until our need, the first flush of need, had been sated. It did not take long, which is as well: neither of them were patient, and my lover and I were still entangled when the vampire appeared bearing iron and wood and stone.
I paid him little mind: it was the red dragon falling from the sky who interested me more, because it was he who interested Rumi.
But the red dragon no longer cared for me at all: it was my mother, feeble in the pit of her own making, who held his attention. The vampire blurred, weighting her down with chains as he snarled, “Bound by iron, drowned by water, pierced by wood. Burned by fire—” and the red dragon drew breath for flame.
“No! ” I flung my hand out, and the white power of a Russian night crashed forth. It caught the red dragon’s throat, seized his fire, and the vampire sped toward me.
But I am immovable, intransigent, immutable. I am the last heir of Russia, and Baba Yaga is my mother. My
bones are this country’s earth, my blood its waters.
My breath is the wind that caresses its never-ending miles, my body the land upon which my people tread.
I am Russia, and not even a vampire can destroy me.
The black one bounced off me as though he had hit a wall, and even in his speed I saw the astonishment in his eyes.
The red dragon slammed into his mortal form, beautiful slim red-haired man, and spoke: “Have you lost your mind, girl? Do you know what she’ll do to you? To us? We’ve killed her son!”
Baba Yaga’s cackle rose from the mud-filled pit she was contained within. “A son, a son, what is a son when now I have a daughter? A son is nothing to a daughter, and I was old and blind to not see what I had been given in you, my child. Free me, daughter, my daughter, my Anna. Together we will teach these monsters the meaning of human magic.”
Instead I said, “Go.”
My mother screamed, but the dragon and the vampire wisely took one step away. Neither could resist, though. They looked at one another, then back to me, and voiced the question as one: “Why?”
“Because you have wakened in me the power to live, and because the witch belongs to Russia. Go,” I said again, “and never return. I will know, and my amnesty will not last.”
“What about him, ” the red dragon said, and pointed petulantly at the other. At the white dragon, my dragon, my Rumi, gentle and ferocious, who had come to save me, treasure in his trove, from the revolutionaries. Who had come in the dawn to stop his enemy from slaughtering his love, and who now burned inside with the gobbled-up power of Grigori Rasputin, son of Russia, son of the Russian witch. He was greater now than he had been, an ancient dragon impregnated with human magic, and my body craved his touch.
I answered without thinking what it might mean to a dragon: “He is mine.”
Shock, and perhaps envy, blanked the red dragon’s face. Then he spoke another tongue, a deep growling language that had no business coming from a man’s chest, and my white dragon sneered both fear and acquiescence. Not loss, though; not regret, and that was a great gift to me, for though I had not been meant to, I had understood what one dragon said to the other:
“Dragons are collectors, not the collected. Stay with her if you wish, but never imagine you are welcome among our people so long as you belong to a human.”
But I am not human, I wished to say. I have died twice and am daughter and mother to Russia. A dragon is my only worthy consort. I did not say it, though, because the red dragon had told me something he did not mean to. Our people. They were not the only ones, these two dragons. My mother’s grimoires had spoken of so many others, others she called Old Races, and had captured so many in their pages that I had thought they were nothing more than stories caught on paper. But no, there were two standing before me, and a third at my side, and many more in the world besides.
It was a sweet secret, rich with potential. They had lost much: so had I. Someday we might find a common ground.
“Go,” I said one final time. I knew myself now. I had passed through death and rebirth. I had cast aside being Anna, but had become Baba Yaga’s daughter, the daughter of Russia herself. “This is your order from the last Tsarina, from the mother and queen of all Russia. Go, and do not return.”
And because I knew myself now, I reclaimed the name that had once been mine, and had no need to shout the last words, only whisper them with all the power of a witch: “So commands Anastasia.”
Chicago Bang Bang
A man with a gun burst into the restaurant and shot Eliseo Daisani in the chest.
Dames everywhere screamed. Men bellowed. Daisani flew ass over teakettle, knocked halfway across the room as more bullets flew. Not just a gun, then: a Tommy gun, shining black and gleaming wood, fully automatic, tossing .45 calibre cartridges like they were shots of whiskey.
Even a guy like me thinks that’s overkill, for just one man.
The broad with Daisani was the only one not screaming. She was a looker, if you like ’em hard around the edges. Wearing her hair long and soft couldn’t hide that. But she had a body that wouldn’t quit, and I can tell you that from personal experience. While everybody else was dodging bullets and hiding under furniture, she crawled toward her man, not giving a damn about what the gleaming hardwood floors might do to her grey satin gown. Grey: that was her name, Vanessa Grey, and that was the color she liked to wear. Dolls are funny that way.
Now this is the thing not a soul at that restaurant admits to seeing: Eliseo Daisani, mob boss and socialite lying there, his chest ripped to pieces, while the gun moll in the grey dress bit open her own wrist and fed him blood.
Maybe nobody saw it. With feathers from the upholstery flying and bullets still in the air, I’m not saying that’s impossible. But if I’d seen it? I’d have forgotten quicker than you could say Jack Sprat. That kind of memory could shorten your lifespan considerably. Nobody heard her talking to him, either, using language a nice girl shouldn’t, and giving a dangerous man what-for.
“Don
’t be stupid,” is what they didn’t hear. “Forty people just saw you take at least one bullet in the chest. You cannot just get up and kill the man, not if you want to stay in Chicago. Not if you ever want to come back to Chicago, and I will not be exiled from my home town, Eliseo. Heal most of it if you want, but you’re going to the hospital and you’re going to take weeks to recooperate, just like a normal person. I’ll deal with this. Now lie down and play dead.”
And if nobody heard that, well, by the time an ambulance got there, nobody was counting the bullet holes in Daisani’s tuxedo, either. There was only one in him , and that was bad enough.
As for the tough with the gun, he was slick, but not slick enough. He backed out of the restaurant right into the cops’ arms, and nobody thinks it was coincidence he got a bullet in the chest, too. The only thing dirtier than the cops in this town is the water.
I got all of this later, straight from the horse’s mouth, not that a catch like Grey oughta be called a horse. But I’m the kind of fella a smart dame goes to when she’s in trouble, and let me tell you, there couldn’t have been a happier man in the world when she darkened my door.
The words Private Investigator were etched on the glass of that door. Used to be it’d said Pinkerton Agency , but they were too square for me. I’d had the glass replaced. I liked the way it looked, and I liked that there was no name on it. People who needed me didn’t need a name. They needed a gumshoe, and most of ’em didn’t want to know any more about me than that. To this day I figure Grey chose my door to walk through because a man without a name is easier than most to disappear, and once you’ve taken on Eliseo Daisani as a case, chances are you’ll end up disappeared.
I knew what she saw when she stepped through my door. The lights were low, leeching color from the room. I was a shadow in the shadows, collar of my trench coat up and fedora pulled low over my eyes. A cigarette dangled from my lips, and hazy smoke in the room said a thousand like it had already been inhaled. Not even a glow lingered at its tip to highlight the lines of my face. It was better that way: even the clientele didn’t need to have too clear an idea of what I looked like.