Mrs. Dracula: Vampire Anthology Read online

  Contents

  A CONCERTO FOR THE DEAD AND DYING

  Jeannie Wycherley

  TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE

  Tracy D. Vincent

  LAST HOPE

  Emma Brady

  SPRING BREAK

  Kasondra Morin

  JUST A LITTLE FUN

  Andra Dill

  FLEEING JUSTICE

  Sherry Foster

  THE BLOOD PRINCE’S BRIDE

  L.D. Goffigan

  THE AGE OF BEASTS AND MEN

  Nadia Blake

  DAME OF DEATH

  Ava Mallory

  NAMUKASA

  Eli Constant

  WILLA’S WAY

  Aria Michaels

  BLOODYMOON

  Angela Roquet

  BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS

  Caroline A. Gill

  CHRONICLES OF STEELE: THE VAMPIRE

  Pauline Creeden

  BLOOD ON A TEXAS MOON

  Diana Layne

  COME WITH ME

  Lee Hayton

  HELL HATH NO FURY

  Logan Keys

  THE BLOODLESS CASE

  Adelaide Walsh

  THANK YOU

  COPYRIGHT

  A CONCERTO FOR THE DEAD AND DYING

  Jeannie Wycherley

  The soldiers in the trench are sleeping. The air is heavy, flavoured with anxious dreams. Weaving among the men here, Elizabetta crinkles her nose. The stench, a mixture of sour festering sores, sulphur and unwashed bodies, is unpleasant. Not the worst she’s experienced by a long way, it’s the nature of the beast after all, but still, she prefers the relative freshness of the night air on the devastated fields above.

  She doesn’t share her husband’s feral adoration of all things rancid and decaying. The Count would appreciate it here on the Western Front, where corpses dance on razor wire, dangling in various states of putrefaction, rotting where they have fallen. It is wicked what humans choose to do to each other.

  Elizabetta distances her own killing from this conflict. The war is a murderous atrocity, whereas she feeds for food, for sustenance. She prefers to keep it simple, and not toy with her evening meal. The men in the trenches are conveniently in her line of fire, to coin a phrase, and she is happy to pick any of them off, as and when she has an appetite.

  Here behind the German line, the men are scrawny and not even as well fed as the British. Their blood is thin. She has sampled many of them over the past few weeks but will need to turn her attention elsewhere. She needs something fresher, cleaner.

  She rounds a corner, hears an officer snoring in a dugout to her left. The walls of the trench are piled high with sandbags, and this helps to deaden any noise both inside and outside, but her hearing is acute. She steps over a man lying face down in an inch of water. The dank rainwater, mixed with the acrid stench of urine and stinking body odour, would make any mortal woman’s eyes sting, but Elizabetta is no mortal.

  The man she has come for is dozing. He is slumped against the front wall of the trench, his rifle hanging limply by his side. Ostensibly he is on look-out, but it has been a long night and his last meal, little more than dried biscuit was eaten over fourteen hours ago. He is spent, and when she moves into his vision, he stirs, but his dull eyes barely register surprise.

  Up close he is younger than she thought. No more than seventeen. His skin, beneath the filth, is pale and unblemished. She takes his jaw in her hand, leans in to him, and inhales his scent. Just a virgin boy. His blood will be sweet.

  “Mother?” he whispers, and Elizabetta shakes her head firmly. He stares at her in wonder as her pupils dilate. Her eyes are cold, mere inches from his. She tips his head with her strong fingers and opens her mouth. In sudden desperate fear, he tries to recoil. Her grip is uncompromising, and he is weak. Her fangs slide serenely into his neck, piercing the jugular. He gasps, probably feeling some sharp pain, and releases his bladder. He starts to shriek, but the shadows take him and he knows no more.

  The mist is rolling across no-man’s land. Francis watches its progress with interest. It glows as it tumbles towards him, lit by the peach dawn that creeps from the east. He feels upbeat. He has taken his final watch for a few days. At precisely 10:00 hours he will be relieved and sent back behind the line to Poperinge for some much needed rest and recreation.

  He’s worried that he will miss her, but no, there she is. Picking her way through the debris on the battlefield. Her red woollen coat apparent even in the half-light, buttoned tight, over a long grey skirt and thick black boots. She has dark hair tucked under a black fur hat, and her skin is unnaturally white.

  He was posted to the Ypres Salient several months ago, and initially the woman had appeared to him only in dreams. Every time he closed his eyes, she drifted into his vision, then walked away again. However, over the past ten days he has seen her in person. Every morning, at more or less the same time, she has appeared. She can only be coming from the direction of the German trenches. She heads his way, picking a route through the chaos of the battlefield with seeming ease. She skirts a particularly large crater, some twenty yards from him, and then turns to the east and makes for the skeletal tree line, stripped naked and cruelly burned. She heads towards the rising sun and eventually the town.

  The other men, his comrades-in-arms, think she’s a prostitute, or a Belgian collaborator of some sort, and they may be right. One or two of them have considered taking a pot shot at her, but the warrant officer won’t allow it. It’s not as though they have an endless supply of ammunition to waste. And besides, she is something to look at that isn’t bleak or murderous.

  The first time Francis spotted her, he’d jumped awake after nodding off. Asleep on his watch and dreaming of this strange woman while his fiancée, Lottie, waited for him at home. For a moment he had allowed his imagination to pretend this woman was Lottie, that it was she who was walking through hell to reach him. He caught his breath and shot to his feet, but the woman’s colouring, and the coat she was wearing, conspicuously scarlet in the threads of dawn light, discounted his modest Lottie.

  The men were right. The woman had to be a whore, Francis decided. Surely, there was no other plausible explanation. Poperinge was full of women with loose morals, looking to make a few francs to feed themselves and their children. In the face of this horror even those women who had been chock full of Christian morality and charity before this embittered and pointless conflict had destroyed the world they loved, had a tendency to lapse. This stranger could be a nurse at a push, Francis imagined, but no decent woman would be brazen enough to visit a trench full of soldiers at any time of the day or night, let alone without a chaperone. Francis considered it foolhardy—nay, suicidal—for anyone to walk through no-man’s land, let alone a young unarmed woman.

  War makes men superstitious. Francis kept his dreams and half-fantasies to himself, deciding she was a good luck charm, this strange woman in red. The German offensive has been lethargic of late, and Francis is still here, still inhabiting this foul ditch, still able to write letters home to his sweet innocent Lottie, even if his mind crept elsewhere.

  Elizabetta reaches her front door before the sun fully breaches the horizon. She pauses, her hand on the cool iron of the elaborate knocker, ready to push the door. She senses eyes upon her. Not her neighbours, no, nor any mortal. Vampires. Her kind.

  She swivels, too fast for a human eye to see. It is one of her gifts. She can shift
simply by willing it.

  She feels rather than sees a movement at the end of her street. Whomever it is, whatever it is, they move equally quickly and have disappeared. She could give chase, but at this time of the morning the risk would be too great. She scowls and hisses. Increasingly of late, she has been unnerved by the thought that someone is stalking her. Too many of her kind in the same vicinity can spell disaster. She has tried to dismiss her suspicions, but incidents such as this feed her paranoia. She has no doubt that her insatiable husband has spawned another of his damn brides. She thinks he does it merely to torment her.

  Inside her house, she welcomes the stillness. Strictly speaking it isn’t ‘her’ house at all. She acquired it through a previous conquest. He is gone now, a short-lived companion who caused her to bristle once too often. She is lonely, but at least she has this haven. Somewhere safe to lay her head until the dusk returns once more.

  He was relieved.

  The term makes him smile. A forty-eight-hour pass to Poperinge. He hitches a ride into town, there’s plenty of traffic headed that way, the supply train is a constant: resources, ammunition, conscripts, corpses. It’s a two-way street. He heads for his billet, peels his clothes and boots off, and luxuriates in a two-inch puddle of lukewarm water that is all that passes for a bath. It is surprisingly refreshing. When he steps out of the bath he notes with interest the ring of grime he has left behind. He wonders whether he will ever feel clean again.

  Poperinge calls to him. Hot food and warm beer. Perhaps a book or a newspaper. That’s all he requires.

  Before the war he had never been a drinker, largely because of his age of course. He had finally turned eighteen in December 1914 and the following September had headed to the Royal College of Music to study. However, he quickly realised that he would never be able to live with his conscience if he remained safe at home while all his friends disappeared to France, many never to return.

  Instead, he enlisted as a regular, fearing his mother would never forgive him. She would have preferred him to take a commission and stay out of harm’s way, however he’d decided that if he was going to go to war, he might as well do it properly.

  Poperinge is oddly vibrant for a town so close to the front line. There is entertainment here, low-grade for sure, theatre or vaudeville, if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy. On the whole Francis has more high-brow tastes. Music spills out of one of the bars. Ragtime. The sort of thing he associates with the piano players at the moving picture houses that are springing up all over the place. Francis pauses outside Le Papillion Bleu. This music is enticing, jolly. He hesitates but not for long.

  Inside, it is loud. Half a dozen scantily clad women, wearing too much rouge and colourful bloomers, cavort on the stage. Francis gapes at the spectacle, warmed by the colour and the distraction of the women, who drive the noise of rifle shots and mortar explosions into a dimly remembered past. He finds a stool at the bar, orders a glass of house red and perches excitedly, ogling the dancers and sipping his drink. He forgets the trenches, forgets the stranger with the red coat; forgets Lottie and his mother. He concentrates on the fluid movements of the women on stage and enjoys the plinkity-plunk of the piano.

  Later, when his eyes are glassy and his limbs rubbery, he steps out into the alley behind Le Papillion Bleu for a piss. He can hear the sound of low voices somewhere close by, but it is so dark he can see little. He fumbles with his fly buttons, his fingers struggling to work, when he is roughly knocked aside. A woman. He starts and apologises, blushing as she passes. He catches a glimpse of a dark eye, heavily bloodshot, half hidden by black hair. The figure moves swiftly down the alley, not running, and yet gone in the flick of a cat’s tail.

  Was it his imagination, or was the woman wearing a red coat? A red coat that accentuated the curve of her hips?

  Surely not? Francis stares after the departing figure, slack-mouthed, then attends to pressing business. He is glad of the sharpness of the evening; it sobers him a little. The moon is rising and the first stars are winking prettily above. It will be a clear night and in the morning the freezing mist will roll into the trenches, but he won’t see it. For tonight at least he’ll have a warm bed.

  Francis inhales a final breath of fresh air, then turns to re-enter Le Papillion Bleu for one final drink with some newfound friends, but as he does so, a scream pierces the darkness. He stumbles through the alley to the source of the noise. One of the dancers has stepped out of the club to smoke a cigarette. She is hovering over the body of a young British soldier, whose face is deathly white, his head angled awkwardly. Francis bends over him to check for a pulse. He notices a smudge of blood on the man’s neck and draws his hands away hastily.

  “Do you have a light?” he asks the dancer. She strikes a match and they bend over the corpse conspiratorially. There are two puncture wounds apparent in the flesh.

  The dancer hisses.“Ç’est le travail du diable.”

  Francis stares along the dark alley to the main thoroughfare beyond, thinking of the woman with the red coat, and frowns. He wonders if she saw anything. Without a word to the dancer, he takes off, chasing the woman who has inhabited his dreams. Too much time has passed, and he doesn’t know which route she chose. He decides on a whim to head left. The thoroughfare is crowded with soldiers, carousing and singing in spite of the curfew. He darts through them, searching for a glimpse of the red coat, impossible to see in the dark and at a distance. The woman is nowhere to be found. Eventually, running out of breath, he halts, shoulders heaving. He turns round and round, wondering where she has disappeared to, scrutinizing the people littering the street, and then suddenly she is there, standing next to him.

  He is startled and steps backwards. She stares up at him, a thinly veiled scowl. She is perhaps six inches shorter than he, her hair as black as a raven’s wing, her face pale and her lips stained a deep red. Perhaps she rouges them like the women in the bar. He cannot tell her age, but her face carries neither blemishes nor wrinkles. Older than him, but younger than his mother.

  “Je vous cherchais mademoiselle,” he says in his best French: I was looking for you.

  “Well you have found me now,” she replies in English, and he thinks he can see the flash of amusement in her eyes.

  “Ah, oui … there has been a death. Outside Le Papillion Bleu.”

  Her dark eyes, red rimmed, drill into him. “I have no idea why you would assume I have an interest in this information.” Her English is clipped and perfect, but he hears a slight accent. Not French nor Flemish. A harder inflection, more guttural. She hails from somewhere east of here. There is disdain for him in her words.

  He blushes. “No. Pardon me, mademoiselle.”

  “Madam.” She says coldly.

  “Madam.” He repeats the word. She is married. Of course. He should take his leave.

  But he holds his ground, staring into her upturned face. Her features are slightly uneven, lacking symmetry and yet the overall effect is one of beauty. She emanates a glow that is at once both charismatic and cold as ice. He wants to reach out and touch her, but he fears her skin will freeze his fingertips.

  He lifts his hand to touch her, then thinks better of it. Instead he bows in her direction, turns and hurries away, still slightly inebriated, but sober enough to know that taking his leave was the proper and most honourable recourse to this situation.

  She had sensed the heat inside him and was half afraid to touch him in case she melted.

  That would never do.

  Now she watches him go, and half-wishes he wouldn’t.

  She considers the information he has shared. A murder in the alley outside Le Papillion Bleu. It is not her style. She is secretive and clean. She clears up her mess and covers her tracks. Someone else has been interrupted whilst feeding. This angers her. Infringement on personal killing grounds is not the done thing, and she realises her suspicions are correct; Poperinge is home to two vampires. This won’t do.

  For her part, she is famished. She
considers the retreating man as potential supper, but something holds her back. She decides against it, heads after him anyway, but detours to the bars and cafes, ostensibly in search of fresh prey but also to take a look at what has occurred. She can move unnoticed among the throng of ogling spectators.

  When she has seen all she needs to, she stalks the back alleys and haunts the yards, searching for the one who dares to impinge on her territory. Eventually she too satiates her need for blood, on a man who stinks of beer and stale sweat. Her victim’s desperate desire for life, away from the abject and relentless horror of the front line, eight miles away, feeds her ravenous soul.

  Francis climbs into his solitary bed and lies awake thinking of her. He has left the curtains open, and from his bed, with its thin mattress and threadbare blankets, he can see the inky sky, stars sparkling like phosphorous on the battleground. He shivers under the covers and is unsure whether he is cold, excited or fearful. It is a heady combination.

  Eventually he nods off but wakes feeling rough, wondering whether he is so used to sleeping in a noisy trench, sharing a bunk with his comrades and a million lice, that he is incapable of sleeping anywhere that offers him a few home comforts.

  He has twenty-four hours before he must return to his unit, and he knows he must make the most of it. He washes, and then shaves with care, although his razor has seen far better days, and he is less than pleased with the result. He has no cologne.

  He heads for a small café on the main thoroughfare. The pre-war cosiness of the café is a distant memory. The chairs are hard and cushion-less, the tablecloths clean but stained. They have little to offer. The menu is faded, with many crossings-out. Francis orders eggs and bread and is pleasantly surprised when it arrives and is almost edible.

  He is looking forward to a day without his soldier’s duties, but he feels oddly discontent too. There is a heaviness within him, knowing that his freedom is limited, and that he will quickly return to the Front and an uncertain future, but the emergence of the mysterious woman in his reality rather than his fantasy also plays a part in his unease. Over a second cup of watery coffee, he considers what is best to do, and he decides he must put her out of his mind and enjoy the day.