[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
it, I did it for my son as much as for you. For if I could cure you . . .'
'Cure!' She spat the word out. 'Why don't you try curing yourself! There is no
cure, Necroscope! Surely you must know that by now?'
He nodded, took a chance and inched closer yet. And: 'Yes, I do know,' he
answered. 'But in a way I did cure you. You had a vampire in you, the sort the
Wamphyri called a
"mother". If you had spawned so many vampires, in the end it must diminish
you, kill you.
Am I right?'
'We'll never know, will we?' she growled.
Harry stood directly before her, less than a pace away, well within the arc of
her gauntlet.
'So you came to kill me.' He nodded. 'But surely you can see I've suffered my
own change?
And surely you know in your heart that I was never your enemy, Karen? I was
merely innocent. In my way.'
She stared hard at him for a moment, narrowed her eyes a little, then nodded
and smiled.
But it was more a sneer than a smile proper. 'I've found you out!' she said.
'I sense your door, Harry! You took me there once, remember? You carried me
from the garden to my aerie, all in a moment. And now there's another door
right here beside you. Would you dare stand so close without it? If so, then
do it. Show me how "innocent" you are.'
He shook his head. 'That was then,' he said. 'As for now: whatever I might
wish to be, I can only be Wamphyri! Precious little of innocence in me now . .
. about as much as there is in you? Yes, the thing within advised me to
conjure a door, for my protection. Or for its protection? But the man which I
still am tells me I don't need this safeguard, that it makes anything I might
say to you - the things I
want to say to you - a mockery. And while I live, the man in me has the upper
hand. So be it!'
He threw caution to the wind, collapsed the Möbius door and opened his mind
wide to her.
In a few moments she read or scanned all that was written there, for he kept
nothing hidden. But in telepathy, to read is often to feel, and most of all
she felt his pain: as great and greater than her own. And his loss -
all of his losses - whose total was so much more.
file:///G|/rah/Brian%20Lumley/Brian%20Luml...pe%205%20-%20Deadspawn%20V1.0%20(
html).htm (250 of 314) [2/13/2004 10:18:41 PM]
Brian Lumley - Necroscope 5 - Deadspeak
Page 244
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
And she saw how lonely and empty he was, which brought her own loneliness and
emptiness into proper perspective.
But . . . she was a woman and remembered certain things. As his right hand
closed in the curve of her waist at first gently, then possessively, so she
bent her elbow at his side until her open gauntlet leaned loosely against his
back and upper-left arm. And she said, 'Do you recall the time I told you how
I'd lusted after you? In how many ways
I lusted after you? Like a woman, perhaps - but certainly like a vampire! And
do you remember when you trapped me in my room, how I tried to lure you? I
went naked, writhing, panting, thrusting at you - and you ignored me. It was
as if your flesh was iron and your blood ice.'
'No,' he husked in her ear, drinking in the natural musk of her body, drawing
her to him and bending down his head to her. 'My body was flesh and my blood
was fire. But I had set myself a course and must run it. Now . . . it's run.'
She felt his need swelling to match, to intensify, her own - so much need -
and was aware of his heartbeat like a hammer against her breast. 'You . . .
you're a fool, Harry Keogh!' she whispered, as he crushed her even tighter.
And every nerve of her body thrilled as
Wamphyri instinct demanded that she scoop her gauntlet into the flesh and bone
of his back and spoon it out, then reach inside and slice his heart to a
crimson-pumping geyser.
Thrilled, yes, and thrilled again - in astonishment - when she relaxed her
hand so that the weapon fell from her fluttering fingers, fell loose to the
ground!
'Even as great a fool as I am,' she moaned then, sinking red-painted
razor-sharp nails through cloth and skin and shivering flesh into his back and
neck, as he in turn wrenched her sheath dress apart, and clutched her
bruisingly wherever his hands would reach, and bit her face and mouth until
the blood flowed. 'Which is to say,' she panted, when finally they held each
other burning at bay, 'a very great fool indeed!'
They flew to her aerie.
Mounted behind her in the ornate saddle at the base of the flyer's neck where
its manta wings sprouted, Harry must cling to Karen or risk falling - in which
case he would conjure a door and fall through it into the Möbius Continuum.
But he would not fall while he fondled her straining breasts, whose nipples
were nuggets under her ruined sheath. And he would not fall while his manhood
strained in the crevice of her delicious behind, surging there as if to lift
her out of her seat.
'Wait!' she had told him back there in the garden, at the wall, where with his
new-found
Wamphyri passions he would have taken her immediately and ploughed her like a
field of yielding flesh. And: 'Wait!' she'd repeated twice during the flight,
when he'd moaned louder than the wind in her ear and bitten the back of her
neck, and she had felt his metamorphic flesh flowing to enfold her while his
hands enlarged and flattened as if to touch all of her at once.
And yet again, 'Wait! Oh, wait!
she had pleaded with him, when the flyer set them down in a launching-landing
bay some levels lower than her topmost apartments, and she had almost to flee
before his lust across the cartilage causeways and up stairways of fretted
bone to her rooms. But at last he caught her in her bedroom and knew that the
waiting was over, for both of them.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]