She looked up and saw him, and felt the power of his magnetism stronger than ever before. It was love and it was much more than love: he need only command it and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. She was entirely enthralled. Taking a magnificent conch with her, she ran to him and saw how different he looked. Different and yet the same. Before returning to her, the Necroscope had stopped off somewhere to pick up a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black overcoat; weird gear, Penny thought, for a beach in the heat of the midday sun! Now he reminded her of the grim-faced bounty hunter or undertaker in … how many of those old spaghetti Westerns? Except they hadn’t worn dark-tinted glasses.
Where the tree gave its maximum shade, Harry eased off his coat and displayed evidence of his wounds: great mats of blood congealed into rusty scabs which crusted his tatters and glued them to him. Feeling his hurt – indeed, feeling more of it than he felt – Penny unwrapped the strip of soaked cotton sheet from her breasts and dampened the Necroscope’s bloodied areas with brine. And then she was able to peel the soiled rags from his now entirely human body. His human-looking body, anyway.
From the front, the bullet hole in Harry’s right shoulder didn’t look too bad, but from the back it was awful. A chunk of flesh the size of a child’s clenched fist had been blown right out of him, and its rim at the top had been ripped by Johnny Pound’s hook. But amazingly (to Penny, if not to the Necroscope himself) the wound was already healing. New skin was forming around the crater where flesh and bone had been blasted away, and while the pulp within gleamed red as meat on a butcher’s block, still it had almost stopped bleeding.
‘It’s healing now,’ Harry grunted. ‘If you just sat there and watched it, you’d see it closing up. Another day, two at most, and there’ll be only a scar. Another week and even the restructured bone will have stopped aching.’
Fascinated, drawn to him irresistibly, she clutched his shoulders and turned her lithe, lovely body this way and that, brushing her breasts against the gaping hole in his back. Done on impulse, her eroticism caused the Necroscope a little pain and gave him a lot of pleasure. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the brown of her nipples stained red by blood fresh from his body. But in the next moment, astonished by the strength of her own sensuality, Penny said, ‘I . . .I don’t quite know why I did that!’
‘I do,’ he growled, taking her there on the sand – and in turn being taken – again and again through the long hot afternoon.
It was love and lust and what lovers have done since the beginning of time; but it was other than that, more than that. It was an initiation of sorts, for Harry as much as for Penny. And it proved beyond a doubt how utterly inexhaustible are the Wamphyri and their thralls.
Later . . . she woke up feeling chilly, saw Harry sitting there with her shell in his lap. His face was gaunt, almost pained. The sun, setting over the rolling ocean, highlighted the rims of hollows in his face like shallow craters in a moonscape. Squinting her eyes until he was little more than a dark silhouette, Penny tried to make this newly perceived Harry less stark. The too-distinct lines melted a little and softened his face, but the pain was still there. Then, when he felt her eyes on him, the mood was broken. And when she sat up shivering, he draped her with his coat.
Picking the shell up, she said, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
He gave her a strange look. ‘It’s a dead thing, Penny.’
‘Is that all you see, death?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I feel it, too. I’m the Necroscope.’
‘You feel that the shell is dead?’
He nodded. ‘And how the creature it housed died. Well, not feel it, exactly. I … experience it? No, not that, either.’ He shrugged and sighed. ‘I just know.’