‘You . . . you were still Wamphyri?’ His mouth had fallen half-open. ‘Even after I burned your vampire and its eggs?’
‘You burned all but one!’ she insisted, ‘which remained in me. The thing would grow again, yes. But I knew that if you suspected as much, then that you’d try again. And then that I would die! Oh, and the thought of that terrified me.’
‘I remember how I slept.’ Harry licked dry, almost desiccated lips. ‘I was even more exhausted than now: by what I’d seen and done.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘You fell asleep in a chair, which was when I was saved. For while you slept one of mine returned to the aerie.’
‘One of yours? A creature?’ Harry frowned. ‘But they were all destroyed or sent away.’
‘Sent away, yes,’ she answered. ‘You had set this one free out of the “goodness” of your heart . . . sent her away to die!’
‘Her?’
‘A trog, a handmaiden, a creature who performed menial tasks within the aerie and in my personal chambers. But she had been born here and understood no other existence, and eventually she returned to the only home she’d ever known. I knew it the moment she set foot on the bottom step of the nethermost stairwell; she heard my mind-call and came as fast as she could; but she was starved from her wandering in the cold wilderness of Starside, and wearied unto death by her climb through all the aerie’s levels. Even unto death, aye.’
‘She died?’ Harry felt Karen’s small sadness, as at the death of a favourite pet.
The vampire Lady nodded. ‘But not before she’d removed the silver chains from my door and disposed of the potted kneblasch plants! Then she collapsed and died, and I saw my chance.
‘While still you slept, I dressed her corpse in my best white dress and bundled it from the ramparts. She fluttered down, down, almost as if she flew! But in the end she rushed to the rocks and was broken. This was what you saw when you looked down from that high balcony, Harry. But me: I was in hiding, where I stayed until you were gone from here.’
The Necroscope saw it all now. ‘I went back to The Dweller’s garden,’ he said. ‘My son knew what I’d done. Fearing for his own existence, he took my powers from me, then transported me back to my own world where for a time I was only a man. But I discovered monsters there and they discovered me. Until, as you can see, in the end I set myself against one vampire too many.’
Karen had settled down between his spread legs. Despite the seriousness of their discussion of past events, Harry’s shaft pounded there like a second heart where her fingers teased the shining rim of its bell. She paused a while to moisten its pulsing tip with her snake’s tongue, and to trap its swaying trunk between her breasts. And: ‘How strong you are, Harry,’ she sighed, perhaps wonderingly. ‘Indeed, I do believe you’re full again.’
‘To see your face,’ he answered, ‘to smell your body, and feel you wet in your core . . . how could I be other than full again?’ He lifted her up to seat her on his rod, but instead she slipped from his grasp and stepped down from the bed.
‘Not here,’ she panted.
‘Oh?’
‘There!’ she said.
‘There?’
‘In that secret place of yours.’
‘The Möbius Continuum? To make love there?’
‘Why not? Is it a holy place?’
Harry didn’t answer. But … it could well be. It could well be.
‘Will you take me there, Harry? And will you take me, fuck me there?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he answered, throatily. ‘And I’ll show you a place you just won’t believe, where we can fuck for a second or a century, as you will!’
She flew into his arms and he rolled her out of the sheets and into the Möbius Continuum. ‘But . . . there’s no light!’ she hissed, opening her legs wide and guiding him into her. ‘I need to see you: the way your face quakes when you come, the slackening of your mouth as the throbbing subsides and the aching starts.’