But no rage, Dragosani? No fury? Why, it seems to me that this time you come almost humbly! Why is that? I wonder.
‘Oh, you know why, old dragon. I want rid of this thing.’
Ah, no (a mental shake of some monstrous head) unfortunately not. That is quite impossible. You and he are one now, Dragosani. And did I not call you my son, right from the very beginning? It is only fitting, I think, that my real son now grows within you. And he laughed in Dragosani’s mind.
Dragosani couldn’t afford the luxury of anger. Not yet. ‘Son?’ he pressed. ‘This thing you put in me? Son? Another lie, old devil? Who was it told me that your sort have no sex?’
/ think you never listen, Dragosani, the vampire sighed. You, his host, have determined his sex! As he grows and becomes more properly part of you, so you become more like him. In the end it is one creature, one being.
‘But with his mind?’
With your mind – but subtly altered. Your mind and
your body too, but both changed a little. Your appetites will be . . . sharper? Your needs . . . different. Listen: as a man your lusts, passions and rages were limited by a man’s strength, a man’s capabilities. But as one of the Wamphyri. . . What end would it serve to have that great engine in you with nothing to drive but a bundle of soft flesh and brittle bones? What – a tiger with the heart of a mouse?
Which was more or less what Dragosani had expected from the monster. But before coming to a final, perhaps irrevocable decision, he tried one last time, made one last threat. ‘Then I shall go away and give myself into the hands of physicians. They’re a different breed to the doctors you knew in your day, Thibor. And I shall tell them a vampire is in me. They’ll examine, discover, cut the thing out. They have tools you wouldn’t dream of. When they have it they’ll cut it open, study it, discover its nature. And they’ll want to know how and why. I shall tell them. About the Wamphyri. Oh, they’ll laugh, measure me up for a strait-jacket – but they won’t be able to explain it away. And so I shall bring them here, show them you. It will be the end. Of you, of your “son”, of an entire legend. And wherever the Wamphyri are, men will seek them out and destroy them . . .’
Well said, Dragosani! Thibor was dryly sardonic. Bravo!
Dragosani waited, and after a moment: ‘Is that all you have to say?’
It is. I don’t converse with fools.
‘Explain yourself.’
Now the voice in his mind grew extremely cold and angry, a controlled anger now, but real and frightening for all that. You are a vain and egotistical and stupid man, Boris Dragosani, said Thibor Ferenczy. Always it is “tell me this” and “show me that” and “explain”! I was a power in the land for centuries before you were even spawned, and even that would not have happened but for
me! And here I must lie and let myself be used. Well, all that is at an end. Very well, I will “explain myself as you demand, but for the very last time. For after that. . . then it will be time for proper discussion and proper bargaining. I’m tired of lying here, inert, Dragosani, as you well know, and you have the power to get me up out of here. That is the only reason I’ve been patient with you at all! But now my patience is no more. First let us deal with your assessment of your situation.
You say that you will give yourself into the hands of physicians. Well, by now certainly the vampire will be discernible in you. It is there, physically and tangibly, a real organism existing with you in a son of symbiosis – a word you taught me, Dragosani. But cut it out? Exorcise it? Skilled your doctors may well be, but not that skilled! Can they cut it from the individual whorls of your brain? From the fluids of your spine? From your tripes, your heart itself? Can they wrest it from your very blood? Even if you were fool enough to let them try, the vampire would kill you first. It would eat through your spine, leak poison into your brain. Surely by now you have come to understand something of our tenacity? Or did you perhaps think that survival was a purely human trait? Survival -hah! – you do not know the meaning of the word!