“Yes.”
“Do you understand that I wish to initiate you into the World of the undead?” the Count asked.
“I do.”
“Do you understand that your new life of damnation is eternal?”
“Yes, darling, yes,” she said. “I want you to—to bite me. Now!”
“Be patient, dearest,” Slavek said. “Now, do you realize that there is no return from the life of the undead?”
“I understand, for Christ’s sake!” Mrs. Cuyler moaned.
“Don’t use that name!” the Count roared.
In the closet, Jessie Blake shook his head, saddened by this spectacle. Maybe he wouldn’t even have to interfere, if things kept going like this. Another five minutes of questions-and-answers would bleed away most of the romantic element the Count had spent the early evening hours in building up. U.N. law certainly had made things tough for the likes of Slavek.
“I’m sorry,” Renee Cuyler told her would-be lover-master.
The Count composed himself and, still with his fingertips resting on the pulse at her neck, he said, “You understand that my culture encourages a certain male chauvinism which you must accept as intimate terms of our blood contract?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you still wish to continue?”
“Of course!”
Jessie shook his head again. Mr. Cuyler was going to have his hands full restraining this wife of his, even if Blake did pull her out of the fire this time. Obviously, she had a vampire fixation, a need to be dominated and used in a physical as well as a sexual sense.
The Count hesitated on the brink of beginning the second and shorter section of the Kolchak-Bliss litany, the part dealing with the woman’s alternatives, and having hesitated he was lost. He tilted Renee’s pretty head, sweeping back her long, dark hair. Baring his fangs in an unholy grin, he went, rather gracelessly, for her jugular.
Delighted that his estimation of Slavek had proven sound, Jessie twisted the doorknob and threw open the closet door, stepping into the drawing room with more than a little flair.
Count Slavek jerked at the noise, whirled away from the woman and, hissing through his pointed teeth like a broken steam valve, back-stepped with his arms out to his sides and his cape drawn up like giant wings ready for flight.
Jessie brandished his credentials and said, “Jessie Blake, private investigator. I’m working for Mr. Roger Cuyler and have been assigned to protect his wife from the influence of certain supernatural persons who have designs upon both her body and soul.”
“Designs?” Slavek asked, incredulous.
Jessie turned to the woman. “If you’d be so kind as to close your blouse, Mrs. Cuyler, we can get out of this dump and—”
“Designs?” Count Slavek insisted, moving forward. “This woman is no innocent victim! She’s about the hottest little number I’ve seen in—”
“Are you contesting my intervention?” Jessie asked.
He was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds, all of it bone and muscle. And though he couldn’t harm a supernatural person without resorting to the accepted charms and spells, silver bullets and wooden stakes, he could sure as hell generate a .stalemate out of which no one could gain anything.
Still, the Count said, “Of course, I contest! You have somehow secreted yourself in a privately rented hotel suite, against all the laws of individual—”
“And you,” Jessie said, “were in the process of biting a victim to whom you had not recited the entire pertinent information which the Kolchak-Bliss Decision obligates you to state in easily understood language.”
Mrs. Cuyler began to cry.
Blake, undaunted, continued: “A mindscan, which you would have to undergo if I lodged this charge with the authorities, would prove my allegations and make you vulnerable to a number of unpleasant punishments.”
“Damn you!” Slavek growled.
“No histrionics, please,” Blake said.
The Count took a threatening step in the detective’s direction. “If I were to make two converts here, then there would be no one to report me, would there? I’m sure Renee would help me to convert you.” He grinned, his black eyes adance with light.
Blake removed a crucifix from his jacket and held it in one fist, where, with a human antagonist,’ he might have carried a fully loaded narcotic pin gun. “I’m not unprepared,” he said.