changes aren’t just in her, but in her husband George, too. It’s as if his coarseness has been fine-polished away, and he no longer strides around like a drunken officer, slapping the furniture with a riding crop. Instead there’s a thoughtful quality about him, a shine to his hair and a pale bloom to his skin.
Have I been blind? Isn’t it strange, how we don’t see what we don’t expect to see? Some ghastly trick has been played upon me, here in my own house. Voices seem to be whispering and laughing at me from the corners of ceilings. Stags stare at me from black glass eyes. Something is pulling at me, an unseen current whirling me along, rendering me as wide-eyed and vulnerable as Elisabeth on that first night. As if in a trance, I walk into the drawing room and they are sitting in chairs on either side of the fireplace, George and Elizabeth, just as if they have been waiting for me to arrive. They sit perfectly composed, like brother and sister, hands lightly clasped in their laps. They are gazing at me with liquid eyes and their skin glows like candle-flames shining through the thinnest possible shell of wax.
“How did you do it?” My voice almost fails as I speak, emerging hoarse as an old man’s.
“We met your angels,” she answers simply. “Your three angels. They came back. I knew what they were and I persuaded them to transform us.”
I should have remembered. The vampire’s kiss, when it does not kill, brings madness. Not always in the form of wilting terror, but sometimes as a kind of megalomania.
“Why? They can’t be persuaded. They take only those who are special, chosen. That is what they told me.”
“And it’s what they told us, too,” she answers serenely. “You take yourself too seriously, Sebastian. Perhaps they changed us simply to annoy you.”
“But him?” I point at the husband, who looks back at me. He sits motionless as only vampires can, fixing me with his all-knowing, pitiless gaze. “That—that coarse, arrogant, drink-raddled merchant?”
“Why would I want to be immortal, without my husband at my side?” she replies, genuinely surprised.
“You hate him, and all he represents!”
“No, I don’t. It was your idea that I hated him, that he maltreated me. Your perception, not reality. I love my husband. Have you no idea of the wonders I’ve shown him? We are one soul, George and I.”
So, all the arts she learned from me, she has taught him in turn! And far from being suspicious at her knowledge, it turns out he was delighted with it, enthralled! Unbelievable.
And now they are holding hands, and he lifts hers to his mouth, pressing her knuckles to his lips. She laughs, showing the tips of her new fangs. “What, did you think you alone were the custodian of this delicious dark secret? Selfish Sebastian. You wouldn’t share, so we found another way, and now we don’t need you anymore.” And she laughs again. Laughs at me!
So this is what I did.
I went away and dressed myself up as a priest, and I arrived in the nearest village all disheveled, with a crusading fire in my eye; a man of the cloth, on a mission from God. First I found the local priest and plied him with whisky as I told my story. Despite his unpromising appearance, he was soon full of holy ardor. He was a fiery fellow, eager to make his mark on the world, to impress his bishop and win the undying admiration of his congregation, or something on those lines. I wound him up and set him spinning.
He gathered the populace, and I spun my story; that Elizabeth and George were undead, that they’d sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for immortality, that I’d been hunting such creatures down across Europe, Britain and Ireland for years in order to bring them the mercy of death. Oh, a rare tale I wove.
I’d come to warn them, to help them purge the evil. Were they with me? Oh yes, by God, they were!
The priest fell in eagerly behind me like a captain behind a general. He took me for the scholar and holy man I purported to be and he wanted to play the hero, scrambling for his share of my glory. Turned out I’d walked into a community already possessed by rumor and fear. Elizabeth and George were young vampires, you see, not yet adept at hiding their tracks. There had been