waves, and knowing what they see, sail higher.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BLACKWATER
Freda Warrington
Freda Warrington is the author of twenty-one fantasy novels including the Blood Wine series (Titan Books): A Taste of Blood Wine, A Dance in Blood Velvet, The Dark Blood of Poppies, and The Dark Arts of Blood. She has spent most of her life in Leicestershire, UK, where the atmospheric landscape inspired her to write otherworldly fiction, such as Elfland (winner of the 2009 Romantic Times award for Best Fantasy Novel). Her 1997 Dracula sequel Dracula the Undead—which views Stoker’s count from an entirely different perspective, while staying true to its Victorian forebear—won the Dracula Society’s award for Best Gothic Novel.
Vampires have fascinated her since childhood. (To learn more about the author, visit www.fredawarrington.com.) Her dark, gothic Blood Wine books began to evolve in the 1980s, long before the most recent explosion of vampire fiction. The main character in the story below, Sebastian, is also a major player in The Dark Blood of Poppies, and his experience here takes place before the novel begins—setting the scene, in a way…
She enters the room, luminous by the light of the candle she carries. In the darkness beyond her curtained bed, I wait unseen. No one ever sees me until I want them to; I’m less than a whisper, a dream. The bedroom is cavernous. Its heart glows orange from the fire banked in the grate, but this weak radiance cannot reach the massed black shadows around it.
She is luscious, barely eighteen. Her hair falls like honey over the white shoulders of her nightdress. She’s quite short, slightly plump; completely desirable. Her eyes are darkest violet, her mouth so deep a red it looks almost purple, like a ripe plum. Her name is Elizabeth.
She’s the only surviving child of her parents and they’ve arranged a marriage for her, so I’ve learned, to some cousin who will come here to live and thus secure the future of the family estate and fortune … A respectable Christian marriage, designed to provide mutual wealth, a place in society, a new dynasty … all that stuff. I don’t care for the dry details.
She’s a virgin, trembling on the chasm lip of marriage. That’s all we need to know.
She sets down the candle beside her bed and climbs in.
Clutching the sheets around her chin, she stares with those enormous pansy-petal eyes at her future. A pulse ticks in her temple. Can she sense me watching?
A maid bustles in, causing me to draw back with a faint hiss of annoyance. This young, freckly intruder chatters as she pokes the fire, then wipes her hands on her apron and fusses with the bedcovers even as my prey sits prettily against the pillows, waiting for her to leave. The maid brushes dangerously close to me as I draw back behind the heavy bed-curtains. She has no idea I’m there, inches from her. She says things like, “Ah, it’s soon you’ll be married! You look like a child still. Before you know it, your own children will be running around the place, and you a grand lady!”
The girl smiles enigmatically.
At last the maid is gone, taking her bustling energy with her. The fire fades to a red sulk. Elizabeth bends towards the candle, her lips pouting to blow it out—then she hesitates. Looking over her shoulder, she asks, “Who’s there?” She speaks lightly, as if she feels foolish at her own sudden fear.
If ever someone introduces himself to you by saying, “Don’t be afraid,” my advice is to run, run like the wind! Why would a stranger anticipate fear, unless it was they who posed a danger? Yet that is what I say. I even speak her name.
“Elizabeth. Don’t be afraid.”
She startles, clutching the bed covers to her chin. Her eyes are pools of astonished innocence. I catch her warm scent; soap and rosewater, with a hint of smooth female musk beneath. She’s terrified—not in a make-a-screaming-rush-for-the-door sense, but in the deeper way that turns the victim deathly still. Yet there’s fascination in her gaze. Before she acts, she needs to know what I am. And that’s the space I have to work in.
“How did you get in?” she whispers. “Who are you?”
“A ghost,” I reply. I move just enough to let her see me. Her lips open. I glimpse myself in the looking-glass on her dressing table—it’s a myth that we cast no reflection—and I see what she must see; a high, curved cheekbone, shapely nose and