- but never a true wolfling. Only by transfusion of Radu's blood, his saliva, his sperm, his essence, could that be accomplished. Or by his leech or its vampire egg. But surely, during all the years that B.J. had served him, sufficient of her Master must have found its way into her? No, not so; Radu had it that the giving was a one-way thing; B.J. got nothing back ...
Oh, really? Then why was it that she always felt - what, an electric connection? An inner awareness, anyway - as Radu's funnel filed and he began to consume her life's blood? Bonnie Jean knew why, or supposed she knew. But she scarcely dared to admit it, not even to herself. For if she was wrong ...
How great his wrath, to discover that she had somehow imagined herself magically endowed - indeed Wamphyri -without that he had engineered it!
Well, he need not worry, for it was not her intention to make a vampire, a wolf, or any other creature out of Harry. It was her intention to obey her Master and eventually have him up out of his resin grave; for as much as Bonnie Jean had been the dog-Lord's champion, she sensed the day coming when he must be hers. The Drakuls and Ferenczys and their thralls were abroad in the world; as yet B.J. was more woman than composite creature; Radu must survive, at least until she had learned al she could from him, and with that knowledge became more capable of managing, of engineering ...her own ... dynasty?
And so it was out in the open at last, in the open of her consciousness, her self-understanding, at least. Not treachery, but survival! Her own survival. More proof - and possibly the best yet - that she was or would soon be what she'd suspected for the last forty years at least: Wamphyri! So for now, Radu would continue to be her Master, and his word law.
And until he was up again, and for as long as the Drakuls and Ferenczys were a threat, she would suppress it as best she could; and as he had used her she would now use others, and so prepare her own way in the world.
As for the dog-Lord's plans for Harry - his so-called Mysterious One, his 'Man With two Faces,' - B.J. could now look at those in a different light, from Radu's point of view. For what he would do now, she herself might yet be obliged to attempt in some far-distant future time ...
Radu had not gone down into the resin of his own volition. Not entirely. He had thought that he sickened; he had believed that the Black Death held him in thrall, and knew from experience that he could not beat it. With his own eyes he had seen his pups develop those hideous black pustules, and die. He had felt the disease inside him, and knew the struggle his essence put up against it, in vain. And he'd cursed his leech for its weakness, its idle inefficiency, that it could not combat the creep of this insidious thing.
But the 1340s was a decade not only of plague but of famine and unrest. Simple movement throughout Europe had been the most difficult thing in its own right. Even a rich Boyar's entourage, fleeing before the all-devouring scourge from the east, could scarcely expect to find it an easy passage. Radu had got into a fight, suffered a sword thrust in his side. Normally his vampire leech could easily handle, quickly heal a simple wound. But his parasite was already battling the plague within Radu's system; a fight it couldn't hope to win, not as long as he was up and about, engaging in other activities.
He had hated it, but there was no other solution. So that finally, in Scotland in 1350, the dog-Lord's long-laid contingency plan for continuity must be brought into being. The pack had built him a makeshift lair in unexplored mountain heights, and Radu had gone down into the resin.
A drastic solution, perhaps, but this was what he'd seen in precogni-tive dreams: that he must go down for long and long - six hundred years and more - and rise up in a future world, even in another body! Metempsychosis: the passing of his Being and Personality into the body of another. Moreover, he had long dreamed of this Mysterious One, who would be there at his awakening; and of himself as the avenger out