youth, before they were vampires, may rise up to trouble them again.
In this dream there had been no blood. Instead, the young Lord had battled through the ranks of a thousand dead men whose bloodless, crumbling bodies stood up again as quickly as he cut them down! But even though his every effort had seemed useless, still he'd fought through them to get to That which they protected, the Thing which they guarded, his Great Enemy from a youth which was now almost entirely forgotten.
And when finally he had stood upon a mound of crumbling, stinking human debris - pieces which yet clutched and clawed at him to pull him down - then the aerie of his alien foe had materialized: a rearing cone of whirling, mutating numbers! And within the rush and swirl of the cone, the infinitely sad face of a yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant; made sad, perhaps, by the sacrifice of his teeming dead army, but not by that alone. For strangely, inexplicably, he also felt for his vampire enemy.
Nestor had somehow known it, that his enemy cared for him. And that was when he'd been wrenched awake, as the sad sapphire eyes of the face in the numbers vortex had gazed right into his soul, or what was left of it...
Now, standing naked and trembling beside the thickly curtained windows with his hand on the rope, Nestor's scarlet eyes stared almost vacantly west and a little south, as if his gaze might penetrate to the outside and over the boulder plains to the mountains, and across them into Sunside. The drapes were of black bat fur, thick and heavily weighted; not a chink of light passed through from the outside, and nothing of Nestor's gaze the other way. But he could imagine well enough. The peaks of the barrier range would be golden, and in a little while the sun would aim its beams this way, too, and shine on Wrathspire.
Wrathspire. That was what the Lady had finally named this place, these upper levels: Wrathspire, after herself and after the memory of another aerie which she'd fled from in the east. The Lady Wratha, aye: Nestor's Lady, now, for as long as that would last. Why, he might even love her, if he were capable of loving anyone. But all of that had gone out of him a long time ago; a dream which was wrenched from him, just as he had been wrenched from his dream. Except...
... Something of the dream remained, niggling there in the back of his wounded mind. The whirling wall of numbers, fading but - real? Absent for so long and only now - returned?
Returned ...
The thought of that - of his Great Enemy, returned -made Nestor's vampire flesh tingle. And what of his stolen love? Was she out there even now, together with him? And were they lovers again, plotting against Nestor anew as once before they'd plotted in a time long forgotten?
'What's on your mind? Do you walk in your sleep?' Wratha's sleepy mumble reached him from their bed, or her bed, to which she invited him ever more frequently, until it was hard to remember when he'd last slept in his own. 'Have no fear but open the drapes if you want to look out, for I would know it if the sun were up. Oh, it is, and burning - but in Sunside! Not on Wrathspire, not yet. No, for I would feel it there, scorching the stone.'
He glanced at her sprawled unashamed, half-in, half-out of the sheets; then looked again, stared, and held his breath. One marble breast that lolled a little, tip-tilted; a flat, dimpled belly; a pale, rounded hip; the curves of thigh, leg, ankle and delicate foot. And central, a tight black mass where her thigh joined her body, half-hidden by the sheet. He breathed again. She was a wanton, this Wratha, and beautiful.
'I don't need to look out,' Nestor told her, his voice already choked with lust, like his bruised manhood, reacting to the lure of her sex as if he'd never known her. 'For I know what's out there ... and also what's in here.' The room was in total darkness; it made no difference, for they were Wamphyri. Wratha lifted her head and saw him as clear as daylight, his shaft rising and hardening as his red eyes fed upon her.
Then come to bed and ride awhile,' she said. 'Or let me ride you, until you fire your juices into me.