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."Simon would have crossed himself, vampire or no.If I ever find myself in a similar situation again—God forbid!—I will do so, too.By this time I realized—and the UnDead are more sensitive to such matters than the living—that the deck under my feet was just slightly out of true.With all that water in the compartments below that didn't surprise or upset me.I climbed to the Marconi shack on the Boat Deck—the room where the telegraphers sat pecking frantically at their electric keys."We've sent word to the Californian, but she hasn't replied," said one of the young men, when I asked."Probably turned off his set and went to bed.Bastard nearly blew my ears off earlier tonight, when I was trying to deal with the passenger messages.The Carpathian's about sixty miles south of us.She'll be here in four or five hours, to take the passengers off."Four hours would put its arrival in darkness, I reflected as I made my way toward my own stateroom and what I hoped would be a rendezvous with my pursuer.Five hours, at dawn.Which meant that the moment Miss Paxton was safely out of the way I would have to get that trunk, one way or another.And be where I could get into it come first light.Never, I vowed, would I travel again if I could help it: it was just one damn complication after another.I could scent Miss Paxton's dusting-powder as I entered the corridor leading to my stateroom.The scent was strong, but she was nowhere in sight.In the other cabins I heard the murmur of voices—a woman complained about having to go out on deck in the cold, which was prodigious—but there was certainly neither panic nor concern.I took a few steps along the corridor, listening, sniffing.She was in my stateroom.Of course.She'd got the maid to let her in.This would be easier than I'd thought.I closed my eyes as midnight moved into the icy heavens overhead.Reached out my mind to hers, where she waited in the comfortable darkness of my room.Laid on her mind, one by one, the fragile veils of sleep.Gently, gently.I'd done this to her before, back in London, and had to be all the more subtle because she knew what it felt like, and would resist if she recognized the sensations again.But she was tired from prowling the ship by night in quest of a clear shot at me, by day in search of my trunk.I could feel her slipping into dream.I murmured to her in the voice of the River Cher, beside which she and her idiot brother Lionel had played as children; whispered to her as the breeze had whispered among the willow-leaves on its bank.Sleep.sleep.you're home and safe.Your parents are watching over you, no harm can come to you.One has only about ten minutes, at the very outside, at those turning-hours of noon and midnight, when the positions of earth and stars (as Simon has explained it to me) are strong enough to counterbalance the terrible influence of the tides.It was excruciating, keeping still, concentrating my thoughts on those of the young woman in my stateroom.Feeling those seconds of power tick away, calculating how many I'd need to stride down the hall, open the door, and bury my fangs in her neck.An image I had to keep stringently from my thoughts while my mind whispered to hers.Sleep—rest—you'll sleep much easier if you take off those itchy heavy silver chains around your neck.It's safe to do so—you're safe.They're so heavy and annoying.I felt her fumble sleepily with her collar-buttons (Why do women persist in wearing garments that button up the back?).Saw her in the eyes of my heart, head pillowed on velvety hair half-unbound on the leather of the armchair.Fingers groping clumsily at her throat.Sleep—The catch was large, solid, and complicated.Bugger.She must have chosen it so, knowing it wasn't easy to undo in half-sleep or trance.Damn, how many minutes—how many seconds—left.?Gentle, gentle, Lionel is asking for the necklaces.You have to take them off to give them to him—I heard her whisper in her heart, Lionel, and tears trickled down her face.In her dreams she saw her brother, plump and fatuous as he'd been in life, holding out his hand to her.Got to have silver to wear to my wedding, old girl.Not legal if the groom's not wearing silver.New rules.She let the revolver slide from her fingers, brought up both hands.The catch gave, silver links sliding down her breasts.Seconds left, but enough—I strode forward down the corridor and that God-cursed, miserable, miniaturized hair-farm of an American matron's Pekingese threw itself out of the door of a nearby stateroom and fastened his teeth in my ankle.The teeth of such a creature would hardly imperil a soggy toast-point, much less a vampire in full pursuit of undefended prey, but the UnDead are as likely as any other subject of Lord Gravity to trip if their feet come in contact with a ten-pound hairball mid-stride.I went sprawling, and although I caught myself as a cat does, with preternatural speed, the damage was done.The Peke braced his tiny feet and let out a salvo of barks, his mistress appeared in the stateroom door just as I was readying a kick that would have caved in the little abortion's skull, and shrieked at me, "How dare you, sir! Come to mummy, Sun!"And the next second Miss Paxton, collar unbuttoned, hair tumbling over her shoulders, and gun in hand, was in the door of my stateroom, taking aim at a distance of six feet.And midnight was over.I fled.Mrs.Harper (I think that was her name), straightening up with her struggling hell-hound in her arms, effectively blocked the corridor for the instant that it took me to get out of the line of fire, and I pelted down the staircase, into the nearest corridor, with Miss Paxton like a silent fury at my heels.There were people in the corridors now, my fellow-passengers in every imaginable variation of pyjamas, sweaters, coats, bath-robes, and life-jackets, all of them carping about having to go out on the boat-decks and all of them impeding Miss Paxton from taking aim at me—and me from getting far enough ahead to lose her.I strode, dodged, slithered bow-wards along the B Deck corridor, making for the cargo-well that would give me swift access to the bowels of the ship.The lights were still on, but if they went out—as I thought they must, with the holds flooding—she would surely be mine.The deck was definitely sloped underfoot when I reached "Scotland Road" on D Deck again, now milling with crewmen.At the head of the spiral stair going down to E and F, I stopped short with a jolt of sickened shock.Beneath me a pit of green water churned, eerily illuminated by the lights that still burned on the levels below.That water looked awfully high.The gun cracked behind me and I spun; there were still crewmen in the corridor but none were between me and the emergency-ladder from which Miss Paxton had just emerged and not a single one attempted to stop her.I don't think the mad bitch would have cared if they had.Maybe her tales of my perfidy had spread widely among the crew: maybe they had a better idea of what was going on below our feet than the passengers or I did.The fact remained that she had a gun and a clear shot and I knew that even a glancing wound from it could prove fatal.I hadn't drunk the blood of thousands of grimy peasants, factory-workers, prostitutes and street-urchins over the course of fourteen decades to let myself be put out of the way by an enraged middle-class virago.I did the only thing possible [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]