"Goulart, Ron - Vampirella 01 - Bloodstalk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

He sensed her bending over him. "Can youЕ help meЕ toЕ"
The dark-haired girl's eyes glowed. She knelt beside the man. She grasped his shoulders and sank her teeth into his throat.
CHAPTER ONE
The uniform crackled as the slim, blonde nurse slipped out of it. Hanging round her neck on a golden chain, resting between her breasts, was a gold medallion. The head of a strange horned creature was carved on the medallion and a circle cut in half by a bolt of lightning.
Naked, the girl crossed the bedroom. She stood beside one high, leaded window and drew back a thick drapery. Snow still fell heavily, and night was advancing. There were no lights out there, nothing, no other sign of life. The sanitarium stood solitary at the foot of the mountains, twenty miles from the nearest town.
Fingering the medallion, stroking its golden face, Lenore Goodwin went to the large four-poster bed in the shadowy corner of the room. She turned down the sheets and climbed in. She settled into the soft mattress, waiting.
Dr. Tyler Westron liked things this way. Liked to find Lenore waiting for him like this when he reached the bedroom. After dinner and beforeЕ
Lenore folded her hands over her smooth bare stomach. The warmth of the quilt and the heat of the room made her quickly drowsy. Her eyes gradually closed.
Time drifted by. Night pressed against the windows.
All at once Lenore sat up. Without her glasses she couldn't see the bureau clock. She swung out of bed to take a look.
"Ten-thirty?" she said aloud, surprised. "Then where the hell is he?"
Black and white. The snowflakes forever flickering down across the night. Nothing else anywhere. Vampirella stumbled again and fell to her knees. Her face was streaked with blood; blood caked the corners of her mouth. Her hands were bloody, too, knuckles smeared, fingernails encrusted.
"There was nothing else to do," she told herself as she struggled down through the night darkness. "If you are to go on living, you must haveЕ blood."
A tremendous gust of wind came sweeping across the mountainside. It caught the long-legged girl and threw her to the snowy ground.
She got up once more. Limping, she continued downward.
"The middle of nowhere," she said. "That's where I am. Not a light, not a house."
Snow and wind swirled around her, snatching at the skirt of her crimson dress, ballooning the leopard-skin coat.
The storm went on and on. She stumbled, fell, rose again. The cold stalked her.
The fury went on and on. Then, a long way off, lights. Small narrow strips of light hanging far off in the black of night.
"Got to be something there," Vampirella murmured, lips cracked. The dried blood was black against her chill, white skin. "Lights mean peopleЕ shelter."
The ground was leveling off. Trees thrust up around her, stiff and leafless.
The dry branches creaked as the snowy wind worried at them. "And I expected to be on some sun-drenched beach by now," the dark-haired girl said. She steadied herself by resting a hand against a tree trunk.
There was a house up ahead, on the other side of this stark dead forest. A large house, peaked with spires and cupolas. A house in the style they called Victorian. It had many windows, and several of them had lights beyond them.
Vampirella took a deep breath of icy air and then pushed on. How far away was the house? Not more than half a mile surely.
She pushed on - walking, fighting against the wind, resting beside a tree.
"It must be there, it can't be an illusion," Vampirella told herself.
Someone was watching her. She was suddenly aware of eyes watching. Over there, among those trees.
Vampirella stared through the spinning snow. There was no one there now.
She kept walking. Then another glimpse. Yes, there was someone. A man, a big man.
"Can you help me get to the house?" Vampirella called out.
The wind swallowed her words.
She shouted again. "Please, can you help me?"
The big man was moving among the trees, watching her, but coming no closer. He had great hunched shoulders, and he was shaggy-haired and bearded.
Vampirella got a better look at him. He had no face. She could see only thick matted fur and two narrow, yellowish eyes staring at her. Staring at her from a dozen yards away.
The girl straightened and put her hands on her hips.
The creature moved away, backing in among the trees.
Vampirella continued on toward the huge old Victorian house.
She could see the wide, wooden porch, the steps leading up to a thick carved-wood door. But she found she could scarcely move; her legs ached. Vampirella took a few more tottering steps and fell to the ground.
She heard a crunching on the snow; someone was coming closer.
Then someone was looking down at her. The man with no face.
CHAPTER TWO
Blood.
Blood raining down from the scarlet skies, flowing in streams down rocky hillsides.
Blood to drink, to give life.
Twin suns blazing in the sky. Burning away everything, killing the planet.
Not this planet, no.
A distant planet, in a distant system. Drakulon.
The double sun. Burning, burning.
The thirst, the hunger, the craving for blood.
Fireworks.