"Freda Warrington - A Taste of Blood Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Warrington Freda)

Dedication
This book is dedicated with love to my mother, Ida Warrington,
who let me watch vampire films at an impressionable ageтАж




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PRELUDE:
RIDE TO HELL
Oh! hateful shadow!
Oh! pallid companion!
Why mockest thou my grief and woe?


тАФHeine
"Der Doppelg├дnger"


The battlefield was deserted now. The fighting had swept I on into
the distance, leaving behind an uneasy lull that lay thick and cold as
fog, shuddering with distant explosions. As he moved slowly across
the devastated plain, the vampire paused now and then to look up at
the sky.
Shellfire punctured the skin of night. A mile or two away, scarlet
spheres of light rose against the blackness, sparks fountained and
fell in coloured showers. The vampire was arrested by the beauty of
the sight, the trails of yellow and silver fire and the soundless fall of
smoke. Beauty, even here. A rocket, drifting down on a silk
parachute, lit up the landscape as bright as the moon with a freezing
light that filled the shell-holes with phantom movement.
And underneath the fire of the sky lay the craters, ruined trenches

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A Taste


and lines of barbed wire trodden into the mud; and everywhere, the
dead and the dying.
The vampire walked through a no man's land where men had been
buried by explosions, thrown up out of their rough graves, half
buried again; where the wounded had been left to die because their
comrades could not come back for them. He walked silently, an
impossible apparition to anyone who was left to see him; too