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

him off, but Kristian was unyielding as rock. He deliberately kept
his nail in the wound as Karl's swift-healing unhuman skin closed
around it.
"I could tear your heart out of your chest!" said Kristian. "How do
you think it would feel, to be pulled apart bit by bit when you
cannot lose consciousness? To be torn and heal and be torn again,
over and over? I've done it to others less wicked than you!"
Then he ripped the fingernail out of Karl's throat. The wound
reopened in a jagged flower of fire, agonizing. By instinct Karl
stepped sideways into the dimension from which Kristian had first

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appeared, the world aslant that only vampires could enter, which
they called the Crystal Ring. Karl entered it to escape, but Kristian
dived after him.
To mortal eyes they were now invisible. To their own eyes, the
battlefield still lay around them but it had lost perspective, seeming
compressed and two-dimensional. The sky, though, unfolded into a
new and miraculous realm; a phantom landscape of infinite depth,
rolling with fiery colours. The lower air currents solidified into
bronze and violet hills that rolled slowly past like clouds. Higher
still, mountains towered like thunderheads, gleaming black and
deep blue, with crimson light from above washing their sides. They
were translucent and they changed shape continually in their
majestic drift across the heavens.
Towards the lower hills Karl fled, but Kristian pursued him, seizing
him and trying to drag him back. As the world and the sky had
changed, so were their bodies transformed in the Crystal Ring, their
human forms attenuated to their very essence. They became slender
ebony creatures cloaked in lacy wings. Angel-demons, fighting in a
realm that meshed with the sky yet was like nothing of earth; a
dream terrain forever flowing like liquid glass. On amethyst-cold
slopes of cloud they struggled, Kristian lunging for Karl's throat
with bared fangs, Karl thrusting him off with all his strength.
"You owe me everything!" Kristian's voice was everywhere, like
thunder. His face, black and aquiline in this changed form, loomed
in Karl's vision with the deep volcanic colours of the Crystal Ring
burning behind him. "I made you, you are mine! Without me you'd
be dead. How can you look on your creator, saviour, master and not

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believe in me?"
Karl broke out of his grip by dropping out of the Crystal Ring and
returning to Earth. He emerged into the sky and fell a short distance