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

Editing by Stephen Pagel

Copyediting, proofreading & interior layout by Teddi Stransky

Front cover photograph by Michael Trevillion

Cover design by Kevin Murphy

ISBN: 1-892065-48-7

http://www.MeishaMerlin.com

First MM Publishing edition: February 2002

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321



Acknowledgements
For help with research, inspiration, encouragement and friendship; thanks to Keren Gilfoyle, Susan Charlotte Berry, Storm Constantine, Julie Parker, Anne Gay, David Gemmell, Andrew Stephenson, John Richard Parker, Don Maass, and Kathy Gale.
Special thanks to Caroline Jones and Mark Weatherall, for all their help at Selwyn College, Cambridge; and to Marlene Fleet, for "Der Doppelganger".
Thanks also to Barry Devlin and Horslips, and to Stevie Nicks, for music that has haunted me down the yearsЕ and inspired some of the chapter titles.
'Ghosts,' 'Ring-a-Rosey' and 'Ride to Hell' Copyright (c) Horslips. Used by permission.



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



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

ЧHeine
"Der Doppelgфnger"

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 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 unhurried and reflective to be real. The continual thud of shell-bursts, which drove men mad, did not trouble him. Several bullets had passed through him that night, but his flesh had healed swiftly in their wake. The carnage could not touch him physically, yet his eyes were clouded.
The dying; he felt them all around him. Through the stink of mud, petroleum and smoke rolled the smell of blood, heavy and sweet; enticing to the vampire and therefore incongruous amid this horror. The thirst rose independent of his will. Thirst and revulsion. Mixed with the vibrant scent of the living, the powerful tang of death and congealed blood weighed coldly in the back of his throat.
No human could have heard the cries of the injured above the barrage, but the vampire could not shut them out. They were everywhere, directionless; screams and sobs, the last dry groans of those who no longer had the strength to call for help. One voice, more plaintive and piercing than the others, cried over and over again in German for his mother.
No one would come to help them. No one could.
Deep in a crater, the vampire found a soldier half submerged in the mud. His uniform was plastered to his body, his face almost black with dirt, but his eyes flickered very white in the bursts of false daylight. An English soldier, this one. There was a great hole in his side through which the viscera gleamed dully. To the vampire's enhanced sight the colours were vivid, the reds and purples of the raw flesh infinitely varied even in darkness. Blood seeped down into an oily pool in the bottom of the crater and made a crimson spiral on the surface.
The man was in agony almost beyond speech, but he reached out to claw at the vampire's legs. A brave grimace broke like a wound across his face.
"Knew you'd come if I hung on. It's this ruddy 'elmentЧcan't get comfortableЧ"