Page 61 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
I did as I was asked and at once regretted it when Ms. Haas took the shard I offered her and immediately began carving a sequence of blasphemous symbols into her forearm. “Are you certain that’s quite necessary?”
“Not entirely. We could just cut her head off and burn the body.”
This put me in something of a quandary. On the one hand, it was an obscure but axiomatic tenet of my faith that vampires were irredeemable abominations in the sight of the Creator. Further, I knew for a fact that the Contessa had murdered at least one person, probably several more, to say nothing of her choice of husbands, which I considered extremely tawdry. On the other hand, there seemed to be something fundamentally wrong in decapitating a defenceless woman, even if her defencelessness was worryingly temporary.
“What exactly are you doing?” I enquired.
“I wasn’t entirely bluffing when I told the Contessa that biting me would be a bad idea. You’d think at her age she’d know better than to form an intimate connection with a powerful sorceress.” She slid off the sofa and knelt by the Contessa’s side, tracing in blood on the vampire’s brow marks that mirrored the ones she had previously inscribed on her arm. “It won’t give me very much control over her, but it will be enough to stop her coming after me or snapping your neck like a twig in an act of petty vengeance.”
“Thank you. I’m most grateful.”
“And at the very least, I should be able to compel her to hear us out on the subject of our dear Eirene.” She sat back on her heels. “Youknow, even riddled with silver bullets I would have expected her to be stirring by now.”
In the light of Ms. Haas’s assurances, I lowered my weapon. “Is that not to our advantage?”
“It is never to our advantage for matters to run contrary to my expectations.”
With that, Ms. Haas began a rather more intimate inspection of the Contessa’s body, at which point I looked away so that I might not transgress the bounds of decency. What followed involved some inauspiciously fleshly sounds, on whose cause I did not, in the moment, like to speculate.
“Now, this is interesting,” remarked my companion.
“What,” came the Contessa’s voice wearily, “is interesting?”
I turned around to see Ms. Haas, bloody to the wrists, holding a number of bullets in the palm of her hand, and the Contessa lying on the floor with her eyes open, wearing an expression of considerable displeasure.
Ms. Haas closed her fingers over the bullets and returned to the sofa. “None of your business. Let’s talk about Eirene.”
“That is none ofyourbusiness.” The Contessa folded her arms across her chest and, her body entirely rigid, swept up into a standing position. “I am a daughter of the immortal nobility of Mircalla and I will reclaim what is mine.”
“I suppose you could, but why would you want to?”
An expression of bewilderment passed fleetingly over the Contessa’s face. “What do you mean? Is this some kind of trickery?”
“No trickery. It’s just that Eirene is a disaster who ruins everything she touches. Fabulous in bed, of course, butsohigh maintenance.”
“What is this... high maintenance?”
Ms. Haas plucked one of the complimentary chocolates that had fallen to the floor during the kerfuffle and popped it into her mouth.“Well, let’s put it like this. We stumbled across your little murder plan because we were working our way down a list of people who might be looking for revenge against Eirene for all the ways she’s stitched them up, set them up, screwed them over, or otherwise wrecked their lives.”
“She has spirit,” returned the Contessa. “I like a woman with spirit.”
“Then get another one. I’m sure the world is full of independent-minded maidens who would love to be swept off their feet by a brooding aristocrat like you.”
“My love for Eirene transcends eternity.” The Contessa spread a clawed hand, then closed it acquisitively. “We are bound forever in blood and passion.”
Ms. Haas uttered a long groan. “Oh, just stop it. You and I both know you’re only interested in her now because you’ve suddenly realised you can’t have her. You’ve had years to hunt her down and make her your immortal bride.”
“I cannot allow her to defy me.”
“You’ve met Eirene. Do you really think turning her into a vampire is going to stop her defying you?”
After a moment of thought, the Contessa hung her head and slumped onto the sofa next to Ms. Haas. “You know, this was so much easier eight hundred years ago. You’d just go down to the village and they’d tie a pretty girl to a stake for you.”
“There are still places where they’ll do that, many of them for a very reasonable fee.”
“It’s not the same. The people nowadays. They have all these crazy ideas. When I was a girl, peasants were happy to be peasants.” The Contessa propped her cheek glumly against her hand. “To tell you the truth, the only reason I came back to Khelathra-Ven was because things weren’t working out back home. One evening I say to my seneschal, ‘Go out and get a baby and put it in a sack and bring it backto me so I can sate the hunger of my vile progeny.’ And he says, ‘Oh, mistress, we can’t do that anymore. The burgomasters, they get very angry when we put the babies in the sacks. There’ll be another revolution, mistress. Remember what happened in Pesh, mistress.’” She sighed. “What is the world coming to when you can’t devour the children of your serfs?”
“Tell me about it,” drawled Ms. Haas. “It’s socioeconomic reform gone mad.”
