The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles 6)

Quickly, he let the man drop. Only the red-haired fellow observed all this. And he seemed in his intoxication not to know what to make of it. Indeed he raised one eye, wondering, and drank again from his filthy sloppy cup. He licked the fingers of his right hand, one by one, as if he were a cat, as my Master dropped his black-haired companion facedown on the table, indeed, right into a plate of fruit.

"Drunken idiot," said the red-haired man. "No one fights for valor, or honor, or decency. "

"Not many in any event," said my Master looking down at him.

"They broke the world in half, those Turks," said the red-haired man, still staring at the dead one, who surely stared stupidly at him from the smashed plate. I couldn't see the dead man's face, but it excited me tremendously that he was dead.

"Come now, gentlemen," said my Master, "and you, Sir, come here, you who gave my child so many rings. "

"Is he your son, Sir?" cried the blond humpback, who was finally on his feet. He pushed his friends away from him. He turned and went to the summons. "I'll father him better than you ever did. "

My Master appeared suddenly and without a sound on our side of the table. His garments settled at once, as if he had only taken a step. The red-haired man did not even seem to see it.

"Skanderbeg, the great Skanderbeg, I raise a toast to him," said the red-haired man, to himself apparently. "He's been dead too long, and give me but five Skanderbegs and I'd raise a new Crusade to take back our city from the Turks. "

"Indeed, who wouldn't with five Skanderbegs," said the elderly man further down the table, the one nibbling and tearing at the joint. He wiped his mouth with his naked wrist. "But there is no general like unto Skanderbeg, and there never was, save the man himself. What's the matter with Ludovico? You fool!" He stood up.

My Master had put his arm around the blond one, who pushed at him, quite dismayed that my Master was immovable. Now as the two dancers offered my Master pushes and shoves to free their companion, my Master again planted his fatal kiss. He lifted the chin of the blond one and went right for the big artery in the neck. He swung the man around and appeared to draw up the blood from him in one great draught. In a flash, he closed the man's eyes with two white fingers and let the body slip to the floor.

"It is your time to die, good Sirs," he said to the dancers who now backed away from him.

One of them pulled his sword.

"Don't be so stupid!" shouted his companion. "You're drunk. You'll never-. "

"No, you won't, " said my Master with a little sigh. His lips were more pink than I had ever seen them, and the blood he'd drunk paraded in his cheeks. Even his eyes had a greater gloss, and a greater gleam.

He closed his very hand over the man's sword and with the press of his thumb snapped the metal, so that the man held only a fragment in his hand.

"How dare you!" cried the man.

"How did you is more to the point!" sang out the red-haired man at the table. "Cracked in half, is it? What kind of steel is that?"

The joint nibbler laughed very loud and threw back his head. He tore more meat from the bone.

My Master reached out and plucked from time and space the wielder of the broken sword, and now to bare the vein, broke the man's neck with a loud snap.

It seemed the other three had heard it-the one who ate the joint, the wary dancer and the man with the red hair.

It was the last of the dancers whom my Master embraced next. He caught the man's face in his hands as if it were love, and drank again, gasping the man's throat so that I saw the blood just for an instant, a veritable deluge of it, which my Master then covered with his mouth and his bent head.

I could see the blood pump into my Master's hand. I couldn't wait for him to raise his head, and this he did very soon, sooner even than he had left his last victim, and he looked at me dreamily and his countenance was all afire. He looked as human as any man in the room, even crazed with his special drink, as they were with their common wine.

His vagrant blond curls were plastered to his forehead by the sweat that rose i

n him, and I saw it was a fine sheen of blood.

The music abruptly stopped.

It was not the mayhem but the sight of my Master which had stopped it, as he let this last victim slip, a loose sack of bones, to the floor.

"Requiem, " I said again. "Their ghosts will thank you, kind Gentlemen. "

"Either that, " said Marius to the musicians as he drew close, "or fly the room. "

"I say fly the room," whispered the lute player. At once they all turned and made for the doors. They pulled and pulled upon the latch in their haste, cursing and shouting.

My Master backed up and gathered the jeweled rings from around the chair where I'd been seated before.