Child of the Sun

by Chris Claremont

They crossed the Ukranian coast at a hundred feet to avoid Soviet radar, the
Mosquito loafing along at three hundred knots. Instinctively, Robbie flicked her
search radars up to a two-hundred-fifty mile sweep, keying the spy plane's Electronic
CounterMeasures systems into the Master Computer; not that any of the gadgets
would do her any good if the Mosquito was well-and-truly spotted. The old wooden
bomber was a beautiful aircraft, but it was still only a propeller plane, its best speed a
couple of thousand miles-per-hour slower than the MiGs and Sukhois the Russians
would scramble after it.
They'd have no trouble scragging the Mosquito once they'd found it.
If they found it.
That was where the ECM gear came in. Because to total the Mosquito, they'd
have to find it first; and all the esoteric electronic hardware aboard made that very
difficult. Almost impossible, the experts said.
Of course, they'd said the same thing to Gary Powers about the U-2.
Robbie didn't think about that part of it too often.
She checked her course computer, then eased the Mosquito into a shallow turn,
skimming the mouth of the Dniester as she headed west, away from Mother Russia:
if nothing went wrong, they'd be inside Romanian airspace in a half-hour, over the
Drop Zone ninety minutes later.
"About two hours to go, Dragon," Robbie yelled over the whistling roar of the
Mosquito's twin Griffon IV propjets; the plane was lousy on chit-chat and neither she
nor her passenger had spoken much since they'd left Turkey, just after sunset.
"Thank you," he replied, his voice crackling tiredly over her radio headset. The
Mosquito was lousy on sleeping, too.
She could see him in her mirror, a massive bear-shape – a deceptive bear-shape,
she noted absently, considering the lean, sleekly powerful man she'd seen before he
suited up – of cold-suit/jumpsuit/parachute/weapons pack, his face shrouded by his
black crash helmet. Like an Angel of Death, Robbie thought suddenly; he's an
elemental force, unfathomable and unstoppable; not even human.
She chuckled at the thought, glad that orders had come in from Langley rotating
her home; she'd been flying 'black' missions for the Agency a long time and the law
of averages had stretched an equally long way for her. And there was something
about the Balkan run, the way pilots and agents occasionally just seemed to
disappear…
She flicked her eyes up to the mirror again, wondering who her silent passenger
was. She'd never seen him before he'd shown up at her base three nights ago.
carrying bonafides and authorisations direct from the highest-of-the-high back in
Langley, identified only by his code name: Dragon. He was a tall man, ascetically
thin; an older man, too – rare in a line agent – with slicked-back hair and a pencil
moustache. And eyes that didn't miss a thing around him; hunter's eyes. English
wasn't his native language, either; he spoke it perfectly but Robbie's cars had picked
up the faintest burr of an accent.
She wondered who he'd killed in Turkey. Who the Agency was sending him to kill
now.
She shivered, easing the Mosquito a fraction closer to the ground. She'd flown a
lot of killers for the Agency; she'd killed herself – those were the breaks in the
espionage trade – but this Dragon... Something was wrong. She couldn't quite place
what. or why; but the itch was there, the sixth-sense that had saved her life more
times than she cared to remember, burring its tinny warning down in the base of her
skull.
The hell with it; she was an aeroplane driver; nothing more.
 2.

They were deep into the Transylvanian Alps when the storm hit, a vicious
katabatic squall the Met forecasts hadn't even hinted at, punching down off the high
slopes with the force of a miniature hurricane. It was insane: one minute everything
was green-board – Robbie jinxing the Mosquito through the high passes with an
ease born of hard experience, the sky too clear for comfort, stars dusting the velvet
from horizon to horizon with no moon up tonight to white out their glory – the next, all
hell had broken loose and the Mosquito was fighting for its life.
Robbie lost the plane almost immediately as the squall slapped the Mosquito into
a reverse spin, the control yoke jumping out of her hands like a thing possessed.
She grabbed for the flailing yoke and it cracked her left forearm and hand so hard
she thought the bones had broken. She cried out as the yoke chopped her arm again
– the insides of her thighs quickly being pounded into one horrendous, crotch-to-
knee bruise – and her mind dimly registered the altimeter as the needle began
spinning down faster and faster, the inertia of the spin pulling her deep into her
padded seat. By a freak of luck, the Mosquito had been crossing a deep pass when
the squall hit – otherwise they'd have totalled against a mountainside long ago – but
luck only went so far.
She kicked the rudder hard over, wincing with a sympathetic pain as the
Mosquito's frame groaned under the brutal strain of pulling out to level flight. She
caught the yoke in her right hand, sweating with the effort of holding it steady against
the squall's fury as she hooked her semi-paralysed left hand around the wheel,
closing the numb fingers as tight as she could. They started to come out of the spin –
the ride a lot easier now as her body picked up the mad rhythm of the storm; pilot
and plane becoming one entity, everything but the Mosquito and the storm
automatically blanked out of Robbies's mind – but, oh Christ, the ground was close!
She fed power to the twin-Griffons, feeling the change in pitch thrill through the
plane as she eased the control yoke a little, the Mosquito skimming a mountain
pasture at better than thirty feet and four hundred knots. There was a jar as she
jumped the firs at the downhill end of the pasture, a flicker from the port engine
sensors, and she knew the Mosquito had trimmed a few feet off the treetops.
Nothing serious yet, but she was going to have to land and take a look at the engine,
especially if she was going to fly back to base through this damn storm.
She pulled the Mosquito back until she had some decent altitude – no doubt about
it now, the port engine was starting to run rough – then thumbed the intercom.
"Dragon." she called. "I'm gonna have to put her down. I've got an engine going
sour on me and this storm is too hairy to risk flying on a single fan. Shouldn't be too
bad for you, though; according to the Inertial Guidance System we're only about ten-
twenty miles short of the Drop Zone. Hell, a little hoofing never hurt anybody. What
d'you say?"
Dragon didn't answer.
"Dragon, you hear me?" Robbie looked up at her mirror, but something had
careened off it during the spin, shifting it on its gimbals. She reached up and jerked it
back into place, then looked to see if Dragon was all right. The spin had been a
pretty rough ride after all...
Dragon's body had no head!
She twisted around in her seat, shock stamped across her face; what the hell
could have happened to him?
 Dragon smiled at her, reaching across the small cockpit for his helmet, fingering
its broken strap as he picked it up off the deck.
"Is something the matter, Roberta?" he asked.
She looked again; in the mirror she was talking to a headless body! But to her
face, he was real.
It was impossible. She had to be hallucinating – maybe she'd cracked her head
against the canopy during the spin and the concussion just hadn't registered yet.
Dragon was looking at the mirror now, his smile gone, his face as chill and
unreadable as his eyes. "A mirror," he hissed softly, hate thick in his voice.
"You ...you don't cast a reflection."
"No."
Even as she watched, his face changed, the shadows reacting around him,
enveloping him until he no longer looked human, his mouth twisting open to reveal
two pairs of gleaming canine fangs, his lips twisting slightly with hunger; his eyes
were bright with anticipation as they bored into her, sapping her will and her strength,
dragging her down.
She tried to fight him, but she didn't know how. All her life her mind – her soul –
had been hers alone, and the Agency had invested long years training her to keep
them that way; in the end she'd been judged resistant to almost all forms of external
'persuasion.' But this was different. Dragon – the vampire – was inside her, inside
her mind, and there was no way she could keep him out. In a moment, he knew her
thoughts, her dreams, all the private things she cherished. In a moment, she was
mind-raped and she was his.
He reached for her, his caress sending thrills of pleasure through her body.
Robbie tried to twist her head away, moaning a futile protest, but he held her fast,
stroking her face and neck until she had to cry out with the ecstasy of his touch.
It was agony.
He pulled her close, his teeth glistening in the star-light, and part of her cringed at
the charnel stench of his breath, screaming desperately that Robbie should pull her
Magnum and shoot him, now, before it was too late! Do it, the voice cried futily, in the
name of God, do it!
Instead, she shifted slightly under his hand, moving her neck closer, hoping that
death wouldn't...
BRAAAAANNGGG!!!!
The proximity alarm!
Without thinking, Robbie twisted away from the vampire, stiff-arming him into the
back of the cockpit with a manic, hysterical strength as her 'hands clawed for the
controls. It was a cliff, mile upon mile of jagged escarpment, rearing over a mile
above the Argeş River valley. And the Mosquito was flying right into it.
She slapped the throttles hard against their stops. pulling the yoke deep into her
gut and dumping the rudder over, part of her praying she'd spotted the cliff in time,
part of her praying she'd hit. At least, that'd be a clean death.
No, not suicide! She was still alive, and while she was alive she had a chance.
There was a pasture ahead, a long firebreak cutting a two-hundred metre wide
swath through the forest as far back into the mountains as she could make out in the
dim light. She took the Mosquito straight in. hoping the snow wasn't too thick, the
potholes too deep.
It was a perfect landing, the Mosquito bouncing easily over the rough turf as
Robbie let the plane roll into the shadow of the giant conifers. Even as the Mosquito
braked to a gentle stop, its propellers winding down from their shrill roar to silence,
Robbie was moving, her hand jerking her gun free from its holster, bringing it around.
He caught her wrist in mid-swing, bouncing it off one of the seat braces. Robbie
crying out as her hand went numb, the Magnum falling from her nerveless fingers.
He turned back to her, his face black with a murderous fury, locking her in place with
one hand as he bent for-ward to finish what he'd started in the air.
She hit him with her mission bag.
It was a thick leather case, crammed with equipment, logs, procedure and tech
manuals, thermos bottles, food – most of it in violation of Agency regs – and it
caught him square. He went sprawling and Robbie lunged across his twisting body,
fingers groping for his parachute. His hands found her neck, squeezed, the world
shimmering grey and red around her as his vice-like grip choked the life out of her;
but she'd found the 'chute's D-ring. She jerked her arm backwards and the big main
'chute blew up in the Dragon's face.
She chopped her right forearm against his and broke his grip, coughing violently
to clear her throat. The gun, where was her gun? No use, she couldn't see where
she'd dropped it and she didn't have time to look; already, she could hear the heavy
nylon 'chute shredding apart under Dragon's onslaught. He'd be free in a moment.
Run for it, Robbie luv.
She blew the main hatch and dropped through, sprinting for the trees as soon as
her feet touched ground, pausing a moment to smear an improvised mixture of oil
and mud on her face before disappearing into the forest. She moved silently through
the close-packed trees, every sense alert for any signs of pursuit.
Nothing.
Which meant nothing. She took her time and took no chances. She'd been shot
down before, deep inside Russia when an SR-71 overflight she was flying went
totally wrong; and she'd made it out, against the best the KGB had been able to
throw after her.
Okay, the forest overlooked the Argeş; and if the peaks surrounding this
escarpment were any indication, she was up near the river's headwaters. Which fit
because the last physical reference she'd spotted before all hell broke loose was the
Moldoveanu, an eight thousand foot peak bordering the north edge of the
Transylvanian range. Which meant a helluva long walk before she came to any
towns of consequence; and almost no chance of scrounging an Agency contact...
She froze, shrinking down into a crouch, her sixth-sense warning her of something
her conscious mind had missed. A sound drifting on the wind. Wolf howls. Lots of
them, echoing down off the high peaks. A hunting pack, probably, starved by the
harsh winter. Hunting what, though?
She'd seen the films enough to remember the lore: vampires can assume the
shapes of bat or wolf or mist, and can control certain predator species...
Mist. There was a mist; it had been with her ever since she'd run from the plane. A
light ground fog, that was all. But it was the wrong place and the wrong time for
ground fogs, especially this high up...
He took her without warning, his hands icy-cold as they lifted her high and
slammed her into a tree. She tried to fight him but he shook her again and again until
the world was a mad, blurry, merry-go-round. There was nothing gentle about his
attack this time, no foreplay. He beat her near senseless and then he took her, his
teeth savaging deep into her neck.
And when he was done, he threw her away.
 3.

She woke up dead.

For a moment, she just lay there, unmoving, her body aching with a need she'd
never felt before, bathed in a cold sweat that was part terror, part desire. She'd had
such dreams. She'd been hunting, soaring high above the cloddish humans – their
earthbound ways making them easy prey for such as she – and she'd chosen her
prey well, a big, strapping ox of a man. She'd shape-changed as she fell, smashing
him to earth with her human form. The man had tried to fight – a rare thing in a
human – but she'd slapped him down like the babe he was and then her teeth were
in his neck and she was feeding, glorying in the raw, fiery ecstasy of his blood as it
coursed through her. Then, he was dead, and she was baying her joy to the night:
hellsteeth, this one had been a fair feasting!
That was when she'd woken up, ravenous and stiff with fear.
She tried to move her arms, then froze, her body stretching taut. "No," she
breathed, "Oh God, please no."
She was in a box.
It was a snug fit, the box only a fraction larger than she was, lined on the inside
with a rich, heavy satin; her back felt scratchy, though, something grinding under her
as she shifted her shoulder blades. She knew the feeling, she'd worked, enough in
the field to know what it was like to sleep on dirt.
The cry welled out of her without warning, a screaming denial of where she was,
of the nightmares and the memories. Of the fears.
"Noooo!" Robbie screamed, her right hand lashing out in a karate punch that
snapped the box's latches and hinges easily, hurling the heavy mahogany lid off her
like it was plywood.
It was a coffin. Beautifully grained mahogany with gleaming brass fittings, marked
at the head with the crest of some obscure Balkan noble, a coffin that fit her body so
well it might have been custom-built for her. The inside was layered in dirt, about an
inch-and-a-half thick – if they're playing the game for real, Robbie thought wryly,
that'll be good ol' Central Park dirt. Someone had taken away her flight suit,
exchanging it for a burial gown of gossamer silk so transparently sheer it left almost
nothing about her to the imagination. Strange, though, it was winter and she was
standing barefoot and near naked on a bare-stone floor, in an unheated room – with
only some thick, blue-velvet drapes between her and the snows outside – but she
didn't feel at all cold. There wasn't even any condensation from her breath...
But how could there be any condensation? Or any breath, for that matter? Hadn't
she died?
Her hands went to her throat, touching the scar tissue she couldn't see, faint ridge
lines running across her neck where the skin had been torn. Hardly worth noticing.
Maybe that had been a dream, too.
She looked around the room, noting the heavy oaken door that scaled one end of
it, as well as the drapes that covered the windows. Her coffin stood in the centre of
the cell, on a rough catafalque; except for that, the room was bare.
The drapes had been pulled to completely seal the room from outside, but
something had stirred one of them a little and a shaft of twilight sun arced across a
small patch of floor. The sun. It'd be nice to see the sun after that godawful flight.
She reached for the curtain.
And screamed.
 Lisle found her crouched in a corner, rocking back-and-forth, her face twisted with
agony, cradling her crippled hand close to her chest. It was a bad burn, third-degree-
plus, the back of Robbie's hand charred and laid open as if someone-had wrapped it
in a white-hot band.
The sun had done that to her.
All she could do was sit there and cry.
"Sister!" Lisle called softly.
Robbie looked up, not sure what to expect, not really surprised at what she saw.
The voice belonged to a young woman, a beautiful woman, a honey-blond with wide.
innocent blue eyes, standing by the coffin, her forehead furrowing with concern as
she saw the burn on Robbie's hand. She knelt by the younger woman, clucking
disapprovingly: Roberta should have known better than to go near sunlight. Robbie
nodded dumbly, of course she should have; how silly of her not to have
remembered.
"Come, sister." the woman said, holding out her hand and helping Robbie to her
feet, "The sun is gone now and we are free to hunt. A quick kill and all will be well
with you."
A quick kill; Robbie smiled in anticipation. There was a cry from somewhere above
them, Lisle murmuring something about one of the other women having already
found prey. Robbie felt all jangly inside, vague, unknown sensations burning just
underneath her skin, a junkie long overdue for her fix; she'd seen the symptoms
enough to recognise them and she knew the only real way to break free of the
monkey was by force of will alone. She'd always prided herself on her will – a manic
stubbornness that was legend throughout the Agency – now it was going to be put to
the test.
But then she caught the man-scent, rich with life and blood, and she knew all her
determination came too late as the change rippled through her. She threw her head
back, drinking in the man-scent, pulling it deep into her lungs as she ran her tongue
over her gleaming fangs. The blood hunger was in her now and she was eager for
the night's first kill. And this time, it would be no dream.
Somehow, she held on. It almost broke her, sent her into a gibbering madness
that would have killed her with the first sunrise – maybe, in the end, that would have
been better – but she held on, remembering the simple joys of being human and
being alive. She remembered flying and her first man and how good it all had been.
"Lisle." she called softly; the other woman turned, irritation plain on her face. This
new addition to the Master's seraglio was getting to be more trouble than she was
worth.
Robbie waited until Lisle was facing her before jabbing her left hand forward,
whuffing the heel of her palm hard into the other woman's chest; it wasn't that
powerful a blow – it wasn't meant to be – but it served its purpose, stunning Lisle
slightly and moving her back a few paces, setting her up for Robbie's cross-head
kick.
Robbie's left leg scythed forward and up, all the power she had focused on her
foot as it lashed back across Lisle's face. The kick should have broken the woman's
neck – at least Robbie felt some bones splinter under her foot; the monsters could
be hurt! – but the burial gown got in Robbie's way, tangling her movements and
throwing her timing off just enough to make a difference. It slammed Lisle back,
toppling her over the coffin, jarring it off the catafalque and bringing the heavy box
down on top of her.
 Robbie had one thing more to do before she left her cell. In one vicious, hating
motion, she ripped her gown apart, throwing it away from her like the unclean thing it
was. If she was to die tonight, she would die human.
"D'you hear me, Dragon." she hissed, "Whoever you are, whatever you are, I'm
human! I'm not one of yours. Never one of yours."
She was almost out the door when an impulse pulled her to the windows. Her
good hand closed on the drapes and she ripped those down as well, the room
colouring a deep rose from the afterglow of sunset. The view was magnificent,
looking out over the Argeş and the valley beyond, and Robbie felt tears sting her
cheeks, aching deep inside with a loss she didn't really understand. All her dreams,
all her hopes, everything she'd ever wanted or needed, gone with that sunset; she
was a creature of the night now. A vampire. And Dragon had done that to her.
He would die for that.
 4.

He found her in his great study. Robbie had moved quickly through the deserted
castle, using her Agency training to best advantage as she tried to find her gear and
then a way out. An instinct tugged her towards the windows, towards the thousand
meter sheer drop, urging her to fall and spread her wings and hunt, but she fought it
down. She was human, not vampire.
The study door had been locked but Robbie'd had no trouble picking, the ancient
tumblers with a stiletto plucked from a suit of armour in the hall outside. It was a
huge room, piled high with shelves, each shelf thick with books of every way, shape,
manner and form. She didn't waste any time exploring, because her flying kit had
been draped casually across one of the study's medieval chairs. It only took her a
minute to get dressed.
God, her own clothes felt good on her again.
"No. Roberta." Dragon said from behind her. "Not ...God. Never God. You are
beyond his grace now."
She whirled, grabbing for the Magnum clipped on Dragon's weapons pack – she
knew in her heart that it was useless but the old reflexes died hard – he didn't move
in on her this time: he just stood there, looking at her, a mocking half-smile twisting
on his thin lips, daring her to shoot.
She pulled the trigger, the boom of the heavy pistol sounding loud in the room, the
bullet striking sparks off the wall behind Dragon. She hadn't missed, she knew that –
he was too close and she was too good a shot – the damn bullet had gone right
through him!
She fired again. And again. And again. Until her Magnum's hammer clicked on an
empty chamber.
She hadn't touched him once.
In desperation, she threw her gun at him, but he merely slapped it away, the
Magnum shattering against a far wall. Robbie backed away from him, instinctively
checking the room for any weapon that could be improvised.
The candlesticks; of course!
There were a number of them scattered around the study's tables, big, heavy,
single-candle monsters dating from the late Middle Ages, all of them carrying
candles.
She feinted towards the room's giant hearth, making as if to grab the iron poker.
and when Dragon moved to cut her off, she dove across one of the tables, taking a
pair of candles sticks with her, snapping the candles off as she spun to her feet and
bringing the two sticks together in the shape of a cross as Dragon started towards
her.
There was a spark, and Dragon flinched, covering his face with his cloak.
Robbie's hands bunt into flame.
And she screamed.
She threw the sticks away – it was that or die – stumbling out of the room deaf-
dumb-and-blind to everything but the agony in her hands. There was almost no skin
left on her palms, the bones and tendons gleaming whitely amid the charred flesh. It
had a brilliant ploy, really brilliant, and it might even have destroyed Dragon – or at
least hurt him – except that Robbie had forgotten she was a vampire, too, as
vulnerable to holy objects as Dragon was.
 He didn't follow her right away and, somehow, she made her way out of the
castle. She didn't remember much of what happened after that. She staggered
through the forest, stumbling a lot, occasionally falling. the branches lashing her face
and body without mercy as she kept blundering into them, opening the exposed
portions of her body with long, razor-thin slashes that didn't bleed. Why should they;
she hadn't fed tonight.
That was where Miklos Szkorbec came in. He was a student, a member of the
Party Youth, an average man with average brains and fair looks. He was nothing
special, and he knew it; and he was content with knowing it. He didn't have much
ambition, and what he did have was confined to a good woman and a good job, one
that'd put a roof over his head and food in his belly.
Still, Miklos was no saint; far from it. And, even scratched and battered as she
was, Robbie was a most attractive woman.
Miklos was on a walking tour of the Alps, travelling alone down the main spine of
the range, ignoring the folk tales of vampires and werewolves – though he did carry
a revolver to defend himself against any gypsies who might possibly have survived
Hitler's death camps and thirty' years of Communist rule – when Robbie came
crashing out of the underbrush to collapse down a slight slope onto the trail right in
front of him.
The moon was up, its full light washing the trail in a negative image, and the first
things Miklos saw were the woman's hands. He recognised the seriousness of the
burns – far too much for his basic first aid kit to cope with – but at least he could
clean and lightly bandage them. She was all cut up, too; he wondered idly, as he
pulled his pack apart, what she'd been running from.
He never saw Robbie push herself to her feet, her eyes gleaming with an unholy
light of their own, lips licking her fangs, as she tagged him as prey and moved in for
the kill.
Miklos felt a hand on his shoulder, then a numbing blow half-way up his spine that
threw him forward onto the snow. He tried to roll over, get back to his feet, but a
booted foot thudded into his side and he didn't have any breath left. He flailed about
as much as he could but he was a fish out of water and she was smoke; he never
really saw her as she flipped him onto his back and bent low over his throat.
He tried to scream as Roberta killed him, but she didn't even give him time for
that.
Her hands had healed, she noted idly as she lifted her bloody face from the dead
boy's neck; she felt so good, higher than any mainliner, rejuvenated and immortal
and powerful enough to move worlds.
Absently, without even thinking about it, she cupped her hands under the still-
dripping mouth, saving as much of the boy's precious blood as she could, licking it
slowly off her palms, savouring its sweet-sour, salty taste.
Then, she caught herself, staring wide-eyed at her hands, the taste of blood
suddenly gone foul inside her. God of my fathers, she cried inside, what have I
done?
She retched. It didn't matter that she hadn't 'eaten' since she died, the reaction
was too deeply ingrained in her; she collapsed over the boy's corpse and dry heaved
her agony onto the snow in long, shuddering spasms that left her drained, as weak
now as she'd been before she'd attacked the boy.
God, she hadn't even had to think about it. She saw him there, so full of life, so
rich in blood – even now the memory sparked a glow in her, and she shuddered,
knowing that if he were alive now she would kill him again, and again – and she'd
responded with a Pavlovian predictability.
There was no way she could live and break free of the curse.
"You see, sister Roberta, you are one of us. In body and soul."
Lisle.
Robbie got up off the snow, her body shaking with the effort – hell, why worry
about suicide, this psychic battle was killing her just as surely – looking across the
boy's body to see Lisle proffer a robe identical to the one Robbie had stripped off in
her cell.
No! Maybe her defiance was futile but she'd defy Dragon as long as she was able.
She took a step towards Lisle, seemingly yielding to the inevitable, then another
step, and, suddenly, she was moving fast, blindingly fast, her body twisting off the
ground, feet lashing out, the kick slamming Lisle off her feet, picking her up and
throwing her back, her body crashing through the thick branches of a nearby conifer.
There was a scream, short and high-pitched – a girl's scream – holding more pain
and fear than Robbie would have believed possible in so short a cry.
Robbie moved the branches aside, peering into the gloom. She'd impaled Lisle on
one of the branches, the wood smashing bones as well as heart, killing her hope-
fully beyond resurrection.
Even as Robbie watched, the body aged, the skin peeling away until only bones
and a few rotted strips of dress were left, the bones themselves yellowing, a few of
them shattering from age and the cold. Robbie jabbed the branch, and more bones
fell away; and, in a mad explosion of fury, she reached in and wrenched the skull
free of the spinal column, hurling it down the escarpment with all the strength she
possessed, smiling grimly as she heard it explode into powdered fragments. For
Lisle, anyway, it was over.
"Not for you, though, Roberta. You caused me pain the night I took you; you have
defied me; and hurt me and mine this night. For that you must pay."
She whirled, trying to trace Dragon's voice back to its master but there was no
one there, not even any mist; only a disembodied voice crying her death sentence.
"Okay, big man," she said to the air, "You want me, you come and get me. 'Til
then, I'm my own woman."
 5.

So, it began again, the panic, the running, the desperate lunge through the night,
knowing it was only a matter of time before Dragon came for her, knowing that when
he came for her she wouldn't be able to stop him. But running all the same.
Then, she stopped dead in her tracks, her face working with a mixture of surprise,
fear and – strangest of all – joy. She was at the edge of the tree line, staring out
across a two hundred meter wide firebreak. The pasture!
She was a wraith now, a wood nymph in black as she raced down the firebreak,
ignoring the harsh slap of leathery, ebon wings overhead as Dragon hunted her from
above. He knew she was heading in this general direction and if he was any good as
a hunter he'd have beaters crowding her trail from behind to flush her out onto the
firebreak, where she'd be easy meat for him.
Her foot caught on some vines and she sprawled on her face, the sudden fall
saving her life as a heavy body careened overhead, a thick stake burying itself deep
into the snow. Robbie came up fast, not giving her hunter a chance to recover as she
smashed his body a dozen times over, her hands and feet snapping out to break the
man's knees, his pelvis, his spine, his neck; she didn't have time to scramble for the
stake and do a proper job on the vampire – otherwise she would have done it with
pleasure – but she made damn sure he'd be immobilised for a while. Hell, even a
vampire couldn't move with a blasted spinal column or walk on splintered legs.
She could be wrong, of course; and if she was, she'd be dead – truly dead – a lot
sooner than she counted on. It was a gamble; but she'd been a gambler all her life.
That was one of the reasons she'd transferred out of NASA to the Agency; NASA
hadn't been willing to train her for a moonshot so she'd figured what the hell, why
stick around any longer.
She hit the man a last time, than backed off for an instant. He stayed where he
was, his body shuddering like a computer going berserk, with servo/waldo feed-
backs spasming all over the place. She shook her head, this vampire wasn't Dragon;
pity about that.
Fine, her first gamble had paid off. Now for the second, the big one. The million
dollar question. Which had to do with the Mosquito and why Dragon had been so
furious the second time he'd attacked her, after they'd nearly crashed.
She found her plane as she had left it. nose in to the trees at a fraction less than a
three-quarter angle, with just enough play left for her to swing the port wing free if
she played the engines and brakes right. The main hatch was still open. the inside of
the cockpit probably thick with frost; hell, the damn plane was probably as dead as
she was, its battery dead, the plugs frozen, gas and oil coagulated and scummy in
the tanks and lines. But then again, the Mosq had been adapted for rough field work,
up to and including unassisted cold starts after a long downtime.
No time like the present for finding out.
She stepped towards the Mosquito and reached up through the hatch; she tried to
pull herself up into the plane but her arms and legs wouldn't work. They were
shaking, she was shaking, terrified of something on a basic, elemental level. Quickly,
Robbie moved away from the plane. The shaking stopped. She moved in a second
time, and she couldn't move any way except away from the Mosquito.
Her hunch was right. It had been the thought of crashing in the Mosquito that had
sparked the fury within Dragon, the unspoken – probably unadmitted, except on a
deeply buried sub-conscious level – fear of crashing in a wooden aircraft, of being
impaled and then burned. A fear, in the end, of being completely destroyed. She
remembered the expression on his face back in Turkey when she'd told him they
wouldn't be flying the usual penetration aircraft – a modified, all-metal Grumman
Firestreak – but would be flying Robbie's jazzed up Mosquito instead. She'd only
seen the fear for an instant, and it had flickered across his eyes so quickly she
thought she'd dreamed it; how he'd kept it under control so long and so well during
the flight she'd never know.
She heard a cry from way up the pasture – her hunters had found the male
vampire's body – Dragon would have no problem figuring out where she'd gone from
there; he'd be here a moment later, confident that she'd be even more paralysed by
the wooden plane than he'd been.
Not bloody likely, mate.
She ducked under the port engine, kicking off the ground and grabbing for the top
rung of the boarding ladder in one swift movement, not giving her body a chance to
react until she'd strapped herself into the pilot's seat.
The hunters were closer and coming fast.
She fought the fear out of her mind and hit switches all across the control panel,
punching the port engine up to speed first. She didn't like starting the portside first –
remembering that her port fan was the one that'd clipped the tree tops on her flight in
– but she didn't really have much choice.
Master switch. Battery. Primer. Catalytic convertors. Fuel pumps. She cut almost
all the regulation check list as she prayed for two minutes to get the engine fired up
and no problems firing it. The vampires were very close now; and she couldn't even
close the main hatch to keep them out, there wasn't any main hatch left to close.
The port engine lit off the first try, the big, chrome steel propeller beginning to spin
with only a minimum of fuss. Beautiful.
She started the priming sequence on the starboard engine, and released the port
brakes, cranking the tail wheel as far over as it'd go, and catching the lead rank of
vampires by surprise as the big plane stewed around, the port propeller shining
death for anyone fool enough to come too close. One vampire did and the massive
blades blew him into bloody hamburger. Robbie smiling grimly as she remembered
the silver alloy coating that had gone on the blades as a weather coat.
The vampires were running. Faced with a wooden airplane with silver props,
Robbie didn't blame them.
The starboard engine fired as eagerly as the port and she wasted no time in
gunning the Mosquito up the fire-break, playing with the fuel flow and mixture
controls until the jet whine settled down and wondering why Dragon hadn't hit her
yet.
The hell with it, she was gonna get out of here.
She swung the Mosquito around, pointing its nose towards the cliff, and pushed
the throttles to their stops, smiling as the Mosq rattled with the insane power of the
twin Griffons; she hadn't realised how much she'd missed her plane, missed flying.
She let the engines go full power for a long fifteen count, then cut power way back
and released the brakes. The Mosq started rolling sluggishly at first, the snow a bit
deeper now than when she'd landed – how long had it been, she wondered, I flew in
under a new moon: the moon's full now, so ifs been at least two weeks. The
question is, two weeks plus how much else. How many people have I killed…
Images flared in her brain, of her stalking alone through the deserted streets of a
lowlands village, partially sating her thirst on an old, semi-comatose drunkard too
boozed up to make it home from the local inn – he would have frozen during the
night, anyway; she did him a service by making his death so pleasurable – then a
pair of lovers out for a forbidden midnight stroll, finally a baby, barely a year old,
crying and kicking and squalling in its crib as she bent over it and kissed it, leaving
her fang marks all over its tiny body as she sucked it dry. Ahhh, but that feasting had
been grand.
Robbie was sobbing as she took off, the Mosquito clawing for altitude in the thin,
cold air, the jet whine of its engines thundering down the valley and waking people
for miles around. Robbie didn't care; she had nowhere to go in her Mosq, what did it
matter to her if the Russians decided to shoot her down.
No, she had nowhere to go but she had someone to kill. That could give her final
death some meaning.
Hell, something had to make sense. Maybe this was it.
She gunned the Mosq into a tight turn and screamed up the firebreak at twenty-
five feet, the chromalloy propellers spinning huge vortices of snow in their wake as
she scoured the earth for any of Dragon's brood. She found two, one of them
breaking for the trees in human form, the other jumping into the air, its body
stretching wide into its bat form.
Robbie didn't take any chances with this one; she cut in close and turned her
head away as the propeller did its grisly job, the big plane jarring slightly as the
vampire died before coming back into the trim, Robbie easing the whey' over in a
shallow arc that took her down the north side of the firebreak. She found nothing.
Dragon waited until she'd passed back out over the valley before he hit her. She
never saw him, just turning back to the controls after a futile search for more targets
when a black-on-black shape materialised beyond the canopy, exploding through the
plexiglass in a shower of hungry shards that tore at Robbie like things alive. She
struck out at him blindly, fighting to push him away from her. Dragon's leathery bat-
wings clammy against her trapped body, his breath hot on her face, the incredible
stench plunging through her like a white-hot spear.
Dragon lashed out at her and the engines took on a frantic note of their own as
the Mosquito began slipping into a dive; Roberta hit him and cried out as he caught
her fist in his hand, twisting her arm and pinning her against the back of her seat.
"You have defied me!" he roared, his voice thundering in her cars as he loomed
above her, ignoring the glass still breaking off the blasted canopy, ignoring the
slipstream, ignoring everything but her. "You are a vampire, one of my own, and yet
you defied me. How, woman! HOW!"
"I don't know!" Robbie screamed, using her free hand to try and break Dragon's
grip; it was no use, she was held fast until he decided to let her up.
"Then you are of no more use to me, woman! And so you must die once more!"
The hell I will!
Her foot kicked out at the throttles, banging them hard against their slops, the twin
Griffons responding magnificently as the Mosquito's speed doubled in a matter of
seconds. The acceleration shift threw Dragon off balance and Robbie heaved on her
trapped arm, laughing with joy – even a small victory justifies that – as he toppled, a
quick twist of the control yoke careening him hard off the rear bulkhead. If she could
keep him off balance long enough…
A quick glance at the panel chrono told her the bad news; the sun probably
wouldn't be up for a couple of hours at the very least. She couldn't kill him with
sunlight. But wood. The Mosquito...
She skimmed the edge of the escarpment by inches, throwing the Mosq into a
series of brutal aerobatics she hadn't tried since her NASA test pilot days,
manoeuvres designed to rip the guts out of planes and drive them beyond the point
of no return. The same could be said for men. Like Dragon.
Not Dragon. She found that out a few minutes into the acrobatics when his open
palm boomed into the side of her head, her eyes gone blind with the sudden pain,
her hands flying off the controls in a last, desperate attempt to keep him away. The
advantage was all his now; he could move while her harness locked her into her
seat. Still, she fought as hard as she could, for what it was worth.
He slapped her so hard she was surprised to find her head still attached to the
rest of her when she recovered from it. Then he slapped her again, a back-hand this
time, his heavy signet ring gouging a deep furrow down her cheek. She didn't
understand this: if he planned to kill her why didn't he just do it and get it over with...
Oh no.
He didn't plan to kill her. She'd slain a number of his vampires this night, she was
going to take their places; the beating was the beginning of a long indoctrination
process, to ensure no repetition of tonight's rebellion.
Oh my God, no!
The Mosq was balanced on a thread; it had taken an incredible amount of
punishment and its age was beginning to show as it slid through the passes at near
five hundred knots. Disaster was only a nudge away; one false move with throttles or
control yoke and the game was all over.
Robbie made the move. Just like the last time; she waited for a back-hand and
rolled with it, her left foot stabbing the left rudder down to the floor while her right leg
knocked the yoke over.
The left wing clipped a pine at better than four hundred knots and the Mosq
seemed to explode around them. Dragon roaring his frustration and his bloodlust to
the elements as Robbie grabbed for the stick and looked for a good place to crash
the plane. Hopefully with Dragon inside.
A siren went off on the panel – the fire alarm – a quick glance over her shoulder
telling her that the crippled left engine had finally had enough and was busy torching
the entire wing, the fire feeding off the Mosq's fuel as it hungrily ate in towards the
fuselage.
There was a heavy jar from underneath as the Mosq tore chunks out of some tall
conifers, the fire streaming far-and-away behind them to ignite the tail assembly.
Wouldn't be long now.
Dragon struck out with his hands and the rest of the canopy splintered and flew off
into the night, and Robbie knew there was no way she was going to hold him. He
was too experienced at survival. He turned to go. pausing a moment to reach for her,
the look on his face hinting that he was prepared to take her by force if he had to.
To hell with it, woman: take him. Now!
Robbie jammed the wheel hard over, and the Mosq slid over onto its back. There
wasn't far to go, and Robbie'd had the plane running at full throttle, even with a
burning engine.
The firebreak filled the shattered canopy and Robbie had time to cry a last.
Desperate, imploring – "GOD!" – and then they hit, a blotchy red flower blooming
high up on the Dragon's Mount.
 6.

There wasn't much left of the Mosquito – there rarely was after a high speed crash
– and the fire that had followed had consumed almost all the aircraft's frame. There
were bits and pieces of the engines, scattered in a pair of narrow circles around the
main crash. And there was a body.
There wasn't all that much left of that, either. The charred remains looked vaguely
human – if one looked hard enough, one could distinguish what was left of the
body's arms, legs, head, not much else, certainly no features – and they had been
impaled by the crash on the main fuselage spar, normally a ten inch thick slab of
wood. Not anymore; the fire had eaten even the main spar down to size.
He'd stood there an hour now, ever since the plane had crashed, watching from
the border of the fire – which was far closer than any of his seraglio dared come –
waiting for the holocaust to burn itself out so he could see what was left of Roberta
Christianson's body. He was smiling, thinking of how much Roberta had hoped this
crash would free her from him. Little did she know!
All he had to do was remove the stake and lay her corpse on a bed of her native
soil; and she would 'live' once more.
She had fought him well, though, and he'd always admired courage. It was
something even the damned van Helsings had in abundance; it was one of the
things that made them enemies worth fighting.
She had fought and died with honour; let her have that much at least.
"You are a worthy foe. Roberta," he said at last, his eyes flickering from the wreck
to the pale blue streak of colour lying low on the eastern horizon. "For that, Dracula
salutes you. And gives you your Death. Farewell."
And then, with a last, insolent, contemptuous look at the rapidly-approaching
dawn, the Dragon Lord turned back to his castle and climbed home.
And Dragon Mount was still once more.

FINIS