Jasper Kent - Thirteen Years Later

He pulled the trigger.

The pistol recoiled in Aleksei’s hand and Iuda’s body jerked with the impact of the pellet. Blood spurted from the centre of his chest, but Aleksei knew he had missed the heart. Iuda had to be alive to be able to listen.

Now for the play-acting – just in case somebody chose to bear witness to this event, to report it back to Marfa or Dmitry.

‘Oh my God! Vasiliy!’ shouted Aleksei. He ran over to the prostrate figure and knelt beside it. Looking back towards the square, he saw government troops begin to arrive at the riverbank. Behind them rode Pyotr in triumphant bronze, silhouetted against the moonlight. Aleksei grabbed Iuda under the arms and dragged him out further towards the middle of the river, as if to protect him from those terrible men who had shot him, but he still made sure that they were in a place where Pyotr’s bronze eyes could look down upon them.

‘You surprise me, Lyosha,’ said Iuda. His voice was croaky and punctuated by coughing. Blood showed on his lips, flowing out down his chin each time he spoke. ‘But I suppose you have won. A checkmate is a checkmate, however dull.’ His fingers scrabbled at his coat buttons. Aleksei helped to undo them, knowing that he had to breathe in order to hear what Aleksei had to say.

‘Oh, this is no simple checkmate, Iuda,’ said Aleksei. ‘You’ve been fooled – played for a prostak – and now I’m going to tell you all about it.’

Iuda’s hand slipped inside his coat. His fingers worked at the buttons of his shirt and finally found their way inside. For a moment Aleksei was fearful that he had his own gun, but he doubted he would have the strength to use it.

‘Do go on, Lyosha,’ said Iuda. Any pretence he made at encouragement was lost in the gargling of blood in his chest. He really didn’t seem interested in what Aleksei had to say. Aleksei thought he had been pretty smart – finding a way of solving all his problems and of puncturing Iuda’s ridiculous ego at the moment of his death. But when the moment came, Iuda was refusing to play the game. His hand reached inside his shirt and finally caught a grip on whatever was within. He sighed and closed his eyes, breathing more easily. In any other man, Aleksei would have suspected that he had taken hold of a crucifix.

Iuda opened his eyes again. ‘Go on, Lyosha,’ he said.

At last, Aleksei understood the difference between them. It was not that Iuda was better at devising a deception than he was. He probably was, but that was not the point. The real difference was that Iuda did not so eagerly play the victim as Aleksei had always done. He managed to keep up the veneer of being in control even as he lost everything – his life included. It did not matter. Iuda would die and Aleksei would have the pleasure of telling him that Aleksandr was alive. Iuda might pretend not to care, but Aleksei would know, and that would be enough.

‘Iuda,’ he said, patting him consolingly on the chest, ‘I have beaten you.’

Iuda’s body was ripped by convulsive coughing. Aleksei realized he would have to hurry things along, but Iuda seemed to appreciate that too. He pulled his hand from inside his shirt. Two strands of a leather cord emerged from it, by which whatever he was holding had been hung around his neck. He opened his hand and in it Aleksei saw nestling a small glass vial, containing a dark liquid. With a jerk, Iuda tugged at it. The stopper, attached to the leather band, came loose, and in a moment Iuda had the vial to his lips. He drank very little and then his arm fell to one side. He breathed more slowly now, as a contented smile spread across his face.

‘Carry on, Lyosha,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it was you were going to say.’

Aleksei didn’t speak. He looked down at Iuda’s hand. The glass vial had rolled out of it on to the ice, spilling the remainder of its contents. A small, dark stain spread out across the ice – black in the moonlight, but Aleksei knew well enough not to trust that fickle illumination. He picked up the vial and sniffed it. The scent was unmistakeable – blood.

‘Please, Lyosha, grant a dying man his wish.’

Aleksei said nothing. Iuda’s words from earlier that day echoed in his mind.

‘Pyotr was the true genius. To have his blood drunk by a vampire and to live through it into old age – that’s a feat that would be almost impossible to surpass.’

But Iuda had surpassed it. He had had a vampire drink his blood – the scars Aleksei had seen on his neck proved that – and had kept in that bottle which he hung around his neck blood from that same vampire; an insurance policy – a lifesaving elixir he could consume whenever his life was at risk. Perhaps Kyesha had been the voordalak from whom he had taken that blood, perhaps another. It did not matter.

‘Please, tell me. How did you fool me?’

Aleksei smiled. ‘I didn’t, Iuda. I was pretending, but I won’t lie to you. I could never devise a trick clever enough to fool you.’

‘I thought perhaps you’d finally discovered it was Dominique you saw me with at that window in Moscow.’ His lips curled into a grin. ‘Or equally, that it was Margarita.’

‘No, Iuda,’ said Aleksei. ‘You’ve still got me there.’

Iuda coughed again. His stomach contracted and his upper body rose up towards Aleksei. His eyes stared out at him, and tried to smile, but it only meant that more of his own blood spewed from his mouth. His eyes lost their focus and his body went limp, falling back on to the ice. On last, great, bloody cough issued from him, but Aleksei knew it was only the wind escaping from his body.

Iuda was dead, but not dead. He was undead. How long it would take for the full transformation – the induction, as Iuda had termed it – to be complete, he did not know. But it would happen. Iuda had preferred to live as a man for as long as he could, but in the end had chosen to live as a voordalak rather than not live at all.

Unless Aleksei could do something about it.

He had not brought his wooden sword with him – he had not thought to encounter any voordalaki in Petersburg. But he had his sabre, and although he knew he could not use it to stab Iuda’s lifeless body through the heart, he could still make use of it to sever Iuda’s head.

He rolled the corpse over on to its front and then stood up. He drew his sword, raising it up above his head and squeezing the handle tight. He felt pain in his left hand, where his newest wound had scarcely begun to heal, but he ignored it, focusing all his hatred upon the back of Iuda’s inert neck.

‘Halt!’ came a shout from the riverbank. ‘You there! What the hell are you doing?’

Aleksei ignored the soldiers and brought down the blade. A shot hit him in the arm, but it did not hamper him as he swung the steel inexorably towards Iuda’s undefended neck. Then the ice shook beneath his feet. A cannonball landed in front of him, just beyond Iuda’s body. Aleksei was thrown back. He felt his sword briefly connect with Iuda’s flesh, but it would have been no more than a scratch. He landed on his back, but was soon sitting up again.

It was too late. Even as he watched, Iuda’s inanimate body slipped into the hole in the ice the round shot had created. There was barely the sound of a splash as it vanished. Aleksei was reminded again of Satschan and even more of the Berezina. It was ever the same in Russia – snow and ice and freezing cold. This time, though, things were different. There was more certainty. This time he knew for sure that Iuda was dead. But though, like his namesake, Iuda would be entombed in ice, and though he had chosen a fate that ensured he would encounter Satan himself, neither would be permanent. This time Aleksei was confident that, when the ice melted, Iuda would live again.