An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3) by Fred Saberhagen (interesting books to read for teens .TXT) 📗

emergency loads through it. Poach was listening too, turning his raised face this way and that. Already his fresh wound was healing. Both of Poach’s eyes were open again, and the blood that covered one side of his forehead was congealed in the frigid air.

    At last Morgan lowered her gaze again to the old man. She shrugged. “If you can gather them in, from the four winds, they will doubtless be your allies now—for as long as you seem to be winning. Much good may they do you. Cowards, one and all. Gods, is it long life itself that makes so many of us cowards?”

    Corday said: “The one who stands beside you has not yet lived a century. Yet he was cowardly enough to attack me in my earth.”

    “Oh, now we are to the considerations of honor.”  Morgan shook her windblown hair.  “But then with you it is always honor, is it not?” She waited a moment, then added quietly: “We are going to walk away now, Vlad. You have won.”

    The old man made no reply. Morgan looked at him for a few seconds longer, then turned away and began to walk. Poach, after a last wary glance, followed. Trudging through the deep snow to the nearest streetcorner, Morgan looked weary as some laboring woman struggling to get home. She turned there, with difficulty heading east into the wind. Poach lurched along beside her.

    The old man took his hands out of his pockets and with each hand motioned one of his companions forward. He still had not taken his eyes off his foe. He walked ahead of Joe and Kate, keeping the distance between himself and his enemies nearly constant. The deep snow made hard walking. Joe wondered how long he and Kate were going to be able to keep up. The going was a little easier when they got to where Morgan and Poach had broken trail.

    After leading them east through untrodden drifts for half a block, Morgan stopped and turned under another streetlight. “Drive us into a corner,” she called back, “and it will be at your own peril.”

    Corday had stopped also, and once more waited with his hands in topcoat pockets. “Alas,” he called back cheerfully, “to our greater peril if we do not.”

    “Yours, perhaps,” Morgan answered. “I speak now to the others. Joe? Kate? He is as cunning as the Evil One himself. Don’t you understand that if he is the survivor, he must kill you at the end? You know too much about him now, for him to let you live. Kate, he has already killed your grandmother tonight.”

    “And you?” Kate called back. “Liar. What will you do with us—refresh yourselves?”

    “You do not matter to us, fools. We only meant to frighten you—you will be left in peace forever, but only if you turn around and go home now.”

    “This is the way I’m going,” Joe told her. He took a step forward, his grip tightening on the spear.

    Morgan looked at them all again, one after another, then once more turned and walked away. Poach kept at her side, walking unsteadily. At once the old man followed them, and Joe and Kate kept pace. Presently, under a blaze of neon from the windows of otherwise lifeless tavern, Joe noticed occasional red-brown drops spattering the snow.

    At the next cross street, Joe could see other people struggling along on foot a block and a half away—perhaps trying to get home, or to get away from home, or to find a doctor or an open liquor store. With sunrise the city, still crippled but aroused, would begin to live again and painfully try to move. Then how would the chase go?

    Morgan turned north. Holy Name Cathedral appeared ahead, slowly fell behind as they walked past it. Would there be an early Mass this morning? Involuntarily Joe glanced at Corday’s profile, then up at the stone cross. The old man’s attention was not distracted from his enemies. He did not even appear to blink.

    Suddenly the going was easy. They had come to a long stretch of sidewalk blown almost clean of snow. Joe and Kate moved up to walk closer at the old man’s sides.

    Joe said: “It goes back a long way, doesn’t it? Between you and her.”

    “It does, Joe. But all things must end.”

    “I heard Poach saying something tonight…that he killed Granny Clair.”

    “He did.” The old man paced on for several yards before he added: “Judy was at the house also. But she is going to be all right—if we win. Now we must concentrate on the hunt. Our enemies are still deadly dangerous. But dawn is not far off, and it will weaken them.”

    “And you too,” said Kate.

    “But not my brave allies.” Corday turned a sudden grin to left and right, including both of them. Joe wished to himself that the old man’s face hadn’t looked something like a skull when he did that. Still it had more life in it by far than many faces that were fat with flesh.

    Corday went on: “If I should be destroyed in sunlight, and they survive, still they will be weakened. And forced to remain in human form until night falls again. So if I fall, you must kill both of them today at any cost. But I have survived many such wintery northern mornings, and afternoons as well—ah, they turn east again.”

    The distant diesels, or another squadron of them, could be heard again, a trifle louder now. Among tall buildings Joe could not be sure from which direction the sound came. Nearer at hand another noise was growing rapidly; a helicopter’s rotors beat the invisible sky. Only a set of red and green running lights were visible as the machine darted past almost directly