‘And so fifteen years later you’ve tracked me down, just to tell me that?’ asked Aleksei.

  ‘Oh, no, no. That’s really just a coincidence, but a pleasant one. For years I didn’t even know if you’d survived, though I suspected you would have.’

  ‘You did well to remember me.’

  ‘I had my mementos.’ It was almost imperceptible, but there was a new darkness, a leering tone to those words. It chilled Aleksei.

  ‘What?’ he asked in a whisper.

  ‘I came back the following night,’ Kyesha explained. ‘Back into the gaol. They hadn’t cleared up at all; the table was still stained with blood. And scattered all around, like little pink dog turds, were fingers. Yours were easy to find, long and slender – so much more refined than those of the peasants. You should have been a pianist.’ Aleksei glanced sideways towards his son at the mention of the piano. Kyesha misinterpreted him. ‘I’m sorry, that was thoughtless. Perhaps you were a pianist – until then.’

  ‘Just get on with it,’ muttered Aleksei.

  ‘As I say, your fingers were easy to find. If our captors had just looked at our hands rather than hacking at them, they’d instantly have worked out who was the spy. But they didn’t, and their loss is . . . your loss. But the gain was mine. I’ve kept them ever since, as a tribute to bravery.’

  ‘You’ve kept them?’ Aleksei was stunned.

  ‘All these years.’

  ‘But wouldn’t they . . . rot?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Kyesha lightly. ‘They’re nothing but bones now; six little bones.’

  Aleksei’s realization came at the same moment that Kyesha threw the six knucklebones on to the table, in the same manner he had done each night they had met. Then he arranged them in two straight lines, and the shape of Aleksei’s two missing fingers was plain to see.

  Aleksei placed his left hand on the table. He thought of the ballet he had seen less than a week before. Then it was a slipper that had fitted perfectly, but now it was those six small bones. He looked down at his hand, complete for the first time in fifteen years – as complete as it could ever be. The bones lay exactly where they should, as if Aleksei had dipped those two fingers into vitriol and allowed their flesh to dissolve while the rest of his hand remained intact. For a few years after they had first been severed, he had still thought he was able to feel them – if he looked away and flexed his hand, he had been able to sense all five fingers move. It happened rarely these days, but as he looked down at the table he tried to flex them again, tried to take control of the long-decayed muscles that had once encased those bones. He almost expected to see movement, but there was none.

  He looked deliberately away and tried again, and this time, just as in the early days, he could observe no difference in sensation in his left hand from that he would have felt in his right. He glanced down again, and almost instantly flung himself backwards, away from the table, knocking his chair to the ground. What he had seen was impossible: his hand complete – truly complete, not just with the two skeletal remnants, but with actual fleshy fingers. He had even seen the nails.

  He raised his left hand to his face, holding it in his right, but all was as it should be; a thumb, two fingers and two stumps. He looked back on to the table. There lay two fingers. Yes, they were made of flesh as well as bone, but they were not Aleksei’s. They had never been attached to him and had remained on the table as he pulled his hand away. The blood around where they had been cut was dried, but still visible.

  Kyesha was smiling. He poured the six small bones of Aleksei’s fingers between his hands as he watched their owner’s reaction.

  ‘I’m sorry, Aleksei,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize you’d be so shocked. I just thought it would be a fair exchange: my fingers for yours.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ replied Aleksei blankly. He resumed his seat, and attempted to ignore the two lumps of flesh on the table in front of him.

  ‘Not very gracious,’ said Kyesha.

  ‘I know how little they mean to you.’

  Unlike his father, Dmitry seemed intrigued by Kyesha’s gift. He picked up the ring finger, but immediately dropped it back on the table as if it had burned him.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Aleksei.

  ‘Feel it! It’s not dead.’

  Aleksei picked up the finger. Dmitry was right; it was not dead, but neither was it alive – an apt status considering the creature from which it had come. It was warm – around body temperature – with none of the strange, clammy quality that dead flesh exhibited. Moreover, it was flexible, without the stiffness that a dead body-part should have after a day. But there was nothing that more obviously indicated life. It did not move, or resist being bent by Aleksei’s own hands. He picked up the other finger and slipped them both into his pocket. Kyesha leaned his head to one side and gave a brief nod of acknowledgement. He let Aleksei’s six bones cascade one last time from one hand to the other, and then – mimicking Aleksei’s action – returned them to his own pocket.

  ‘I presume this still isn’t the reason you contacted me?’ said Aleksei.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Kyesha. ‘But I think it is enough for one evening.’ He stood. ‘Goodnight, Aleksei Ivanovich, Dmitry Alekseevich. We shall meet once more in Moscow. I will see you then.’

  With that, he was gone.

  Aleksei took the two fingers back out of his pocket and began to examine them, but his thoughts were interrupted by Dmitry. ‘What do you suppose he meant by “in Moscow”?’

  ‘I imagine he thinks that what he tells me tomorrow will be so fascinating that I’ll be tempted away to some other place – somewhere I will be much more vulnerable.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t be foolish enough to do that.’

  Aleksei looked over to the doorway through which the voordalak had so recently departed. ‘If I choose to leave Moscow then I shall be able to do so in complete safety, secure in the knowledge that Kyesha will never leave the city.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because tomorrow, Mitka, we’ll have help.’

  CHAPTER X

  ALEKSEI RECOGNIZED CAPTAIN OBUKHOV, WHOM HE’D SPOKEN to at the club near Lubyanka, and a few of the other men who faced him in a small street to the east of Theatre Square. They were all members of the Northern Society, all dressed in civvies, all younger than its average membership, eager to see some action rather than sit around and debate the new order that was to come after the death of the tsar. Dmitry had done the work of recruiting them – in fact, most of the evening’s plan had come from him. Aleksei had only made slight modifications, and as he had described each one, he could see the sneer in Dmitry’s eyes at the very idea of such caution. But Aleksei knew far better than Dmitry the risks involved, and Dmitry seemed to accept this. Even if he didn’t, Aleksei was Dmitry’s father, and his superior officer, and something in that mix made Dmitry acquiesce.

  The one thing they were in agreement on was the one that would put these young men into the greatest danger. They both knew they could not even think of using the word voordalak during any briefing. Many soldiers had in their time willingly followed insane commanders, but there were different strains of insanity; some could raise an army large enough to conquer Europe, others only laughter. Thus they had remained silent on the matter. Even so, it was a cruel mission to be sent in pursuit of a vampire in the belief that it was a man. The simple soldier’s faith in the steel of a blade or the lead of a bullet would quickly prove to be his undoing. And there were no rational pretexts that could be devised to insist that a man must be beheaded or stabbed in the heart with a blade of wood. Even men whose grandmothers had not been so well versed – and so forthcoming – in their folklore as Aleksei’s would listen to the words ‘wooden stake’ and hear only ‘voordalak’.

  And so Aleksei had altered Dmitry’s plan to come up with the safest and surest he could muster. In his final briefing, he emphasized the points he had added to the strategy, afraid that Dmitry might have avoided pressing them home, not out of disobedience, merely youthful over-exuberance.

  ‘Do not approach him,’ he said in a low voice as the group huddled round him. ‘We know he’s extremely dangerous – he’s killed six men already.’ The body count had mounted during the week. Aleksei had no idea if the blame for all could be laid at Kyesha’s feet, nor did he care. Even if the creature had exercised utter self-control for all his time in Moscow, he had managed to live for at least fifteen years as a vampire. The total number of deaths – wherever the bodies lay – must have been far greater. ‘But it’s not the risk to us I’m concerned about.’ Aleksei knew that all these men would only rise to a challenge; he needed a better reason to keep them away from Kyesha. ‘We believe he is working with somebody else; someone who rarely goes out into the streets with him but who is the political force behind these murders – perhaps an enemy of Russia, perhaps a member of our own government.’ It was ironic that these revolutionaries were such patriots. A foreign invader stirred their passion to just the same extent as did their perceived enemy within. ‘Finding the mastermind is far more important than the mere capture of his henchman.’

  ‘But if we capture him we’ll make him talk.’ It was Obukhov who spoke. ‘Ten minutes is all it will take.’

  Aleksei felt both amused and sickened. If time had been less precious he would have asked Obukhov how long he thought he himself would last under interrogation. The answer would most likely have been for ever – days, certainly. Perhaps Obukhov could stand torture that long, but then why did he believe that he would be so much better a torturer, and his subject so much less of a man, that the outcome would be any different if the roles were reversed? But a less philosophical response was more appropriate.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There are too many risks. You can’t guarantee to capture a man alive – not a man like this – and if you tried you’d be compromised. More than that, we can’t be sure he’d talk, and even if he did, ten minutes could be plenty of time for the real enemy to get wind of it and be out of the city. We do this my way, OK?’

  Obukhov glanced from side to side at his comrades, to see if he would gain any support from them, but received no encouragement. ‘OK,’ he said to Aleksei, with some semblance of conviction.

  ‘So we follow him. He has a hideout somewhere in the city. He’ll go there once he’s finished with me. You track him to wherever he ends up. Then you get word back to me or Lieutenant Danilov.’ Aleksei felt a quiet rush of pride as he described his son in this official fashion. ‘Work in pairs so one of you can wait while the other brings the message. If he enters a building for a while and leaves again, keep following till his final destination.’ And don’t take a peek at the bloody mess he’s left inside. Aleksei did not give voice to this last thought.

  ‘Why is it that he’s meeting you anyway, sir?’ Aleksei did not know the name of the man who had asked. It was an astute question.

  ‘I can’t tell you. Suffice to say that he believes me to be someone rather different from who I actually am.’ A bit of intrigue should keep them quiet. It seemed to stave off any more questions.

  ‘You’ve all got his description, and you know that, when he speaks to me, I’ll give you the signal. He may speak to Lieutenant Danilov, but the plan will be the same. Any questions?’

  He looked around them, but no questions came. Despite his rank, the responsibility of command had not been a frequent feature of Aleksei’s career. He’d shouted orders on the battlefield often enough, but usually this was no more than being a link in a chain, not true authority. As a spy, he was most effective alone, or as a member of a team who knew one another to be equals. Tonight, he reminded himself of Vadim, whose attempts at issuing orders had often fallen on the deaf ears of Aleksei and the others. Aleksei was now two years older than Vadim had been when he died, engaged, just as they would be tonight, in a vampire hunt through the streets of Moscow.

  Aleksei stepped back from the conspiratorial huddle. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said. He headed down the street, before turning right towards the theatre. Dmitry kept pace with him. The others dispersed in various directions. They knew not to approach the Bolshoi as a mob; they would be easily spotted. Even so, Aleksei could only hope that Kyesha would be too suspicious of him and Dmitry to be on the lookout for so many associates. He hoped also that everyone would stick to his plan. If they did, it would be easy. The news would come that Kyesha had made his way to some address – most likely just before dawn. Aleksei and Dmitry would send the other soldiers away. They would be disappointed not to be in on the arrest, but they wouldn’t ask questions. Then it would be a familiar trip down into a darkened cellar. If it could be done with sunlight, that would be better, but he already had a new wooden sword whittled for the occasion.

  He smiled as he cast his mind back to earlier that day, as he sat there, carving away at the wood. Domnikiia had been across the room, sewing, aware of what he was planning, but repressing her concerns. Tamara had dashed in and seen the sword. The look on Domnikiia’s face expressed both their fears that their daughter would ask what it was for, but in her childish self-interest she had immediately assumed it was a toy for her. ‘I don’t want a sword,’ she had said. ‘Swords are for boys.’ With that, she had raced out again. On a different occasion, Aleksei would have chided her for her rudeness, but instead he and Domnikiia had laughed, a little of the tension between them released. Years earlier, Dmitry had been far happier to receive a wooden sword as a gift from his father. It had only been broken two nights before.

  Kyesha had not provided a ticket for tonight’s performance as he had the previous week, but Aleksei had had no trouble in purchasing one – or rather two, so that there would be an empty space beside him for Kyesha to sit. Tonight’s performance was of Flore et Zéphire, a revival of Didelot’s production of Bossi’s score. Aleksei had already seen it in Petersburg, and while he had enjoyed plenty of ballet in his time, Didelot’s over-staged trickery somehow bored him beyond all measure. Artistic appreciation was not, however, the purpose of tonight’s visit. Aleksei and Dmitry stood for a while in the square outside the theatre, their eyes darting in all directions in search of Kyesha as the audience made its way between the columns of the theatre’s façade to take their seats within.

  ‘I should go in,’ said Aleksei.

  ‘You’re sure he’ll be inside?’

  ‘He was last time.’

  ‘Last time he knew where you’d be sitting.’

  Aleksei nodded, but he already had an answer to that. ‘Last time, he didn’t know what I looked like.’ Now it was Dmitry’s turn to nod. ‘Anyway,’ continued Aleksei, ‘he’s either going to be inside or outside. It’s either you or I that will meet him.’ And I hope to God it’s me, he thought.

  ‘You’re certain he’ll come.’ Dmitry spoke it as a statement, not a question.

  ‘He wants something,’ was Aleksei’s simple reply.

  Aleksei glanced around the square again. To anyone who knew the faces, the whole area screamed out that it was a trap. Even if Aleksei had never seen a single one of them before, he would have felt uneasy. Too many pairs of men, evenly distributed, each in his own way trying to look as if he had a reason for being there. Considering the assumed trade that Kyesha had used to lure some of his victims, he might well guess that there was an embarrassment of competition for him here tonight.

  Dmitry took his father’s hand. ‘Good luck,’ he said sincerely, before adding with a smirk, ‘Colonel.’

  ‘You too, Lieutenant,’ replied Aleksei. Then he turned and went into the theatre.

  His seat was again in the stalls, but further back this time, in row nine. As before, he was close to the aisle. He wanted to make it easy for Kyesha to approach him, and just as easy for him to get away. The main plot of the evening would not be unfolding in the theatre. Looking around, he could see three pairs of men he knew to be members of the Northern Society. No – more than that. Three pairs were members of the inner circle which had embarked upon tonight’s adventure, but there were almost a dozen other faces Aleksei knew to house the same political point of view. He hoped none of them would interfere with his plans by trying to engage him or his colleagues in any kind of conversation.

  The ballet began. Aleksei paid little attention. He glanced around the auditorium. It was almost full. He was pleased to see that the eyes of his comrades were all fixed on him, rather than on the stage. That was an important part of the plan. None of them had seen Kyesha before, and his contact with Aleksei might last only moments. They could not simply follow the man who took the seat next to Aleksei. Kyesha might not sit down – or some innocent, noticing a vacant space, might occupy it instead. It was vital that there be no confusion, and so all knew the prearranged sign Aleksei would make to indicate that this was the man. Aleksei clenched his fist in preparation. It was only after he had described the signal he would give that he understood its irony, though he felt sure that some deeper part of his mind, or some mischievous God, had suggested the idea to him in full knowledge of its implications.

  The sign was to be a kiss – an inconspicuous kiss to the side of his own forefinger when he was in the presence of the man they should follow. It was not a kiss to the man he would betray, but it amounted to the same. The words of Saint Matthew came to him: ‘Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.’ And there was another difference. Aleksei’s instructions were explicitly not to hold him fast, but to let him go. Even so, Aleksei hoped he would not have to endure the same fate as Judas. The icy cold of winter was his Hell on earth. He did not need to experience that same cold for eternity, down with the traitors in Hell’s ninth circle.