Free Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl by David Barnett Page A

Bathory. Stoker felt simultaneously sickened and excited.
    That faraway look entered Bathory’s eye again. “But that was not enough to save my husband. Castle Dracula, which has been my home for almost three centuries, is a beautiful place,” said Bathory. “Its spires and towers reach for blue skies only recently sullied by the occasional passage of your empire’s airships. It sits high in the Carpathian Mountains and can be reached only by the Gorgo Pass, on which no mortal will tread. The jagged peaks are covered with snow in the winter months, which thaws to form thunderous waterfalls and churning rivers in the spring. Raw, untamed forests spin out in every direction, haunted by things unknown to man, or forgotten by him. Wolves roam and sing in the moonlight, serenading Castle Dracula with the music of the children of the night. It is peaceful and happy. Or it was.” She looked at him. “We were attacked, Mr. Stoker.”
    “An attack? But you said you had an army . . . the mountains were impassable.”
    “No plot of mere men could have unseated us. They came stealthily and in secret, traveling the watercourses, swimming upstream like black salmon against the melt-water torrents.
    They crawled like rats over the battlements of Castle Dracula while we slumbered as the summer sun burned in the sky.”
    “But what were they?” said Stoker.
    Bathory shrugged. “If they had ever been human, it was a long time ago. They were dead things, wrapped in rags, with vicious claws and inhuman strength. Their faces were fearful to behold, Mr. Stoker: blank round eyes and rows of pin-sharp teeth. As my husband beheld them I heard him shout, ‘The Children of Heqet!’ and he entered the fray.”
    She paused, then spat, startling Stoker. “Foolish, foolish man. Always had to play the protector and the hero.” She cast her eyes down. “They tore him apart. They broke into our treasury and took one item, a jeweled scarab from ancient Egypt, picked up from somewhere or other by Vlad many centuries previously. For that they murdered my husband and turned my world upside down.”
    Stoker sat in silence for a long time after the story was finished. “And these Children of Heqet? What do you know of them?”
    “Nothing. Vlad died before he could say anything further.
    They leaped into the rivers with their prize, and fled.”
    “So what brings you to Whitby?”
    “I joined the battle at the side of my husband. The Children of Heqet did not escape without casualties. Come with me.” Without any of his earlier fear, Stoker followed Bathory back into the stone cell. She took a sturdy hatbox and opened it, bidding him to shine his lamp on it. He did so and drew back, horrified. Within was the severed head of one of the monsters Bathory had described, its withered skin stretched taut over a domelike head, its bulbous eyes staring sightlessly, its thin lips drawn back in a grinning rictus over daggerlike teeth. “I have tasted their blood,” said Bathory. “And as foul as it is, I continue to taste it, a drop or two a day. Because when it suffuses me I feel their presence, these hated Children of Heqet. They shine like a beacon in my mind. I have followed them here.”
    “To Whitby? But why?”
    “I mean to find out. And they will know my wrath.” In the tiny cell, as Elizabeth Bathory drew herself up to her full height and bared her fangs, her eyes shining in the darkness, Stoker felt suddenly very afraid. No longer for himself . . .
    but for those who had wronged her.
    “Mr. Stoker,” said Bathory, holding out her hand. “Will you help me avenge my husband?”
    Stoker had come seeking one monster, and he had found more to hunt. And he still felt as though he owed something of a debt to Gideon Smith. The young man had given freely of his time and energy to help Stoker, all—it had seemed—for nothing to help him in his quest for an explanation for his father’s death. But now . . . it seemed likely the Children of