Free Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer by Brian Lumley Page B

had crossed to the room’s small window, half-shuttered his eyes and cringed as he cautiously lifted a corner of dank and mouldering curtain to glimpse beyond the fly-specked pane only the dark of night and sense something of its balming coolness…only then could Mike feel truly secure and breathe more easily—
    —At least until dawn, when the sun would rise again…
    It had not always been this way. In more familiar Sicilian surroundings after those Francezci bastards had taken his blood and turned him, and when the change had taken hold, he’d had at least a little time to get accustomed to the dangers of his condition. But since visiting Bulgaria on the orders of the brothers, and having met “The Chemist,” who was one of their agents, those dangers had not only multiplied but were much more imminent. And even after a week and a half Edinburgh was new to him and strange, while the work he had been tasked to perform was not without its own hazards.
    Getting dressed by the window and continuing to look out on the night, Mike scowled and cursed the fates—but in the main, and for all that they had appointed him their thrall, he cursed the Francezcis. And Mike’s thoughts were poisonous as he remembered the events leading up to this: his punishment, his reason for being here. Mere thoughts, however, could never be as lethally poisonous as Le Manse Madonie’s vampire brothers—nor for that matter as monstrous as the man they had sent him to see in Bulgaria…
     

     
    Mike remembered how he had struggled awake in the confines of a cellar under Le Manse Madonie; how he’d surfaced from a drugged stupor to find himself hanging in chains against a damp, nitre-streaked stone wall. And despite that in those first moments of returning awareness he ached in every fibre of his being, still Mike’s first dull reaction before his situation fully dawned on him had been one of relief—that he was still alive!
    Moments later, as his painful stirring caused his chains to clank, a Francezci servant had appeared, nodded his acknowledgement of Mike’s awakening, and moved silently off again into the shadows. Following which, within just a few minutes, the Francezcis had come to visit.
    Barely conscious, Mike’s thoughts had been confused, whirling. His only emotion: that soothing sensation of relief for his continued existence, however precarious that might yet prove to be. So that when at last Anthony had spoken to him, it almost seemed to Mike that the “youthful,” centuried vampire had read his mind:
    “Oh, what’s this? Do I see fear, terror in your eyes, Mike? Now why is that, I wonder? Did I not tell you that we have work for you, a job for which you seem eminently suited? But perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps you’re not the man we took you for, not suited at all! For to find you here, so very weak, strung up in your chains…and afraid?”
    At which Francesco had taken it up. “And so you should be afraid, Mr. Milazzo! How many warnings did you expect? Knowing who we are, and what we are—and what we guard, succour, and feed down there in its pit at the roots of Le Manse Madonie—and for all that you are or should be one of ours, a Francezci thrall, still your behaviour has been intolerable!”
    Anthony had moved closer, narrowing his smouldering yellow eyes and cocking his head a little to one side where he stared as if in fascination at Mike dangling from his chains. Finally he had nodded. “Yes, my brother is quite right: utterly intolerable behaviour! And here in this very house of ours at that! You attempted a second attack on several of our very best men! Either incredibly brave, or unutterably stupid! For unlike you we learn from our mistakes.”
    And at last Mike had found his voice, which sounded from a parched throat and emerged as a strangled croak: “I thought…thought I was a dead man. And it seemed…seemed to me I had no choice but to fight. So I fought, or tried to.”
    “Yes, which gave us no