Free More Than Mortal by Mick Farren Page A

and Victor Renquist has to be primarily in your imagination. Even you have to agree you were very young and silly at the time, and he was, and still is, eight hundred years your senior. You’ve spent the passage of years enlarging and embroidering on the situation. He probably doesn’t even remember you.”
    Despite herself, Columbine exhaled smoke and pouted. “He remembers me. I’ll guarantee you that.”
    Marieko pressed their two-to-one advantage. “If you
could be objective for a moment, you would realize Renquist is exactly what we need.”
    “I don’t want him here.” But even as she spoke, Columbine knew her aura was giving her away. A part of her was subversively excited at the prospect of seeing Victor Renquist again.
    “Be real, Columbine.”
    “You’re the one who’s complaining about the nightmares.”
    Destry glanced at Marieko. “Perhaps she thinks Renquist would be too much for her to handle. Perhaps she’s afraid she’ll turn into a simpering girl again at the sight of him.”
    Columbine knew she was being both teased and manipulated by the other two, but she couldn’t stop herself from angrily reacting. “I am not afraid of Victor bloody Renquist.”
    Destry pressed home the advantage. “Then act your age, and let’s make use of him.”
    Columbine wasn’t quite ready to give in. “There must be another undead of the same stature.”
    “Name one.”
    Columbine cast around for a name. “I can’t
    “No, of course you can’t. So act your age, and let’s make use of him.”
    Columbine was effectively outnumbered, but she couldn’t surrender without one more turn of the wheel. “Very well, suppose we did manage to get Victor to come here. What then? If there is some potential power in the burial mound, wouldn’t we be running the risk of him taking over whatever we might find there?”
    “You think the three of us aren’t a match for him?”
    “No, I don’t think that.”
    “So?”
    “All right, all right, I don’t want to see him, but if we can get his attention, I’ll go along with it. I’m not so sure he’s actually going to be that interested. He’s fascinated
by nosferatu history, but he’s also very circumspect, and protective of his colony.”
    Marieko made a Zen gesture indicating the great merit of simplicity. “We send him a letter.”
    By the time the sun had begun to sink over the West London suburbs, Renquist decided he had experienced more than enough of this drifting but not sleeping and resolved, as soon as he had the safety of twilight, to take another walk out in the streets. He needed to move, to stride and to swing his arms, and, after his own fashion, to breathe in his new surroundings. Only after that, when he returned to the Savoy, would he telephone Columbine Dashwood. In the meantime, until the sun was down, he would abandon these attempts at halfway rest and apply himself to a final recap of what he knew so far about the task at hand. He reached for the leather folder in which he’d filed the paperwork relevant to the project, unzipped it, and extracted the letters. The sequence of correspondence and the way it had been couched bore all the hallmarks of Columbine’s style and operational approach. She had always fancied herself as the seductive coquette, the incremental tease. Each letter had given away a little at a time, never allowing him to know more until he’d at least made some tentative commitment of interest. He doubted, though, that Columbine was the author of the letters in terms of physically creating them. Unless she had undergone a radical change over the many years since he’d seen her, she was not the kind to labor long and diligently at perfecting the complicated calligraphy of the nosferatu. The flame script, in scarlet ink on the handmade oriental writing paper, had been drawn with a near-flawless dexterity and what appeared to be an ultrafine 00 sable hair paintbrush. The delivery by exclusive courier service had been the