Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha Read Online Free PDF Page A

sea-horse, pointing her breasts at the stars.
    One of the cocktail waiters must have been suffering from a fever. Kate was not feeling at all well. Impressions filtered into her mind in flashbulb bursts. Hot, dusty, empty landscape. Laughing famous faces. A dangerous crimson shadow.
    She lay on the bench, head throbbing.
    Something fast and red bounded into the piazza. Kernassy turned, cloak swirling, and was struck. The elder was lifted up and tossed into the fountain. His head was gone completely. Blood fountained from his neck-stump. His torso tumbled backwards, tangled in the cloak. The head soared and crashed into a pool, face powdering off it.
    Kate tried to sit up, but couldn’t.
    Malenka screamed in fury, talons and fangs starting. She leaped like a lioness. Something that flashed silver struck under her bosom.
    Kate got up and tried to step forward. A hand took her by the back of the neck and made her watch. She had seen true death come to many vampires. Most elders went like Kernassy, turned instantly to dust and bones, centuries of age and decay catching up in seconds.
    Something she’d never seen before happened to Malenka.
    If she had grown old as a warm woman, Malenka would have become fat. It was in her body type, a ripeness ready to swell. Now, pockets of blubber bulged under Malenka’s skin, inflating her face, her belly, her thighs, her torso, her arms. She ballooned, splitting like overcooked sausage. White stuff, veined with red, bubbled out of her rent skin. Her dress exploded.
    Malenka boiled over. Her cheeks expanded, and her forehead, her jowls, her throat, even her lips. Her eyes stared in panic from the bottoms of their wells of flesh, imploring. Kate was stabbed with guilt for having taken a petty dislike to this woman. Blood poured from Malenka, along with masses of fatty tissue. Her hands were huge, meat hanging off their backs and the fingers.
    Kate was held fast like a kitten. An outsize hand gripped the back of her neck, clamping her shorn hackles. She looked down. The Count’s cloak floated like a wingspread of black duckweed. Coins lay like a scatter of eyes on the pool-bed.
    She braced comparatively tiny hands against the low stone rim.
    Operatic laughter roared out of the Piazza di Trevi and up the Quirinal Hill. The killer was bellowing gusts of triumphant hilarity. The fountain’s rush was muted for a moment.
    She was pushed slowly forward. Her elbows began to bend the wrong way. Her thick specs, blobbed with droplets, slid down her nose, blurring everything further. Fang-teeth sharpened in her mouth, an instinctive defence mechanism rather than a response to spilled blood. She felt no flicker of red thirst, only disgust and puzzlement.
    The killer steadily forced her face to the water, as if he wanted to make this kitten drink. Maybe he thought her of a bloodline susceptible to running water or, considering the nearness of the church of Santa Maria in Trivio, holy water. If so, he was wrong. She wasn’t even Catholic: water thrice-blessed by the Pope would only get her wet.
    Kernassy’s fleshless skull grinned from one of the upper pools. His empty boots lay among coins. Ribbons of old blood, the foul blood of the Dracula line, threaded through the water, not mixing. It was sucked up from the pool and sprayed from the jets, falling all around like dead rain.
    Face near the surface of the water, dizzy from the stink of spoiled blood, Kate focused on the killer’s rippling reflection: crimson skull-cowl, black domino mask, tunnel-mouth nostrils, Burt Lancaster grin. Bare-chested, he displayed an expansively muscled and oiled torso.
    Her hands slipped from the rim and plunged into cold water. She was shoved forward and her chest slammed against stone. Her glasses fell off and splashed into the fountain. Without specs and with the agitation of the water, she glimpsed a dark image between the wavelets — her own reflection, rarely seen. It hadn’t vanished altogether like those of