For a moment, Redlaw didn’t answer. “It all happened so fast,” he eventually said. “And I suppose I didn’t feel that I
should
be escaping from HQ. I’d resigned myself to the idea that I deserved to be a prisoner. I even felt I was kidding myself I could ever get Lambourne.
“And then you came for me. You came, and it completely changed my perspective. Opened up a new, unexpected avenue. Yanked me out of the dead end of despair I was in.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And you’ll forgive me if I haven’t realised you’re on your best behaviour with me, only I’ve nothing to compare it to. You’re the only shtriga I’ve met.”
“Apology accepted. Have you always had such a problem opening up to others?”
“I’m a solitary man.”
“Just you and the Lord, fighting the good fight together.”
“Something like that. He’s the only one I know I can count on—and even Him I’m not sure about these days.”
“Crisis of faith?”
Redlaw brushed his fingertips unconsciously over his crucifix. “A flat tyre on the road to redemption. God doesn’t seem to be paying me the attention I think I deserve. You dedicate yourself to someone, you expect it to be reciprocated.”
“Like an one-sided love affair. You give the other person your all and get nothing in return.”
“Worse—abuse.”
“Ah,
that
kind of relationship. Isn’t the best advice to walk away?”
“Hard to walk away from an all-seeing deity. Where do you go?”
“Into the arms of His Adversary?” Illyria suggested, jokingly. “That’s the usual place.”
“I’ve entered into a pact with one of Satan’s minions, haven’t I? So I daresay I’m halfway there.”
“Satan’s minion? Me? I thought we were past all that twaddle.”
“I’m not being serious.”
“Oh. It’s so hard to tell with you. I must admit, for a while after I was turned, I did fear I was damned, Hell-bound. My upbringing was stalwartly Orthodox, and although I’d rebelled against that, I hadn’t shaken off the shackles fully. I let myself believe that becoming a shtriga meant I had forfeited my mortal soul. It took a long time for me to come to terms with what I was.”
“You said you were attacked on one of your aimless Albanian bus rides?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘attacked,’ exactly,” said Illyria. “And don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“Getting me to talk so as to distract myself from my thirst. Really, I can hold out.”
“You don’t think I’m just curious? Interested to know?”
She eyed him. “Well, you may be. Perhaps at some level you’re not prepared to admit to.”
“Go on, then. You weren’t attacked, but...”
She looked out of the window at the passing city. The bus was at that moment rolling alongside the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The high brick wall was strung with barbed wire, supplemented with a palisade of outward-jutting ash stakes. Sourced, in accordance with royal wishes, from a sustainably managed forest.
“I met him in the seaside town of Vlorë,” she said, “the man who created me. I’d done a lot in my life before then. I had a privileged, some would say sheltered upbringing in Korçë, capital of the south of the country: my father was a doctor, my mother a schoolteacher with some inherited wealth. All very prosperous and educated and God-fearing and respectable. I studied music at university. My ambition was to become a concert pianist. I even spent a year at Oxford before the war, and learned English.”
“Old bean.”
“Old bean. But for all that, I was still quite a naïve creature, for a woman in her early thirties. I’d never had a proper boyfriend, a really passionate affair. The odd fling, including one with the son of a British aristocrat while I was over here, but nothing serious. I was too busy being self-determining and free. The middle of the last century was when women truly began to come into their own, and I was making the most of it. Albania itself was enjoying a new-found independence after half a millennium of Ottoman rule. Liberation was in the air, like the smell of spring, a determination never to be oppressed again. We fought off Mussolini, then Nazi Germany. We even got Stalin off our backs eventually, although we immediately gave ourselves over to Communist China instead, and for years afterwards... But you don’t want a history lesson.”
“Where does Norman Wisdom fit in? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“That’s really all you can think of when it comes to Albania?” Illyria huffed. “A small but proud nation? Our love for imbecilic little Mr Pitkin?”
“It’s just one of those cultural head-scratchers, like the French and Jerry Lewis. Carry on.”
“All right. In Vlorë, where I fetched up one evening more or less by accident, I met a man in a bar. I was in the mood for another of my brief liaisons, a night or two of uncomplicated fun. It was 1953. The year Hillary conquered Everest. The year of your Queen’s coronation. Dear Lord, nearly half a century ago. He was... quite beautiful. Didn’t smile much. Spoke without fully opening his mouth, a trick I have not fully learned to copy. But how smitten I was! Thunderstruck. He was a Tosk like me, a southerner. We shared the same dialect and the same cordial dislike of anyone from the north of the Shkumbin river, those backwoods, backwards Ghegs. He bought me a shot of
rakia
. One shot turned somehow into four. I became giddy—not just from the alcohol—and chose not to notice that he himself wasn’t drinking. He had such penetrating dark eyes. We went outside to take the night air. It was warm. We promenaded along the shoreline, arm in arm, my head on his shoulder. The moon was full and high and its light on the water was an expanse of pure shimmering silver.”
She sighed, almost a parody of wistfulness.
“It still haunts me, the memory of that night. It had such promise, the potential to be so magical. Folk music spilled out of a restaurant, a violin scratching on top, a
lahutë
plunking away beneath, and we paused to listen. Further from the centre of town we heard the gasps of a couple making love, echoing from an upstairs window, and we paused to listen to that too. And then just the shush of water on sand, the Adriatic rubbing against the coast like a contented cat. I thought we were going to make love on the beach, in a secluded cove somewhere. I thought that was the plan.”
“You can spare me the grisly details,” said Redlaw.
“Instead we went uphill, and in the quietness of a pine grove he suddenly thrust me against a tree and opened his mouth wide and I was ready for the kiss, and then I saw his teeth, his fangs, and they shone so whitely in the moonlight, and I tried to scream...”
“Again, you can spare me the details.”
“It was over quickly, anyway. It hurt—it was unimaginable agony—but pain is so hard to remember, isn’t it? Even if you try. What I recall most is him lowering my body to the ground as he drank from me. I recall the smell of pine needles and soil beneath me, mingling with the tang of the sea air and the tang of my blood as it poured out, as he sucked it up in huge, wet gulps. The sound of his lips smacking, his tongue working—it reminded me of my father’s old wolfhound Ari slurping water from his bowl. And then, as my consciousness faded, his final, parting words to me. ‘This is an honour,’ he said. ‘Only the most accomplished and deserving earn this. You have been blessed. You have been made special.’ It was months before I grasped fully what he’d meant.”
The bus rounded Bressenden Place, turning left onto Victoria Street, eastbound.
“Months...?” Redlaw prompted.
“Months in which I lived like a hunted thing up in the hills above Vlorë, in what’s now the Llogara national park, preying on rabbits and deer. I found a cave and called it home and only ventured out of it to catch food. Instinctively I knew sunlight was to be shunned. My hearing, my vision, my sense of smell—everything had amplified to the extent that I felt I might go mad. It was like leaving a darkened soundproofed room and walking straight out onto a concert hall stage where the spotlights are dazzling and the orchestra is in full swing. I was stunned and dazed, reeling from the immenseness of it all. Gradually I pieced together what had been done to me, what I had become. It appalled me. What was this ‘honour’ that was supposed to have been bestowed on me? It was surely a curse. I was a vampire. I would never again walk in the daylight, never know a normal life. I did not dare return to my family. What if my parents spat on me and spurned me? What if they tried to have me killed? Worse, what if I tried to kill them? There were times when I was so miserable, I came close to ending it all. I would wait in the mouth of my cave for dawn, but always retreat into the shadows just before the sun rose.”
“What stopped you?”
“Cowardice, I would have to say. But also the growing awareness that actually I hadn’t been abased as I thought—I’d been improved. My understanding of vampires came from legend, the stories that persisted in Mediterranean folklore about shambling bestial bloodsuckers, inhuman monsters. Yet clearly I was not that, and neither had been the man who made me this way. He had been urbane, handsome, mesmerising. I was less a victim, more a recruit. That’s why I can’t claim to have been
attacked
by him. It was more as if I had been specially selected. What confirmed it for me was meeting an actual vampire up in the hills. Our paths crossed when we were both stalking the same stray sheep. I outran him easily; out-hunted him. He couldn’t come near what I could do. I caught and slaughtered the sheep, and when he swooped on me hoping to poach my kill, I repelled him with ease.”
“I suspect he didn’t survive the encounter.”
“No, he jolly well did not,” said Illyria with some zest. “I knew then for sure that I was not simply a vampire. I was something rare and exceptional. I felt ready to rejoin humanity, but on my terms. I became a wanderer, a night traveller. I roamed not just around Albania but throughout Europe, doing whatever work I could find, mostly playing piano in restaurants and cocktail lounges, stealing sometimes when I had to, feeding only off animals, never people.”
“Did you ever run into him again? Your creator?”
“Once. Back in Albania, at the port of Durrës. He was travelling one way, I the other. Ships in the night—almost literally.”
“How did it go?”
“Well. Enough time had passed that any resentment I might have had was gone. I no longer felt I had been misled, betrayed. We chatted like old flames who’ve got over the acrimony of their breakup and are content as friends. I knew by then, from poring over library books, what a shtriga was, but he filled in gaps in my understanding. The shtriga bloodline goes back thousands of years, to the earliest times, the dim pre-dawn when civilisation was just emerging from the primitive darkness. It is the purest form of vampirism, the stem from which ordinary vampires are merely a corrupt offshoot, and the Balkan region, ancient Albania specifically, was its point of origin, where it first took root. A shtriga turns only those he or she believes to be truly worthy. That’s why we are so dashed few. Ordinary vampires can proliferate like fleas, and will, given half a chance, but the shtriga finds perhaps one person in every century to pass the priceless gift on to. Usually it’s a fellow Albanian—we like to keep it in the family, as it were.”
“Have you?”
“Passed it on? No, not yet. There hasn’t been anyone I felt fit the bill. There’ve been a few who have come close. There’s one man I’d even say met all the criteria... but you wouldn’t be interested, would you?”
“Certainly not!” Redlaw exclaimed. “What do you take me for?”
“You have to want it, you see. Even if you don’t know you do. I did, that night in Vlorë. I was at least a half-willing victim. At some subconscious level I realised my maker was more than he appeared, that his elegance and eloquence masked some dangerous secret. That was part of the thrill for me, why I found him so alluring. I let him have me, with scant regard for the consequences.”
“Don’t even think of trying any of that stuff with me.”
“I get it, Redlaw. No need to keep harping on. I only mentioned you as a possible candidate because it is a shtriga’s responsibility, among other things, to look after vampires. And that’s what you used to do, isn’t it? That’s what a shady’s job is, in essence.”
“You look after vampires?” Redlaw said. “I thought you enslave them. Bend them to your will. Make them your docile little houseboys.”
“Same difference. I keep them in check. An age-old duty. We of the shtriga line are the stern elder siblings, the babysitters, the shepherds minding the flock. We see lesser vampires as
us
, with the willpower and self-discipline stripped out. Someone has to stop them running wild, and that someone is the shtriga. If not for the actions of my kind, this world would long ago have become a vampire planet, infested with them, overrun.”
“It’s starting to get that way now. You lot obviously haven’t been keeping your eye on the ball.”
Illyria nodded, gravely. “Possibly we have become too discriminating in our choices, too picky for our own good. There aren’t enough of us to go around. In fact, you see, the vampire population explosion has been going on longer than you think. It dates back to the war. Europe in turmoil was the perfect Petri dish for vampires to flourish in. Death and mayhem all across the continent. Entire countries transformed into killing fields. That was the catalyst for a surge in vampire numbers. There was easy human prey everywhere, and their depredations could go unnoticed amid the mass slaughter. They were turning people left, right and centre. After the armistice, every shtriga did what he or she could to thin the herd, and for a while we had some success. But still there were just too many. By the late ’eighties they were spreading out from their usual habitats—the Balkans, the Baltic states,
Mitteleuropa
—faster than they could be curbed. I myself had joined the effort by then, but it was clear we were fighting a losing battle. We weren’t as organised as we could have been—should have been. It was like trying to contain a house fire with not enough hoses and nobody saying where to direct them. Eventually it got beyond our power to control. That’s when humans started taking matters into their own hands.”