Blood Royal Read online

  Ulysses was surprised at the man’s appearance – even after all that he had already witnessed in his time as an agent of the throne of Magna Britannia.

  Everything about him was as pale as porcelain, from his slender fingers, his skin, his hair – which was set in a sweeping side parting – his bloodless lips. Everything, apart from the irises of his eyes, which were as red as rubies. His clothes were of a sombre cut and funereal black.

  The albino observed him, his mouth set in a frown, and lifted two items from where they had been lying on a barrel. Ulysses’ eyes widened a notch. One of the objects was a stoppered phial, its contents dark, the other a well-thumbed notebook.

  “These were found about your person,” the prince stated, “both of them formerly the property of Dr Victor Gallowglass. Now, as I understand it, this is a sample of blood and this,” – he held up the notebook – “is of incalculable value. Or at least it would be if anyone could translate it. And you will translate it for me.

  “And what makes you think I can do that?”

  “Translate it for me,” the prince repeated softly.

  Ulysses became aware of the other person in the room with them for the first time. He was a tall man, taller than Ulysses by a head, heavily-bearded and dressed in the rough clothing favoured by Cossack warriors. Everything about the man’s posture and build spoke of violence done or violence waiting to be done.

  A raw chuckle escaped Ulysses’ throat. “You can hurt me all you want. I won’t help you.”

  “No, I rather thought you wouldn’t,” he said.

  Vladimir clicked his fingers and the hulking, hairy Cossack standing behind him left the room only to return a few moments later.

  Within the Cossack’s bear-hug embrace was Miss Wishart.

  The dandy felt sick to the pit of his stomach.

  “Don’t!” he hissed.

  The Cossack – his right eye a blind white orb, the brow above and the cheek below it knotted with a pink welt of fresh scar tissue – let one hand slip from before the wretched woman’s face, ungagging her.

  “Ulysses!” she screamed, tears streaming from her eyes.

  “Lillian!”

  He turned his gaze on the albino prince, eyes burning with a passionate fury.

  “If you touch a single hair on her head...” he spluttered bloodily.

  “Oh, I shan’t touch a hair on her head. Not a single one,” The prince stated with cold honesty. “Instead I shall let Dmitri here have his way with her, and then, I shall have him start to remove... pieces of her. Her fingers, ears and nose to begin with, I think, and we’ll see how long she lasts. But then again, of course, you probably wouldn’t be interested in having back what’s left of her after that. And by the time he gets to her hands and feet, or her arms and legs, killing her will be a mercy.”

  Ulysses sagged upon the torture frame. “Then it doesn’t look like I have much of a choice, does it?” He said. “I’ll help you. I’ll translate your code.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Codename Caliban

  AND SO, THAT night, Ulysses set to work retranslating the contents of Victor Gallowglass’s precious coded notebook, exposing the details of the late haematologist’s greatest work for the benefit of his incarcerator, Prince Vladimir of Bratsk.

  Having been taken down from the torture frame by the growling Cossack – none too gently either – he had his head plunged into a bucket of freezing water, his forehead being used to break the skin of ice that crowned the water. The fight had gone out of him by then. Exhausted and beset by all manner of cramps, along with other aches and pains, he felt certain that his fate had already been decided.

  He had not seen Miss Wishart since accepting the futility of his situation and he hadn’t seen or heard of what had befallen Miranda.

  He was led to a dank cell, its walls black with algae, its stone flags strewn with rotting straw, and set to work with pencil and paper, straining his eyes as he worked by the light of a lone guttering candle. Locked away as he was in this manner, the only indicator he had as to the continued passage of time were the irregular meals that were shoved through the door and the occasional emptying of the slops bucket.

  More than once he cursed the fact that he had rebelled against De Wynter’s authority – as was his wont – and pursued the Russian connection, wishing that he had never left Blighty at all. There were even moments when he regretted ever agreeing to help his old school chum.

  But what kept him going was the thought that, sooner or later, when this work was finished there would be an end to it all.

  As he set about transcribing Gallowglass’s notes, racing through some of those sections he had already attempted on the Trans-Siberian Express, the enormity and daring of his old friend’s endeavour was revealed to him. It threw into question not only Gallowglass’s patriotism but also what state of mind he had been in to even attempt such a thing. What kind of a man had Victor Gallowglass become in the years since he and Ulysses had fallen out of touch?

  For what was revealed was a scheme on a par with something the megalomaniacal Uriah Wormwood might have come up with.

  Having pieced together the various footnotes, appendices and addenda – even though he could make little sense of the blood science and biological engineering – the sample contained within the stoppered phial, Gallowglass’s ‘thing of darkness’, was nothing so simple, nor so innocent as blood.

  It was a bio-weapon, a blood agent codenamed, appropriately enough, Caliban.

  The genius of the Caliban bio-weapon was that it had been engineered to target those of a specific bloodline.

  This realisation left Ulysses in a state of shock and sleep did not come easily to him that night.

  How could he pass such knowledge into the hands of a man as utterly without morals as the sociopathic Prince Vladimir?

  Having lain upon the damp straw, wringing the stinking horsehair blanket in his hands, he rose and, lighting a fresh candle from the flickering stub of the last, he took up the notes he had made and burnt them.

  He then set to work re-transcribing some of the sections of the journal, before moving on to translating the passage following the one containing the terrifying truth. He worked as quickly as he could, hoping that this flurry of activity might help hide the fact that something was missing. As Ulysses resumed his work, he came across something else that provided him with the faintest glimmer of hope.

  AND SO, AT last, after God alone knew how many days or nights of desperate, feverish work, Ulysses found himself standing before Prince Vladimir, forced to watch as the nobleman went through his work.

  “Fascinating. Fascinating,” the prince said as he scoured page after scruffy page of Ulysses’ translation.

  Eventually, the albino looked up and, fixing Ulysses with his blood-red stare said, “I take it the vital component that you have left out is the fact that this weapon was created to work only on your own dear Queen Victoria and her descendents.”

  Ulysses stared at him in horror. “You knew.”

  “Of course I knew.” Vladimir laughed. “Why do you think I went to so much trouble, and at no little cost to myself either, to get hold of this?”

  A PAGE WAS missing from the journal, torn out for some reason. Following that one missing leaf was something that was just as startling a revelation as the discovery that Caliban had been designed to kill the monarch. As well as creating the weapon that could wipe out Queen Victoria and her descendants, Victor Gallowglass had created a cure.

  Victor Gallowglass didn’t have a daughter; his late wife Marie had died before she could provide him with an heir and her husband had, it seemed, remained faithful to her all the time that they were married. Certainly, from reading the doctor’s journal, Ulysses was in no doubt as to the fact that Miranda was not his biological offspring.

  The truth of the matter was that Miranda was the product of a test tube experiment, although one that must have required no small feat of medical and scientific s
kill for it to have been such a success. Ulysses and Victor Gallowglass, along with his so-called ‘daughter’, had a common acquaintance – a certain Dr Pandora Doppelganger.

  Victor Gallowglass had been Queen Victoria’s haematologist, Ulysses had known that, but what he could not have begun to even guess at was what his old school friend had got up to with the blood samples he had taken from Her Majesty.

  Using the biological information encoded in the DNA present in just one drop of the mighty monarch’s blood, Dr Doppelganger had been able to grow an exact replica of Her Majesty, the perfect test subject for the appalling experiment Gallowglass had been conducting.

  How many Mirandas had there been? How many had unwittingly been used and tossed aside in Gallowglass’s quest to develop the perfect form of the traitorous bio-weapon?

  Ulysses found himself wondering how Gallowglass could even countenance producing such a thing of darkness, but then other pieces of the puzzle began to slot into place. The truth was that he couldn’t countenance such a thing, forcing whoever it was that had been coercing him into producing the weapon to step in. Now Ulysses understood at last why Miranda had been a target for kidnappers. It had all been a set-up to force the wretched Gallowglass into completing his even more wretched work, just as Ulysses was now himself being forced to sell his own soul in the vain hope that he might save the life of another.

  But should Ulysses reveal the existence of a cure to the tyrannical prince? Could he bring himself to do it? If he did, what dreadful fate would befall the child? If he didn’t, Vladimir had made it perfectly clear what would happen to his erstwhile lover, Miss Wishart.

  Should the knowledge that the child wasn’t even Gallowglass’s own flesh and blood change how Ulysses himself felt about her? Victor Gallowglass had effectively made Miranda Ulysses’ ward and he had already saved her life on one occasion. No matter what her origins, she was still an eleven year-old child in need of love and protection. Could he really turn his back on her now, in favour of a woman he had seduced once on a monotonous train journey? But then what right did he have to forfeit either of their lives?

  “YOU HAVE WHAT you wanted. It’s all there,” Ulysses lied as he stood before the prince. “I have kept my part of the bargain.”

  “Like a true English gentleman.”

  “Now it’s time to show me that you’ve kept yours. I need to know that she’s safe, that Miss Wishart is alive and well.”

  “What do you take me for, Mr Quicksilver? I am not a monster.”

  “That’s not enough,” Ulysses said. “I need to see her. Let me see her.”

  The prince looked at him coldly. “I had thought it might come to this.”

  Vladimir snapped his fingers. ”Would you come here, my dear?”

  As Ulysses watched, a figure rose from the chair facing the fire in the corner of the room. He did not realise who it was until she turned and crossed the room, hips rolling seductively. Everything about her was a million miles away from the staid governess he had first met on the steps of his house in Mayfair.

  “What have you done to her?” Ulysses railed.

  Vladimir laughed. It was a harsh, humourless sound.

  “Done? Prince Vladimir has done nothing to me.” Miss Wishart said.

  Ulysses felt sick to the pit of his stomach as the truth of the matter became clear.

  “That’s right,” Vladimir pronounced, as the temptress slipped an arm around his shoulders and pressed herself close against him. “You might say she was my woman on the inside, from the moment she started working for the late Dr Gallowglass.”

  “But Lillian, how could you?”

  “Don’t you understand, Ulysses, my poor dear?” the seductress said. “There never was a Lillian Wishart. There was only ever me.”

  “But I am forgetting my manners,” the prince said, “let me introduce you. Mr Quicksilver, meet Lilith – Lilith de Báthory.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Bloodlines

  “SO YOU WERE onto that poor bastard Gallowglass from the start,” Ulysses said.

  “I have eyes everywhere. We knew that Gallowglass was working on a potent weapon.”

  “Caliban.”

  “But we didn’t know what form it took and, due to the late doctor’s eccentric method of note-making, we could not play our hand too soon, for fear that the work was not yet complete. But thanks in no small part to you, Mr Quicksilver, we now have the means to achieving our goal.”

  Ulysses’ mind reeled. That could only mean one thing – the assassination of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. There had been no fewer than twelve attempts on the Queen’s life during her 160 year reign, and Ulysses had saved her from one of those attempts himself. However, he doubted that he would be able to do anything to foil this latest challenge to her authority.

  Ulysses turned to face Miss Wishart – the viper at the breast of the Gallowglass family. “You bitch!”

  “Now, now, Ulysses,” she chided. “That’s no way to speak to a lady.”

  “You’re no lady. You’re nothing but a conniving serpent.”

  “So, I should thank you, Mr Quicksilver,” Vladimir said, an icy smile on his bloodless lips, “for without your dogged pursuit of the truth and your unstinting work, I would not be where I am now, ready to put my master plan into effect.”

  “And now, I take it, I am a dead man,” Ulysses stated, eyeing the Cossack disdainfully.

  “Eventually,” Vladimir agreed. “Frankly I couldn’t care less what happens to you now.”

  The Cossack turned and strode up to the dandy. Ulysses turned his head away, but the brute grabbed his chin in one hand, forcing him to look up into his face, a face scarred by the tip of a rapier blade. Ulysses felt the Cossack’s rank breath – redolent with the aroma of spoiled meat and sour blood – gust into his face, and had to fight the urge to retch. The brute bellowed something in the Balachka dialect.

  “What did he say?” Ulysses managed.

  “He said, he owes you,” Prince Vladimir chuckled.

  “Oh, but can I keep him?” Lilith de Báthory said. “Can I keep him, Vlad? I’ll be so lonely here with you away, and you know how... hungry I get.”

  “You and your... appetites,” the prince said.

  “Please?” she wheedled.

  “So you’ve had one taste and now you want to go back for seconds, hmm? Oh, very well. Keep him as your plaything. Do what you will with him, but when you’ve had your fun, make sure you have him properly disposed of, hmm?”

  “Oh thank you, Vlad, thank you,” she gushed, kissing the prince on the cheek.

  She moved across the room, her hips rolling provocatively. To Ulysses’ eyes she almost seemed to glide. As she stood before him, she leaned forward, her shapely breasts barely contained by the gown she was wearing. She put a baby-soft hand to his face and stroked his cheek. “We’re going to have such fun.”

  Ulysses turned away, disgusted with himself as much as by her.

  Lilith laughed.

  “Make him comfortable in my quarters,” she told the Cossack. “And Ulysses, I’ll be seeing you later.”

  “Yes,” the dandy snarled. “In hell, if I have anything to do with it!”

  WHEN ULYSSES REGAINED consciousness he found himself in what appeared to be a cross between a whore’s boudoir and a dungeon cell. Velvet drapes hung from the rough stone walls and a fashionable Japanese silk-screen stood close to an extravagant four-poster bed. A fire crackled in the grate at the other end of the room.

  Ulysses was upright, arms stretched out to each side of him, legs splayed, to a sturdy wooden saltire cross.

  A door opened somewhere behind him and a voice as soft and as sensual as silk said, “Good, you’re awake. Now, where did we get up to?”

  He felt Miss Wishart’s – no, Lilith de Báthory’s – caressing fingertips circle his nipples; his body thrilling to her touch no matter how much his rational mind might rail against it. He felt her hook a leg around his from behind, th
e rise and fall of her knee stroking his thigh.

  And then she was there in front of him, bosom heaving, her gown practically falling from her shoulders, the split dress revealing her own creamy thighs.

  Ulysses felt himself stiffen despite his exhausted, wrung out state.

  A scream sounded from somewhere within the castle and Ulysses snapped out of his ecstasy in an instant, but the only sign his seducer showed of having even noticed was a brief hiatus as she tensed before resuming again.

  The scream came again, a horrible, animal sound.

  Lilith grunted in annoyance. “Ignore it.”

  “That’s quite normal, is it?” Ulysses asked.

  “It’s nothing. Besides, soon we shall drown out their shrieking with our own screams of ecstatic pleasure.”

  The scream was met with a brief burst of machine gun-fire.

  “What is going on? This is most off-putting.” Lilith broke off.

  Crushing her lips hard against his, her tongue forcing its way into his mouth, she grabbed hold of him and said, “Hold that thought,” before making for the door.

  He heard a door open behind him. Lilith screamed in fury. There was the ring of steel and then a sound like someone burying a spade in a cauliflower. A moment later Ulysses heard two distinct thuds as something – two somethings – hit the floor.

  And then – as Ulysses’ mind reeled at the impossibility of it all – there was a woman with bobbed blonde hair, releasing him from his bonds.

  “Katarina?” he said, as he stared down at the black, bloodied hole in the front of her tunic. She was now wearing a bandolier of weapons across her chest – pistols and knives mainly.

  “You were expecting someone else?”

  “But you’re dead. I saw you impaled on a tree branch.”