Read Online The Last Aerie by Brian Lumley - Free Book Online Page A

memories, no past. Except a lone voice in the back of his mind, which was wont to repeat insistently, “I am the Lord Nestor!” But only a notion, for obviously he was not Wamphyri. The sun didn’t harm him; he ate common fare, like common men; his senses were less than a vampire’s, indeed less than those of a whole man. No, it had been a fantasy, some lone fragment from lost times … Or a forecast?
    Glina made him a man—in part, anyway—but never a whole man. Pondering a vanished past, Nestor’s mind was wont to wander; lacking the cohesion of memory, his brain and body seemed detached, as if he lived by the will of another. Knowing Glina’s flesh and having her (or rather, being made love to by her) became instinctive, an automatic thing; so that in fact there was nothing of love in it. But with blood racing in his veins and his shaft rocking to and fro within her, passion of a kind would light in his eyes, and emotion of a sort blaze up in his heart. But it was never love. Glina had known that.
    And sometimes at the climax of Nestor’s strange cold passion, as he jerked to a crescendo in her body, she had sensed that he would like to kill her. For then at the height of their sex, his hands would leave her breasts and seek her throat, so that she must protect herself. Sometimes, too, she would hear him speak a name: Misha.
    Misha! It had been like a curse, bitter as a wormy apple on his tongue. So that Glina had hated this Misha without even knowing her, because Nestor had known and loved her. Yes, and she’d hurt him more than Glina ever could. Or so Brad Berea’s homely daughter suspected …
    Then came the night of the Wamphyri! … their flyers wafting high overhead … the propulsors of their warriors making thunder and stenches in the clear night air! But the house of Brad Berea was hidden in a forest thicket, camouflaged, secret, secure. The Wamphyri passed by like swift-fleeting clouds, heading north for the Northstar, to Starside across the barrier range.
    But Nestor had seen them; he felt their weird allure; and in the back of his mind, as always, a small but insistent voice repeating, “I am the Lord Nestor, of the Wamphyri!” A vampire Lord? Perhaps he had been, upon a time, and now by some freak of misfortune was changed back to a man. One way or the other, he had to know.
    That night as the house slept, Nestor crept out into the dark and took his leave of the Bereas. But trekking through the gloomy heart of the forest, he was never alone. Like a clot of blue ice frozen and glittering over the barrier mountains, the Northstar was both beacon and companion. For he knew that the star of ill-omen shone down not only on Sunside, but also on Starside and the last great aerie of the Wamphyri…
    Towards dawn Nestor had found himself in the foothills— and in the presence of monsters!
    A pair of Wamphyri Lords had come to fight a duel on Sunside, which Nestor witnessed. Wran Killglance was one (called Wran the Rage after his furies), and Vasagi the Suck the other. Vasagi’s face was a nightmare in itself: with no mouth or chin as such, but a tapering trunk and flickering needle proboscis, like the siphon of some monstrous insect … but worse than a nightmare when Wran was done. For then Vasagi’s face had looked like the hole which is left behind when a limb is wrenched from its socket, all bloody and dripping from its rim.
    But Nestor had been more than just a witness; indeed, he had been part of the fight, and had probably saved Wran’s life. For in his horror of the conflict—the animal ferocity which the enormously powerful combatants displayed—Nestor had temporarily forgotten his perverse desire to be a “Lord” himself; and of the two who fought, Wran had at first seemed the least alien …
    At first, aye.
    Later, with the flush of a false dawn flowing like molten gold along the far southern horizon, Wran had dragged Vasagi to the hillside and pegged him down to await the sun’s rising.