“Hello, Jessamine.” I smiled at her, and then the others. “It’s nice to meet you all—you have a very beautiful home,” I added conventionally.
“Thank you,” Earnest said. “We’re so glad that you came.” He spoke with feeling, and I realized that he thought I was brave.
I also realized that Royal and Eleanor were nowhere to be seen, and while I was relieved, I was also kind of disappointed. It would have been nice to get that out of the way with Jessamine here, making me feel calm.
I noticed Carine gazing meaningfully at Edythe with a pretty intense expression. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Edythe nod just slightly.
I felt like I was eavesdropping, so I looked away. My eyes wandered over to the beautiful piano on the platform. I suddenly remembered a childhood fantasy that, when I was older and somehow a millionaire, I was going to buy a grand piano for my mother. She wasn’t really good—she only played for herself on our secondhand upright—but I loved to watch her play. She was happy, absorbed—she seemed like a new, mysterious person to me then. She’d put me in lessons, of course, but like most kids, I whined until she let me quit.
Earnest noticed my stare.
“Do you play?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Not at all. But it’s really beautiful. Is it yours?”
“No,” he laughed. “Didn’t Edythe tell you she was musical?”
“Uh, she hasn’t mentioned it. But I guess I should have known, right?”
Earnest raised his eyebrows, confused.
“Is there anything she’s not good at?” I asked rhetorically.
Jessamine barked out a laugh, Archie rolled his eyes, and Earnest gave Edythe a very fatherly look, which was impressive considering how young he seemed.
“I hope you haven’t been showing off,” he said. “It’s rude.”
“Oh, just a little bit.” Edythe laughed—the sound was infectious, and everyone smiled, including me. Earnest smiled the widest, though, and he and Edythe shared a brief look.
“Edythe, you should play for him,” Earnest said.
“You just said showing off was rude.”
“Make an exception.” He smiled at me. “I’m being selfish. She doesn’t play enough, and I love to hear her.”
“I’d like to hear you play,” I told her.
She gave Earnest a long, exasperated look, then turned the same look on me. When that was done, she dropped my hand and walked up to sit on the bench. She patted the spot next to her and then looked back at me.
“Oh,” I mumbled, and went to join her.
As soon as I sat down, her fingers started flowing across the keys, filling the room with a piece so complex and full it was impossible to believe only one person was playing. My mouth fell open in shock, and I heard chuckling behind me.
Edythe looked at me casually while the music surged around us without a break. “Do you like it?”
I got it immediately. Of course. “You wrote this.”
She nodded. “It’s Earnest’s favorite.”
I sighed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m just… feeling a little insignificant.”
She thought about that for a minute, and then the music changed slowly into something softer… something familiar. It was the lullaby she’d hummed to me, only a thousand times more intricate.
“I thought of this one,” she said quietly, “while I watched you sleeping. It’s your song.”
The song turned even softer and sweeter. I couldn’t speak.
Then her voice was normal again. “They like you quite a bit, you know. Earnest especially.”
I glanced behind me, and the big room was empty.
“Where did they go?”
“Giving us some privacy. Subtle, aren’t they?”
I laughed, then frowned. “It’s nice that they like me. I like them. But Royal and Eleanor…”
Her expression tightened. “Don’t worry about Royal. He’s always the last to come around.”
“Eleanor?”
She laughed sharply. “El thinks I’m a lunatic, it’s true, but she doesn’t have a problem with you. She’s off trying to reason with Royal now.”
“What did I do?” I had to ask. “I mean, I’ve never even spoken to—”
“You didn’t do anything, Beau, honestly. Royal struggles the most with what we are. It’s hard for him to have someone on the outside know the truth. And he’s a little jealous.”
“Hah!”
She shrugged. “You’re human. He wishes he were, too.”
That brought me up short. “Oh.”
I listened to the music, my music. It kept changing and evolving, but the heart of it stayed the same. I wasn’t sure how she did it. She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her hands.
“That thing Jessamine does feels really… not strange, I guess. It was kind of incredible.”
She laughed. “Words don’t fully do it justice, do they?”
“Not really. But… does she like me? She seemed…”
“That was my fault. I told you she was the most recent to try our way of life. I warned her to keep her distance.”
“Oh.”
“Indeed.”
I worked hard not to shudder.
“Carine and Earnest think you’re wonderful,” she told me.
“Huh. I really didn’t do anything very exciting. Shook a few hands.”
“They’re happy to see me happy. Earnest probably wouldn’t care if you had a third eye and webbed feet. All this time he’s been worrying about me, afraid I was too young when Carine changed me, that there was something missing from my essential makeup. He’s so relieved. Every time I touch you, he practically bursts into applause.”
“Archie’s enthusiastic.”
She made a face. “Archie has his own special perspective on life.”
I looked at her for a moment, weighing her expression.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re not going to explain what you mean by that, are you?”
Her eyes narrowed as she stared back at me, and a moment of wordless communication passed between us—almost like what I’d seen between her and Carine before, except without the benefit of mind reading. I knew she wasn’t telling me something about Archie, something her attitude toward him had been hinting at for a long time. And she knew that I knew, but she wasn’t going to give anything away. Not now.
“Okay,” I said, like we’d spoken all that out loud.
“Hmm,” she said.
And because I’d just thought of it… “So what was Carine telling you before?”
She was looking at the keys now. “You noticed that, did you?”
I shrugged. “Of course.”
She stared at me thoughtfully for a moment before she answered. “She wanted to tell me some news. She didn’t know if it was something I would share with you.”
“Will you?”
“It’s probably a good idea. My behavior might be a little… odd for the next few days—or weeks. A little maniacal. So it’s best if I explain myself beforehand.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, exactly. Archie just sees some visitors coming soon. They know we’re here, and they’re curious.”
“Visitors?”
“Yes… like us, but not. Their hunting habits are not like ours, I mean. They probably won’t come into town at all, but I won’t be letting you out of my sight till they’re gone.”
“Wow. Shouldn’t we… I mean, is there a way to warn people?”
Her face was serious and sad. “Carine will ask them not to hunt nearby, as a courtesy, and most likely they won’t have a problem with that. But we can’t do more, for a variety of reasons.” She sighed. “They won’t be hunting here, but they’ll be hunting somewhere. That’s just how things are when you live in a world with monsters.”
I shivered.
“Finally, a rational response,” she murmured. “I wa
s beginning to think you had no sense of self-preservation at all.”
I let that one pass, looking away, my eyes wandering again around the big white room.
“It’s not what you expected, is it?” she asked, and her voice was amused again.
“No,” I admitted.
“No coffins, no piled skulls in the corners; I don’t even think we have cobwebs… what a disappointment this must be for you.”
I ignored her teasing. “I didn’t expect it to be so light and so… open.”
She was more serious when she answered. “It’s the one place we never have to hide.”
My song drifted to an end, the final chords shifting to a more melancholy key. The last note lingered for a long moment, and something about the sound of that single note was so sad that a lump formed in my throat.
I cleared it out, then said, “Thank you.”
It seemed like the music had affected her, too. She stared searchingly at me for a long moment, and then she shook her head and sighed.
“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” she asked.
“Will there be piled skulls in any corners?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Well, okay, but my expectations are pretty low now.”
We walked up the wide staircase hand in hand. My free hand trailed along the satin-smooth rail. The hall at the top of the stairs was paneled in wood the same pale color as the floorboards.
She gestured as we passed the doors. “Royal and Eleanor’s room… Carine’s office… Archie’s room…”
She would have continued, but I stopped dead at the end of the hall, staring with raised eyebrows at the ornament hanging on the wall above my head. Edythe laughed at my expression.
“Ironic, I know,” she said.
“It must be very old,” I guessed. I kind of wanted to touch it, to see if the dark patina was as silky as it looked, but I could tell it was pretty valuable.
She shrugged. “Early sixteen-thirties, more or less.”
I looked away from the cross to stare at her.
“Why do you have this here?”
“Nostalgia. It belonged to Carine’s father.”
“He collected antiques?”
“No. He carved this himself. It hung on the wall above the pulpit in the vicarage where he preached.”
I turned back to stare at the cross while I did the mental math. The cross was over three hundred and seventy years old. The silence stretched on as I struggled to wrap my mind around the concept of so many years.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“How old is Carine?” I asked quietly, still staring up.
“She just celebrated her three hundred and sixty-second birthday,” Edythe said. She watched my expression carefully as she continued, and I tried to pull it together. “Carine was born in London in the sixteen-forties, she believes. Time wasn’t marked as accurately then, for the common people anyway. It was just before Cromwell’s rule, though.”
The name pulled up a few disjointed facts in my head, from a World History class I’d had last year. I should have paid more attention.
“She was the only daughter of an Anglican pastor. Her mother died in childbirth. Her father was… a hard man. Driven. He believed very strongly in the reality of evil. He led hunts for witches, werewolves… and vampires.”
It was strange how the word shifted things, made the story sound less like a history lesson.
“They burned a lot of innocent people—of course, the real creatures that he sought were not so easy to catch.
“Carine did what she could to protect those innocents. She was always a believer in the scientific method, and she tried to convince her father to look past superstition to true evidence. He discouraged her involvement. He did love her, and those who defended monsters were often lumped in with them.
“Her father was persistent… and obsessive. Against the odds, he tracked some evidence of real monsters. Carine begged him to be careful, and he listened, to an extent. Rather than charge in blindly, he waited and watched for a long time. He spied on a coven of true vampires who lived in the city sewers, only coming out by night to hunt. In those days, when monsters were not just myths and legends, that was the way many lived.
“His people gathered their pitchforks and torches, of course”—she laughed darkly—“and waited where the pastor had seen the monsters exit into the street. There were two access points. The pastor and a few of his men poured a vat of burning pitch into one, while the others waited beside the second for the monsters to emerge.”
I realized I was holding my breath again, and made myself exhale.
“Nothing happened. They waited a long time, and then left disappointed. The pastor was angry—there must have been other exits, and the vampires had obviously fled in fear. Of course, the men with their crude spears and axes weren’t any kind of danger to a vampire, but he didn’t know that. Now that they were warned, how would he ever find his monsters again?”
Her voice got lower. “It wasn’t hard. He must have annoyed them. Vampires can’t afford notoriety, or these probably would have simply massacred the entire mob. Instead, one of them followed him home.
“Carine remembers the night clearly—for a human memory. It was the kind of thing that would stick in your mind. Her father came home very late, or rather very early. Carine had waited up, worried. He was furious, ranting and raving about his loss. Carine tried to calm him, but he ignored her. And then there was a man in the middle of their small room.
“Carine says he was ragged, dressed like a beggar, but his face was beautiful and he spoke in Latin. Because of her father’s vocation and her own curiosity, Carine was unusually educated for a woman in those days—she understood what the man said. He told her father that he was a fool and he would pay for the damage he had caused. The preacher threw himself in front of his daughter to protect her.…
“I often wonder about that moment. If he hadn’t revealed what he loved most, would all our stories have changed?”
She was thoughtful for a few seconds, and then she continued. “The vampire smiled. He told the preacher, ‘Go to your hell knowing this—that what you love will become all that you hate.’
“He tossed the preacher to the side and grabbed Carine—”
She’d seemed lost in the story, but now she stopped short. Her eyes came back to the present, and she looked at me like she’d said something wrong. Or maybe she thought she’d upset me.
“What happened?” I whispered.
When she spoke, it was like she was choosing each word carefully. “He made sure that the preacher knew what would happen to Carine, and then he killed the preacher very slowly while Carine watched, writhing in pain and horror.”
I recoiled. She nodded in sympathy.
“The vampire left. Carine knew her fate if someone found her in this condition. Anything infected by the monster would have to be destroyed. She acted instinctively to save her own life. Despite the pain she was in, she crawled into the cellar and buried herself in a pile of rotting potatoes for three days. It’s a miracle she was able to keep silent, to stay undiscovered.
“It was over then, and she realized what she had become.”
I wasn’t sure what my face was doing, but she suddenly broke off again.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m good—what happened next?”
She half-smiled at my intensity, then turned back down the hall, pulling me with her.
“Come on, then,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
16. CARINE
SHE LED ME BACK TO THE ROOM THAT SHE’D POINTED OUT AS CARINE’S office. She paused outside the door for a second.
“Come in,” Carine called from inside.
Edythe opened the door to a tall room with long windows that stretched the entire height of the walls. The room was lined by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling and holding more books than I’d ever seen outside a library
.
Carine sat behind a huge desk; she was just placing a bookmark in the pages of the book she held. The room was how I’d always imagined a college dean’s would look—only Carine looked too young to fit the part.
Knowing what she’d been through—having just watched it all in my imagination while knowing that my imagination wasn’t up to the job and it was probably much worse than I’d pictured it—made me look at her differently.
“What can I do for you?” she asked with a smile, rising from her seat.
“I wanted to show Beau some of our history,” Edythe said. “Well, your history, actually.”
“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” I apologized.
“Not at all,” she said to me, and then to Edythe, “Where are you going to start?”
“The Waggoner,” Edythe said. She pulled me around in a circle, so that we were facing the door we’d just walked through.
This wall was different from the others. Instead of bookshelves, it was covered by dozens and dozens of framed paintings. They were all different sizes and styles, some dull, some blazing with color. I scanned quickly, looking for some kind of logic, something they all had in common, but I couldn’t find any link.
Edythe pulled me to the far left side, then put both her hands on my arms and positioned me directly in front of one of the paintings. My heart reacted the way it always did when she touched me—even in the most casual way. It was more embarrassing knowing Carine would hear it, too.
The painting she wanted me to look at was a small square canvas in a plain wooden frame; it did not stand out among the bigger and brighter pieces. Painted in different shades of brown, it showed a miniature city full of steeply slanted roofs. A river filled the foreground, crossed by a bridge covered with structures that looked like tiny cathedrals.
“London in the sixteen-fifties,” Edythe said.
“The London of my youth,” Carine added from a few feet behind us. I jumped a little—I hadn’t heard her approach. Edythe took my hand and squeezed it lightly.
“Will you tell the story?” Edythe asked. I turned to see Carine’s reaction.
She met my glance and smiled. “I would, but I’m actually running a bit late. The hospital called this morning—Dr. Snow is taking a sick day. But Beau won’t miss anything.” She smiled at Edythe now. “You know the stories as well as I do.”
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