Susan glanced at him. “What about now?”
John took a drink. “Now? Who knows?”
chapter thirty-three
1942. The door swung open, and poisoning sunshine spilled in like a tainted river. Devin scrambled deeper into the shadows and plunged his face into the sweet hay. Dear God, he felt so very bad. So sick. He groaned softly and folded his arms across the back of his head.
“Kitty? Come out, Kitty, Kitty.” A woman.
He heard the soft padding of footsteps drawing closer, and Devin no longer cared if anyone found him or not. He could not run, so escape was out of the question. He would be better off if someone just killed him, but quickly, not with the torture that Kasper had inflicted in the name of the Führer .
He groaned and went into a coughing fit that sent spasms of agony through his entire body. He drew his legs up tight and curled into a fetal position.
“Who’s in here?” The woman moved closer. Seeing him, she expelled an audible gasp. “Young man? Let me help you.”
She placed her hand on his broad back.
“You’re injured. You must let me help you.”
Devin coughed and squirmed away from her touch, frightened. Whom might she tell, and what would they do next?
“Oh, dear. I’ll not hurt you.”
***
He must have been freezing to death in this weather. He was dressed in only a thin undershirt and under shorts that were stained with dried blood, enough blood to indicate that either he was gravely injured, or he had put someone else in the grave. Lillian could not yet see his face.
“Dear, oh, dear!” she muttered to herself. She was frightened, yet energized. She had always been that kind of person, one that wanted to help others. She was a nurse, what seemed like a hundred years ago. Now, she took in strays of all sorts—dogs, cats, even a runaway child or two. Now, a pitiful man.
Mindful of her arthritic knees and of the pretty, flowing sarong John had bought her on a trip to India several years ago, she knelt beside the wounded man and touched him again. Gently, so gently, she stroked his soft, fair hair. He flinched away, even her most tender touch seemed to pain him.
“No more,” he moaned, his face pressed into the straw-scattered barn floor. “Please.”
“Poor, poor thing. So hurt and cold. Let me get my husband and get you into the house.”
“No. Please. The sun. I can’t bear it,” he said.
“I won’t let anything harm you,” she assured him.
She ran as fast as her stiff knees would allow back to the house to fetch John. She kept her long dress bunched in her fists to keep from tripping on the hem. By the time they returned to the barn, the blond stranger had managed to hide himself again. But the trail of blood he left behind was an easy giveaway. They quickly discovered him behind the trough of oats and hay that their elderly cow fed from on especially rainy or cool days when she could not venture into the pasture.
John was not handy with firearms and never hunted, but the notion of “there should be gun in every cottage” had not been lost on him. He had placed his Webley .38 in the waist of his trousers, out of sight under his field coat. Still, it was against Lillian’s wishes; the poor man in the barn could scarcely stand, let alone fight.
“He could be one of them,” John reasoned, meaning, she was quite positive, a German.
“No. He spoke perfect English,” she answered.
“Still, we cannot be sure. Until we are, we carry the gun at all times.”
Getting the man into the house was no easy task. Quickly, though, his weak and spastic struggles and raspy pleas convinced John and Lillian that the only way to handle it was to humor him. He was photosensitive, or at least thought he was, so John gently hooded him in the heavy wool horse blanket that had belonged to their long-deceased mare, Agnes.
John carried him as best he could, but the man was quite large, standing slightly taller than John’s impressive 6’4”. He was big-boned, but frighteningly emaciated.
John complained later of an aching back, but with his typical kind nature and dry wit, often suggesting to Lillian that she had been the cause, to have gone as far as to demand he carry another man into their home, into one of their beds. Of course, she had giggled, but how far from the truth was he?
Just as they stepped out of the barn and into the crisp light of the autumn sun, the man whispered, “Thank you. My name is Devin.”
***
Days passed, and Devin’s body slowly mended. However, his need for blood went unsatisfied. He did not know how to tell them what he needed. John and Lillian were saints, caring for him wonderfully. In the morning, Lillian came in quietly and drew the heavy drapes and then the thick brown blanket John had nailed across the bedroom’s single window. At dusk, she opened the fabric and tacked it back to allow the night to pour in. They had saved him. Now was he to simply say, “I must have blood to live?” They would think him an animal, some kind of demon.
Still, he was starving. He was wasting away despite Lillian’s sweet insistence that he take the food she made. Wonderful peasant food, much like the food Evie used to prepare for him and the children while singing sweet songs in their cramped kitchen.
He knew what he must have looked like—wasted to the bone, his pale skin stretched over the framework of his skeleton like rubber, his blond hair brittle and faded to no-color.
Finally, one night about a month into his recovery in the Moses home, he could not take it any longer. Night bled through the small window. The fat, high moon rained glorious white-yellow light across his bed and illuminated the rest of the small room. Lillian had pulled a leather reading chair to his bedside, and the book she had been reading to him was lying open across the arm. It was an espionage novel—John’s—called The Dark Frontier, by Eric Ambler. He did not much like it, but he did enjoy Lillian’s lilting voice and her warmth.
Bandages tightly bound his injured feet. Lillian claimed with a smile that once a nurse, a nurse for life, not just until retirement. She cleaned and dressed his wounds daily, marveling at how quickly he healed. The tendons at his heels were knitting back together nicely. His crushed feet were no longer plum-colored, but a dull, jaundiced yellow. And, the swelling had decreased greatly.
Wincing with pain, Devin swung his legs around. Dizzy, he sat a long moment on the edge of the bed. The legs sticking out beneath the borrowed nightshirt were not recognizable as his own. So thin, they were little more than twigs covered with flesh the color of a fish’s belly. Below, his feet were so heavily bandaged that they seem huge and cartoonish, without shape.
He pushed himself up, biting back a cry of pain. His feet felt as if they were being torn from his legs. He collapsed into a weeping heap beside the bed, biting into his palm to quiet himself. On hands and knees, he crawled to the open bedroom door and out into the dark hallway. With his vampire eyes, he had no need for a lamp; the darkness was as easy to navigate as daylight. He crawled down a long hall with floorboards that spit splinters into his palms and knees. It was a big Tudor-style home, cluttered and lived-in, full of the eccentric spirit and strange interests of John and Lillian and their lost son, Ian, who lurked in every corner of the place like a disembodied wraith. The house smelled of lilacs, fresh and dried, Lillian’s powder, cooking and some chemicals that John had experimented with.
The silence made him feel a bit ill. Though he slept much of the daylight hours, he had grown to love the evenings. It was the deep-night silences of the house he had quickly grown to despise since coming here, the times when John and Lillian slept and their silly, dry banter did not ring in every rafter, and the radio was shut off. No news of war and death, no tinny jazz filtering its way up the stairs and into his room. The night cut them off from one another and the rest of England, and the world for that matter.
Moving in silence was an animalistic skill he found he had gained since becoming a Deathwalker, but without the use of his feet, he knew he was moving awkwardly, loudly. He felt as if
he was betraying his surrogate family, slipping along their corridors in secret, in darkness, his mouth running with hunger for blood. He hated himself for being what he was. If he had been mortal, none of this torture, this dreadful loneliness, would have been heaped upon him. He hoped that the downstairs would yield something, the blood of a pathetic mouse scurrying along the baseboards, or one of Lillian’s beloved stray cats, perhaps, Devin thought, disgusted.
At the landing, he lay on his belly, his nightshirt twisted around him like a villain’s arms and his legs against the cold floor. He stared down into the darkness. There was a long, wide flight of treads. He would surely break his neck, and a broken neck was a long recovery he was quite positive, immortal or not.
Just as he rolled onto his back and swung his legs around, ready to maneuver downward on his ass, the dim and flickering wall sconce hummed to life. Above him stood Lillian, her eyes bleary with sleep.
“Whatever are you doing, dear?”
She was as beautiful as an angel in the soft lamp glow. Her hair, which he had seen loose only once before, fell onto her shoulders, reaching the tops of her breasts. It was nearly black, but a black that had gone soft with years, paling to ash gray. Her white, cotton gown was like the cloak of a seraph. Devin wondered for a moment if he might be delirious, seeing angels and saints everywhere. Was he close to death? However, he was quite sure it was demons he would encounter on the other side. Was he not a demon himself?
He tried to answer, but the words just would not come out. What could he tell her? That he was going down to the pantry to murder and devour a few mice? “I-I—“
She knelt and slipped her arm under his head. “Shhh. Let’s not wake John.” He smelled her, the warm flesh of her throat above the lace of her gown, perfumed with rose-scented soap. Her breasts pressed into his shoulder and his chest. He sighed and turned his face away.
“Let’s get you back into bed. I’ll bring you whatever you need.”
She raised him to a sitting position, her body still pressed to him, then she lifted, her strong nurse’s back taking his weight. He pressed his face into the curve of her neck. He wept.
“Lillian. I—I’m so sorry.”
She stroked his hair as if he were her child. “There, now. You’re going to be all right.”
“No. I’m not,” he breathed against her ear.
His fingers wove into the silken ropes of her hair, and he held her tightly.
She gasped his name.
His teeth sank into her flesh and thick, metallic liquid flooded his mouth. He rocked her back and forth against himself, his cock swelling and pushing against the pillow of her stomach. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and he hated himself for the beast he had become. Lillian gripped his hair. Instead of fighting him, she pulled more tightly to him. Her heart beat like the frantic struggles of an injured bird through the cage of her bones. Her mind raced, and he absorbed every thought—the fear, the excitement. She wanted this. She wanted him. He pulled her to the floor, and she was beneath him, his weight, as much as it was at that point, pinning her to the floor. She did not cry out.
Moments passed. Devin was nearly unconscious with the ecstasy of finally gaining sustenance. He forced his awareness back to the shadowed hallway of the Moses home and the woman who was already dying against his body. He rocked his hips against her again, now aware that he had come and hot semen had flooded from him onto the flat of her stomach.
He pulled away, shaking, but new strength filled his limbs and chest. Lillian stared up at him, her eyes wide. Was she seeing him, or was she too far gone? He dipped into her mind once again, like slipping into an icy pond. Did he want to see death from that side again? Cautiously, he entered her thoughts and found no fear there.
Sobbing, he pressed his face to her breast. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Oh, Lillian.”
What to do now? Should he flee into the night? And how could he, anyway, hobbled as he was? John would surely kill him once he discovered Lillian.
He should crawl like the vermin he was, out of the house and into the field beyond, and wait for the retribution of the morning sun.
Instead, he tore his wrist with his teeth. Blood welled and then spilled down his arm, blotching his nightshirt and Lillian’s white gown with red circles. Drops like tears. He pressed the running wound to Lillian’s lips.
“Drink, Lillian. Drink fast and live.”
For one horrible moment, it appeared he was indeed too late. She lay there, unmoving. Finally, he felt the sweet, quivering movement of her lips against his skin. Her tongue worked, and her teeth tore the gash wider. She pulled at his vein until searing pain uncoiled up his arm and across his chest. He sucked oxygen through his clenched teeth, and tears of despair became tears of agony. Was this what a coronary felt like? Would John wake to find him dead and Lillian covered with blood, instead of the other way around?
After a moment, he yanked his arm from her grasp and scrambled away, holding his bleeding wrist against his chest.
Lillian climbed to her feet, and her movements were easier than he had ever seen them. The stiffness, the constant ache of her knees that made her limp like an old lady before her time, was gone. She drew the back of her hand across her lips, wiping away the blood, smearing it like a mad woman’s lipstick.
Teary-eyed, she smiled down at him. “Devin? What did you do?”
chapter thirty-four
Susan sat in the in the grand room by the fireplace and pretended to flip through the “lifestyle” section of the local paper that was over two months old. Instead of reading, she listened as they wrapped things up in the parlor. She could follow their conversation easily through the closed door. Her hearing was incredibly keen now, and it was no longer as disconcerting as it had been at first. She didn’t care to be caught eavesdropping on their meeting like some kind of nosy girlfriend, but she needed to know what was going on. Devin could be closed to her at times, so unlike Michael, who had willingly shared everything. His day, his dreams, his fantasies, his plans for the future; Michael had been an open book. Getting Devin to open up was akin to excising shrapnel from an artillery wound.
There were five other Deathwalkers in there, four of which she had never seen before tonight. The fifth was her friend from college a lifetime ago, the strange Mary Lei. Mary had nodded to Susan and smiled a knowing smile, which made Susan positive that it must have been Devin who had turned her, as well. A pang of unwarranted jealousy had prodded her heart. She did not speak to Mary Lei, and Mary did not speak to her.
The other woman was about Susan’s mortal age, stunning, lean and wild-looking, with skin like coal. She sported a large afro. Next was a man who appeared to have some Native American in his lineage. He made Susan’s heart skip a beat when she first saw him, he was so beautiful. His crow-black hair and hawkish, haughty profile made her blush a little when he nodded to her as he entered the garden gate. The other two were not as notable, one a scrawny Kurt Cobain lookalike and the other an older fellow, who carried a military air about him, balding and grumpy-looking, with an odd accent she couldn’t quite place. By the sound of it, all were both angry and confounded by Devin’s indifference toward them and the fact that so many of their kind had been taken down by Jacobsen. Some of them had thrived there for many decades before Devin had come to the states, but they evidently looked to him as a leader.
Stories of him circulated among those who had always been there and among the fledglings. Perhaps it was his choice to hunt only the dregs of society that served as inspiration to the few who wished to maintain some semblance of humanity, or maybe it was his cunning ability to never get caught. Either way, most considered Devin McCree the strongest and most human of their kind in Charlestowne.
Despite the Deathwalkers’ immortality, lately, most of them were not living very long after making the change. Leader or not, they blamed him for drawing Jacobsen to the city and to the shoreline.
Finally, the voices on the other side of the door quieted.
Susan waited and read, paying no attention to the printed words. The parlor door opened, and they filed out silently. Each of them nodded to her as they headed for the door. She waited until they were well gone before going in to confront Devin.
When she walked in, he was pouring himself a tall glass of scotch from the decanter.
“Want one?” he asked, not looking up.
“No.” She was still a bit loopy from John’s expensive, high-octane cognac.
Devin sat down at the big mahogany desk and stroked the stubble on his chin. If there was ever a time when he looked out of place to her, it was now, behind a desk, worry creasing his forehead.
“John told me why they came here. What are you? Some sort of king?”
Devin shrugged. “I suppose I am assumed to be in charge. It makes no sense to me. I never asked for it, nor do I want it. Either way, I’m responsible for Kasper. I am his maker, after all.”
Susan nodded, pulling a face. “Nice move,” she said. “John told me about him.”
Devin looked uncomfortable. “Everything?”
She sensed a slight change in his tone. Maybe it was overly sensitive police-woman bullshit, but she stepped closer, searched his face and whispered, “Everything that he knows.”
“Why don’t we just leave here?” she asked.
“Because this is my home, that’s why. I’ll not allow Kasper Jacobsen to drive me away until I’m ready to leave.” He took a sip of his drink and then set it aside. “Come here,” he said.
She straddled his lap, hung her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“You should have killed him when you had the opportunity,” she said. “He’s not going to stop until you do.” Seeing Devin’s concern, she felt ill thinking of someone prowling the streets looking for them. The things he had done to Devin; the horrible torture. She wondered why Devin had ever allowed him to live. She would have killed the bastard. She would not have questioned it; she would have shot him in a breath.
Darklands: a vampire's tale Page 18
