What sort of name was Safian? It sounded foreign and menacing, matching his appearance.
“I am no man’s underling,” Peregrine said.
“Safian is not a man.”
“He looks like a man.”
“In outward appearance, yes, but he has been something else for a long time.”
“How long?” Peregrine said, pretending to scan the titles on the shelf nearest him. Some were in English, others in the weird language of these creatures.
Her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “You’re curious,” she said.
“Yes, I am. That is why I am here. How long has Safian not been a man?”
“For centuries.”
“How can that be possible?”
“You cannot begin to guess all the things that are possible,” she said, and started slowly toward him.
Peregrine held himself still and upright as she walked slowly around him, looking at him the way one might appraise a horse at auction. She did not seem big or strong enough to be a threat to Peregrine, who had killed men in battle with his bare hands. Still, he knew she was a killer; he could feel it in his bones. But he wasn’t afraid. Fear was an emotion he could no longer experience, perhaps because his reasons for living had themselves been dead this past year.
“If he’s not a man, what is this Safian, besides old enough to be my grandfather’s grandfather?”
“One of us, my child,” she said from behind him.
“Us?”
“Yes,” she said, turning the word into a purr.
She came around in front of him and looked up into his face as if interested in him in an unexpected way. “You are not afraid.”
He did not deny it.
“You should be afraid.”
“Perhaps.”
“Most people who want to die are weak.” She leaned close and put her cheek against him. He could feel her warmth through his tunic and shirt. She drew in a breath through her nose. “You do not have the stink of cowardice. Do you want to die?”
“I don’t know how to answer your question. I no longer have any interest in life, but it might be more accurate to say I’m indifferent on the subject. The one thing I do want is to understand what this is all about—you, the others, the woman who introduced me to all of this.”
She spun away from him, giving Peregrine the impression that she did not want him to see whatever was in her eyes.
“She is of no concern.”
“She brought me here tonight, although I can’t explain how she did it.”
“She brings many here,” the gypsy said, her new smile so bright that Peregrine thought it had to be false. “That is what she does, you know; she brings people here. She is like a flower drawing insects here to the nectar.”
“Or is it just the reverse—she draws the nectar here to the insects?”
“You have a quick wit.”
“Take me to meet her,” Peregrine said.
The smile flickered but only just. “That would not be wise. You know what happens when the moth flies too near the flame.”
She put her hand on his breast before he could speak. Desire came flooding into Peregrine then, catching him unawares, possessing him, setting him on fire from inside. How could she do this to him, with a touch of the hand?
Peregrine saw his yearning mirrored in the gypsy’s gamine eyes, and though he knew it was only her hunger for his blood, he could not make himself resist. An inexplicable paralysis robbed him of control over his body, so that all he could do was stare down at that hand, smooth and white as the marble fireplace, the long fingers tapering to nails the color of blood. She wore a ring of an antique design, the gold setting holding a square-cut ruby. The jewel glowed with the same sensual fire burning within him.
“A lover gave it to me,” her voice said, sounding very far away, as in a dream. “He is dead now. I keep it as a memento mori.”
Her hand began to move across his chest, the caress making his heart race. She slipped her fingers inside the edge of his tunic and drew him to her, pulling them both backward until she was against the table. She released him long enough to raise herself up onto the marble surface. Peregrine found himself standing between her legs, looking down to see that she had raised her dress up to her hips.
Peregrine put one hand on her arm, the other around her back. He did not know what he was doing or why he was doing it, only that he had no control. They were face-to-face, eye to eye, Peregrine leaning forward until there was no more than a breath separating their lips.
A glitter of light at the edge of the gypsy’s mouth became the serpent’s teeth, appearing from beneath her upper lip.
Peregrine had not discovered what he’d come to the house on Chestnut Street to learn, but it no longer mattered to him. The bliss enveloped him, erasing all memories, cares, and intentions. He had long since ceased participating in life except insofar as it allowed him to pursue vengeance against the people who murdered his family. This final act severing him from the world would be but a formality, the formal ending to something that in actuality had been over a long time ago.
“What will you give me as a memento mori to remember you when you are dead?” she said in his ear.
Their lips touched briefly before she lowered her face into his shoulder. The ecstasy crashing into him seemed without limit. No wonder Evangeline and Mrs. Foster had gone to their deaths moaning with delight. Who could resist pleasure a million times more powerful than anything that came out of an opium pipe?
Her nimble fingers had opened his tunic and were drawing down the collar of his shirt, her lips parted against the skin of his throat. Peregrine closed his eyes, waiting for it, wanting it, anxious for her to possess him completely, and for the peaceful nothingness that would follow.
The ugly hiss destroyed the moment, breaking the spell as completely as a rock thrown through a windowpane. Peregrine felt himself thrown roughly back. Disoriented and staggering, he saw the gypsy push herself up from the table, her upturned face contorted with rage at an apparition on the ceiling she alone could see.
Peregrine’s hands came up defensively, but she flew past him and was gone, leaving one bookcase turned out into the room at an angle. Through the opening, Peregrine saw the revelers still circled around the piano. Behind them, sprawled across the settee like a discarded doll missing a shoe, was Mrs. Foster’s dead body.
9
Les Vampires
THE CORPSES HAD accumulated in the mansion during the brief time Peregrine was sequestered within the hidden library. No one seemed to notice him as he walked through the music room, stepping over the body of a young man stretched out between the two parlors. Behind him, the pianist began to play Mozart’s A Little Night Music.
The foyer was deserted, without a doorman or servants to bring him his cloak—or to dissuade him from leaving. The double glass doors remained open, with only the screen outer doors separating him from escaping into the night.
Peregrine did not move. He stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, trying to make up his mind. He was in a house of death, and he had no more illusions about being able to control his future if he stayed there, beyond seeing himself become one of the monsters’ next victims.
But she was in the house. He knew it without knowing quite how he knew it. Surely she had brought him there for some reason. Peregrine did not think it could have been to kill him, or he would have been dead already, at her hand, or the gypsy’s, or one of the other blood drinkers. Why engage him in such a living game of chess, moving and countermoving herself and her deadly chess pieces, unless she was building to something more than Peregrine being slaughtered—or allowed to walk out the door?
A cool breeze blew in through the screens, flowing past Peregrine as he stood rooted, like water dividing around a boulder in the stream. During the intermittent pauses between the phrases of Mozart from the farther room, Peregrine heard the faint sound of bamboo wind chimes. It reminded him of something
, although he wasn’t sure what. And then it came to him, the connection to chimes he’d heard that night in the opium den, a sound like the clicking of finger bones laced together with thread.
Peregrine tilted his head, straining to hear the sound. There was more than an overwhelming sense of remembrance or an unnerving moment of déjà vu. A chill of cold sweat broke out on Peregrine’s neck as he realized he was hearing exactly the same sound he had heard at Yu’s. He did not know how this could be, or if there really was a wind chime outside the house on Chestnut Street, or if it was all inside his mind. What he did know was that she was able to play tricks with the night, controlling events and perceptions with a power that seemed nothing short of wizardry.
Only a fool would contend with such a being without expecting to pay a severe price.
Peregrine began to take a step toward the door but stopped himself.
The other side of the coin was that only a fool would think he could step willingly into the black widow’s web, then change his mind, turn around, and leave without paying the consequences.
Peregrine’s eyes looked out through the screen. The Spanish moss moved gracefully back and forth in the night breeze, either beckoning him to come or mocking him for his predicament.
If he stayed, he died. If he left, he died. Peregrine was a king in check. The mistake was in the earlier moves, now too late to recover from. All that was left was to see how long it took the endgame to play itself out. Escaping checkmate was not even remotely possible.
He saw a subtle change in the darkness outside the door, the shadows moving across one another. He thought it was just the moss swaying in the wind until the shadows coalesced into something solid. He heard the scrape of shoe leather against wood as the shadow turned, directing its attention away from the street to focus inside the house. Peregrine would not close his eyes for even a fraction of a second. There was someone out there, looking in at him through the door.
Another sliding footstep. A face took shape in the darkness, but it was not the woman. It was someone as big as Peregrine, perhaps bigger. A shock of black hair emerged in the reflected light, then an arching eyebrow and curling upper lip.
It was Safian.
That decided the matter for Peregrine. His reaction was purely tactical, like a general arriving on the field to find the advance blocked and his position untenable. Without the least expression of haste, he turned away from the door and started to climb the stairs, toward the upper regions of the mansion on Chestnut Street in search of the woman he had come there to find.
The broad staircase curved around like the shell of a nautilus, depositing Peregrine in a hallway running the length of the house. The doors along either side of the hall were closed except for the last door on the right, which stood ajar a few inches. A pair of ornate iron stands, whose design might have been copied from an Egyptian tomb, framed the door, shoulder-high oil lamps the only light in the hallway. The windows on either end of the hall were open, their gossamer draperies moving in the breeze with motions as sinuous as Turkish dancing girls. No sound of the gaiety below penetrated the house’s second level. The Garden District mansions were built solid as tombs, with stout brick walls and floors made from thick planks of cypress or oak.
Someone had dropped a woman’s white scarf in the middle of the hall. The breeze stirred the silk, fabric so fine that it seemed to have no more substance than a whiff of smoke. As he stood on the landing, the scarf lifted a few inches from the floor and fell back. It stretched itself, like a snake uncoiling after sleep, and edged toward Peregrine, as if possessing both will and purpose. He watched it rub itself against his foot the way a cat does when it wants to be scratched. His wife had once owned such a scarf, a memento of their honeymoon in St. Louis, traveling there on the newest steamboat in the Peregrine Mississippi & Ohio Line.
The scarf rose unsteadily and levitated in the air in front of his face, twisting and turning, until Peregrine’s hand shot out and grabbed it. Or so he thought. He stared at his empty hand. The scarf was gone.
“Ohhhhh.”
The moan came from the door on his left, the sound of pain and pleasure merging into one. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, like static electricity in the air a moment before lightning strikes.
Refusing to be diverted by whatever was going on inside that room, Peregrine walked straight to the door between the braziers at the end of the hall, a sixth sense telling him that was where he would find her. He put his hand on the knob. It was cast brass, cool to his skin. He ran his finger over the decorative metal raised along the outer edge of the casting. There was no turning back if he opened the door and went inside. No, he thought. That was an illusion. He had passed the point of no return long before that moment.
Behind him, a door opened. Peregrine felt a pair of eyes upon his back, but he did not look around. Instead, he grasped the ornate doorknob, pushed forward, and stepped into the monster’s inner sanctum, closing the door behind him.
The chambermaid greeted him with bowed head.
“Good evening.”
She did not answer. Her coffee-colored face was a blank mask, the same as the other servants in the house. If Peregrine hadn’t seen her move, he would have taken her for a wax model of the sort displayed at Madame Tussaud’s in London.
Peregrine found himself in a sitting room furnished like the rest of the house with elegant European chairs and tables. A low couch with brocade pillows faced the fireplace. The oil paintings on the walls were landscapes except for a portrait of a noble-looking man from another time over the mantel.
“Have you found my scarf, chéri ?”
The woman’s voice had come through an open door Peregrine hadn’t noticed because it was mostly hidden behind a Japanese screen. She spoke with the slight French accent once common to old Creole families in the Delta. Peregrine recognized the voice. He would have known it anywhere.
“No, I thought I had it, but—well, I’m sure you understand.”
He was glad that his voice was firm and level. He was not worried about sounding frightened or uncertain—although he feared he might sound crazy.
The woman did not answer. Peregrine wondered what she was doing in the adjoining boudoir. He stared hard at the Oriental carpet, trying not to picture her in there with someone like Evangeline or even Mrs. Foster, draining them of their blood and life as he stood next door, waiting his turn to die, but secretly harboring obscure hopes that he would learn some great secret and it would all turn out miraculously different for him.
The servant went to the sideboard and poured a snifter of brandy. She put it on the low table before the couch, curtsied to no one in particular, and went out the hall door, closing it behind herself. Peregrine sat down unbidden, for that obviously was what he was supposed to do, and picked up the glass. The cognac tasted rich and warm, and he felt its effect almost immediately. He took a second swallow, this time bigger, and leaned back to wait.
“My dear general.”
The woman seemed to have materialized in front of him.
Peregrine put down the glass as he stood up and bowed. She was smiling up at him when he straightened, more beautiful than ever. She had come out of the bedroom with her long hair undone, so that it tumbled over her bare shoulders. Her skin was as translucent as a cameo held to light. Her lips were shining and full, her profile of such classic shape that she might have been the model for a statue of Aphrodite—and for all Peregrine knew, she might have lived long enough to have been the original goddess. Her sharply drawn eyebrows and lustrous eyelashes served only to accentuate the size and color of her green eyes. She was simply dressed in a plain white gown with raised bodice, the sort of dress a vestal virgin might have worn, golden slippers on her tiny feet. Only two pieces of jewelry adorned her body: a golden bracelet around her wrist in the shape of a serpent chasing its own tail, and a simple golden cross.
“I am delighted to see you again, General Peregrine, but why did you take so long to pr
esent yourself to me? Certainly you know that a gentleman never keeps a lady waiting.”
10
Seduction
“HOW DO YOU know my name?” Peregrine asked in a voice that was curious rather than accusatory.
“I know everything about you, Nathaniel. I am Delphine Allard. Secrets are not kept from Madame.”
He looked at the hand she had extended, which was as tiny and fragile as a songbird kept in a gilded cage to entertain a drowsy empress.
Madame Allard gazed back at him with a Mona Lisa smile, amused rather than insulted that he had not taken her hand. She seemed to know what he was thinking—that such a hand hardly looked capable of belonging to a monster.
“What are you afraid of, General?”
“Excuse me, madame.” He took her hand in his and lightly held it, her skin dry and warm even to the point of feeling feverish.
“You are not really afraid of me, are you, General Peregrine? That is one of the first things I noticed about you.”
Peregrine looked back into her eyes and said nothing. There was no point. She already knew what was in his mind and heart.
Madame Allard sat down and nodded for him to join her on the couch.
“It is a curious deficiency you suffer, General.”
“I beg your pardon?” He had been thinking about how beautiful she was.
“This peculiar condition you suffer, never being afraid, it is because you lack something. Do not look shocked, General. I do not doubt your courage. It is plain that you are a brave man. But your inability to fear is a different matter entirely. A vital part of you simply is not there. Part of your soul is missing. That is the real cause of your indifference to”—she looked around her in a manner that indicated the house on Chestnut Street and its murderous inhabitants—“all of this.”
“How is it possible to know such things?”
Madame Allard laughed merrily. “That is what you came here to find out. “You cannot hide your secrets from me, General. No one can.”
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