Frost & Filigree: A Shadow Council Archives Urban Fantasy Novella (Beasts of Tarrytown Book 1)

by Natania Barron

Vivienne is already wearing her most revealing shift, the one she found in Paris with the décolletage to her navel. Since she looks, more or less, human, she has very little need to drape herself in such finery, but she is always bolstered by the power of her form in various states of undress. She knows Worth is particularly fond of her stomach, and she reaches a hand there to touch the soft, cold skin. He always reveled in her chill touch.

  “I seem to be missing a shirt,” Vivienne says softly. “You’ll forgive my mistake.”

  Worth tries to make a few words with his mouth, but he just frowns.

  “The cat got your tongues?” she presses, knowing the full count at four, and every one as talented as the next.

  “You are most inappropriate.”

  “You used to like that about me.”

  “Vivienne, this is a serious matter.”

  With a pout, Vivienne lowers herself down onto her bed, crossing one long leg over the other and casting her head back so her black hair spills down her shoulders. She has taken great care to position herself just so, to remind him of her most expert talents.

  “You are a serious bore,” she says, closing her eyes. Her charms don’t work directly on him, but she imagines what it would be like if she could compel him. “But if you want to know my thoughts on the matter, I have plenty of them. Including that I see you to be quite the turncoat against your kind and, if I didn’t find you so absolutely devourable, I wouldn’t have even allowed you in the room.”

  “You know I can get in,” he points out, “if I really want to.”

  She ignores this little detail and continues to speak. “As I see it, I have been hoodwinked into helping these ridiculous mortals one last time. My sincere hope is that they will come to their collective senses soon enough and realize, as they did in London when we were last in business, that it’s best to keep us out of their troubles, even if Aberrants are involved. That you conspired with them to out us is unforgiveable.”

  “There is more to this. I couldn’t tell them because I am working undercover. I wasn’t even trying to expose the Circle; I was trying to avenge the death of someone dear to me.”

  “Are you saying you were a double agent?” Vivienne tries not to laugh, but it is a most laughable concept.

  “Something to that effect.”

  “Nonsense. Subterfuge is your worst skill. Even worse than your croquet. Your very nature is to be true to yourself, even if that is an ever-shifting menagerie.”

  “They’ve got your ledger, Vivienne.”

  This piques her interest. She had thought it lost, assumed it was burned in their Paris house fire of 1899. Once Worth left Goodwin and Waldemar, she had no use of it, anyway. Just a litany of the details of their adventures, annotations, and the occasional alchemical dalliance.

  “They must be lying. That book was destroyed,” she says.

  “No, I… stole it.”

  “Worth!” She is genuinely shocked.

  “I took it with me when I left. I was hurt. You’d… hurt me, darling. But I knew it was important work; I kept it secret for a long time until I found someone who I thought could aid me in the research, finding antidotes to iron and the like.”

  Vivienne doesn’t believe for a moment that he stole it. The convenient theft is too riddled with Nerissa’s signature to be much of a consideration.

  “The notes have details about a great many things. How to kill Fey, for instance. What we used to subdue them.”

  “Someone had to keep track of things. I wasn’t completely useless, as you make me out to be. After all, if it wasn’t for me, you’d have had a sincere image problem.”

  “The uniforms, you mean?”

  “When fighting evil, it does behoove a person to look the part.”

  “They were rather uncomfortable.”

  “Fashion is pain, my dear. And you couldn’t very well go looking like two wandering werewolves, could you?” Vivienne scoffs. “You’re not the only one with a reputation to uphold. I couldn’t very well be associated with the two of you looking so indecent. I see that you still have a rather lacking approach to fashion. Tell me, did Christabel dress you?”

  Worth stutters and says nothing, so Vivienne continues.

  “But we weren’t talking about my sartorial contributions to the cause, no. We were speaking of my ledger.”

  “We were,” says Worth, his tongues finally working in concert. “We were speaking of the ledger.”

  “I can’t see why you’re so concerned,” she says. “It’s written in daemonic. Even if, as I’m assuming, it’s found its way into the wrong hands, no mortal can read it.”

  “Yes, but they are close to figuring that out. Christabel’s is a mind like no other I’ve known, and I think she may be learning the language. I need to get it back… to protect all of us.”

  Vivienne sighs. “I already said I would help you.”

  “I have a personal stake in this,” Worth says. “You need to understand. I can’t lose you both...”

  “And who are we talking about, now?”

  “A young vampire by the name of Yvan. Quebecois by derivation. We’d been traveling the Appalachians together when we arrived a bit outside of Tarrytown to find…” He trails off, wincing. “Christabel mentioned him earlier. I just didn’t have the heart to explain it.”

  “Were you making a terrible pun about stakes, just then?” Vivienne asks.

  “No, that was…” He shakes his head, caught in her web again. A deep breath follows. “Yvan is dead.”

  “Maybe he looked at your excuse for fashion and perished at the thought.”

  “Vivienne. He was a healthy vampire. Sane and solid. But he went Aberrant overnight. I had to…”

  Vivienne understands. Being creatures such as they means they understand innately what can happen when an Aberrant goes on a rampage. “You killed him. You had to,” she says.

  “I did. He went for a walk and came back to our cabin. And when he returned, he was already half mad. He made me promise I would find Christabel Crane, that she would lead me to answers. She has, though added a few more queries to my list, and I know the Rockefellers and the Circle are somehow involved, and when I realized you were here, I thought it expedient to make introductions.”

  “You could have called on me in a civil manner. After years of hearing nothing from you, there are significantly less risky approaches, you know.”

  “I wrote. You didn’t answer.”

  The mail.

  Nerissa.

  Or Barqan.

  Or both.

  Damn them to the last circle of Hades.

  “Still, that was an overwrought gesture, the bloody party,” Vivienne says, taking in air slowly and deliberately to calm herself. “It was a great shock, and the night did nothing for my complexion. Nerissa could have snapped.”

  “But she didn’t, and that’s important. You see?”

  Vivienne does not see and has half a mind to push him out the door herself. “I honestly don’t see why you couldn’t have just come for tea.”

  “They wanted proof you weren’t Aberrants. So, I allowed for a test. You need to trust me.”

  “I can’t without understanding, Worth. You’re going to have to give me the details.”

  Vivienne has had enough of talk. It is a pale imitation of communication between them, and she is fairly certain that Worth has warmed to her at least a little bit. The idea of seeing his lover in detail does not appeal much to her, but there is no use asking him a thousand questions when he is capable of simply showing them to her.

  When they were younger, and in love, they shared this mental projection together, creating little sub-dreams where they could share in memory and creation. A sacred, psychic space. She and the Glatisant, it seems, have similar workings in terms of their mental capacity and strength. It’s not something she’s ever been able to do with Nerissa, though she has tried. Worth would blame it on her lizard brain.

  The look Worth gives her is full of hop
e.

  “You want me to show you?” he asks, tentatively like a child.

  “Of course,” she says. “It’s all I ever want from you.” Which is not entirely true, but it’s a good place to start.

  It isn’t until his skin touches hers that she remembers, that she really feels the grief of missing him for so long. She used to think that they were made for each other—he, the prey, and she, the huntress—but in the ensuing years apart, she began to doubt that.

  When his hand approaches hers, she recalls immediately, and with striking detail, how it used to be. The blending of their bodies, their true bodies. Her fingers, skeletal and frosty; his, an ever-shifting glasslike framework, insubstantial and moving from reptile to mammal to avian and back again. His fibers meet her fingers, like branches reaching out toward the sun. Each strand of him twists into her arm, moving quickly up her frame until it finds its way up to her temples, forming curlicues around her temples.

  Then, the story begins…

  Yvan

  It’s a matter of living smartly in New York, that’s what Yvan always says. No one will know who and what they are if they are smart enough. There are enough places they can go to get food—enough volunteers—that so long as they can blend in, there will be no challenges. During their time in Canada, it had not been so difficult. Fewer people to run into, and by nature, Yvan’s work—he is a kind of arctic botanist by trade—requires a certain level of solitude.

  But with his recent book completed, and no sign of the moly he sought together with Worth, they decide to make the trip to New York to see some of the academics in the area with whom they had correspondences. Yvan is always more trusting of human beings than Worth is, but then he blends in more easily, especially among the educated, cloistered away in their studies and offices, scarcely different than the reformed night hunter vampire himself.

  Yvan Tousignant is in every way a perfect complement to Worth. He is outgoing and naturally friendly, charismatic and genuine. Like Vivienne, who Worth is still reminded of every day, Yvan seems to flourish in the company of people, wanting to please them and be part of their society. Hence his most baffling obsession with botany, a peculiarly solitary endeavor.

  “Imagine what good I could do in this field in the span of my lifetime,” Yvan tells Worth the first night they meet, atop a London hotel in the spring. They very quickly fall in love.

  And how could they not? Yvan is, despite every literal indication to the contrary, very much alive. He moves and talks and expresses himself with a kind of Gallic intensity, his dark eyebrows up and down the pale lines of his brow, his hands a frantic ballet of movement.

  Worth has never met a dead being so full of life and passion. Most of the vampires he has met during his long tenure are either Gothic hangers-on or Byronic creatures leaning toward orgies, excess, and tacky home furnishings. Which is welcome now and again, but damned difficult to manage in the long term. One can go through only so many chaise lounges.

  But Yvan does not have a home. He is a nomad, a traveler, an adventurer. Working with Nerissa, years ago, Worth had a similar kind of connection—not to her personally, as he found her repugnant physically—but to the work itself.

  It had been Vivienne who destroyed any semblance of balance by insisting he settle down and engage in a facade of domestication. Still, he has kept Vivienne’s notes since the sundering of their relationship, and her meticulous categorization of flora and fauna in the supernatural realm prove most helpful in their studies. He considers it a parting gift from Nerissa, and one of the most valuable items in his possession.

  Living with Yvan makes him happy. Down to his toes, it makes him happy. The road calls to them both, and side-by-side they explore the corners of the world still left to mystery. They fall in love with the land, and with each other; they understand more about who they are and why they exist. Now and again they discover an Aberrant or a mystery otherwise impossible to puzzle out, but it is all dealt with in time and Worth is content.

  Sleepy Hollow is as quaint a place as it sounds, but the idea of creatures of their mettle living among the average gentry is not well accepted. But Yvan has friends, he promises, who will keep them safe from harm, or at least from persecution. Most do not believe that monsters like them exist, and those who do are quite certain none of them are reformed in the least.

  They take up separate apartments, lest they heap yet another grand scandal upon themselves, and Yvan spends his days resting and recuperating and his evenings meeting with the academic elite as far away as New York City. It’s important that Worth stays his distance during this time, so he does. But he is greatly lonely.

  This is when he discovers the names of the two women recently moved in to Lyndhurst in nearby Tarrytown.

  Of course. He knew something felt extra chilly about this place.

  Despite his work to very diligently avoid the two of them, Vivienne and Nerissa are within a half hour’s stroll. The lamia is of less a concern, but Worth knows if Vivienne sees him, she will be both furious and betrayed, and he can’t explain to her exactly what went badly with them, but he knows it to be true. He loved—loves—her, but in a desperate, wanting, perpetually unsatisfied way. They bring out the worst in each other—she, her capriciousness; he, his narcissism—and their years together were marked with such overwhelming sadness and dismay that the mere thought of seeing her again makes him feel nauseated.

  When at last he tells Yvan about it, the vampire initially shrugs it off. He has come into contact with a young scholar named Christabel Crane, who has been hinting to a sort of secret cadre among the elite of Tarrytown and the surrounding boroughs. As it stands, Yvan is more interested in this than anything else. It is rumored they have, in their possession, a great many antique books, and one that may hold the key to the moly he has sought for so long.

  One late night as they sit together in Yvan’s quaint parlor, Worth brings up Vivienne again, and this time, the vampire reacts with anger.

  “Do you expect me to feel jealous, is that it?” Yvan asks, rising from his seat to angrily pour himself a glass of wine. “Really, if you keep going on about that fickle creature, I’m going to have to drag her here by the hair so you do the deed done yourself. Apparently you aren’t satisfied with our current arrangement, maudite.”

  Worth is so taken aback by the language coming from his lover that he takes a moment to respond. He is in his natural form, preening the fur on his hindquarters near his hooves, delicately, in order not to show his face. Though his face looks the part of a snake—it is, in reality, more akin to the great Komodo dragon—it is surprisingly expressive. But truly a detriment in terms of grooming. Whatever god had its hand making his body must have been well and truly drunk, for the fangs and tongue of a reptile do very little to smooth mammalian fur. It takes ages to get it right, and while he may have four tongues in total, they are rarely in agreement.

  “I was simply stating,” Worth manages at last, turning from his work, “that Fate seems a cruel mistress to bring us within such close proximity. It is no surprise that the winter is so bitter cold this year, what with the Queen of Frost herself holding court.”

  “There you go again,” Yvan mutters. “Caulisse.”

  “No need to get so vulgar.”

  “Dare you call me vulgar, after the stories I hear of that woman! Yet here you mention her, flatter her, as if she wasn’t the most damaging creature you ever came across.”

  “I told you, our relationship is complicated. But it’s her meticulous notes that have helped us in our studies. Without her book, we might never have—”

  “Yet she is so damned woven into your brain that you can’t stop talking about her. I honestly don’t know what I would do if I saw her.”

  “It’s best we keep you separated, Yvan. For the good of all of us. She’s powerful, though she looks fragile. A bitterest cold that will wipe your soul clean.”

  “I have no soul.” The way Yvan says it, Worth understands the th
reat and decides it best to refrain from bringing up the fair sylph again.

  It does not get easier. Yvan stays out later and later, arriving dangerously close to dawn on more than one occasion, meeting with Christabel Crane. He calls her odd, yet fascinating. Worth grows more and more concerned for the vampire, but when he brings up the issue, Yvan shuts him out and says he is being possessive.

  This is not the creature he fell in love with. Without the open road between them, without the promise of adventure, their differences are so much clearer. Worth wants to get to know the lay of the land, to discover the patterns of the town. He spends hours plotting the comings and goings of millers and bakers and merchants, noting the strange habits of errant husbands and housemaids. He finds it so curious that they would live their lives so in the open, so easily left to discovery. Yvan, however, wants nothing to do with anyone else in Sleepy Hollow. He wants only to speak with the Circle, but despite his better efforts, he is never truly allowed into those secrets.

  They fight. Many times. When Worth makes a passing comment about seeing whether or not Nerissa Waldemar might be a good resource, the vampire flies into a jealous rage. Worth is not physically hurt—his blood draws substance from the air and sun, much like a flower, and no amount of loss would cause his death—but he is bruised within. Yvan leaves in a fury.

  Then, after waiting up all night, Yvan does not return home to his apartment. Beyond exhausted, Worth falls asleep on the chaise longue in the vampire’s parlor and sleeps right through the day. The sunlight refreshes him, but so deep his melancholy that he slips into a near hibernation.

  A scratching sound awakens Worth, and he quickly draws up his glamour. He is so used to doing it in moments of discovery that the act is more of a reaction than conscious. He pulls on a nearby bathrobe and listens at the door, unable to find the tie and instead leaving the garment displaying his most natural human state, if it can be called such a thing.

  Leaning into the door, Worth senses the urgency behind it. It’s a skittering, whimpering sound. Like dog nails scrabbling on the floor.