by Thea Devine
His body had finally merged with the dust and the ash. The murderous injuries to his head had ultimately healed as brain and blood-soaked back into his dirt-clogged wounds. That, and time, had grown a skinlike protective sheath so that he finally felt he could function again.
But there were limitations. For his damaged brain to function, he had to eliminate other necessary activities: he was now trapped in a prison of his own making, and, blast fate, of his own volition.
He couldn’t operate on any plane except mentally, and it drove him to dust-blasting rages that he couldn’t exact a meaningful revenge on Dominick for what he’d done to him.
Eight years, his liquefied body had intermingled with the charred ruins of Dominick’s town house, and he couldn’t think of one way that he could rise up from the ashes and take back his life again.
There were good days and bad, days he was thankful he could still think and remember and, if it was necessary, speak. His mental powers sharpened, expanded, amplified, and intensified until he could hear the conversations of passersby, until he could almost intuit what they were thinking, until he could pretty well read their minds.
The bad days, he was consumed by rage, tormented by his inability to do anything but think. Too much thinking, not enough action. Eight years of no action while Dominick had lived like a king in Lady Augustine’s town house and left him to die and dissolve into nothingness.
That alone kept him breathing and thinking. And living. Even as confined as he was.
So he healed and slowly progressed, and one day, he began playing around with possible ways he could accomplish Dominick’s demise, even if he couldn’t run a knife through his vitals himself.
That puzzle took several years to solve.
A simple solution after all. He’d just needed all these years to develop the brainpower to implement it.
He needed a stand-in. Someone who personified his philosophy, who had a finely honed deranged desire to kill, who hated Dominick, who would be willing to slay this dragon without a whisper of conscience.
He hadn’t known it, but he’d been waiting all these years for Renk to fulfill his vampire destiny. Renk had gone above and beyond Charles’s expectations. Renk loved to kill and feed. Renk hadn’t an ounce of compassion or regret about anything he did.
And best of all, Renk was Dominick’s son.
Charles knew he’d be the perfect stand-in—he’d been tracking him, the whole family—all these years, just as a mental exercise. But it just proved how brilliant he really was: he’d known somewhere in his black soul that Renk would eventually serve him somehow.
The only next obstacle was assembling the Keepers of the Night, long disbanded, but still hunting, killing, feeding.
They could just as well feed on Miss Proud-Not-to-Be-a-Vampire Rula, daughter of Dominick. Feed and turn her into a Tepes. Then he’d hear the music of Dominick’s anguished howl, then he’d feed on Dominick’s pain.
Then he’d order Dominick’s son to slice him and dice him until he existed no more.
Then, oh, then—he’d feel alive again.
Now she’d gotten some answers, Rula was beset by a ceaseless curiosity. Her mother and father, right here in London, and Mirya’s finally telling her that her mother did sometimes watch her from afar didn’t deter her from wanting to see both of them.
Nor did the fact she had no idea what they looked like. For some inexplicable reason, she thought she would know.
So every day when she went into the streets, she chose a different residential area to run her scams, card tricks one day, fortunes the next, reading palms after that.
She saw fairly fast that reading palms would be the easiest because it didn’t require props or equipment, so she concentrated on that as she continued from neighborhood to neighborhood.
“Read your palm, ma’am?” Most people said no. “Tell your future? It’s in the palm of your hand.”
Occasionally someone stopped out of curiosity, and she’d give a quick topical reading, always positive, always worth a few pence in the palm of her hand.
This was good—she ought to have thought of it sooner, just for the amount of money she was tucking away in her pocket.
“Read your palm, sir? You never know what’s in the palm of your hand.” The man brushed by her dismissively, but she’d come to expect that too in these upper-class neighborhoods.
She thought she might clean herself up a little more, but then it seemed as if her ragtag appearance and her unaffected beauty were the things that compelled passersby to stop.
But nowhere in her meanderings did she meet anyone with whom she felt an immediate connection.
She took note of other things, however. The burned-out shell of a town house in Belgravia, an eyesore on the landscape. The ramping up of antiwar protests and rhetoric in signs and demonstrations all over the city. The overarching desperation pervading the city as the vampire deaths continued, and people carried on as if fear was not a constant companion.
A situation ready-made for a scammer, Rula thought. “Palm readings, palm readings. Know what’s coming, see your future in the palm of your hand.”
People ignored her, passed her by. No one looked like her mother, but she didn’t know what her mother looked like. She just thought she’d know.
Walking around these neighborhoods gave her the respite she needed to absorb everything Mirya had told her. She’d assured Mirya she had no intention of leaving her—but Rula couldn’t know what her future would hold. And Mirya was old—and mortal.
As was she. Mortal, with parents who would never die, who would wander the earth forever, killing and feeding. That thought made her queasy. In her mind’s eye, she saw the dark, endless tunnel of forever.
“Read your palm?” Another no with a brisk shake of the head. “See your future right in the palm of your hand. Consult an expert reader of palms.”
Not even that pitch warmed up the few people she saw in passing down this one long street. Something about it felt barren, as if no one lived here, as if there were no life here.
She felt cold. Death cold. She couldn’t wait to get away from there.
From behind a curtain of a nearby house, a woman watched, a woman with long, dark hair and deep blue eyes, a woman who could have been Rula’s twin.
She turned to her guest.
“Now,” Mirya said, “you have seen her, as I promised. Now, let her be or she will leave altogether.”
“She’ll keep looking for me.”
“I will discourage her. He is coming. He wants her—and if he sires her a Tepes . . .” Mirya left the thought unsaid. “Stay away from her, Senna, and give me the time I need to prepare.”
After several weeks of roaming the city, Rula returned to her spot at Victoria Station, resuming her card tricks, her fortune-telling, wondering whether this was to be her future because it seemed no less a black hole than eternity.
Sometimes she thought about how this had been her mother’s life before she tried to pull off the biggest deception of her life: pretending to be a wealthy family’s indigent relative.
And look where that had got her. Although, as Mirya was quick to assure her, her father had been guarding her mother and had gotten her to safety.
Rula had the sinking feeling that name she so desperately sought would tell her nothing.
But now she had an audience waiting for her to perform. She shuffled the cards and laid out three rows of three cards each.
“Who will cut the cards?” A volunteer was in the rear of the crowd. She quelled her feeling of disappointment upon seeing it was not him and gathered up the laid-out cards, placed the deck on her little table, and motioned for her volunteer to cut them as she would.
Then Rula looked up and saw him.
He acknowledged her and stepped back into the crowd to allow her to do her act. He knew wh
at it was, how she did it. Yet, he’d let her read his awful fortune.
Death.
No death card in this woman’s layout. No dropped cards as a portent of bad news. Nothing but good things for this woman. Good fortune, good times, money coming to her, romance, love, marriage. The things people loved to hear. The things Rula wished could be in her life.
She thanked her mark for her generosity, pocketed the coins, and held up her hands. “Thank you, everyone, thank you. Come again tomorrow when I’ll read the magic cards that give you the key to your future.”
The crowd dispersed, except for him. He stood a distance away, watching her tuck away her cards, her collapsible seat, her small folding table, all of which she hooked and appended to a prop bag she slung over her shoulder.
Then she glanced at him, wondering if he would speak to her, or whether he would just disappear.
She picked her way through the passersby until she was within speaking range.
He held up his hand. “I know who you are. I’ll see you again soon.”
A most cryptic message. She took a step forward, but he’d vanished. Like a magician. Waved a wand and he was gone, leaving a trail of mist and fog.
“How does that man know me?” she demanded later of Mirya. “Why, when I look at him now, do I see death?”
Mirya shook her head. “I know nothing of this man or how he knows you. Or why he should have wanted you to read his cards.”
“Nothing to do with my twin, my family?”
Mirya didn’t answer.
Senna persisted. “Charles’s son, perhaps?”
“Charles never spawned,” Mirya said tightly. Thank the saints.
“Tell me again about how my father saved my mother from the Countess.” This was the real point, finally, a story she often requested because she never got tired of hearing it. But this time, she sought something Mirya hadn’t yet revealed, the thing that could be the essential clue to her mother’s whereabouts.
“He transported her to London, to the care of a Lady Augustine, who believed your mother was her ward, but who treated her as nearly a daughter. But vampires always cause blood and destruction. The Countess and Charles soon followed. It was inevitable there would be a confrontation. The Countess triumphed—even though she died, she managed to save your father and sire your mother.”
Mirya had never before mentioned that name. Lady Augustine.
“What happened to this Lady Augustine?”
“She was sired, and ultimately she died,” Mirya said stiffly. “It is sufficient for you to know that Charles had a hand in all of that. And that is all you need to know.”
Charles. Maybe it was Charles haunting her dark dreams.
The important thing was the name: Lady Augustine. The name she’d been seeking? Her mother had lived with a Lady Augustine when she first came to London. She needed to find Lady Augustine’s house, and maybe whoever lived there could provide information about where her mother was.
She told Mirya the next day that she was only reading palms that day, which relieved her of the burden of carrying her props.
Mirya didn’t question it, which was strange. Rula thought for a moment Mirya knew exactly what she was up to and that she knew something that Rula did not.
She was determined to find the town house where her mother had stayed when she’d arrived so precipitously in London.
It was time.
Or a fool’s errand.
It was something to do. She had to do something. Her mother might have other answers, and even if her motherly instincts had diminished to nothingness, maybe she could help in some way.
She had to have known Charles. She might have an idea where and how Charles would mount some kind of attack on her.
Or not.
It was a cloudy day. People were in a hurry. Rula could see almost immediately they wouldn’t slow down for a palm reading, especially in the fog and drizzle.
She wandered back toward the squares, the posh neighborhoods, without even an idea of how she would proceed.
“Pardon me—do you know where Lady Augustine lives?” Some of the strangers she accosted looked at her as if she were vermin.
Most had never heard of her. Some hurried past her, others were outright rude.
“Where might I find Lady Augustine?”
“You? What for?”
“I need directions to Lady Augustine’s house.”
“She’s dead.”
“Where does Lady Augustine live?”
“They ain’t givin’ alms to the likes of you.”
“Could you kindly tell me where Lady Augustine lives?”
Finally, after hours of this, someone pointed her to Berkeley Square. The barren square. The death-cold square.
The one place she should not go. She felt shivers down her spine and an oppressiveness thick as a wall. What had she thought she would do once she reached her objective?
Observe. Try to identify her mother. And then?
When she didn’t even know which was Lady Augustine’s house?
She darted down into the servants’ entrance of the nearest house. Here, she had a view of the entire street and the park. She could see anyone coming and going.
She could be here all night, she thought. She might see no one for days. She had once more operated on an impulse that would probably get her nowhere.
Still, she waited.
The sun went down. Twilight turned to darkness. Carriages neither came down the road nor left. There was no sign of a living being. A full moon rose, huge and blaring with light.
She dozed. She had no sense of what awakened her, but when she came to consciousness, she felt a curious stillness, as if time had stopped.
She looked up at the moon, huge and casting an eerie bright white light across the square.
Shadows flitted around the edges. Leaves rustled in the faint breeze. A dog howled in the distance. A rumble of carriage wheels somewhere close. Every sound was magnified, eerie.
She peered up over the edge of the basement stairs and caught a glimpse of a shadow moving quickly across the face of the moon, angling downward toward the square.
She rose up higher to see more clearly—and wished she hadn’t. The figure was drenched in blood, from mouth to knees. She felt a gut knowledge of that body, that posture, and the direction he was heading: toward one of the houses on the square.
She didn’t see which one—a body came out of nowhere, leapt on her, and they went tumbling down the stone basement steps entangled in each other and out of breath when they landed against the basement door.
The moonlight was even bright down here. They were virtually mouth to mouth, crushed up against the door. She recognized who it was instantly.
“You?”
“Me,” he said ruefully, but he didn’t move. And she found she didn’t him want to. Inexplicably, she wanted his body pressed that tightly against hers forever. She felt hot, safe, breathless. She didn’t know what to say; she had a hundred questions and none of them seemed to matter at the moment. She felt as if she’d always known he’d feel so hard and fit so perfectly against her body. As if she’d been waiting and hadn’t known it.
And he had. How?
She felt his mouth touch hers, and just the whisk of his tongue against her lips, along with the expectation there could be more because he wanted more.
Except this wasn’t the moment, the place. And she knew she was too inexperienced to know what she wanted.
He knew it too.
Slowly, regretfully, he lifted himself away from her and helped her to her feet and, holding her hand, up the steps to the empty street.
“I saw something,” she whispered, leaning in close to him because she still needed his heat, his comfort.
“I know.” He took her elbow and led her from the
square.
“That bloody beast was my brother, wasn’t it?” she said shakily.
He didn’t try to deny it. “Yes.”
She blew out a breath. Her brother. A merciless murderer. Returning triumphant from the kill.
His sole purpose in life was to kill. And feed.
She felt sick. Her brother. Her mother. Her father. She clutched the stranger’s arm convulsively. It felt tight with tension, muscular, hot.
“I wish I’d spared you that,” he said softly.
She shook her head. “Why should you?”
“Because I could have.”
She stopped short. “Who are you?”
“My name is Rob Ellis, and the rest I’ll tell you soon. If,” he added coaxingly, “you come with me.”
She wanted to. In spite of all the alarms ringing in her head, in spite of her overwhelming sensual reaction to him, she wanted to.
But how could she trust him? A face in the crowd keeping constant watch on her for weeks? A virtual stranger whose cards foretold trouble and death? Watching her. Why?
What had he been doing at Berkeley Square this evening?
“Tell me now,” she parried. “Tell me something.”
“Mirya knows you’re with me.”
That shocked her. “You know Mirya.”
“I know many things, Rula. I know you.”
Now she was shaking. This was worse than just arrogant interference. This was another level of knowledge about things she did not know, should know, had a right to know.
She backed away from him. “Stop. Right now, right here. Tell me now. Everything.”
“In the middle of the street?”
“There’s no one around, no one to hear your precious secrets if you have any to reveal.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Tell me one,” she challenged him.
“There is only one,” he said roughly, pulling her toward him so he could look into her eyes and see her reaction. “We, you and I, are Vraq, the uninfected children of vampires. And our mission in this life is to destroy as many of them as humanly possible.”
