by Thea Devine
Mirya shrugged. “The Vraq are constantly in motion. You must learn to live with that.”
“Assuming I join them.”
“You are them. This is not a club or secret organization.”
“This is a coven of killers. I can’t—”
“You will,” Mirya said simply. “You’ll have to.”
Nothing had changed even though everything had changed. Rula took her cards and her folding table and chair and went out late in the morning and headed toward Victoria Station once again.
“See your future in the cards. Come see what good fortune the cards predict for you.”
No one stopped. Everyone was in a hurry. She moved her table to another location.
“Read your palm? Palm reading here. The future is in the palm of your hand. Palms read here. . . .“
Several people lined up. Poor people. People who worked menial jobs and wanted hope. People like her.
Mirya had done this for years, moving in the morass of day-to-day humanity, hiding, hoping to pocket a coin or two supporting her.
She read palms, ramping up a good fortune even if a palm predicted a dire future. Why discourage hope?
As she worked, she reached within to feel whether she sensed Charles hunting her. But she felt nothing except wariness and weariness, his or hers, she couldn’t tell.
Suddenly, a woman was standing before her, smiling tauntingly in a way that turned Rula’s blood cold. She looked up, and her whole world jolted in a most unpleasant way.
Behind her, Renk smirked at her, goading her, daring her to acknowledge him. Waiting for someone to comment on how alike they looked.
No sign of blood, of fangs, of vampiric villainy. Just a woman with her palm stretched out, her smile inclusive, as if she knew that Rula had no foreknowledge of anything to come, but she was willing to play along because Renk had asked her to.
In her mind’s eye, Rula saw blood everywhere. This woman was doomed. Renk meant to kill and feed on her, and she had no idea of the danger.
He didn’t look dangerous; he was a well-dressed stranger she’d met—in the park, at a restaurant, a museum, the home of a friend—someplace legitimate that she thought made his acquaintance the beginning of an exciting love story.
A reading of her palm only added to the titillation—she had probably suggested it, and Renk undoubtedly thought it was an amusing irony, given what he knew was to come.
Rula took the woman’s hand. Immediately she saw the life line was abbreviated. How could she not tell her? How could she?
She felt Renk’s eyes on her—those deep cobalt eyes so like her own. It was as if he could read her mind. He knew what she was going to do. He thought she was a coward.
Or she was too kind. Why distress the woman?
And she could write a different ending to this story. She could interfere, she could prevent the carnage somehow. Except she didn’t know how. The best she could think to do was follow them after she finished the woman’s reading.
“You will live a long, happy life,” she told the woman. “You will have three children, your husband will be successful in business, you will be admired in society, and you will do good.” She pointed to lines randomly as she told this fortune. It didn’t matter which lines, what predictions.
She needed to finish fast and follow them.
She wondered how many women Renk had met and macerated in a day, a night, a week, a year. Not this one. This one was hers. This one could be saved.
The woman tossed a couple of sovereigns on the cards, and as she turned away, Rula pocketed the coins and began folding her table and waving off the disappointed crowd.
“Come back tomorrow, I’ll be here with more fortunes, more predictions, more messages of hope.” She couldn’t pack up fast enough as Renk and the woman turned away. Nor could she carry the table and her props and keep Renk in sight.
Quick decision—abandon everything and just go.
She did. Just left the prop bag and table against a nearby wall and took off after Renk and the woman.
Then she wondered how wise that was, especially if Renk could sense that she was following them. She had no idea what his powers might be. He would always be young, and therefore he’d have the energy and curiosity to explore what was possible.
Such as mind probes.
She kept a healthy distance behind them. To the onlooker, it would seem that Renk was doing all he could to charm the woman he was with. Hugs, sweet little kisses on her ear, her cheek, an arm around her waist, whispering in her ear, giggling with her as she pretended to be coy.
Rula couldn’t stand it. She didn’t know what she could do to stop it. He seemed to be heading to a working-class neighborhood just beyond the city, a place of factories, cheap housing, and cemeteries.
The woman seemed not to care. Or Renk had hypnotized her not to care. Rula wondered if he was leading her on by where he was taking the woman, and by how he manipulated her.
They kept going. The neighborhood got better, the houses better kept, farther apart, with gardens and carriage houses and . . .
And suddenly Rula realized where they were as she slipped behind a tree with a thick enough trunk to conceal her. The servants’ entrance to Lady Augustine’s house.
Renk opened the door and pulled the woman inside. Rula reacted, racing toward the door, which slammed in her face, Renk’s mocking laugh echoing in the garden.
He’d known she was following them. Damn, damn, and damn.
She threw herself against the door again and again, a futile effort, and no help in the end after a soul-searing scream of unendurable pain pierced the air—and her heart.
The woman she should have saved.
Rula sank to her knees against the tree trunk, tears streaming down her cheeks, feeling utterly helpless.
I should have saved her. I could have. I didn’t—
The door creaked open. She bolted to her feet and shifted so she was hidden from view. It didn’t matter. Renk, blood-soaked and grinning, appeared on the threshold, his victim in his arms, blood dripping everywhere.
Rula peered around the tree trunk, ready to follow at an instant, but it wasn’t possible. Renk moved out into the garden and, in a blink, transhaped into an owl, grabbed the body of his victim by his claws, and took off on a gust of wind into the sky.
Rula stood transfixed. The transformation utterly knocked the breath out her.
And where was Renk taking the body? She’d expected he would feast on it or offer it to Senna and Dominick.
She took several deep breaths. She had to go inside that door. She had to see what lay beneath in Lady Augustine’s house of secrets.
Even if it killed her.
That had been her twin. Her bloodsucking, bone-crunching, murderous, transforming twin.
Heaven forever, how could anyone come to terms with that?
She couldn’t calm down even if she wanted to. She finally eased out from behind the tree with the thought that Renk could return at any moment, and that would be worse than anything that she would see behind that door.
It was dark out now, dark inside as she stepped over the threshold, but she had superior night vision, after all. The stench nearly bowled her over. This was the erstwhile root cellar in Lady Augustine’s house. Before Lady Augustine was turned, when she had a life with a future and foreseeable ending.
Now, it was a graveyard, piled high with blood, guts, skin, and the skeletons of people who were once alive.
“Where is she?”
“She is safe.”
But Mirya’s certainty was hardly reassuring. Rula had been gone all day, promising she’d set up at Victoria Station, and nowhere else, specifically so he’d know where to find her.
Instead he found her table and prop bag, and the wonder that no one had stolen them in the time between when
she’d abandoned them and Rob had found them. But nowhere could he find her.
“She comes,” Mirya said. “Sit down.”
Rob made an impatient sound. “What if Charles has her?”
“He would gloat. We would know.”
“Wherever she is, he knows it,” Rob muttered as he stamped back and forth. “If he infiltrates her consciousness, she’ll never escape him. She understands just the minimum of how to combat his intrusions. Damn it—where the hell is she? I don’t even know where to look.”
“She comes,” Mirya said again. “Charles is . . . otherwise occupied.”
Rob stopped pacing. “What do you mean?”
“He must have nourishment. What he is, where he is, doesn’t diminish his need to feed.”
“He’s feeding?”
“I sense that is so.”
“So he’s homed in on that.” Which meant he wasn’t seeking Rula. Yet. Feeding would give him new energy, new determination, new rage.
“Who supplies his food?” Rob started pacing again. “Who brings him the blood and bone he can’t forage for himself? How close is he that his servants can get to him without calling attention to themselves?”
Rob stopped abruptly and looked at Mirya. “Who would it affect the most?”
Mirya didn’t need to make the calculation, it was so evident, but she was the one who said the words out loud: “Dominick and Senna.”
Charles would never give up. Rula was halfway to Lombard Street when she felt him. The tendrils weren’t obvious at first. They were subtle and sinuous, gently seeking, never intrusive.
And, it felt like, with renewed energy, Rula thought frantically. She was already disturbed, outraged and shaken up by what she had witnessed in the servants’ quarters at Lady Augustine’s.
Renk had done that, killed all those people, sucked their blood and cavalierly thrown their bones onto a heap.
How could she live with that? Her brother . . .
She was too vulnerable; she couldn’t get the vision of all those body parts out of her mind. Or Renk’s blood-suffused smile as he hefted into his arms what was left of the woman he’d killed.
Her brother . . . all those bodies—she wanted to kill him—
But Charles was coming after her. She had so little to defend herself with. Her will could never be stronger than his, when he’d been festering for years with hate and rage and she felt crippled by all she had just witnessed.
The force of that, exploding inward, might kill her.
She was so close to home, where there would be rest and solace, where somehow all those deaths might recede into a nightmare.
Rob, come find me. . . .
He couldn’t read minds, just infiltrate them.
She forcefully pushed away the tendrils, even as they insinuated themselves other places.
Rula . . .
No doubt now. Charles was after her.
She braced herself against a gate and concentrated. Hammering on the tendrils with the bricks with which she began building a mental wall.
Ru-u-ula . . .
By the heavens—she couldn’t combat him. Yes, she could. She must. If she got to Mirya’s—she inched her way along the gate and then a nearby wall, with Charles pushing at her, and her fighting back, a row of shops, where she nearly collapsed in pain as Charles continuously made his presence felt, and finally to the entrance of the alleyway.
Now, if she turned in, if she let him find Mirya . . . so much would change. Her puny efforts to deflect him had gotten her nowhere. She felt ready to give herself over to him but she couldn’t, out of loyalty, give him Mirya.
She staggered across the alleyway entrance and continued down the street. Let Charles come take her. Let him do with her what he wanted. She could not combat him or her brother. She could not give him Mirya.
Or Rob.
Rob.
The thought of him steadied her.
Rula, I’m waiting—
She had to escape Charles. The tendrils felt as if they were squeezing her brain. They’d penetrated the wall. They’d surround her, up, down, all over.
Come to me . . . you have no choice now.
No, she had a choice. She just needed to push harder, build faster, light a fire under those tendrils and burn them to a crisp.
Burn them . . .
Could she? Rob said her mind was that strong, she had that much power. She knew what to do . . . Rob had said so.
She could do it—build a fire instead of a wall. Twigs and logs instead of bricks. She beat back the intrusions while she constructed the pyre, setting it against the brick wall where tendrils were poking through.
Then, a match, struck against the wall. Applied to the twigs—and she closed her eyes against the conflagration and the fuming fury of Charles’s burning ambition.
She sagged against the nearest wall as a raging Charles released his hold on her. It was too much even for her after everything else she’d been through today. She could almost smell the burning wood, the burned tendrils, Charles’s burning fury.
“Are you all right?” A stranger at her elbow.
“I’m all right,” she whispered. That scent of charring would be with her forever. “Really.” She managed to get her body upright.
“If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.” But she wasn’t. That stranger could have been manipulated by Charles, a stand-in to lull her into trusting him.
“All right.” He didn’t linger, and she waited to be sure he wouldn’t follow her before she retraced her steps back to the alleyway.
Even then, she waited a long time before she finally slipped into the narrow entrance and made her way to Mirya’s.
Rob opened the door at her knock and she fell into his arms. He carried her to the bed, while Mirya prepared her cure-all for everything: a cup of tea.
“I fought him off,” Rula murmured. “I burned the tendrils.”
Rob held her close, as Mirya made her sip the tea.
“Where the hell were you?” he asked roughly.
She blinked up at him, her eyes slightly glazed. It was really him. She was really back with Mirya and Rob and not on the street fighting off Charles’s incursions.
He’d nearly gotten her too, but now Rob held her and she was perfectly content to lie in his arms, inhale his scent, bear the brunt of his anger and worry.
But he wasn’t so much angry as relieved. She was whole and unbroken. Everything else could wait. For about ten minutes. But still . . .
He held her closer and murmured in her ear, words she couldn’t understand, didn’t need to understand. It was enough she was in his arms.
She was exhausted from all her mental exertions, but there was so much they needed to know.
“Where were you?” Rob asked again in a gentler tone. “We were out of our minds with worry.”
She swallowed. “Renk—and some woman . . . came to my stall. She wanted a reading. I knew he was doing it to taunt me. To see if anyone noticed how similar we were. And I knew he was going to kill her. I wanted to save her, so I followed him—”
“Good God.”
“He killed her. I couldn’t do anything. . . . Rob, he transformed himself into an owl and took the body somewhere else. Oh, and his boneyard is in the servants’ quarters of Lady Augustine’s house. So many bodies—so many lives . . .”
Lives he’d cut short that he should suffer for.
Rob looked at Mirya. “So what we thought is confirmed. It makes perfect sense, Renk being his servant. He’s young, malleable, and empty-headed. And Charles’s targeting both Renk and Rula—that’s masterful.”
Rula tried to sit up. “So what do we do?”
Rob pushed her back onto the pillow. “We find Charles. That hasn’t changed. What’s different now is that we’re absolutely ce
rtain his lair is close by. And we were pretty sure there was someone supplying blood to him because he’s immobilized and he can’t do it for himself.”
“Where is he then?” Rula whispered.
“Close. Very close. And we will find him—soon.”
Her dreams overwhelmed her. Death’s-heads. Skeletons. Fire. She woke up screaming and in tears. Rob held her tightly, kissing her, murmuring to her, all through the night.
“He should die. He deserves to die.” She heard herself sob the words; she felt Rob absorbing them, holding her close to his heart.
He let her cry. There was no other way for someone who’d experienced all that she had in one day.
Charles the bastard. Close, so close, Rob could almost taste him. He was missing something, he thought, even though he’d parsed out most of it.
It’s all been about Senna and Dominick all along, he thought, as he stroked Rula’s hair. All about the possibility of the commingled blood, his plot to kidnap whichever child was born with the dual clan marks; his mad plan to use Lady Augustine to take over the monarchy, his plot to mate with Dnitra to produce another baby with commingled blood in the event neither twin was destined be the Eternal Ruler.
And then, Dnitra’s death and his survival after Dominick’s ravaging attack. But survival as what, where?
They’d searched Dominick’s charred town house six years before. Now, the burned-out shell had been torn down but the ground had not yet been leveled. Maybe, Rob thought, they hadn’t searched thoroughly enough. Maybe because they didn’t know what they were looking for.
They still didn’t know, except for their best guess of an incapacitated Charles, who needed a substitute for himself for mere survival. A Charles who could rely only on his mind now to wreak the vengeance he so dearly desired.
He must be nearly a vegetable, Rob thought. Charles probably wasn’t able to move, to tend to himself, to touch or feel or grasp anything. He could have been a lump of dirt they never noticed.
Rob hugged Rula closer.
If his supposition was anywhere near true—God, what an end for Charles. And if everything that had happened led back to Dominick and Senna, and if Rob believed that Charles had appropriated the town house because it belonged to Dominick, then it warranted another search of the house—to finish it, finally, for himself and for Rula.
