by Anne Frasier
She wanted to tell him he’d betrayed her; she wanted him to admit to it, but at the same time she didn’t want to start an argument that would go nowhere.
He passed a hand over his face. “I’m living in two worlds.”
“Move back to Tuonela.”
He let out a snort of shock and shook his head in disbelief. Yo u don’t get it.
But she was trying to. “I have a lot to deal with myself right now.” Did she always have to be the wise, stable one? The person others came to with their problems? What about her? Wasn’t she allowed to fall apart?
Both of her parents were dead. Evan had his father. He had Graham. Who could she count on? Who would she call if she needed help? Who would come? David Spence? Yes. David would come.
Not Evan.
She loved him. There was no doubt in her mind about that. But love didn’t always mean a future together. That’s what kids didn’t get. You could love someone from afar. You could even love someone close. But it didn’t always mean a life together. It didn’t mean you were good for each other.
She snapped off her gloves and tossed them in a nearby hazardous waste container. She reached behind her back and untied her gown as she walked toward him. “Let’s step out of here.”
She tried not to think about what had happened in this very room last spring. Sex in the morgue. My God. That was the kind of thing that made a person question her own sanity.
Heat shot up her neck and crawled into her cheeks. She hardly remembered it, and yet she had proof it had happened. But it all came back to her when she slept. She would wake up consumed by a sweet ache, a sweet yearning, missing what she didn’t even remember.
A faint illumination came from the emergency bulb near the elevator; Evan had turned off the hall lights when he’d come in.
She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “What are you doing here?”
A shadow fell across his face, and she could barely make out his features. He fiddled with a button on his long wool coat.
Fingernails caked with earth. The nails themselves were pale and smooth. Did they look slightly like the nails of a cadaver?
What a cruel thought.
I’m so sorry, Evan.
“Was your grandmother’s name Emily Florence?”
“Yes.” She frowned. “Why?”
“What was her mother’s name?”
“Florence Elizabeth. Florence Elizabeth Cray.”
“Born in 1906?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Florence had a sister named Victoria. Victoria was one of the women murdered by Richard Manchester.”
Victoria. How did he know about Victoria? She didn’t want to hear about Victoria.
She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the skinned corpse. Victoria hadn’t visited Rachel in months.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” she whispered. Talking about her, thinking about her, might bring her back.
But Evan was suddenly animated.
“Remember the photo at my house on Benefit Street? The photo of the woman in the tub? I think that’s Victoria.”
Rachel swallowed. “Yes. I know it is. I’ve known for a long time.”
“What you didn’t know is that Victoria was your great-aunt.”
“You can’t know that. My ancestral line was lost in the big move.”
“Not lost.” He unbuttoned his coat and reached inside. “Just left behind.” He pulled out a book. A leather-bound book in faded red, the page edges yellow and uneven. “A journal,” he explained.
The book smelled of damp earth, mildew, and ancient paper.
He wanted her to take it.
She didn’t want to touch it.
Yet in her mind she could already imagine how the embossed floral design would feel against her fingertips.
He brought the book close, opened it, and reverently searched the pages until he found what he was looking for. Then he turned the journal around so she could read it.
“This is why I’m staying out there. This is why I saved Old Tuonela from being destroyed.”
“It’s too dark.” She took a step back. “I can’t see.” But she could make out strong cursive letters that had been written with a sharp quill pen.
“Florence Elizabeth Cray and Victoria were sisters. Victoria was killed by the Pale Immortal.”
“You already said that.”
“Florence plotted her revenge. She tried to poison Richard Manchester, but succeeded only in making him temporarily ill and extremely pissed off. So she got back at him in the best way she could. She made him fall in love with her.”
Rachel stared at the book, intrigued now.
“Do you want to read it?”
“No, you tell me.” She was only remotely aware of her hushed voice and the hand she held to her throat.
“She gained his trust, and when she was finally alone with him she killed him with a dagger. Your great-grandmother put an end to the Pale Immortal’s reign of terror. I thought you would want to know that. I thought you should know.”
She smiled, and a lightness fluttered inside her.
“You come from a line of strong, tough women. You should be proud.” Evan’s heart was beating loudly again.
“That’s not all, is it? That’s not everything.”
“No.” That single syllable carried so much weight. “Maybe that’s enough for now.”
“Tell me. You might as well tell me everything.”
“Before Florence killed Richard Manchester . . . Before she killed him, she seduced him and slept with him. And when she killed him, she was pregnant with his baby.” Evan watched her with an intense, unreadable expression.
Her eyes stung. “No.” Her chest suddenly felt hollow, and she realized fear was really the absence of something, not the addition.
Why was he telling her this? It was cruel. “I was right. You should have left Old Tuonela alone. What good can come of such information?”
“We all deserve to know the truth.”
She shook her head and pressed a palm to her trembling lips, then a hand to her swollen belly. This was where they clashed. This was where she couldn’t begin to understand Evan Stroud. “You’re cruel.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you should know. I thought you would want to know.”
“Did you think it would make me happy? Did you think this was somehow going to add something to my life? To know that my great-grandfather was the Pale Immortal?”
Why had he really been so eager to share such awful news? Because he thought this made her more like him? Had he wanted to hurt her? Was he so caught up in Old Tuonela that it hadn’t occurred to him that she would find such information devastating? Or was it to deliberately drive an even bigger wedge between them?
For a second he seemed poised to open up; then she saw his brain shift. “Are you okay?” Not what he’d originally intended to say.
“I was fine until a few minutes ago.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you should know. If not for yourself, for the baby.”
For the baby? “What are you saying?”
Once again he seemed to be struggling with a decision, and seemed reluctant to speak his mind.
“Are you trying to tell me I might give birth to a vampire? My God, Evan. Not you, of all people. Is that what you really think?”
“Of course not, but that’s what people will say. That’s what the child will have to deal with.”
“Have you mentioned the contents of the journal to anyone else?”
“No.”
“Evan, nobody can know about this. About the journal.”
He looked dismayed. “We can’t keep it to ourselves. This is history. Not just your history, but the history of most of the residents of Tuonela.”
“I understand, but you’re talking about ruining a child’s life, a child’s future. Our child.”
“We will never see eye to eye on this, will we?”
“What difference do
es it make if people never know what happened?” She couldn’t keep the anguish from her voice. “Oh, why did you go out there? Why did you buy that damn place? Sometimes I think you did it to hurt me. What have I ever done to you other than love you?”
He flinched as if she’d confessed hatred rather than love. He flinched at words that brought most people joy.
She held out her hand. “Give me the journal.”
He didn’t move.
“Give it to me.” She was crying. He tucked it in his coat. “I’m sorry, Rachel.” He turned and left.
Thirty minutes later Rachel finally managed to pull herself together enough to return to the autopsy suite, where she realized she hadn’t turned off the handheld recorder. She picked it up, rewound, then pushed play.
The constant roar of the fan.
Expected.
Sh, sh, sh.
She held the device close to her ear—and could detect the murmur of voices beneath the roar of the exhaust fan.
Like the wind the other night.
The audio documented Evan’s arrival, and she heard his voice softly speaking her name. That was followed by her exclamation of surprise. The roar stopped; she’d turned off the fan. Then came conversation, followed by the snap of her gloves and their footsteps as they left the room.
Sh,sh,sh.
Whispers.
More than one voice, continuing even after the sound of the fan ceased.
Rachel shut off the recorder. The click of the stop button was deafening.
Oh, Jesus.
She moved to the door and hit the wall switch, flooding the room with light.
The body looked the same.
She stepped close enough to grab one corner of the sheet and jerk it free.
She was a coroner. A medical examiner.
But sometimes the dead talked to her. It was why she’d become a coroner. Facing her fears. Subconsciously she’d thought she’d dig deep into death until it finally left her alone.
The great-granddaughter of the Pale Immortal . . .
Did she finally have an answer to a question that had haunted her most of her life? Was that why death followed her? Because she came from a lineage that had somehow traversed death?
No! Those were crazy thoughts. Crazy, crazy!
Richard Manchester had been human. A human who had done some very sick and evil things.
Stop thinking these thoughts right now.
Nonsense. Total nonsense.
She inserted a fresh tape and pushed the record button. She turned on the exhaust fan and snapped on a new pair of latex gloves. She opened a clean set of instruments.
She did her job.
When she was finished, she wheeled and slid the body into the cooler.
Without replaying the audio track, she placed the recorder on her office desk. She would type up her notes tomorrow.
She took a shower in the claw-foot tub, washing with lavender soap. After drying off she slipped on a pair of jogging pants and an oversize white T-shirt. She opened the refrigerator and stared at the transparent container of liver.
So why did she crave raw meat if she wasn’t the pregnant great-granddaughter of a vampire?
Iron deficiency. Easily explained. It certainly made more sense than being the descendant of a vampire.
The phone rang.
David Spence.
“How about I bring something by? Chinese. How does that sound?”
She didn’t want to be alone. Did he sense that about her? Her loneliness? But she couldn’t be with David Spence. She’d been fooling herself about that. He wasn’t the one she wanted. And being with David would be worse than being alone, because now she had so much more to hide.
She told him she was tired and was going to bed. She hung up and drank the blood from the liver container. With her bare hands, she ate the raw meat.
Then she went to bed.
Daughter of darkness.
Chapter Thirty-two
A scraping sound woke her. Rachel looked at the window above her head and saw the shadow of a bare branch.
Only the wind.
The sound came again. Not from the window, but from inside her apartment.
Someone in the hall.
She groped for her portable phone. Touched it. Grabbed it.
Scrape.
Moving closer.
A kind of dragging and a thunk, combined with a rustle—like dry leaves or the hem of a taffeta gown.
A fetid odor drifted nearer. Probably her clothes or shoes, she reasoned. That went with the job.
She moved from the bed, the noise of the shifting mattress magnified a hundred times. A night-light, plugged into a low hallway socket, illuminated the path to the bedroom. A shadow crept across the floor.
With her heart hammering, head roaring, Rachel tried to dial 911. Wrong buttons, then a dial tone that filled the room. She tried again and failed.
She watched the open doorway. Up, back down at the phone. Hands shaking, breathing labored, fingers blindly hitting numbers.
The smell getting stronger.
Coming from whoever—whatever—was in the hall.
And then there it was.
Standing in the doorway, blocking the light. Maybe five feet tall, with an indistinguishable shape. Narrow at the top, wider at the floor, with trailing, draping pieces that had the appearance of wrinkled fabric.
Not Victoria.
And not Evan.
She did something you’re never supposed to do when faced with an intruder: She reached for the bedside lamp and turned on the light.
Oh, my God.
The dangling bits of fabric were shriveled fingers tipped with curved nails. Blond hair hung down each side of the face. Instead of eyes, two opaque black pits stared back at her. The mouth was a gaping hole.
She knew what she was looking at, although her mind refused to believe it: a human skin.
Standing.
Moving toward her.
Chapter Thirty-three
The skin moved deeper into the room.
Rachel stared, her body and mind frozen.
It came closer, nails clicking and scraping against the wooden floor.
Move.
Without taking her eyes from the wrinkled flesh, Rachel dragged the quilt from the bed.
The skin moved closer, a heavy stench wafting with it.
Click, click, click.
Blond hair.
It was the girl’s skin. The dead girl’s skin. Claire’s skin.
Dear God.
No.
Impossible.
When the skin was a couple of yards away, Rachel gripped the quilt with both hands—and tossed.
Cotton print sailed over the nasty mess, covering it, knocking it to the floor.
Rachel ran.
With bare feet she shot around the blanket and bolted from the room. Halfway down the hall, she skidded to a stop.
Go back. Shut the door. Lock it in there.
Couldn’t do it.
She ran from her apartment. She took the stairs to the basement and morgue. In her office she called 911.
It seemed like hours, but it was probably only ten minutes before she heard sirens outside. She met a police officer at the delivery door.
“An intruder?” he asked. “Where?”
“Upstairs.”
Another officer pulled up and stepped from his patrol car. They went ahead of Rachel, weapons drawn.
Up two flights of stairs to the third story and her apartment.
“Wait here,” the first officer whispered over his shoulder.
“In the bedroom,” she told them.
He nodded and they moved forward.
She put a hand to her heart. Some people said that intense fear could harm an unborn baby.
I have to get out of here.
One of the officers returned. He shook his head. “Nothing. Nobody.”
She pushed past him. “I’ll show you.”
In the bedroom she
grabbed one corner of the quilt and gave it a tug, then quickly dropped it. The officer strode across the floor. She let out a shriek of alarm as he scooped up the blanket.
He shook it. “Nothing.” He brought the quilt to his face and sniffed. “It is a little rank, though. You might want to toss it in the wash.”
“Did you get a look at the intruder?” the other officer asked. “Enough for us to put together a composite?”
She glanced around the room. Was it under the bed?
The officer saw her concern, got down on his knees, and checked. “Nothing.” He straightened and walked to the closet. He shoved the hangers of clothes back and forth. “Nothing.”
But a skin . . . A skin could make itself very flat. It could hide a lot of places. Maybe even a crack or a seam in the wall. Maybe even under a layer of wallpaper.
The house was old. There were a lot of places for a skin to hide.
“Did you get a look at him?” the first officer on the scene coaxed.
She shook her head. “No. It was dark.”
“But the light was on when we came in.”
“I ran. I didn’t look.”
Had she really seen anything?
She had been asleep. And she had just autopsied the body of Claire Francis. And she had just eaten a container of raw meat.
Pregnancy did strange things to a person. She’d never been one to have night terrors, but that must be what had happened. Dreams that were so lucid and so frightening that the dreamer insisted they were real.
The officers went over the building thoroughly, from the attic to the coolers in the morgue. “He’s long gone,” the younger cop said, sliding his weapon into his belt holster. “But I’ll have someone keep an eye on the place, at least until morning.”
She walked him downstairs so she could lock the dead bolt once he was gone. At the door, he bent and picked up something. “This yours?”
The journal.
Florence Elizabeth Cray’s journal.
Evan must have changed his mind. Thank you, Evan. She tried not to appear too eager as she took the book. “Yes, it’s mine. Thanks.”
She bolted the door behind him.
The journal in her hands felt familiar.
It smelled old. Like leather and paper and damp earth.
She would put it away. She would lock it in the safe in her office, where no one would ever find it.
