Susan Squires - [Companion Vampires 0]

by The Companion

  The fever was coming back, stronger now, and he was shaky on his feet, but he knew what would keep the fever at bay. He stooped to scoop up the two leather articles. He hung the tiny bag of diamonds around his neck. He squirted a small stream of the thickening blood far down his throat in the hope that he could prevent gagging. He couldn’t. But he kept the blood down. Was it some slave’s blood, or was it Fedeyah’s? He bet on Fedeyah, as strength flowed through his body. Only the blood of one of them could confer such vibrant, frightening consequences. He slipped the water bag over his shoulder. He could follow the track of the caravan as far as the first oasis.

  Then he would turn away from Marrakech.

  Ian’s eyes cleared as the memories drained away. The girl was speaking earnestly.

  “Are you well?” she was asking.

  He shook his head as if that could dispel the memory of that night when he had discovered what lived in Kivala and lost his humanity into the bargain. How long had he been staring at his hands, immobile? He cleared his throat before he dared to speak.

  “As well as I can be these days.”

  Her eyes were round with concern. Concern? He did not deserve the concern of a virtuous woman. “Is the one you saw at Kivala so horrible?” she asked matter-of-factly.

  “Horrible enough. It was also the night I became what I am today.”

  “Ahh. Was Asharti the one who waited? You said it was her blood that poisoned you.”

  “No. She wanted his blood. Apparently he is the ancestor of her kind. His ancient blood is very powerful. She thought his blood would make her invincible.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “She wants to rule men. My guess is that she has plans for that corner of the world.”

  The girl pressed her lips together. “That would be bad.”

  He roused himself and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if to wipe away memories. “But we will be in England. She cannot reach that far. And neither can the One Who Waits at Kivala.”

  She was about to ask another question but apparently thought better of it. “Well, back to our original intent then. That is all the scroll tells us about the Old Ones. It moves on to talk about the monuments. What have we learned?” She glanced back at the scroll. “There is a ‘blood companion,’ whatever that means. It sounds like more than a disease. We see that they are very old. There is some power of compulsion that goes with the reddening of the eyes. And this reference to being ‘invisible bats.’ ” She looked up. “Did you ever become a bat?”

  “No.” He made his voice as repressive as possible. But she would not be repressed.

  “Well then, we must concentrate on what we do know. Tell me what happens when your eyes go red. Can you do it at will, or does it just come on you?”

  He yielded to her matter-of-fact approach. “I suppose it comes on me.”

  “When?”

  “When . . . I have the hunger and there is an opportunity to . . . feed.”

  “Could you call it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Asharti call it at will?”

  He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

  “Try it,” she urged. “Try to make your eyes go red.”

  “No!” he exclaimed, his brows drawing together. “Are you mad?”

  She cocked her head, exasperated. “It is an experiment. You said you wanted to know more about your condition. How else will we find out?”

  He got up and paced the room, automatically compensating for the roll of the ship and bending under the beams of the low ceiling. “What if I unleash something I can’t control?”

  “How can you learn to control it if you don’t try?” She lifted her chin in challenge.

  He whirled away and took another turn, hands clasped behind his back. As he faced her again, she raised her brows and pointed to the chair. She was right, of course. If he said he wanted to know about his condition, he couldn’t run from it. He sat.

  “Try to go red.” He could detect some quaver in her voice, but she nodded resolutely at him in encouragement.

  He had no idea how to go about it. He sat there, blinking. Nothing. He shrugged helplessly. “What do I do?”

  She bit her lip. “Hmmm. Try closing your eyes.”

  He closed his eyes. What difference would that make?

  “Can you smell the tar that holds the ship together?” she asked, her voice soft.

  He nodded slowly. He felt her rise and walk around behind him.

  “Can you smell the wet of wood and seawater?”

  “Yes,” he breathed.

  She rubbed his temples gently. Her touch was soft, revealing her tender nature. He began to be distracted by her touch until her voice brought him back. “Now, think about your body. Feel the weight of it in the chair, shifting with the sea beneath us.” Her voice carried a curious lilt. His body had weight and substance he had never noticed. “Feel your muscles shift to brace yourself against the roll.” Yes. He could feel that. “Now think about the air coming into your lungs. Breathe in, deeply.” He filled his lungs. “Hold it there. Now breathe out. Bodies are quite marvelous, are they not?” Yes, they are, he thought. It was just her voice, in the night, and the roll of the sea beneath him.

  “Now press your right hand across your breast and feel your heart pumping there.” Lub-dub, lub-dub. Her fingers rubbed his temples in time with his heart. “It’s pumping blood into your lungs and your belly and your legs and back again. Feel the blood coursing through your veins. The blood is the key, you see. Feel the blood.”

  Ian felt blood sliding along his veins. It pulsed in his carotids, down through his loins into his thighs, throbbing in his femoral arteries. Low, just above the throbbing of his heart, some song beat where he could not quite hear it. Behind him, she stepped back. The tender touch faded away, leaving only the rhythm of his heart. His strength, his feeling of well-being, was like a song. Something sang in his blood. To listen was dangerous. Yet he listened.

  He heard rejoicing, reveling in strength. There was a sense of oneness, two as one. His gladness ramped up until life flowed along his veins, tingling, and Ian was more than he had ever been and what he was rejoiced, even as part of him was afraid of that giddy swirl of power.

  From a distance, he heard Miss Rochewell whisper, “Do not cut the connection. Let yourself experience it or we will never know.”

  Ian opened his eyes. They would be red, he knew, red like his blood. He felt his core glowing, the song in his blood growing louder. Air could hardly fill his lungs full enough to fuel the fire that sang along his veins. The joy and the power were almost painful, and still they ramped up in some mad chorus of voices or instruments clashing in a music never heard by man. Ian thought he would scream. He was standing, though he had not felt himself rise, and he saw Miss Rochewell through some red haze of joy and power he knew must be wrong. But he couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it. He wanted to feel it all. A blackness grew at the edges of that transparent pool of red. Already he could not quite see the doors to the cabins off the great room and the edges of the stern windows were melting into the dark night beyond the glass. The edges of his vision collapsed. The singing in his veins grew to a shriek and the pulsing blood now screamed, distributing pain throughout his body. All went black for a roaring moment. The pain was excruciating. His body felt as though it were turned inside out.

  The shock of ice-cold seawater filling his lungs hammered his senses. He sank into the night-black ocean. For a long moment he was paralyzed, dazed by disconnection. Then he reached the ultimate darkness at the perigee of his descent. His senses shuddered into place. He kicked, lungs bursting, until he caught a glimmer above him that might be the moon. Groping upward, fear making him desperate, he clawed the insubstantial water toward the surface.

  Bursting upward into moonlight and a choppy sea, he could see the ship receding, its stern lights glowing in the dark of the Atlantic.

  “Beltrane!” he shouted. But a wave sloshed o
ver him and converted his hail into no more than a gurgle. He looked around and saw nothing but dark night and cold black sea. He cursed the weight of boots that could not be removed. He struck out for the ship, its sails taking it farther away at every moment.

  Beth gasped as the figure before her with the red glowing eyes wavered at the edges and suddenly blinked out. He was there one moment, huge, menacing, a monster she had coaxed out of a man, and in the next moment he was gone.

  For a moment she was so amazed she thought she had imagined it. She looked around the empty cabin. “Mr. Rufford?” Her voice was tentative in her own ears.

  “Mr. Rufford!” She ran to the cabin doors, but each tiny room was empty, no possible place for him to hide. Did she not believe her eyes? He had disappeared, just as the scroll said he could, like a bat in the night. Panic rose inside her. Was he dead? Had he gone to some other world? Why had she encouraged him to draw the redness? What had she done?

  She stumbled to the deck, thrown from side to side in the narrow passage by the roll of the ship. “Mr. Rait!” she called to the first officer she saw. “Have you seen Mr. Rufford?” She searched the deck wildly, but there was no familiar black coat.

  “Miss Rochewell,” Rait said, alarmed. “Are you well?” Sailors around her stopped what they were doing to gape at her.

  “Where is he?” She looked up at the rigging as though he might have suddenly taken a fancy to climb the shrouds. The sails belled with the wind. The ship was moving fast.

  “I couldn’t hardly say, miss,” Rait answered, obviously reserving judgment on her sanity.

  At that moment they both heard a faint shout. “Beltrane!”

  Beth ran to the rail on the leeward side, searched the black water, seeing nothing.

  “Lookout!” Rait yelled. “What see you?”

  A long moment passed. Beth clung to the railing. Rait came to stand behind her.

  “Man overboard!” the lookout finally yelled. “Two points east of south.”

  “Back topsails!” Rait yelled. Sailors scurried up the yards. “Bring her off the bowline.”

  The ship gave way, sails shivering, and still Beth could not see him for the short-breaking, disorganized waves of the Bay of Biscay. There he was, a white face in a trough of the choppy seas. He was swimming strongly now, though the waves broke over him.

  “Shall I send out a boat, Mr. Rait?” Mr. Gilman asked.

  How could they not send out a boat?

  Rait watched the figure a moment, then shook his head. “He’ll be up with the ship before we could get anything launched.” Sailors headed for the rail. Rait cocked a head up at the sails and then glanced out to the figure struggling in the heavy seas. “By the time we wore round to pick him up . . . No, we’ll let Mr. Rufford display his swimming prowess.”

  Rufford came up the side by the leeward boarding stairs on the upward roll, holding to the rope they let down for him. Beth had been sure he was drowned a dozen times.

  He came up heaving and sputtering. “Apologies, Mr. Rait, for checking your way,” he gasped. He offered no explanation for how he had gone overboard. Beth felt it beyond herself to intervene with anything plausible. She was overcome with the image of a black whirling mist that disappeared from the Captain’s great stern cabin. And she couldn’t say that.

  Rufford turned from the questioning glances and made his way, dripping, to his quarters.

  Beth nodded to Rait and said she would retire herself after all the excitement. She knew she was leaving rampant speculation behind, but she could not face it alone.

  In the light of the common room outside their cabins, Rufford stood, dripping. He looked up at her entrance. “So much for scientific experimentation.” He tried to convey calm dismissal. He failed. Then he could not refrain from whispering a question. “What did you see?”

  “Your eyes . . . your eyes went red,” she said with as much composure as she could manage. “Then a kind of black mist swirled around you and you . . . you disappeared.”

  “I reappeared about three feet above the water some forty yards astern. I should be glad it wasn’t farther.”

  She swallowed. “I think you ‘moved through the night like a bat, unseen.’ “

  He nodded, a puddle growing, unnoticed, at his feet. “Well, I hope I never do it again.”

  “What did you feel?” she could not help asking in her turn.

  He searched her face, his blue-eyed gaze turned inward. “Life singing along my veins. Strength. I felt as though I was not alone.” He blinked. “It felt . . . wonderful.”

  Neither of them thought that was necessarily a good sign. Beth nodded, trying to keep her face from betraying any astonishment, let alone disapproval. He is just different, she kept reminding herself. Did you not want to know the mystery?

  “I intend to go to my cabin and try to stay there,” Rufford growled. “I suggest you do the same, Miss Rochewell.” He turned away and stalked toward his cabin door.

  Beth watched him go. Their research into his nature had not proved a comfort to him. Rather the opposite. And for her? The mystery was greater than she had imagined.

  Rufford discouraged further research into the scrolls as they beat up against the winds in the Channel, making for Portsmouth in the days that ensued. He did not mention again what had happened that night. He seemed to withdraw into some kind of austere acceptance of his condition that put up a barrier between them. Yet every night saw him leaning on the rail at the leeward side of the quarterdeck, willing the frigate on toward England with yearning in his eyes.

  Beth pored over her scrolls in daylight, alone. But no more revelations came to light. As much as Rufford ached for England, so she dreaded its approach. Her father had been at her side whenever she returned to this strangest of lands since her school days. He had been her anchor, the source of her confidence, her friend. More than that, he was her protection against a society that disapproved of her life. Now she had no one. The emptiness was beguiled for a while by her fascination with the mystery of Rufford. But once the Beltrane anchored in Portsmouth, Rufford would vanish. That knowledge brought a stab of pain she had not expected. It is only that his companionship beat back loneliness, she told herself. The practical consequences of her father’s death came home to her. She had still never cried for him. But her devastation was no less complete for being dry-eyed. The empty feeling of regret was echoed, though fainter, in the distance that Rufford now kept. He was afraid of what he had become and ashamed of all he had admitted to her. When she tried to discuss it, he simply shook his head.

  “There is nothing for it but to see if a doctor can cure me,” he had said when she asked him how he did. And he would say no more. Indeed, his expression was so closed and glowering she dared not question him or try to give him solace. The ability to disappear seemed to have horrified him all over again.

  Still, the night before the Beltrane docked, he came out to where Beth played chess, black against white, a very sterile occupation. She heard his door open, felt him standing behind her.

  “Well?” she asked, not turning to him, all the stiffness of his distance these last days and all her fear of the loneliness ahead in her voice.

  “We dock tomorrow, or so the Captain seems to think.”

  “Yes.” She moved the black rook.

  “You will go ashore in the morning, no doubt.”

  “Yes.”

  “I . . . I wanted to thank you for your . . . understanding.”

  “There is nothing for which to thank me.”

  “I know of no one else who would overlook a deep wrong against her person and keep so objective an attitude about my . . . proclivities. I am fully sensible of my debt.”

  “You owe me nothing.” She meant it as a kindness. Yet that was not how it came out, somehow. She glanced behind her to see him bow his head and turn back into his cabin. That was all that was needed to sink whatever spirit remained to her. She had not meant it to end so.

  This might be the
last time she would ever see him. It was another loss, along with Africa, along with her father. She was surprised it hurt so badly.

  Thirteen

  The hackney coach stopped in front of number 27 Curzon Street. Beth looked up at the imposing stone front of the house, her emotions wound tight in her chest. Her nerves were still a-jangle from a day and a half on the Mail Coach with Mrs. Pargutter up from Portsmouth. She wondered how she would have supported the voyage had that lady not succumbed to seasickness. She’d been relieved to part company. Yet now that she had reached her destination, her mind was even more agitated. Had her letter arrived to inform Lady Celia Rangle of her coming? Would her aunt welcome her or view her as some sad trial? Was she even in London? Beth heaved a breath and let it out. The door to the coach opened. The driver handed her down. She stood uncertainly on the walk in front of the door as he unstrapped her trunks and piled them in a heap. The knocker was on the door, so her aunt was at home. Best get on with it. She could not stand forever in the street without attracting attention. Indeed, several people passing had looked at her with disapproval. She was already feeling out of place.

  Paying the coachman, she stepped forward and raised the knocker. It sounded dreadfully importuning as it banged against the plate. The butler who answered it looked down at her from a height well above six feet, his mouth dour. He was an older man, his shoulders slightly stooped, one of those retainers who had been with Lady Rangle so long that he felt proprietary about her time and attention. Beth searched for a name. She had seen him several times.

  “Edwards, is my aunt at home?” Did he remember her?

  Recognition dawned in his eyes, followed close on by disapproval. He could hardly deny someone with a direct relationship, but he could frown his censure of luggage heaped in the street. “She is resting, Miss Elizabeth.” He paused to emphasize his coming generosity. “However, I will have the underfootman take your things up to the blue bedroom.” He stepped aside to let her in with great condescension. “You may wait in the drawing room.”