by Am Hudson
He laughed loudly. “No need for that. The rules have changed here since you took the throne. We no longer stand on ceremony—” He spread his arms out wide, his voice bold and commanding, like an actor on a stage, “—we kill, in these rooms, without consequence, and we care not for discretion. We are after all vampires, and the consequences of unruly vampires destroying the population no longer falls on my shoulders.” He bowed his head, pushing an upturned palm in my direction. “It falls on yours.”
I scoffed, so insulted my head bopped a little. “So you just let them run wild because it’s not your problem?”
“Precisely,” he said, planting his hands behind his back.
I folded my arms, trying not to let it get to me—or at least not to show it. “Well, can you please bring me some headphones then? I really don’t want to be sung to sleep by dying humans every night.”
As he walked past me toward the door, he stopped and whispered in my ear, “What makes you think we only feed at night?”
A cold shiver ran down my spine. I waited until the door closed behind Drake before I let out the breath I was holding.
***
In a situation where one finds oneself cold, in an empty, dirty old room, there are two options. One: light a fire, wet a cloth and start cleaning. Or, two: lift the rusty old trapdoor, slip down into the damp and the dark with nothing but a candle, and sift through spiders and possible skeletons to find a box of journals.
Well, I decided, lifting the trapdoor with one hand, holding a candle with the other, no one ever thought of me as a particularly smart girl.
The trapdoor rolled over and hit the wooden floor with a very loud thud. I stopped and checked over my shoulder, staring at the door to the corridor for a moment as if what I was doing was wrong and I might be caught. I could smell men out there—two of them—vampires. They weren’t talking or moving, just standing there outside my door. I could only assume they were either guarding me or imprisoning me. Not that it mattered just now. I had no plans on leaving.
The small flame of my candle caught the dungeon draught from below and flickered as I placed one foot on the bowing step and pressed my weight down. When it didn’t snap, I braved another foot, and another, until slowly the darkness below consumed me.
Away from the glow of sun through the windows, the thin candlestick cast more light, warming a space around me like widespread arms, dimming a little more the further it reached.
Three things caught my eye as I came to the base of the stairs: a stack of wooden crates to my right, with black ink stamps naming the ship they came in on. Right beside that was a mound of dirt, poorly concealing what I knew instantly were bones, and directly in front of me was a thin chain, attached to a dangling light. The ceiling was so low I wondered how David stood straight in here, and the dirt surface under my feet so thick and wet and cold I wondered how he, who hated the kill suites, could have killed down here.
I pulled the chain and the light came on beside my cheek, sparking a question. I looked back up at the light spilling down onto the first step, daring to come no further, and wondered why there was electricity down here but not up there.
My eyes and my candlestick followed the black cord from the top of the light along the ceiling to the wall, where it dropped down behind a very old desk with a sunken top, and slipped into a wall plug. My mind then resurfaced to David’s room, skipping to the book nook in the wall beside his bed, where I was sure I’d seen a digital bed clock.
So there was power. Just no lighting. Which made sense, I guess, because vampires, when left to live outside the human realm, very rarely used lights when it got dark. They just didn’t need them. But I wondered what David would have needed a light down here for.
I laid the candlestick down on the sunken desktop and turned to take a look around me. The single globe at the centre of the space offered so many more secrets than the flickering flame. A more modern set of cardboard boxes sat slightly rotting from the base in the furthest corner now to my right, and behind them was a wall of guitar cases, laid flat and stacked from the ground to the ceiling in three piles. They were all wrapped tightly in plastic; preserved, I imagined, from the dampness that would otherwise damage them.
A few wooden shelves stacked tightly with books of all shapes and sizes were tucked into the brickwork, half-rotten and giving off a rather pungent stale odour. I shook my head at an imaginary David. He should know better than to leave books in such a place.
Candlestick lit the way while I perused, in search of dated spines like David’s current journals, but I mostly found French titles, indicating, with what French Jason had taught me so far, that these were books on law.
My bottom lip slipped out over my top one. Boring. I wouldn’t even read those if I was trapped in here for three years and had read everything else five times.
We moved on then to the cardboard boxes. Each was labelled clearly with things like ‘David’s NY Apartment’, ‘Corrigan Files’, ‘Frisk Files’. Cases, I imagine. And if those cases had ended in torture, he probably had pictures in there too. Make for compelling reading? Not for this romance-loving book-a-holic.
Over the course of the next half hour I moved and re-stacked the boxes, digging through each one for journals, but found nothing interesting. And as I moved on then to the nailed crates, it occurred to me that this secretive, very private man I married would never leave journals with such personal confessions as recorded emotions laying around for anyone to find. He would bury them, or lock them up so no one could get them.
The other thing I realised, after searching for a hammer for ten minutes, is that vampires don’t usually use hammers. David would have put the nails in those crates with his own hands, and he’d rip them out the same way. I wouldn’t be getting in to them any time soon.
With my feet dragging I skulked up the steps again and blew out the candle, laying it on the bench at the foot of the bed, then hauling the heavy wooden door over the hole and dropping it into place. And with no mission to complete, the loneliness of autumn blew in through the windows and made me shiver.
This time last year I was still wearing shorts. In fact, I’m pretty sure I might have even bathed in the sun. But winter was clearly coming early this year, in that moody way it always did. Although, who knows, that may change next week.
I moved over to the fireplace and gathered up some kindling and a stack of the old newspapers off the coffee table, and knelt down to build a teepee out of it all—the way Mike taught me when we were kids. I made a few attempts at using my Cerulean Light to bring a flame, but I couldn’t even muster up enough energy to zap it like I used to zap my knights. So I grabbed a box of matches off the mantle and did things the old-fashioned way.
The chamber door swung open just as the newspaper caught the flame, and a portly old woman hidden behind a stack of sheets hobbled into the room.
“Hello,” I said, standing up quickly like a kid caught drawing on the walls.
“Oh!” she screeched, nearly tossing the sheets into the air. “Heavens to Betsy, you scared the living willies out of me, dear.”
“I’m sorry.” I winced, sniffing the air a second time as it became apparent that she was human.
Her disapproving eye centred on me as she laid the stack of sheets on the bench at the base of the bed. “Who are you then, and why are you in Master David’s chambers?”
I wasn’t sure what to tell her. “How come you can see me?” I said instead. “Drake put a spell on the castle—so that anyone looking for me won’t see me.”
“Well, I suspect I wasn’t looking for you, was I?” she snapped, and started tugging at the sheets on the bed. “You plumb scared the daylights out of me. Thought the Lord wanted clean sheets on account of bringing that boy back here—not for some lass posing as the Lady Pepper.”
Grrr. My teeth ground together in my mouth. “Bringing what boy back?”
“David. The pretty lad with his green eyes.”
“Oh, um
, no.” I toyed with the hem of my shirt. “He’s not coming back. It’ll just be me in here.”
“Well, don’t be touching anything. The master didn’t like no one touching his things.”
I crossed my hands behind my back. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“See that you do.” The grey-haired old biddy went to work after that, while I watched from the armchair by the fire, stoking the flames into a roaring monster of warmth.
The unsettled motes of dust from the past burst into an elegant dance as the maid ran her feathered stick across them, and the sheets David once slept on were gathered up in her arms after, along with the old bed curtains, and she hurried out the door without so much as a word of farewell. I opened my mouth to say goodbye, but she slammed the chamber door shut, remarking to the guard on the way out that she liked the last girl better.
I poked the fire brutally with the iron pole. Stupid old cow. She didn’t even clean the bathroom. What kind of a maid left that job undone? It was probably full of spiders and webs and mouldy tiles. And… David’s aftershave.
The iron poker fell to the tiled hearth as I leaped out of my seat and ran for the bathroom. I reached for the light switch, but there was no light switch. Of course. So I ran back to the bedroom, grabbed the candlestick and dipped into the fire. It came to life right away, as if the wick had longed to be burned, and we both entered the darkness of the bathroom again, now in a different light.
“What do you think, Candlestick?” I said. “Not as Medieval as we expected.”
And it was true. The walls were tiled from floor to ceiling in tiny white squares, grimy and blackened with age; which was a little scary really, but not Medieval. But despite its windowless coffin-like presentation, it had the most charming Victorian tub in the middle, a modern toilet in the corner beside a rather long counter with two sinks, and an old gilded mirror. Most probably an antique. There were pipes and a faucet to fill the bath, thank God, and even a showerhead in the corner opposite the toilet. And with a candle sending warm splashes of light around the tiles, it looked ultimately lonely but kind of inviting.
I laid the candle on a white shelf by the door, and it lit up, revealing a stack of white fluffy towels—a little dusty but clean—and a small wicker basket with bottles of smelly stuff in it. As I sorted through the bath milk and bubbles, it suddenly dawned on me that David would never use things that smell so… pretty. Clearly he hadn’t lived here alone. He had, in fact, shared this room with a girl.
Pepper.
I threw the basket back onto the shelf and dusted my hands off. “Gross.” I just touched her stuff. Stuff she probably washed in after she had sex with my husband. And it all smelled so nice, like baby powder. And Pepper’s soft blonde hair and milky complexion came straight to mind.
I grabbed the basket again. “Grow up, Ara. They’re just bubbles.”
So me and the bubbles and Candlestick started to work. I used the towel from the top of the pile to wipe out the bath with the cold, rusty water from the faucet, and when satisfied that I wouldn’t catch something, I poured the entire contents of the bubbles into the tub, put the water on full and left, leaving Candlestick behind.
When I came back, naked and wrapped in a towel, with a friend for Candlestick and a book for me, the bath had filled itself with rich sparkling bubbles, and the whole room smelled like beauty.
“You can wait here until my fingers prune,” I said to Book, and dropped Towel to the floor around my feet. My skin sung before my toes even touched the water, already anticipating the rich warmth of hot water on such a cold day.
But as my toes sunk into the tub and my leg followed, I let out a mighty shriek.
“Freezing! Freezing!”
I hopped around the cold bathroom tiles, shaking my foot off, stopping dead when someone banged on the door, shaking the handle.
“Miss? Is everything okay?” a man’s voice said.
“Uh, yeah.” I ran to the door and pushed a hand flat to it. “I’m fine. Just a case of cold water.”
“Right then. As long as everything’s all right.”
“Sure is. But… um.” I opened the door and leaned my head and my shoulder out, trying to keep as covered as possible. The guard’s eyes twinkled as he noticed my bare skin. “How long does it take the hot water to come up the pipes?”
He scoffed. “Not likely to get hot water up here, Miss. Haven’t done for some thirty years.”
“Thirty years!” I nearly fell out of the bathroom. That explained why David was always such a cold stiff! “Well, how am I supposed to get clean?”
“You’re a vampire, ain’t ya?” He appraised me critically. And then I guess he heard a heartbeat, because his eyes rounded in surprise. “Or p’haps not.”
“Never mind,” I said harshly and shut the door. “I’ll just have a cold bath.”
“Better than stinking the place out like a dead body.”
“Hey! I don’t stink.”
“Another week and you will.”
“Could you just get out, please?” I leaned my back against the door. “I want to be alone.”
I heard the chamber door close and then heard his footfalls in the corridor, but I still checked for a sense of energy in the room before I stepped away from the door. For all I knew he only pretended to leave so he could catch me naked. Unfair to be so untrusting, I know, but I would never trust a vampire that chose to remain under Drake’s rule.
Cold and naked, my bare feet angled inward to keep off the icy tiles, I looked to Candlestick and his friend and considered heating the bath with them—like a cauldron. Then an idea I should’ve had two minutes ago hit me in the common sense.
I marched over to the tub and sunk my arms in up to my elbows, using the memory of what David and I did on our last night together to excite my cells. As my body heated up, so did the water, and my arms slowly sunk deeper and deeper into the tub until I nearly slipped into it completely—head first. The water was as perfectly warm as I could desire, and as I climbed in and let my whole body go under, head and all, the worries and concerns and burning desire to cut Drake up while he was sleeping just melted away, leaving me centred and smiling.
But a small niggling pain made my head tight just above my eye. I knew the feeling too well. This far away from Nature—from grass or soil or trees—my Cerulean Light would draw on the energy in my own body, draining it until I ended up in excruciating pain. There would be no reheats of this bath today.
***
When I stepped out of the bathroom, leaving small puddles behind, the empty, dusty old room I expected to enter had changed: the drapes were drawn shut over the dying day, the candles in the chandelier had been lit, and a pair of white, what I assumed, pyjamas were folded neatly on the end of the bed.
A shiver went up my spine. Someone was in here, while I was bathing, naked, in the bathroom, and I didn’t know.
My eyes shifted to the lock on the door as I walked to the bed and picked up the pyjamas. They practically melted around my fingers—the silk so soft and fine it was actually warm to touch. I smoothed the top gently down my face, reaching for the folded paper beside them:
Amara, or perhaps I should call you Ara, as you seem to prefer,
You will find, for your convenience, the top drawer in the chest by the door has been cleared out and laid with some clothes that I think will be to your liking. I have also taken the liberty of choosing some music for you. You will find an iPod and, as requested, headphones, in the nightstand. I will send your personally appointed handmaid to your room at precisely six-thirty pm with supper. Should anything not be to your liking, ring the bell on the bookshelf beside the bed and Fanny will come to your service.
I will be out of the castle until tomorrow morning, but I trust we can enjoy breakfast together.
And he signed it with “Drake”. Not “Uncle Drake”, like his previous communications.
I folded the letter and laid it back on the bed, then slipped my still-partially w
et feet into the legs of the silk bottoms and pulled them up to my belly. I still wasn’t very round for how far along I was, but these pants had clearly been made for someone with a belly and a small bum. And the top, as I slipped my arms and then head through, not only felt like a baby’s face against powdered skin, it fit perfectly over Bump, giving me plenty of room to move freely.
Once I killed Drake and took over his faction of the monarchy, these pyjamas would be coming with me.
I wrapped my towel around my hair and wrung it out a few times on the way back to the bathroom, then tossed the towel in the empty bath and headed back out to find the iPod.
Beside the bed, in a nook that looked like it was once a doorway, was the bookshelf where Drake said I’d find the bell. It was also marvellously stocked with antique hardbacks that, in any other situation, I wouldn’t even dream of touching for fear I might damage a part of history. But, boredom and loneliness called for a good read.
Then again, I decided, drawing my hand back, it looked as though the books had fused themselves to the shelves, becoming a part of the dark wood—as if they might not come out when tugged. So, perhaps I’d just leave them alone.
I opened the nightstand drawer, found the iPod and headphones, and climbed up onto the newly made bed with a little leap. The mattress felt softer than it was when I touched it before and clearly not as ancient as everything else in here. My bottom sunk right down into the lush feather quilt until I tipped backward. Deciding to just go with it, I landed with my hair and arms sprawled out in the comfort of a place David used to sleep—before he met me. It fascinated me in an odd way to think he lived here before he was who he is today. I’d heard plenty of stories about how he changed after meeting me, but what could have been so different about him before. Surely he had to have had some resemblance to the man he is now.
With that thought, my determination to find those journals renewed. I left the iPod on the bed and rolled onto my side, slipping my feet onto the ground before standing up.
