Carpathia (18 page)

  "Touché," Abe said, a smile creasing his face. "But your answer to my question brings up another query. If we're not going to bed, then exactly what do you suggest we do to while away these tiresome hours?"

  "We need to get to the root of this," Lucy said. "Just because Captain Rostron is happy to sweep this under the rug until we disembark doesn't mean I am. I want to know what happened there. Who was that man that Brody Murtagh was carrying? What happened to him? And how exactly did the fellow get away?"

  "Is that what people call suicide these days?" Abe said. "'Getting away.' How quaint."

  "He didn't kill himself," Lucy said. "I'm sure of it."

  "We saw him, Luce," Quin said. He didn't want her to think he was siding with Abe against her, but he knew what he'd witnessed. "He leaped to his death. Even if he survived the fall into the water, we all know how long he'll survive out there in the freezing waters without any sort of aid at all."

  "He never even hit the water," she said. "I'm sure of it. Did you see the glint in his eyes just before he jumped off? That wasn't the look of a suicide. More like a magician about to pull off his greatest trick."

  "So you think it was some kind of illusion? That perhaps he wasn't really there?"

  "I can't say that for sure," she said. "The only thing I know is that Brody Murtagh knew exactly what he was doing when he leaped off that railing, and his plans didn't involve him taking his final bath in the icy Atlantic."

  "You think he's still on this ship." Quin marveled at her. In so many ways, she was a never-ending delight.

  Lucy leaned forward in her chair. "I'm sure of it. Where else could he have gone?"

  "Go on, Lucy," Abe said. "I'm enjoying this little intellectual exercise of yours. Tell us, where is he now?"

  "I don't know." Lucy stood up. "But I plan to find out – with or without the help of you two brave young gentlemen."

 
 

 
 
 

"What in the devil's damned names are you doing here?" Elisabetta stormed across her first class quarters and stabbed a red-nailed finger straight at Brody's chest. "If Dushko discovers you here, he'll kill us both!"

  Brody gave her his best smirk, the one she found irresistible when she was in good spirits. At the moment, it would only infuriate her, he knew, but he didn't mind that. He wanted her as flush with excitement as he was from the fresh blood that flowed through his veins.

  "Don't you dare give me that look," she said. "You know all too well what you've done here, don't you? You forced my hand."

  Brody slouched down into the thick couch that sat against the room's outer wall. "Nice digs," he said. "A fellow could get used to these sorts of accommodations."

  Elisabetta growled at him. "Don't you dare think about getting comfortable here. This is my place, and I don't share well. You're going back down to the hold by dawn."

  "If I do that, Dushko will kill me, and you'll have attacked him for nothing. Do you really want that?"

  Elisabetta opened her mouth to launch into a tirade against Brody. Her fangs had extended from the rest of her teeth, an involuntary reaction to the fury building in her. Brody braced himself for a tongue lashing – maybe even a full-out attack – but instead of diving at him, Elisabetta closed her mouth, spun about, and fell down onto the couch next to him with a heartfelt sigh.

  "Why, Brody?" she said, looking up at him past her thick eyelashes. "Why do you do this? Why can't you just play nice with Dushko? Just until we get to Fiume?"

  Brody snorted, then put a gentle arm around her and let her snuggle up into his shoulder. "For one, we're not headed for Fiume any more. Our next stop is New York City, and you can bet they'll herd us all off the ship while they get everything sorted with all those waterlogged souls from the
Titanic
."

  "But we'll be back at sea in no time at all."

  "What? In a few days? A week?"

  Elisabetta frowned. "When you've lived as long as I have, weeks pass like hours do for the young."

  "Either way, it's too long. The plan's finished. Most of the people down in the hold didn't want to get on the ship in the first place. Dushko tricked or blackmailed them into going along with his little 'back to the homeland' plan. Once we get to New York, they'll scatter like cockroaches from a light. He'll never get them all back on the ship again."

  Elisabetta's frown deepened. She looked older than Brody had ever seen her. "Dushko thinks we're at a crucial juncture. There are too many of us now. We've been too careless. If we don't leave America soon, we're going to be found out, and then all hell will break loose."

  Brody sat up. "If it's going to happen, then let's make it go down on our terms. Why wait for the world to discover us and hunt us down like vermin? Stand up and strike first, I say. Bring the battle to them before they even know they're in a fight. Then we'll see who hunts who."

  A hesitant smile warmed Elisabetta's lips. "You always did talk a good game."

  "I'll do more than talk," Brody said. "I'll lead the whole bloody revolution."

  Elisabetta's smile widened. "Very well," she said, "you can share my resting place tonight. But such largesse comes with a price."

  Brody crossed his arms over his chest. "If you're going to charge me with being a good little dog for Dushko, forget it. The price is too high."

  She ran a cool hand along his cheek and spoke low and soft into his ear. "Nothing of the sort, my sweet. I was thinking of asking you to surrender something a great deal more entertaining – and intimate."

  Brody's head swam, the way it always had since the first time they'd met. A lusty smile curled his lips. "I may have overfed myself," he said, thinking back to the men he'd murdered earlier. "I think I have plenty to share."

  "Excellent." Elisabetta grinned as she threw a leg over Brody and straddled his lap. "I've been holding back too long, I'm afraid, trying to keep a low profile the way Dushko demands."

  "Doesn't that bother you?" Brody arched his head back, exposing a long, warm section of his neck. He could feel his stolen pulse still pounding there. "That sort of discipline always puts me on edge."

  Elisabetta nodded as she lowered her fangs to Brody's jugular. "I'm absolutely starving."

  The first time Elisabetta bit him, Brody had screamed in terror and pain. It had taken him a while, but he'd learned to anticipate the thrilling sensation it sent through his body rather than fear it. He gave himself over to her control willingly and wholly.

  With both of them so consumed by the feeding, neither of them heard the gentle knock at the door that Elisabetta had left partially open when she'd stormed in. They didn't see the steward who'd been roped into helping out with the ship-wide headcount until he'd stepped into the room and caught them in their horrifying act.

  The embarrassed "Whoa, pardon me," that erupted from the steward – who thought he'd interrupted them in the middle of a sexual act – got their attention.

  Startled Elisabetta sprang off of Brody's body, blood still streaming down his neck and from her fangs and lips. The steward goggled at her.

  "Dear God, miss," he said. "What's happened to you?"

  Then he caught a glimpse of the ruin she'd made of Brody's throat. Brody clamped a whitened hand over the wound and tried to stand up, to offer some sort of explanation for what the man had seen. Dizzy from the loss of blood, he swayed and fell back to the couch in what he knew must seem like crumpling to his death.

  The steward opened his mouth and screamed. The horrible noise still erupting from his throat, he spun on his heel and sprinted from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Without even a glance backward, Elisabetta raced after the man. Groggy as she was from the feeding, she fumbled with the door for a moment before flinging it open. Then she was gone, leaving the door wide open behind her.

  Brody pushed himself to his feet. After steeling himself for an instant, he staggered toward the door and after Elisabetta and the hapless steward. When he reached the corridor though, he couldn't see a trace of either one.

  Brody cursed to himself and held his neck tighter, hoping the wound would seal itself fast. He couldn't see a single way that this incident could finish without more bloodshed, but that didn't mean it couldn't end well, at least for him. He hadn't wanted to be discovered – exposed to the world, as it was – in this exact way, but as he'd told Elisabetta just moments before, if they were going to be found out, he was determined to own the moment.

 
 

 
 
 

"It came from that direction." Quin stabbed a finger up the hallway to where a door stood open near the aft end of the Bridge Deck. Abe and he had failed to talk Lucy out of her mad plan to scour the ship for some sign of the man they'd seen leap overboard, and she had led them all over the ship on her wild goose chase. So far, it had proved fruitless, but perhaps that was about to change.

  Abe and he had escorted Lucy down to the second- and third-class lounges, which became wilder and noisier the farther they delved into the ship. After poking through the smoke-filled chambers for many long minutes, Lucy had given up on finding this Brody Murtagh in them. That didn't mean she was ready to call it quits though.

  "He could be anywhere on the ship," she had said. "From the captain's quarters to the deepest hold. We need to keep looking until we find him."

  "It's late, Lucy," Abe had said. "Can't we go hunting for your mystery man in the morning?"

  "And what if he kills again before that?"

  "Then at least we'll have had a good night's sleep before we have to do anything about it."

  Lucy had spun on her heel and stormed off then, her fists balled up beside her. Quin had followed her, and despite his obvious reservations Abe had too. It was when they were coming up the stairs to the Bridge Deck once more that they all heard that horrible scream.

  Lucy had raced up the stairs and then come to a halt as she cast her gaze around, looking for some sign of who could be screaming, but she saw nothing that tipped her off. When Quin joined her, he decided to hazard a guess as to the proper direction from which the scream had come, and off all three of them went. Quin reached the open door first, and he burst inside without so much as a knock. Lucy followed right after him, and Abe brought up the rear.

  Inside, they found a couch stained with what looked like fresh blood. Otherwise, though, the room stood empty. It seemed that no one had spent much time here, and Quin wondered if the cabin had been assigned to one of the other survivors of the
Titanic
, someone like them who had come aboard without any belongings to their name.

  Quin moved forward to examine the stained couch, and Abe moved over to the left where there stood a closed door. That surprised Quin a bit, as the cabin he shared with Abe was a relatively small affair when compared to the luxuries of the
Titanic
. He'd figured that all of the first class cabins would be similarly made, but if that were the case, someone had taken the liberty of knocking out the wall that separated this cabin from the next one over.

  Quin touched the stain on the couch with the tip of his finger, and it came away covered with blood that was still warm. Lucy covered her mouth as she gasped at it. As brave as she was, Quin knew she'd rarely had to face such horrors outside of the occasional novel. None of them had.

  Surviving the sinking of the
Titanic
should have been enough to inure them all to the worst things in life. That hadn't proven true for Quin, and he could see from the look in Lucy's eyes that the experience hadn't armored her against such darkness either. He wiped his finger clean on an unstained part of the couch and then held her hand. She accepted it with quiet gratitude.

  "Dear God!" Abe said from the adjoining room. "Quin! Lucy! You're going to want to see this."

  Quin was at the doorway in a heartbeat, Lucy peering around his shoulder. Inside, Abe gestured toward a large piece of polished mahogany furniture that sat along the hull wall in the room, right where the bed would normally be. It seemed so out of place there that it took Quin a long moment to identify it.

  Lucy made a horrible sound in the back of her throat. "It's a coffin."

  "You must be joking." Quin shuddered in revulsion. He'd been to funerals before and seen many coffins. To find one here in place of a bed, though, disturbed him to his core.

  "Brody Murtagh is a vampire!" Lucy's tone was hard and sure this time.

  Quin's head spun. It made perfect sense, of course it did, but only if you were willing to accept the basic premise that fictional monsters like vampires existed. Nothing in his life had prepared him to believe that such creatures were anything other than the figments of disturbed imaginations.

  "This has to be some kind of cruel joke," Abe said.

  "Perhaps someone is simply returning a body to be buried in Europe," Quin said. "That would fit."

  "Sure," Lucy said, "that's why it's here in a first class cabin rather than tucked down in the hold with the rest of the baggage."

  "You don't need to poke holes in everything," Abe said. "Quin's right. That's the simplest explanation."

  "Along with the blood-drenched couch out there," said Lucy. "And the scream we heard that brought us here."

  Quin stepped into the room, waving off their argument. He'd heard them bicker over things like this before, and he knew that it would not end well for him. They'd both beg him to take their side, and he'd wind up disappointing someone. He had a better idea this time though.

  "It's a simple question," Quin said. "Is this a vampire's coffin?"