Dawn Thompson (27 page)

“What was I to do, sir? You told me to admit no one. I went at once when I heard the knock, for fear one of the others would let someone in. They have their orders, but they have no understanding of the danger—especially Rodgers. I couldn’t take the chance.”

Joss broke the seal on the missive, whipped it open, and read:

Joss,
It has become necessary for us to leave England for awhile. You knew this would come. We are needed abroad. The weather prevented us saying our good-byes in person. The Abbey is in your hands until we return. Look for us in the spring, when it is . . . safe. Until we meet again,

Your loving father and mother.

“Is it bad news, sir?” the valet asked anxiously.

“Hm?” Joss grunted, his brows knitted in a frown. “It is encrypted. See here, it’s dated nearly a fortnight ago. They sent it well before I went to London seeking them, before they left in great haste. They didn’t even tell the townhouse servants where they were going.”

“But what does it mean, sir?”

“It means, Parker, that my praying they’d come home and lend a hand in this is to no avail. They will be gone until they can return without their youthful appearances
damning them, and that when they do return, it will be in the spring—a generation from now at least. We had discussed this. It isn’t wholly unexpected. But someone must have questioned their appearance for them to have left so abruptly.” He jammed the missive into his pocket. It had shown another thorn on the rose he longed to pluck: Would he stay youthful as the years passed, as his parents had done, or age like a normal man? “No matter now,” he said, beating that thought back. “They know what they’re about. When it is safe to do so, they will contact me again. Right now, we have a greater press. What has become of Miss Applegate?”

He strode to the window and took another chill that crippled him so he nearly lost his footing. He hadn’t noticed until that moment that the draperies had been drawn back. He was almost afraid to look below. That vantage gave a clear view of the stables and the raging bonfire, which hadn’t even begun to die down. He could have sworn his heart stopped. There, in the drifted snow, he picked out Cora’s footprints in the weak slice of moonlight finally breaking through the clouds. The trail carried toward the stable, and there were no footprints returning.

Spinning from the window, Joss strode to the armoire and rummaged through Cora’s things. Her fur-lined wrapper was not among them. “Bloody hell!” he seethed. “She’s out of the house. Make sure the tunnel room remains unlocked. I can make better time in wolf form than I can on two feet.” Crashing through the door with little regard for his valet, he called out: “I’m taking Milosh with me. Search the Abbey in any case, and the old rule stands . . . admit
no one.
Look sharp, and pray that we find her before our enemies do!”

Milosh threw the door to the toile suite open almost
before Joss’s knuckles addressed the ancient wood. “What is it?” he said, stepping into the corridor.

“Cora’s left the house,” Joss panted. “She must have seen the bonfire and gone to investigate. I saw her footprints from the master suite bedchamber window. There isn’t a moment to lose.”

The last was spoken unnecessarily; Milosh was sprinting along beside him as they ran down the back stairs and burst through the rear door into the snow. Beyond the stable, the eerie red glow of the bonfire cast a blood-red haze over the indigo sky. Sparks rose, fanned by the wind that spread the stench of burning horse and human flesh to where they stood. The sickening sweetness threatened to make Joss retch. Eyes narrowed upon the trail at their feet, the pair trudged on, taking great care not to sully the tracks picked out by the moon.

Reaching the stable, Joss called out Cora’s name. It echoed back to him, ringing from the empty stalls, rousing the horses, whose complaints funneled down the long length of the building to meet them; but there was no human sound, and Joss’s heart began to hammer against his ribs. There was no sign of Cora.

“This way,” Milosh said, pointing to the place where her footprints passed the stable. They hadn’t taken two steps when he seized Joss’s arm. “Stop!” he gritted. “Look here.”

Joss squatted down over hoofprints. Glancing further west, he saw signs of a struggle. The horse had pranced in circles. Cora’s tracks led there then stopped altogether, and the hoofprints led off down the tor.

“They’ve got her!” he seethed, surging to his feet. “The tracks are fresh. We haven’t a moment to spare. Choose your mount; I’ll saddle Titus.”

“Wait,” Milosh said, crouching down to examine the
prints. “No horse will catch that beast, not even your Titus. It’s the phantom, and infected. It won’t sprout fangs, but it would tear your throat out with its teeth right enough, and it now has extraordinary powers. It will do the bidding of its master.”

Joss blinked the mist from his eyes. “Sentinel,” he murmured. “It was Sentinel . . . the mildest gelding in my stables. I cannot imagine him as you describe.”

“He is a killer now, Joss. This wants the Brotherhood. You will never catch it otherwise. Infected animals are the nastiest. One never knows what they might do, and it will take more than one wolf in a confrontation with it; it will have the strength of ten horses, I promise you. Come. We are wasting time.”

The two men left their clothes in the stable and, minutes later, a pair of wolves—one white, one darkly masked and saddled silver-gray—loped down the tor to follow the phantom horse’s tracks in the moonlit snow.

It was no use to struggle. Sooner or later Clement would relax his grip upon her—he would have to—and she would run. The kirk came to mind as a likely place; she would seek refuge there. It was a reckless plan, but something to cling to as her captor’s high-stepping horse pranced down the tor.

Joss would have discovered her missing by now. He would surely come, but she dared not wait for that. As soon as an opportunity to escape arose, she would take it. One thing was certain: never again would Clement—or anyone else for that matter—touch her in the vile manner he had when he took her virtue. Of course, this was not Clive Clement. This creature using Clement’s shell of a body was
vampir,
and what it could do to her was far worse than what she had already endured, or could possibly imagine.

Now and then the phantom horse tossed its mane, curled back its lips, and jerked its head around, as if it had in mind to bite her with its great teeth. Its eyes were glowing red, even though that they’d left the fire behind,
and long strings of drool dripped from its mouth. Her instinct should have been to shrink away, but that would mean leaning into Clement’s embrace, and that she would not do even if the hideous beast chomped her head off with those great horse teeth. There came a guttural chuckle from Clement, but it was short-lived. They had nearly reached the bottom of the tor, and a blood-chilling flapping sound drew Cora’s eyes toward a large bat hovering over the phantom horse’s head. Its presence seemed to strike terror into the animal, breaking its stride and causing it to cower. It did not slow its pace, though, Cora had never seen the like.

In a blink, Clement was plucked from the horse’s back in a silvery swirl of displaced energy and flung without ceremony into the snow. She had scarcely blinked again when the bat surged to human height. Its wings became a black mantle that covered its emaciated body as it took Clement’s place behind her and urged the horse into a gallop, leaving the man behind.

The new vampire drove the horse relentlessly onto the fells. No ordinary horse could have possibly traveled at such a speed through the tall mounds of drifted snow. The creature’s cold, foul breath puffed against Cora’s hair and sent gooseflesh racing along her spine, and she shuddered visibly, wrenching a lascivious chuckle from the vampire behind her. Was this Sebastian? It must be. If it was, there was no hope of outwitting him—not if neither Joss, nor his parents, nor the legendary Milosh had been able to conquer him in almost four hundred years. Still, she must try something, if only to escape, and she began by taking the lay of the land around her.

The creature chuckled again. “You cannot escape
me,” he said, “though it amuses me that you will try. I do so love the games you mortals play. Your time is not yet, unless you anger me. I have another plan to set in motion before I make you my consort, and you must be as you are to bait the trap, so it will serve you well to obey me in the meanwhile, hm?”

He could read her thoughts! She must guard against that to put her plan into motion. With that decided, Cora tried to clear her mind of all save trivial thoughts, but it was impossible. The howling of wolves chilled her blood. How many voices—three, four, five? Cora had lost count. It seemed like more. The vampires had had plenty of time to attack others in the village, and it would stand to reason that at least some of them would have changed by now. But she mustn’t think about that. Sebastian was too close, and he was listening.

They passed the kirk by, and the kirkyard, with its crooked headstones listing this way and that. Legend had it that crooked stones were a sign of
revenant
; ghouls that rose from their graves after death to wander the earth and prey upon the living. In the old days, such graves were dug up and their occupants beheaded just in case. Sebastian gave the place a wide berth, and Cora marked its location in her memory. If he feared it, she would be safe there.

It was difficult to tell, what with the snow, but they passed what seemed like a large field where some crop or other would be planted in the spring, judging from a few dead stalks in ordered rows poking through the drifts. Next they entered a deep, dark forest to the south. Sebastian seemed to know the way, as if he’d been there before. Here Cora was at a distinct disadvantage, having no knowledge of the terrain.

The scent of pine rushed up her nose and she greedily drank it in. It had a calming power, which was what she needed now. It was darker than dark in the forest, an eerie sort of green darkness that enveloped them and caused the horse to shy as if some unseen entity lived in the viridian shadows. It was peaceful among the trees for a time, until they began to thin and a brake appeared at the edge of a thicket farther south. Wild and overgrown with all manner of bracken and thorn, it seemed a place where a cottage once stood. That suspicion was confirmed when Cora spotted a wedge-shaped silhouette protruding from a heavy windswept patch of gorse so deeply buried that the moonlight scarcely picked it out.

“Astute of you,” the vampire said, answering her thoughts again. “The tract of land we passed is a woad field, and a cottage used to stand here. It burned down thirty years ago. I am no stranger to your England, lady. I know it well. I have many haunts, like this one that I used to frequent before first light.” He laughed. The sound nearly stopped her heart. “Your lover’s father always wondered where I’d gone to escape the dawn. My refuge was right under his nose all the while. He was a fool.” Fisting his hand in her long loose hair, he leapt to the ground and yanked her down alongside.

“Do you hear that?” he said. Until then, Cora had blocked out the blood-chilling howls of the wolves. She heard them clearly now, close by. “They are my creatures,” he said. “Do not think you can escape. They will rip your pretty throat out.”

Still tethering her by the hair, Sebastian dragged her across the snow-crusted ground to the wedge-shaped structure rising above the snow. Reaching down, he
swept the snow away from an iron ring and yanked it, forcing the door he’d unearthed to creak open.

“Go down,” he said, giving her a shove that undermined her balance and sent her sprawling inside. “I won’t be long,” he drawled. “Do not worry, you shan’t be lonely.” Then, the door came crashing down, shutting out the light and causing loose snow to sift down through cracks between the boards that had formed over time.

Cora cried out, scrambling to her feet. She was standing on the earthen floor of what obviously had once been a root cellar. Only thin slivers of moonlight seeped in through the rotting wood in the door overhead, enough to catch a glimpse of movement outside. The earth shook with the vampire’s heavy footfalls. He hadn’t gone.

She hastened to climb the crude wooden steps beneath the door, but the decayed boards gave out and she tumbled back down to the cold, frozen earth. “Let me out of here!” she sobbed, rubbing her behind, for she had landed hard. “Let me
out,
I say!”

Sebastian laughed. “In due time, my dear, all in due time,” he said. “Though I wouldn’t be in such a hurry for that, if I were you.”

The scuffling of his feet in the snow was the only sound then, until something heavy slammed upon the door overhead, causing the wood to shudder and more loose snow to sift through the cracks. Cora cried out, but this time there was no reply, only the sound of Sebastian’s top boots carrying him away.

Cora groped through the dark until she found the steps. There were four, and it was the third step that had broken, sending her sprawling. Testing the others, she began to climb again. The old wood creaked and splintered at her weight, slight as it was, but she managed to
make it to the top and began pushing her hands against the overhead door with all her strength. Again and again, she heaved against it. From what she could see through the gaps in the wood, a large flat stone covered the door. What if more snow came and buried the root cellar, she wondered; it wouldn’t take much. Suppose Sebastian never came back? She would die a slow, horrible death down there in the bitter cold. That thought drove her relentlessly, and it took some time, but she finally raised the door a crack—just enough to see what lay beyond. She froze with the door suspended. Two poison-green iridescent eyes wreathed in red stared back at her from the head of a massive wolf, its foul and visible breath puffing in her face, its hackles raised from the shaggy gray ruff about its neck to the razor-straight ridge along its spine. Its mouth hung open, its lips curled back over yellow fangs dripping foam. For a long moment Cora’s eyes met the creature’s boldly, before the animal snarled and lunged. The sound of its great teeth striking the wood ran her through like a javelin as she backpedaled, half falling, half scrambling down the steps to the hard dirt floor, the creature’s guttural growls ringing in her ears. She covered them with her hands to shut out the sound, and the noise the beast’s claws were making as it dug and scratched at the wood overhead. But she heard it still, and she pulled on the fur-edged hood of her mantle and held it against her ears with her tiny hands balled into fists.