Lady Killer (2 page)

Clio looked around the room, memorizing it. She noted the dolls, arranged by dress color, then the small statue of a saint at the foot of the bed, the worn-through boots, the bug-infested straw mattress covered with a patterned piece of fabric—no doubt to brighten the room—and the bouquet of flowers on the window sill, undoubtedly put there with the same end. She noted the two sets of muddy footprints on the floor, one made by the sort of small feet Clio had always longed to have and appearing to correspond with the boots next to the mattress, the other set larger but following the same path from the door to the bed.

Finally, when she had taken everything in and her nose had adjusted to the smell of death enough to keep from gagging, Clio crossed the floor and stood next to the body. Deep green bracelets of bruises circled the girl’s wrists, but no other wounds were immediately apparent. Bending, Clio brushed aside the plait of dark hair that covered the girl’s face.

She recoiled. Huge, glittering eyes stared out at Clio with an expression of acute terror and the dead girl’s mouth gaped open in a silent scream.
No.
Clio could almost see the words forming the syllables.
No, don’t please no, NO.

Clio tried to close her own eyes but she could not. She could not free her gaze from the lifeless one of the corpse, and as she looked, she felt a prickling fear crawl over her. It started at her feet and swam slowly up, until her entire body was tingling. She heard a scream in her ears, in her head, and felt a line of clammy perspiration form down her back. Her heart pounded as she struggled to swallow, but she could hear it over the screams.

There was a noise behind her. The cupboard! She had not looked inside the cupboard, and he had been hiding there. The girl’s face, her scream, had been a warning. There was something coming for Clio. She heard a board creak. The hairs on her arms stood up. She could smell his sweat as he moved up behind her. Another board creaked.

She wrenched her eyes from the girl’s and swung around. A sound rose in her throat, then stopped. From every wall the dolls leered at her, grinning ghoulishly. But there was no one else in the room. She was alone. The door to the cupboard was closed. Her heart thudded. She had imagined the whole thing, there had not been anyone there. She was alone. Her heart slowed. Alone. She swallowed hard and turned back to the bed.

That was when she really knew terror. The hideous death mask of moments before had vanished. The girl was lying on her back peacefully. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were pressed together, and almost curved into a smile. She was still dead, and there were still bruises on her wrists, but there was no sign of the horror Clio had seen in her face.

Clio forced herself to breathe to keep from screaming. Breathe, think, breathe. It was a trick of the light. An illusion. It was nothing, a fake—it had looked so real—there was a logical explanation for it. There was, damn it—but the fear, the fear had been real. It had been the girl’s fear, locked somehow in the air of the airless room. She knew it, the fear of someone about to die.

It had looked so bloody real.

Clio shook her head, shaking away the feeling that she was lying to herself. She had never had a premonition in her life, she did not even believe in them, but she knew with unwavering certainty that something horrible had happened in this place. She concentrated on focusing her thoughts, on pressing the chilling vision down into the darkest corner of her mind.
It had been so real.
She would consider it later, rationally, logically, objectively. Right now she had work to do. She still had no idea of how the girl had died, she reminded herself, let alone who she was. Work to do. Seizing on this, Clio moved her eyes from the serene face. Behind the girl’s head, wedged in the corner between the mattress and the wall, was what appeared to be a dark blue silk kerchief, similar to one Clio had at home, its fine fabric looking startlingly out of place in the humble room. Clio reached across the dead girl’s body to finger it—

And froze.

What stunned her was not so much what she saw, but how unsurprised she felt seeing it. It was as if she had known—had known even as she mistook shadows on the girl’s face for a scream—what she would find. She blinked twice, just to be sure, but this time there could be no trick of light. Just at the point where the woman’s neck met her collarbone, on the smoothest, purest part of her neck, were two dark brown dots, slightly larger than pin pricks, but much, much more deadly.

Although Clio had never seen anything like them, she knew instantly what they meant. The Vampire of London was back.

“Impossible,” Clio whispered to herself. She had been in Nottingham looking for the missing daughter of a baronet when the vampire first made his appearance three years earlier, but she remembered the stories and had the news sheets about his crimes in her files. Twenty-four London women died that summer at the vampire’s hands, and scores of others perished indirectly by being forced to sleep with their shutters closed in airless rooms during the long, hot months. Families bankrupted themselves buying mirrors when the belief that a vampire could not bear to see his reflection gained popularity, and herbologists got rich selling “secret essences” guaranteed to be anathema to demons when applied to the neck. The behavior of vampires past was closely analyzed by the leading lights of Oxford and Cambridge for clues as to his method of selecting his victims, but the London fiend’s preferences remained a mystery. He seemed to strike indiscriminately, preying on women of all complexions and social classes. Their only common denominator was that they were all young and smallish in stature. The inanimate figure lying on the bed in front of Clio was both young and diminutive, so it was not any lack in the victim that had made Clio whisper
impossible.
Nor was it because she had never really credited that the vampire existed. It was quite simply because the Vampire of London was dead.

Or supposed to be. He had been killed three years earlier, shot down in broad daylight as he tried to escape pursuit by stealing a boat and making off down the Thames. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw the first shot go into his thigh, saw him waver, and then watched as the second shot went directly into his heart. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw him look toward his assassin with surprise, saw him stretch his throat to yell, “You’ll be sorry Dearbourn,” and saw him fall backward into the swirling rapids of the Thames at the base of London Bridge. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw the body pelted against the strong supports of the bridge once, twice, three times, until it was sucked into the powerful vortex of the river and disappeared entirely. No one had ever survived a fall that close to the bridge’s supports—even the most seasoned boatmen avoided the rapids at all cost—but the river was dredged religiously anyway, for three months, without a sign of the vampire’s body. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens swore that the vampire was dead and the entire city of London rejoiced.

But Clio knew something that the Upstanding Citizens did not know, a detail that had been kept secret by the special commission the queen dispatched to look into the public menace. She knew that next to each corpse had been found a pure, white gardenia. And now, looking at the windowsill next to the mattress on which the dead girl lay, Clio saw what she had failed to see before. There was not a bouquet of flowers there. There was
a
flower. A white gardenia.

Two hundred Upstanding Citizens, Clio thought grimly, were wrong.

Clio, rational and unafraid and not at all having trouble keeping her breathing steady, rose from the bed and crossed the floor. She looked more closely at the larger set of footprints now. The previous night’s short rain had been the first London had seen in over two weeks, which meant that both the girl’s muddy footprints and those Clio tentatively assigned to the vampire had been made last night, between an hour before midnight when the rain started, and three hours afterward, by which time the ground would have been dry. Clio filed these observations away clinically, as if she had never seen a dead woman scream, and was about to leave when her eye fell again on the cupboard.

The door was not quite closed. It had been closed—hadn’t it?—when she looked before, but now it hung open, just a crack, just enough for someone to be watching her, just enoug—

Clio crossed to it and threw open the door. It was empty. EMPTY she told herself. But she stood looking at it, into it, for a moment, to steady herself. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Not in the course of an investigation. Cool. Levelheaded. Unafraid. Those were the words people applied to Clio. She did not believe in supernatural killers—there were enough bad people in London alone to logically explain all the murders in the world, she had said numerous times. No need to go into the realm of true demons. She had not even believed in the Vampire of London when she first heard about him. She knew that if she had been in the city at the time, she would have found a logical explanation for his behavior. She was convinced that he was no more than a man cloaking himself in a legend.

But suddenly, for the first time, she had to wonder. No
man
had ever survived the rapids that sped under the supports of the Thames. No
man
had ever resurfaced from that particular swim in the river. But the Vampire of London had. Shot through the heart, he had survived. Which meant…

Reason came to her aid. No man
had
survived, but it did not mean that no man
could.
Things were not necessarily what they seemed. It was just this room, this place that was playing with her mind, the heat, the smell, the dolls, and the fact that she had not really eaten anything in two days.

The vampire was just a man, she told herself firmly. A girl had been murdered by someone and she simply had to find out who. This was no different than any other investigation she had undertaken, she was just hotter, and hungrier, her mind was playing tricks, but it would stop, now. She gave the cupboard a scornful look, cast a final glance at the corpse, and stepped out into the courtyard.

Toast had climbed atop a stump of wood and was delivering one of the lengthy performances for which he was named—consisting largely of lifting an invisible glass and drinking it down with intermissions of loud and somber sounding twittering—while the boy sat on the ground before him. From the way he rolled his eyes at her, Clio could tell that Toast was finding the boy an unsatisfactory audience, probably because he had not yet yielded up the packet of meat pies, and the monkey was only too happy when she sat down next to the child.

The boy turned hollow eyes to her, then gestured with his head toward the room and pointed two fingers at his neck.

“Yes,” Clio said, searching his face, “I saw them. The pricks. Did you find her like that?”

The boy looked down at his lap, his face hidden by his dark hair, and nodded.

“When? Today?”

The boy nodded again.

“Is she your sister?” Clio asked. The question was almost unnecessary. Their features were very similar and the girl looked to be only three or four years older than the boy, but Clio wanted to be sure.

The boy answered in the affirmative, this time raising his face to hers. Anger flashed across his hollow eyes, and then expectation.

Despite his lack of speech, Clio understood the boy’s request instantly. “Of course. As soon as I have settled you at home, I will dedicate myself to learning who hurt your sister,” she replied. For most people in London, such an assurance from her would have been all they needed to sleep more soundly in their beds, because Clio’s reputation for wresting the truth out of mysteries was well known. There were a few skeptics who suggested that a person who would willingly take into their home any being—man, woman, child, animal—who merely
seemed
hungry or lonely or even just sad could not be nearly as intelligent as Clio was said to be, but her supporters far outnumbered her naysayers. People had begun to come from all over England not only to seek her aid—which was how she supported her menagerie—but merely to cast eyes upon her, causing the ancient ruin of a house she and her companions occupied on the corner of Milk and Honey Streets to become something of a tourist attraction, rivaling even the gallows at Tyburn in popularity. Indeed, so often did visitors stop her neighbors on the street with the question “Which house is Clio Thornton’s?” that they had forgotten the true name of the rambling old building with the rose bushes growing over the facade and now called it simply Which House.

But Clio’s assurances seemed not to placate the boy at all. He frowned and poked a finger in his chest, then pointed at her. When she appeared not to understand, he did it again.

“
Oh
,” Clio said finally. She tried to smile a boy-soothing smile. “That is a very kind offer, but I am afraid that I only work alone. The best way for you to help me would be to go and eat—”

The boy shook his head fiercely and again went through the pointing regimen.

Clio began to worry that she had not been firm enough with the boy at the beginning and she felt a twinge of panic. When she said she only worked alone, she had been telling the truth. Those who kept track of such things could tell you that Clio Thornton had solved exactly 203 mysteries in the past three years, and she had wrestled with all of them solo. She might turn to others for information, but she always worked by herself. It was a rule she had made years earlier, and it was a rule that no one, especially not anyone under the age of thirteen, was going to get her to break.