The Kindred of Darkness (6 page)

‘Oh, I hate the catch on that thing! One of these days I'm going to lose it and then Daddy will be furious …'

Well he might be
, Lydia reflected as she gathered up the glittering weight in her hands. The thing was easily nine hundred guineas. ‘I'll get it.' She moved to put it around the girl's throat.

And as she did so, even without her spectacles, she saw on the right side of Cece's throat, just above the jugular vein, the small, fresh scab of two puncture wounds, as if the flesh had been bitten by an animal.

For a blank second Lydia wondered if this were her imagination.

But Emily, coming in at that moment saying, ‘Cece, have you got a cigarette? After listening to Ned Seabury for two solid hours I deserve—' then stopped in her tracks and said, ‘Cece, what
did
you do to your neck?'

And Cecelia put her hand over the wound and said, ‘Just a stupid accident with a pin.'

And she smiled a smile of dreamy ecstasy.

I
s it Grippen?

Light rain, blowing in late, clattered on the window. Across the street, the chime on All Hallows church struck one.

Or one of his fledglings?

What can I do?

Lydia stared unseeing at the neat pages of handwritten notes before her.
Jan. 12
, Empress Josephine
from Bordeaux, Matthias Barrière and Family, of Bordeaux – 2 trunks 2×2×5½ 275 lb. Same craft, Ottakar Dusik of Prague, trunk 2×17 – ×4 200 lb. Jan. 13
Doksa
out of Athens, Christov Antokolski of Kiev, coffin of his father. Jan. 13,
Sirena
from Venice, Natalia Vatarescu of Sofia, and maid, 3 steamer trunks: 2×2×4 250 lb, 28'×17'×50 220 lb, 28'×22'×3.5' 250 lbs …

What could I say, and to whom?

She knew the look in Miss Armistead's eyes. The girl was being lured by a vampire.

Courted in her dreams – as Lydia's companion Margaret Potton had been courted four years ago – with visions of a soulful Byronic wanderer through the ages, who lay the heart he did not think he still possessed at the feet of a living girl who could save him …

She wondered if the vampire seducer had grinned to himself all the while at the depth of her eager surrender, tickled at his own power to fool.

She shivered, and drew the room's spare blanket closer around her bare shoulders.

Ludovico Bertolo of Sofia, and valet, Jan 15, from Cherbourg, on the
Reine Margot,
trunk 28'×18'×6', 300 lbs. Fuad Al-Wahid of Cairo, Jan 17, on the
Great George
out of Bordeaux, with the coffin of his brother …

By and large, vampires fed on people no one would miss. Crossing-sweepers, mudlarks, paupers in workhouses or old men sleeping on alley pavements in the East End.

But neither man nor vampire lives on bread alone. The drunkards, the whores, the irredeemably abandoned were no fun to hunt.

And with all of eternity before them, vampires – she had been told by Jamie, who knew them better – were often and easily bored.

Her skull felt as if it would split.

Cece would deny it.

If Grippen – or one of Grippen's fledglings – was Cece's demon lover, Miranda and Nan would probably die if Lydia asked questions, poked into shadows.

They'll probably kill me, too
.

And Cece
.

Would vampires dare kill the daughter of an American millionaire?

Grippen wouldn't
. That was a thousand times worse than two or three paupers a night.

But none of his fledglings is more than six years a vampire. Who knows who they are, or how much control he has over them.

By the end of the evening Aunt Lavinnia had been unobtrusively maneuvering to break up Lydia's conversations with the American girl, lest – Lydia knew without a word being exchanged – her growing friendship with Cece encourage Armistead and his bumptious partner Binney to believe themselves ‘accepted' into the Halfdene-Peasehall social circle.

God, forgive me for not pulling Cece aside this evening, demanding to know what's going on. For not warning her, telling her
…

Telling her what?

5–7 Shoe Lane, willed by William Boyle of Newham Street to Francis Houghton of Priest Row, Nov. '07. 10 Bell Yard, willed June '08 by Cosimo Graves of Rood Lane to Bartholomew Barrow of Rose Street. By the same testament, 2 Rose Street willed to Daphne Scrooby of Parish Street, and 13–17 Horsleydown Street to Nicholas Barger of Rood Lane. 29 Rosemary Lane by deed of gift Dec '09 by Viscount Vauxhill to Nicholas Barger of Rood Lane
…

(Dear Heavens, not Geoffrey Vauxhill! Father wanted me to marry him!)

Vampires hunt slowly, when they hunt for sport. They'll court a victim for weeks or months … Cece looked FAR too healthy for this to have been going on long …

I can't let her meet him again!
But even as she thought it, she knew she'd have to. Distantly the clang of the Liverpool Street train yards broke the dark of the sleeping city, and the coal-oil stink of the lamp smoke vied with the pungency of the dried garlic she'd hung in garlands around the window.

I should have hung them in Miranda's nursery.

Osric Millward – she had heard from Valentina, accompanied by a tinkling, silvery laugh – had such protections on the windows of the small chambers he rented in Kensington, on the settlement that his wife's family still paid to him. ‘Honestly, I'm astonished the poor woman stayed with him as long as she did! She's a cousin of Honoria Savenake's … still lives in Deauville … I hope your husband doesn't keep horseshoes nailed to the doors or strews salt across the thresholds …?'

Dimly, she heard the clock strike again.

She opened her eyes. Sat up. The rain had ceased, and the lamp had gone out. Something moved outside the window.

Some flying thing that blundered into the glass.

Lydia put on her spectacles, got to her feet.

She crossed to the window, her long red hair hanging down her back in the ruins of her chignon, the fawn-and-pink silk of her niece's gown whispering perfumed secrets. Whatever was out there, it was small and pale, bobbing erratically in the darkness. Sulfur eyes sparked in the light.

Is this a dream?

Feeling strangely unlike herself, Lydia unhooked the swags of garlic and wolfsbane from the curtain rods.
Did Cece dream something like this? About how she had to go to the window, open it for whatever that is – that white flying thing out there?

Did it whisper like this in her mind?

She stood for a moment, hands filled with dried blossom, looking out into the darkness. Then she carried the garlands to the farthest corner of the room, covered them with the bed pillows, came back to the window and opened the casements.

Stretched out her hand into the blackness of the night.

It landed on her wrist, a white mantis half again the length of her palm. Tilted its triangular head to regard her with yellow eyes. Four little feet pricked the skin as it walked up her wrist, the other two, tucked centaur-like up under its breast, for all the world as if it was indeed about to recite a Paternoster for the insects it would kill.

She brought it inside, set it on the corner of the table where the reflections of the street-lamps did not reach. Wondered again if this was really happening.

The mantis changed, and a man stood beside the table. He was young and very thin, his long hair like dusty moonlight over his shoulders and his champagne-colored eyes reflecting the dim luminosity like a cat's.

Scars marked his cheekbone and throat, as if the wax-white flesh had been sliced with razors.

He said, ‘Mistress,' and because this was a dream Lydia stepped forward into his arms.

His flesh was cold through his clothing and his grip like whalebone and steel cable. It was like embracing a skeleton in a two-hundred-guinea suit.

‘Hush.' He brought up a gentle thumb to wipe the tears on her face. She realized she was weeping, and could not stop. ‘Hush, t'will be well. T'will all be well, Mistress.' The clawed nail touched her skin like a dagger-point. For a time she could only cling to him, terrified that waking would drag them apart, until her tears were all cried.

‘He took my child,' she whispered at last. ‘Grippen took my child.' Just being able to say it was like a steel band breaking from around her chest.

She didn't have to keep silent any longer, or be strong, or explain.

Don Simon Christian Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro understood.

He said one word, in Spanish, that Lydia guessed would have taken paint off a gate.

Then, ‘What does he want of you?' He handed her into the desk chair where she had been sitting, replaced the blanket around her shoulders. Then he perched one narrow flank on the corner of the table, folded those long hands upon his knee. He had a gold signet ring, worn nearly smooth by time.

‘There's an interloper here, another vampire.' She removed her spectacles, wiped her eyes. Replaced them. Simon had seen her in worse state than as a goggle-eyed golliwog, and anyway this was only a dream. ‘You got my telegram?'

‘Upon arising. Service in Rome is villainous.'

‘When will you be in England?'

‘Tomorrow night.
Die Todten reiten schnell
, as Burger observes. One of the few advantages I have ever found in being dead. He wishes
you
to find this interloper?' Another man's brows would have knit – there was only a flicker of shadow in those yellow pupils pleated with faded gray.

‘He says he can't. He's a Serb, or a Montenegrin, Grippen says, calling himself Zahorec … Simon, before anything else, please, can you learn if Miranda is still alive? She's with her nursery maid; Grippen kidnapped both.'

‘Then I should say the odds are good that both thrive.'

‘But it doesn't mean she's safe. It doesn't mean she isn't terrified, or hungry, or cold, or alone in the dark. It doesn't mean they haven't murdered poor Nan—'

‘Nan?'

‘Nan Wellit. The nursery maid.' Lydia wiped her eyes again, propped her spectacles back into place. ‘She's only seventeen. Heaven knows what will happen to her – to them both – if she tries to escape. Or if whoever is keeping watch over them panics. …'

‘Were I employed by Lionel Grippen to guard one whom he wished to keep well,' remarked Don Simon, ‘I should take great care how I panicked.'

In appearance, the young man before her was as he had been when death had claimed him, in his mid-twenties, in 1555. Lydia had not seen him in waking life since a November night last year in Peking, and the scars on his face – taken in a struggle with the Master of Constantinople, to protect her – seemed fresh as ever after four years.
How long DOES it take vampire flesh to heal?
He could keep the living from seeing them, though Lydia suspected that they would be visible in a mirror.

She wished she could do as much with her eyeglasses.

He had killed, probably, at least as many people as Grippen had. Drunk the energies of their deaths in order to maintain his own powers to tamper with the perceptions of the living.

Murderer and monster, a walking corpse.

She took his thin hand. ‘Please.'

‘It shall be as you desire, Mistress.' Inflections of sixteenth-century Castille clung to his whispering voice. ‘At this distance, knowing neither your child nor the girl, no, my mind cannot touch theirs. In any case I would hazard that Lionel guesses you will call on me – though to my knowledge he knows not where I am hid – and he will have bestowed the pair of them underground. The thickness of earth baffles our senses. Thus it is, I suspect, that he can find no trace of this interloper himself. London is an old city, and built upon river clay. Underground rivers flow beneath her streets, and the movement of living water confuses perception. Ancient crypts lie deep below the palaces of your progress, and Roman vaults below them. An interloper, whose mind Lionel knows not, could easily hide from him for a time.'

‘Since early February, Grippen says. But Grippen's dealt with interlopers before.'

‘But interlopers before promenaded themselves upon their arrival, walked the night streets that he might see them, and asked his leave to hunt. I take it this man has not.'

Lydia shook her head. ‘Grippen says he's been killing, every night and sometimes twice and thrice—'

‘Has he, indeed?' This time the vampire's eyebrows really did go up.

‘Grippen said the police – and worse, the people of the neighborhood – were getting angry and suspicious—'

‘Well they might. There are those among the Undead who would – an they could – kill twice and thrice in a night, and most would hunt every night an t'were possible. But 'tis not. Indeed, without stooping to the vulgarity of a pun, I would say 'tis the chief bone of contention between most Masters and their fledglings that the Master must keep those he has created from over-hunting their grounds, and revealing to the living the existence of the nest. 'Tis curious that this interloper, knowing himself in a strange city with a powerful master, would kill in this fashion. What does he do, that he would
need
to kill so?'

He looked about him at the dingy flowered wallpaper, the narrow bed. ‘And where is James during all of this? I take it you are in London—'

‘Yes, at the Women's Temperance Hotel on Blomfield Street. James is at a philology conference in Venice, lecturing on Balkan dialects. I wired him this morning.' Already it seemed weeks ago. ‘At the same time I wired you, but I've heard nothing. I think he must have gone on from Venice to … somewhere else …'

Her voice faltered. Another woman might have suspected an errant husband of marital divagation. Lydia's own fears ran deeper than that. James had often said that no one ever really left the Department: working for them was more than something you did. It was something you were.