by Lara Hayes
“I know. I have a great many limitations, Elizabeth. But at least one of your problems is well within my area of expertise.” We stand together, slowly, both exhausted. Elizabeth’s lips are pressed in a firm line. “Stay in this room until I have gone. We should not be seen together.”
Her small fist balls the edge of my emerald sweater in her clammy fingers. “What are you going to do?”
I slide my sunglasses down and stare into her hesitant eyes until her lids grow heavy, and her hand loosens its grip and falls into my waiting palm. She drifts closer to me, lulled by the promise of peace. I stare down at her hand, which seems so small. Collins has frightened her, intimidated her, stalked her, and no doubt intends to do much more than that. A possessiveness I have only ever felt for Fane rises in my chest, so swiftly I cannot obscure the malice that twists my features. Elizabeth snatches her hand away, and takes a step back.
“I am going to pay a visit to Mr. Collins.”
* * *
Elizabeth’s only reprieve the past week has been between the hours of one and four a.m. every other day when Mr. Collins abandons his surveillance and heads to the mortuary to collect the evening’s bounty from Derek Carrington. Little good it does her, as her mother rises promptly at six every single morning. I waited in the shadows beside Elizabeth’s brownstone until the sun threatened to rise and Mr. Collins drove off for a few precious hours of sleep.
My family hunts only those who will not be missed and our night is staggered to keep the number of disappearances to a minimum. Month after month, measured by the flesh of the dead. Year in, and year out. The task of obscuring the ever-mounting body count belongs to Bård, and I sometimes accompany him on the occasional meeting with lackeys in the mayor’s office, the district attorney, a tight-knit brotherhood of veteran detectives who call themselves “The True Blue”—all corrupt—and the leaders of every local gang and crime syndicate. Money talks and through the tireless efforts of the Opes family as well as lucrative side ventures—like our arrangement with Collins—Fane has more than enough to make even the most damning surveillance footage vanish. Still, we are all expected to be discreet and careful.
Down by the docks, I watch the shadowed silhouettes of strong muscled bodies shuffle below. The whole outfit is finely tuned. Fishing trawlers having emptied their cargo have empty freezers, awaiting Collins’s more sinister meat. The loadmasters do not speak aloud of the work, not even to each other.
I have spent the last few hours rifling through Mr. Collins’s boathouse office. His records are as meticulous as they are vague. All written in the same indecipherable shorthand, similar to what I receive from Bård. Perhaps this is a code they developed together. Where on earth did my brother meet this man? Collins is cautious, to be sure.
The screaming ache behind my eyes dulls to a low roar in favor of a sharper sense. Mr. Collins’s van rumbles to a halt at the top of the incline at precisely three thirty a.m. As always, he collects his cut, secured in a manila envelope in a drained diesel barrel. In anticipation of counting his booty, he whistles a half-forgotten melody, keys jingling between his fingers and boots assuredly crunching the gravel underfoot. But the lock on the boathouse door offers no resistance to his key, and his jaunty tune dies mid-whistle. He shuffles his feet, and from the shadows of his office I watch his cap-covered head twist into the night to scan his surroundings.
Fear has already begun to pickle his blood, and bitter is precisely the way I imagined he would taste. He slips the pistol from his waistband and steals into his office. Papers rustle beneath his feet, a whirlwind of mess spread across the floor. The acrid stench of human perspiration fills the air, and his pheromones carry me further and further away from myself. The thirst. Always the thirst. My throat, unbearably dry, constricts.
From the corner, in the deepest shadows and just in front of the barrel of his gun, the swoon of the hunt hits me like an inescapable tide. Heat—or the anticipation of it—licks its way from the tips of each finger, to the soles of my feet and curls between my ribs, my body spreading open on the inside.
The blaze rages through my veins as Collins fumbles a frantic hand along the wall, searching for the light switch, lowering his pistol in the process. All my distraction, the fatigue, the booming in my head, the sun-weary ache behind my eyes, the worry, the doubt over this treachery and Elizabeth—all of it burns to a cinder, and what is left is instinct.
One hand clamps over his gaping mouth, and the other twists the gun from his distracted grip. I push the cold steel barrel against the base of his skull, and all protest leaves his body until he is as stiff and still as the chilled corpses in his van. “Turn around.”
Collins does not hesitate, and when he faces me his eyes are deceptively calm. His muscles tell a different story, taut and thrumming with unspent violence as he fights the futile impulse to retaliate. I press my face so close to his that our noses touch and my eyes stretch to fill my sockets, to swallow him whole. His muscles loosen, as though slipping into a warm bath, lips parted, mouth slack. My body shakes from the effort to restrain my hunger, to remain calm.
“Mr. Collins, I apologize for the mess.”
Tears gather in his eyes as he stares back unblinking, mute.
“Does your wife know the nature of your business?”
He can only nod.
“Good man. Honesty is the foundation of a strong union.”
Fat tears roll unfettered down his stubbled cheeks.
“You love your family, Mr. Collins. You want to protect them.” Again, he nods. “Write a letter to your wife. Tell her to take the children and leave the city this very morning. She must call no one. Tell her to stay with someone she trusts, and not to return until you come to get her.”
I back him against the desk, careful not to break eye contact until pen and paper are in his hands.
“Write to her. Something urgent, but nothing specific.”
Reeling from the sedation of our encounter, Collins hastily scribbles his final correspondence. When he reaches the affectionate valediction, his penmanship steadies, and upon concluding the signature, he grips the pen as tightly as a blade. His right hand raises to plunge the pen into my breast, but I sidestep behind him with an arm around his waist.
He opens his mouth to scream—they always do—but my hand is already in place, closing his mouth, drawing the long neck back. The flesh erupts under my teeth, and the blood—molten in its slow-moving heat—crashes down my throat in a maelstrom of memory. The faces of his children, sweaty after play. His wife’s soft body, limp and sated beneath him. Her trembling arms wrap around his neck as though it were my own, and my grip on Collins doubles. The spinal cord pops in that satisfying way that few will ever know. Gauzy flashes of life. The threads disintegrate as the blood slows, a warning of his imminent demise I ignore out of sheer contempt for this man.
I drink deeper than I have in years, to the bottom of him, to the base of the cup, until the memories drown and all that fills my mind is an unfathomable and impenetrable darkness. Mr. Collins takes his first wavering step out of my grasp and into cold oblivion, and I rear back, shoved to safety by death herself as the body crumples at my feet.
If there exists anything more ravenous than my kind, it is the vacuum that awaits us, and though I learned several lifetimes past that death has no interest in me, neither am I welcome in her realm. I press my palms to the top of his desk, powerless to stop the icy shiver that races down my spine, a cold that penetrates my bones despite the heat of his stolen blood.
A moment’s meditation is required, a deliberate and sobering breath, and in my reflection Fane finds me. A familiar swell of gratitude washes over me, warm and honest, that my Lord saw fit to save me from such an impersonal fate, and blessed me with life eternal. However far I have fallen from his grace, the honor of being the only human from which Fane has ever fed, is mine.
The poison of my unclean, mortal blood which Fane took into himself was made extraordinary at great pers
onal cost. For weeks he lay in bed, tainted by my humanity, writhing in pain. Strigoi blood, his nightly fare, could not cleanse him. The blood of a fellow Moroi was the only known antidote. And had a Moroi felt physical pain before, or was Fane the first? Did death keep him barred from the black beyond, hanging on the precipice between the living and the deceased by her crooked fingers?
Once he was restored Fane refused to speak of the experience.
Why turn me himself when any Strigoi under his command would have readily ushered me across the divide?
A low bellow gurgles from the depths of the trawler docked below. I set to work swapping Collins’s clothes with mine, leaving his worn denim in place and looping my own emerald sweater down over his head and shoulders. I don his yellowed undershirt, his black Carhart jacket, stuffing the pockets with his identifiers: wedding ring, watch, wallet. I tuck my hair inside his cap as the boat cries its final warning.
Any one of the young men waiting to load the cargo could recognize his face. I kneel beside his head and remove the straight razor from my boot. The body is dry and barren as bone. A few shallow scores along the jaw, the forehead, the eyes, and the skin separates in my hand like the rotten peel of some exotic fruit. I have not scalped a man in centuries. I fold the flesh against itself and shove the evidence in the outermost pocket of my stolen coat.
I hoist Collins’s horribly disfigured body into my arms, and shoulder him through the side door. The edge of the road is clotted with helpful shadows and at the top of the hill, I open the back of his van. Five bodies lie tangled in the cargo hold. Two with the ghastly pallor of the freshly exsanguinated, and three more riddled with bullet wounds. There is little time to wonder just how many other business partners Mr. Collins had as I flip one carcass on its side and shove Collins to the bottom of the stack.
At the foot of the incline, the young men stand shoulder to shoulder in a ready line. I whip the van around and slowly back down the dock. The crew smacks the side of vehicle and I throw it into park. With the engine running, three men lift the bodies into the night, as a fourth works to cast off the ship.
“What the hell were you doing up there, asshole?” a thickly bearded man asks familiarly. I throw a gloved hand over my shoulder and raise a middle finger. The crew cackles and continue to collect their bounty.
The gasps are audible when they reach for Collins’s body, and the well-oiled machine grinds to an abrupt halt. A string of coarse words, the bearded man crosses himself, and I tighten my grip on the steering wheel, one hand waiting on the gear stick. The youngest among the crew mutters under his breath that this job is not worth it. The rear door slams and with a rap of hands against the back window, I throw the vehicle into drive.
My work here is not over. I hide the van behind the boathouse and reenter Collins’s office.
I text a short message to Elizabeth that she can rest peacefully tonight and resume her usual routine in the morning.
Collins’s letter to his wife is waiting on the desk. I secure it in the manila envelope he collected this evening, and empty the contents of the safe beneath the desk into a duffel bag hanging from the back of the door. Collins’s personal effects cannot be delivered to his widow, of course. But in the morning, she will wake to a considerable sum and an odd note in bed beside her, where her husband should have been.
In an oil drum at the back of the building, I place the jacket with all its incriminating content and douse the evidence in petrol. There is just enough petrol left to deal with the van, but not here.
Sleep, when it finally descends upon me is fevered with visions. Mr. Collins standing behind his two young boys, pushing their curved backs high overhead on a rusted swing set. Their short legs kicking the air and behind them, Collins’s skull shining in the bright morning light, bits of meat still clinging to his cheekbones, his mouth—all teeth—stretching on forever in ghastly, lipless amusement. And as the sun descends for the night and wakefulness returns to me, Collins is waiting at the foot of my bed, a motionless, fleeting shadow, while Erebus whines in a crumpled pile of spiny fur in the far corner of my chamber.
* * *
The waning evening hours are spent on the phone with Andrew, poring over Fane’s finances to ensure I can answer any question, and that Lydia will never again be better versed in our financial state than I am. She has always had ideas above her station, and she has been after my position in Fane’s heart and his affairs since the night she was made. Andy surprises me with his cordiality, his candor. To his eternal credit, my Lord was right about him. Pampered his entire privileged life, Andrew was lacking the proper motivation to serve our family well.
Fear is a great motivator, after all.
I am mindful to be seen about the compound, and careful not to hide myself in my room. Civil when I bid good evening to Lydia, warm when I greet my Lord. Crogher and I discuss the hounds, and Erebus’s reclusiveness. I spar in the armory with Bård while Fane looks on from the hall with familiar amusement. I lose, of course. And though the right to move aboveground has never been denied me, I leave the compound as quietly as a thief, and exit my chambers through the service tunnel, instead of the hatch.
Elizabeth stands in a circle of blue-uniformed nurses beneath the overhang of the Emergency doors, dodging clouds of second-hand smoke. Hers is the only voice I can distinguish. Elizabeth’s attention turns toward me gradually, whether I wish to be noticed or not. Brown eyes pitch across the parking lot as she shifts her bag to the other shoulder, and then she stops. She can sense my proximity, but she waits until her colleagues disperse. She does not approach my vehicle until the last has vanished from sight.
“What are you doing here?” she asks with her head craned through the open passenger side window. “Someone might notice.” Without invitation Elizabeth tosses her purse to the floor and seats herself quickly, rolling up the tinted window.
“I came to drive you home. Unless you prefer to take the L.”
She arches her brow, and grows still. Reluctantly, Elizabeth leans back against the leather with no reply apart from the eventual snap of her seat belt.
The sound of the engine as we drive is the only disturbance to the heavy silence, neither knowing where to start, or what to say. Elizabeth finds her voice in a tangle of traffic.
“Nice car.” Her fingers trace the inlaid wood of the armrest, the stitching around the base of her seat.
“Thank you. You were less than complimentary the first time I drove you home.”
“What?”
“The night you were wounded,” I explain. “I carried you back to my car, and took you to a trusted ally. Mended you myself.”
Unconsciously, Elizabeth rubs her left arm and the conversation drowns before it has really begun. She stares out her window at the familiar streets.
I find a park half a block from her door. One can never be too careful, and I am being anything but.
“Thank you.”
“For?” I pull the keys from the ignition and tuck them in the pocket of my coat.
She twines the hair back round the shell of her ear, and keeps her eyes forward. “Not leaving me to bleed out, I guess. And for taking me home after.”
“You needn’t thank me. I am to blame for your injury.”
Elizabeth appears poised to protest, but I exit the vehicle before she can continue. The soft thud of her thick-soled shoes echoes against the pavement as she rushes to catch up with me. To my surprise, the faint hairs on the back of her hand brush the back of mine in a hesitant dance. I turn my palm outward and her shy fingers entwine themselves in mine. We both stop walking, stalled in the middle of her deserted street. Blood thunders in her wrist, and the blossom of a blush spreads across her cheeks, flooding her full lips. Beneath our feet, the black street stretches out undisturbed, and if I am still, if I quiet the warnings in my mind, I can nearly convince myself that we are the only two beings left in the city.
The flashing high beams of an oncoming car break our shared trance and
I pull Elizabeth roughly from harm’s way, pushing her ahead of me down the short thruway between her brownstone and the next. Once more in the alleyway outside her fenced backyard, she tenses under my touch and digs her heels in. “Stop shoving me. I thought you said you took care of everything.” She crosses her arms.
“I handled one threat, yes. It would be irresponsible to invite another.”
The silver of the waxing moon spills down as she inches closer.
“What did you do to him?”
“Elizabeth, please. Not here. If you will permit me to join you upstairs, I will explain.”
“Is that real?” She tilts her head. “Do you need permission to enter?”
I do not mean to laugh at her, and instantly regret having invoked another glare. “My actions thus far should confirm that I do not.”
“Right,” she grouses as I pull open the back gate, and urge her ahead of me. To further illustrate the point, I silently let myself into the darkened kitchen a step ahead of her and lock the door behind us.
Once inside Elizabeth does not lead the way. “You can show yourself upstairs,” she says with an intentionally flippant wave of her hand. “I need to check on my mother, jump in the shower. Won’t take me long.”
She is only marginally aware that the state of things has shifted, some tangible alteration to our connection. The new depth of our bond, though disquieting, is little shock to me. But then, murder is a contract. Once you have killed for someone, you belong to them.
Mounting the darkened stairs, I think of Fane and the legion of dead I have laid at his feet. Can one corpse alter the meaning of thousands? And how many masters can one serve? Is it possible to remain a loyal servant while serving yourself? And if not, to whom do I swear my allegiance? Taking Collins’s life was yet another act of treason, far worse than my connection with Elizabeth. I regret it, but not enough to promise to avoid such measures with the spy that is sure to replace him.
Elizabeth is mine.