I tossed the turkey in the refrigerator and walked Jakob to the elevator. “When’s our next magic lesson?” I asked as he stepped inside.
After a moment of chuckling, his face went somber. “Are you planning to tell Cabot about the journal?”
“That’s funny. I lured you up here for lunch to ask your advice about that very thing. But I think I’ve already made up my mind. Michael knows about it, but I’m going to wait awhile before telling Cabot or anyone else. I’d like to actually read it before he confiscates it.”
He sighed, looking relieved. “Promise me something, Mora. Promise me you won’t show it to Cabot until you’ve read it. All of it.”
Chapter 11
Katherine Winterborne
November 22, 1994
I’ve gone and done it now. I’m officially a bad person. I guess I’m being overly critical of myself, but technically I’m still a married woman. Phillip has been out of the apartment for months, but I was raised to honor my marriage until the divorce is final. That might be difficult to do with Ryker though. Does a hand on another man’s arm count as adultery?
Ryker and I went to the most interesting bar last night. When I met him in the Village, he suddenly changed his mind and suggested something different. Imagine my reaction when he hailed a cab and gave the driver an address on 121st Street. When we got out and headed down a dark stairwell, I thought he was taking me to someone’s basement. But then I heard music and my nerves settled. I would have hated to put him in his place with a little magic before I even had a chance to get to know him.
We drank bourbon all night, and I actually smoked a cigar! Well, I took a few puffs and handed it back to the gentleman sitting to my right at the bar, a lovely man who later got up and played the saxophone with the band. God, it was fun!
At the end of the night, Ryker got me a cab and was the perfect gentleman. The man didn’t even try to kiss me, which was a bit of a disappointment. It probably would have just made me feel even more like a wanton woman, but I wanted that kiss.
I’m seeing him again this weekend, after Thanksgiving. I thought about it all night and let guilt do a number on my head. I almost called him this morning to tell him I couldn’t see him again, but I can’t stay away. I have to see him. I’ve never felt like this before. No man has ever made me feel the way he does. I know it’s only been a couple of days, but Ryker Caspian has put a spell on me.
I read the sentence one more time to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. If there was any doubt that the man who’d been following me was the same man my mother had an affair with twenty-six years ago, it was gone now. The most shocking part was knowing he was a vampire, which explained his youthful appearance after all these years.
Had she known?
My phone rang as I turned the page to continue reading. It was Jules.
“You’re not going to believe what just happened,” she said without a greeting. “Your stalker walked into my shop a few minutes ago.”
Jules had passed up a college education and opened a vintage clothing boutique down on Broome Street in the East Village, funded by her rich mother for the first couple of years. It was a lot cheaper than Harvard and all the other Ivy League schools she’d been accepted to. If you needed a leather jacket or a T-shirt with some interesting history attached to it, you shopped at 6Seven8, a reference to her favorite decades, even though she wasn’t alive during any of them. I was convinced she was the reincarnation of some dead rock star from the seventies.
Ryker Caspian?
It took me a second to find my words. “The guy from the memorial service?”
“Yep. The same guy.”
That meant a vampire was in her shop, and she was in danger. “Jules, you need to get out of there right now.”
She huffed into the phone. “Please. No one’s chasing me out of my shop. Besides, he seems pretty harmless to me.”
“Seems? Is he still there?” I whispered.
“Why are you whispering? You think he can hear you?” It made her snicker. “Don’t worry, he’s long gone. Didn’t buy anything either, but he left you a gift.”
“Me? What is it?”
“I’m walking into your building right now, so you can see for yourself.”
I hung up and sat down, stunned. I was easy to track down. With the clan’s name on the building, everyone knew where the Winterbornes lived, but he also knew where to find my best friend. This whole thing was spinning out of control.
“Ms. Robbins is on her way up.”
“I know, Otto.”
When she walked into the living room a couple of minutes later, I blurted it out. “He’s a vampire.”
She dropped her bag on the coffee table and headed for the kitchen. “Got any wine?”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“Yeah. Hence my need for alcohol.” She came back out with two glasses of wine and handed me one. “He does kinda look like a vampire. You know, with his dark hair and eyes. Sun doesn’t seem to bother him though.”
“I’m not kidding, Jules. He’s a card-carrying vampire.”
She took a sip of her wine before digging into her bag to retrieve a small box. “I peeked,” she said, handing it to me. “Congratulations.” My first name was written across the top in perfect calligraphy. “He didn’t say a word. Just handed it to me.” She guzzled the rest of her wine. “The guy’s got some creepy eyes.”
After hesitating for a moment, I opened it. There was a ring inside. “What the hell is this?”
She shrugged and sat down on the sofa. “A proposal?”
“That’s not funny, Jules.” I took it out of the box to get a better look at it. “And since I’m pretty sure he had an affair with my mother twenty-six years ago, that would be so wrong.”
“What?”
I spared her the details about the box that mysteriously showed up at the auction house, but I told her about the journal and what I’d read about Ryker. “She was married to my father at the time, but she mentioned that they’d been separated for months.”
“Let me see that thing.” She grabbed the ring and looked at it closely. “It’s probably white gold, and I’m guessing the stones are rubies.”
“It’s platinum.” I got up to fetch the earrings from my bag. The filigree design matched the carving of the ring perfectly. “These were my mother’s, and someone left these on my desk at work this morning in a box with a bow.” I walked over to the painting hanging on the living room wall. “See. She’s wearing them in the painting.”
Jules joined me to see for herself. “Yeah. They’re definitely the same earrings.”
“It was him, Jules. His name is Ryker Caspian, and he paid two hundred thousand dollars for a set of rare letters at the action house today.”
I knocked on the door of the grand suite a few minutes before eight o’clock. When the door opened, a strange woman was standing on the other side. “I’m looking for— Who are you?”
The old woman gave me a wide smile. “Morgan!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, sidestepping her outstretched arms to look over her shoulder at the group of people in the living room. “Do we know each other?” She had to be in her late sixties or early seventies and had a familiar look in her eyes.
She chuckled and put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you know your own grandmother?”
“Uh…”
“Is that Morgan?” An elderly man joined her at the door, and this time I couldn’t avoid the onslaught of hugs.
They pulled away and looked at each other.
“She doesn’t recognize us,” the man said.
“Well, of course she doesn’t.” The woman stepped aside and invited me in. “It’s Grandma and Grandpa. We’re just a little older now.”
Ethan walked up and handed me a glass. “We’re having champagne to celebrate their return.”
“Can someone please explain what’s going on?” I said, happily taking the champagne flute. Like every other immort
al in the clan, my grandparents had stopped aging in their thirties, so while these two people had familiar eyes, they definitely did not look like Grandma and Grandpa.
“That’s the problem with the Winterlands,” the man said. “You leave your immortality at the gate. Every day—every minute really—that you stay there, your mortality starts to catch up with you.”
The woman shook her head. “I looked at my husband one day and barely recognized him. That’s when I took a good look at my hands and realized we needed to get out of there before it was too late. Mirrors are forbidden in the Winterlands for a reason.” She leaned in and whispered, “They like to keep people.”
The man—I mean my grandfather—continued. “Steep price to pay for lifting grief. We had no idea how quickly it would happen. No disrespect for the land of sorrow eaters, but I think that’s exactly what they intend to do when you enter—feed off your residual immortality until there’s nothing left but your old, mortal bones.”
“You’ll get used to looking at us old farts,” my grandmother said with a grin.
If it didn’t bother them, which it clearly didn’t, it didn’t bother me. I kind of liked the idea of having grandparents who actually looked like grandparents.
Ethan took a sip of champagne and pointed at them. “I warned them not to go. The Elders managed to get them out just in time. Another week and they’d have probably been dead.”
I followed them to the living room where everyone was congregating. Cabot was deep in conversation with Ramsey and my cousin Olivia, and James was sitting by the window with some guy who looked a little dazed and confused by whatever they were discussing. Knowing my cousin’s over-the-top presence, I suspected the poor man was just trying to keep up with James’s overwhelming mind dump of a conversation. He was probably reciting his thoughts on ceremonial magic or some other pet topic he liked to expound on to unsuspecting victims.
James and Olivia’s father, my uncle Samuel, lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, but my aunt Charlotte had stayed behind with the twins. She was quiet and shy, not at all like her children, who were usually the life of the party. You’d think they were Cabot’s children. But he had a child of his own, a daughter with some serious magical abilities. Even at nine years old, Georgia could put most of us in our place if she ever developed half of her father’s ambition, which I think we all secretly prayed she wouldn’t. That child was a force. Dangerous if guided in the wrong direction.
And then there was my aunt Rebecca, Cabot’s wife. Now there was a woman with ambition. Rebecca enjoyed living like a queen. In fact, her father was the head of a prominent clan that controlled Paris. If she’d been married off to a French immortal, she’d probably be a queen today, and I never lost sight of her ambitions for her daughter. Neither had my mother. I think that’s why she insisted on naming me as her successor before I reached majority. Had she died without naming me, Cabot would have stepped into the role while his wife quietly groomed Georgia to someday rule the clan.
Knowing that Rebecca wouldn’t miss a gathering of the Circle, I wondered where she was. She’d been conspicuously absent from the meeting to formally announce me as the new head of the clan, and I hadn’t heard from or seen her since the memorial service.
Right on cue, she walked into the living room with a bottle of Dom Pérignon dangling from her hand. She was wearing a tight red dress that hugged her perfect figure and matched her lipstick. Her blond Hollywood-glam hair fell over her shoulders like lacquered waves that barely moved as she walked toward me with a forced smile.
“Don’t you look lovely,” she said, giving my conservative slacks and blouse a once-over. “I’m sorry I missed the council meeting yesterday morning. I hear it was eventful. Your first day as queen and you’re already spotting the enemy.”
I would have preferred a snub rather than her condescending greeting.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, waving it off. “There’ll be plenty more for you to attend.”
We locked eyes for a moment before she raised the bottle to my glass. “I couldn’t take another drop of that Bollinger swill. Would you like some real champagne?”
“I’m fine,” I said, taking a sip from my full glass.
My grandfather headed for the terrace door when the Elders appeared on the other side of it. It wasn’t necessary for them to wait for him to open it, but as a courtesy they rarely let themselves into someone’s house without an invitation. The Elders were long past the point of needing doors.
“Good,” my grandmother said. “We can start now. Who’s hungry?”
Apparently we were having a dinner meeting, which was fine with me because I was starving.
We followed them into the dining room and headed for our usual seats. “Not there, Morgan.” My grandfather pointed to the chair at the head of the table. “That’s your chair now.”
I hesitated. My mother had never sat at the head of the table in her parents’ house, and neither would I. It was disrespectful. I sat down next to my grandmother before Grandfather could make a fuss over it.
“Very well.” He reluctantly took the seat I refused to sit in and motioned for the stranger James had been chatting with to sit directly across from me. “Mr. Miller, this is my granddaughter. She runs the place.”
Rebecca’s eyes threw daggers at me when I glanced at her across the table. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said to Mr. Miller, who was seated next to her. “I’ll shake your hand when we don’t have a table between us.” Everyone laughed at my comment, which wasn’t really funny. “How do you know my grandparents?”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The man’s eyes looked dazed, the same way they had when he was having that conversation with James.
“Mr. Miller has agreed to help the Circle,” my grandfather said with a cheerful smile. “But we’ll get to all that later. First we eat.”
I leaned over to Ethan, who was sitting on my other side. “Where’s Charlotte?” Of all my relatives, my aunt Charlotte was one of my favorites. She was kind and had been a good friend to my mother, nothing like the woman glaring at me from across to table.
“Are you serious? Aunt Charlotte is an empath. She’d lose her mind sitting through a Circle meeting.”
How had I not known that? “An empath? Why hadn’t anyone ever told me?” All those times I’d gone crying to her with my adolescent problems, and I had no idea she was absorbing all my angst and suffering right alongside me. “Jesus, I feel like shit now.”
The housekeeper pushed a cart of food into the dining room and placed a platter of carved roast chicken on the table. My grandfather got up to help her and placed a second serving platter at the other end. After they finished loading the table with sides and bottles of wine, Rita pushed the cart back to the kitchen and returned with one more dish. This one was covered by a silver dome and placed between Mr. Miller and me.
“Bon appétit,” my grandmother said, shaking out her napkin before placing it in her lap. She served me a few slices of chicken, signaling for everyone to help themselves.
Never one to ignore my curiosity, I reached for the covered platter. “What’s this?”
“That’s not for you,” my grandfather said, grabbing my hand before I could lift it.
He left it at that, and I filled my plate with glazed carrots and mashed potatoes, eyeing the platter with an urge to rip the cover off. Maybe Mr. Miller had special dietary requirements and I’d just rudely reached for his dinner. He never touched it though. In fact, his plate was empty.
“Not hungry, Mr. Miller?” I couldn’t resist asking.
Cabot cleared his throat. “Unless anyone has a particularly strong aversion to discussing business while we eat, I suggest we begin.”
“No objection here,” James said. “I have another meeting after this.”
Olivia raised a carrot to her lips. “What’s the poor girl’s name?”
James had a “meeting” every night. He was ruthless in his pursuit of human females who
could satisfy his monstrous libido, which had only grown stronger after his transition. Unfortunately, a mortal woman was no match for him, so he left an endless trail of happy victims while he searched for his Aphrodite.
Cabot continued. “We have a crisis in the city. The Night Walkers are multiplying like flies.”
“How do you know that?” Ethan asked.
“The clan’s connections at the NYPD have confirmed that the number of missing-person cases has gone up tenfold over the past six months. A small percentage of them have turned up as runaways or estranged family members. And of course there will always be a good amount of mundane murders in a city the size of New York. But the bottom line is there’s a ninety percent rise of missing citizens that the police can’t explain.”
I decided to speak up, if for no other reason than to feel useful. “That’s a pretty suspicious increase, but what makes you think it’s due to vampires and not some other supernatural threat?”
“Perhaps Mr. Miller can answer that question.” We all looked at my grandmother as she spoke and then turned our attention to the mystery guest at the table. “Are you hungry, Tom?”
He looked at her, and for the first time since I’d noticed him sitting across from James, he seemed capable of holding a conversation. He nodded, his Adam’s apple bulging as he swallowed and stared at the covered platter.
“Good.” She stood up and slowly pushed the platter toward him. “A man like you needs to eat.” She lifted the lid, revealing a lump of something dark and red that looked like raw meat. It smelled of iron.
Tom Miller couldn’t take his eyes off it. His breathing grew rapid as he salivated and visibly forced himself to sit still. A tiny whimper slipped from his mouth, and he looked at my grandmother with desperate eyes.
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