He had one, too, and who wouldn’t have who had to listen to the insidious preenings and whinings of those two bitches Mariana and Lady Alecia, all day and all night. While they had been traveling in France and Italy for Mariana’s “edufication” it had been fine, there had been enough distractions. But now they and the waiting were beginning to wear him down, and he was only too happy that the end of his project was nearly in sight.
He breathed more easily as he slipped out a side door of Dearborn House and made his way into Alsatia. His appearance was innocuous enough that he was almost invisible. Neither the women lingering on the street in search of a last catch for the evening, nor the thugs waiting to accost drunken noblemen out on a spree, bothered with him, and he arrived at the Painted Lady Tavern entirely unmolested.
“Who comes strutting upon the stage?” Lovely Jake demanded from behind his hand of cards, then looked up, saw the new arrival, and nodded. “Ah, it is only my good boarder, back from his revels. Would you care to join us in a hand of Primero?”
“No, thank you, I am very tired,” the man refused vaguely, and the other players were just as happy.
“Odd fellow,” he heard one of them lean over and whisper to Lovely Jake. “Doesn’t look quite right in the head.”
He was up the far stairs and had the door of his room closed so he did not hear Lovely Jake’s assurances that “he but wore a mask” as the thespians said, and was actually a very interesting fellow. Afterward, when they were shown the evidence of his disguise, one of them remarked that the mask line had been closer to the truth than Jake reckoned. Of course, Jake was dead by then and in no position to say whether or not he had known that the light-haired, disturbed looking fellow dressed in dark blue who left the tavern less than a half hour later had really been the same man as his strange boarder.
Nor did the women on the street or the thugs recognize him from earlier, but there was something about this new appearance that kept them away even more efficiently. When questioned afterward, one of them even remembered commenting that the fellow, “made the blood run cold in the veins, he did. Could I identify him if I saw him? No. But I would know that feeling again anywhere. I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone with him, not for the queen’s pearls, and the other girls felt the same.”
But the man did not care what they, or anyone, thought of him. He had one thing to do, one thing only, and there was only one person who could help him. Three years he had waited to return to England to put the demons to rest. Three years of planning, and scheming. Three long years. It had been worth it.
Or at least, it soon would be.
He paused for a moment to massage his thigh—the bullet that bastard Dearbourn had shot at him was still lodged inside and it pained him when he tried to walk too quickly—then made the final turn and stopped outside a house. Two of the windows were still lit, but he knew they would grow dark soon. He could wait. Waiting was what he did best.
As he assumed his position outside the house, he glanced up to study the moon, noting with a trained eye that it was a sliver smaller than it had been the previous evening. “Good night,” the man known as Vampire of London then whispered into the darkness. “Sweet dreams.”
“Looked like he was up to no good,” the char-woman who had passed the man on her way to work reported during the hearings of the Special Commissioner later. “Looked like he was putting a curse on someone.”
In his tower at Westminster Castle, the Royal Astrologer licked his pen and wrote: 4 hours after midnight: moon—exactly half full. Waning.
Chapter Seven
She was not alone.
That was Clio’s first thought when she woke with a start. It was more a perception than a certainty. The room was completely dark, she could see nothing, but she could sense the presence of another person. Close to her. Behind her? To her right? God she was thirsty.
She sat entirely still, listening. And waiting. Like the man who had been waiting outside her house.
At first she heard nothing. Then she saw a shadow move and heard a moan and a sharp crack to her left. She swung her head toward it. A surge of relief coursed through her.
The shutter on her window swayed back and forth in the breeze, wailing softly and rapping against the side of the house each time. That was the crack she had heard. There was no one in the room with her, it was just the shutter flapping. How foolish of her to leave it unlatched, she thought. Inigo was sleeping in the room just below and the banging would surely wake him, as it had no doubt woken her.
That, and her thirst. Her throat was so dry it hurt, and her lips were cracked. She licked them and tasted a drop of blood. What time was it? The half-moon outside trailed light in through the open shutter, shadows moving as the wind rustled among the leaves of the old apple tree. In the dim light she could make out the familiar contours of the battered old armoire that held her enormous wardrobe of two dresses, the mirror with the faded green enamel leaves around it that had belonged to her mother and was now so warped that it made everyone’s face look like a parody of melancholy, the outline of her bed. Why was she sitting on the chair instead of lying on the mattress, she wondered, but her thirst distracted her attention to the table next to her bed that held the water jug.
The room was obviously empty, but the feeling of being not alone persisted. It must have been something she had been dreaming. Something from a dream. She rose, her eyes locked on the water jug—God she was thirsty—and then gasped.
The pain seared through her, up from her ankle, as soon as she put her weight on it. Sitting back down quickly, she examined her left leg, and saw that there was an enormous, crudely wrapped bandage around it. She had absolutely no recollection of having hurt herself, no recollection of having come to her room at all, actually. Had she fallen and hit her head? But her head felt fine, except for her thirst.
How did she get here? She remembered watching Toast scurry around the house vainly attempting to avoid the puppy, who had developed a violent crush on him. And she recalled dinner, one of the best they had eaten in recent weeks, because of the cartload of food Elwood had sent. It contained no note, but she knew it was from him because no one else would have bothered, and no one else would have remembered her passion for hazelnut cakes and sent a dozen. She must have eaten three of them before getting tired and going to doze off in her study. An image of the numbers on her ledger floated into her mind, seeing them from the side, as if she was lying next to them, and then nothing. Three whole hazelnut cakes—not the little ones like Mariana’s but proper full sized ones with sugared syrup drizzled over them—could have that effect on anyone, she reasoned. No wonder she was thirsty.
She looked at the water jug again. If she were very careful, she could reach it without having to step on her injured leg at all. She stood and hopped toward it. On her last hop she tumbled forward onto her bed, hitting her sore left ankle against the table leg. She winced in pain, but then forgot her pain altogether.
Lying diagonally across her bed was a girl she had never seen before. On her neck were two round pricks. In her hand was a gardenia. Clio opened her mouth to scream and tasted blood.
In that horrible instant Clio understood. She understood why she had been so unsurprised to see the pricks on Inigo’s sister’s neck, understood how she had so clearly seen the girl’s fear. She understood why it had all made so much sense to her. It was because she had seen it all through her own eyes and forgotten it. Because she had been there. Because it was her. She was the vampire.
Clio swallowed back her scream. You do not know what you are, the note had said that morning, but she did now.
What? You think you know?
Demon. Fiend. She had always known there was violence living inside her. Just like your father, her grandmother had said, and she understood now, better than ever, what she had meant. “The vampire as a child is impossible to love,” she remembered reading in the compendium. It all fit together. Her father’s interest in the occult and the supern
atural, the vampire’s appearance at the time of her birth, her mother’s death whose cause no one talked about directly. All the years she had wanted to know more about her father, all the questions she had asked that had been evaded or ignored, she now understood why. She had indeed inherited her father’s wickedness, just as she had inherited his blood.
His taste for blood.
These thoughts streamed through her head as she stood paralyzed, looking down past the girl, her eyes fixed on the gardenia. It seemed to glow, pulsing white in the moonlight, a perverse symbol of purity, a sign of her wickedness. All at once, the half-seen images she was always trying to recall when she awoke flooded over her, coming to life in her room, fantasy and reality meshing together.
Clio looked up and saw hovering in front of her a portrait of a woman, wild-eyed. In the space between reality and imagination Clio watched the woman in the picture lift a kerchief to wipe her lips, a blue kerchief, like the one she had found near the first girl, like the ones she had received as a mysterious present the year before on Mariana’s birthday. That was when Clio saw it wasn’t a portrait at all. It was a mirror, her mother’s mirror with the green leaves, the mirror in her room, and the woman was a reflection. A real reflection. Of her. Clio looked down and saw that she really was clutching a blue kerchief in her hand, and that it was stained with blood.
She had known it all along. It was as if, all along, something inside had been waiting to get out, waiting to tell her. Waiting for her to understand that she was the vampire.
Wicked girl!
Clio wrenched her eyes from the gardenia, sinister and glowing, and found that she was crying. Why was this happening now? What was making her do these things? Words and images swam together before her eyes—a screaming corpse, those laughing dolls, dirty footprints, mud on her boots, a man winking at her, cracked lips, her thirst, her godawful thirst—and she knew she had to get away, away from the body, away from her house. She had to leave before she hurt someone else. Heedless of the pain in her leg, she ran. She would turn herself in, she would kill herself, she would get away. She would not hurt anyone again.
She flew down the stairs, panting, her heart pounding. Her thoughts were a jumble—please don’t let them wake up, please don’t let me hurt anyone, what are you what are you what are you? With shaking hands she unlatched the front door of the house and rushed out, into the street, into the warm night air, into the comforting, anonymous, darkness.
Into the arms of the man who had been waiting for her all night.
Chapter Eight
“I had expected you earlier. You can’t imagine how long I have been standing here.”
At first Clio did not know him, in his dark suit with the cap pulled low over his forehead. But then recognition dawned and she fought even harder.
“Get away. Let me go. You must let me go.” Her voice was desperate, almost pleading.
He had not planned to reveal himself, had planned merely to follow her, see where she went, before letting her know he was there. It was the plan he had devised that afternoon, after he had followed her back to her house, but the way she had looked when she ran out the door, the dangerous expression on her face, changed his mind. Now he held her at an arm’s length and examined her.
“Clio,” Miles asked with genuine concern. “What is wrong? Has someone hurt you?”
Clio shook her head tensely. “I am fine. Just let me go. Please. Leave me alone. I must be alone.”
Her eyes were wild, and refused to meet Miles’s gaze.
“Clio, you are not fine. You must—”
“I would be if you would just leave me the hell alone,” she spat at him. “Get away from me. Don’t you understand? Don’t you see that I am dangerous? That I am wicked? That I will hurt you.” Her voice changed. “Oh, God, Lord Dearbourn, for your own good, you must go away.”
“What do you mean you are dangerous?”
Tears were running down Clio’s cheeks. “I am the vampire, my lord. I am the killer.”
Miles looked at her in silence for a moment. “That is not possible.” Then, his eyes narrowed. “Is this some sort of jest?”
Clio’s face changed again, this time into a malevolent smile. “You think so, my lord? Not possible? Come and see.” She began to lead the way across the street, then stopped. “But you must promise me, after you do, that you will do nothing to stop me from turning myself in. That you will see to it I am not left alone until I am in custody. Do you promise?”
Miles nodded.
“No,” Clio insisted. “You must say the words.”
“I promise. I promise I will not leave your side until you are turned in,” Miles assured her, and she took his arm and led him into her house. Instead of turning left into her office as he had done that day, they went directly up two flights of stairs. They turned, then passed through a crooked doorway.
Two strides took Miles to the side of the bed. His eyes, already adjusted to the dark, spotted the dark pricks on the girl’s neck immediately.
He swung around to face Clio. “When did you do this?”
Her eyes looked strange, dangerous, again. “I don’t know. I woke there,” she pointed to the chair, “and found her as you see her now. But there can be no question it was me. This is my room.”
“What do you mean you ‘found her’? Didn’t you put her there?”
Clio shrugged. “I have no recollection. I can’t remember anything that happened tonight. But I suppose that makes sense. I suppose my mind blotted it out. That is the logical explanation. It would also explain why I did not remember killing the other girl, two days ago.”
“That, or the fact that you did not kill either of them,” Miles pointed out. He turned back to the bed and leaned over the corpse. At first he thought the girl had a bruise on her cheek, but he saw it was just a flower-shaped birth mark. She did have rings of bruises on her wrists, however, and scrapes on her knees and shins below the hem of her gown. The gardenia was clutched in one of her hands, but the other was closed, in a fist. He took it and pried it open.
“Light a candle,” he instructed without turning around.
Clio did not know why, but she obeyed him, then moved with the taper to his side. In his hand he held a small lead token, of the type sold as collectable souvenirs at major fairs. Each fair minted its own tokens and impressed its own logo on. them. This one showed a crude portrait of the queen, marking it as a token of the once-a-year fair that had opened that day in Smithfield, just outside the walls of London.
“Have you been to the Jubilee Fair?” Miles asked Clio.
“Not in my right mind. There is no telling what I might have been doing out of it,” she answered bitterly.
He turned to face her. “I do not believe that you killed this woman.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, because I have been standing outside your door all night.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he rushed on. “There is no way you could have entered, or left, by that means. So you would have had to come through there—” he gestured toward the window whose shutter continued to moan weakly in the wind, “—dragging the girl behind you. Which seems unlikely given that she is heavier and nearly a head taller than you are.”
“Why couldn’t I simply have induced her to walk up with me? Why would I have had to drag her?”
“Look at these marks.” Miles pointed to the scrapes that ran up the girl’s shins and over her knees. “Unless I am mistaken, we shall find that they match in width the supports of the ladder that is leaning against the house outside your window.” Clio looked out the window and noticed for the first time the ladder Mr. Williams had been using that morning in rehearsal. But how had Miles noticed? Before she could ask, he went on. “For another, the last time I saw a vampire, his mouth was dripping with blood. There is not a spot of blood on you except a touch on your lips and that is because they are so dry they have begun to crack. Besides, if you did kill her, why would you bring her to your house? Y
our room?”
“Perhaps I was trying to show myself. So I would know. I read about a madwoman doing something like that once. She did all these horrible things and never remembered any of it, it was as if she were possessed by a demon. And each time the demon got more powerful until finally he was going to take her over and the way he did that was by showing her all the evil she had done. Perhaps the vampire part of me is getting stronger.”
“I think it is more likely that the vampire wants to make it look like you are responsible for the deaths of those girls than that you are possessed.”
“Why would the vampire do that?”
“Shift the blame. It would be a good way to get you, and anyone to whom you reported the news that you were the vampire—say the Special Commissioner—to stop investigating.”
“But if I were arrested or turned myself in and another girl was killed, then it would be clear it was not me,” Clio pointed out. “This would only work for a short time.”
Lady Killer Page 10