“Yes, that was the worst part. Not being able to show people what I really am,” he was saying. “Not being able to reveal what I am really capable of. That was what made me suffer. You see, I learned long ago that they would not understand. That their jealousy would force them to call me names. As you did. But you won’t anymore, will you?” Saunders stopped pacing the room and turned to stare at Clio with burning eyes. She noticed that one side of his face had begun to twitch.
“No,” she said in what she hoped sounded like a meek voice. “I won’t.”
“Good. I am tired of being insulted by you, and people like you. How dare you have tried to fool me with that idiot impersonator in Newgate? A child could have seen through that.”
“You are right. We were fools.”
“No,” Saunders hissed, delight flashing in his eyes as Clio recoiled from him. “You are fools.”
Clio nodded. “But when we saw how ingeniously you disposed of the man, we knew we had been wrong. Where did you learn so much about poison?”
Saunders smiled. “From my stepmother, Serena. Her first husband had been an apothecary. She taught me everything I know.” He looked pensive for a time. “I certainly hope Miles will appreciate all I have done for him. Appreciate the lengths I have gone to orchestrate a hero’s death for him, even though he is my enemy. To lose one’s life in a final battle with the vampire—what a marvelous way to die. Serena did not understand the gift I was giving her. I kept trying to explain it to her, explain that I was making her part of something special, a part of history, but she fought me. She stood no chance of course. Like you.”
Clio shrank away from him, from the twitching lips. “Why do you need me if it is Dearbourn you want?”
“Because I want him to wait. I want him to feel each minute that passes. I want him entirely under my power. He must die in pursuit of the vampire, but first he will taste what it is like to be in someone else’s control. He must follow my timetable, be my creature. And you will make him that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He will come after you. He must. And then he will be mine. My puppet. My servant. Mine to command. For as soon as he attempts to enter this room, you will be shot.”
“Shot?”
“Yes. With that pistol.” Saunders gestured behind him and Clio saw that there was indeed a pistol there. It was secured on a stand bolted to the floor so that it was just above the level of her head, but it was pointed downward, at her heart. A thin cord ran from its handle to the top of the door, the only door in the room. “When that door opens, the cord will go taut and the trigger will be pulled. That way, Miles will know it is he and he alone who has killed you.”
“You cannot know the shot will hit me, much less be mortal,” Clio pointed out to him, her air of terror dissolving in the face of his madness.
“I rather hope it will not be fatal,” Saunders assured her kindly. “I would rather have you die slowly, in a puddle of your blood. The shot will hit you, some part of you, depending on how still you stand, and it will injure you too gravely to leave here. But that is not the important part. That is just the crossfire. What is important is that Miles will rush to you, run to bathe his hands in your blood, stand right here—” he moved and stood directly in front of her, “—to support you and hear your last, rattling breath. And he will stay that way, with you, until midnight.”
“What if he comes soon? It’s hours until midnight. Why would he stay here that long?”
“I have seen to that. There is no way he could get here for another four hours and by then…” He smiled secretly to himself.
Clio looked at the clock in front of her. Its hands showed a quarter of an hour shy of eight bells. “Why is midnight so important?” she pressed. “What happens at midnight?”
The tick in Saunders face disappeared and it grew smooth, almost beatific. “There will be no moon in the sky at all. And I shall be invincible.”
“You are not the vampire,” Clio told him, having entirely thrown off the mantle of fear. “You are just a man. The moon has no power over you.”
“Just a man,” he said with a strange smile and a sideways glance at the clock. “You shall see, Clio Thornton, if I am just a man. You shall see soon. Because it has begun. My plan is moving forward. Your viscount is on his way to Hartwell Heath. I can sense it.”
Please, Clio thought to herself, her eyes moving from the pistol to the door. Please let him be wrong.
“Whoever named this the Garden House must have had a wonderful sense of humor,” Sebastian murmured to Tristan as they rode around the perimeter of the old building. There was nothing near it for miles, not another house, certainly nothing that looked like a garden. It just sat, low and dark and glowering in the middle of the heath.
The group had split into two detachments, each of which was to take up a station near a different part of the house. They had made good time from London, arriving in under three hours, but they forced themselves to go slowly now. They had agreed on a plan of action, and on the fact that once in place around the house, they would not speak but only communicate by whistling, to minimize the chances of alerting the vampire to their presence.
Tristan, the group expert on breaking and entering, was to go in first, accompanied by Sebastian, and quiet any dogs that might be waiting to announce visitors. He had been hoping for an open window, or even just an open shutter, but he found none. As far as he could see, the house was completely dark, which meant that the vampire had to have Clio in an inside room, possibly on the upper floor.
He and Sebastian had just reached the backdoor when they heard a noise from inside, like the sound of a body hitting a wall.
A low whistle alerted the others, and they were all there by the time the lock yielded to Tristan’s expert touch. Once inside, they moved silently through the rooms, finding nothing. Somewhere in the distance they could make out the sound of footsteps, pacing, with the regularity of clockwork. Somewhere above them.
They found the main stairs and scaled them slowly, walking along the edges of the boards to keep from making them squeak. They were about halfway up the second set, growing closer to the pacing feet, when they heard it again, the sound of a person falling. This time it was accompanied by a piercing shriek.
They ran up the rest of the stairs, pursuing the noise, and traced it to a small door. It was louder here, a sound of terror unlike anything they had ever heard before. One of them reached for the handle and jerked the door open.
The ancient hinges gave a hideous wail and suddenly there was an enormous explosion. Black objects came hurtling toward them in a sea of inhuman screeching. The air pulsed with the force of a hundred wings flapping as the bats, disoriented, spun wildly through the hall, careening off the walls and each other. The men ducked beneath the black cloud and ran into the room.
There was no one there. Off to one side stood an enormous, ancient clock. The rhythmic tone of its timekeeping seemed, even this close, like the sound of footsteps. The hands on its face showed a little past nine. And below it, written on a long pieced together strip of parchment, large enough to be seen without a light, were the words, “Fooled you, Dearbourn. She dies at midnight.”
Clio’s breath caught in her throat.
“What?” Saunders demanded, turning around. “What is it?” His eyes followed hers to the pistol over the door.
“I just cannot stand to see that thing pointing at me,” Clio replied in a voice edged with panic.
Saunders studied her, as if he knew she was lying, then returned to his careful, quiet pacing.
Clio let her breath out, slowly this time. It was the only sign of her discovery she allowed herself.
It had taken two hours, but she had found it. She had forced herself to study the clock opposite her, in part because it kept her eyes off the pistol aimed at her, and in part because there was something about the way Saunders had looked at it and about his being barefoot that triggered her imagination. She watched each p
iece of it in turn, isolating what she could see of the mechanism through the clock face, forcing herself to look for something that might not belong there.
As if she would know that thing when she saw it. But she had. Finally, at last, she had. Because while she was not an expert on clocks, she was fairly sure that they did not usually contain an archer’s bow inside of them that was gradually being pulled more taut with each advancing hour, or, being pulled with it, an arrow.
Aimed exactly at her. Or at the spot where Miles would be standing if he was tending to her pistol wounds.
It did not require a mind like Saunders’s—which, as he made a point of telling her at regular ten-minute intervals, she did not possess—for her to guess that the arrow was poisoned, most likely with ourali, or that the probable time of release, the moment when the bow would be pulled as tightly as it would go, was midnight. That way he could kill without having to be present. It would be the ultimate display of his power—the power to take a life without moving a finger.
And it would happen in less than two hours.
There was nothing she could do about the pistol, yet, but perhaps there was something she could do about the clock. Flawless balance, she remembered Miles saying of the clockwork mechanism. As soon as the balance is upset, it stops working. All she had to do was upset the balance. Easy.
Or it would have been, if she had not been bound to a post. Not only was her range of motion severely limited, but any sort of unusual activity would undoubtedly draw Saunders’s attention to what she was doing. He might have been insane, but he was not stupid.
Suddenly, she narrowed her eyes at him. “Do you really think Mariana will marry you when this is over?” she asked.
He spun around and stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“Once she is free of her betrothal, she will have her pick of men. What makes you think she would want anything to do with you?”
“She loves me.”
“Of course,” Clio said with undisguised sarcasm. “How often has she told you that?”
“She has never said it. That would be dishonorable while she was betrothed to someone else. But I know. I know.”
“How?” Clio jeered.
Saunder’s eyes flashed. “You are just trying to upset me. But it will not work. I am in control here. I am in charge. What do you know of love anyway? No one has ever loved you in your life.”
Clio let the words sink in, soaking them up like a sponge. “I know that Mariana is incapable of loving anyone but herself,” she said quietly.
“You say that only because she did not love you. And why should she? You are nothing. Nothing at all. Like your wicked father. He was so wretched that your grandmother had to drive him away. She fabricated a spate of vampire killings in the village and framed him for them, so that he would be thrown in jail.”
It was working better than Clio had expected. “What are you talking about?” she demanded, truly confused.
“That is how I got the idea. Your grandmother, Lady Alecia, confessed it to me. She told me of how your father beat your mother, her dear daughter, and how in order to avenge her she made it look as though some of the cows and things had been killed by a bloodsucker. Your father had always been interested in such fiends, and it was only too easy to convince the local constabulary that he was responsible. They locked him up and he died by his own hand in prison.” Seeing that she was truly shocked, Saunders pressed on. “Once your mother had died, Lady Alecia wanted to do the same thing to you, make it look as though you had been killed by the vampire, but something stopped her.”
Clio got a faraway expression on her face. In her mind she was no longer in the tense, hot little room with the pacing madman and two death traps aimed at her heart. She was in a bed, like the beds she had found the girls on.
She is lying there, helpless as someone comes toward her, leaning over her, breathing hot breath on her face, someone is fumbling for her neck, struggling with one hand to pin her down and keep her from crying out, and with the other—
Then her assailant is being dragged away, yelling and screaming, arms flailing. She cannot see who is responsible for her salvation. But she can see the face of the person who had been leaning over her. Who had been trying to hold her down. A younger face, but still the face she knows, the face that has so often looked on her with hatred and contempt. Her grandmother’s face.
It had happened to her. That was why she had felt such horror when she saw the dead girls, why she had beheld the terror on their faces. It had almost happened to her. Her grandmother had tried to kill her when she was an infant.
Rage began to boil inside of her and her eyes refocused on Saunders.
“You should know,” he went on, grinning malevolently, “that your grandmother confided to me that she has always been sorry she did not go through with it.”
Clio was breathing shallowly. “I don’t believe you. You are a liar.”
Saunders’s eyes darkened. “You would dare to call me a liar? You, who are not even worthy of sharing a room with me? Not even worthy, really, of listening to me speak? You are nothing but a stupid idiot, Clio Thornton. You thought you could catch me? You thought you could investigate me? You? You are not even fit to go after a three-legged dog.” Saunders watched the color rise in her face, watched the anger take over, and was thrilled. “You see? I told you that it was inside you. I told you—”
“Stop it,” Clio hiccuped, interrupting him. Upset the balance.
“Have I grieved you, Clio?” Saunders asked with mild amusement. She hiccuped twice more. “Is it the truth you do not like to hear?” She hiccuped again. “Does it make you sad to know that you are a stupid fool?” he demanded, his voice meaner now.
“No,” Clio told him, hiccuping so hard her feet stomped. “It makes me,” she hiccuped, “angry. It makes me,” she hiccuped again, “feel violent.”
“Poor, poor angry Clio,” Saunders said, closing his eyes to laugh. “Furious because you cannot destroy my perfect plan.”
Clio stole a glance at the clock. The hands were quivering in one place, as if caught on the verge of motion.
“You poor unlovable fool.”
Nothing perfect can endure.
Clio hiccuped five times in quick succession, powerfully, hiccups that made her body strain against the post, her feet kick, and the clock hands freeze. Inside, she could see that the gears had ceased to turn. The clock was no longer going forward.
She had stopped it. She had stolen time. The hiccups had upset the balance enough to halt the clock. She knew that Saunders would discover the deception soon, but hopefully she would have thought of some way out by then. Now there was only the pistol left to deal with. She had just shifted her attention there, ignoring the taunts Saunders continued to heap upon her, when two things happened, scaring her hiccups away. With one eye she saw Toast sit up. And with the other, she saw the handle of the door begin to turn.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Saunders saw where she was looking. In a single, swift motion, he crossed to the door and put his arm against it, forcing it to stay closed. “Good evening, Viscount,” he said. “I am so glad you have come.”
“Good. Why don’t you invite me in?” Miles asked through the door.
“I would, but we are not quite ready. We were not expecting you so soon. You are a bit early.”
“Open the door or I will break it down.”
“Oh, that will not be necessary. It is unlocked. But if you open it, Clio will die.”
“Is that true, Clio?”
Saunders looked at her and nodded.
“Yes Miles, it is true.” Her voice changed to one of supplication and she became more formal. “If you got my note, my lord, then you must understand. No small amount of time will save me.”
“She is right,” Saunders assured Miles. “And you must wait until midnight.”
There was a long pause. Then Clio heard Miles’s voice say, “Very well,” and the sound of receding f
ootsteps.
“What are you doing?” Saunders demanded.
“Leaving.” Miles spoke through the door. “You said I could not see her until midnight. That’s almost two hours from now. I’ll be back then.”
Saunders was incredulous. “Where are you going?”
“To get something to eat. I am hungry. It has been a long day and I missed my betrothal feast.”
“But you cannot leave.”
“Why not?”
“Because I will kill her. I will kill Clio.”
Clio could almost hear Miles’s head shaking on the other side of the threshold. “You are not going to kill her. If you do, I will march right in there before midnight and kill you before you can get to me, and Mariana will inherit nothing.”
Saunders stood up a bit straighter and smiled. “Ah, so you figured it out.”
“Yes. Ingenious. You noticed that the betrothal contract only specifies that she shall inherit everything if I die on or after the day of her twenty-fifth birthday, not after the marriage has been celebrated. I should have realized it earlier. You are very literal. And following the letter of the contract you decided to kill me on July first. As soon after midnight as possible.”
“Before you could touch her with your filthy hands. So she would be rich and pure when she came to me,” Saunders rhapsodized.
“Yes,” Miles sounded skeptical. “But you see, that guarantees that you will keep Clio alive, because you need something to lure me back here to my death. I am going to go to a tavern. I’ll be back before midnight.”
“Wait,” Saunders commanded. “Don’t you want to hear me tell how I killed the women?”
“I would prefer to be killed quickly than bored to death slowly.”
If Clio had not been preoccupied, the way Saunders jerked in front of the door would have caused her to laugh. “Bored to death? You find the prospect of hearing about my crimes boring? I assure you, Dearbourn, they are fascinating in the extreme.”
Lady Killer Page 33