The Path of Razors

by Green, Chris Marie

  The custode didn’t flinch at the assumption that the hotel visit had been all about checking in rather than implanting tales.

  “—a camera showed one of them, Violet, appearing on the roof of the hotel and then running off in a burst of speed to who knows where. We’ll have to slow down our recordings to isolate her image, camera by camera, and discover her destination.” Nigel offered his associate the chair. “Claudia hasn’t contacted me about this disappearance yet, and I’m not certain she even realizes the situation since she left the girls alone in the hotel so she could spend precious time with Mihas.”

  The new custode noted the slightly mocking way in which Nigel had mentioned Claudia and Mihas. Interesting.

  “But,” Nigel added, “we do need to act since Violet seems to have taken great pains to avoid detection for some reason.”

  Violet, the little bitch of the crowd. The sort of girl who made life pure hell, and it had been hard to watch how she treated everyone around her this past week. “You don’t think she’s merely off somewhere pouting after another fight with Della?”

  “No matter her intention, she shouldn’t have left in the first place. Our alert system”—a feature that highlighted particular screens and allowed the custodes to focus on where their vampires were when aboveground—“tried to keep up with her, but she moved faster than she usually does when the girls are outside on their own. It’s possible that Violet even halted on the outskirts of the city, or in a place where there are no cameras. That would explain the reason the alert system hasn’t isolated her by now.”

  With his fluid custode way of slipping across a room, he moved toward the exit. “And since there aren’t cameras everywhere, I’ll go afield to see if I might locate Violet. If nothing pans out, I’ll check on Queenshill later. You stay Underground to access and slow down that footage from around the hotel, because you might be able to piece together a lead.”

  “But—” began the new keeper.

  Big Brother held up a hand. “One of us must always stay Underground. You know that. No exceptions.”

  Yes. Right. There were only two of them.

  Always two.

  And, with that, he was gone, the black automatic door sliding shut behind him.

  The custode stood there, feeling the chiseling buzz of the atmosphere, feeling a ripping sensation digging into every pore because of what resided down here with them.

  But this was life now—the lot of the Meratoliage family—and the custode accepted that, sinking into the chair’s leather comfort while the monitors flashed with activity.

  One of the screens was rimmed with red, highlighted by their alert system, and the keeper saw that it came from the camera trained on the hotel where the schoolgirls were.

  Nigel had obviously been keeping an eye on it while going through other footage to find Violet on the smaller console screens. But there was a different reason this particular telly caught the new custode’s attention.

  Della was standing at the window, staring out at the waking sky.

  The caretaker pushed a button that connected directly to this camera, and the lens zoomed in to magnify Della. The glass of the hotel’s window provided an eerie sheen over the girl’s frizzy hair, the intense expression on a face that was otherwise so sweet and innocent.

  What was dear vampire Della doing?

  The custode could only hope that the last implanted tale—the one given the most emphasis during the tuning—was emerging in Della, flickering in snippets that would make more sense to her with each passing hour.

  A most bloody, beware-little-girl story that, mixed with the others, would awaken Della to what was really happening in her safe little Underground ...

  ONCE upon a few hundred years ago, on a path that stretched far into the woods, a lone figure ran and ran, slicing his way to where the moon couldn’t peek through the branches and the scent of blood was like crushed berries staining the air.

  The aroma grew thicker, and the figure halted, dust clouding around his boots as he froze, sniffing.

  Searching.

  He was a vampire, his facial features blurred by the night. A creature carrying a limp girl—an unconscious pile of long blond hair and bunched wool from her cloak—over his shoulder.

  Again, the creature sniffed the night, shuddering as saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth to his chin.

  Then, his eyes aglow, the vampire darted off the path and into the foliage, which held branches that clawed past his slight beard and razored straight to his skin, leaving gashes that screamed in pain.

  Yet by the time he reached the cottage in the woods, his skin had already healed to pale smoothness, to a hue that could even be mistaken for human, with the correct amount of artifice.

  The creature crashed through the door, the spill and splash of blood hitting his senses as he fought the instinct to become animal, as he battled the urge to feast on what the scent offered.

  Instead, he controlled his overwhelming tremors while scanning the darkness with a bright gaze that cut right through the pitch of night.

  He looked past the blood on the walls and floor, the ash-strewn hearth, the shattered wooden table, the mangled bodies of village men who had taken up axes and farm tools to enter the woods and hunt what they deemed a monster.

  There. In a corner. Another blood-soaked body—one that had survived.

  The one that had created all this carnage.

  The trespasser lunged toward that body, dropping to his knees at the other vampire’s feet. Around them lay the carcasses of wolves and other animals that the wounded creature on the floor had summoned for aid—an ability that both vampires wielded as personal talents.

  Although the night would have obscured the other creature’s face to anyone else, every feature was vivid to the first vampire. Besides, the other’s hollow, sharp breathing was all too agonizingly familiar.

  “Even from home, I heard your call for healing....” The first one’s words faded to a whisper. “What have they done to you this time?”

  The wounded vampire attempted to smile, his fangs, which had not yet receded, bathed with evidence of blood play. His wild hair, grown long and free during his time away from Versailles, was matted with gore from the head injuries that were healing all too slowly. His clothing-the justaucorps, cravat, vest, breeches, silk stockings, and elegant buckled shoes he wore with such arrogant pride at court—was torn and ruined with red.

  Worst of all, his face was caught between his pure hunting form and the more human one he used to masquerade among his prey.

  He is too weak to shift back into regular shape, the first vampire thought.

  Yet the injured vampire would never admit that he had almost been beaten by the angry humans this time. That sort of pessimism did not exist for him.

  Rather, he held up a white ribbon soaked with her blood. The latest young female conquest’s.

  “You will be the death of us all,” said the first vampire, allowing his own poached village girl to tumble from her resting place on his shoulder and to the ground, where her hair spread like bright rays over her closed eyes. She had fainted when the creature had met her on the dusk-lined path that fringed the village, where she had been intending to meet with a boy, no doubt.

  The wounded vampire began to laugh in flagrant disregard of the danger he had invited, but his mirth was cut short as he sucked in a deep breath of agony.

  The first vampire felt his comrade’s pain, sharing it, as the ribbon fluttered from his companion’s fingers to land over the hair of the prone village girl.

  “This is no laughing matter,” the first creature said, reaching out to touch his blood brother’s face.

  The injured vampire avoided the contact, turning away. “From what we hear, the dragon himself takes risks far greater than the both of us, my friend. Do not be so alarmed.”

  Something seemed to sink within the first vampire as he hesitated, his hand still in the air. Then the creature schooled his expressi
on to blankness while touching his comrade’s head, whether his friend wished for the soothing contact or not.

  Like this, the creature healed his friend’s wounds, gash by gash, although every closing of an injury drained him of more energy.

  Eventually, the wounds were in such shape that the injured vampire’s own body could take over the healing. He leaned his head back in clear relief, his fingers glowing as he touch-healed the more minor cuts on his face, his chest.

  The first vampire took the limp girl in his arms again and watched his friend.

  “If you are not torn apart by wrathful villagers,” he said, “then this questionable lack of discretion is bound to slay you nonetheless.”

  The second vampire raised an eyebrow.

  “I refer in particular to your mistress at court,” added the first creature, his voice tight. “She is sure to guess at your excesses one night.”

  “She waits for me to return from my time in the country as any other kitten would—unsuspecting and innocent.” He grinned, a predator biding his time in the dark. “Isn’t that so? They all wait because they cannot resist us.”

  The first vampire ignored the cutting jibe, thinking instead on the word “us.”

  Blood brothers. Powerful, enthralling, insatiable. Nothing seemed enough for any of them: never enough blood, enough gluttony, enough ...

  As the word “affection” dissipated in the creature’s mind, he used a nail to cut the village girl’s throat, then offered her to his blood brother to build up his strength yet again.

  The other creature ravenously accepted, grabbing the girl and latching his mouth to her young, fresh neck, sucking, sucking until she was drained to a husk.

  When he raised his face to the first vampire, his skin was high in color, his gaze flaring.

  “What would I do without you?” he asked.

  The first vampire did not answer.

  He merely stood and left the cottage as he always did after healing his friend, knowing he would come every time the other vampire called....

  THE custode watched the monitor screen as Della gripped the hotel’s windowsill, her eyes wide and bright, the veins in her throat standing out to such an extent that it seemed the vampire girl might explode altogether.

  Were the implanted tales backfiring? the custode wondered. 013-41117_ch01_4P.indd 57 5/22/09 12:22:51 PM Perhaps only a member of the Meratoliage family could withstand them....

  Or was something else happening with Della?

  On another screen or two, the caretaker saw an oddity: ravens gathering.

  Still, the caretaker monitored the hotel’s screen while beginning to access earlier film from this same camera.

  Violet’s film. And the custode would find her, if only to facilitate some trouble for the bitch.

  Meanwhile, Della backed away from the window on the telly, her hands covering her mouth as she sank to the floor out of camera range, so the keeper paid due attention to the job at hand, where other screens were showing larger gatherings of ravens heading south of the Thames.

  Suddenly, the custode had the feeling that perhaps Della had not been undergoing the visions at all. That she was quite busy with another activity ...

  But the ravens were only the beginning.

  Hours later, the cameras at the Queenshill dorms revealed something equally noteworthy.

  The lenses, clouding over, just as they had on Billiter Street one week ago.

  SIX

  LONDON BABYLON, STILL -TEMPORARY-HAVEN-BOUND

  Later

  DELLA had not meant to go so far with the ravens.

  Not so far at all, and even hours after it had happened, as a seething dusk enshrouded London, she sat between Polly and Noreen on the hotel’s floor near the beds, wishing she could do something, anything, to redeem herself.

  Their backs against the wall, they could hear Mrs. Jones talking to Wolfie on her secure mobile phone in the confines of the loo, reporting to the too-distant Wolfie what Della had confessed about Violet and the ravens. Their housematron had discovered it upon returning from Wolfie’s. Bad welcome-back tidings.

  Yet there had been no use in hiding it.

  Actually, the sooner told the better, because Della was beyond fear now. She had lived so long in a constant state of waiting for reprisal that this last act had finally brought about a protective numbness, and she took a chance on using the mind-link that connected the class of Queenshill girls, even though Polly and Noreen had been staring straight ahead, avoiding her this entire time.

  I didn’t mean it, she apologized once again.

  Polly turned her face away a little more, her hands splayed over bent knees that, in her human days, had been constantly scratched by the grass of field sports. Her fingers arched as if she were trying not to claw at Della.

  Noreen merely slumped, the legs that she so loved to dance on stretching before her. She resembled a doll with red-thread hair left out willy-nilly after playtime.

  You already apologized, Della, she thought back in response. Drained. Stunned. Apologized a thousand times.

  In sharp contrast, Mrs. Jones’s voice rose and fell from the muffle of the loo as she and Wolfie discussed what should be done about Della now. It didn’t escape Della’s attention that the housematron realized the girls could overhear every syllable, although Wolfie’s sorrowful tones were slightly garbled by the mobile.

  She didn’t understand his sadness since Violet had recently fallen out of his highest favor. Still, Della supposed he had loved Violet because she was one of his darlings.

  Della wished he were near enough to hear her apologetic thoughts, too.

  She shifted on the ground as Mrs. Jones told Wolfie that he was not the only one to have lost quite a bit with the death of Violet.

  Della wasn’t exactly certain of what she meant, but the entire conversation was pressing a sense of dread against her chest, and she could hardly concentrate on anything else.

  It was the worst form of punishment, this dread. It was torture that all but made her want to hurl herself out the window in an act of redemption. And wouldn’t that be perfect? The slow wait of her broken bones mending, the inability to end her own life so that she would have to endure even more dread from Mrs. Jones’s endless watching ...

  Della curled her arms round her bent legs, resting her forehead on her knees, but it did nothing to dash away the memory of what she had done with the ravens.

  She had only meant to have them track Violet, to perhaps even scare her into returning by showing that there was no place Violet could ever hide from her pack.

  But as the birds had searched the streets, Della’s fear that Violet would do the girls harm had only expanded instead of abated. And by the time she had sensed the birds coming upon her fellow schoolmate—wherever she had been—Delia’s fear had stretched and birthed into something that resembled the viscous dark of justified hate.

  Violet had to pay for running away from them, had to pay for every time she had made them all feel so small and bullied—

  The ravens had responded to Della’s temper in a black cloud of cawing, diving, tearing fervor, and she had not been able to stop them.

  Stop ... herself.

  The loo door opened, and Mrs. Jones, with her sensible bun, shoes, and skirt, rounded the corner into the main room, snapping shut her mobile.

  She crooked her finger at Della.

  Come here, little girl.

  But a tear of fright kept Della lanced to the ground.

  Do you know what’s in store for you, little girl?

  Della squeezed shut her eyes at the niggle. She dug her fingernails into the carpet, more afraid than she had ever been, even as a human. As a vampire, she had been told she would be improved in many respects, but Della had brought so much emptiness and fear with her into this existence that she hadn’t been able to let go of what had always been so much a part of her.

  It was said that the masters were the same, though—they each had varying power
s based on personal strengths brought over from humanity. Why shouldn’t she have carried traits with her, too, even if they were more like weaknesses than abilities?

  The housematron leveled an impatient glare at Della.

  Get up, Della told herself. Stand up, as you did last night. You can do it again.

  Unsteadily, she did rise, Violet’s death screams coming back to her as a reminder of why she was in this spot.

  But, oddly, those screams made Della ... stronger.

  Yes.

  Much stronger.

  On legs that didn’t seem so ready to buckle anymore, she walked to Mrs. Jones, her gaze lowered, mostly because she was wary of the elder vampire entering her mind to see that, deep down, she didn’t regret killing Violet at all.

  A moment passed, two moments, as the housematron stared at Della. Then, finally, she said, “I am in a quandary as to how to address this, Miss Bennett.”

  “I’m so very sorry, Mrs. Jones.” Sorry a bully such as Violet had not been taken care of sooner, and that was the truth of it.

  Masquerading this regret as remorse for Violet’s raven attack, Della opened her mind to her superior.

  Just then, the housematron skimmed Della’s thoughts, her head tilting as she narrowed her eyes, then withdrew. Did she believe it?

  The older female looked her charge up and down. “My quandary is rather more complicated than your apologies, Della.”

  Yes. Yes. “I understand, Mrs. Jones.”

  She hefted out a sigh, gracefully resting her hands on her hips. “Violet ran away when staying inside was extremely necessary. You and I know that she was up to no good, and I realize you only wished to stop her before she brought more trouble upon us.”

  Della quashed the urge to nod.

  Mrs. Jones tapped her fingers against her hips, as if turning a decision over in her mind. Then her fingers stilled. “And this brings us to the bottom of it,” she said. “You stepped over the line, yet you did it out of respect for us. In spite of what happened in the end, you started out by protecting the rest of your group, and I’m sorry Violet never wanted to do that, although we had such hope for her. Loyalty to the unit is valuable to us. Betrayal of the group is not.”