Kitty Steals the Show

by Carrie Vaughn

  My new goal in life was to become wealthy enough to own a private jet and never have to travel like this again. What were the odds? Just another hour and maybe I could have a nice soft bed. A hot meal and a bed. A hot meal, shower, and bed. No, a drive around Trafalgar Square first, then a hot meal, shower, a cuddle with Ben—I’d never had sex in a foreign country before—and bed …

  Ben was actually paying attention and directed us to the sign labeled NON EU COUNTRIES, but before we could join the line, a uniformed official, a stout man in his late thirties, round face and serious expression, approached. Shaking myself awake, I tried to seem calm and collected rather than defensive.

  He glanced at a sheet of paper before addressing me. “Are you Katherine Norville?”

  But we hadn’t done anything wrong, we had all our ducks in a row, we’d worked so hard making sure we had the paperwork, that Cormac wouldn’t be held at the border for his felony conviction—and how did they know, we hadn’t even had our passports checked yet.

  I wet my mouth and tried to think through the fog of jet lag that said it was seven in the morning rather than seven in the evening. “Yes. Is there a problem?”

  “And Benjamin O’Farrell? Cormac Bennett?” He looked at each of us.

  He could see we were, he had our pictures on the page in front of him. I caught Ben’s gaze, trying to ask him what this was about. Hold on, wait and see, he seemed to reassure me.

  The official gestured toward a closed door labeled RESTRICTED at the back of the room. “If you’d come with me, please? Right this way.”

  He was so agonizingly polite, and yet his manner invited no argument. My stomach flipped; I didn’t want to have to deal with this, not now.

  “I’m sorry, but what’s this about? Is something wrong?”

  “Just step along, please. It will only take a moment.” His expression hardly changed—just a guy doing his job.

  “Ben—” I murmured.

  “Wait,” he said. “If we were in trouble there’d be more than one of them.”

  Him and his logic. Sullen, I followed the immigration officer. Rumpled and glassy-eyed people in line stared after us, radiating curiosity and schadenfreude. This trip couldn’t have gone completely smoothly, could it? But for heaven’s sake I’d hoped to at least get out of the airport without any trouble.

  The officer held the door open for us and we filed inside. The tile-floored room held a table and chairs, for interviews. None of us sat. I turned on the officer, questions ready to burst, when the door on the opposite side of the room opened and Emma stepped in.

  We’d taken a flight that arrived after dark; of course she’d come to the airport to meet us.

  The last time I’d seen Emma she’d been cute—a ponytailed college student in jeans and a sweatshirt, her whole life ahead of her. She’d worked as a part-time housekeeper for Alette to pay tuition. Then Emma had been turned, and it had been the end of that world. She hadn’t wanted it, had even considered opening the curtains at dawn on herself. But that would have been an even bigger tragedy. Instead, she learned how to be a vampire, and she seemed to have developed a talent for it. She wore a flowing skirt in a trendy print, a gray shirt, purple high-heeled shoes, and a black silk wrap draped around her shoulders, too fine to be anything but decorative. She didn’t need shielding from the cold. Her brown hair was swept back and held by a sparkling clip. Her makeup was subtle and perfect. She was gorgeous.

  She saw me and grinned. “Kitty!”

  I grinned back, and we came together in a girly hug. “You look amazing,” I said.

  Pulling apart, we regarded each other. “I’m so glad you’re here, I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks,” she said.

  “Yeah, me, too. What’s with this?” I tipped my head to the immigration officer, standing politely out of the way.

  “Ned has connections,” she said. “He thought you’d appreciate not having to stand with the crowds. So—shortcut.”

  “This is the power that comes with being Master of London?” I said.

  Her eyes—her whole face, really—sparkled with glee. “Neat, huh? He can’t wait to meet you.”

  Yeah, I could just bet. What kind of vampire was he, then? Haughty and arrogant? Permanently amused and detached? Something else entirely? At least Emma seemed happy here, which was a point in his favor. He couldn’t be all bad if she liked him.

  I pulled Ben and Cormac into our circle and introduced them. They’d actually seen her before, in Washington, D.C. She’d been technically dead at the time, though, attacked by Alette’s traitorous lieutenant and still three days from rising again.

  Ben smiled and shook her hand, and Cormac did likewise, grudgingly.

  “Welcome to London. You ready to see the sights?”

  My energy roared back, the travel fog slipping away. I could have bounded.

  The officer stepped forward. “If I could just check your passports, then?”

  We weren’t completely getting out of procedure—it was, as Emma had said, a shortcut. He looked at our passports, glanced at our immigration forms, and produced a visa stamp, which he punched into our passports.

  My passport was no longer virginal.

  “Welcome to Britain,” he said when he’d finished.

  Indeed.

  * * *

  EMMA LED us through another restricted door to an exit, which opened to a curb outside the airport, where a black cab was waiting for us. A real honest-to-God London black cab. Mom would want me to take a picture, so I pulled out my camera and did. Ben looked at me. “Really?” I just grinned.

  Our luggage had been fetched for us. The driver was loading it into the trunk. Boot, rather. I’d been studying. He wore a smart black suit with a conservative striped tie. Young, dark-haired, and clean-shaven, he stood at attention and nodded smartly to Emma. He was human—one of the Master’s human servants. Not a cab driver, of course, and the car wasn’t marked TAXI. We were getting chauffeured.

  When he’d finished with the luggage, he opened the back door for us.

  “Thanks, Andy,” Emma said, smiling, and he tipped his head.

  Emma sat in front with Andy, and we climbed into the spacious back of the car, which had wide seats and lots of legroom. Our wolves would have been happy in here, even. Ben and Cormac put me between them—I’d meant to get a window seat. I gave up arguing about it.

  “You really do look great,” I said to Emma.

  Leaning on the back of the seat to talk to us, she bit her lip and ducked her gaze. “Thanks. It’s been a pretty wild ride these last few years.”

  No doubt. I thought back to my own first couple of years as a werewolf and the way the world turned upside down. I couldn’t imagine what becoming a vampire would be like.

  “And now you’re in London living the high life,” I said.

  “I’m thinking of it as grad school,” she said. “Alette wanted me to get out and see the world, or at least see how a different Family works, and Ned was happy to take me in.”

  “What’s Ned like?” Ben asked.

  Emma’s expression melted and turned downright dreamy, her eyes going wide and her smile going soft. “He’s amazing. You’ll just have to meet him—I don’t want to give anything away.”

  “Hmm, just like a vampire to keep secrets,” I said, then wished I hadn’t because her smile fell. I’d meant it as a joke, but I could have kicked myself. Emma hadn’t asked for this; she was making the best of a bad situation—the only thing she could do.

  “Good God,” Cormac murmured, leaning forward to press himself to the window. “This is London?”

  “We’re in the suburbs,” Emma said. “It’s still about fifteen miles or so to the city center.”

  “But it’s all city,” he said.

  That wasn’t Cormac speaking, I realized. During his time in prison, he’d acquired a ghost: Amelia, the Victorian wizard woman living in his head. He insisted it was a partnership, not a possession. Sometimes, though, she was
in control. It was weird, hearing another person’s words spoken in Cormac’s voice. A big reason he’d wanted to come along was so Amelia could see home again, after more than a hundred years as a ghost trapped in a prison’s stone walls. She’d probably been at the front, the driver’s seat so to speak, since we landed, ready for a glimpse.

  Emma looked to me for a cue, and I didn’t know how to explain.

  To Cormac/Amelia I said, “It’s changed a lot, I imagine.”

  He/she glanced at me, lips pursed. “It’s just a bit of a shock to see it for myself.”

  He sat back and stayed quiet the rest of the trip, watching out the window. I put my hand on Ben’s knee, and he squeezed it.

  “You guys must be wiped out,” Emma said, regaining her previous cheerfulness. “Maybe we should go straight home and save the sightseeing for later? Ned’s main house is in Dulwich, south of London. We’ll be in Mayfair for the conference but I really want to show you the Dulwich house, if that’s all right.”

  The car turned south before heading into London proper. We passed over a bridge, and Emma confirmed that the river below us was the Thames. Orange lights flickered on the surface of rippling black water, and the shores were an almost solid wall of buildings. We never did encounter anything like the rolling green hills and meadows of a stereotypical English countryside, not that we could see any of it at night. I wondered if that was what Amelia was looking for.

  Eventually, we passed a sweeping, well-groomed park bounded by reaching, gnarled trees, then approached a brick wall supporting a tall iron gate. Beyond that lay a magnificent manor house—colossal, redbrick, with filigree accents carved in white granite, neo-Gothic towers and cupolas, and ornate windows opening into what seemed to be a vast main hall. How could I expect anything else from the Master of London?

  “Pretty swanky,” I said.

  “This isn’t Ned’s house,” Emma said. “Not directly, anyway. This is actually a boys’ school, Dulwich College. We’ll end up a little farther on.”

  The cab passed the impressive school and a minute later turned up the drive of a much more modest, but even more venerable and beautiful house, with a brick façade, painted accents, and warm light showing through the mullioned windows.

  “Here we are,” she said. “Fortune House.”

  The car pulled into a gated yard, letting us out before continuing on to a building that might have been a small stable in another age. Now it was the garage—same purpose, different context. Emma took us through a mudroom that was nicer than Ben’s and my whole condo, with slate tile on the floor in a checkered pattern, shelves made of some expensive polished wood, and brass fixtures. This opened into a hardwood foyer. A kitchen lay through a doorway, and a maid came toward us—an honest-to-goodness maid in a black uniform dress and apron.

  “He’s in the library waiting for you, miss,” the young woman said to Emma.

  The house must have been bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside. We went from the foyer through a long hallway with a fancy carpet runner, antique sideboards and accent tables that held stunning porcelain vases, a row of paintings on the wall showing everything from hunting dogs to light-suffused cityscapes. The hallway let out into a parlor with a big fireplace, marble mantelpiece above it, more antique furniture, more paintings. Tall windows had heavy drapes drawn over them. Over the fireplace was what seemed to be a life-sized portrait of a man in late-Renaissance attire: a starched white ruff, long black coat lined with fur, a glimpse of doublet and knee-length trousers, shoes with buckles. He was tall and stately, brown hair going to gray, a full beard hiding his expression, and he looked down on us with some amount of pride. The Master, maybe? Next, Emma opened a set of heavy double doors, polished wood, simply carved, and ushered us into the library.

  I could have sat on the lush antique Persian rug and stared at the room for hours. Floor-to-ceiling shelves occupied all four walls, with scant allowance made for the door and a set of tall windows opposite. Some of the shelves appeared to slide back to reveal even more shelves. And they were all filled with books. All of them. A myriad of comfy chairs and sofas—the arms scuffed, the seats lumpy and soft—had been well used by people lounging in them, reading all those books.

  In addition, the room held display cases and curio cabinets—and yes, they contained even more books. Special books, no doubt, hermetically sealed and brought out for holidays. Many of them lay open on stands for admiring. The cases did hold a few other items—ornate daggers, a thin sword, jewelry, pocket watches, miniature portraits. That was just what I could see from the doorway. I might have squeaked in awe.

  “You seem impressed,” the man standing by the curtained window said in a rich voice, an orator’s voice.

  He wasn’t young like most vampires I’d met. His brown hair, tied back in a shoulder-length ponytail, was streaked with gray, and his beard was salt and pepper. He might have been in his sixties—he’d lived a whole life already before he’d been turned. He wore a long smoking jacket, pushed back. His cream-colored shirt was open rakishly at the throat, his dark trousers were plain, and he went stocking-footed. The ensemble managed to give off an air of casual elegance. All this wealth and centuries’ worth of collected riches were his and he was quite comfortable with it. He stood hand on hip, shoulders back, posing like the man in the portrait over the fireplace—maybe because he was the man in the portrait.

  “This is Ned,” Emma said proudly. “Ned, may I present Kitty Norville, Ben O’Farrell, and Cormac Bennett.”

  “Excellent work, Emma,” he said. “Any trouble at Heathrow?”

  “None at all,” she answered.

  “Hi,” I said, waving, feeling a bit inadequate for the surroundings. “It’s quite a place you have here.”

  He smiled broadly at us, like we were new acquisitions for his collection. “I bet you say that to everyone.”

  “Oh no,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “Not everyone.”

  “Please, look around if you like. Ask questions. I rarely have a chance to show off for visitors.”

  “Questions, huh? Anything?” I said.

  “Here it comes…” Ben murmured.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  His gaze went soft, as if he was doing math in his head. “Four hundred forty-three years old.”

  Ben laughed. “Wow, he actually answered!”

  I gaped. “I have never, ever, ever gotten that specific an answer from any vampire ever,” I said. I might have fallen in love with the man in that instant. I did a bit of my own math—it took a couple of tries. “Fifteen sixty—”

  “Fifteen sixty-six,” Cormac said, and Ned nodded.

  “And you were born in London,” I said.

  “Born, bred, proud to be so.”

  “Wow,” I said. “We have to talk, you have to tell me everything, what was it like, what did you do, who did you know—Queen Elizabeth, did you ever see her? Meet her?”

  “You were right,” Ned said to Emma. “She doesn’t stop, does she?”

  “Most vampires are so secretive, they won’t say anything about how old they are, where they came from. Like that life is dead to them and they’ll be damned if they talk about it. Why aren’t you like that? Why just let it all out there?”

  “Of all the secrets I could keep, the ones about myself are the least useful.”

  A vampire not interested in keeping secrets. Oh, the things I could ask … “Next question. Why Ned? Most vampires I’ve met are a little more fancy-pants with their names. Not Rick, it’s Ricardo, that sort of thing. But it’s Ned, not Edward?”

  “My friends call me Ned. I’ve been known by both names all my life. Why do you prefer Kitty instead of Katherine?”

  “Fair enough.” I looked around, taking in the thousands of rich leather spines, smelling the vast collection of paper, parchment, and ink, and guessing that every item was here because Ned wanted it to be. This wasn’t a museum, these were his things. “You’ve been building your libr
ary for over four hundred years, then. You want to point out the highlights?”

  “Look around and tell me what catches your eye.”

  I did, my gaze skimming over shelves and glass cases, having trouble stopping on any one thing because there was too much to focus on. Start with the books or the artifacts? Try to read one of the rare editions? But which one?

  One of the cases held sheets of papers, letters maybe, some drawings, individual pages with short pieces of writing. The old-fashioned handwriting was hard to make out, but I spotted a phrase that repeated: Edward Alleyn. Or Alleyne, or Allan, and a few other variations of spellings. At the tops of letters, on lists of names, and in the title of what seemed to be an admiring poem.

  “Edward Alleyn, that’s you, yes?” I said to him.

  “It is.”

  I continued to the next case, which held only one large book, as big as an old picture atlas, open on its stand. The object had been well cared for; its pages were only just aging to yellow. The text was typeset rather than written, but it was still antique, hard to read. Even so, I only needed a few lines to understand what it was—one of Hamlet’s soliloquies.

  “This is a First Folio,” I said to Ned.

  “Are you a scholar of the Bard, then?” he asked.

  “More like a fan. I majored in English lit, if that means anything. It looks like it’s in really good condition.”

  “Hot off the presses you might say,” he said. “It isn’t even listed in the official census of how many First Folios still exist.”

  “That’s so cool! You must have seen the plays when they were first being performed—oh my God, I can’t even imagine.”

  “I saw most of them, I think. You might say the theater was my life, back then.”

  At that, a synapse in my brain clicked into place—the English major coming back online and earning its keep. “Edward Alleyn,” I murmured. “I’ve heard that name before.”