In the Garden of Sin

by Louisa Burton

  The fatal “accident” would be Galiana’s insurance should Elic be tempted then or in the future to reneg on his deal with the Devil and remain at Grotte Cachée. And, too, Elic’s grief would make it that much easier for Galiana to manipulate him into accepting vampiric conversion.

  “Anthony?” Lili said.

  “Hm?”

  “I said I’m sorry I blew you off like that when you asked me out to dinner yesterday. You’re obviously a nice guy. I hope I didn’t come off as a bitch.”

  “You?” Turek laughed. “Look who my girlfriend is.”

  Lili laughed, too, but her smile soon faded. “Yeah, she really knows what she’s doing. Elic… It’s like he’s a teenager with his first crush.” She looked down, swallowing hard.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded and gave him a watery smile. “Here.” Taking his hand, she closed it around the wine bottle. “You finish it before I start blubbering.”

  His hand was warm where she’d touched it. He took a long pull on the bottle. And then he took another.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “Hm?”

  “You’re scowling.”

  “Oh. Just lost in thought for a minute. I was wondering, um…”

  “Yes?”

  “I was, um, reading online about a mountain near Clermont-Ferrand that has a Roman temple on it.”

  Nodding, she said, “The Temple of Mercury. The mountain is the Puy-de-Dôme. It’s about eight or ten miles from here. Amazing view.”

  “Yeah, the article I read said the sunrises and sunsets are spectacular. I was thinking, if you felt like taking a drive, it might be a nice break from all this.”

  Her gaze shifted from Turek to the spot in the courtyard where Elic and Galiana had been kissing. She nodded. “Yeah. Why not? I think I’d like that. And God knows I could use a break from… all this. What time is sunset tonight?”

  “Tonight?” he said. “I was thinking about setting out before dawn tomorrow and catching the sunrise. There’s something about sunrises. They feel like… beginnings.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “Shall we say six o’clock tomorrow morning?”

  “Why not make it five? I like to see the pitch-black sky start to lighten little by little. Oh, and maybe we should keep this little outing under our hats. If Galiana finds out about it, she’ll go postal on me, and I really don’t need that.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Sure as hell does, Turek thought.

  Elic gazed up at the sun-spangled leaves overhead, his thoughts as dreamy and insubstantial as the breeze waltzing through the woods. From time to time he would realize he was lying naked on his back in six inches of burbling water and forget why. And then he would feel the tickle of her hair on his face and chest, feel the fresh blood, Inigo’s blood, surging into him through the fangs buried in his throat, feel the warmth of his own blood pumping into the water from the incision in his femoral artery and swirling downstream…

  He couldn’t turn his head because the vampiress was holding it in a steely grip, but he could slide his eyes to the side and see his old friend lying nearby in his garish Renaissance garb, his face a death mask leeched of color, of life.

  No, not quite. Already Inigo’s waxen pallor was just a bit less white, and there may have been a hint of pink on the pointed tips of his ears. He was regenerating the lifeblood that he had granted Elic with such careless generosity. Bro! We’ll be the ultimate blood brothers! This totally rocks!

  Mesmerized by the sun glittering through the branches of the sacred oaks far above him, Elic closed his eyes and saw her face, her beautiful, beloved face, and smiled to himself, and thought, Not much longer now, mins Ástgurdís…

  HAME ABOUT THE CAR,” Galiana said as she smoked a cigarette in the driver’s seat of the Alfa Spider, parked on an overlook of the Puy-de-Dôme access road with its top down under a star-strewn night sky. She was in normal clothes tonight—vinyl leggings and a leather bustier.

  “What?” Anton shimmied out from under the jacked-up chassis and stood, dusting off his ridiculous designer jeans as he aimed his flashlight in her face. “I’ll have to throw these out now.”

  “Will you get that fucking thing out of my eyes?”

  “Sorry.” He opened the passenger door and wedged the flashlight between the gear shift and the dashboard with its beam aimed downward to illuminate a square foot of neatly cut, peeled-back carpeting. In the middle of that square was the small hole he’d cut in the floor pan with the cordless reciprocating saw lying on the pushed-back passenger seat. Threaded through that hole was Galiana’s Paramount 900XT Maximum Security Waist Chain, five feet of heat-treated, nickel-finished carbon steel, one end of which he’d just finished padlocking around the front crossbar of the car’s steel frame. Attached about a foot and a half apart at the chain’s other end, which lay on the passenger seat next to the saw, was a pair of heavy-duty handcuffs fitted out with Medeco locks in polycarbonate housings.

  “I said it’s a shame about the Spider,” Galiana said as Anton smoothed down the square of carpeting with unsteady hands. He’d been a nervous wreck all night, seeing to these preparations for Lili’s final drive. “I hate having to destroy a beautiful machine like this just to take out that tiresome little bitch.”

  “It’s your plan,” he reminded her as he gathered the business end of the waist chain and tucked it under the passenger seat. Then, as if worried that he’d overstepped himself, the little weasel added, “And it’s a great plan. You’re right, this road is perfect.”

  It was perfect, a treacherously winding mountain road with rock face on one side and a drop-off on the other. The spot she’d chosen for Lili’s predawn “accident” was an especially sharp curve over a plunging drop about a hundred yards back.

  Checking out her lipstick in the visor mirror, Galiana said, “I told the guard when he gave me the keys that I’d be giving them to Lili when I brought the car back tonight, because she’d asked if she could take it out for an early morning drive tomorrow—or rather today,” she said, checking her watch. “Elic will think what everyone else thinks, that she was driving a little too fast in the dark in a car she wasn’t used to, went off the road, and roasted to death in the ensuing fire. Alone. You did tell her to keep her mouth shut about your romantic little sunrise date, didn’t you?”

  “I told her.”

  “And you won’t let anyone see—”

  “I won’t let anyone see us leaving together.” Anton lifted the floor mat from where he’d tossed it onto the pavement and replaced it over the carpet, covering the incised square and most of the chain snaking under the seat.

  Galiana said, “Pull the seat forward to hide the rest of the—”

  “Way ahead of you,” he said as he adjusted the seat. “But thanks. The devil’s in the details.”

  Rolling her eyes at the pedestrian cliché, Galiana leaned back against the headrest and blew a plume of smoke at the winking stars. “Make sure one handcuff is where you can reach it easily from either the passenger seat or the driver’s seat. In the unlikely event she doesn’t want to do the driving, you’re still going to have to immobilize her.”

  “We’ve been over all this.” He didn’t apologize for his insolence this time.

  Galiana closed her eyes and shook her head. You’d think, after having tried to hoodwink her with that Gebirgshaus shit, that he’d be walking on eggs, but no. She’d promised to let him live if he helped her get rid of Lili, and like the trusting moron he was, he believed her—all the more reason to thin him from the ranks of the Upír. As soon as Lili was dead and she’d gotten Elic away from here and under her control, Anton Turek was going to get the slow roasting he’d been begging for all these years.

  Tapping the cigarette onto the pavement, she said, “Go over it again, marish. One bungled detail could ruin the entire thing.”

  Anton grimaced as he stowed the saw in the trunk alongside the five gallons of g
asoline he’d picked up that afternoon. “I tell her she’s about to hit a deer, and when she stops, I handcuff her.”

  “Both hands.” Even if Lili possessed extraordinary strength, there was no way she could work free of such a secure restraint.

  “Right. Of course. I drain her completely, leaving her too weak to move, and then I douse her with—”

  “No!” Galiana bolted upright. God, the imbecile. “After you drain her, remove the handcuffs and unlock the chain from the car’s frame. You’re going to take it with you, remember? So it looks like an acci—”

  “Right, right. I knew that, I’m just… a little keyed up.”

  “Speaking of which, you’ve got both keys, right? For the handcuffs and the padlock?”

  “Right here.” He patted his front jeans pocket.

  “And remember,” Galiana said, “if she’s in the passenger seat, you’re going to have to move her to the driver’s seat and strap her in. Then comes the gasoline.”

  “I soak her down and take the can.”

  “Don’t forget to bring a backpack or something to put the chain in. The can you can carry. You’ll just look like you ran out of gas. Don’t run, it’ll attract too much attention. You can hoof it back to Grotte Cachée in about two hours. Don’t let anyone give you a ride. Stay off the local radar.”

  “Gotcha. So then I figure I should put the car in neutral so it’s easier to push off the—”

  “Did I tell you to put it in neutral?”

  “Um, no.”

  “The cops might be able to tell from the wreckage that it was in neutral, and then it won’t look like an accident. You want the engine running and in drive—with something to brace the front wheels, like a rock or a log. Aim them toward the drop-off, release the parking break, toss a match in— remember to bring the matches, not your lighter, so you can throw it and don’t have to try to—”

  “Sheisse. The fucking matches.” Anton slammed the balls of his hands against his forehead. “Fuck!”

  Leaning back, she said, “God, chill, Anton. You still have time. You can scrounge some up before five o’clock. There are, like, a hundred fireplaces around the castle. Check them.”

  “Fucking matches,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “Toss the match in. She’ll go up like a torch. Then just roll away whatever was bracing the wheels and push the car off the mountain. The engine will probably explode immediately. Cars burn at super-high temperatures. She’ll be toast within minutes. Dead and gone. Kaput.”

  Galiana hurled her burned-down cigarette out the window, plucked another one from her bustier, and looked toward Anton for a light.

  “Um, yeah, okay. Hold on.” He slid into the passenger seat, reaching into his back jeans pocket.

  “You didn’t forget your lighter, too, did you?”

  “What? No,” he said, fumbling in the pocket. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “You are the most worthless fucking—”

  Something cold and hard snapped around her right wrist. She opened her eyes to find him reaching toward her with the other handcuff.

  She swatted him away with a snarl, teeth bared. He landed on the pavement with a grunt of pain.

  She jerked at the handcuff, rattling the chain, as he scrambled to his feet. In a voice deepened by rage, she said, “Very funny, marish. Unlock this now.”

  Digging in his front pocket, he produced the two keys, held them up in a quavering hand…

  And threw them over the side of the mountain.

  A growl of fury thundered from her lungs as she strained toward him.

  “I know what that means,” he said in a voice that was at once tremulous and irate. “Marish. I know what it means. It means slave. That’s what I am to you. That’s what I’ve always been. Your personal fucking slave.”

  “What are you doing?” she demanded as he hauled the five-gallon can of gasoline out of the trunk and unscrewed the cap.

  “You’re so smart, such a brilliant schemer. You figure it out.” His old Germanic intonations were creeping in on the British accent he’d been affecting for the past century or so.

  She tried to wriggle her hand free of the cuff, but it was no use; he’d snapped it on good and tight, and it was probably the best handcuff in the world, which was why it was her favorite. Willing her voice back to its normal timbre, she tried to reason with him. “Why are you doing this, Anton? Our plan is that close to completion. After today, you can go your way and I’ll go—”

  She shrieked as he splattered her with gasoline, standing just far enough from the passenger side of the car so she couldn’t reach him. He stumbled back anyway, when she lunged for him.

  “Lili said something really interesting to me today,” he said. “She asked me if I wasn’t worried that you’d double-cross me someday. Like, try to get rid of me. And I realized what a fucking asshole I’ve been, thinking you would ever let me live after—”

  “She’s manipulating you, you fucking—” Galiana bit off the rest of that. “Don’t you see? I get it now. Think about it. Somehow, they figured out who we are and what we’re up to. And… and that I can transfuse blood from one Follet to another. We were talking about it in the subs’ dressing room yesterday, remember? Someone must have overheard us and told Elic and Lili.”

  “There was no one there.”

  “There could have been,” she said, cringing at the desperation in her voice. “Hiding behind the racks of clothes, or those chairs, those recliners—”

  “You would have smelled him.”

  “Not over all that perfume. Anton, think about it…”

  “Nein!” he screamed, shaking another stream of gasoline onto her. “Erzaehle mir nicht so einen mist!” Another splash. “Blöde Fotze!” And another.

  Choking and sputtering, Galiana said, “Elic played me. Lili played you. All Follets are fucking awesome actors, you know that. She has no intention of going anywhere with you, Anton. She poisoned your mind against me so you’d do this—or something like it. Neutralize me, take me out of the equation.”

  “This was my idea!” he yelled as he hurled the half-empty can onto the front seat. “Mine!” He kicked the passenger door shut. “You don’t think I can think for myself? You don’t think I can scheme like you?”

  Anton reached into his back pocket, produced his gold lighter, flipped it open, and thumbed the flame to life. He crept toward her, arm outstretched. Galiana’s deeply ingrained instinct was to cower from the flame, but that was suicide. The only way she could keep him back long enough to talk some sense into him was to go on the offense.

  She made a grab at him. He dropped the lighter, cursing, but picked it right up again and lit it, glowering at her.

  “Anton,” Galiana said in a tight, quivering voice, her hands raised placatingly. “Please just stop and think. You’re setting yourself up for another long imprisonment. This”—she gestured to the handcuff, the car, the gasoline can—“isn’t going to look like any accident. It’ll be a murder scene, plain and simple.”

  “I’ll be gone—with Lili—by the time the sun comes up tomorrow. I’m going to keep her at Gebirgshaus till she lets me turn her. No one knows where that is. You’re the only one who even knows it exists, and you’ll be dead.”

  “No, Anton. No. Just stop and think—”

  “Stop telling me to think!”

  “Elic and Lili set this up so I’d transfuse him, then disappear from the picture. When you get back to the castle, they’re going to be waiting for you—guards or cops, or whatever. They’re going take you into custody and—”

  “Liar! Bitch! Halst maul!”

  “Anton, just think—”

  He struck in a blur, flames blossoming with a whump all around her.

  Howling in pain and rage, she seized his arm as he started to retreat.

  “Nein!” he cried as she grabbed the second handcuff and locked it around his wrist, t
ethering them both to the car. He looked toward the gas can, opened his mouth.

  A white-hot concussion roared through her world.

  Darius, perched on the wall of rock above the black sports car, having followed it to the Puy-de-Dôme from Grotte Cachée, shot into the air on a bloom of heat when the gas can exploded. Flames boiled high into the night sky, along with billows of soot-black smoke.

  Gaining his bearings, he flew in a circle over the burning automobile, his gaze on the two charred, twisted, roughly human-shaped figures chained to it. Neither one moved— which didn’t mean they were dead. Follets clung tenaciously to life, and vampires especially.

  Within seconds, there came a second, larger explosion as the fumes in the car’s gas tank ignited. The fireball came close to singeing him because his lousy avian depth perception had him flying closer than he thought. He flew as hard as he could to the safety of a nearby walnut tree.

  Darius found himself captivated by the liquid-gold flames dancing in and around the distorted exoskeleton of something that had been, until moments before, a machine of great beauty and elegance. It was a cleansing fire, steadily devouring the blackened figures as sirens began to whine somewhere out there in the darkness.

  It’s done, Darius thought as he flew back to Grotte Cachée, or it will be soon. The fire would be extinguished, the scene photographed, investigated, and pondered over. The vampires’ remains, carbonized fragments by the time they were cool enough to extract from their chains, would end up in a morgue drawer pending identification, which would likely never occur. The mystery of their presumed murder would go unsolved, and eventually what was left of them would be disposed of and forgotten. They were gone from this world, and more important, from Lili and Elic’s world, these beasts of the night.

  Darius had suspected what they were the moment he awoke in the chapel withdrawing room yesterday, ears flattened and lips drawn back, tasting a whiff of raw meat beneath the lemony perfume filling the room. He remembered Anton Turek from the first time he’d set his sights on Lili two and a half centuries ago, loathed him and feared him for her sake. Then there was the older, stronger female, and her tantalizing reference to transfusion. It tickled his memory; he’d read of this, but where? It had taken hours of research among his ancient demonological texts, but he had found it, a reference to vampiric blood exchange dating back to ancient Etruria, translated by a monk laboring in a Dark Ages scriptorium.