by Nancy Morse
“That is what you will become.”
He reached for her hand and drew her out of the shadows. She followed without speaking, numbed by what she had witnessed.
***
For a long time Pru sat without thinking or speaking, just breathing. Her thoughts were trapped behind a wall of disbelief, her voice smothered beneath the weight of reality. The only emotion she felt was anger, at herself, at him, at the whole world.
She was only dimly aware of the glass that was held to her lips, the hand at the back of her head, the clink of crystal against her teeth forcing her mouth open, the full and heavy taste of the Oloroso that slid down her throat.
Gradually, the world returned, the crazy, savage world into which she had been thrust. The color rose to her cheeks and she felt her heart beating again. She sat there, dismally contemplating what her life had turned out to be, and worse, what it would be if she became the thing she had witnessed on the wharf. She felt numb, and stupid, so incredibly stupid for thinking she owed him anything at all.
“You are revolted by what you saw, and well you should be.”
At the sound of his voice, smooth and charming as if nothing had happened, she lifted her gaze and stared at him—at his angelic face, the green eyes so clear and innocent, the sensual curve of his mouth—and the truth of what he was hit her with sudden impact. She looked away, unable to bear the contradiction of his physical beauty and the demon that resided within.
“You are truly an evil thing,” she said.
He walked away and placed the empty glass of sherry on a sterling tray. “It’s not I who am evil. It is the narrow-minded and the intolerant.”
“You are a sin against all that is holy.”
He shrugged elegantly. “After the fall of the Roman Empire, Islam and Christianity should have put an end to dark gods and blood rituals, but the church’s use of demons to further its army of converts served merely to move me one step closer to humanity.”
“You dare to compare yourself to a human? No human would have done what you did tonight.”
“It was a human who plunged his knife into the heart of an unsuspecting innocent tonight. Humans fight wars in the name of what you call all that is holy. In those wars men are maimed and slaughtered, women raped, children butchered. You’re right. I am much worse than that.”
Pru clenched her teeth. “Your appalling sarcasm is more than I can bear. I hate you.”
“Ah, but love and hate are all the same in the end, aren’t they?”
“Do not presume to know what is in my heart, Nicolae. I will never love you.”
His voice tightened. “So you have said. I will survive it. I am, after all, immortal.”
“What you did tonight was reprehensible.” Her voice reeked with disgust.
“What I did tonight was beyond my control,” he snapped. “I am what I am. I have never pretended to be otherwise.”
“That thing, that terrible snarling thing.” With a shudder she recalled the eyes of yellow-gold and the fangs she imagined seeing once during their lovemaking, and the dog that chased the rats away in the distillery cellar. Only it wasn’t a dog; it was something far more diabolical. It was him.
“Yes, well I do have the power to transform,” he said, “but unlike you, I did not ask for this. I did what I did tonight to show you what you would become if I accepted your gratitude.”
“I would become a…a…beast of the forest?”
“Only if I gave you enough of my own immortal blood to drink. Otherwise, you would become a common blood drinker.”
Pru drew back and gasped softly. “Papa.”
“I told you, he would not necessarily have to drain humans for his survival. Chicken blood would do. Or ox blood.”
“Then why isn’t chicken blood or ox blood good enough for you?” she charged. “Why do you kill innocent people?”
“Innocent?” he echoed. “You saw what that footpad did.”
Was he trying to divert her attention away from himself? She shot him an appalled look. “I despise you,” she said. “I was a fool for thinking I owed you anything, least of all myself for all eternity. You are a loathsome creature and you deserve to be alone.”
A look of distress crossed his face, hidden in the next moment behind a careless smile. “I take it that means you do not want me to give your poor papa eternal life.”
“I don’t want you anywhere near him.”
He spread his hands wide in a gesture of feigned helplessness. “As you wish.”
“I would prefer that he die with some dignity than at your hands,” she said with a huff.
“From what you have described to me, and from what I have seen with my own eyes, what dignity can there be in feeling your life slowly slipping away? If I did not know better, I would say he was the victim of something far more insidious than me.”
“He is receiving the best possible care,” Pru said defensively. “I do everything I can to make him comfortable, and Aunt Vivienne sees to his needs every night.”
“You mean when she is not busy with one of her young lovers, she finds the time to tend to him.”
“You are being impudent.”
“I am being truthful.”
“She is…” Pru bit her lip and cast about for an apt description. “Headstrong and spoiled and given to having her way. She is flirtatious, and somewhat cunning, and her moods can be changeable. Nevertheless, I am lucky to have her.” She spoke without much conviction in her voice, trying to convince herself as much as Nicolae of her aunt’s attributes.
“She sounds like someone I used to know,” he said.
“One of your former lovers, perhaps?” Even now, despite how much she hated him, she felt a twinge of unexpected jealousy.
“Hardly,” he replied with a laugh. “She reminds me of Lienore. I told you about her. She, too, is spoiled and headstrong and flirtatious and given to having her own way. I wouldn’t exactly call Lienore cunning, though. Devious, is more to the point.”
“You mean the witch who was sacrificed for something, I forget what.”
“For lying with her female lover in the bracken.”
“Oh yes, that’s right,” she said, not bothering to hide her distaste. “Well, Aunt Vivienne is nothing like your friend Lienore.”
He ran a slender finger negligently over the fluted edge of the silver tray. “She is no friend of mine, I can assure you. It is said she hates music. Can you imagine a friendship between the two of us?”
Pru stared dismally at the floor. It had all been a foolish fantasy, a flight of her naïve imagination, to fancy anything remotely romantic about him. The tortured creature, part-man, part-demon, shut away from light and friendship for all eternity. The temperamental musician sunk in a remote and brooding unhappiness. She thought she understood what he was, and was willing to offer him the companionship he seemed to crave in exchange for the thrill of being in his arms. Until tonight, that is, when she witnessed him at his most brutal, and now she wasn’t sure which of them she hated more, him for shattering her illusions, or herself for believing she had seen something human in him. And the music? Perhaps it was as he said. Just that. Music. Nothing more.
She squeezed her eyes shut at the awful disgrace she felt. When she opened them, he was watching her, a lazy smile on his lips as if he could read her shame. She stood up, smoothing her skirts. “Would you hail a carriage for me please? I would like to go home.”
CHAPTER 23
Nicolae paced the floor of the garret room, cursing himself and the world. He cast a scornful look at the violoncello that had brought her into his life. It was not likely she would want to see him or hear his music ever again, and it was just as well. He could do nothing but bring her harm. And yet, a part of him wept at the loss. He could find other lovers, even ones as inexperienced as she whom he could tutor in the ways of lovemaking as he had tutored her. But where would he ever find another as pure and guileless as to believe him capable of possessing a soul? With
her departure went the last vestige of his humanity.
With a beleaguered breath he blew out the candles and sat down on the floor with his back pressed against the wall, legs drawn to his chest, staring into the blackness. Inside of him was a great lonely space that nothing had ever been able to fill, save a timid Englishwoman with blue eyes, and then, only for a little while. The loneliness bore down on him with a heaviness that threatened to suffocate him. If only it could. If only it could squeeze the air from his lungs and the life from his heart until there was nothing left but peace and rest from the awful burden that was his life. He wanted to cry, but could not. Tears were a thing of the past. In the decades after his making he had shed so many thousands upon thousands of tears that there simply were no more left to shed.
Without her, he would go back to the great nothing that was his life. And what about her? What would her life be like now that he was no longer a part of it? Would she find the love she was seeking and bestow upon some lucky mortal the love she could not bring herself to feel for him? Would her womb swell with the children he could not give her? Would she and her beloved grow old together and reminisce over their vanishing youth? Would she look back upon this time and place as she drew her last breath and think of him and wish she had made a different choice?
Well, at least she was not alone like he was. She had the music master, for now at least, until he succumbed to whatever it was that was slowly draining the life from him. And she had her aunt, that frivolous woman whose dislike of him had been evident from the start, almost as if she could sense what he was, and recoiled from it.
Words spoken earlier in the evening came to mind. Headstrong. Spoiled. Flirtatious. Cunning. The words fluttered around him like bats in a dark cave. There was something about them that he could not quite put his finger on, yet which unsettled him. He tried to banish them from his mind and concentrate on his own self-pity, but they continued to haunt him.
Headstrong.
Spoiled.
Flirtatious.
Cunning.
He had laughingly compared Prudence’s aunt to the witch Lienore. But now, looking into the dark, an impulsive thought began to take shape, growing in his mind to a frightening possibility.
Lienore. Lienore.
***
Pru stood at the window of her bedroom, her eyes raised to the moon, an aching in her soul. This was the same window at which her mother had sat at the loom weaving her silks what seemed now like a lifetime ago. Margaret had suffered from a melancholy that could not be explained, just as Pru herself was suffering now. Was she destined to meet the same fate? The only difference was that her mother had found a deep and abiding love, and until the inexplicable sadness had overwhelmed her, had been happy and content, whereas Pru was doubtful of ever finding the kind of love for which she longed.
Nicolae claimed to love her, but there was little comfort to be derived in that thought. He may not have pretended to be anything other than what he was, but he had conveniently neglected to mention that he was a brutal killer. Oh, how naïve she had been. He was a blood-drinker, for God’s sake. His victims may have been thieves and murderers, but that did not make him any less of a killer. How could a man like that love anything at all? Well, he had done her one favor, at least. He had shown her what he truly was, although she doubted his reason for doing so had anything to do with her, but everything to do with him, selfish thing that he was.
What a fool she had been to think him capable of possessing a soul. He was self-centered, not given to regret, and possessing no conscience whatsoever. By all indications, he was void of anything remotely human. She was glad to be rid of him. Why, then, did she feel like weeping? A tear formed and slipped down her cheek and would have been followed by others, had something not captured her attention.
She saw a slight movement on the street below, and through a splash of moonlight she recognized her aunt’s form. She expected to hear the front door close, but no such sound came. Squinting into the shadowy night, she saw the figure draw back and look up. For many long minutes Vivienne just stood there staring at the house as if she were deciding whether or not to enter.
Just then, the moon appeared through a tattered cloud, illuminating her aunt’s face, and it was plain to see that she was looking up at Papa’s room. Pru gasped and blinked hard. Was it a trick of the shifting light, or did she really see an expression of abhorrence on her aunt’s face?
Pru turned from the window, feeling sick. She knew Aunt Vivienne had grown weary of tending to Papa, but she never imagined it had grown into such loathing as she had seen on her face just now. Perhaps it was time to speak to her, to relieve her of her duty as caregiver and send her back to Paris where she could be as free and wanton as she liked. Surely, Papa would not mind. He had been begging her to bar Vivienne from his room, claiming there was something unnatural about her.
Pru pressed her fingers to her temples and attempted to rub away the headache that had only grown worse since leaving Nicolae’s house. A glance down at her dress revealed the truth she would have liked to forget. The hem was soiled with mud from the wharf, the bodice ripped at the hands of Nicolae’s demon lust. Beneath it, her stays were broken, the laces torn. In the morning, she would go downstairs to the kitchen before Gladys arrived and toss them into the fire. For now, she undressed and shoved the soiled and torn garments to the back of the wardrobe and slipped a simple white linen shift over her head.
She glanced at her disheveled reflection in the mirror, and frowned. Sitting down at the dressing table, she withdrew what pins were left in her hair and let it tumble past her shoulders. With mechanical movements, and staring at nothing in particular, she drew the bristles of a rosewood hairbrush through the tangled tresses, trying hard not to think about Nicolae, but not succeeding.
What was it about that man that made her ache with conflicted emotion? She should have been glad to be rid of him, yet she knew she would never meet another man like him. He was a rake and a clever manipulator, a petulant and dangerous man, yet he was intelligent and passionate and blessed with a gift for music that few men possessed. She could tell by the look of distress on his handsome face that the cruel things she said to him this evening had cut him to the quick. Not even the undead were immune to that type of injury, it seemed. She felt dreadful for it, yet he deserved it. She didn’t fancy herself in love with him, yet what she did feel for him was something she could not define. Empathy, yes. Lust, oh God, yes. Damn him for causing her this misery.
She tugged the brush through her hair with long, angry strokes. The thought of his judgmental nature was too much to bear. Not even Aunt Vivienne was beyond the reach of his scathing comments. How dare he compare her aunt to that witch Lienore? The only thing they had remotely in common was their preference for young lovers, although Vivienne had claimed to have been in love with only two of them, the one she had married and divorced, and the one with whom she had laid in the bracken a long time ago. The bracken. Vivienne’s own words.
Pru stopped brushing her hair in mid-motion and slowly lowered the brush to the dressing table. Something nagged at the back of her mind, causing a sensation not unlike a hundred pin pricks over her flesh.
The bracken. A long time ago.
How long, she wondered? Years? Centuries?
She laughed nervously at the preposterous thought.
Yet try as she might, she could not banish it from her mind. There were too many coincidences to ignore.
Papa had begun to grow weaker with Vivienne’s arrival in London. He did not want her in his room. His own words rattled like sabers in Pru’s mind. “Don’t let her come.”
There was Vivienne’s dislike for Nicolae, as if she knew there was something unnatural about him. Who but another like he would have known what he was?
Then there was Vivienne’s aversion to music which she tried to hide. Pru recalled the night of the concert. Had she really run off to meet one of her lovers, or had it been an excuse not to stay an
d hear the music? And the night she, Vivienne and Edmund had gone to see the Beggar’s Opera, glancing over at her aunt during the production to see a repugnant look on her face. Pru had been too preoccupied with her own problems with Edmund to give it much thought. Until tonight, when she had seen the same look on Vivienne’s face as she stood in the street beneath an oil lamp staring up at Papa’s room.
This was outlandish. Her imagination was running away with her. Or was it?
Papa!
The brush fell from her hand. The flame flickered as she rushed past the candle to the door.
Her bare feet flew down the narrow winding stairs and across the hardwood planks to her papa’s room. Hearing no sound from within, she opened the door and stepped inside. She approached the bed cautiously and stood for several moments staring down at him. The gentle rise and fall of his chest and the soft wheezing sound of his breathing told her he was sleeping. Expelling a breath of relief, she backed out of the room on tiptoes and quietly closed the door behind her.
She was headed back upstairs, chastising herself for letting her imagination run wild, when a sound from behind another door caught her attention. A voice she did not recognize was coming from Aunt Vivienne’s room. Had her aunt brought one of her lovers into the house? But wait. It was not a man’s voice she was hearing; it was a woman’s. Tiptoeing closer, she pressed her ear to the door.
The voice was chanting in a language Pru did not recognize, one moment crooning sweetly, the next filled with low, gurgling tones. She caught her breath. With trembling fingers she reached for the knob and gave it a turn, ever so slightly, ever so quietly, and pushed the door open, only an inch at first, ready to flee at any second. The chanting continued, luring her to push the door open further and peek inside despite every inner warning to turn around and run.
The room stretched before her like a great cave. The drapes were drawn, blocking out the pale moonlight. The only light came from the candles that sulked and sputtered from the gilt wood wall sconces set on either side of the bed. There was a smell of decay in the room, of something old and dead, that made Pru’s stomach heave.