by Aubrey Rose
Robb scrambled down to her.
"Eliza, what happened?"
"Run!"
She sprang up, terror in her eyes, and stumbled against Robb. It looked like she had a sprained ankle. Blood dripped down her face from her hairline. Robb clutched her upright.
"Your head—"
"Run!" she cried. She spun, her foot smashing one of the tarts, and burst into a limping run back toward the way they'd crossed the streambed.
Robb didn't waste a second following her. Behind them, he heard a loud cracking, and as they scrambled across the makeshift log bridge, he turned to see the two halves of the pine trunk come crashing down. The impact shuddered the ground. In the middle of the splintered wood, where the main trunk had stood, there was a dark shadow that Robb could barely make out but for the outline. It didn't look like an animal, though.
It looked like a man.
Robb turned back to the log bridge. If he could make it fall, the man wouldn’t be able to cross the moat. Bracing himself against a rock, he shoved the log once. It only moved a few inches.
The shadow moved forward—floated forward, it seemed, the mist clearing a path in front of his feet, and Robb pushed at the log with all the strength his terror gave him. The log shifted, then rolled, and then fell down into the stream with a splash. Robb scrambled to his feet and fled. He could already hear Eliza screaming at the guards to open the gate, and he thought that they might make it in time. Turning back to look, though, he saw the figure move, and his jaw dropped.
The black ghost—for what else could it be?—leapt halfway up one of the nearby pines, and then sprang off of the tree, seeming to fly over the stream without any effort. It landed hard on the city side of the stream and Robb caught a glimpse of two eyes, glowing red. Terror seized his heart and he ran desperately toward the main gate. The guards would never open the gate without an order from a higher command, and Robb knew that he had to give himself away.
"It's me! Prince Robb!" he cried out as he reached the gate. A guard leaned out from a window in the side tower overhead. "Let us in quick!"
He heard shouting and the latch on the gate began to ease open slowly. Much too slowly. Robb turned to see the mist creeping across the empty space between the city and the forest, the black shadowy figure visible only partially, the red eyes still glowing as it moved forward to them. There were noises from the top of the city walls, and Robb knew that the other children must be watching them in excitement.
"Here," he said to Eliza. "Climb!" He grabbed her again by the legs and lifted her up to the guard opening. It was too far, but maybe she could climb up. Eliza's fingers scrambled for purchase against the cracks in the stone wall. The gate latch was still being raised slowly, but then it stopped. Robb didn't know why. The mist swirled around his feet, crawling up his ankles.
The guard leaned over with a short length of rope, and Eliza grabbed for it. There! Robb felt her weight ease off of him.
Holding on tightly to the rope, she reached a hand down to Robb.
"Come on!" she cried. "Hurry!"
Robb reached out but the guard was already pulling her up.
"Wait!" she screamed. "Wait, he's not up yet!"
"Eliza!" Robb shouted. The mist was at his waist, and a coldness swept over his whole body. He tried to clamber up the wall to catch her hand, but the mist had made the stones slippery. He had only made it up a few feet before his foot slid over the stone and gave way, sending him tumbling back into the white mist. Before he landed, cold arms caught him and held him tightly around his chest. It was not a ghost—no, this flesh was all too real—and as Robb kicked and twisted, the arms dragged him backwards with seemingly no effort.
"Robb! ROBB!"
The last thing Robb saw before he was plunged backward into the woods was Eliza. Her necklace dangled from her neck as she leaned out the window, her arms reaching out desperately to him. Then there was only the white mist and black figures hooded and menacing above
him, and Eliza's screams fading into nothing.
CHAPTER ONE
"Robert? Robert!"
Robb yawned and opened his eyes, expecting to look into the face of a beautiful woman. Instead, he found himself staring at a pair of bushy white eyebrows furrowed over a wrinkled brow. He blinked hard, instantly awake.
"Gerry?"
"So sorry to interrupt, sir, but you do have an appointment this morning."
Robb groaned and turned his face away from his butler. The beautiful naked woman sprawled next to him in bed continued to snore lightly, her light blond hair spread out over the pillow. One of her arms was still draped over his chest. He tried to remember his dream. In his dream, she'd been tied up, and he'd pulled her up onto his lap and began spanking her, yes, spanking until her skin was red and his hunger drove him to lean forward and bite her shoulder, bite down hard—
"No." The night had been normal. He'd bit her on the neck during foreplay and then given her more wine, and she'd fallen asleep shortly after they'd tumbled into bed.
Gerry flung the curtains open and a flood of morning sunlight filled the large room. The wall-sized television turned on and began to play a soft Mozart sonata while abstract shapes floated across the screen.
"I said no!" Robb squinted into the morning sunlight coming through the glass-paned wall across from his bed.
"And yesterday you said—and I quote—'Before nine o' clock, don't listen to anything I sa'—"
"Gerry, come on! Ten more minutes?" He looked back at the girl. What he could do with her in ten minutes...
"Sir, you insisted that I get you up at eight sharp for your appointment."
"Appointment?"
"The dedication speech at the university library, sir." Gerry stood politely beside the doorway, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes averted from the bed.
"Right." Robb slapped his forehead and shook his head. He should never have to wake up so early. "Damn. The dedication. Right... could you see that...ah..." He gestured to the girl in bed, snapping his fingers. Gerry glanced over.
"Madison, I believe, is her name, sir."
"Right. Madison." He wiggled sideways, extricating his arm from the tangle of limbs. Madison rolled over sleepily and murmured something unintelligible. "Could you get her breakfast and see that she's out before I get back?"
"Of course, sir."
He pulled on his pants and took the newly pressed shirt that Gerry held out for him, slinging the tie over his shoulder. He'd put it on later. In his bed, the girl—what was her name again?—began to stir. He strode out the door, Gerry following him calmly.
"There's a pot of yogurt for you on the counter and a banana to go with it. The doctor said—"
"Thanks, Gerry!"
Robb grabbed the brown paper lunch bag and dashed out of his apartment into the private elevator. At the bottom of the building, he passed by the security guard's desk. Tossing the brown bag onto the desk, he reached over and plucked two donuts out of the box sitting in front of the guard.
"Hey!" The guard sprayed donut crumbs from his lips as he spoke. "What gives?!" He turned the bag over and out fell the fruit and yogurt. "What the hell is this?"
"You shouldn't eat so much junk food," Robb said, winking as he took a bite of the chocolate cream-stuffed donut. "Have a banana every once in a while."
"Screw your banana," the guard said.
"Come on now, Joe, I'm only looking out for your health."
"Next time you take one of my donuts, I'll shoot you," Joe said, sniffing at the yogurt warily.
"This is the thanks I get for caring," Robb said, shaking his head in mock disappointment as he backed toward the door. “You’re welcome.”
"See you later, Mr. Chatham," the guard said.
Robb held his hand up in a half-wave as he strode out the door, nodding to the doorman as he went. The valet pulled his car up to the curb a second after he walked out, and he hopped in, resting his head back on the leather seat for a moment before stuffi
ng the remaining donut into his mouth and revving the motor. The Porsche Cayman's engine roared to life, and he tore down the street, the acceleration waking him up more than any of Gerry's admonitions ever could.
The penthouse he lived in was located in midtown London, not too far from the university. He arrived in front of the library in less than five minutes. There was nowhere to park on the street, so Robb eased the Porsche up onto the sidewalk and pulled under the awning of the student coffeeshop. Two undergraduates having coffee outside stared at the Porsche as Robb parked it next to their table and got out. He pulled his tie around his neck and knotted it as best as he could, leaning down to see his reflection in the window. Stupid dedication. Stupid speech.
"I don't think you're supposed to park your car here," one of the students said to Robb.
"It's not a car," Rob said, straightening his tie. "It's an art installation."
"A what?"
"It's a—uh—a commentary on the modern lifestyle of conspicuous consumption," Robb said. There. The tie was as good as it was going to be.
"Huh," the student said, peering at the black sportscar. "Why park it here?"
"Obviously he wanted to tie together the concept of consumption of food and transportation with the idea of knowledge as a consumable good," the other student said, pressing his glasses back on his nose and nodding fiercely in understanding. "It's about how our universities spoon-feed knowledge to us in exchange for currency. It's about capitalism's excesses."
"Exactly," Robb said. Before the students could ask any more questions, he turned on his heel and walked across the lawn toward the university library.
"We're running late." The library director ran a hand through her frizzy red hair, pausing for a second to yell at the people setting up the small stage just inside the library doors.
"Don't tell me that," Robb said. "My speech was supposed to be at nine o'clock."
"Fifteen minutes," the director said, her eyes trained on the two students heaving the podium up onto the stage. "Maybe twenty. Depends on the sound people."
"Then you'll have to get someone else to speak," Robb said, turning away. That was easy enough. What was the next thing he had on his schedule? He pulled out his phone to check. A visit to the university chemistry lab in the afternoon. He could take a nap before then...
"Wait! No, wait! Mr. Chatham," the library director said, stepping in his path. Robb looked up from his phone in irritation.
"Please, Mr. Chatham, I understand your time is valuable and I promise it won't take long. Ten minutes, tops." The director grasped his hand in both of hers, obscuring his phone's screen, and looked up at him, her eyes beseeching. "We have the university president attending. Please."
"Fine, fine," Robb said, shaking her hands off of him. "I'll be back in ten minutes."
Robb wandered upstairs to the private rooms of the library. There was one room in particular where he knew he would not be disturbed: the poetry collection room he'd founded years ago. Nobody ever had time to read poetry anymore.
At the back of the upstairs hall, he unlocked the room and stepped inside. The air was stale, dusty, and the shelves were piled high with antique books that looked as though they'd fall apart if you looked at them too hard.
Robb walked down the last row, letting his finger slide over the spines of the books of poetry. At the end of the row he found the book he was looking for. Pulling it out, he lay down on the small couch in the corner and swung his legs over the couch arm. He flipped through the book, reading snippets of poetry at random until he found the one he was looking for.
Summer Dawn, it was called. That poem had always reminded him of Eliza. He began to read, and the first line took him back to the time when he was ten and he'd read to her. She'd thought it was wondrous that he could take the letters on the page and translate them into songs, and he thought it was wondrous that she could not. He'd read them with exaggerated lyricism, and she'd read along, her finger moving with his across the page that he'd copied laboriously from his tutor's worn books.
Now, sitting back on the couch arm, he read the poem the same way, his finger moving from line to line. His lips moved only slightly as he read the words.
Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.
His eyes filled with tears at the thought of Eliza reading the poem to him in her stumbling, half-certain syllables, looking up at him with pride when she managed a section by herself. He'd thought himself so far above her that even in his love he'd let his arrogance taint him. That was his sin, and he would never forgive himself for letting pride supersede his love for her.
It did not matter now that his vision was watered and blurred. He knew the poem by heart and continued to read, though the words now were fuzzed. Eliza loved the next part, she did...
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn
He blinked, and a tear escaped the corner of his eye, running down his cheek. He continued to recite the poem, his eyes closed. He kept them closed.
There would be no dawn for him. He would always have this seething darkness inside of him, and he would never again be able to love. There would only be the next girl that he used for his purposes for a brief moment, and then she would go and the next girl would come along. And the next. And the next. Could he do this forever?
A book dropped, and he wiped his hand quickly across his cheek as he sat up to see who had made the noise. It was a girl with dark hair, and for a moment he thought it was Eliza. But no, no of course it wasn't her, it was a young woman, a student. She looked up, and—
Her eyes. Robb found his skin hot, and he swallowed the lump that must have risen in his throat when he had been thinking about Eliza. Instantly he shamed himself for being so put out by a clumsy girl. He drew his face into a practiced expression of aloof disdain and looked down at the girl, trying not to let her eyes distract him into falling in love.
Falling in love. He'd tried before, whenever he found the flickering of desire inside himself, and been rewarded with abject failure every time. Inevitably women hated him for something: an intuition, maybe, that the charm he'd worked on them had already worked on hundreds of women. He could never let them know the black secret he carried into every human relationship—that their desire for him was largely due to the chemical reaction that occurred when he bit them lightly. They fought with him, they insulted him, they left him or cheated on him and he left them. After living four hundred years, he could not work up the energy to care about the trifling disagreements that tore his relationships apart. Eventually he'd stopped trying, and he'd accepted his fate. He was a monster, after all.
There was no room in his world for love.
CHAPTER TWO
"Ninety-nine empty test tubes on the wall, ninety-nine empty test tubes. Take one down, pass it around—"
"Very funny."
A strand of Liz's dark hair fell into her eyes. Again. She contorted her shoulder upward, trying to nudge the disobedient strand of hair back behind her ear.
"When you're done figuring out what pubs to visit, maybe you could help me wash some of these." Liz took the wire cleaning brush and snapped it in Jenny's direction, sending a light spray of water over her. There were test tubes piled in the sink, on the counter, everywhere, and Jenny had had her nose in her phone for ten minutes, looking up pub specials.
"Eek! I'm coming, I'm coming." Jenny wiped the drips of water off of her phone and stuffed it into her pocket, tossing back her blond ponytail as she rolled up her sleeves and came to help Liz wash the glassware. "You know, that used to be a British song. It was ten green bottles when I was a kid."
"I suppose Americans like their beer more than you Brits."
"That is not true!" Jenny brandished a test tube at Liz. "You take that back, you dirty Yank."
Liz grabbed the test tube away from Jenny and began to wash it. Ninety-eight e
mpty test tubes on the wall...
"Come on," Jenny said. "We can do this tomorrow."
"Or," Liz said, "we can do it tonight. And then we won't have to do it tomorrow."
"Lizzzzzz..."
"Jennnnny..." Liz said, raising the wire brush in a threatening pose.
"Have some fun! Come on, it's the beginning of the semester. There's a happy hour at Rossi's across the street. We can do this tomorrow."
"The lab program director will be here tomorrow." Liz hadn't met anyone in the chem lab except Jenny, but she wanted to make a good impression on the program director. And Jenny, god bless her, was not the labmate she had imagined working next to during her graduate study. She was friendly, sure, but she seemed more interested in what was on tap at the brew pub than getting the lab ready for the beginning of the year. They'd been working a week and, while they'd started a few lab culture tests, the remaining clutter from the year before had yet to be cleared out.
"He won't show till afternoon,” Jenny whined. “Come on, my mates have been killing me to meet you."