As Vital as Blood (Victorian Vampires Book 1)

by Amanda DeWees

  Other reasons for her dismay and for the tears that threatened she simply refused to let herself think about.

  Every now and then, though, she caught herself standing and just gazing around the library. Even with several shelves already emptied, their contents crated for passage to England, it was the loveliest room she had ever known. It had been a sanctuary for her, perhaps, in its way, a new home to take the place of the one that had been dissolved with her father’s death.

  Whether that was because of the books alone or the companionship of the baron she did not want to consider.

  At least there was one happy development. That morning Ana had given her a letter from Rosamond containing good news: she was engaged to be married to a fine young man of the distinguished Alder family, so Michael did not have to worry about her any longer. Michael, Rosamond said, could now pursue her own life and interests in the comfortable knowledge that her little sister was taken care of.

  Unfortunately, Rosamond’s engagement to such a prominent man would meet an abrupt end if her older sister brought scandal upon the Cargraves. Now it was more important than ever that Michael be circumspect—and give up all hope of any further employment with Baron Dalca, as wrenching as that was. And she couldn’t even confide in Rosamond, who deserved to enjoy this exciting development unshadowed by concern for her older sister.

  By staying busy she managed to keep herself from dissolving into a weeping wreck until nearly time for luncheon. Then she realized that a book she needed to consult had already been packed.

  Fortunately she had a good idea of where the crates were being stored. It was true that she had promised the baron not to wander about the castle alone, but this particular chamber underground was near the library, and she had heard Dumitru going up and down the stairs with boxes so frequently of late that she knew it was safe and not barred to all. She lit a small spirit lamp, made certain that the glass flue was secure, and set out for her destination.

  She found the doorway down a few turns of the smaller corridor leading from the library. When she tugged the heavy door open, a blast of cold, dank air greeted her, wrinkling her nose. Thank goodness the crates for the books had been specially made to be airtight and waterproof, for they could protect their precious contents from becoming moldy or mildewed during their time in the cellar. The baron cared too much for his collection to risk its coming to harm before it reached England.

  Her boots struck echoes as she descended the great stone stair into the darkness. At the foot of the steps she stood to get her bearings, holding the light aloft to reach as far as it could. So many arched passages led out of this main chamber that she thought of a crypt, and shuddered.

  Ah, there they were—the newest crates, all together, huge oblong shapes that she guessed took both the baron and Dumitru to carry. Thanks to her cataloguing system she knew which crate held the volume she needed, so she would not have to look in each one.

  The lid resisted her efforts to open it until she found the catches to release. When those were sprung, the lid opened graciously on silent hinges, and she jumped back with an involuntary cry when she saw what was inside.

  A dead woman lay in the crate.

  Michael’s heart struck her ribs with the force of her shock, but somehow she did not drop the lamp. She raised it with a shaking hand to throw its illumination on the sight before her and confirm the terrible thing.

  The woman was young, younger than Michael, and naked. Rippling blonde hair fell around her bare shoulders, and her skin was as white as chalk. Even though she was so pale she was quite beautiful, with delicate features and smoothly rounded limbs. There was no sign of an injury that Michael could see.

  To make certain she was truly dead, Michael did the last thing she wanted to do: she put out her hand and touched the woman’s skin. It was cool, almost cold, and when Michael forced herself to seek a pulse at the wrist, there was none.

  Her heartbeat was slowing its wild gallop, but now her thoughts were racing. This was one of the missing village girls, and the killer had hidden her here. No, the killer must live in the castle, which meant—

  “Madmoazelă should not be here.”

  The words made her gasp and whirl around. Dumitru loomed behind her with a face like a thundercloud.

  “This woman,” Michael stammered. “I think she is dead. We need a doctor, or the police. Or the mayor—”

  The words halted abruptly as a giant hand clamped around her arm. With the other, the manservant seized the lamp. Then he began to drag her across the packed earth.

  For a terrible instant Michael thought he might be dragging her toward a packing case to shut her in, and she struggled wildly in his grip. Was that how the girl had died? There was no mark upon her. If she simply ran out of air…

  Then Dumitru’s boot struck the first stair, and he began to roughly haul her up the steps. A wave of relief made her so weak she couldn’t find her footing at first, but then she got her feet under her, reducing the iron grip on her arm somewhat.

  “You can let me go,” she told him, trying to speak calmly and confidently. “I’ll go with you. You needn’t drag me.” She had to placate him until she could escape or attract the attention of someone who could help her.

  The man stopped short and looked her in the face. Beneath the shaggy brows and behind the wild beard she couldn’t be sure of his expression, especially in the wavering lamplight. His brow was drawn as if he were angry.

  “Vino cu mine,” he said gruffly. “Come with me.” With a little shake of her arm as if to scold her, he continued stamping up the steps, and Michael kept up as best she could, her panicked thoughts darting in all directions.

  Dumitru could have killed the village girls and hidden them. Or he could have concealed them on behalf of someone else. Someone like Baron Dalca.

  All she knew right now was that Dumitru was too strong for her to escape, and he seemed to have a very definite idea about what he planned to do with her. Michael plucked uselessly at the hand that held her arm, but the giant Romanian seemed not even to notice. She could scream for help. Would she even be heard? And even if Ana heard, how likely was she to interfere with her own son, especially since he could physically overpower her as well?

  She knew that the baron’s habits meant he was probably asleep. But oughtn’t he to know what his servant was doing, especially since he had professed to care about Michael’s safety?

  She drew in a deep breath and screamed with all her strength.

  All that happened was that Dumitru grunted in annoyance, set down the lamp, and covered Michael’s mouth. His palm was so large that it covered her nose as well, and she struggled in mounting panic until he realized he was smothering her. He released her then, although he glared at her with so fierce an expression that she didn’t risk screaming a second time. Better not to antagonize a man who could snap her neck without even straining.

  Ana came running up as they reached the top of the stair. She and her son exchanged a few words, and then, to Michael’s amazement, the serving woman simply turned and left.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

  Dumitru didn’t answer, but shortly she discovered it for herself: he was taking her to her room.

  He didn’t enter, merely shoved her over the threshold and slammed the door. She heard a key turn in the lock, and then his heavy footsteps retreated.

  Somewhat relieved, she sat down and waited for her heartbeat to return to normal. Then, minutes later, it quickened again as Dumitru’s heavy tread approached once more. This time he was accompanied by Ana, who carried a tray with Michael’s usual luncheon and a pot of coffee. Dumitru stood in the doorway, practically filling the space, while Ana brought the tray in and set it on the writing desk.

  “Ana,” Michael began, trying to find the words in Romanian, “please tell me what’s going on. What will happen to me?”

  But Ana didn’t seem to understand her, or else she refused to become involved. Saying only,
“Wait for baron,” she left the room. Dumitru gave Michael a severe look and shut the door once again. She was a prisoner.

  It was not for many hours, not until after the sun had set, that anyone came looking for Michael.

  The worst part wasn’t the not knowing what would happen to her, strangely enough. The worst part was fearing that Baron Dalca was a murderer.

  She couldn’t bear to believe that he could be capable of such an act. Not a gentleman as courteous, as kind, as intelligent as the baron. A man who possessed not only a philosopher’s mind but a poet’s heart. Such a man was not capable of deliberate murder, surely? But such men, she knew from history, had killed before.

  There was also the terrifying additional possibility that her rational mind fought to suppress: that he was not even human, but one of the blood-sucking creatures of folklore. It seemed absurd to let herself consider it even for a moment…but her father had encouraged her to challenge assumptions, to question accepted beliefs. It would be foolish not to at least consider that centuries of folklore might have a basis in fact. If she let herself consider for a moment that such creatures as vampires might exist, could the baron be one?

  He had evaded her question as to whether he believed in the creatures. And if the vampire’s bite did heal itself and disappear, it might have been how the beautiful woman in the cellar had been dispatched.

  She forced herself to go over in her mind all that she knew about vampires. The difficulty was that the different sources often disagreed. Some said they could walk by day, others that they could not, still others that they were merely unable to call upon their powers of transformation while the sun shone. Some said they could be killed by beheading, others by driving a stake of ash or holly through the heart. A substantial loss of blood in a short time might destroy them, or drinking the blood of a dead man.

  Holy water, the crucifix, and wafers of the Host might wound them, or they might not. Silver, iron, and salt, three of the most ancient protections against supernatural evil, seemed to be among the most certain weapons against them. Some vampires drew vitality from the moon, others from sleeping in a coffin filled with their native soil. Some could transform into mist or living creatures like bats and wolves…

  She thought uneasily of her dreams of the mist and of seeing a wolf from her window. Had those been coincidences? Phantasms of the brain, brought on by her knowledge of the lore, made urgent by recent events? Or were they evidence?

  Vampires themselves varied so much from book to book that it was impossible to derive anything useful from the written accounts. Some chroniclers depicted them as little more than reanimated corpses, incapable of reason or emotion, who returned from their graves to feed off those to whom they had been closest during life—their own family. Yet others described aristocratic figures with pale skin and noble bearing, who possessed a mysterious power to attract…this was so close to the baron that she couldn’t help but be uneasy at the parallel.

  But the baron’s entire character argued against his being a monster out of folklore. He had treated her with courtesy and care, always quick to reassure her that her well-being was important to him…

  Although that might have been a charade meant to conceal the fact that he had been drinking her blood while she slept.

  The realization was as humiliating as it was horrifying. He might have been preying on her all along, merely pretending to keep her safe. The idea of his being capable of such a violation made her feel as if her mind would break in two.

  Or was it only her mind?

  Perhaps the real agony was that he had won her heart, and that too would break if he proved a deceiver and a bloodthirsty killer.

  The hours dragged by like weeks, and her thoughts stung like a swarm of angry bees, never giving her a moment’s peace. No matter how much she sifted through her memories of her time at Castle Dalca, she could reach no definite conclusions about the questions that tormented her. She needed her freedom, for answers would never come to her while she was imprisoned here.

  Some time after nightfall she heard Dumitru’s unmistakable footsteps in the corridor, and she tried to prepare herself—for anything. Someone else was accompanying him, she noted, someone whose tread was lighter, more rapid. Not the baron—but who?

  The answer was one she never could have predicted. It was the dead woman from the packing case.

  Alive and smiling, she stepped over the threshold as if stepping out of a carriage before a royal palace. Dressed in a fashionable dinner gown of red and gold damask, with her fair hair in braids arranged like a coronet, she glided forward in a rustle of skirts and extended one gloved hand.

  “How do you do?” she said. “My name is Bianca.”

  Chapter X

  “Of course the poor girl was frightened,” Bianca said. “She found a corpse in your cellar! I thought I put her at ease quite nicely.”

  Vasile shook his head, not in negation as much as frustration. “I wish you had simply cast a glamour over her to make her forget finding you. Now I must explain a live woman in my home, which is almost as inconvenient as a dead one.”

  Bianca arched one perfect eyebrow. She perched on the corner of the banquet table in the great hall, her damask skirts arrayed around her, swinging one foot. It was clad in a dainty red kid leather slipper that looked as though it was made for dancing.

  “Don’t fret. I told her I was your sister and that I made an impulsive stop at Castle Dalca to break a long journey, as I often do, which is the truth. And that I have a peculiar medical condition that makes my heartbeat slow and difficult to detect. Which is close to the truth, at least.”

  “And did she ask why you were sleeping in the nude in a packing case?”

  “Well, I could hardly tell her that I don’t like to sully my beautiful clothes with graveyard soil. I said it was a beauty regimen for my complexion. She thinks me eccentric, but not a revenant.”

  “I suppose that will do.” Now that he was relieved of that worry for the moment, his thoughts alighted on the one matter besides Miss Cargrave that was never far from his mind. “So you will reach England before me. Do you have any idea why Wulfgar is summoning us all?”

  She shook her head, making her earrings swing. They looked as though they were set with rubies and pearls, which would not have surprised him, as she had a taste for luxury in all things. “He has been quite cryptic with me,” she said.

  “With me as well. It frustrates me.”

  “I’m certain he shall unfold everything to us in his own time. Perhaps he wishes to have all of us there with him so that he need only explain things once. At any rate, to get back to your Miss Cargrave, I didn’t want to use a glamour if I could avoid it. She has a good mind. It would be a pity to cloud it.”

  Vasile sighed. “Miss Cargrave is not ‘mine,’ Bianca. Ours is a business arrangement only.”

  Bianca’s green eyes lit up with mischief, and dimples appeared on either side of her rosy mouth. Once upon a time she had been a member of the pleasure-loving court of England’s Charles II, and she still sought the merry side of life even on the other side of the grave. “You need not try to pull the wool over my eyes, Vasile. You deserve some happiness, after all.”

  “That is far from certain. And her happiness is a great deal more important than mine.” Human happiness, after all, was so brief.

  “Why not both at once?”

  He gave her a pained look. Her lack of a strict conscience was part of her charm, but it could also be exasperating. “How can you propose such a thing? If the past has shown me anything, it is that our kind and mortals cannot find happiness together.”

  She laughed. “If your definition of happiness depends on marriage, no wonder you cannot find it. Why must you strive to make an amour permanent? ’Tis against nature.”

  “It is an ideal, Bianca. What are we if we have no ideals to strive toward?”

  She pursed her lips. “I would say ‘hedonists,’ but I know you find that outlook disquieting.
”

  “Conduct your existence as frivolously as you see fit, and I shall not interfere or condemn…but neither shall I follow your example.” Was her amorality more dangerous than he knew, though? “Bianca, are you certain you only arrived last night? You haven’t been here for a fortnight or so?”

  She gave him a quizzical look. “It isn’t the sort of thing I am likely to forget. Why do you ask?”

  Briefly he told her about the missing young women. Her expression of innocent curiosity did not waver.

  “I’m astonished you would ask that, cherub,” she said. “I’ve never taken hostages, and I’ve never drained anyone so much that they couldn’t find their way back home within a day. If this is one of our kind, he must be a dreadful sort, or extremely inept. A feral, do you think?”

  “A feral wouldn’t have covered his tracks so well.”

  “Is this why you are sending the girl away? To keep her safe from whoever is doing this?”

  “Or perhaps to keep her safe from me.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what to do, Bianca. I stood watch outside her window all last night, but there are signs that she may have been bitten already, which would make her suggestible. In that case she might be safer here, where I at least know how to protect her. But that has its own dangers.” It shamed him to admit it. “Last night I came so close to biting her.”

  That, or kissing her. When she had stood before him all unsuspecting, eyes closed, her smooth young throat bared for him, he had been wracked by both impulses. He could so easily imagine brushing his lips down the column of white skin, either to taste or to caress. Or burying his face in her silky hair to inhale her scent. Taking her in his arms to feel her body go supple and pliant against his…

  Bianca interrupted the fevered daydreams. “Why don’t you, then?” she asked simply. “A few sips will do her no harm.”