Then a moan, and a curse: “Caulisse. They took the book… wretched woman… Aberrants… ledger…”
Two things wind through Worth’s mind: one is that he knows the sound as Yvan’s voice, the other is that he did not sense him. A Questing Beast always knows the feeling of his captor. His scent, his presence, his unique energy imprint. It has always served him well and alerted him, even when sleeping.
But it isn’t working.
Then there is the matter of the ledger. They have spoken at length of its value, all whilst avoiding the subject of its author. He must be desperate to be bringing it up.
When he opens the door, he understands why.
Yvan is covered in boils and scratches. The sun is not up, but even so, those burns are different—he had seen them once when they timed an expedition wrong. These are hideous things, purple and black, cracking on the top like burnt custards left too long in the oven. He is stripped naked, black blood seeping from his marvelous, pleading eyes, in slow trickles down the lines of his face.
Moving faster than any human could, and resuming his natural form, Worth encircles the vampire and sweeps him into the apartment, wrapping his body around him as if warmth would help a creature already dead.
“Yvan, listen to me, breathe deeply,” Worth says, not knowing what else to say. Vampires don’t breathe, exactly. They take in air when they want to, to smell or to express a more humanlike exterior, but it isn’t necessary.
“Get it out,” Yvan says, his dry, cracked lips pulling taut over blood-speckled teeth. He flails, fingers going back to whatever he was working on before. “It’s inside of me! I need to let it out!”
His chest. Yvan wants to break into his own chest.
“There’s nothing there. Just whatever it is that makes up a vampire’s heart.”
“My heart is broken. I need to get it… out and… fix…” Yvan renews his efforts, thrashing, long arms fumbling and scratching his own skin.
Worth pulls Yvan tighter, but the vampire is suffused with energy. He is writhing, his hands and nails going for his own chest with such pure power that no matter how strong Worth tries—at least without dismembering his lover—he cannot prevent him from doing so.
It is a gritty, grisly business. The floorboards creak and char with the energy between the two, skin flaying off the vampire’s chest as his nails dig deeper and deeper.
“Love, stop, please,” begs Worth, shouting from his hideous mouth, four voices at once. The hart, the leopard, the snake, the lion. There are other words, but no script could put them in a legible semblance.
It is pure sorrow, pure angst, and grief. At last, unable to stop the vampire lest he destroy him himself, Worth unravels around Yvan and pulls back, blue tears falling from vermillion eyes.
To watch such a thing, a creature searching for some hidden meaning, mad and rending, is beyond any horror Worth has yet witnessed, and there have been many. Never has he seen a creature work so hard to destroy himself.
Yvan manages, at last, to worry his hand through his chest completely. He pulls out a rib triumphantly, the bone cracking brightly in the evening quiet. The look on the vampire’s face is both of wonder and horror. As he pulls his hand out, bloody black to the wrist, triumphant, he frowns immediately. There is nothing there but the remnants of a heart, shriveled and dark, old veins once living snapping off and splattering against his face. It does not pulse, but it twitches, and then a bright stream of light comes from it, twisting away and out the window.
“I couldn’t help you,” Worth says. “I’m sorry.”
Yvan laughs shortly, spraying blood across the room. It stinks of offal and worse, staring at his heart. “Why, what a sight,” he says. “I do have a heart after all.”
Then, Yvan falls. It only takes a moment for the body to decompose, the long pause of a few hundred years finally culminating. By the time Worth stumbles his way to his lover’s corpse, it is but a dark stain upon the ground.
Into the Breach
What horrendous company these human beings are, Nerissa thinks, as she skulks back to the room she has adopted since they began this miserable Tarrytown adventure. She smells sweet and fermented, like a cherry spoiled in the sun, but she doesn’t notice because she’s forgotten how drunk she is. Alcohol is, generally speaking, a detriment to most sharp minds, and to lamias perhaps most of all. Something to do with their blood composition.
So, she muses on her situation darkly. She had wanted to go to the city proper, certain that the best way for monsters to stay out of sight would mean finding a population large enough in which to hide. But Nerissa loved the idea of living in one of the large houses in the country, and once she got on with the planning, there was no stopping it.
And now Worth is here and ruining the little peace they made for themselves, a calm stillness that passed through her hands like water over rocks. The very people she spent so long trying to help—mostly because of her antiquated appreciation for their arts and culture—turned on her. She knew you couldn’t trust wealthy people. That was why, in their previous business, she and Worth never took a penny for their work. It was all pro bono. People who could pay always wanted more than they billed, and it is too exhausting to keep up with.
Nerissa does not wish to speak with Vivienne, but they were both expected at the gala party at Rockwood, William Rockefeller’s home. It would not do well to ignore the summons. And there is much planning to do.
That, at least, she and Vivienne can agree upon. Nerissa makes it her goal to avoid Vivienne, apart from formal summons to gather in the drawing room together along with Christabel Crane and a few of her Circle cronies. They would have to be transparent about their dealings, of course, but once it is over, Nerissa is absolutely certain that she will be leaving Tarrytown, Lyndhurst, and all the inane goings on of the New York elite for good. If Vivienne wants to stay, that is her prerogative.
After calling the meeting, Nerissa is purposefully late. And she decides to dress as commonly as possible, knowing such behavior will bother Vivienne immensely. It is perhaps childish, but Nerissa has lived with the sylph long enough to know each and every one of her pithy complaints, and dirty hems and out of date clothing are nearly as intolerable to her as men with unkempt mustaches and books arranged out of alphabetic order. It’s the little things, really.
As soon as she opens the door, she feels her high spirits, fueled by willing disobedience, darken immediately. Worth and Vivienne are so close they are practically entwined. Barqan is standing stiffly by the window as if keeping an eye on the entrance to the house, but is probably just catching a nap. Christabel and her cultists—a fellow named Smythe and a middle-aged woman named Mrs. Bellemains—are drinking alcohol from fancy glasses and laughing.
Laughing.
“I’m glad someone can find levity amidst the gathering doom,” Nerissa says, making her way rudely past the Circle and toward Vivienne and Worth. “It’s best not to let such evil possibilities ruin our fun.”
“Hello to you, as well, Nerissa,” Worth says drily. “We were wondering if you were going to show up. Considering you arranged the meeting, we expected you to be here when it started.”
“I was a bit detained,” Nerissa replies, turning to check and see if Barqan is, indeed, asleep. He is not and gives her a sympathetic look.
“An hour is a bit more than detained,” Vivienne says, refusing to make eye contact, “even for you.”
“Well, the point is that we are all here,” Christabel says, injecting herself into the conversation. She is positively ebullient, and as a rule, Nerissa despises ebullience. “We have been making conversation in hopes that you would join us to add your expertise.”
Nerissa snorts in a most delightfully impolite way, takes the glass of wine from Mrs. Bellemains, and drinks it in one quaff. It’s terrible stuff. Brandy, she thinks. But she is quite convinced that playing the part of a monster is her best approach, even if it is simply a creature with terrible manners. There is no d
oubt that social taboos hold as much gravitas as actual bloodshed among these people.
“My expertise?” Nerissa asks, considering the bottom of her glass before putting it on the windowsill—not, she knows, the ideal place to put it, but the closest flat surface and, therefore, her decision.
Did she have much to drink beforehand? Now that she has the brandy rolling down her throats again, she remembers that, yes, she has been enjoying the one spirit she quite likes, port. She found an impressive store of the stuff in the wine cellar the day before. She finds that rolling back the narrative of her day results in more than a few gaps.
“You recall when we were in business together,” Worth says slowly, deliberately, as if Nerissa is an imbecile and cannot understand twenty languages and speak seventeen. “In England. Our work, to find the Aberrants. To help people.”
“Ah, yes, the good people of Lower Kent,” says Nerissa, waving her arm in the air so close that she nearly takes off Mr. Smythe’s glasses. “You mean those halcyon days where we worked for the good of people who needed help, not those who were willing to sacrifice the lives of their friends and family to out a trio of uninteresting monsters?”
An uncomfortable silence ensues, only interrupted by a forcible burp provided by the lamia. She has practiced a long time to get the sound and shape of it just right, as burping is not inherent in her kind, whose bodies are more accustomed to slow feeding and thereby need very little in the way of air expulsion.
The effect, and the look of horror on Vivienne’s face, is worth all that work, however. Nerissa has been saving it up for quite some time, this surprise act of defiance. While she considers all concepts of human rudeness to be just a matter of perspective, or else a side effect of over-breeding, Vivienne has followed the rules of etiquette every day of her life since learning of them.
But this is one expression beyond the sylph’s ability to cope. Rather than utter words or cast magic in her direction, Vivienne simply grabs Nerissa by the elbow and ushers her out of the room. Were she not well past the point of inebriation, the lamia would be well equipped to resist such an assault on her person, but given how the floor is sloping both away and behind her, and she isn’t entirely sure how she ended up in that room in the first place.
Once the two are down the hall, Vivienne pulls Nerissa into a small anteroom and locks the door. The hinges rattle as they freeze slightly, and even in her sorry state, Nerissa registers that her friend is furious.
Good. That is her aim.
“I don’t even know what to say to you right now,” Vivienne says, pinching her nose. She is dressed just one degree from formal, the only indication she has not gone all the way in the tilt of her hair and the absence of jewelry.
“Say that we’ll leave,” Nerissa offers, shrugging. “Say that we will take Barqan and go to Prussia, where he is from.”
“Persia,” corrects Vivienne, “and you must truly be lost to the world if you are suggesting doing anything with Barqan.”
“Right now, I like him more than I like you,” the lamia replies, going to push up her glasses, but realizing too late that she never bothered to put them on. “A great deal more.”
“This is about Worth, isn’t it?” Vivienne asks.
“This is about Worth, isn’t it?” parrots Nerissa, making her hand into a little puppet and then giggling. The noise escaping her sounds foreign, as if her insides have been replaced with a boiling tea kettle.
Vivienne says something very unkind in French, and given a regular day, Nerissa would have retorted in High German, a language she always felt most at home in. But instead she just stares back at the sylph and snorts.
“You are so blind to it,” Nerissa says at last. “You are so damned obsessed with trying to please them that you would do anything, even sell me out.”
“I did no such thing. You don’t have to do this. I tried to speak with you, to explain what I know now—about Worth and Yvan, his lover.”
That word is enough to cut through the haze, and Nerissa feels her legs go out from under her, and she slinks into a large jacquard chair.
“I don’t have lovely eyes,” she says, thinking of the Keats poem. It’s one that they read together every year, that and his La Belle Dame Sans Merci. For a mortal, he understood some aspects of their being quite well. “I have horrible eyes. The Romantics always wanted to find something beautiful in their monsters, some lingering shred of perfection amidst the ugliness. But my eyes are blood red and black-pupiled. And I am, and always will be, repulsive.”
“What if you didn’t have to be?” asks Vivienne, kneeling before her friend and putting her hands on her knees.
The touch is enough to send the lamia’s hearts fluttering, the three little organs playing a counterpoint dance about each other. It’s enough to distance her from the mass quantities of alcohol coursing through her body, to still her into a kind of stunned silence and then, perhaps inevitably, a sense of shame.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Nerissa says. She does not ask Vivienne to remove her hands. Her own are trembling.
Vivienne’s eyes are deep violet, such an impossibly perfect color. How could she be such a beautiful monster? What gifts.
Vivienne explains Worth’s story about Yvan, telling the lamia as quickly as possible about the events recently unfolded.
“We believe that they may have harmed Yvan to get the ledger—or that the creature we’re trying to fight is somehow connected to it. He wanted to become mortal again. That’s what the moly was for. Worth didn’t understand until I explained it to him. It may be that, coupled with his research, we are on the brink of discovering the key to mortality.”
The realization of what Vivienne is implying sends Nerissa to her feet, nearly unable to retain her human guise, so deep is her revulsion.
“Are you… you think that I want to be a human?” the lamia asks. “That I would give up all that I am, every fiber of my being as knit by the gods, to… to pass as a human being?”
Vivienne blanches, shaking her head. “I didn’t mean to imply that you are somehow lacking, my dear. It’s only that you’ve seemed so miserable for so long, and I thought perhaps it was the years wearing on you. The continued distance.”
“Do not mistake my sorrow for your unhealthy human obsession.”
“But, Nerissa, please. I want to understand what makes you so miserable.”
Nerissa laughs brightly now. “You! You make me miserable. And you can write that down so you don’t forget it while you’re chasing baubles and making small talk with millionaires, all of which will shatter and die.”
It is Barqan who materializes through the wall. He is showing off, and normally Nerissa would chide him, but she’s no idea how much of the conversation he’s heard. Not that it matters; he knows her heart well enough. But that’s the least of her problems for now.
“Barqan, I did not summon you,” Vivienne says sharply. It is not often that she speaks to him in such a manner; usually she is careful and sweeter than she should be.
“Perhaps not. But my mistress is in distress, and I am compelled to help.”
“What is it?” Nerissa asks sharply.
“I hear that the Circle is aware of my presence, and therefore, this is most intimately my business,” Barqan says. His eyes are glowing a muted green. Unusual. Nerissa doesn’t know what in the heavens that could mean, but she takes it as an ill omen.
Vivienne frowns, trying to go for the door to leave. How is it that she’s the one acting the victim now? Barqan bars her way, however.
“How did they find out about me?” he asks, more directly this time.
“I don’t see how that has to do with anything,” she shoots back. “You are both wasting precious time. Regardless of our individual thoughts on the matter, we have to get this business done. Then we can decide what we are going to do.”
“There may be other things they know,” he says. “Methods of freeing me. There are texts, some thought lost to time, but
if they exist…”
“My concern,” Barqan says, continuing as if Vivienne has said nothing at all, “is that if they are able to break certain bonds between the supernatural and the mortal, that they may be able to do the same for me. The version of myself, as presented to you now, is but a mere reflection of my abilities. You know this. Were I to be unwittingly released, outside of your control, I would not have hold on my faculties. The end would be bloody indeed, both for you and for your human friends. The ledger has some rather impressive details on your attempted work to free me, I recall.”
Yes, there is much to fear in the djinni. There has always been an undercurrent to him, a restlessness, and her debt to him is at the center. She has kept him in chains too long. There is an air of inconstancy in his very being. His shackles transform him into a lie, a living lie. A power awaiting release. Lamias can hide, it is well known, but their true nature is always there, just below the surface, hiding behind a mask. To look upon Barqan is to see a vessel containing an object of unimaginable power.
“Then you will stay here,” Vivienne says simply, her frozen smile unwavering. “I will simply tell them that your presence is needed elsewhere, and you won’t be attending the ball.”
“If the threat is as great as you make it out, though,” Nerissa says, “we’re going to need every power we have. And Barqan has always been handy in a fight.”
“Regardless, we must find my research and any sign of what Yvan was doing—and, hopefully, do away with whatever threat is attacking the Circle.”
“You don’t think it’s Yvan, do you?” asks Barqan.
“That was my first inclination—some soul transference—but the first haunting happened before Yvan and Worth even arrived in Tarrytown. So it is unlikely,” Vivienne says. “Nerissa, dear, what do you think? Will you help me?”
Nerissa sighs. There is no true way out of this ordeal. As much as she would like to abandon Vivienne in this hour of need, she cannot help but feel moved by Worth’s story. While it would be delightful to call it a hoax, she knows his abilities well enough. During their years together, they would often meld in the same way, he opening up his mind to hers to play back memories. The connection could not be forged.
Frost & Filigree: A Shadow Council Archives Urban Fantasy Novella (Beasts of Tarrytown Book 1) Page 7