by Matt Forbeck
Before Abe could finish his sentence, Elisabetta rushed at him and leaped onto his back. She threw back her head, exposing inch-long fangs stabbing down from her upper teeth. As Abe hollered in protest, she brought her head down and sank those fangs straight into the corded muscles of his exposed neck.
Abe screamed in terror and pain. Quin cocked back his fist and then stabbed down with the rod, striking Elisabetta in the head with it. The point, such as it was, twisted against her skull, but it tore a gash in the side of her head, right over the temple. It did not bleed, leaking only some blackish tarry material instead.
Abe continued to scream and tried to buck Elisabetta off his back. She held on tight, her hands like claws set into his jacket's shoulders, and her teeth like a bear trap closed on his flesh.
Quin brought the rod back once more. If anything, the strike against Elisabetta's head had sharpened its splintered tip. He struck her with it again, and this time the rod stabbed straight into her left eye and stuck there.
This persuaded the woman to let go of Abe. She unleashed a scream that Quin thought might peel the paint from the ship's hull, and she shoved his friend away, clutching at her ruined face and the stick still caught in it. The same tarry fluid that had leaked from Quin's first blow dribbled from her eye socket and down her pale cheek.
"You animal!" she screeched at Quin. "Look what you've done!"
Elisabetta staggered back toward the couch, and Quin sprang to Abe's side to help his wounded friend to his feet. As they rose, they turned to gape at the woman as she plucked the rod from her face and stared at it with her one good eye. She cried thick black tears now, rolling past her cheekbones.
"No!" she said. "No!"
She drew in a deep breath and held it for an instant. Her skin turned from pale into an ash gray. She reached out for the two young men and screamed at the top of her lungs. As she did, she crumpled into a pile of dust – and was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Quin stared at the spot where Elisabetta had been and wondered what sorts of horrible things he had just learned about the true nature of the world. Nothing about this fit well with what he knew about how things were supposed to work, and it shocked him so much he had to remind himself to breathe. His gaze darted around the edges of the room as he hunted for any sign that he'd just experienced some sort of illusion, which would mean that the woman he'd just stabbed through the eye with a sharp stick might attack him again.
He jumped with a start the moment Abe groaned in pain, and he dropped to one knee to see how he could help his friend. Abe held a hand over the spot where Elisabetta had bitten him, and blood trickled between his fingers. He reached out toward it with a nervous hand, but Abe waved him off.
"How bad is it?" Abe asked.
"I can't tell with your hand over it."
"Should I take it off?"
"Hold on." Quin darted into the bathroom and grabbed a hand towel hanging on the railing inside. He returned an instant later and held it up before Abe.
"You wouldn't get that for me when I asked." Abe allowed himself a gentle grin, which shifted to a pained grimace.
"I wouldn't get it for her." Quin held the towel up over Abe's wound. "For you, anything. Now move that hand."
Abe did as instructed, and blood gushed from the wound. Elisabetta had done more than just bite Abe's neck. After Quin had hurt her, she'd torn a good chunk of it away.
Quin pressed the towel down over the wound. "That has to do a better job than your hand."
"How is it?" Abe grabbed Quin's arm and would not let go.
"Not good," Quin said. "I need to go find a doctor."
"No worries about that," a voice said from down the hallway. It swept toward them on a thunderous tide of footsteps. "He's already on his way."
A sailor – Second Officer Crooker, Quin recalled – appeared in the doorway and surveyed the scene. "Good God!" he said, recoiling. "What happened in here?"
They would never believe the truth, Quin knew. He wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it – hell, stabbed it – himself. But he couldn't come up with anything else to tell the man, so he chose to simply avoid it for now.
Quin stood up and hauled Abe to his feet. He rose, although on legs as shaky as those of a newborn fawn. "We need to get this man medical attention," Quin said, moving Abe forward. "Where's the doctor?"
"He was in the Smoke Room," Crooker said. "I sent word for him." He craned his neck to peer into the room, unwilling as of yet to step across its threshold. "What have you two chaps done here then?"
"We heard a scream," Abe said. "We came in here to help, and someone attacked me."
"And just where is this someone?" Crooker edged forward into the room, glancing about as if someone might step out and try to brain him at any moment. A number of other men crowded into the hallway where he had just been, each of them staring at the horrible scene through the open doorway.
"Disappeared," Quin said.
"Did you get a good look at him?"
Quin put a shoulder under Abe's arm, helping to keep him propped up. "No, but I think Elisabetta Ecsed did. If you find her, she should be able to identify the attacker."
"Isn't this her room?" a steward called in from the hallway.
"Of course it is," Quin said. "Who do you think we heard screaming? She was so terrified, she ran off. Find her, and you'll find the killer."
"Killer?" Crooker said. "Who's been killed? I don't see any body lying about."
"Attacker then," Abe said with a snarl. "Could you please quit quibbling about words and find me a physician?"
"Coming through," Doctor Griffiths shouted from somewhere down the hallway. "Gangway, my good people!"
Quin hauled Abe toward the voice and spotted the doctor coming for them. Lucy followed right behind the man, and she gave out a little scream when she saw the state that Abe was in. "She did this to him?"
"How do you mean 'she,' miss?" Crooker asked. "Do you have reason to believe you know what happened to this man?"
Lucy stared at Abe, her mouth open and her eyes wide. Crooker walked over to take her by the elbow and speak to her. As he did, the doctor rushed up to inspect Abe.
"What happened?" he said.
"Is that important?" Quin asked. "He's hurt. Help him!"
"It always helps if I know how he was hurt, young sir."
The doctor peeled back Abe's fingers and the towel underneath them until blood squelched through them again. "It's bad. Very bad."
"He was bitten," Quin said in low confidence.
"I can see that," Doctor Griffiths said. "But by what? Or who?" He shook his head in frustration. "You're right. None of that's important now. We need to get this man down to the hospital right away. I may have to rig up a blood transfusion for him, or he might not make it through the night."
"You can tell that by just looking at him?"
The doctor jerked his head at the blood-splattered scene in the room beyond. "That gives me some indication as well. Come on now. Help me get him moving."
"You'll have to stay with me, miss," Crooker said to Lucy. "I have some questions I need you to answer."
"Not now!" she said, near hysterics. "You must go and find Elisabetta Ecsed. She's the key to all of this. I need to be with my friend. He's hurt."
Crooker hesitated, and the doctor called back over his shoulder to intervene on Lucy's behalf. "She can come with me, Mr Crooker," he said. "I'll keep an eye on her, and if her young friend here is as bad off as he looks we'll be a long time at it."
"Just make sure she doesn't wander off anywhere," Crooker said. He rubbed his chin as he relented. Quin could tell he was wondering just what to do about this awful mess.
"It's only one ship," Doctor Griffiths said. "How far could she get?"
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
"Is he going to make it?" Quin asked as the doctor emerged from the curtained off area in which he'd been working on Abe.
Quin had spent the entire time sitti
ng next to Lucy in the waiting room and holding her hand, calming her down, and explaining to her in rushed whispers what had happened in Elisabetta's cabin. She hadn't believed a word of it. Not at first.
"There's no such thing as vampires. I know what I saw but I refuse to believe it." Lucy set her jaw in the way that Quin knew meant she'd already made up her mind about the topic at hand. At another time in another place, he might have let her have her way. In most cases, no harm could have come from it.
"How do you explain what happened to Abe then?" Quin said. "Do you think I bit his throat?"
"You tell me, Quin." She glared at him with an intensity. "You were there. This time, just tell me the truth."
"What about the coffin?" Quin sat back in his chair. "You used to believe in vampires, Lucy. I still remember."
Lucy's cheeks turned a fierce pink. "I was just a little girl. You can't hold a childish imagination run amuck against me. My parents took it very seriously, at least."
"And what did they tell you?"
"That vampires don't exist. Of course."
Quin leaned forward. "But Lucy," he said, "what if they lied to you?"
"Why in the Lord's name would they do that?"
"Maybe they just wanted to let you finally have a good night's sleep. My parents used to tell me Jack the Ripper wasn't real either, and we both know the truth of that."
"But Quin." Lucy steeled herself, squelching down emotions that threatened to overwhelm her and drive her to give in to the tears welling up in her eyes. Quin knew better than to interrupt her at such a time. "Are you saying it's all true then? That you killed her?"
"It seems so." Quin shuddered as the image of Elisabetta crumbling to dust passed before his eyes. "I saw that myself – hell, I did it myself – and I can hardly believe it."
The doctor emerged from behind the curtains then, and Quin and Lucy stood to speak to him. Quin asked him about Abe's health. The man gave them a grave but determined look.
"He's about as bad off as anyone I've ever treated aboard this ship," he said. "But he's stabilized for now. We're only a couple days out of New York. As long as he holds out until we get there, and I can have him transported to a proper hospital, he should survive."
Lucy breathed a huge sigh of relief and clung to Quin's shoulder. He kept looking at the doctor though. Something about the man's statements had run hollow in his ears.
"'As long as?' Is there a reason why he shouldn't be able to do so?"
The doctor wrung his hands together. After a glance at the open doorway behind Quin and Lucy, he seemed to come to a decision and spoke.
"He's lost a lot of blood, Mr Harker," the doctor said. "A lot more than I would have thought possible from a wound like that."
"You saw the blood all around the cabin."
The doctor allowed himself a soft chuckle. "It would help if you came clean with me, my boy. We both know that not all of the blood spattered about that cabin came from Mr Holmwood's neck."
Quin looked at the floor for a moment, then at Lucy, who'd started to squeeze his arm in an iron grip. "I'm afraid I don't have a decent explanation for it, Doctor."
"Or at least one that you think I'd believe." The doctor gave up a wry grin and leaned his head toward the curtains that separated Abe from the rest of the room. "Those are fairly thin curtains, Mr Harker. There's not a lot that gets said in this room that I don't hear."
Quin swallowed hard and flushed red. "I'm afraid you've caught me taunting my friend here with a cruel joke. Please do forgive me for being so tasteless. My sense of decorum tends to leave me when I'm in such stressful situations as this one."
"Is it true that you killed Miss Ecsed?" He held up a hand. "Wait. Don't answer that. Instead, consider this: What's going to happen after the captain has the ship turned upside down looking for her? Will they find her? Or will they find a body with your fingerprints on it?"
Quin frowned. "I only struck her in self-defense."
"I knew it!" The doctor quivered in his shoes. "You did kill her, and she was a vampire!"
"What… what do you know about vampires?" Lucy asked.
Quin didn't understand what asking that kind of question could do to help him and Lucy, but he was grateful to her for distracting the doctor from his role in the affair as a possible murderer.
The doctor chuckled again. "My dear, you don't serve as a ship's doctor on a liner heading back and forth from Fiume without running into a vampire legend or three."
"So you only know about them from legends?" Quin asked. His disappointment sat in his stomach like a rock.
"I treated a woman here on the ship once. She had symptoms identical to that of your friend Mr Holmwood there."
"And what happened to her?" Lucy asked.
The doctor's face fell. "She died. I did everything I could to save her, but it wasn't enough. I even set her up with a number of transfusions, but it didn't work. No matter how much blood I pumped into her, she wound up sick and pale."
"Did you ever figure out what happened to her?"
"It's impossible to say," Doctor Cherryman said. "The autopsy listed traumatic blood loss as the cause of death. The kind that your friend Abe has back there."
"But you didn't believe it?"
"No. I monitored her day and night. The treatment should have worked. Something – perhaps someone – stopped it, and that killed her."
"And what or who do you think did it?"
The doctor shrugged. "I don't know, but I can tell you this. There was another passenger on that voyage who took a special interest in that young lady who died. Someone you know all too well."
"And that was?" Quin asked.
"None other than your supposed victim, Mr Harker. The one you have the crew tearing apart the ship to find right now: Elisabetta Ecsed."
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
"Mr Dragomir?"
Dushko looked up from his overstuffed leather chair in the Smoke Room where he'd been sipping at a fine glass of port that tasted like vinegar in his mouth. A man had to keep up appearances, though, at least if he wanted to be able to make this trip above decks. He thought of being stuck down in the crowded hold with the others of his kind and repressed a shudder.
"Yes?"
He recognized the nervous man looming over him as second officer on the Carpathia, Mr Blum, his highestranking confidant on the ship. Dushko had taken great pains to cultivate the proper relationship with the man, and a good part of that meant that they rarely spoke to each other in public.
Most of the time Elisabetta had handled Mr Blum, but as a woman she wasn't allowed into the Smoke Room. That was the very reason that Dushko had chosen to hole up here, despite his actual distaste for food and drink. While he adored Elisabetta on many levels and they'd been companions for more years than he liked to count, he needed a bit of space from her each day. If they didn't spend some time apart, they started to bicker after a while, and he found such arguments tiresome. Better to find some means of separation rather than rub each other's nerves raw from too much togetherness.
"I have a matter of some importance that I need to discuss with you. Immediately."
Dushko made a show of rolling his eyes for the others in the room. "We're in the middle of the ocean," he said with a droll groan. "Can it really be that important?"
"I'm afraid so, sir." Blum gave Dushko a curt nod. "It involves Miss Ecsed."
Dushko loosed a derisive snort. "Of course it does." He stood, put his glass down on a nearby table, and gave a stiff bow to the men with whom he'd been pretending to have an interesting conversation. "Gentlemen, I must be off to attend to my lady's needs."
Amid a chorus of guffaws, Dushko took his leave and followed Blum out of the Smoke Room and onto the open section of the Boat Deck. With the Titanic's lifeboats stacked up among the Carpathia's, it felt a bit more cramped than normal, but it also meant that fewer people bothered strolling the deck. This gave Dushko and Blum as much privacy as if they'd locked themselves into Dus
hko's stateroom.
"What is it?" Dushko said to Blum. "What is so vital that Elisabetta needed to interrupt my evening away from her? I was going to clean those men out at cards later tonight. I might still if I can get back to them in time."
"There was an incident in Miss Ecsed's room," Blum said. "No one's seen her since, and the captain has us turning over the boat to look for her."
Dushko felt his irritation at Elisabetta wash away. "What happened?" he said. "Where is she?"
"I don't know," Blum said, his voice cracking with strain. "That's the thing. No one knows. We've been unable to find her."