by Thea Devine
And how would Mirya provide the milk Rula needed, the food, the clothing, all the things that Dominick had pointed out vampires couldn’t provide? Her heart felt leaden. Mirya continued staring at her.
It was better than leaving Rula with a stranger, Senna consoled herself as she met Mirya’s hooded gaze. She knew Mirya. Mirya had saved her life more than once. She must believe that Mirya would do her best for her child.
“I’ll see that Mirya has money,” Dominick added. It didn’t make her feel better or wipe away Mirya’s frown.
“Settled,” Senna said reluctantly. It would never be settled. It would just be something she would live with to eternity.
She wondered if she’d ever forgive Dominick for this. She wondered how many years it would be before she even saw Rula again. She wondered if it would matter in the end, after all.
Then Mirya said, “She must be with me when he comes.”
Senna understood much later, when, after two years, Renk was the size and had the intellectual capacity of a six-year-old. After four years, an uncontrollable twelve-year-old, despite all Senna’s best efforts to teach and contain him. After eight years, he’d already started rooting and ravaging victims far from London in the countryside.
Senna finally saw when Renk would return, his jaws, neck, and clothes saturated with blood, and sprawl in the parlor, exhausted. Renk cared about nothing except filling his daily needs.
There was no pretense with him that he was anything other than a bloodsucking monster, and that he enjoyed every minute of it. He was, to all intents and purposes, a younger version of Charles.
All Dominick’s dire predictions had come true.
Eight years ago, Dominick would have hated that, Senna thought. Eight years ago, he’d still had some conscience, some humanity lurking below the surface of his vampiric civility.
To Senna’s deep regret, that was now gone, a facade that was impossible to keep up forever in the maw of his now-unfettered vampiric urges. For the first years after they’d taken over the town house, they’d attempted to take back their place in society, even though Dominick had closed his business. But the society they knew had been democratized. England had changed, and once the Queen died. they briefly mourned the loss of that society, but after a while, it didn’t matter. They could remain in the town house or repair to some other place, some other country. It was all the same.
The one thing they had decided was they would stay together no matter what. And they would remain at the town house so that Senna could occasionally catch a glimpse of Rula working her cons on the streets.
But there was also that warning: She must be with me when he comes.
Mirya didn’t have to elaborate. Senna was determined to be there when he came.
While she waited for that day, Senna caught those fleeting glimpses of Rula that she so coveted.
It appeared that she had grown at the same rate as had Renk. Because when next Senna saw her, she was a beautiful young woman with thick, black hair and cobalt-blue eyes who could have been Senna’s twin.
Rula knew nothing about her parents or her past. The woman who raised her, she called grandmother. She’d known no other life but the poverty of the hovel and her grandmother’s teaching her how to work the streets and earn a tuppence.
Her grandmother never told her she was beautiful, but she could see that for herself, and that it was a definite plus now that she was eking out a living on the street.
Her grandmother never talked about family, or who was Rula’s mother, or why she had no other relatives or siblings, or why Grandmother had raised her and not her family. And she never explained how Rula aged so quickly in only eight years.
“It is the way it is,” her grandmother would say dismissively, as always, when Rula asked. She had finally stopped asking.
Her grandmother was not a strict disciplinarian; she didn’t need to be. She’d instilled in Rula when she was quite young the debt she owed her, and how to repay it.
Yes, Grandmother had some little money with which to feed and clothe Rula. They could have had better quarters than a decrepit, old alley hovel. They could have had a lot, had grandmother spent the money that mysteriously appeared under the door once a month.
Instead, Grandmother sent Rula out on the streets to perform basic magic tricks, and she taught her to read palms by teaching her to read her own.
“Lines, you see? Heart line here. Life line there. Right in your hand.”
Rula studied her palms with great care. It seemed important somehow. But then Mirya taught her the secrets to fortune-telling, where she supposedly sensed things about her victims by parsing clues from body movements, dress, and the expressions on their faces, and how to tell fortunes with regular playing cards.
Mirya taught her a lot. She had every reason to be grateful to the grandmother who raised her.
And yet, she wasn’t. She sensed that Mirya could tell her a lot more, but Mirya discouraged questions.
“It is the way it is,” she’d always say, leaving Rula seething in frustration.
Was she some by-blow of royalty? She liked that idea a lot, but it didn’t explain the impulses and nightmarish, dark dreams that haunted her sleep. The sense that she was not fully whole, that a part of her was missing.
“Grandmother, why do I so often dream of death?” she’d ask.
“How should I know? It’s your dream.”
“I feel like there’s a part of me that’s missing.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Why can I see so clearly at night?”
“You are blessed.”
Rula didn’t feel blessed. She felt as if her life was one big mystery to which Grandmother had the answers. And Grandmother was old. That scared Rula the most. At least now, with some pestering, she might get some answers from her. But if Grandmother died? All her secrets would die with her.
“Grandmother, there’s a fly buzzing around me.”
“There is no fly,” Mirya said, too loudly, Rula thought. And then it was gone.
At times Rula thought someone was watching her, more so as she transformed into a woman than when she was a child.
But that was crazy.
“Is there a reason someone would be watching me?”
She almost thought Grandmother froze for a moment, right there at the pot where religiously at five o’clock she prepared their dinner.
“No reason at all,” Mirya said, controlling her expression. But it could be Senna; Renk, even, if he was remotely curious about his twin sister. Mirya thought not.
Dominick? No. He was beyond that, the father-love, the care, the concern. For him, Rula was a debt now, paid promptly every month.
It wasn’t one of them.
She started stirring again. Stopped.
Him? But he was dead, the life bashed out of him by Dominick.
Or was he?
When she’d predicted he will come all those many years ago, did she mean him—now?
She’d known that day would come, but this soon? Still, Rula was of an age, strong-willed, curious, independent—too much for her own good. Moreover, the streets were nastier than they had been in Mirya’s youth, and all the skills she’d tried to impart to Rula would be nothing against his will.
He would take his vengeance just as Dominick had done—and what better way than to defile Dominick’s daughter?
She’d have to tell Rula everything, she thought frantically. It was the only way to protect her, and the one thing she’d tacitly promised not to do.
She needed some kind of proof that he had come first, and then, if the danger was imminent, she would act.
Sometimes Rula wondered if a few shillings was worth it, a whole day on the streets, begging, fortune-telling, scamming.
She hated it. She couldn’t understand how Grandmother
could condone such a life. She wondered if it was time to leave and forge her own way.
But then she felt those eyes on her. She was performing card tricks just outside Victoria Station that day, an interested crowd gathered around despite the stream of passengers pushing their way through.
She looked up for one minute and caught a glimpse of a face before it disappeared.
That face . . . handsome, blue eyes, reddish hair . . .
She’d seen it before. She folded her cards and signaled she was done. Some passengers tossed some coins at her. Others turned away, irritated that her tricks were nothing special and they’d wasted their time.
She didn’t care. She pushed her way to where she had seen the face, knowing she’d be too late to catch him.
“Did anyone see—” How would she describe him? Young, well-dressed, handsome, perhaps . . . a description of two dozen men pushing past her at that very moment.
“Someone is watching me,” she told Mirya that night.
“No one is watching you.”
But, Rula thought skeptically, Mirya didn’t know, couldn’t be sure. “I need answers. I hate what I’m doing. Conning people. Giving them false hope. Taking their money. And here is today’s take, by the way.” She poured a handful of coins and a sovereign onto the table. “Why should I believe you?”
“I don’t know everything,” Mirya muttered.
“You know something. And there are things I need to know. You can’t treat me like I’m ten years old anymore. Who could be watching me?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if I tell you he’s young, well dressed, blue eyed, handsome?”
Mirya shook her head.
Rula stamped her foot. “I’m tired of all your evasions. It’s time for answers, or I leave and I find my own way.”
Mirya grabbed her arm. “No!”
Rula glared at her.
“It’s too dangerous,” Mirya said at length.
“Why?”
Mirya turned away. “I’m bound not to speak.”
“Unbind yourself then. I know you have the power.”
“I have no power,” Mirya said bitterly. “I only have foresight.”
“Then tell me everything you do know.”
“They’ll destroy me,” Mirya whispered.
Rula tilted her head to look at her. “But you’ve been expecting that for years.”
Mirya heard the words, but it was as if she were in a tunnel and the speaker was far away. “What did you say?”
“You’ve been expecting some kind of retaliation for years,” Rula repeated, totally unaware of the portent of what she’d said.
“And how do you know that?”
“I—” Rula faltered. “I . . . just know.”
“I think,” Mirya said, coming to a quick decision, “you are ready to hear what I know.”
The revelations were unpalatable. Her mother, a child of the streets, trained by Mirya to scam the unsuspecting, as Mirya was tutoring Rula now? Her father, a vampire? She had a vampire twin and her parents lived in London?
Dear heaven.
A vampire half brother thought to be dead might well have survived and might be stalking her family . . . ?
This, the cause of her blood dreams and nightmares? Her sense of another self that haunted her? Why her mother gave her away?
“I was the safest one,” Mirya said. “How could they trust a stranger?”
“I’m not a vampire?”
“No. You were born without the telltale clan scars. But there are things—your strength, your ability to see at night, how fast you aged—some things are just in the blood.”
Rula went silent. It was too much to take in. Too much too fast. She regretted she’d asked because now she’d have to have all the answers.
“How could my mother not want to see me?” she whispered after a while.
Mirya made a helpless gesture. “There comes a time when all human emotion dies away and nothing is left but the bloodlust. Your mother tried not to succumb, but the lure of the blood is—the lure of the blood.”
Rula buried her head in her arms. “I can’t understand what you’re telling me. It doesn’t make sense.”
“They didn’t want you to know—for your own protection, and because they couldn’t give you a normal life.”
“I can’t—that’s no excuse.”
“Think about it. Food. Clothes. Education. They have no need of such things. And bringing strangers into the house to take care of you? How could they hide what they truly are?”
“Yes, I see,” Rula said, her voice muffled. “What was the life of one child against keeping such a secret?”
“It is the truth. And it is such a secret.”
Mirya set out the bowls for their evening gruel just to do something rather than look at Rula’s anguished expression. Too much. She’d thought Rula could handle it, especially in light of the mysterious watcher, but truly she was only eighteen.
“Are you even my grandmother?” Rula asked suddenly, her voice larded with tears.
Mirya didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
“So I’m free to go,” Rula said, wiping her eyes. Whom was she crying for, after all? The family she’d never known? The twin who didn’t care? The grandmother who really wasn’t?
Herself, the innocent dupe of all of them?
Mirya shook her head. “There is danger still.”
“Any more than there ever has been?”
“You are a woman now. Yes, there is greater danger.”
“From?” And then she understood. “The half brother my father supposedly killed.”
“He believed so, yes. My sense says it has taken him all this time to heal enough to carry out his vengeance.”
“And I am the instrument of that vengeance.”
“You are vampire born but not infected. His plan will be to sire you. He will turn you Tepes—the ancient rivals of your father’s clan—and it will cause a war that will destroy cities, countries, the world.”
That seemed extreme, and Rula said so.
“It will be so,” Mirya said soberly. “So in turn, Charles must be destroyed. Forever.”
“This is crazy.” Rula jumped up and started pacing.
“Your freedom won’t mean much after that.”
“I don’t believe you. Except—” Rula wheeled around suddenly. “That’s why you were so scared when I thought someone was watching me.”
“This I know—it is not Charles. Yet.”
Yet.
What could she do? Vampires had powers, even she knew that. She had nothing, even with her strength and night vision, that could combat any danger.
Besides which, there had been no sign of the half brother for these past eight years. Maybe he did die. Maybe Mirya was wrong.
There was so much Rula didn’t know. Vampires. Clan wars. That twin brother. Dungeon-dark dreams.
Where could she go to escape those nightmares?
“So,” Mirya said, intruding on her thoughts, “you will not leave because you are safer here and in a crowd than on your own. And we wait.”
Rula had chosen not to leave Mirya. But it meant the same long days on the street, the same meager living. Everything the same because Rula was afraid to take any risks now she knew the truth about herself.
So, after yet another long day of card tricks and cons, when an unexpectedly sizable crowd had gathered around her,. she resignedly took out a pack of playing cards, cautioning it was her last reading of the day.
This was one skill Mirya had insisted Rula learn. Mirya believed people put their trust in the cards, in their symbolism, and their truth, and that a successful reading always attracted more money.
Rula gathered the deck, shuffled it, and laid out a single row of
three cards.
She pointed to the card on the left: “Past”; the middle, “The present”; and the right, “The future.” She looked around at the spectators as she picked up the three cards and began to shuffle them into the deck.
“Who will cut the cards?” She put the deck on the small table she’d set up at the entrance to the train station.
“I will.” He stepped from the back of the crowd, him—the one she’d seen watching her all these past days, the one she never expected to show his face.
Yet there he was, tall, well dressed, with his piercing eyes even bluer than hers.
He took the deck, cut it; as he put the two piles of cards on the table, two fell out. He started to put them on one of the decks, and Rula impulsively stayed his hand, unprepared for the shock of the feeling of skin on skin.
He reluctantly moved his hand first.
She took the cards, her hands shaking just a little, merged the piles, and set out the three cards: “Past: eight club. Present: seven heart. Future: king diamond.” She pretended to ruminate on the interpretations for a moment, when she was itching for answers about him.
But this was an act played for the audience. She had to make it good. “You’ve had many problems until recently. There were those who sought to push you out of the way. But that isn’t the threat anymore. Rather—it’s something told to you by someone you trust and admire.”
She picked up the two cards he’d dropped. “Spade ten: there will soon be changes because of it, I’m afraid. And not things you would want.”
She took the other dropped card. “Spade ace.” She angled a look at him before she said, “Death.”
He held her eyes. “For certain, death,” he murmured as he tossed a handful of sovereigns across the cards. “We will meet again,” he added, before he wheeled into the crowd and disappeared.
She was speechless for a full minute, oblivious of the murmuring of the crowd and the amount of money on the table.
He’d meant it, about death. She hadn’t. She’d made it all up.