Beyond the Night

by Thea Devine

  In the morning, he summoned Naik, Dvora, Zekka, and Deklan to Mirya’s.

  “New plan. Boru has another assignment. I need you four to come with Rula and me. We’re going to go search Dominick’s town house again.”

  “There’s nothing there to search,” Zekka said. “They tore down the building. All that’s left is rubble. No one could have survived all these years in there.”

  “Someone could who is alive by virtue of his brain and not his body,” Rob pointed out. “Charles isn’t a vampire, though he requires blood to sustain him. He’s not Vraq. He’s an entity to himself and he’s being kept alive by Rula’s twin brother. Add that to the fact that every scheme Charles ever conceived is connected in some way to Rula’s family. I know we searched there six years ago, but we didn’t know what we were looking for then.”

  “And what are we looking for?” Zekka asked.

  “A lump of dirt the size of a grave.”

  They would have to dig from the top down and from wherever they could find a likely entry from below. Naik and Deklan were detailed to approach from above, while Zekka, Dvora, and Rob would try to enter from what had been the coal-cellar slide at the back of the house.

  In addition to shovels, Rob had come prepared with stakes, axes, picks, and the warning that excavating the site would not be easy—or quick.

  They began by parsing out the outlines of the first floor, and where the staircase to the kitchens and the storage rooms would have been. Naik and Deklan began shoveling there, while Rob, Zekka, and Dvora climbed over the dirt bed to the rear of the house.

  The carriage house was there, still intact, but an avalanche of dirt, caused by the destruction of the remnants of the house, had blocked any rear entrance they could have accessed.

  “I didn’t think it would be easy,” Rob muttered, “but damn—and where the hell is Renk’s access?”

  That entry had to be somewhere here in the back of the house, where there’d be no witnesses, where a body could easily be insinuated into the ground.

  Rob signaled to Naik and Deklan. “We should be looking back here.” When they’d gathered around him, he went on, “Look, Renk is bringing him bodies. That requires a fair-size space to contain both Charles, his victims, and room for Renk to deliver the victims. By Rula’s account, he transhaped into a large owl with this last kill. Where in this area”—Rob motioned to the blocked-up rear of the house—”could an owl enter the house with a body in its claws?”

  “Has to be from above,” Deklan said. “Someplace he could drop the body and leave.”

  “But he couldn’t count on the drop being anywhere near Charles, could he?” asked Zekka.

  “Maybe Charles is positioned under this drop so Renk wouldn’t need to do anything more than provide for him.” This from Dvora, who had paused in her shoveling and was listening closely.

  Rob shook his head. “No, I rather think there’s some kind of cavern under here where Renk brings him what he needs. The question is—where is it? It has to be somewhere he can get to easily.”

  “It was buried under when they took down the house,” Dvora said.

  “But Renk still can get in. How? Where?”

  “The coal bin,” Deklan said suddenly. “They’d hide it so you and I couldn’t find it, but Renk knows exactly where it is. The opening is big enough, there would be enough space . . . well, for anything.”

  “Someone—check out the neighboring houses and get a bead on where we should be digging,” Rob ordered.

  Deklan was closest to the back entrance. He returned in five minutes.

  “Right to the left of what was the back door,” he reported.

  “All right, let’s pace that off and begin digging there.”

  Ru-ula . . .

  The enticing voice of her nemesis, somewhere in her dreams.

  Ru-u-ula—they’re here without you.

  Who? Where? Now she felt groggy from what seemed like a long nap. However, when she gained consciousness, she realized she’d slept through the night and Mirya was at the table, teacup in hand.

  And Charles was plucking at her mind again. It wasn’t enough to burn him. It wasn’t enough to outwit him, she thought as she washed herself and changed her dress.

  Nothing was enough. Charles would be in her head for the rest of her life.

  As she sat down to breakfast, she asked Mirya, “Where’s Rob?”

  Mirya went silent.

  “Mirya?”

  Mirya said nothing.

  “Charles is calling to me this morning, He says they’re here without me.”

  Mirya’s expression changed. “They have gone to Dominick’s town house.”

  “Without me.”

  “Rob thought it best.”

  “Rob knows nothing about what’s best for me,” Rula said tensely. “I want to be there.”

  Mirya eyed her for a moment. “Do you?”

  Do you? Charles’s mocking voice echoing Mirya’s.

  Rula put down her cup emphatically. She knew what they meant, she knew what Rob’s intentions were.

  “Yes, I do,” she snapped, grabbing a shawl and bolting out into the cool, foggy morning.

  Ah, Rula, you finally come to me of your own will.

  She’d never get rid of that voice in her head. She had to be there when Rob rendered the final judgment.

  She scurried down the alleyway to Lombard Street, and into the early-morning traffic.

  And there it was—the wrought-iron cover to the coal bin, unearthed easily after several false starts.

  It was square, covering an opening more than large enough for a man to fit through—and other objects.

  They stared at it as if it could burn them if they touched it.

  It felt like it. It seemed to reek of the fires of hell. It was more than likely that what remained of Charles was under that iron cover in the rubble of the coal bin, where someone who aided and abetted him would get ash on his shirt.

  Senna had guessed. Dominick had refused to believe it.

  “When we open it, we’ll release all the demons in hell,” Rob said, thrusting his shovel into a nearby pile of dirt emphatically.

  He picked up an ax and tried prizing open the cover. “This will take a couple of us. Grab anything we have with a point.” He covered his eyes as he caught a movement at the rear of the carriage house.

  Rula. Damn. He should have expected it. He watched as she picked her way through the rubble, and rather than argue with her, he handed her an ax. “That wrought-iron cover is heavy as hell. And all of you, guard yourselves—the stench will be horrific.”

  They bent to the task. Only a creature of superhuman strength could move that cover. Or the untainted children of vampires. It took the six of them altogether—Rob, Rula, Deklan, Naik, Dvora, Zekka—to shift the cover to the point where someone could enter the space.

  The blast of death rot and fetid air almost knocked them over.

  “Who wants to go first?” Rob muttered. “God, I’m swallowing that shit. Forget it. I’ll go first. Naik, Deklan—the rest of you stay out here. You don’t want to see whatever there is to see.”

  Oh, yes, you do, my dear Rula. It is time for us to meet and mate.

  Rula made a little sound. “He’s in my head. He’s goading me to come into his space.”

  “Let us go first.”

  There was no arguing with that. The air was sickening. Nauseating.

  Rob grabbed his ax and bent over one side of the hole. It was devil dark down there, and the rot smell nearly cost him his breakfast.

  He jumped—he heard Rula’s cry of dismay—and then Deklan and Naik followed him down.

  They landed on a pile of bones, tumbled off and down onto the grave dirt illuminated by the opening. The space was large, larger than Rob had imagined.

 
I’m here. Charles, infiltrating his mind.

  But where?

  And then Rob saw—toward the back of the space, near the opening where servants would shovel the coal into the furnace—and his stomach heaved.

  Charles lay in a grave-size pile of dirt, half of his hairless head, one eye, his nose, and part of his mouth the only part of him visible.

  Lay? Or had become, his body swallowed by and rooted in the dirt?

  So . . . Charles’s voice in Rob’s head again. This is what that son of a bitch Dominick did to me. Hell. Utter, reeking, incomprehensible hell. Do you wonder I want to kill everyone in sight? But—Rula will do for the moment. It will give me monstrous relief to cause someone else to suffer.

  Rob swallowed his hate, his nausea. “Can you move at all?”

  Not at all. Can you?

  A blast of sound rocketed through Rob’s head and rooted him to the spot.

  If I could, I’d be smiling. I haven’t had a chance to practice all my skills yet. It was enough to take down half of London the other day.

  Rob felt Charles releasing him.

  Where’s Rula?

  “No Rula.”

  I must have Rula.

  Rob heard a thud, and then Rula’s voice: “I’m here.”

  “You’re crazy,” he whispered. “You didn’t need the ax. He can’t hurt you. Look at him.”

  She looked and nearly gagged. A distended, wild-eyed, and hairless head buried in the ground almost like a head of lettuce in a garden.

  Rula, my dear.

  She made a move to go to him, but Rob caught her arm. “Don’t.”

  I’m so lonely.

  So plaintive, it disconcerted her. This wasn’t Charles. It was and always had been a homicidal maniac who subsisted on blood and guts and the love of killing.

  Only now, he had someone else to do the dirty work. Renk. Poor stupid, mindless Renk.

  She felt the whisk of a bat wing against her cheek.

  Ash on his shirt.

  This was where, this was why, this was meant to lead her to both Renk and Charles. She felt paralyzed, not knowing what to do.

  The stench was nearly killing. So was seeing Charles brought to this, and she fought feeling any sympathy for him when he was surrounded by death dirt and human bones.

  Nothing had changed except the type and depth of his powers. And his taunting. He loved his words, his nearly supernatural power. He had an audience now, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill Rula and present her to Dominick just as he’d always vowed to do.

  His yellowed eye fixed on Rob. You don’t have the guts to kill me.

  Instantly Rob swung the ax and embedded it in the dirt not three inches from Charles’s head. “You are going to die.”

  Impressive.

  “And again—” Rob swung again and clipped Charles’s forehead. Charles howled, as blood flowed from the nick, in tandem with an unearthly shriek coming from above the nightmare lair.

  And then, a heavy thud.

  Rob and Rula whirled—and there was Renk, a body in his arms, already torn to shreds because he’d fed first. But now he was bringing it to his master to suck what remained of the blood and guts from its shell.

  It was another woman, her heart torn open, bite marks all over her naked body, one of hundreds of women, hundreds of bodies, that Renk, her twin, her other half, her brother, her blood—hundreds of bodies as evidenced by the pile of bones, by Charles’s very existence—her brother, brain-dead and used and abused by this ghoul-head of a creature who was no longer human—

  All those women, she thought, her blood rage building as she watched Renk drop the body right on Charles’s head, where he could begin his monstrous biting and sucking to feed his worthless brain.

  And he watched, her brother. Just sat on the pile of dirt that had been Charles’s body and watched, and guided, and took—

  The horror consumed her, nearly killed her. Never again. Never ever again, she thought wildly, as she swung the ax without conscious effort; she swung and caught Renk in his ribs, and she swung again and hit his shoulders. And again, and she sliced his neck. Blood flowed copiously as she swung one more time and she cut off his head.

  His lifeless body listed; his head, streaming blood, rolled; Charles howled; Rob bashed aside the body Charles was feeding on and swung to kill—cleaving Charles’s head in two, not caring that blood spewed everywhere; he kept swinging and swinging until he finally chopped it off altogether.

  The death sound echoed throughout the whole of London—a deep yawling that ricocheted off buildings, Big Ben, Parliament, the Palace. It sounded like the devil dying. All the devils under Charles’s psychic command. It sounded like the end of all things.

  And it sounded like a blood-drenched Rula sobbing as she dropped her ax and dropped to her knees.

  Rob grabbed her. “Don’t.” He looked at Deklan and Naik, who were still in shock at such close-range, vicious violence.

  “We have to get her out of here.”

  “We have ropes,” Deklan said, gathering his wits. He called to Zekka to toss one down, then he and Naik climbed up, then pulled Rula first and Rob after, out of death’s hole.

  “Done,” Rob said as they shifted the cover over the hole. “Let’s shovel all the dirt we can over that cover. No one else will ever come now.”

  He turned to find Rula staring above them as they worked.

  Senna and Dominick floated there, watching impassively.

  “They’re going,” she murmured, her voice hoarse with emotion.

  “They’re leaving me. They saw, they know. They want us to take Lady Augustine’s house. They—”

  She broke off as they heard a ruffling sound, like an umbrella being opened, and Senna and Dominick suddenly both disappeared.

  A moment later, Rula felt the brush of a bat wing against her cheek.

  No, two bat wings touched her, one on either cheek.

  She reached up to touch them, but they were gone, vanished forever somewhere beyond the night.

  She would never get the gruesome picture of both Charles and her beheaded brother out of her mind. She had done that—she’d killed Renk, she was a murderer, a monster.

  The thing she’d sworn never to be—a killer.

  She rocked back and forth in anguish. How did you wash that out of your soul? How did Rob do it? Rob, who was equally culpable of murder, and who seemed to slough it off like dead skin.

  Maybe it was just like that for him.

  “I’m a murderer,” she moaned.

  “You’re a savior,” Rob contradicted her. “Or do we need to count the bodies in the servants’ quarters to justify what you did? That’s probably only a portion of the women Renk murdered week to week merely to sustain himself. Rather, let’s count how many lives you’ve saved now that Renk is dead.”

  “Even my brother?”

  “Hardly a brother. And Senna and Dominick? You said they saw, so they knew. They came to you. They were tacitly saying you did the right thing.”

  “They’re gone forever. They stroked my cheeks.” Tears again, so hard to control. Her whole family gone forever, one way or another.

  Rob nodded. “They did care about you. Hold that to your heart, Rula. Because it was inevitable they would succumb to their nature. And now they’ll walk through eternity together.”

  He waited a moment before he added comfortingly, “And while we won’t have eternity, we’ll have each other.”

  Her Vraq family cleared out Lady Augustine’s town house, but Rula was adamant that she would not live there. She still had nightmares of swinging the ax, breaking her brother’s skull, chopping off his head, blood everywhere . . . how did the Vraq live with themselves? How, how, how? And how could she even have feelings for the man who’d disposed of Charles with such impassive violence?
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br />   The problem was, she didn’t want to admit she had those feelings for Rob. They were there, separate and apart from anything else. And they were overwhelming.

  She pushed them away and hunkered down with Mirya.

  She refused to see him, but she kept remembering what he said:

  We’ll have each other.

  “What could you have done otherwise?” Mirya kept asking her.

  “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. My brother, my twin, killed that woman, he gave her to Charles. And all those others—all the bodies, the bones—and he wouldn’t ever stop—I had to . . . I had to . . .”

  But in the aftermath, nothing seemed to justify something as savage and reprehensible as beheading her twin brother.

  It was like beheading herself.

  “Our Vraq family will live at Lady Augustine’s town house,” Mirya told her a couple of days later. “Everything is cleared out and away. Nothing remains of what was, even to the furniture.”

  “I can’t live there,” Rula said. “I’ve seen too much. I can’t go there.”

  “Then you stay here until you’re ready.”

  She’d never be ready, Rula thought. Killing their enemies had solved nothing. Vampires still roamed. The Vraq still killed. People still died. Nothing had changed with Charles’s death, except the minions of the Keepers had all died when Charles’s brain ceased functioning.

  She still didn’t know how she could ever lead a normal life.

  “No life is normal,” Mirya said. “Every life has troubles, death, and sorrow. Every life has good and bad. The obstacles may be different, but humanity suffers in its own way just the same. So someone might be poor. Someone might be the victim of an accident. Someone might be a vampire hunter. There is no difference.”

  Rula still couldn’t see it. She went out every day to work her magic with her fortune-telling and palm reading, making up positive futures, making people happy.

  This was no life either. She felt restless and fretful. She missed Rob. But his life was centered around killing, and she didn’t want to kill ever again.