Dark Embrace

by Eve Silver

  The words came as no surprise. The entire hospital had been buzzing with conjecture and whispered supposition for days. Some thought an animal with a burrow in the walls had killed all four. Some thought a creature of the night stole through the darkened corridors. There was all manner of conjectures as to the culprit. One thing she knew: no one who was a patient of Mr. Thayne’s had a bad word to say about him.

  A mad fit. She had never seen Killian less than composed and controlled...except for a single moment in the closet when she had thought he might kiss her. There had been a tiny fracture in his control then.

  “Mr. Thayne is an extremely competent surgeon,” Sarah replied as she unwound the dressing from the patient’s arm. The woman stirred and mumbled a protest but did not wake.

  Elinor made a sound of displeasure. “He is. That fact is not in question.”

  Sarah cut her a sidelong glance. “And you, Elinor? Do you believe the gossip?”

  Elinor searched her face. “I believe people gossip too much. Including me.” She lowered her voice once more. “A constable was here yesterday. From the Metropolitan Police.”

  Sarah murmured a wordless reply, for she already knew of the constable’s visit, having heard about it not only from the night nurse, but one of the lads who brought the morning gruel, the laundress, and two of the apothecary apprentices.

  “The constable spoke with Mr. Simon and Mr. Franks, and after that with Mr. Thayne, but in the end, he left. I thought he might like tea, so I went after him and asked about that.”

  “Of course you did,” Sarah said.

  “I’m nothing if not hospitable.” Elinor smiled, dimples in her cheeks.

  “And inquisitive. Out with it, then. What did he say?”

  Elinor shook her head. “He very politely declined the tea, saying he found the place off-putting.”

  “I can’t imagine why...” Sarah swabbed the wound, pleased to see the healthy pink of newly healed skin and no sign of infection.

  Elinor snorted. “He did share enough conversation that I can tell you he was called in to investigate by Mr. Simon, and that he will not be back.” She unfolded another bandage and handed it to Sarah. “It seems that the constable holds the opinion that people die in hospitals, and without further evidence, he cannot think there is foul play afoot.”

  Something in her tone made Sarah pause in her work and turn her head to offer her full attention.

  Elinor tapped her foot on the wooden floor, a rapid patter. She pursed her lips, and after a moment continued in a whisper. “But I wonder. I do. I worked at Guy’s Hospital before I came here, and I’ve never seen the like of those wounds, ripped open and not a drop of blood shed.”

  Sarah stared at her for a long moment, having no words, but so many thoughts. Because she, too, wondered, not just about the wound, but about the shadow she had seen the morning Mr. Scully died, and about Killian Thayne’s presence beside the bed of the woman who had died two weeks before that. She was certain that he was not responsible, a certainty that dwelled in instinct rather than quantifiable fact. But was such faith in him folly?

  Wetting her lips, she shook her head. “We need more bandages, Elinor,” she said, her voice soft, her heart heavy. She did not want to wonder about him. She wanted to believe that he was exactly the man she conjured in her dreams.

  The trouble was, she had learned both in the months leading up to her father’s death and the months since then that the boundary between dreams and nightmares was wont to blur.

  * * *

  Sarah drew her cloak tight about her shoulders. The night was cold and clear, the stars winking bright and pretty against the dark blue-black sky, a sliver of moon offering pale light. Her gaze strayed to the graveyard. There was nothing there save old stones and a single ancient tree, its gnarled branches casting creeping shadows along the ground.

  Still, she shivered, in part from the chill, and in part from the certainty that he would come, the man who watched her. He would follow her through the wretched, twisted streets and alleys of St. Giles.

  He would not approach. He would walk close enough that she would know he was there, but not close enough for her to see him. The pattern was set.

  She hated it. Hated the feeling of impotency and the ever-present fear that this time he would break the pattern, draw near, reveal his dark intent.

  The wind howled down from the north, pushing up under her cloak, chilling her to the bone. The temptation to take the shortest route was strong, for it halved the distance and would bring her to Coptic Street that much faster. But that route was the least safe of her choices, and so she would take the longer and hope that the crowds kept the man who stalked her away.

  She began to walk, her cudgel gripped in her fist beneath the material of her cloak. Her steps were quick and sure, her senses alert. She heard nothing, felt no creeping certainty that she was being watched, but the streets were far from safe and she was yet far from home.

  Home. Such a strange word to apply to the tiny, cramped room where she slept each night. She had grown up in a pretty house with fine china and a pot of chocolate every morning. They had employed a cook, a maid-of-all-work, and her father’s man who was valet, coachman, butler, and footman all rolled into one. They had not been wealthy, but they had made do quite nicely, she and her father, a physician who saw mostly to the health needs of merchants and tradesmen. Not the upper class, but not the poor, which meant her father had always been paid moderately well.

  She had never expected her pleasant life to be anything else.

  But then, inexplicably, her father’s temperament had changed, his mood fraying, his thoughts and actions growing irrational. After months of steady decline and frightening and unusual behavior, he died. He was alive one night and dead the next morning, fallen in the Thames, his body never found. The only reason that Sarah knew anything of his fate was because he had been accompanied that night by an old friend, Dr. Grammercy, who had tried to find him and fish him out of the river, to no avail. It was a terrible and tragic culmination of months of descent into what she suspected was opium addiction.

  With his death, Sarah had found herself without funds, evicted from her home. She could not say precisely how that had happened. She had never thought her father the type to squander his money, but in the months before his death, he had spent it on something that defied her understanding.

  A cure, he had insisted. He was searching for a cure.

  She could have told him that the only cure was to stop taking the drug. She thought now that she should have told him that.

  Well, it mattered little, she thought now as she passed the small cramped houses that backed onto the slaughterhouses, the smell of death and old blood always heavy in the air. Come morning, there would be children running in the street next to a herd of pigs, with inches of blood flowing beneath their feet. A terrible place, really.

  She kept her head down as she hurried past. It was too late to change what her father had done, what he had become—an opium addict. She must only find a way to go on.

  Turning onto Queen Street, she was confronted by light from the street lamps and sound and a tight press of bodies that she navigated with care. Near Drury Lane, the public houses spilled their patrons into the streets. To her left, two men engaged in fisticuffs, dancing about to the taunts and calls of their fellows. To her right, three women were screaming like harpies, pulling and yanking on an old dress stretched out between them, none of them willing to relinquish their grasp.

  The next street was narrower, with fewer people, and the street after that narrower and less crowded still. Now her route brought her to a place where she could no longer avoid the dimness and the shadows. There was only one lamp on the road, and tonight it was unlit. She quickened her pace and ducked down an alley.

  A staircase ascended the outside of the building and a man, bowed and bent, slogged up the steps, a sack of cabbages slung over his back. He would peel the outer leaves off on the morrow and take
them to sell as fresh, though they were likely already several days old. It was a trick she had never suspected before her life had brought her to St. Giles.

  Sarah scanned the shadows and moved on, unease trickling through her now. This was the part of her trek she liked the least.

  Again, she turned, this time into an alley narrower than the last.

  Almost there. Her boots rang on the cobbled pavement, her heart pounded a wild rhythm.

  She walked very quickly now, the wind tunneling down the alley to sting her eyes, her cheeks, and behind her, she heard footsteps. Not ringing like her own. Shuffling, sliding.

  He was there, behind her. She could hear him.

  Her breath came in ragged rasps and she dragged her cudgel free of the draping material of her cloak, holding it before her at the ready as she quickened her pace even more.

  There was nowhere safe, nowhere she could turn.

  The courtyards that fed off the narrow alley held their own dangers, for she knew not what manner of men, or women, might lurk there. In this place, poverty forced even women and children to toss aside morals and do what they must to survive. Calling out for help was therefore not an attractive option.

  Ahead of her loomed a dark shape, and she skidded to a stop, horrified to realize that a large wooden cart blocked her path.

  From behind her came the sound of cloth flapping in the wind, and she whirled about, her cudgel raised and ready.

  The light here was so dim, there was only charcoal shadow painted on shadow, but she knew what she saw. The shape of a man loomed some twenty feet away. He was draped in a dark cloak that lifted and fanned out in the wind like the wings of a raven. His features were completely obscured by a low crowned hat pulled down over his brow.

  He was tall and broad and menacing...familiar somehow, his height and the shape of his shadow...similar to the shadow she thought she had seen on the ward the morning Mr. Scully died. But it was more than that…something else familiar…

  Trembling, she clenched her teeth to keep them from clacking aloud. If she dared cry for help, she might bring down a dozen worse creatures on her head.

  Taking a step backward, and another, she pressed against the wood of the cart, her legs shaking so hard, she knew not how they yet bore her weight.

  Run, her mind screamed, and she dared a rapid glance in each direction. To her right was a courtyard, to her left, another alley.

  The man before her took a single step forward, menacing. Terrifying. He was done toying with her. He was coming for her, as she had always known he would.

  Still clutching her cudgel, she snaked her free hand behind her back and groped for the wooden cart. It was high-wheeled, and she could feel the lower limit of it at a level with her waist.

  There was her best choice.

  She dropped to the ground and rolled beneath the cart.

  Her pursuer made a sound of surprise. For the briefest instant, she wasn’t certain if it was a hiss, or her name—Ssssarah—but she did not pause to look behind her. Bounding to her feet as soon as she reached the opposite side of the cart, she grabbed her skirt with her free hand and hauled it up, then ran as fast as she could, her legs pumping, her breath rasping in her throat.

  The cobbles were caked with years of grime and refuse, and her feet skidded and slipped on the sludge. Once, she slammed her shoulder against a wall, nearly falling, but she pushed herself upright and ran on, weaving through the alleys, taking any turn she recognized, not daring to take those that were less than familiar.

  The only thing worse than being chased through this warren would be running blindly without having a clear concept of her location.

  Twice, she dared look behind her. She saw nothing to make her think she had been followed.

  Finally, she ducked into a shadowed niche beneath a narrow wooden stairwell. Her lungs screamed for air, and she huddled as deep in the gloom as she could, pulling her body in tight to make herself as small as possible. Her ears strained to hear the sound of footsteps pounding in pursuit, but there was nothing.

  From the window above her came the discordant noise of an argument, a man’s voice, then another, deeper voice in reply, and a moment later, the dull thud of fists on flesh and a cry of pain.

  Panting, she struggled to satisfy her desperate need for air and will her galloping pulse to a more sedate pace.

  She waited a moment longer then crept from her hiding place. Staying close to the wall and the sheltering gloom, she made her way clear of the labyrinth of alleys to New Oxford Street. There she crossed and then continued north to the small lodging house where she rented her room from Mrs. Cowden.

  She strode along the street toward the narrow house hemmed in on both sides by other narrow houses. Almost had she reached the place when she drew up short and stumbled to a dead stop. Fear lodged in her throat like a fishbone. Just ahead, a man lounged against the light post several houses away.

  A tall man, garbed in a long, dark cloak.

  The wind caught the cloak and made it billow like a sail. Sarah stood rooted to the spot, uncertain whether to run for the door of her lodging house or flee down the empty street.

  He stood on the far side of the lamp-post his face obscured. Then he shifted, and the light from the lamp spilled down, glinting off the metal rims of his spectacles and highlighting the sun bright hair that framed his angular face.

  10

  Barcelona, Spain, 1585

  * * *

  The inquisitor’s chamber had walls of stone with two barred windows set close to the high ceiling. Darkened hallways branched off the main room like the legs of a spider. Killian stayed close to Layla’s side. She trembled, from fear or cold or anticipation he could not say.

  He almost turned back, almost drew her from this place of pain and torment, but he stifled the inclination and drew her forward instead. He refused to carry out the task he had set himself without her full and clear consent. He had brought her here so she could see the truth of what he was, what she would become.

  He had met her by happenstance, a dying woman who desperately wanted to live. She was the sister of a man with whom he carried out business. He did not love her—was one such as he even capable of love?—and she did not love him. Theirs was a friendship of mutual respect and companionship. She was intelligent and shrewd, and their conversation was amusing. After months of watching her slowly fade away, he had told her he could offer a cure, he could save her life.

  The offer was made not only for her sake but for his. He was weary of his solitude. The lovers he had taken over the years had been fleeting distractions, women who were well aware that he would never be a permanent fixture in their lives. He had told none what he was, shared little of himself with any of them. But Layla was not a bedmate. She was a friend, and he thought that was a good basis for the solution he offered: a way to cheat her rapidly approaching death.

  He had shared few details, had only warned that she would have to do things that were both distasteful and against her nature in order to survive.

  “I do not care,” she had said, her dark eyes flashing in her pale face. “I want to live, whatever the cost, I want to live.” She had paused. “Do you do those distasteful things?”

  “I do. Do not misunderstand. I do not revile what I have become.” What his mother’s murderer had made him. “It simply is. And because of it, I have had opportunities to travel, to study, to see wonders others can only imagine. Pyramids. Tigers. Monkeys in a jungle thick and green. Rome, Venice, Paris, London…”

  And always he moved on after a few short years, never offering the chance for any to notice that he never aged, never grew ill. Never allowing himself the opportunity for friendships or connections of much length or depth. It was a lonely existence, one he had lived for over two centuries. In his human life, he had enjoyed interludes of quiet and equal interludes of camaraderie. But he was no longer human, and whatever interactions he shared with mortals could never be enough to breach the walls between
them for he was the hunter and they were his prey.

  In the beginning, there had been occasions when he had considered walking into the sun. But he had not, for his yearning to live, to learn, to feed off experiences, and yes, to help mankind and atone in some tiny way for the lives he stole had outweighed his melancholy. The plague that had killed his family—that he had brought to his family—had sparked in him a need to understand disease and death, to bring ease to the suffering of others, to find cures where he could. So he studied texts and healed those he could; those he could not heal, those who were already wrapped in death’s embrace but had yet to draw their last breath, he drained.

  Layla looked up at him now in the dim light, her face pale, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders.

  “For everything you gain from this choice, there will be sacrifice in equal measure,” he warned.

  He had not made this offer before. He was not even certain he could succeed in her transformation for his plan of action was based solely on the hazy recollections of his own rushed and terrifying transition. She might die during the process. She would definitely die without it.

  She nodded.

  “Come.” He offered his arm and she took it, leaning heavily upon him as they moved from the Inquisitor’s chamber to a narrow hallway with small cells on either side. When they reached the end of the corridor, Killian stopped. He held to the shadows, his form draped all in black, invisible to the wretch who lay on the ground where he had been tossed.

  Killian had come to this place because he had heard this man’s cries and pleas.

  He was doomed, this man who was a husband and father, whose crime was labeled heresy because he refused to forsake his religion and replace it with another. He had been accused and detained. Tortured. Tried. Sentenced.

  Killian had not been there to witness the man’s torment. But he knew what had been done because he knew the human body and could read the signs in the prisoner’s broken and bloodied form.