“Stop,” Sasha demanded, unable to bear another words. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at his friend. “Now tell me what is truly going on, Rowan. Why you are suddenly so ready to consider my theories. And to conceal information from the Council.” He paused and glanced at the Inspector. “Moreover, why do you speak of the Council at all in front of this human? We’ve never revealed ourselves to the Inspector.”
The Earl shook his head. “Elijah will have to explain this tangle. I confess I still don’t quite understand what’s going on. But not here.”
Sasha decided to have both Fyodor and Matthews escort Finch back to Mayfair in the meantime, unwilling to take risks with her safety, or to make her stay a moment longer than she had to. After he’d seen to this task, he let himself be led into the bowels of the warehouse by Elijah and Rowan, away from prying eyes.
“Prepare yourself,” Rowan warned as he set down the steam torch he’d brought along for illumination on an old table.
Sasha just shrugged at Rowan’s dramatics. He was fairly certain nothing could shock him after all the things he’d witnessed in his long life.
Sasha was wrong. He was very shocked indeed when Inspector Drexler tore off his Iron Necklace, revealing a neck that appeared as if it had never been touched by a Welder’s blade. It looked just like Sasha’s own neck, underneath the fake Necklace he wore to blend in. Drexler then set aside the long cane he was never without and straightened to his full, towering height, his limp miraculously disappearing.
Sasha was even more shocked when Drexler reached up and detached his brass-Welded eye carapace.
“The old Earl gave Elijah the Weldling eye when Elijah was just a boy. His real one had been damaged beyond repair. I saw for myself,” Rowan said quietly. “But now…” He trailed off, speechless.
Sasha took up the steam torch and approached Drexler for a closer look. Drexler didn’t look pleased, but he stoically endured the inspection. Sasha reared back in shock. Like the Necklace, the carapace had been nothing but a facade, for underneath was a very healthy human eye.
The only indication that the eye was not quite right was its unusual color. Only Elders had eyes the color of yellow amber, but never just the one.
“I’ve never seen the like,” Sasha murmured. “Your eye … grew back?” It sounded absurd to say aloud.
Drexler nodded uneasily.
“Even I cannot regenerate,” Sasha murmured. “What are you?”
Drexler’s expression grew grim. “I’m a vampire,” he said bluntly.
Sasha laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “There’s no such thing,” he scoffed.
“There’s no such thing as four hundred year old Elders with Da Vinci Hearts,” Drexler shot back. “Or at least that was what I always thought until I was changed.”
“How long have you known about us?” Sasha demanded.
“I’ve known about the Earl since I was changed eight years ago. Before you came to London. I knew you were one of them the minute I saw your eyes,” he said bitterly.
“I’m not one of them, not exactly,” Sasha protested. They had never let him call himself an Elder – not that he’d ever wanted to. “I’m only three hundred forty two, by the way. And I still say there are no such things as vampires.”
With that, Drexler’s canine teeth descended into sharp points that gleamed in the lantern glow, and the whites of his eyes flooded with amber fire. He picked up Sasha with one arm, tossing him into a wall ten feet away, so quickly Sasha hadn’t time for a single blink. The wall caved inward with the force of his impact.
Shaken, he remained where he’d fallen, leaning against the crumbled wall for support, brushing mortar out of his hair.
“He’s nearly as strong as we are, Sasha,” Rowan said darkly. “Nearly as fast.”
Drexler sneered, and with those fangs still extended, it was a chilling sight indeed. “Stronger, faster, after a feeding,” he muttered.
Sasha did not want to test either of their claims. He climbed to his feet, but kept his distance from the Inspector. “What the fuck, Elijah?”
“Could you put those away, old boy?” Rowan said, eyeing the fangs and glowing eyes uneasily.
“Sorry,” Drexler said. “They’ll go away in a moment. I’m just a bit on edge.”
“You’re on edge?” Sasha cried.
“Well, yes. I have just revealed what I am to not one but two Elders tonight. Forgive me for being concerned for my life.”
“I am not an Elder,” Sasha insisted. Though he didn’t know why he bothered. “And why would you be concerned? The last time I checked Council law, there was nothing about killing vampires in them,” he said wryly.
“Not in so many words,” Rowan said. “But what he is … it’s forbidden.”
“If I have to say I don’t understand one more time tonight, I will rip someone’s head off,” Sasha cried.
“You have always wanted nothing to do with Bonding, so you would not be very familiar with all of its rules,” Rowan began.
“I have read the rules. A long time ago.”
“Foremost among these rules – rules that, if broken, are punishable by death, if you’ll recall – is that no Bonded may share his blood with a mortal. It is an inviolable rule, one that I thought no one had ever broken. Until tonight. Now I am questioning everything.”
“You mean to say, Bonded blood turns people into vampires who can regenerate eyeballs?” Sasha said slowly. He groaned. “But it makes no sense. Bonded companions have none of our powers, other than longevity and accelerated healing. Even those are limited.”
“There is some property in Bonded blood that is corrupted when passed onto others,” Rowan said.
“I feel as if I’ve fallen into Finch’s penny-dreadful,” he said, shaking his head in dismay.
“The feeling is mutual, and you’ve not heard the whole story,” Rowan said. He sighed and leaned against the table. “I know you never approved when I Bonded Christiana. But she was my descendant, and she was dying.”
“She was a child,” Sasha murmured.
“She was my blood, Sasha!” Rowan cried. “You can never understand, with the family you had. But I couldn’t watch her die.”
Sasha didn’t know why Rowan’s words hurt so much, but they did. He could understand. Had his child lived, perhaps he too would have been tempted to do what Rowan had done, if it had come to that. But he’d never know. He’d been forced to watch the child and Yelena die, helpless to change their fates.
“Maybe you were right to disapprove,” Rowan continued in a raw tone. “She has put me in an untenable situation.”
Sasha recalled that strange scene in the garden earlier, and the pieces of the puzzle started to come together. He glanced at Drexler, whose fangs had receded. Thankfully. “She did this to you.”
Drexler’s expression grew bleak. “Eight years ago, during the Ripper case. The little fool followed me into Whitechapel the night the Ripper tore me open. Drank me dry and left me for dead.”
“Wait. The Ripper was a vampire too?” Sasha demanded.
“There are many of us out there,” Drexler said grimly. “Or so I have discovered. Lady Christiana found me, and she fed me her blood. She didn’t know what it would do. She’d never been told that. She just panicked and tried anything to save me.” He turned to Rowan. “She couldn’t watch me die, just as you couldn’t watch her die. You cannot hold her responsible, no matter how misguided she was.”
“What she did is a killing offense. I cannot rewrite Council laws.”
“No wonder you don’t want to involve the Council,” Sasha said. “You’re protecting Christiana.”
“For now. For as long as I can. But from what the Inspector has told me, it seems there are many of his kind walking around out there. And they can only be made by the Bonded. I don’t think we can trust anyone at this point, Sasha. Something strange is happening.”
“Obviously.” He turned to Drexler. “So you are a vampire. Or a
being who perhaps inspired the creation of that fictional creature. Do you … dear God, I can’t believe I’m asking this … do you drink blood?”
“I crave it,” Drexler said baldly. “I’ve found a way to control the … frenzy to a degree. But when I must feed, I only feed from criminals.”
“How noble of you. And the morphine? Does it serve some purpose?”
Drexler’s eyes widened in surprise. “How do you know about that?”
“I know an addict when I see one.”
Drexler reluctantly took off his jacket and rolled up one of his shirtsleeves, holding his arm under the glow of the steam torch. It was riddled with hundreds of raw, blistering track marks where he had injected the opiate with a needle. The evidence of Drexler’s addiction was hard to stomach – but no harder to stomach than his vampirism, Sasha supposed.
“Dear God!” Rowan said, aghast, obviously seeing this for the first time. “Elijah, what is this?”
Sasha ignored Rowan’s outburst. “Why do these wounds not heal like your neck, or your eye?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Drexler said. “But the morphine suppresses the thirst.”
“And is slowly killing you,” Sasha surmised.
Drexler rolled his sleeve back down and shrugged back into his jacket. “Perhaps. But if you knew how it feels when the frenzy sets in, you’d be glad of the needle in your arm too.”
Sasha gestured at the scar on Drexler’s face. “And why has that not healed?”
Drexler turned it away from the light and Sasha’s prying eyes. “I don’t know that either,” he said in a tone that left no room for further discussion. The Inspector apparently had a few secrets he was stubbornly clinging to. Sasha let it pass, for now. “Why reveal yourself tonight, Elijah? What does this have to do with the madman we seek?”
“Because I think your madman might be the vampire I’ve been hunting for months,” Drexler said. “This is not the first body I’ve seen like this. It’s the twelfth.”
Sasha sucked in a breath, stunned. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“Because I didn’t know you were after the same killer. And I never tell you about my cases when a vampire is involved.”
“You have multiple cases involving vampires?” Rowan cried. “How could you keep these secrets from us?”
Drexler rolled his eyes. “Please. If your lot weren’t so bloody tight-lipped, I wouldn’t be what I am now, would I? And you didn’t tell me shite about this madman you were hunting, other than he was after Miss Finch and he butchered people. In my line of work, I run into a lot of butchers. How was I to know?”
“So all the other twelve victims had their hearts removed?” Sasha demanded.
“More like ripped out. But they were definitely killed by a vampire, like the victim tonight. The wounds on the neck are unmistakable, and the lack of blood. Someone drank that woman to the bone.”
“But this is the first victim we’ve seen with wounds on the neck,” Sasha said, thrown.
“Maybe we just didn’t notice them before,” Rowan said.
“Maybe,” Sasha replied doubtfully. “Was there anything different about this victim and the other twelve you’ve seen?”
“The strange writing with the blood was new. And I don’t think she was raped like the others.”
Aline. “The other twelve were raped? All women?”
Drexler nodded. “Prostitutes, most of them. Not like the one tonight.”
“Another difference. But you seem certain this is the killer we are looking for.”
Elijah nodded grimly and extracted an envelope from his jacket. He handed it to Sasha. “I received this at the Yard earlier tonight by Steam Post.”
Sasha scanned the note, his unease deepening.
Your Russian associate might be interested in the little bird waiting for him on Greymarket Street. Give him and his charming secretary my regards. I continue to enjoy our games, Inspector. OSIRIS.
“Osiris?” Sasha murmured. The God of the Egyptian Underworld.
“That is what he calls himself.”
“How melodramatic of him,” Sasha murmured.
“I have been reading about this Osiris bloke,” Drexler said. “In ancient Egypt, the heart was removed at death and mummified. They believed the heart would be weighed by the gods, to determine whether its owner was worthy to join Osiris in eternal life.”
Sasha handed the note back and ran a hand through his hair, sighing wearily. “It always comes back to the heart. And the blood. Elijah, just how many of your kind live in London?”
“Near a hundred, perhaps. There are more now than ever before. Someone is turning people faster than I can kill them. Someone is planning something big in St. Giles, and it reaches far beyond this case.”
And Sasha wouldn’t doubt it for a minute if Elijah claimed an Elder was involved, not just rogue Bonded. After the revelations of this evening, he was more convinced than ever that the perfect brotherhood of Da Vinci’s chosen ones wasn’t perfect and never had been.
As an old friend of his had pointed out quite succinctly, absolute power could corrupt even the best natures. And if there was one thing the Elders had, it was power. Whether they were ever in possession of the best natures was doubtful.
And he highly doubted he and Rowan were the first of their kind to discover what happened when the Bonded opened their veins to humans. There wouldn’t be a rule against it if someone hadn’t known exactly what it did this entire time.
“Someone is breaking those precious rules of yours, Rowan,” he said.
“I am wondering if anyone ever followed the rules in the first place,” Rowan muttered with quiet devastation. Sasha didn’t envy his friend, and the trouble he’d face with Lady Christiana.
“There is one more thing you need to know about my kind, Professor,” Drexler said. “We can scent the quality of a person’s blood from across a room, and the less enhanced our victims, the better the blood – and the harder it is to restrain our compulsion to drink. But when I met Miss Finch for the first time, I had to knock myself out with morphine afterwards to stop myself from hunting her and draining her dry. The scent of her blood is … exquisite.” Drexler shook his head.
“If you ever harm her, I will gut you,” Sasha growled.
Drexler looked affronted. “I would never hurt her. But she is in more danger than you could ever imagine. Why do you think I make my best lieutenant guard her? It is certainly not because she likes to bet on the Races. If any of my kind were to scent her … well, let’s just say I am one of the few vampires out there who knows the definition of self-control."
ALINE raised no protest when Fyodor and Matthews delivered her to Sasha’s townhouse instead of her flat. She raised no protest when Madame Kristeva fussed over her, insisting on bringing her tea in Sasha’s private study. She raised no protest even when the hellhounds licked her face in greeting, then followed her around the house like two giant shadows, as if sensing her disquiet.
For once in their misbegotten acquaintance, she was glad for their company. They would never hurt her, but they could defend her, if the need arose. And the need might indeed arise, since apparently she was being stalked by a killer with a grudge against her ex-employer.
She waited until Madame Kristeva had departed after bringing her tea, and Matthews and Fyodor took up posts outside the study, leaving her alone with the hellhounds. Then she went over to Sasha’s desk and began riffling through the drawers for the key to the door in the corner of the room.
The room behind the door was the only one the Professor made off-limits to everyone on his staff. She’d never been brave enough – or callous enough – to break his rule, as she had a feeling what was on the other side was intensely private.
Unlike the Professor, she was able to restrain herself from meddling in other people’s business.
But after the night’s events, she was through treading softly where the Professor was concerned. His secrets were threaten
ing her life, and she was convinced he would continue to keep them, even at her expense.
Why, he’d rather seduce her than tell her the truth. That she’d been fool enough to believe, for even one moment, that his attentions in the Earl’s garden were sincere, was humiliating. He’d made her think he wanted her, and all to keep her under his thumb. Her blood boiled just thinking about it, and not in the wonderfully seductive way it had when she’d been lost – like a ninny – in his embrace.
Damn him.
A woman’s heart had been ripped out, and apparently this wasn’t the first time. He couldn’t have explained all of this to her? Explained why he’d set Mr. Matthews on her heels? Explained why he didn’t want her to leave his employ instead of playing these stupid games with her? What secret was important enough he’d rather risk her life than reveal it? She was merely his secretary, but surely he valued her more than that.
Perhaps not, she thought to herself. Perhaps I don’t know this man at all.
One of the drawers was stuck. She pulled on it, with no success, until she realized the secret panel at the bottom was jammed in one corner. She found a penknife and began to pry it open. The penknife slipped, slicing one of her fingers open.
“Damn!” she muttered, sucking on the wound. She took a handkerchief from her pocket – one of the only redeeming features of her drab blue evening gown – and wrapped it around her finger tightly. The cut would bleed all night because of her strange disorder, but she had no patience for dealing with it at the moment. She turned back to the drawer, and after a few more frustrated attempts, pried the false bottom open.
Turning up the gas lamp on the desktop, she peered into the drawer. She easily located the key and put it in her pocket, then pulled out a stack of old letters.
The one on top was the most recent, and, with a little jolt, she saw it was from her. It was the one she’d written when she’d been sick with her cold and the Professor had hounded her to return to work. She smoothed the letter out and reviewed her words with a certain amount of pride. She’d certainly held nothing back. Though she was puzzled why he would keep it.
Prince of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles) Page 13