Marking Time (The Immortal Descendants)

by April White

  The guys bent their heads back to their chess game and I knew that whatever had just happened between us wasn’t going to be mentioned again. Ringo was studiously avoiding my gaze and Archer was unreadable. So I surrendered to the fact that I might never fully understand, and settled in to watch.

  I was starting to get nervous about visiting Will Shaw. While he was in solitary it hadn’t been possible so I didn’t really have to think about it. But now that we were actually going to do it, I suddenly wondered what I would say. The whole ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ thing was weighing on me too. What if the nice, reasonable guy I’d spoken to through the vents was the costume and the horrible monster was the real deal?

  I hadn’t told Archer that I’d already met Will. I guess I was protecting the knowledge of the tunnel between the chapel and Bedlam, but we’d talked about nearly everything else, so I wasn’t sure why I was being cagey about that.

  But that wasn’t the only thing I’d been keeping from Archer. And that secret was so big I didn’t even know where to begin.

  Archer beat me in a game of chess, but this time I got both of his knights and a bishop before he did, which made me think of the other bishop I wished was out of the game. “Have you seen Bishop Wilder?”

  “He accosted me last night when I got back from here.” Archer’s tone was grim. “He’s suspicious.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of my absences every night.”

  Ringo suddenly jumped up and climbed out the window to the roof. Startled, I looked back at Archer. “What was that?”

  He sighed. “He’s probably gone to see if I was followed here. I don’t believe he sent someone after me tonight, but he will tomorrow. He didn’t believe my excuse and I honestly thought he would forbid me to leave.”

  Ringo re-appeared and closed the drapes tightly over the window when he came in.

  “I took care to pay attention behind me, if it’s any consolation.”

  Ringo looked equally grim. “You weren’t followed so I could tell, but I wish you’d told me when you first got here. They might have gone back to report.”

  “I’m sorry, Ringo. I’m putting you both in jeopardy by coming here.”

  Oh God, the pity party wasn’t just limited to me. “Then you shouldn’t go out tomorrow night. Don’t give him any reason to doubt you.”

  “You’re not going to Bethlem Hospital alone, Saira, and that’s final.”

  “So meet me there.” Archer had just opened his mouth to protest when I continued. “There’s a tunnel, under Guy’s Chapel, that goes to the Bedlam cellars.”

  “And you know this because?”

  “It’s how I got to the chapel when you found me.”

  He looked me steadily in the eye. “Where’s the entrance?”

  “Under the stairs to the loft. But I won’t go tomorrow night if it gets you in trouble.”

  He smiled at me. “You and I both know that you’ll go with or without me. Your curiosity is too great not to.”

  “But I’ve already talked to him. I can wait another day or two.” If I kept dropping bombshells like this I was going to have to scrape their jaws off the floor with a putty knife.

  Archer stood up suddenly. “I’d better be going. Good luck to you tomorrow, Ringo.” The way he avoided looking at me made my skin crawl with guilt. I hated the feeling, especially because I’d made the conscious choice not to be totally honest with him.

  I got in his way as he turned to leave. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth before. I don’t know why I hid that from you.”

  He finally looked me in the eye again, but his voice was cold. “You forget, Saira, I can see your lies. Green has glowed around you since you returned.”

  Oh God, I had forgotten about Archer’s Seer gift. He’d known I was keeping secrets from him every day, and must have been waiting for me to come clean without having to be busted on it. I felt sick.

  “I’ve been afraid to tell you the truth.” I practically whispered in my desperation.

  His voice was mocking. “About Shaw?”

  “No, not about that. That was just stupid.” I included Ringo in my gaze and gave them both the Cliff Notes version of the night I got there. Ringo seemed a little impressed with my adventure, Archer just looked disappointed.

  “And you couldn’t see fit to tell me about either the bishop or the tunnel? Clearly that’s what Bishop Wilder has been doing these weeks that he has holed himself up in the chapel. He’s been using the tunnel to go to Bethlem.”

  I winced. Of course he was right, and if I had been straight with him from the beginning we could have gotten to that information right away.

  “But there’s more, you said.” The chill from Archer’s voice was practically arctic and I deserved every degree of it. I nodded.

  “There’s more.”

  A pin dropping would have sounded like an anvil in that room. I took a deep breath and looked Archer in the eyes. His arms were crossed in front of him and disappointment was coming off him in waves.

  “If you stay with me you’ll die.”

  Home

  “I’ll…die?” The look on Archer’s face was one part incredulity and one part disgust. Or shock. I couldn’t tell which. This was the conversation I’d dreaded since I found Archer’s hideaway under St. Bridgid’s, and every day I hadn’t told him made it ten times harder now.

  “You’ll think it’s worse.”

  “What could be worse than death, Saira?”

  “Becoming a Vampire.”

  He looked at me for an instant like I’d gone insane, then wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I become a Vampire.” He seemed to be talking to himself, testing the word out on his tongue. Ringo looked a little pale and sat down hard on the chair behind him.

  Archer finally looked at me, his voice curiously flat. “How?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t remember.” I whispered, “I’m sorry,” as if by taking my words back I could take away the outcome.

  Archer’s detachment ended suddenly as he turned cold anger on me. “How dare you, Saira!”

  I was shocked into speechlessness.

  “How dare you insist we track down Mary Kelly to warn her of her fate, and yet you hid mine from me! Do I mean so very little to you that you’d let me die with no warning?”

  He paced the room with a wildness I’d seen in trapped animals. I think Ringo might have stood up for me then, but my spine went rigid and I bit back like I was the cornered one.

  “You were testing me! You knew I was hiding something and you waited to see if I’d come clean. Do you have any idea how much I’ve been dreading this conversation? Every time you talk about Vampires you sound disgusted and I’ve practically bitten my tongue off not to say, ‘Oh by the way, you’re one too.’ I have to defend you to everyone! My teacher practically attacked me to get to you, and I don’t even know if you’re alive or dead now. When I left you were about to be ambushed by Mongers and Werewolves, you hadn’t eaten in I don’t know how long because you won’t tell me, and I had to leave you behind because you were still sleeping when the Mongers came after me. And to top all that, it’s my fault!”

  I felt like poisonous toads had just fallen from my mouth and I wanted to rinse out the words I’d just spewed. It had not made me feel better to unload all that garbage, and the deadness in Archer’s eyes dug a hole right into my soul.

  He spoke more stiffly than an English king. “I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused you, Miss Elian.”

  I couldn’t even find breath to protest as he left the loft. I watched him go with guilt and shame crawling up and down me like spiders. I sank onto my bed, still staring at the place where Archer had stood, shocked beyond recognition by the vacuum he’d left behind him.

  Ringo didn’t speak, presumably disgusted with me too, and I could hear him shutting the flat down for the night. I closed the drape around my bed so I didn’t have to see his disappointment, and I lay back to try to stop the spinning in my hea
d. Finally, I found something that resembled my breath again.

  “I have to go home, Ringo.”

  He paused outside the bed curtain. “For good?”

  “No. I’ll be back.”

  “When do ye need to go?”

  “Now.”

  He flipped open the curtain and looked at me. “You should have told him. You should have told us both.”

  “I know.” My voice was as small as I felt.

  His gaze held mine for a long moment, and finally he sighed. “His Lordship won’t like it.”

  “His Lordship has taken himself out of the game.” Not that I blamed him.

  Ringo’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you going back?”

  “There are things I need to get. Things my mother left me.”

  He nodded curtly. “Come. I’ll walk you to a spiral if you’ll bring me back some torch food.” I stared at him in surprise, then finally cracked a very small smile.

  “You mean batteries?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Those.”

  “You got it.” I got up from the bed, took a deep breath, and grabbed Archer’s leather sport bike jacket. “Let’s go.”

  There were probably safer places to go through, but Ringo wanted to see the Bedlam cellars, and I wanted to travel back to the last place I’d seen Archer. My Vampire. The one who loved me even though I sucked.

  Ringo didn’t have any trouble breaking into the King’s College chapel and he loved the hidden staircase and the connecting tunnel. We slipped inside and down the stairs without anyone the wiser.

  The Bedlam cellar was empty too except for the moaning echoes of patients above us. If I thought of it like the wind blowing through old castle ruins it didn’t make my skin crawl. I tried to whisper for Will Shaw through the vent, but Archer had said he was in solitary confinement until tomorrow, so I presumed his usual room was empty.

  Ringo was a silent companion through it all until we found the spiral. I hugged him. “I’ll be back tomorrow, through the spiral at the bridge. I’d like to go see Mary Kelly with you.”

  “It’s not fit company for a proper girl to keep.”

  Stuffy Brit. I didn’t even have it in me to scoff, I just rolled my eyes and sighed. “We both know I’m not a proper girl. Just let me come with you, please. I failed miserably in my warning to Archer about his future, maybe I can do some good for Mary.”

  Another pause. “Okay. I’ll set the meeting for seven. That way if his Lordship does come for dinner we can all go together.”

  We both knew that was about as likely as us growing wings, but we tactfully didn’t say it. I walked him back to the tunnel door so I could lock it behind him.

  “I’m sorry, Ringo. I screwed up and I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

  Ringo gave me a solemn look for a long moment, then grinned. “Oh, you’ll probably screw up again, just not like that.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him, then closed the door on his jaunty wave. As I went back to face my spiral I thought about the conversation I’d had with Archer about my mom.

  Discovering that my mother had been lying to me about our family hurt me so deeply I had wondered if I would ever be able to fully trust her again. Because I had trusted her without question before. You do that with people you love.

  Archer the Vampire had been so intense when we first met on the grounds at St. Brigid’s. He loved me then in a way I couldn’t understand and didn’t make sense. Because I hadn’t fallen in love with Archer the human yet. And now I had.

  And if he felt the same way about me, I had wounded him in a way that twisted my guts into tiny little knots. My fingers traveled around the spirals with practiced swirls and I almost welcomed the nausea and humming before they happened. It was kind of like a train rounding a corner: I could hear it coming before I felt it, and I surrendered to it.

  The sound of a chain being unwound from a metal door was the last thing I heard when the humming in my body sent me through the portal.

  And I was still hearing it when I landed, on my knees, barely able to keep my heaving stomach under control. I was in the same dank, moldy cellar. But the air felt different. Deader, somehow. I reached out my hand and felt along the wall until I found the cave-in rubble. So I was back in my time, maybe.

  And maybe it was Archer unwinding the chain from the metal door. Or maybe I was really an inmate at Bethlem Hospital for the Insane and none of the last hour or week or month had really happened.

  I listened to the noises in the cellar. The echoey sounds had definitely been dampened by the cave-in, and the moans from the past just sounded like whispers in my head. I wondered if I truly had gone nuts.

  The creak of metal as the gate upstairs opened finally galvanized me to move. I suddenly needed to get out of that cellar very badly.

  I inched my way along the wall, out to the main chamber, with the stealth of what I hoped was a ghost. I didn’t want to use my Maglite in case someone with nefarious intentions was down there with me. Although at this point I was pretty sure all my pursuers had long gone.

  Until I kicked one.

  Ick.

  The second time in my life I’ve ever kicked a body is two too many for me. And it’s as unmistakable as it is disgusting. Every hair on my skin shot straight up and I practically wet myself trying not to run and scream like a little girl.

  Instead, I very calmly flipped on my Maglite, aimed well above the floor. I didn’t want to look directly at it, but I had to make sure it wasn’t Archer.

  It wasn’t. I saw the chain-and-leather jacket of one of the Weres. Mal, I think, based on the tattoo on his neck. He was facedown, thank God, so I deliberately stepped over the body, which was lying against the wall at the edge of the room, flipped off my Maglite, and continued my mostly silent progress toward the stairs. I say ‘mostly’ because hyperventilation isn’t done well in silence, and I was doing a very nice job of it.

  Fortunately, by the time I’d gotten to the stairs I had finished gasping and stepping on dead people, so I was pretty prepared for the next thing to startle me out of my skin.

  Hands grabbed me in the dark, and at that point I was no longer capable of screaming so I just gave in to them as my knees let go. Stunningly, it was Archer, and he pulled me into his arms and held me close to his chest until my heart stopped hammering and my throat re-opened.

  “You came back to me.” His own voice was pretty tight and I didn’t realize until that moment that his heart was hammering too.

  “You’re still here.” My voice came out somewhere between a squeak and a whisper and without meaning to, my arms wrapped around his body.

  “I waited for you.”

  Seriously? For more than a week? With a corpse? Ugh. That was hardcore. But I couldn’t say it freaked me out. I was way too glad to see him. Archer held my hand as we stepped through the metal gate. He had opened the wooden door beyond and I watched as he re-wound the chain around the gate and pushed a broken link back together to make it seem whole.

  “How did you—?”

  “I fed.”

  “From the Were?” I squeaked. I couldn’t help it.

  “No. Him I killed. There was another.”

  “Oh.”

  What else could I say? Don’t eat because it’s gross and wrong and murder to suck the blood out of another human being? Except in this case it was very definitely self-defense. The morality of this might have kept me up at night before, but at this point, I wasn’t feeling so spotless myself.

  We made it out of the Imperial War Museum without difficulty and we spent the next ten minutes walking in silence. After a quick recon at Archer’s car to determine no one was watching it, he finally turned and looked at me in the light.

  His eyes seemed to scan every inch of my face. There were about a million emotions zooming around my brain as I watched him, but I waited for him to speak first. And he did. “I’m sorry.”

  That wasn’t what I expected him to say. If anything, those words belonged to me,
but I didn’t even know how to begin. So I didn’t. “Why?”

  “I don’t usually feed from humans anymore. And I’m sorry you know about it.”

  I seriously was not in any shape to deal with the philosophical ramifications of sustaining a Vampire. I had much bigger conversations to avoid with him. I closed my eyes and sighed. “I need to sleep.”

  “Where should I take you?”

  “Elian Manor.”

  Archer watched me for a moment longer, the he started the car. I must have passed out, because I had very vague impressions of trees, and being carried, and someplace very cold and dark, and then warmth.

  My surroundings gradually came into view and I sat up in confusion. I was in a bedroom; that much was clear. Heavy drapes were mostly pulled around the four-poster bed and I was alone. The light outside looked like either evening or very early morning, which meant Archer was resting somewhere else. My chest tightened with thoughts of everything that was unsaid between us and I willed myself to get out of bed, just to avoid thinking.

  Every muscle in my body was achy and stiff. I had no idea how long I’d slept, but I clearly hadn’t moved much. It was what old people must feel. Weary. I even groaned like an old person when my feet touched the floor, and I had a new respect for what it must be like to have lived in the same body for eighty years.

  Someone had undressed me, and I was stunned and very grateful to find my clothes, clean and folded, on the wing chair next to the bed.

  There was a very light tap on the door and I froze, then quickly scurried back under the covers. The door creaked as it opened, but the heavy drapes blocked my view.

  Sanda didn’t seem surprised to see me awake, and she placed a tray full of food on the table next to the bed. “Old ‘un said ye’d be tired.”

  The gravel was so much easier to decipher since I’d been hanging out in 1888. I smiled at her. “Hi Sanda.”

  She gave me one of those looks mothers give kids they don’t know whether to hug or spank, then the deep lines around her eyes softened and she gave me a smile that took twenty years off her face. “Gone a week, eh? Good yer back.”

  “Does my… Millicent know I’m here?” Her look said ‘are you insane?’ “Good.”