Beyond the Night (16 page)

“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.”

R
ula 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.

His body had finally merged with the dust and the ash. The murderous injuries to his head had ultimately healed as brain and blood-soaked back into his dirt-clogged wounds. That, and time, had grown a skinlike protective sheath so that he finally felt he could function again.

But there were limitations. For his damaged brain to function, he had to eliminate other necessary activities: he was now trapped in a prison of his own making, and, blast fate, of his own volition.

He couldn't operate on any plane except mentally, and it drove him to dust-blasting rages that he couldn't exact a meaningful revenge on Dominick for what he'd done to him.

Eight years, his liquefied body had intermingled with the charred ruins of Dominick's town house, and he couldn't think of one way that he could rise up from the ashes and take back his life again.

There were good days and bad, days he was thankful he could still think and remember and, if it was necessary, speak. His mental powers sharpened, expanded, amplified, and intensified until he could hear the conversations of passersby, until he could almost intuit what they were thinking, until he could pretty well read their minds.

The bad days, he was consumed by rage, tormented by his inability to do anything but
think
. Too much thinking, not enough action. Eight years of
no action
while Dominick had lived like a king in Lady Augustine's town house and left him to die and dissolve into nothingness.

That alone kept him breathing and thinking. And living. Even as confined as he was.

So he healed and slowly progressed, and one day, he began playing around with possible ways he could accomplish Dominick's demise, even if he couldn't run a knife through his vitals himself.

That puzzle took several years to solve.

A simple solution after all. He'd just needed all these years to develop the brainpower to implement it.

He needed a stand-in. Someone who personified his philosophy, who had a finely honed deranged desire to kill, who hated Dominick, who would be willing to slay this dragon without a whisper of conscience.

He hadn't known it, but he'd been waiting all these years for Renk to fulfill his vampire destiny. Renk had gone above and beyond Charles's expectations. Renk loved to kill and feed. Renk hadn't an ounce of compassion or regret about anything he did.

And best of all, Renk was Dominick's son.

Charles knew he'd be the perfect stand-in—he'd been tracking him, the whole family—all these years, just as a mental exercise. But it just proved how brilliant he really was: he'd known somewhere in his black soul that Renk would eventually serve him somehow.

The only next obstacle was assembling the Keepers of the Night, long disbanded, but still hunting, killing, feeding.

They could just as well feed on Miss Proud-Not-to-Be-a-Vampire Rula, daughter of Dominick. Feed and turn her into a Tepes. Then he'd hear the music of Dominick's anguished howl, then he'd feed on Dominick's pain.

Then he'd order Dominick's son to slice him and dice him until he existed no more.

Then, oh, then—he'd feel alive again.

Now she'd gotten some answers, Rula was beset by a ceaseless curiosity. Her mother and father, right here in London, and Mirya's finally telling her that her mother did sometimes watch her from afar didn't deter her from wanting to see both of them.

Nor did the fact she had no idea what they looked like. For some inexplicable reason, she thought she would know.

So every day when she went into the streets, she chose a different residential area to run her scams, card tricks one day, fortunes the next, reading palms after that.

She saw fairly fast that reading palms would be the easiest because it didn't require props or equipment, so she concentrated on that as she continued from neighborhood to neighborhood.

“Read your palm, ma'am?” Most people said no. “Tell your future? It's in the palm of your hand.”

Occasionally someone stopped out of curiosity, and she'd give a quick topical reading, always positive, always worth a few pence in the palm of her hand.

This was good—she ought to have thought of it sooner, just for the amount of money she was tucking away in her pocket.

“Read your palm, sir? You never know what's in the palm of your hand.” The man brushed by her dismissively, but she'd come to expect that too in these upper-class neighborhoods.

She thought she might clean herself up a little more, but then it seemed as if her ragtag appearance and her unaffected beauty were the things that compelled passersby to stop.

But nowhere in her meanderings did she meet anyone with whom she felt an immediate connection.

She took note of other things, however. The burned-out shell of a town house in Belgravia, an eyesore on the landscape. The ramping up of antiwar protests and rhetoric in signs and demonstrations all over the city. The overarching desperation pervading the city as the vampire deaths continued, and people carried on as if fear was not a constant companion.

A situation ready-made for a scammer, Rula thought. “Palm readings, palm readings. Know what's coming, see your future in the palm of your hand.”

People ignored her, passed her by. No one looked like her mother, but she didn't know what her mother looked like. She just thought she'd
know
.

Walking around these neighborhoods gave her the respite she needed to absorb everything Mirya had told her. She'd assured Mirya she had no intention of leaving her—but Rula couldn't know what her future would hold. And Mirya was old—and mortal.

As was she. Mortal, with parents who would never die, who would wander the earth forever, killing and feeding. That thought made her queasy. In her mind's eye, she saw the dark, endless tunnel of forever.

“Read your palm?” Another no with a brisk shake of the head. “See your future right in the palm of your hand. Consult an expert reader of palms.”

Not even that pitch warmed up the few people she saw in passing down this one long street. Something about it felt barren, as if no one lived here, as if there were no life here.

She felt cold. Death cold. She couldn't wait to get away from there.

From behind a curtain of a nearby house, a woman watched, a woman with long, dark hair and deep blue eyes, a woman who could have been Rula's twin.

She turned to her guest.

“Now,” Mirya said, “you have seen her, as I promised. Now, let her be or she will leave altogether.”

“She'll keep looking for me.”

“I will discourage her.
He
is coming. He wants
her
—and if he sires her a Tepes . . .” Mirya left the thought unsaid. “Stay away from her, Senna, and give me the time I need to prepare.”