Lady Killer (13 page)

Clio had no idea what the words meant, but she suddenly felt chilled through.

Mrs. Wattles, wife of Mr. Wattles the doll maker-cum-artist, bustled into the front of her husband’s workshop, out of breath. Between having to run her own errands now that their maid-of-all-work had been taken by the Vampire of London, and having to stop at every one of her London acquaintances to share that news as she did so, she had traversed the city more than once that day and, not being a small woman, her feet hurt awfully.

She cast a longing glance at the large carved chair that stood next to the table, but did not let herself stop. Just one more errand and she would be through. Huffing slightly, she made her way to the back of the workshop, where her husband (famed for his ability to reproduce a lifelike face from a sketch) was bent over his work.

“Mr. Wattles,” she announced as she came in. “Mr. Wattles, I have brought the newest picture from Lady Alecia. She says she needs the bust right away and you are to stop all your other work.”

Mr. Wattles raised his head from the face he was molding. He wore a large magnifying lens over one eye that made him looked like a lopsided fish. “That lady thinks she owns me, she does,” he complained, reaching out for the folded paper his wife was holding. “I didn’t even hear there’d been a hanging. Whose head is it this time?” His wife shrugged and walked gingerly away, the large chair beckoning to her from across the room.

He brought the picture, which was clipped from a news sheet, close to his face, and his surprise was so great that his unmagnified eye grew almost as large as his magnified one.

“Mrs. Wattles,” he called to his wife’s retreating form. “Mrs. Wattles, come see.”

Something in her husband’s tone made her return quickly. She took the paper from him, studied it for a moment, then met her husband’s eyes. “Isn’t that—?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “That is what I thought, too.”

“Do you suppose we ought to tell someone?” Mrs. Wattles asked, slowly.

Mr. Wattles thought for a moment, then shook his head. What he said was: “Isn’t any of our business, is it?”

But what both of them were thinking was: Lady Alecia is a
very
good customer.

“Poor Inigo,” Mrs. Wattles murmured under her breath at regular intervals during the remainder of the day. “Poor, poor boy.”

Chapter Six

No one had ever seen a barge as large or as luxurious as the one anchored in the Thames in front of Dearbourn Hall, nor had anyone ever imagined a banquet so clever. There were a dozen lemon-ice swans floating between the candied violets that covered the surface of the crystallized sugar pool—the viscount himself had developed the machine that made the swans really glide across the surface—and long tables filled with food. No one had dreamed of a juggler as charming as the one who produced gilded gillyflowers specially grown to smell like oranges for all the ladies as he wandered about, no one had ever counted so many monkeys so delightfully dressed to match their owners in one place before, no one had thought there could be musicians so handsome, or heard birds so sweet-voiced, or conceived of lanterns so cunningly decorated with the Dearbourn crest—in short, never had there ever been a party as marvelous as the one Mariana had orchestrated for herself, at “the dear Viscount’s” expense. And it was not even halfway done when one member of her entourage made a low bow to his mistress and a lower one to her grandmother, and slipped away from the festivities, complaining of a headache.

He had one, too, and who wouldn’t have who had to listen to the insidious preenings and whinings of those two bitches Mariana and Lady Alecia, all day and all night. While they had been traveling in France and Italy for Mariana’s “edufication” it had been fine, there had been enough distractions. But now they and the waiting were beginning to wear him down, and he was only too happy that the end of his project was nearly in sight.

He breathed more easily as he slipped out a side door of Dearborn House and made his way into Alsatia. His appearance was innocuous enough that he was almost invisible. Neither the women lingering on the street in search of a last catch for the evening, nor the thugs waiting to accost drunken noblemen out on a spree, bothered with him, and he arrived at the Painted Lady Tavern entirely unmolested.

“Who comes strutting upon the stage?” Lovely Jake demanded from behind his hand of cards, then looked up, saw the new arrival, and nodded. “Ah, it is only my good boarder, back from his revels. Would you care to join us in a hand of Primero?”

“No, thank you, I am very tired,” the man refused vaguely, and the other players were just as happy.

“Odd fellow,” he heard one of them lean over and whisper to Lovely Jake. “Doesn’t look quite right in the head.”

He was up the far stairs and had the door of his room closed so he did not hear Lovely Jake’s assurances that “he but wore a mask” as the thespians said, and was actually a very interesting fellow. Afterward, when they were shown the evidence of his disguise, one of them remarked that the mask line had been closer to the truth than Jake reckoned. Of course, Jake was dead by then and in no position to say whether or not he had known that the light-haired, disturbed looking fellow dressed in dark blue who left the tavern less than a half hour later had really been the same man as his strange boarder.

Nor did the women on the street or the thugs recognize him from earlier, but there was something about this new appearance that kept them away even more efficiently. When questioned afterward, one of them even remembered commenting that the fellow, “made the blood run cold in the veins, he did. Could I identify him if I saw him? No. But I would know that feeling again anywhere. I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone with him, not for the queen’s pearls, and the other girls felt the same.”

But the man did not care what they, or anyone, thought of him. He had one thing to do, one thing only, and there was only one person who could help him. Three years he had waited to return to England to put the demons to rest. Three years of planning, and scheming. Three long years. It had been worth it.

Or at least, it soon would be.

He paused for a moment to massage his thigh—the bullet that bastard Dearbourn had shot at him was still lodged inside and it pained him when he tried to walk too quickly—then made the final turn and stopped outside a house. Two of the windows were still lit, but he knew they would grow dark soon. He could wait. Waiting was what he did best.

As he assumed his position outside the house, he glanced up to study the moon, noting with a trained eye that it was a sliver smaller than it had been the previous evening. “Good night,” the man known as Vampire of London then whispered into the darkness. “Sweet dreams.”

“Looked like he was up to no good,” the char-woman who had passed the man on her way to work reported during the hearings of the Special Commissioner later. “Looked like he was putting a curse on someone.”

In his tower at Westminster Castle, the Royal Astrologer licked his pen and wrote:
4 hours after midnight: moon—exactly half full. Waning.

Chapter Seven

She was not alone.

That was Clio’s first thought when she woke with a start. It was more a perception than a certainty. The room was completely dark, she could see nothing, but she could sense the presence of another person. Close to her. Behind her? To her right? God she was thirsty.

She sat entirely still, listening. And waiting. Like the man who had been waiting outside her house.

At first she heard nothing. Then she saw a shadow move and heard a moan and a sharp crack to her left. She swung her head toward it. A surge of relief coursed through her.

The shutter on her window swayed back and forth in the breeze, wailing softly and rapping against the side of the house each time. That was the crack she had heard. There was no one in the room with her, it was just the shutter flapping. How foolish of her to leave it unlatched, she thought. Inigo was sleeping in the room just below and the banging would surely wake him, as it had no doubt woken her.

That, and her thirst. Her throat was so dry it hurt, and her lips were cracked. She licked them and tasted a drop of blood. What time was it? The half-moon outside trailed light in through the open shutter, shadows moving as the wind rustled among the leaves of the old apple tree. In the dim light she could make out the familiar contours of the battered old armoire that held her enormous wardrobe of two dresses, the mirror with the faded green enamel leaves around it that had belonged to her mother and was now so warped that it made everyone’s face look like a parody of melancholy, the outline of her bed. Why was she sitting on the chair instead of lying on the mattress, she wondered, but her thirst distracted her attention to the table next to her bed that held the water jug.

The room was obviously empty, but the feeling of being not alone persisted. It must have been something she had been dreaming. Something from a dream. She rose, her eyes locked on the water jug—God she was thirsty—and then gasped.

The pain seared through her, up from her ankle, as soon as she put her weight on it. Sitting back down quickly, she examined her left leg, and saw that there was an enormous, crudely wrapped bandage around it. She had absolutely no recollection of having hurt herself, no recollection of having come to her room at all, actually. Had she fallen and hit her head? But her head felt fine, except for her thirst.

How did she get here? She remembered watching Toast scurry around the house vainly attempting to avoid the puppy, who had developed a violent crush on him. And she recalled dinner, one of the best they had eaten in recent weeks, because of the cartload of food Elwood had sent. It contained no note, but she knew it was from him because no one else would have bothered, and no one else would have remembered her passion for hazelnut cakes and sent a dozen. She must have eaten three of them before getting tired and going to doze off in her study. An image of the numbers on her ledger floated into her mind, seeing them from the side, as if she was lying next to them, and then nothing. Three whole hazelnut cakes—not the little ones like Mariana’s but proper full sized ones with sugared syrup drizzled over them—could have that effect on anyone, she reasoned. No wonder she was thirsty.

She looked at the water jug again. If she were very careful, she could reach it without having to step on her injured leg at all. She stood and hopped toward it. On her last hop she tumbled forward onto her bed, hitting her sore left ankle against the table leg. She winced in pain, but then forgot her pain altogether.

Lying diagonally across her bed was a girl she had never seen before. On her neck were two round pricks. In her hand was a gardenia. Clio opened her mouth to scream and tasted blood.

In that horrible instant Clio understood. She understood why she had been so unsurprised to see the pricks on Inigo’s sister’s neck, understood how she had so clearly seen the girl’s fear. She understood why it had all made so much sense to her. It was because she had seen it all through her own eyes and forgotten it. Because she had been there. Because it was her. She was the vampire.

Clio swallowed back her scream.
You do not know what you are,
the note had said that morning, but she did now.

What? You think you know?

Demon. Fiend. She had always known there was violence living inside her.
Just like your father,
her grandmother had said, and she understood now, better than ever, what she had meant. “The vampire as a child is impossible to love,” she remembered reading in the compendium. It all fit together. Her father’s interest in the occult and the supernatural, the vampire’s appearance at the time of her birth, her mother’s death whose cause no one talked about directly. All the years she had wanted to know more about her father, all the questions she had asked that had been evaded or ignored, she now understood why. She had indeed inherited her father’s wickedness, just as she had inherited his blood.

His
taste
for blood.

These thoughts streamed through her head as she stood paralyzed, looking down past the girl, her eyes fixed on the gardenia. It seemed to glow, pulsing white in the moonlight, a perverse symbol of purity, a sign of her wickedness. All at once, the half-seen images she was always trying to recall when she awoke flooded over her, coming to life in her room, fantasy and reality meshing together.

Clio looked up and saw hovering in front of her a portrait of a woman, wild-eyed. In the space between reality and imagination Clio watched the woman in the picture lift a kerchief to wipe her lips, a blue kerchief, like the one she had found near the first girl, like the ones she had received as a mysterious present the year before on Mariana’s birthday. That was when Clio saw it wasn’t a portrait at all. It was a mirror, her mother’s mirror with the green leaves, the mirror in her room, and the woman was a reflection. A real reflection. Of her. Clio looked down and saw that she really was clutching a blue kerchief in her hand, and that it was stained with blood.

She had known it all along. It was as if, all along, something inside had been waiting to get out, waiting to tell her. Waiting for her to understand that she was the vampire.

Wicked girl!

Clio wrenched her eyes from the gardenia, sinister and glowing, and found that she was crying. Why was this happening now? What was making her do these things? Words and images swam together before her eyes—a screaming corpse, those laughing dolls, dirty footprints, mud on her boots, a man winking at her, cracked lips, her thirst, her godawful thirst—and she knew she had to get away, away from the body, away from her house. She had to leave before she hurt someone else. Heedless of the pain in her leg, she ran. She would turn herself in, she would kill herself, she would get away. She would not hurt anyone again.