“I still cannot believe it,” Clio whispered to Miles as they pressed themselves into the darkness alongside the Curious Cat Tavern and waited for their man to come out. Tendrils of mist swirled in front of her face, and seemed to curl inside of her, leaving her ill at ease and with a bad taste in her mouth. “I cannot believe it is him. Or that we are here. That it has been this simple.”
“Neither can I,” Miles said in a voice that seemed almost dead. “But I am more convinced then ever that he is the vampire.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain later.” Miles spoke without turning around. He hoped his tone was dismissive.
He looked up at the sign swaying creakily back and forth above the door he was watching. It was peeling, but the outline of a black cat within a cage was still visible. At least he thought it was. He might just be remembering it from the last time he had seen it.
“I wonder what he is doing in there,” Clio whispered, just to make conversation.
“Don’t,” he told her in the same dismissive tone.
“Don’t what?”
“Wonder. Talk. Anything.”
Miles clenched his hands and tightened his muscles and wished like hell that he had a drink.
And that he had not brought Clio along. That he had not let her help in the search, that he had found some way to keep her locked away, safe. In his house. In his room. Like she had been that morning.
That morning. Hours ago. Years ago. That morning he had felt like anything but a failure. He and Clio had still been lying in bed—he had just been working up the nerve to ask her if she still loved him, even in sunlight—when Lady Alecia’s raised voice in the outer chamber of his apartments made the walls seem to vibrate.
“I thought you said my grandmother was not in the habit of visiting your apartments,” Clio had whispered to him urgently.
“She wasn’t,” he replied, pulling the linen sheets over her head and moving quickly from the bed. He had grabbed a robe from his armoire and had just gotten the belt knotted when Lady Alecia burst into the room, dragging a harried looking footman with her and trailed by Mariana.
“This is an outrage,” Lady Alecia began.
“I entirely agree.” Miles had given her one of his steeliest looks. “I do not take well to having my sleep invaded.” He stood, hands on his hips, legs spread wide, barring the entrance to his bedchamber.
Lady Alecia, unfazed, stepped past his blockade. Mariana followed behind her, craning her neck to take in the furnishings. “I shall have to redo this room,” she announced, interrupting Lady Alecia’s renewed shouts. “This color gray does not suit me at all. I prefer blue like the color of a baby rob—”
“Be quiet,” Lady Alecia told her, and for once Miles thought he could like the woman. “I do not apologize for upsetting your sleep, Viscount, for I do not take well to having my privacy invaded. This man says you ordered him to search my room.”
“Not your room,” Miles corrected, but before the gleam at the prospect of disciplining the young man violently could settle into Lady Alecia’s eye, he went on. “I ordered him to search all the rooms in that wing of the house. He and his men have already been through this wing and the connecting rooms.”
“Then you do not deny it?” Lady Alecia spoke with such vehemence that her Lisbeth Willard wig—the red ringlets of a dear little seamstress who sewed her mother’s mouth shut so the woman starved to death—slipped sideways on her head.
“Why should I? The men were acting on my orders. Now if you would please leave my chamber—”
“Your orders?” Lady Alecia glared at him. “You had them checking on my guests. Mine?”
“They were not checking on your guests, Lady Alecia. They were looking for something I had lost.”
“What?”
“I would rather not say.” Miles crossed his arms over his chest. “And I would like to remind you that this is my house.”
“I am afraid, Viscount, that you do not have that luxury. This may be your house, but my granddaughter will be mistress here in only five days—”
“—four,” Mariana corrected. “Since we are not going to postpone the wedding because poor dear Clio died. It is only four days until my birthday.”
“—Four days,” Lady Alecia went on, “and neither she nor I will tolerate this behavior.”
“Really, viscount,” Mariana said, moving toward him, “you are acting like a naughty baby bear. Bad viscount. Bad, bad, bad,” she scolded, shaking a finger at him.
Miles thought he heard a choking noise from his bed, but it might have been from his own throat. He had never felt quite so much like running from an adversary as he did at that moment. “Very well,” he conceded finally, addressing Mariana. “I did not want you to worry, so I was keeping it from you. I lost a necklace. The famous Loredan amethyst necklace. In the commotion of the parties honoring our betrothal, it was misplaced. My mother received it as a wedding present on her wedding day. I had hoped to find it before—” Miles stopped, swallowed, and resumed, “—before the happy day of our marriage.”
“The Loredan amethysts,” Mariana proclaimed. She had never heard of them, but they were famous, the viscount said so, which meant they must be large. And they were to be hers. Perhaps she could trade them in for sapphires. Or even emeralds. Purple was not her best color. “I am so sorry we distributed you, Viscount,” she said with her loveliest smile, taking her grandmother by the arm and pulling her from the room. “By all means have your men search every inch of the house. We should not keep them any longer.”
The door closed behind Mariana with a thud. Clio just had time to flip the covers from her face and then flip them back before it swung open again.
“Oh, Viscount, darling, how thinkful of you,” Mariana gushed as she swept back into the room.
There was a long pause and Miles seemed to be having trouble speaking, so Clio made a peep hole in her cocoon and peered out. Only Mariana’s complete self-absorption covered Clio’s gasp of horror.
Clutched in Mariana’s arms, straining vainly to escape, was Toast.
“You knew I had been loitering for a baby monkey like this one and you got it for me to show that you are not mad about the scandal my horrible cousin caused,” Mariana cooed. “Oh, look how darling he is,” she went on as Toast tried to climb her hair and poke out her eyes. “He absolutely loves me.”
Miles found his voice then, largely because he was worried that if he did not Clio would leap naked from his bed. “Why don’t you have Corin look after him? So he will not trouble you. Leave him here, and I will have him bring the monkey to you before the ball tonight.”
Miles heard a strangled grunt from his bed at the suggestion, but fortunately Mariana did not.
“I couldn’t dream of such a thing,” Mariana said. “I would not want you to think I did not fancy your present. I shall call him ‘Darling Baby.’ That is a nice name, don’t you think? And I shall have a new suit of clothes made for him at once. This one is so musty.” Then she frowned at Toast. “Don’t you think he would look dreamy with some darling little earrings? I know just where to get them. You will send your man for them, won’t you? Tell him they must have pearls. Baby pearls.” She fluttered her long eyelashes at Miles, simpered, “Oh, Viscount, you are a naughty baby bear,” and, finally, left.
Miles had locked the bedroom door then, but he and Clio could not escape from what they had started forever. Reports filtered in from the various footmen assigned to the search, as well as from Which House where messengers with notes of condolence about Clio’s supposed demise had clogged the streets since morning, and a pile of flowers left by well wishers had turned the front steps into an impromptu and impassable shrine. But none of that—not even the information that Princess Erika had apparently been dreaming of Clio’s death every night for a year and did not know whether to be sad at the loss of her friend or delighted that another of her prophesies had come true—could take Clio’s mind off the fact that Mariana had kidnapped Toast and wanted to make him wear earrings. Her primary consolation was that Toast—or rather, Darling Baby—could undoubtedly hold his own against Mariana and that, according to Miles, he was already wearing his Jungle Beast expression, which always proceeded his Shrieking Wild Monkey Tantrum, by the time she carted him off.
Their afternoon had been spent listening to Miles’s footmen recount the details of their searches. Clio had been impressed by the questions Miles asked—where did Saunders Cotton’s eyes move first when he heard you were looking through his room, did Doctor LaForge fidget with his hands, how did Sir Edwin’s voice sound when he answered your questions—and even more impressed by the degree of observation evident in the answers his footmen gave. During one of these recitals they had received a frantic visit from Elwood, who had suspected there was something untrue in the reports of Clio’s demise and in the tepid confirmation of them he received at Which House. Over his protestations of relief, Clio managed to ask him if he had been responsible for sending her the hazelnut cakes five days earlier. With much embarrassment, he had admitted that he had not, but that he should have, and in the future he would send her dozens. He had finally left, with a curiously probing glance in Miles’s direction.
But even this lengthy interruption had not bothered the footman, who had resumed his narrative exactly where it had been interrupted. From him and the others Clio and Miles had learned that Doctor LaForge had to mop his head with a kerchief every three seconds whenever anyone approached his bed, that Sir Edwin clenched and unclenched his fists when people touched his writing desk, and that only Saunders Cotton had reacted to the search with anything like outrage or indignation—that is, reacted in what Clio described as a normal way.
“If you call going pink in the face, stammering about the unholy imposition it is on Lady Alecia, and almost losing your voice you are so mad, normal,” Miles had demurred.
“At least it approximates the sort of outrage you would expect. The sort of thing my grandmother was exhibiting this morning,” Clio offered.
“I suppose you are right,” Miles had conceded. “Which means we have two people who acted in individually strange ways and one who acted normal. Who stands out most?”
Clio did not hesitate. “The normal one.”
Miles nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking. We start with Saunders’s room.”
Clio, dressed in the yellow doublet and breeches of a Dearbourn footman, had waited in Miles’s apartments for him, and once the ball was underway they had crossed to Mariana’s wing together using service corridors. When they entered the peacock sitting room, Miles had stopped dead in his tracks.
“My God,” he muttered in a whisper. “This place is horrible.”
“You haven’t seen it before?” Clio asked.
Miles shook his head, his mouth a thin, grim line. “It terrifies me to think that any portion of my house looks this way.”
“If I recall from her outburst this morning, Mariana did not like the way your part of the house looked either.”
Miles made a sound between a groan and a snort, and crossed toward a row of three gilded doors on his left, leading to the three rooms they had come to search. From the plan of the house she had studied, Clio knew that Saunders’s door was at the far left. It was unlocked, so Miles only had to push it open. He did, waited a few moments before entering, and when he was sure there was no one within, motioned Clio inside.
The furniture consisted of a bed with a writing table next to it, a large armoire and a small chaise, all done in peacock blue silk. Besides being outraged, Saunders had not seemed particularly sensitive about any part of his chamber, so they had decided to go over the entire thing. But after opening every piece of furniture that bore opening, looking under every surface that had an under, examining inside all the insides there were in the room, and even sniffing every bottle of ink in Saunders’s secretary box, they were forced to conclude that there was nothing there. Miles remembered a secret compartment in the mantelpiece that they slid open, but there was nothing inside it, not even dust.
“I wish Toast were here,” Clio sighed. “I can’t believe she dressed him in a toga.”
“Yes. I was unaware that there was a Baby Monkey God on Mount Olympus. But when I left he seemed to be enjoying himself.”
Clio shook her head at the fickleness of males. “Which room next?”
“Why don’t you take Sir Edwin and the writing desk, and I will do Doctor LaForge and the bed. I am worried about hanging around too long.”
Both of these chambers were identical in furnishings and layout to that of Saunders Cotton, except that Sir Edwin’s was deep forest green while Doctor LaForge’s was a bright scarlet that made Miles’s eyes vibrate.
He was just checking the fourth leg of Doctor LaForge’s bed to ensure it was not hollow when he heard a low whistle from Sir Edwin’s room.
“Miles, come here. I’ve found a secret compartment in the desk,” Clio called hoarsely. “I cannot get it open,” she explained when he arrived, “but there is definitely something in there. You can hear it when you kick the desk. Will any of your keys work on this?”
The lock was ingeniously hidden inside the eye of what had to be a baby rabbit who, along with other baby animals, was frolicking around the bottom edge of the table. The baby rabbit’s eyes were closed, but if you flicked them with your little finger, one of them slid open in a sly wink entirely unbecoming to such an innocent looking animal. Miles glared at the small gilded lock hidden beneath the eyelid, decided he probably did have a key that would fit it, but instead slipped one of the knives from his boots, jammed it in the space between the top of the desk and the location of the secret compartment, and pushed. There was a low squeak, splinters of wood fell to the floor, the baby rabbit’s head cracked in two with a satisfying noise, and a drawer sprang open.
Clio and Miles stood and stared at its contents. It contained about ten medium-sized, round pebbles whose surfaces were smooth, as if from being handled frequently. Miles brought one of them to his nose, and then another. He looked bemused
“What do they smell like?”
“Rocks.” He faced her. “Do you think they could be souvenirs?”
Clio shuddered. “Yes. In fact, I can’t think what else they could—”
Miles clapped a hand over Clio’s mouth and blew out the candle in their lantern with one move. The sound of footsteps crossing a thick carpet was faintly audible from the other room. Hidden by the darkness, they moved toward the door of Sir Edwin’s room and peered around its edge.
At first Clio saw nothing, but light pressure on her shoulder from Miles’s fingers showed her where to look. Her uncle was standing in the middle of the peacock chamber as if transfixed. His eyes looked large and dead. In the moonlight his face was a jumble of planes and shadows, like a misassembled puzzle. A sinister puzzle. The face of a demon.
But what caught and held Clio’s eye, what made her body chill completely, made her bite her lip to keep from crying out, were his hands. Because clutched between his long fingers, he held a perfect, white, gardenia.
Miles’s fingers massaged her shoulder, instinctively holding her where she was, instinctively reassuring her. “Wait,” his touch seemed to say, “you have nothing to be afraid of. I am here. Wait and watch.”
Sir Edwin turned his head slowly about and for a moment Clio felt as though the dead eyes had seen her, had to have seen her, but they kept moving steadily around the room. Then he apparently found what he was looking for. Abruptly, he turned on the heel of his boots and moved toward the door of the service corridor through which Miles and Clio had entered, which now stood slightly ajar. Moving fast, faster than Clio could ever remember seeing him go, he disappeared through the door, leaving it swinging violently behind him.
Clio and Miles exchanged a look but did not speak. They had not needed to. Leaving the pebbles and decapitated baby rabbit in plain view, they had taken the same door, and had been following him ever since.
The Curious Cat was not the first place Sir Edwin had stopped, but it felt as if they had been heading there, circuitously, all along. Up until they reached the tavern, Clio and Miles had been holding hands, sneaking along walls and in shadows in order not to be seen, but always in contact. But as soon as they arrived at the Curious Cat, Miles had moved away from her, crossed his arms over his chest, and become cold and distant.
She studied his back through the misty haze closely now and saw the outline of tensed muscles. She noticed that he was clenching and unclenching his fists. “Miles, has something happened? Is something wrong?” she asked, disregarding his order not to speak.
“No.”
“Could you explain then why—”
“There he is,” Miles said, cutting her off. “Come on.”
Clio was still puzzling over Miles’s abrupt coldness as they followed Sir Edwin again into the night. She was not familiar with this part of London, and even if she had been it would have been hard to know where they were with the thickening mist sliding up from the Thames. The regular echoes of Sir Edwin’s footsteps were audible even when the fog swallowed him up, and they gauged his direction and progress by those as much as by the occasional glimpses of him they caught when the air cleared.
They followed him around a corner and it seemed to grow colder and darker simultaneously. The sense of foreboding Clio had felt at the Curious Cat redoubled, and she realized that it had been some time since they had heard any sound besides Sir Edwin’s footsteps, or seen even the faint outline of candlelight behind a shutter. Clio surmised they must be around the docks at Old Fish Street, where the houses had been slated for destruction and where not even the Watch patrolled any longer. It just kept getting darker and more quiet, darker and more quiet, until, abruptly, the footsteps ceased.
Miles put his hand on Clio’s wrist to stop her and Clio was acutely embarrassed that he would now know her pulse was racing. Without releasing her arm, he moved forward, taking her with him. They were about halfway down a narrow street. Up ahead, where it junctioned with a wider one, they had seen Sir Edwin turn to the right.
Soundlessly, their backs pressed against the street walls of the houses, they inched forward, toward the corner. Miles put himself in front of Clio, and was almost close enough to peer around when a sound like a wail pierced the air.
It came again, shattering the silence, and Clio realized it was not a wail at all. It was a laugh. Somewhere a girl was laughing in a high falsetto. And then she began to sing, her voice creaky and strangely thick. She ran the words together, but Clio had no trouble making them out.
“The first time I did see you dear, my heart in me did pound. I knew that day as I know now, that my true love I’d found,” the girl sang tunelessly, and the words seemed to come from all around them. There was something terrible about it, about the sound, something desperate and unnerving about the way it echoed and multiplied off the walls around them. Found-hound-ound, it rebounded, as if it were surrounding them, following them. Hunting them.
“Where is it?” Clio demanded feverishly. “Where is it?”
Miles did not reply at first and Clio was suddenly filled with the horrible thought that maybe she was the only one who heard the ghastly music, that it was some figment of her imagination like that expression of horror on the face of the first victim, that the vampire was somehow—
“I don’t know,” Miles replied. “It seems to be coming from all around.”
Relief washed over Clio but only for a moment because the singing started again, louder, more piercing.
“The second time our lips did meet”—it was closer now—“t’was better than the first.” Much closer. “I felt the air float under me, and like me heart would burst.” Burst-cursed-cursed, Clio heard, and felt like the word was pressing down on them—cursed cursed cursed—chasing them, seeking them out, leading the Vampire to them.
Suddenly she understood why it was so horrible. “It’s a man,” she whispered to Miles. “It is a man singing like a girl—” but before she could finish the unnerving laughter came again, the fake, clunky, pretend laughter, like the laughter of a wicked child in the face of punishment. It was coming for them, getting louder and louder, more and more harsh. She could hear it getting closer, could hear footsteps, it sounded like three sets of them, coming and the laughter above them and suddenly the hair on her arms stood up and it was right behind her. If she turned around she would see it, but if she did not it would have her. She swung around, her mouth open to cry out, her arms coming up to ward off whatever it was.
Nothing. There was nothing. Only mist, curling and twisting in the street behind them, thick and noxious.
She stood staring at it for a moment, watching as it furled and unfurled itself in endless eddies. She felt as if she were rooted to the ground by a supernatural force, utterly unable to move. And as she watched, a form took shape in the middle of one of the eddies, first a shoulder. A leg. A torso. Finally a head. It had not been there a moment ago, it appeared as if generated by the mist itself, a creature of vapor. A creature of horror. One moment nothing, the next a man, from nowhere. A demon.
A demon with long, thin fingers, pale and white in the scrap of moon, appearing and disappearing as the mist swirled, long fingers still clutching a gardenia. They reached out, straining toward her, toward her neck.
“Clio, Clio, Clio,” it said in a voice that was a death rattle. “You should not have come, Clio. I will have to take you home now.”
On the word “home” Sir Edwin opened his mouth wide, and the horrible, mirthless laugh rebounded off the walls of the street with crushing volume.
Clio screamed.