I can, too, drive a stick shift, Tessa thought, fuming as she glowered at the closed door now separating her and Rene Morin. Asshole.
She couldn’t drive one very well, granted, but she could sure as hell get away from him if need be. Brandon had taught her using his tutor Jackson’s car, an old, mud-brown Nissan Sentra with threadbare seats, manual transmission and a bumper sticker that proclaimed: HONK ALL YOU WANT—I CAN’T HEAR YOU!
Like Jackson, Brandon was deaf. He was also mute, both conditions the result of injuries he’d suffered as a young child during a botched robbery at the great house. Three farm workers had snuck inside in the wee hours of the night and tried to burglarize the Nobles. Brandon had stumbled upon them unexpectedly, and they’d assaulted him.
Tessa remembered clearly: a bright and flawless September afternoon, the first time Brandon had tried to teach her to drive. They’d both been seventeen, still a year away from what was supposed to be their bloodletting ceremonies to mark them as adults among the Brethren; a year away from the night when Tessa would be wed to Martin Davenant, a man at least five times her age.
More like sold into slavery to him, she thought as she sat on the motel bed. Memories of that summer were bittersweet for her; sweet because she’d still enjoyed the envelope of naïveté that had always surrounded her at the great house and bitter because those had been the last, fleeting moments of such innocent happiness.
Now down-shift into first again. She remembered Brandon flapping a note in her face, one he’d written on a page from the spiral-bound notebook he carried in a brass case around his neck. He could lip-read and, like all of the Brethren, communicate through telepathic ability—although unlike other Brethren, Brandon’s was severely limited, again thanks to his childhood injuries.
Jackson had also taught Brandon sign language, and Brandon, in turn, had taught Tessa, but at the moment, her eyes were on the road in front of her as the engine suddenly died with a shuddering wheeze.
“Damn it,” she muttered, slapping the steering wheel and turning to her brother in wide-eyed exasperation. “I did it again.”
It’s all right, he signed. You’re letting out the clutch too fast, that’s all.
They had driven out to the farm’s back acreage, where the Nobles’ property abutted the neighboring Giscard horse farm. The “road” in front of Tessa, so to speak, was in actuality an open sea of tall grass and wildflowers, broken occasionally by dense islands of trees. This wasn’t one of the Grandfather’s pristine rolling fields of lush, tended bluegrass where his prized Thoroughbreds grazed; here was a forgotten corner of land, an abandoned expanse where few among the Brethren ever tread with any frequency, and a place where Brandon had thought Tessa could practice driving undiscovered. Neither of the twins was supposed to know how to drive, but Brandon at least could probably get away with having learned. As a female among the Brethren, Tessa wasn’t allowed such luxuries.
Try again, Brandon signed from the passenger seat, with a glance in the side-view mirror, then over his shoulder, his dark eyes somewhat anxious. He’d been doing this off and on for the last several minutes, and Tessa frowned, pivoting in her seat to follow his gaze.
“What is it?” she asked.
He shook his head. Nothing, he signed. Never mind.
“Do you sense something?” It seemed impossible that anyone might discover them out there in the middle of nowhere, but then again, one never knew. The Brethren employed a staff of more than forty humans called the Kinsfolk. The Brethren weren’t allowed to feed on these humans, and the Kinsfolk, in turn, helped keep the farms stocked with migrant workers upon whom the Brethren sated their bloodlust. They also managed the primary, day-to-day responsibilities of the Brethren’s combined 1,750-acre properties, so there was always the remote possibility that their duties had taken one or more of the Kinsfolk that far out. “Is someone there, Brandon?”
His telepathy had been damaged during his attack, like his ears and voice, but Tessa had come to notice over the years that he was often more aware of things than she was. She supposed it was because he had less to distract him, no noises or voices to compete for his attention.
He shook his head again, then smiled as he moved his hands in the air. It’s nothing. He nodded at the steering wheel once in encouragement. Try again.
Tessa put the Sentra in gear and turned the key in the ignition. She wondered what Jackson would think if he’d known that Brandon had taken her off the main roads twining through the farm. True, Jackson had said they could borrow the car, but he hadn’t said anything about taking it bumping and jostling through fields. Not to mention letting me grind his transmission all to hell along the way.
They continued along, bouncing across the rolling hillocks as the grass, blanched from the late-summer sun and nearly as tall as the car’s wheel wells, whispered and slapped against the Nissan’s doors. She did better this time, making it at least another quarter mile before the car died once more.
Tessa uttered a little cry of disgust, clasping the steering wheel between her hands and giving it a frustrated little shake. “I’m never going to get this!”
Yes, you will, Brandon signed. It just takes time, that’s—
There was more, but she cut her eyes away and missed it. Ahead of them, protruding out of the grass, were what looked like the remnants of walls, crumbling heaps of stone nearly buried beneath an overgrowth of weeds.
Brandon, she thought, forgetting herself in sudden, surprised wonder and opening her mind. Look at that.
Brandon followed her gaze and the two of them sat there, silent, for a moment. What is it? she thought to him at length, and when he didn’t immediately answer, she turned and tapped his shoulder to draw his gaze. “What is it?”
He shook his head. I don’t know, he signed.
She reached for her seat belt, unbuckling it, and he caught her arm as she opened her door. What are you doing? he asked, his eyes wide, his expression inexplicably alarmed.
“I’m going to get out for a minute,” she said. “I want to take a closer look.”
Tessa, wait… he began, but she ignored him, stepping out into the bright, warm sunshine, being immediately enveloped in the thick humidity of early September. The air buzzed and thrummed with the overlapping symphonies of crickets and cicadas. She watched grasshoppers the size of her little finger dart away on the wing as she began to wade through the grass.
Tessa, don’t, Brandon thought, opening his car door and standing.
Tessa turned long enough to smile at him. “Olive oil,” she said with exaggerated emphasis. It was a long-standing joke between them, one that usually drew at least a smirk from him. Brandon had explained to her once that olive oil and I love you were pretty much identical to someone who was deaf and could read lips. The way a person’s mouth moved to form the sounds were virtually the same. Tessa had seized upon this, and was fond of teasing Brandon good-naturedly with it.
Today it didn’t put him any more at ease whatsoever. We need to get the car back to Jackson. Come on, he thought. Besides, I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.
What do you mean? She walked again, undeterred despite the obvious apprehension in his words. She felt drawn to the site somehow, a strange and persistent whispering in her mind, pulling her along. I think these are walls, Brandon. There was a building here or something.
Which didn’t make any sense. The farms the Brethren called home had belonged to them for well over two hundred years, lands chartered in 1790. The only structures that had ever stood there had been built or sanctioned by the Brethren, and Tessa didn’t know of any that had ever been constructed—much less torn down—in that spot.
“What the hell is this place?” she murmured to no one in particular as she drew the blade of her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare. The closer she came, the more of the ruins she could see. Whatever it had once been, it had been enormous; what remained was an expansive circumference that had once been a creek stone foundation crowned with the toppled scraps of brick walls.
I think it was a great house, she thought, turning to Brandon. He hadn’t moved; he stood rooted in place beside the car, his dark eyes round and apprehensive.
It’s just an old barn, Tessa, he signed. One that somebody tore down a long time ago. Come on. We need to get back.
It’s not a barn, she signed in reply. He knew it, too; she didn’t need to open her mind to sense it. He knew, and it frightened him for some reason.
The grass stood almost to her waist in places. She could part it with her hands as she cleaved a slim path. Yellow flowers like tinted daisies—ashy sunflowers, they were called—wild blue sage and purple waxweed dappled the field around her in bright color, while scarlet pimpernel stood out in vermilion pinpoints among the fallen stones. Near the crumbled foundation, Tessa caught sight of cut stone among the wildflowers and weeds, a long, rectangular tread from what had once been a flight of steps leading presumably to a porch or entrance.
The great houses of the Brethren were sprawling, four-story Victorian mansions that had been constructed during the late 1880s, one of the first directives undertaken by Tessa’s grandfather and other Brethren males of his generation when they had been appointed as Elders, the most venerable leaders among the clans. The original houses on the property had been built shortly after the land’s acquisition nearly a century earlier; Tessa knew this because paintings depicting them remained on display in the Grandfather’s study, along with an old, framed daguerreotype of Augustus Noble as a younger man, standing outside of the house that had once belonged to the Nobles. She had always liked that picture, because the Grandfather was a strikingly handsome man—nearly identical in appearance to Brandon, in fact—and reminded her of her brother in the image.
Was this one of the original houses? she thought, stepping carefully over the ruined stairs and into the circumference of the remaining foundation. I thought they’d just built the newer ones over the old, but maybe they didn’t.
Not much remained of the building, only the front stairs, the foundation, a few fragments of brick wall and a crumbling chimney left like a listing grave marker to rise from the grass. And yet, to Tessa, it felt as though the air around it tingled, like the broken rocks and fallen bricks were alive somehow, almost electrified.
What is this place? she wondered again as she carefully cut a diagonal path across the foundation. In a far corner, where the weeds grew particularly thick, she saw a hole in the ground, cut into the limestone. Curious, she drew closer, kneeling down and pushing aside the tangled grass and thistles with her hands. The hole was about three feet in circumference, a gaping pit that led downward into darkness. It had been covered with a heavy iron grate that was rusty enough to be antique, and secured in place with a padlock that was shiny enough to be new. Someone has been out here recently, then, Tessa realized. But why? And why would they bother locking up a hole in the ground?
And then she knew.
The Beneath.
The Brethren farms were reputedly crisscrossed by a network of subterranean tunnels and caverns called the Beneath. All of the great houses were joined by these passageways, and each supposedly had entrances in the cellars. Tessa didn’t know what lay in the Beneath. No one among the Brethren did, with the purported exception of the Elders. But rumors ran rampant, especially among the younger Brethren like Tessa, her siblings and cousins, about why the tunnels had been built, and what the Brethren kept secreted away in them.
“It’s the Abomination,” Tessa’s older brother, Caine, had liked to taunt when they’d been children. “The first one of us. They keep it down there, where it lives on the blood of spiders and rats. It’s like an animal itself, gone mad down there in the deep.”
Caine also liked to say that if they were bad, the Grandfather would punish them by throwing them into the Beneath, where this horrific creature—the “Abomination”—would eat them, bones and all.
Just as she reached out to touch the padlock, Brandon caught her by the shoulder, startling her.
“Jesus!” she yelped, scrambling to her feet, wide-eyed. She managed a shaky little laugh and gave him a shove. “You scared me, Brandon. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
We have to go now, he signed, his motions swift and imperative, his expression stern.
“Look,” she said, pointing. “Do you know what that is? I think it leads—”
Tessa. He finger-spelled her name in its entirety for emphasis, rather than simply folding his index finger over his thumb in a letter T and drawing it against his cheek in his pet sign for her. I mean it. Now.
He was really spooked. She could see it in his face, his rigid posture. Whatever she could sense about that place, the peculiar, electrical sensation, Brandon could feel it, too, and he clearly didn’t like it.
“All right.” She nodded, and he relaxed visibly. Not enough so that he walked back to the car first, however; he waited until she heaved a put-upon sigh and tromped past him before turning and trailing behind her. She kept glancing over her shoulder, her gaze drawn toward the hole in the ground with the padlock and grate. What happened here? she wondered, and even though she didn’t mean to open her mind and let her twin be privy to her thoughts, it happened anyway.
I don’t know, Brandon replied. But I think it was something bad.
Tessa had asked her grandmother about the crumbled old ruins later that evening, but Eleanor Noble hadn’t known anything, either. “Whatever it was, it’s in the past and not for us to know or care about,” she’d said.
Tessa hadn’t thought much about it in the four years since that day. She might not have ever thought about it again. In fact, had it not been for the side trip Rene had taken that morning as they’d left New Orleans together, a trip that had taken them about an hour southwest of the bustling city and toward the Gulf of Mexico to a place called Bayou Lafourche. Here, along a rutted, winding back road just past a small town called Thibodaux, Rene had stopped, parking his black Audi TT roadster in a swirling cloud of dust and grit in front of a boarded up, one-and-a-half-story house with a broad front porch and dilapidated roof.
The house had obviously been abandoned for some time. The window shutters listed, the porch was littered with piles of dirt and leaves and the white clapboard siding was weather-beaten and worn. The yard was a tangled mess of overgrown grass, weeds and wildflowers—much like that Kentucky back field had been years earlier—and surrounded by the twisted remains of old trees, many of which appeared to have been violently uprooted.
“What happened to the trees?” Tessa had asked quietly, wondering where they were and why in the hell Rene had driven out of their way to reach this place.
“Katrina,” Rene murmured, opening the car door and stepping out. He moved slowly, grimacing slightly as his legs unfurled. His right leg was prosthetic from midthigh down; Brandon had explained to Tessa that Rene had once been a police officer and had lost his leg after being shot in the knee. Rene hadn’t said anything to Tessa about it, and she hadn’t asked him.
As a matter of fact, the two of them hadn’t said much to each other at all during their trip to New Orleans, or their limited stay there, as well. Most anything they had exchanged to date had been antagonistic, although before leaving for the Big Easy, they had been at least cordial to each other. That had changed after Brandon and Lina, Rene’s former police partner and the woman with whom Brandon was in love, had hit the road for Louisiana, with Rene and Tessa to follow. In addition to not being able to learn how to drive, the Brethren were also prohibited from leaving their sequestered Kentucky estates. Ever. Brandon had broken that fundamental rule; as a result, the Brethren Elders were hunting for him, to kill him in punishment for his defiance. Because she’d fled, too, in order to help her brother, Tessa had sealed her own fate in the eyes of her people as well.
She had mentioned something about one of Martin’s cars, a gray BMW sedan, to Rene. She’d taken it when she’d escaped Kentucky, and told Rene she needed to get her suitcases out of the trunk before they left for New Orleans.
Upon which he’d blinked at her as if she had just sprouted a third eyeball. “Quoi?” he asked. “What the hell do you mean, your husband’s car is here in the city?”
“How else would I get here?” she’d replied, and he’d rolled his eyes skyward and thrown up his hands with an exasperated little snort. “What? Brandon drove, too. He told me he took one of the Grandfather’s cars and…” Her voice faded as the furrow between his brows deepened. “What?”
“Why didn’t the two of you just hang a big fucking sign at the city limits saying ‘here we are’?” Rene had exclaimed. “Mon Dieu, woman, when you’re trying to run away from someone, you don’t go stealing cars with goddamn license plates traceable right back to them!”
Before they could uncover any more of what Rene called “goddamn breadcrumbs” she and Brandon had left for the Brethren to find, Rene had promptly cut short the three week lead time he’d offered Brandon and Lina. He’d pretty much tossed Tessa unceremoniously into his car—without letting her get her luggage—and headed south. Things had only gone downhill from there.
“Where are we?” she had asked him outside of the ramshackle little house in Louisiana, but he hadn’t replied. He’d left the driver’s door standing open, the little warning chiming alarm beeping inanely as he’d walked toward the remnants of a picket and wire fence that surrounded the front yard. The gate hung at a clumsy angle, loose of most of its moorings, and Rene eased it open on squealing hinges. Beside the gate, a rusted, battered mailbox listed hard to starboard, the hand-painted name LaCroix barely legible on its side.
“Rene?” Tessa unbuckled her seat belt and opened the car door, following him as he climbed the steps to the front porch. “Rene, wait!”
He didn’t pay any attention to her. Which, she figured, was pretty much par for the course. When he tried to open the screen door, it fell; he sidestepped in surprise as it crashed to the rotted plank floor of the porch with a thin cloud of dust. Tessa hesitated on the steps. “Rene? What is this place?”
“It’s home,” he replied without looking back at her as he walked into the house. “Wait for me in the car, pischouette.”
That was it. Nothing more. He’d dismissed her as he might have a nuisance child, and she stood there for a long moment, her blouse clinging to her back between her shoulder blades with sweat, perspiration beading along her brow, the bridge of her nose. It was hot and humid despite the early hour, and the air was thick and heavy and utterly motionless.
Home? she thought, looking at the shack in disbelief. Rene was a multimillionaire many, many times over, the sole heir of a fortune his family had earned in crude oil, much as hers had in the Thoroughbred horseracing and bourbon distilling industries. He’s kidding, right?
She could hear cicadas buzzing, crickets chirruping, tree frogs singing and the fading, resonant sounds of Rene’s footsteps as he disappeared from her view.
“Rene?” she called, but he didn’t answer. Tessa frowned, closing her fingers into fists against her sweat-dampened palms. “The hell with this.”
She marched up the stairs, stepped around the collapsed screen door, and followed him into the house. The cracked and dingy hardwood floor was all but hidden beneath a thick layer of dirt and grime broken only by the ghostlike impressions of Rene’s footprints. The air inside the house smelled stale and musty; in the muted sunlight that filtered in through gaps between the window boards, she could see glinting fragments of broken glass littering the ground along with heavy shrouds of cobwebs, piles of dried leaves and broken branches, old newspapers and other anonymous garbage.
Her stomach immediately roiled, stirred to uncomfortable nausea as much by the claustrophobic confines of the house as her fledgling pregnancy. She was almost four months along. The ordinarily flat plain of her belly was just beginning to swell, although her morning sickness—which had turned out to be more like any-time-of-the-day sickness—and the soreness in her breasts at last seemed to be waning. Being around Rene of late had seemed to rekindle at least the nausea more frequently.
Part of the problem was also that she needed to feed. She’d sated her bloodlust before leaving Kentucky, but that had been almost two weeks earlier. Although normally, that should have sustained her for at least a month, while pregnant, she needed to feed more often, and the bloodlust had been stirring persistently within her. Even now, as she glanced around the empty house, she could feel her gums tingling, a dim ache as they swelled and her canine teeth wanted to drop.
She even imagined she could smell blood, a human from somewhere close at hand. Which isn’t possible, she thought. Look at this dump. There’s no one here but me and Rene.
And while Rene may have been half human to her full-blooded Brethren, she sure as hell wasn’t going to feed from him. I’d as soon ram a rusty nail through my eye.
The sound of Rene’s footfalls as he went upstairs, heavy and hollow against the steps, attracted her gaze, and she headed in that direction. What is he doing?
She rounded a corner and found the staircase. The corridor beside it led to a bathroom straight ahead, a place where the boards on the window had either been pried away or had blown off during the hurricane. Pale sunlight spilled through and pooled on the floor, seeping out into the hall. The ceiling above had been waterlogged from a leaky roof, and plaster dusted the ground like a fine snowfall, crunching in larger chunks beneath her shoes.
Tessa paused at the foot of the steps, looking up into darkness. She could hear Rene tromping around up there, but couldn’t see anything. “Rene? Whose house is this?”
After a long moment, he looked over the railing and down at her, more shadow than distinguishable form. “It’s mine, pischouette. I told you. This is where I grew up.” He ducked out of her view again, walking away from the railing. “Look, just go sit in the car, will you? Before you get something on your little designer pants and then I never hear the end of it.”
Her brows narrowed. Asshole, she thought. Fine. If that’s how he wants it, fine by me. I hope a rat comes up and bites you right in the ass, Rene Morin. You’ve got it coming, and I’m sure there are at least a couple of them running loose in here somewhere.
She turned to go and heard a soft sound from the bathroom, a scrabbling in the loose plaster that gave her pause. The idea that a rat might actually be close at hand suddenly left her apprehensive, and she glanced hesitantly over her shoulder. Oh, God, don’t let it be a rat, she thought, as the scratching sound came again. I hate rats. Please don’t let it be a rat. Don’t let it—
A man appeared in the bathroom doorway, a crooked figure nearly silhouetted by the backdrop of sunlight as he shambled into the corridor. Tessa shrank back in startled fright and he paused, squinting blearily at her.
He was older, with gray, wiry hair that framed his face in a wild, disheveled halo and sprouted from his chin and cheeks in a matted, mangy beard. His clothes were filthy and threadbare.
He was human. She could tell by the scent of his blood, discernable even over the stink of his body odor, his need for a bath. And that realization, coupled by her need to feed—which had suddenly, almost instantly swelled to near-desperate proportions—fueled her already stirring bloodlust. Her fangs dropped fully; Tessa felt the distinctive pop as her lower jaw snapped reflexively out of socket to accommodate her extended canines. As her pupils widened, spreading in circumference to fill the visible spaces between her eyelids, the shadow-draped interior of the house suddenly became bathed in light from all detectable sources. The bright spill of illumination from the bathroom became like a solar flare, and the jackhammering of the man’s heart as he recoiled in clumsy, floundering terror pounded in her ears.
She didn’t remember leaping at him, knocking him backward and to the ground. She didn’t remember straddling him or burying her teeth into the side of his neck while he thrashed beneath her and cried out hoarsely. All she could think about was the blood. She tore his throat open with her mouth, plunging her canines into his carotid artery and gulping greedily, hungrily as his frantic heart sent blood coursing rhythmically into her mouth.
She didn’t hear Rene shouting her name, hadn’t even realized that he’d come racing downstairs at the sounds of the man’s shrieks until she felt his hand close sharply, firmly against her elbow. Rene jerked her to her feet, hauling her away from the man. She fought him the entire way, kicking and scratching at him with her nails, screaming and cursing as she struggled to return to her feeding. Rene grasped her by the arms, whipped her around and shook her soundly. “Tessa, goddamn it!”
The sharpness of his voice startled her instantly out of the reverie of the bloodlust, and she fell still, hiccuping for breath and shuddering.
“What’s the matter with you?” Rene yelled, giving her another solid shake before turning her loose. He forked his fingers through his disheveled, shoulder-length hair, shoving it out of his face and all the while staring at her as if she’d lost her mind.
“I…I couldn’t help it…” she whimpered. She could still taste blood in her mouth. It was smeared all over her face and neck; a glance down revealed the front of her white linen blouse stained scarlet with it.
Rene walked over to the derelict. The man lay in a crumpled heap against the floor. She could hear him gargling softly for strained breath; she’d punctured his windpipe in her overzealous effort to feed. She’d also swallowed enough blood to leave him hovering on the brink of death. After a few, sodden, struggling breaths, the man fell still and silent. Rene pressed his fingertips against the side of his neck, then glanced at her as he stood again. “He’s dead.”
Rene could feed without killing, a concept as alien to Tessa as trying to eat a cheeseburger with her feet. The reason her twin, Brandon, had fled the Brethren was because he hadn’t wanted to kill; he’d abandoned his bloodletting, the ritual of the first kill, rather than give in to his bloodlust. He’d learned from Rene how to feed without killing, but he’d never fed before then. Tessa had, plenty of times in the last three years. She hadn’t meant to kill the old man, hadn’t been acting out of any malicious intent. She’d simply been doing what came naturally to her. And Rene clearly didn’t approve.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. And then she remembered—to her horror. Oh, God, Rene’s family is half human! What if someone did live here? Oh, my God, what if I just killed someone in his family? “Who…who is he?”
Rene’s sharp brows crimped together, draping his brown eyes in heavy, menacing shadows. “How the hell should I know? That’s hardly the point.” The thin line of his mouth turned down; the hard angle of his jaw was tense and rigid. He closed his hands—smeared now with the old man’s blood—into fists and marched past her. “Viens m’enculer!”
“I said I’m sorry!” She hurried to follow him, but one of the floorboards in the hallway snapped beneath her, sending her sprawling to the floor. She landed hard on her knees, scraping them raw, and abrading her palms.
“Goddamn it!” she cried. Her foot had fallen into a deep recess beneath the floorboard, and the rough edges of broken wood had cut open her ankle. She winced as she eased her foot loose, then frowned as dim light reflected off something in the hole.
She scooted toward the narrow opening and looked more closely. Reaching inside, she felt something thick and leathery against her fingertips; the spine of a book. She frowned, trying to get a grip on it and pull it free, but the hole didn’t grant enough room. Tessa grabbed the next floor plank in her hands and jerked against it, pulling until the old, weather-beaten wood gave way and snapped loose. Again and again, she yanked away floorboards until she’d cleared away a wide enough opening through which to remove the book.
It was huge, thick and cumbersome, and her first thought was that it was some kind of scrapbook. It wasn’t until she turned back the heavy cover and flipped carefully through the brittle, yellowing pages that it occurred to her what the book might really be.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, wiping her hands against her pant legs so she didn’t get blood all over the parchment.
The book appeared to be written in French, words set to the page by hand in ink, but it was some sort of dialect she’d never seen before. The light was too dim, the handwriting too small for her to make out the text clearly, but as she thumbed ahead, she saw pages outlined with lined diagrams through the last quarter or so of the thick volume. Family trees, she thought. Or at least, one family tree.
She recognized some of the names transcribed on the diagrams: Davenant, Trevilian, Morin.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered again, so stunned she forgot about the man she’d just bled to death, or the fury she’d seen in Rene’s face. Oh, God, this is Rene’s family tree—his Brethren side of the family. This book is one of the Tomes! Holy shit, it’s one of the clan Tomes!
The Tomes were a series of books maintained by each of the four Brethren clans, the Nobles, the Davenants, the Trevilians and the Giscards. These books not only chronicled the history of the Brethren race, they were used to meticulously track and plan each family’s line-age. Marriages were arranged by the Brethren Elders like Tessa’s grandfather after careful consultation of the Tomes in order to prevent inbreeding between particular families and to keep the bloodlines clean. Only the Elders were allowed to see the Tomes; the books were kept under tight lock and key and used only behind closed doors, away from any possible prying eyes.
Until now. Tessa stumbled to her feet, hefting the book against her chest. Her ankle smarted as she settled her weight on it, but she gritted her teeth and limped to the front door.
“Rene!” she called as she staggered back outside into the oppressive heat, the blinding sunlight. Rene had returned to the car, popped the trunk and fished out a fresh shirt from an oversized duffel bag. He’d also pulled out a bottle of water.
“Rene, look,” she grunted. “Look what I found inside. It’s—”
“Clean yourself up.” Rene tossed the bottle of water at her, and she yelped, loosening her grip on the book reflexively. It dropped to the ground and the bottle fell beside it, landing heavily in the weeds.
“Be careful!” she exclaimed, snatching the Tome back in hand. “Do you know what this is?”
“No,” he replied, striding toward her. He grabbed the book and jerked it away from her, tossing it unceremoniously into the backseat of the car. “And frankly, my dear, I don’t give a flying fuck.”
Something had fallen out of the book, a postcard or photograph that had fluttered to the ground by the Audi’s back tire. Rene leaned over, picking it up. Whatever it was, he stared at it for a long moment, his expression growing momentarily stricken.
“Rene?” she asked. At the sound of her voice, his face hardened again, and he shoved the slip into the back pocket of his jeans.
“I said clean yourself up.” His voice sounded strange, suddenly strained somehow, but his brows remained furrowed, his mouth set in a frown. “Take off that goddamn shirt and throw it into the trees over there. You just murdered someone, and I’d just as soon get on the road again before I’m tempted to try it, too.”
He said this with a pointed look that left no doubt the person he might feel inclined to murder was her. His disgust and aggravation were so apparent, it left her abashed and ashamed. Her shoulders hunched, her eyes burning with the sting of tears. Her bottom lip quivered and she sniffled as she opened the water and splashed it on her face and hands. “You’re an asshole.”
Rene leaned his hip against the rear bumper of the car, folded his arms across his chest and deliberately turned to present his back to her as she unbuttoned her blouse. She shrugged her way out of the blood-soaked linen, letting it drop to the grass at her feet, then pulled the faded gray T-shirt Rene had given her over her head.
“Get in the car,” Rene growled after she’d tossed her blouse into the heavy underbrush as he’d ordered.
Still sniffling, Tessa obeyed, sitting against the pale leather front seat with her shoulders hunched, her fingers knotted in her lap. They sat there in silence for a long moment, him in the driver’s seat drumming his fingers against the wheel, and her beside him.
“If you ever do that again, I’ll leave your ass behind,” Rene told her finally, his voice low and clipped, as if he struggled to sound calm. “You understand me, pischouette? You can’t just run around killing people. That guy was at least somebody’s son, and who knows what else—someone’s father, their grandfather.” He spared her a glare. “He was something to somebody somewhere and you killed him.”
At this, his snide tone and his sharp words, as if she was a naughty child in need of remonstration, something in Tessa snapped. It reminded her too vividly of her life in the Davenant house with Martin.
“I told you I was sorry!” she exclaimed. “What else do you want from me? I couldn’t help it. Maybe you and Brandon don’t have to bleed someone dry to feed, but I—”
“Who told you to wait so goddamn long between feedings that you had to go and rip that poor son of a bitch’s throat open?” he snapped back. “I asked you before we left the city, ‘do you need to feed?’ I asked you again before we took off out of New Orleans, and both times, you told me no.”
“Because you wanted me to feed off hookers! Maybe that’s good enough for you, Rene, but I’m sorry. I’m not about to pay some bleach-blond whore to—”
“Oh, no.” He barked out a short, mean laugh. “You’ll save yourself for some strung out bum stinking of his own goddamn waste, too drunk to even stick up to you in a fight.” He spared her a glance, his brow arched. “Or maybe next time, you’ll find some migrant worker who doesn’t speak a lick of English, just like down on the farm. You take your food there Mexican, no?”
She smacked him, the report of her hand striking his cheek loud and sharp in the heavy morning air. She hit him hard enough to whip his face to the side, and he turned back to her slowly, his brow still arched as he pressed his fingertips against the point of impact.
“You have no right to judge me,” she seethed at him, trembling angrily, her voice choked with tears again.
He continued looking at her for a long moment, seeming simultaneously amused by her slap and irritated by it. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe no.”
That had been earlier that day. They’d spent the rest of the afternoon on the road, neither speaking to the other. When they’d stopped for the night at the chain motel with its nondescript suite that smelled faintly of stale cigarette smoke to Tessa’s keen nose—despite the NO SMOKING sign on the door—she’d planned to call Brandon, to beg him to come and get her. But then she’d sat down on the bed and began to study the Tome she’d found—which she’d snatched out of the backseat of the car before Rene could lay a finger on it—and remembered the day years earlier when she and Brandon had discovered the ruins of the old great house.
Rene’s name, Morin, didn’t belong to any of the existing Brethren clans, which had led Tessa and Brandon to believe he was part of a separate sect, or perhaps a family that had splintered from the Brethren. But Tessa had seen another Morin family tree, this one much shorter than the one presented in the Tome, which Rene’s human grandmother had put together for him, and through this, she’d clearly seen that the Morins and the Brethren clans had once been affiliated. One of Rene’s ancestors had married into the Davenant clan.
What if the Morins had once been part of the Brethren? she wondered.
In addition to the clan names she recognized, there were others still that were unfamiliar to her—some French, like Durand and Lambert and others with origins not so apparent—Ellinger, Averay.
Were all of these clans, too? she thought in amazement. My God, at some point could there have been so many? What happened to them? What if that great house Brandon and I found had belonged to one of them? What if they never rebuilt it, like they did the others, because they left somehow?
But why?
The first portion of the book consisted of old, brittle parchment pages that appeared to Tessa’s untrained eye to have been carefully removed from another, probably older volume, and bound into the Tome. The pages were intricately adorned with hand-painted borders to resemble climbing vines, tree limbs and other decorations. The text wrapped around large, colorful paintings depicting all sorts of imagery—groups of men gathered together around a large table, as if in conference; farming scenes that appeared to depict different crop harvests; people playing musical instruments or dancing; people traveling by horseback to what looked like castles and closely nestled villages or men in armor on white horses jousting or sword fighting.
Many of the illustrations showed darker images—men and women lying in bed, their bodies covered in boils or sores; others lying naked and strewn on the ground while behind them houses burned and a skeleton rode an emaciated black horse, a scythe slung across its bony shoulder. Several depicted another manner of monster, this one naked, hunch-backed and hairless, with bulging eyes, a mouth ringed with long, sharp teeth, and long, spindly fingers hooked with claws. Abominacion was transcribed beneath it, and Tessa didn’t need to be a medieval linguist to understand.
“Abomination,” she’d whispered, shivering as she thought of the stories her brother Caine had always told about the Abomination living beneath the great house in the depths of the Beneath.
Upon closer examination of the text, it appeared to be written, at least at first, in a strange mix of French and Latin she couldn’t decipher. She’d been fighting mounting fatigue, propped up in bed with pillows, skimming through the book when she’d dozed off. The sound of Rene’s cell phone, set to speaker mode and turned up loudly as he rang someone’s line, had roused her. The phone kept ringing and ringing until finally, irritably, she’d shoved the book aside and stumbled out of bed with every intention of flinging the door wide and screaming at him to hang up already, goddamn it. She stopped, her hand on the doorknob, when she heard a woman’s voice—tinged with sleepiness—finally answer.
Who is he calling?
Tessa had opened the door slowly, quietly, cracking it a brief margin and peering into the living room and beyond. She had seen Rene on the couch with a mostly empty bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him. He’d gone out earlier after they’d checked into the room, and now she knew why. He’d been buying booze.
He’s drunk. Terrific. Just what I need, she’d thought, tempted yet again to call Brandon and Lina and ask if they had room in their car for her.
“Hello?” the woman on the phone said again.
Rene had pulled the tails of his shirt loose from his jeans and sat with it unbuttoned so it lay open, revealing his chest. Even from her vantage, Tessa could see he was hard-cut with muscles, his stomach chiseled above his waistband.
He wasn’t an unattractive man; quite the opposite, in fact—and that was probably the most aggravating thing about him. He’d told her once he was in his fifties, but he looked only in his late twenties or early thirties. Damn near perfect when it came to physique, he had broad shoulders, a slim waist, long legs and strong arms. With caramel-brown eyes, sharp brows, high cheeks and angular features, Rene was handsome in a rugged, if not somewhat disheveled sort of way. He seemed content to let a day or two—or even three—lapse in between shaving, and his idea of styling his dark, sandy blond hair appeared to be simply running his fingers through it and letting the wind take care of the rest—a far cry from the men of the Brethren.
Tessa had never seen her husband, Martin, for example, in anything besides collared shirts and ties, no matter how hot the weather might be. The only exceptions to this seeming rule had been the nights he’d come to her for sex, stealing into the small bedroom at the Davenant great house that Tessa had shared with her cousin Alexandra, who was also one of Martin’s wives. Then he’d wear only a silk bathrobe, or at least that’s what Tessa had assumed based on the whispering sound of the fabric swishing against his legs as he moved. It was hard to tell anything else because she’d never open her eyes, never even move, not until he had finished and left her as wordlessly as he’d arrived.
Unlike Martin, Rene seemed to have a never-ending barrage of things to say. And he smelled good, too; another distraction Tessa found irritating.
When the woman on the other end of the line hung up, Rene had dropped the phone with one hand and—to Tessa’s surprise—raised a pistol to his head with the other. He’d closed his eyes and folded his finger against the trigger like he seriously meant to plug a bullet into his skull, and Tessa had panicked, her heart hammering in a sudden, frightened cadence. He may have been an asshole, and she may have pretty much officially hated him as of that afternoon, but that didn’t mean she wanted to watch him shoot himself. She’d bolted from the bedroom.
And the rest, as they say, is history, she thought, sitting on the bed again, her body still feeling tremulous and electrified in the aftermath of his touch. The scruff of his unkempt beard stubble had scraped against her cheek when he’d murmured in her ear and her flesh there still felt sensitive, nearly raw from the friction. She could still recall the sensation of his hand against her skin, his palm sliding along her thigh toward her buttock. She could still smell him, the light, musky, pleasant fragrance of his cologne trapped and lingering in her robe. He’d almost kissed her. And she’d almost let him. Almost.
What the hell is wrong with me?