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.
Chapter Nineteen
“No,” Sir Edwin said, coming toward Clio fast. “You mustn’t scream, he won’t like that.” He had his fingers touching her lips, his palm over her mouth one moment, and then next he was collapsed in a pile on the ground with the gardenia lying next to him.
Clio spent an instant panting and staring down at the body, then felt Miles’s arms close around her and she began to tremble.
“It’s all right,
amore,
he cannot hurt you,” he whispered into her head as he hugged her hard. “You have to believe me. Have to trust me. Because we don’t have much time before he wakes up and there is a good deal we need to do.”
“He isn’t dead?” Clio asked, and she did not know if she felt relief or dread.
“No. Only momentarily knocked out.” He would have to thank Sebastian again for teaching him that trick. “We have about a quarter of an hour before he regains consciousness and we can talk to him.” He looked down at her. “I want to go in that building over there,” he gestured with his chin to a structure a few yards down the street. “Would you like to come or stay here?”
“Come,” she answered instantaneously.
The door of the building was closed but opened easily when Miles pushed it with his foot. They paused on the threshold and Miles reached into his doublet and produced a tinderbox and a stump of candle. He got it lit and held it up.
The entire structure consisted of a single room. Clio had been wrong in thinking that no one lived in the neighborhood, because it was clear that someone had been living there. Crumbs from a meal recent enough not yet to have been devoured by mice were still scattered over the top of a table, a plate and tankard were stacked neatly in a corner, a cracked bit of mirror hung on the wall, and a pile of straw had been covered with a thin blanket as a makeshift mattress.
But more interesting was the second door, the one opposite that through which they entered, which was swinging open. Miles poked his head out, then came back in.
“That explains Sir Edwin’s miraculous entrance. One of these doors opens onto the next street and he must have come from there. In the mist it looked like he had just appeared, but really, he had come through a door.”
It had looked so real.
Clio struggled to bring her rational mind into control. Sir Edwin had come through a door. He had not been generated by the mist. When they went outside he would still be there, he would not have disappeared, he—
“Clio,” the death rattle voice called out from the street, through the door. “Clio, where are you?”
Miles went out in front of her. Sir Edwin was sitting up in the middle of the street looking dazed and rubbing his neck.
“What did you do to me, Your Lordship?” he asked Miles. “Never felt anything like that.”
“Be careful, Miles,” Clio called from the doorway. “Don’t get too close to him.”
Sir Edwin turned around and looked at her. “Ah, there you are, Clio. They said you were dead, but I knew better.”
“How?” Miles demanded.
“Went to Newgate myself, didn’t I? I can’t think why that fellow used her name to get arrested, though,” Sir Edwin mused to himself. “I suppose he had a perfectly fit name of his own.”
Miles nodded at this bit of insight. “Why didn’t you tell Lady Alecia and Mariana that Clio was alive?”
“Man’s got to have secrets,” Sir Edwin replied with a ghoulish smile. “But I did tell them later. Mother was so upset.”
“Did you tell them you are the vampire?” Clio asked, emerging from the dark building.
Sir Edwin lost all color. “What are you saying, Clio? What are you saying?”