“No. Clio, Clio, Clio. What are you to me? Was it you I took to the cockfights? Was it you who loved to see the birds bloody one another so much that you fell and hurt your ankle? Was it you who captured my heart and showed me what it was to love? Who could have impersonated you so perfectly at the fair? Do you really think I would do all this for you?”
“You did this for Mariana,” Clio breathed, letting the mask of fear she had been struggling to wear drop for a moment as she grasped everything. “You did it to kill Miles.”
“Exactly. Mariana, my perfect angel, must be liberated from the prison of her betrothal. She must be uncaged, so her exalted spirit can fly free. And that bastard Dearbourn will have died in pursuit of the vampire. Just like Serena. Just another victim of the clever fiend.”
“Does Mariana know of your plan? Is she helping you?”
“My pure saintly Mariana? She knows nothing of all this.” He gestured about as if castles and land grants were scattered at his feet. “She knew only that we had to attend the fair in disguise so her reputation would not be sullied. She loved the idea of dressing up as you. She said she wanted to know what it felt like to look so ill.”
“How charming,” Clio murmured despite herself.
“Yes, she is. She was my helper. And my muse. Do you understand now?”
Yes, Clio nodded. She understood many things. She understood that the bonds on her wrists and ankles were insoluble. She understood that she was in the hands of a lunatic. She understood that Toast, hunkered in a corner, could never get past him to summon help. She understood that her only power was in convincing her captor of her fear while actually keeping it at bay. And she understood that unless the note she had dispatched from the inn where they changed horses made it into Miles’s hands soon, they were both going to die.
“None of you were following her?” Miles demanded, looking ferociously over the assembled inhabitants of Which House as if he suspected them of having broiled and eaten Clio.
“After the threats she gave about what would happen to anyone who dared endanger his life by following her when she heard about Inigo the other night?” Mr. Hakesly shook his head.
“Why weren’t any of
you
following her?” Mr. Williams asked, eyeing the Arboretti. “Strong men. Good for following. Look like you’d be willing to risk having your toes licked for ten hours straight by this puppy.”
“Is that what Clio threatened as punishment?” Sebastian inquired, barely repressing a smile.
“That, and drawing and quartering,” Mr. Pearl elaborated quietly.
“But you know she would never do anything like that,” Miles ranted. “You should have—”
“Miles,” Ian said, putting his hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “You had two guards following her, remember, and she was still abducted. These men are not to blame, and your storming around is not getting us anywhere.”
The room fell silent but for the sound of men shifting uneasily in their leather boots. Then Miles said, “You are right.” He nodded to Snug, Inigo, and the Triumvirate. “I am sorry.”
He would have gone on, saying he knew not what, but a messenger in golden Dearbourn livery puffed into the study then like a bitter wind. “This just came,” he said, flapping a paper in front of Miles. “This just arrived at Dearbourn Hall.”
Miles snatched the grimy sheet from him.
My lord,
The vampire has me. This shall be my last chance to get a letter to you. I overheard at the coach stop that we are going to the Garden House near Hartwell Heath. Please, my lord, come as quickly as you can. I am terrified.
Your Lordship’s own, Clio.
Miles handed the sheet to Mr. Hakesly. “Is this Clio’s writing?”
“Looks like it,” Mr. Hakesly averred, showing it to Mr. Pearl.
“Yes.” Mr. Pearl confirmed.
“Hartwell Heath is close to my sheep pasture. It’s three hours hard riding away,” Crispin said hesitantly.
Miles looked at the clock. It was after six. Six hours until midnight, and a three hour ride in each direction. What if Clio was wrong about where the vampire was taking her?
“Saddle the horses,” he said grimly. “We had better get started.”
“You know,” Saunders confided, “the hardest part is not the waiting. The hardest part is the pretending.”
Clio would have liked to disagree. She was finding the waiting, the steady click of the clock in front of which she was tied, extremely tedious. Pretending to be afraid of Saunders was not a problem at all.
Her mouth was still dry and tasted bad from whatever he had used to make her sleep during the coach ride from the Painted Lady. He had shoved something warm and wet between her lips when she tried to scream, and it must have been coated with a sleeping drug. She remembered telling herself that it was crucial she stay awake, alert, crucial that she know where she was going and what was happening, but no matter how hard she struggled her eyes would not stay open. Her last clear thought was of seeing Lovely Jake napping at the strangest angle on the stairs, and she recollected thinking that if he did not clean it off soon, all the red wine on the front of his doublet would ruin it. It was only when she regained consciousness in the coach that she had realized Lovely Jake was dead, and she had wondered who would look after his pig.
Her first thought on waking in the lurching vehicle, however, had been one of relief, because Toast was nowhere to be found. He had gotten away. And perhaps he could lead help to her. But when, midway through their journey, they pulled up outside the inn where Saunders had forced her to write the note to Miles, she saw that Toast had been tied behind the coach with a sturdy chain, forced to grip its outer edges or run in order to avoid being dragged to his death. Exhausted, he now lay almost motionless in the far corner of the room.
The chamber had no furniture beside the post to which Clio was tied, if that could be considered furniture, and the large clock that stood directly in front of her. Saunders paced back and forth across the floor in bare feet, his quiet footsteps keeping exact time with the steady ticking of the timepiece.
“Yes, that was the worst part. Not being able to show people what I really am,” he was saying. “Not being able to reveal what I am really capable of. That was what made me suffer. You see, I learned long ago that they would not understand. That their jealousy would force them to call me names. As you did. But you won’t anymore, will you?” Saunders stopped pacing the room and turned to stare at Clio with burning eyes. She noticed that one side of his face had begun to twitch.
“No,” she said in what she hoped sounded like a meek voice. “I won’t.”
“Good. I am tired of being insulted by you, and people like you. How dare you have tried to fool me with that idiot impersonator in Newgate? A child could have seen through that.”
“You are right. We were fools.”
“No,” Saunders hissed, delight flashing in his eyes as Clio recoiled from him. “You are fools.”
Clio nodded. “But when we saw how ingeniously you disposed of the man, we knew we had been wrong. Where did you learn so much about poison?”
Saunders smiled. “From my stepmother, Serena. Her first husband had been an apothecary. She taught me everything I know.” He looked pensive for a time. “I certainly hope Miles will appreciate all I have done for him. Appreciate the lengths I have gone to orchestrate a hero’s death for him, even though he is my enemy. To lose one’s life in a final battle with the vampire—what a marvelous way to die. Serena did not understand the gift I was giving her. I kept trying to explain it to her, explain that I was making her part of something special, a part of history, but she fought me. She stood no chance of course. Like you.”
Clio shrank away from him, from the twitching lips. “Why do you need me if it is Dearbourn you want?”
“Because I want him to wait. I want him to feel each minute that passes. I want him entirely under my power. He must die in pursuit of the vampire, but first he will taste what it is like to be in someone else’s control. He must follow my timetable, be my creature. And you will make him that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He will come after you. He must. And then he will be mine. My puppet. My servant. Mine to command. For as soon as he attempts to enter this room, you will be shot.”
“Shot?”
“Yes. With that pistol.” Saunders gestured behind him and Clio saw that there was indeed a pistol there. It was secured on a stand bolted to the floor so that it was just above the level of her head, but it was pointed downward, at her heart. A thin cord ran from its handle to the top of the door, the only door in the room. “When that door opens, the cord will go taut and the trigger will be pulled. That way, Miles will know it is he and he alone who has killed you.”
“You cannot know the shot will hit me, much less be mortal,” Clio pointed out to him, her air of terror dissolving in the face of his madness.
“I rather hope it will
not
be fatal,” Saunders assured her kindly. “I would rather have you die slowly, in a puddle of your blood. The shot will hit you, some part of you, depending on how still you stand, and it will injure you too gravely to leave here. But that is not the important part. That is just the crossfire. What is important is that Miles will rush to you, run to bathe his hands in your blood, stand right here—” he moved and stood directly in front of her, “—to support you and hear your last, rattling breath. And he will stay that way, with you, until midnight.”
“What if he comes soon? It’s hours until midnight. Why would he stay here that long?”
“I have seen to that. There is no way he could get here for another four hours and by then…” He smiled secretly to himself.
Clio looked at the clock in front of her. Its hands showed a quarter of an hour shy of eight bells. “Why is midnight so important?” she pressed. “What happens at midnight?”
The tick in Saunders face disappeared and it grew smooth, almost beatific. “There will be no moon in the sky at all. And I shall be invincible.”
“You are not the vampire,” Clio told him, having entirely thrown off the mantle of fear. “You are just a man. The moon has no power over you.”
“Just a man,” he said with a strange smile and a sideways glance at the clock. “You shall see, Clio Thornton, if I am just a man. You shall see soon. Because it has begun. My plan is moving forward. Your viscount is on his way to Hartwell Heath. I can sense it.”
Please, Clio thought to herself, her eyes moving from the pistol to the door. Please let him be wrong.
“Whoever named this the Garden House must have had a wonderful sense of humor,” Sebastian murmured to Tristan as they rode around the perimeter of the old building. There was nothing near it for miles, not another house, certainly nothing that looked like a garden. It just sat, low and dark and glowering in the middle of the heath.
The group had split into two detachments, each of which was to take up a station near a different part of the house. They had made good time from London, arriving in under three hours, but they forced themselves to go slowly now. They had agreed on a plan of action, and on the fact that once in place around the house, they would not speak but only communicate by whistling, to minimize the chances of alerting the vampire to their presence.
Tristan, the group expert on breaking and entering, was to go in first, accompanied by Sebastian, and quiet any dogs that might be waiting to announce visitors. He had been hoping for an open window, or even just an open shutter, but he found none. As far as he could see, the house was completely dark, which meant that the vampire had to have Clio in an inside room, possibly on the upper floor.
He and Sebastian had just reached the backdoor when they heard a noise from inside, like the sound of a body hitting a wall.
A low whistle alerted the others, and they were all there by the time the lock yielded to Tristan’s expert touch. Once inside, they moved silently through the rooms, finding nothing. Somewhere in the distance they could make out the sound of footsteps, pacing, with the regularity of clockwork. Somewhere above them.
They found the main stairs and scaled them slowly, walking along the edges of the boards to keep from making them squeak. They were about halfway up the second set, growing closer to the pacing feet, when they heard it again, the sound of a person falling. This time it was accompanied by a piercing shriek.
They ran up the rest of the stairs, pursuing the noise, and traced it to a small door. It was louder here, a sound of terror unlike anything they had ever heard before. One of them reached for the handle and jerked the door open.
The ancient hinges gave a hideous wail and suddenly there was an enormous explosion. Black objects came hurtling toward them in a sea of inhuman screeching. The air pulsed with the force of a hundred wings flapping as the bats, disoriented, spun wildly through the hall, careening off the walls and each other. The men ducked beneath the black cloud and ran into the room.
There was no one there. Off to one side stood an enormous, ancient clock. The rhythmic tone of its timekeeping seemed, even this close, like the sound of footsteps. The hands on its face showed a little past nine. And below it, written on a long pieced together strip of parchment, large enough to be seen without a light, were the words, “Fooled you, Dearbourn. She dies at midnight.”