The Hunger (25 page)

He lifted his head. She stood there, hands on hips, the front of her gold dress and her Brussels lace soaked in blood, glaring at him. Then her face dissolved in a grim smile. “I thought you were concealing something. Not an intent quite so lethal, of course.” She raised her brows. “And now I come to think on it, I believe you are not Presset at all.” She tapped a finger to her lips. “In fact, I think you are Langley.” She looked sideways at him and switched to English. “I had thought to eliminate you in London, but you outwitted my poor tools. I should have recognized you immediately. But your French is excellent, and although I did not believe your fey predilection for a moment—you exude a manly essence, you know—still I thought you might only be feigning to get into my boudoir. What a bold move you have made to come directly after me! How did you know it was me and not my dear, stupid Fanueille?”

John closed his mouth. He would give her nothing. Whatever she was. What was she?

“Ahhh. Of course, Dupré. He must have told you before he died. We should have disposed of him more quickly.”

“You paid the guard to shoot him?”

“Clumsy, I acknowledge, but effective in the end, I understand.”

During this speech, John’s shame at being taken so easily had been rising. Was he some amateur that she could see through him? But there was worse to come if he did not extricate himself from her grasp. Women could be more cruel than any man when it came to torture. His gun was useless. He had no knife and no capsule from Barlow. A tiny tendril of fear wound round his belly. How was she so strong? And how not dead?

“Now,” she said, hands on her hips again. “I must change for the journey.” He watched as she slipped her gown off her shoulders and let it pool on the floor. She shrugged out of her shift and kicked off her slippers until she walked, back straight, wearing only her stockings and garters, to her dressing room. Sounds of rummaging came from inside. John staggered to his feet. Could he open the door by backing up to it and get down the stairs before Quintoc reappeared? He was halfway to the door when he heard her voice behind him.

“Which one, do you think?”

At the door, he turned, fumbling at the knob. He glanced up and saw her, her heavy breasts perfectly formed, the hair dark at her groin. She held up two dresses, unconcerned at his attempt to escape.
Turn, knob
, he thought.
Damn you! Turn
.

She stood quite still, holding the dresses up. As he watched, scrabbling at the door handle, he saw something he could not credit. Her eyes went red, bloodred, a color no eyes were. She seemed to exude a halo of darkness around her form.

He stopped groping at the knob. Slowly he straightened. Without willing his legs to move, he found himself drawn toward her. Then he was standing before her, looking down into the bloodred eyes. Before he could stop himself he had knelt before her and bowed his head. He
wanted to rise. He hated her for the fact that he had knelt.

“I have no time for this.” He felt a stunning blow to the head. Darkness sparkled up from the edge of his vision. He was falling, falling into red eyes, and blackness all around.

“Stack the trunks in the hall, Symington,” Beatrix said, not bothering to look up from her pen scratching its way across the heavy rag paper of the note card. A packet left for Amsterdam on Thursday. Then up the Rhine to Vienna, across to Budapest, and so into the Carpathian Mountains to Mirso Monastery. An uncomfortable journey, but it would be her last.

Why did she bother writing apologies to her regulars? She would never see any of them again. Perhaps it was closure. She was shutting down her life here. She had given her art collection to the Prince Regent for the use of the British people. The artists, poets, and musicians she sponsored would want for nothing. She endowed the orphanages and the hospitals. And she provided for her servants. It had been a busy week. She purchased annuities from her surprised bankers at Hoare’s with sacks of gold coins engraved with Viking ships or the stamp of the Holy Roman Empire. Symington would see to everything. And then it was time he retired. He had given her a full life of service. Now, she had provided him enough to support himself and his sister and indulge every want.

Her pen scratched across the note to the Duke of Devonshire explaining that she was called to the Continent by a family emergency. Regrets. Gratitude for the acquaintance. Hope for a future meeting. Meaningless.

“Your ladyship?”

Ink blotted the card. She looked up to see Symington hovering, his face creased in worry. He had been fussing ever since she announced her departure, even though it meant a life of ease for him. The old just couldn’t stand change. “What is it?”

He closed the door. “I thought your ladyship would like to know.”

She raised her brows.

He cleared his throat. “Admiral Strickland’s man mentioned that a ghost ship was brought in to Portsmouth last week.”

“A ghost ship? What do you mean?” Something disturbing nibbled at her brain.

“The crew was drained of blood off the coast of France.” Even Symington could not keep his impassivity. His voice was tight.

Two hundred men, five hundred if it was a ship of the line! Shock shivered down her spine. It meant a rogue vampire. Or many. “Have they . . . have they caught the perpetrators?” She didn’t need to tell Symington what this meant. It might mean the end of the world as he knew it. Vampires were not obeying the Rules. And the Rules were what preserved the balance.

“They have not. The admiral dispatched his staff immediately with several notes to convene an urgent conference on the matter. His man Darby was entrusted with requesting an interview at the Admiralty with . . . the Earl of Langley.”

“What?” Beatrix blinked, then stared down at her note. The ink blot had spread outward unevenly. Her brain did not register the ruination of her effort. The Admiralty sought out a notorious rake on this emergency?

Ahh, no. It all fell into place.

He disappeared for a month at a time. The mill was a pretense. Would he be whipped so brutally at a mill in Petersfield?

“The admiral was quite distraught that he was out of town,” Symington noted.

She sat up. Was she so preoccupied with her own past that she thought of nothing but his abandoning her? Langley led a double life, a life that led an admiral to believe he
could depend upon him in a dire emergency. They wanted him to be involved with this death ship? They wouldn’t know vampires were behind the disaster. John would not even know the horrible danger he was in. She must warn him away. “They haven’t found him, yet, have they?”

“I don’t know, my lady.”

Then she must. She stood and began to pace. She might be angry at him, but she had no wish to see him drained of blood. He had been so purposeful about leaving. He might be on some kind of mission. Pray it had nothing to do with vampires and she was not too late. She wouldn’t think of that. Where would he be? He may actually have gone to Petersfield for that month, though she wagered it was not to see a mill. Symington would know. “You’re sure he went to Petersfield when last he went out of town?”

“My sources are infallible on that point, my lady,” Symington said. “At least that is where his initial destination was.”

Was that where he was now? Did the current trail start in the same place? Would there be those in Petersfield who knew what he was, and where? She tossed the Duke of Devonshire’s card into the wicker Indian basket beside the escritoire. “Order the carriage. Pack your things. I will have need of you. Oh, and send in Betty.”

“Yes, your ladyship. And, uh . . . for how long should we pack?”

“A week, I think.” She tapped the quill on the inlaid burl wood of the escritoire. She could spare a week to be sure John did not involve himself in anything to do with vampires.

Fourteen

John swam in and out of consciousness. It was dark. Jolting hurt his head. He wanted it to stop, but he knew it never would. At one point his stomach rebelled against the pain in his head and he vomited. Someone cursed him. A woman.

Later he woke more surely. He was in a carriage. Lavender water as well as something else, fainter, made his gorge rise again. He controlled it this time. Cinnamon? Beatrix. A glow suffused him. Beatrix.

He opened his eyes. Asharti stared at him from the corner of the coach.

“If you vomit again, I will punish you,” she said, and turned her head to look out the window. Her profile was bathed in moonlight. He was Asharti’s prisoner. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. He had shot her dead, but she was not dead and neither was Quintoc. She had subdued him casually, without effort, though she was only a woman. He would say he had dreamed it. But here he was bound in a coach with a broken head, the woman who should be dead staring at him. Her eyes . . . her eyes had gone red. Surely
that
was a dream. Eyes weren’t red!
His breath came shallowly. He couldn’t think about that. Escape. He must focus on escape. He tried to move his hands, expecting numbness. But they responded with a clank.

Shackles. He moved his feet and heard another clank. Glancing down, he saw his chains were fastened to a ringbolt in the wall of the coach. The coach was moving fast over good roads. How could he escape when he was shackled hand and foot in strange country? Even if he tore himself away they would hunt him down. A tendril of despair wound round him. He gathered his slender strength. The coach slowed and turned onto a rougher lane.

After what seemed an eternity the carriage stopped. The door was opened. Asharti rose. God, she was bringing him to a place where he could not escape!

She stepped out. Rough hands reached in for him. “Here is the key,” he heard her say. They slid the clanking chain through the bolt and pulled him from the carriage. His legs would not support him. Two massive brutes, one on either arm, carried him bodily up through crunching gravel to the massive doors of a sixteenth-century chateau, all stone gables and rounded Renaissance turrets pushing into the dark.

He mustered his senses and looked around. They had come across a causeway over a lake like a moat. The water was clogged with a tangle of plants, the causeway overgrown with weeds. He glanced up toward the chateau again and saw dark tongues of soot in the slit stone windows of the upper stories from a fire now some years distant. He shook his head to clear it. He knew this place. Chateau de Chantilly, once the seat of the grand Condé, head of the Bourbon-Condé dynasty, looted and brought to ruin by the mob in the first violent rush of the Revolution. He had thought it deserted. It wasn’t. A spider had moved in and made her nest.

“Get him down to the dungeons,” Asharti said over her
shoulder as she waved a languid hand and moved through massive wooden doors opened by an exceedingly pale, black-clad servant. Inside, the first efforts at restoration had begun. The front hall was reasonably intact, if several of the rooms beyond looked desolate still. Asharti ascended one of two graceful curling staircases, the banisters still bare wood in places where they had been repaired. He was hauled through a heavy wooden door to the right of the great entryway, down some steps and then another stair into the bowels of the earth. The chateau had been used as a prison several times in its long life. The passages here were lined with torches that provided flickering, nightmare lighting. Through open arches he saw the small stacked tiles of hypocausts. Between the towers of tile bubbled steaming hot springs that would heat the rooms above. The air smelled of sulfur. The chateau was built over a Roman ruin.

All this registered in some part of a mind still filled with cotton. The two brutes hauled him into a darkened cell. He had the impression of rough stone. They bolted his shackles onto chains that fell from rings in the ceiling. He half hung there, the metal biting into his wrists, his legs too weak to bear him up. The place was hot and dank, filled with the smell of mold over the sulfur. The door clanged shut and he was left in darkness to contemplate just what Asharti might do with a man who had information she wanted, with a man who, to all intents and purposes except the final result, had killed her. If he was a praying man, he would beg for courage.

John was wakened from a semiconscious state not rightly sleep by the shriek of the hinges on the metal door. He was sweating in his broadcloth coat and waistcoat. The flickering light from the corridor silhouetted a sinuous figure surrounded by a gauzy haze of fabric. With an effort, he grasped the chains above his shackles and hauled himself
up. He would meet his fate standing. The movement made his head swim. He breathed through his mouth to keep the nausea at bay.
Barlow, I should have taken your offer of a capsule
, he thought.

Quintoc entered behind her, carrying a torch, his rosy, open countenance marred by a self-satisfied smirk. In his other hand, he carried a large, curved knife.

Asharti was wearing almost nothing. A gathering of semitransparent silk in olive green that passed over her shoulders in two swathes covered her breasts, was cinched at the waist with a belt that looked as if it was made of copper coins, and fell in frothy pools to the floor. Her hips were revealed and the side curve of her breasts. Her nails were now painted with copper instead of gilt. She had what looked like amulet bracelets on her upper arms. A beaten-copper necklace lay between her breasts. Her skin glowed with a light sheen of perspiration. Still, she looked at ease in the stifling atmosphere. As she walked into the room it seemed to come to life.

“Now,” she said, “we may indulge in some truly private conversations. Many in fact. We have all the time in the world.” She spoke English, her accent flavored with the Eastern Mediterranean. She nodded to Quintoc who put his torch in a metal holder set against the stone wall. John eyed his knife, trying to keep fear out of his eyes. The man with the innocent face stalked over and ran the knife tip along the line of John’s jaw. It was almost a caress.

“All the time in the world,” he whispered.

“Get to it,” Asharti snapped.