A Drop of Red (28 page)

Maybe someday Blanche truly might join us,
she thought, allowing the others to hear.

Noreen and Polly sent Della agreeable yet tentative smiles while Violet darted past them, saying, “Can’t you even offer a smidge of what to expect, Wolfie? Please, please, please?”

“Such enthusiasm,” he teased, allowing Polly, then Noreen, then Della through the beads before letting them slap back to place. Then he led the group through the tunnel. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have raised your hopes about this old, stuffy place. I do hope there won’t be any postvisit comments about how decrepit your Wolfie is.”

In spite of his jesting, they all knew he
was
terribly ancient, and it’d actually been just over a century ago that his own master had instructed him to build an Underground. Yet even as the other blood brothers separated and grew more isolated as they constructed their own communities, Wolfie had been too enamored of using Thomas Gatenby’s inheritance while exploring the world to settle down so soon. Hence, like a stubborn playboy, he had only committed to his own Underground in the nineteen thirties, long after Queenshill had been established.

The part of the story that always interested Della the most whenever Wolfie told it concerned those other blood brothers—the master vampires who’d exchanged at the same time as he. Wolfie had told the girls about the hideous rumors from other traveling brothers—more carefree creatures such as he—who had not yet built their own communities way back when.

Some masters, they had told Wolfie, were taking over existing Undergrounds. This was the reason
they
had bided their time in creating their own.

The news had been no shock, Wolfie had told the girls. The blood brothers had been raised and trained as warriors, and this habit had obviously carried over into vampire life, although when the dragon awakened . . .

Wolfie always trailed off ominously here, making the girls squirm because they could guess there would be awful consequences for the disobedient blood brothers.

When the story continued, Wolfie would always mention how he and his companion had been significantly drawn to London for years, and they had settled here only after he’d sensed the aggressive vibrations from another blood brother depart the area. During one of his roams about town, he had even discovered the remains of a series of burned-out subterranean rooms that had been situated in deserted construction areas for the tube.

Remains from the master who had left London?

Wolfie believed so, yet he had still set down roots in this city with such wonderfully open parks, high living, and mystical anchorings. And even though he ruled an Underground, he’d vowed never to hide down below. After all, he hadn’t sensed another master since finding evidence of the departed one.

Yet, most importantly, he had no doubts that this Underground was the strongest of them all, and this was the reason other masters had no doubt stayed away.

Even so, Della couldn’t help but recall what she’d accidentally heard in Wolfie’s mind last night.

Nearby?

As they arrived at the surface door, she told herself that if a master such as Wolfie wasn’t visibly concerned about the possibility, she, the lowest of the low, certainly shouldn’t be.

Wolfie made a show of listening for vibrations above, then he winked at them as he crouched, then zinged up to the door and blasted through it, springing into the open.

For a beautiful moment, he was suspended against a brittle night sky until he landed, then hunched over the opening to watch the girls follow.

Beginning with Violet, each of them imitated his exit, bouncing upward, then thudding to the crunchy leaves.

Once Della emerged, she immediately helped Noreen chain the door and cover it with dead leaves just before Wolfie whispered, “Follow me,” and gave a howl as he zoomed into the darkness and through the thick, scraggly woods so far from the school.

Pulse spiking, Della and the rest leaped to a gallop, falling into his very steps as they bounded over grass and hills and railway tracks, streaking through the moonlight and leaving only a blur for any human eye that might catch their progress.

Della was never happier. Running in her humanlike form. Wind in her hair. Away from her old life and toward the new.

They shot up more hills, then through branches that grabbed for their hair and clothing but couldn’t hold on because they were moving so fast and—

They sensed that Wolfie had stopped at the cusp of a hill, and they did, as well, halting in front of a grass-camouflaged door. They panted softly as he motioned to the entrance, causing it to yawn open in the flowing rise.

“In you go,” he said.

Violet, Polly, Noreen, then Della hopped down into a pitch-dark gape, so blinding that Della’s heightened gaze had to adjust once she landed in a crouch on the dirt.

Wolfie shut the door behind them, and Della’s chest beat with a tattoo that linked with that of her friends’.

But, as she began to see vague shapes in the tunnel, she realized the thuds consisted of more than
their
pulses.

There were . . . drumbeats.

Other bodies punching out a common rhythm.

Wolfie’s teeth gleamed into a smile in the dark, and he walked off, leading them down a dank tunnel, which gradually became a brick corridor of arched walls that moaned with captured wind.

“This is my favorite part of teaching,” he said as the pounding got louder, bouncing round in all their chests. “I always love to see the looks on the classes’ faces when they catch first sight.”

Noreen clasped Della’s hand. Polly did the same on Della’s other side.

But Violet? She was right next to Wolfie as the darkness grew to dimness, as the thumping grew to banging.

Where are we?
Violet mind-asked him.

He glanced down at her, hardly seeming surprised that she had left the group behind.
Highgate, just off North Road. Highwaymen used to employ these tunnels for smuggling loot, and when I found them, I couldn’t resist. I blocked some of the known ones off, then all it took from that point was a touch more digging and decoration.

They halted several meters away from what looked to be a belling banner that covered an entrance. The colors reminded Della of a flag waving over a castle, yet that made sense, seeing as Wolfie had spent his existence in and out of castles and palaces and even the woods where peasants used to hunt predators.

He taunted them, his eyes searing through the dark.
On second consideration, perhaps another night would be a better time for your introduction. . . .

“Wolfie!” they yelled over the drums, needing to finally partake of the treat they’d been promised for so long.

His laugh tore through them as he turned round and leaped toward the banner, then whipped it aside to welcome them to their future, their home upon finishing school. . . .

They all ran to him, peeking in and sucking in a breath at the cavernous, raucous seventeenth-century inn, with rough-pine drinking bars, overturned tables, and bone-spiked chandeliers.

But they could barely see the furnishings through the throng of girls, the powdered, sugared scent of their clothing taking the place of the ale and smoke that should’ve seeped past the doorway.

There were girls sporting golden half masks that hid their identity as they tossed back their hair and laughed.

Girls wearing dresses from all eras while they stood on wooden chairs and tore at each other’s clothing as if they were the stepsisters in a Cinderella story.

Girls sitting on the floor and beating large drums like overbearing pulses. Girls climbing on the upstairs railings. Girls lying on the bar and drinking the blood spilling from the golden taps.

Senses blooming with all the yelling and carousing, Della longed to see their faces. A clinging hope in the back of her mind made her wonder if, perhaps, she would find Briana, Sharon, and Blanche here, where they had been told by a wickedly plotting Wolfie to reveal no secrets until Della and the rest had been introduced to the real Underground. . . .

But that was ludicrous. Wolfie would never go that far.

So she went on to see if she might recognize former students from previous classes. The group had never been told the identities of earlier Queenshill vampires, so she was dreadfully curious.

All they knew was that every two years, girls like them—of proper European stock, of affluence—were turned, then trained to recruit for the main Underground. Then they were sent here, where they could go to the surface to feed at will, or even to attend another school under another name, as long as they shielded and remained alert for nosy humans.

Della clutched Noreen’s and Polly’s hands, and they clutched back, taking in the vivacious army Wolfie had been instructed to form so that, one day, his master could rise, gather all the Undergrounds, and dominate the world.

An army of scratching, running, singing, laughing, drinking masked Violets, Pollys, and Noreens, and Blanches, and . . .

And probably even Dellas.

But there were also the girls who had been recruited—the ones who didn’t quite have the polish of any Queenshill girl.

Kates. Disaffected girls, runaways, bad daughters who took care to remain missing from wherever they had originally come from. Once accepted by the recruiters, they had all exchanged in a ceremony such as the one Della had undergone with her own class-mates.

As Wolfie said, they had all become one, big, happy family.

Even so, Della keenly remembered the raw initiation into it—the blood coming out of her, into her, her soul ripping out of her core to go . . .

Where? Was it roaming about, as free as Wolfie had promised?

Or had it gone to the other place—the inferno that was hinted at in the eyes of the cat who kept watch over the girls?

When Wolfie motioned them farther into the chaos, Della was reminded of the very reason she had welcomed the exchange: as long as she lived—and it would be a long, long time, maybe even forever if she could manage—she would be a part of a home, no matter where her soul might be.

A low, cracking scream claimed Della’s attention, and she glanced across the room to where a teen boy ran from a girl who was moving in human-time motion, toying with him instead of pouncing vampire quick. He yelled again when she batted him to the floor.

Then he scrambled back up, darting for a table. She bounded into the air, landing on him, then licked him from bare chest to face.

Polly’s mind-voice validated what Della was thinking.

Noreen added,
Wolfie would’ve eaten him right and proper aboveground.

All of them squeezed hands, excited, their pulses stabbing.

Near Wolfie, Violet was greedily eyeing the boy as he wiggled out from under the attacking girl. He stumbled up the stairs as the vampire alternately snatched at him and laughed.

Wolfie, in turn, was watching his class, his eyes alight.
They’re having a masque in your honor. A good soiree will relieve all kinds of pressure from the drudgeries of life.

One girl dressed in a primal, fringed ensemble and wearing a gilded fawn’s mask pranced by Wolfie, touching his hair, just as if he truly were a rock star. And since he loved to brag that he was quite storied, Della thought that, in the eyes of all these eternal girls, he really might be a leather god.

Right behind the fawn, another female, this one in what looked to be a Spanish gown with the full mask of a panther, followed in hot pursuit.

As she passed Wolfie, she whipped off her facial covering to reveal the hairless cat-wolf appearance they had all earned during the exchange.

She barked lightly at her master in greeting, then masked herself again and pursued the fawn. They disappeared through an arch in a far wall.

As yet another girl swished by—this one in a green cape, wolf half mask, and a chaste, ribboned skirt and bodice—Wolfie scooped her into his arms. She giggled and hugged him.

But then that hug turned into something more when her hand crept between them, hidden by her cape.

Closing his eyes, then opening them to reveal that his irises had gone pale yellow, Wolfie whispered into her ear.

She giggled once more, then scampered off.

A dual paradise,
Della thought. For the girls and Wolfie.

Hearing Della’s thoughts, he winked at her, his gaze mellowing back to gold as he mind-said,
She was one of the first. Still as lovely as the day she was turned.

A seventy-plus-year-old vampire who hadn’t aged past sixteen. And she would never have to grow up and leave the best friends she would ever make.

None of them would, and this warmed Della’s blood.

Safe.

Wanted.

Violet had tracked the green-caped girl through the arch in the wall, her own eyes a feral purple, showing her excitement at this promise of what they would soon have. Della also felt it, just as she could feel it in the pulsing skins of Noreen and Polly.

After straightening his jacket, Wolfie invited the girls to follow him into that arched exit, where the others had gone.

As they made their way hand in hand through the crowd—oh, the smell of yummy sugar, sweetness,
blood
—the other vampire girls reached out to touch Violet’s arm, Noreen’s red locks, Polly’s cheek. One vampire even swooped down from a swing to skim the frizzy hair Della so despised.

They’re welcoming the new class,
Della mind-said, smiling shyly at them.

The new us,
Noreen added.

They left the masque, the cool, black atmosphere beyond the arch swallowing them. Even before her sight adjusted, Della could tell this second area was just as massive as the first, merely by the way it seemed as if she might fall into a hole if she took another step.