Blood to Blood (6 page)

"Don't worry. Countess. Everything can be handled through us," Steranko explained. "We are quite used to handling the affairs of nobility like yourself, as well as those with other unique needs."

Beside her. Colleen whispered in a voice so low only a vampire's ears could detect any sound at all. "Unique needs. Banshees. Dearg-dul. Rakashas."

"And you can handle this all?" Joanna asked.

"All of it. We can even keep you safe until the ship departs tomorrow evening."

So easy! So very easy! Joanna pulled in a quick breath, then realized how insane her laugh would seem, how out of place. She pressed her lips together tightly, feeling ready to explode.

"It will cost, of course," Steranko went on.

How dare he try to cheat her! Her eyes flashed with anger and he quickly added, "But no more than any set of forged papers, I assure you."

Forged? "I go under my own name," she insisted.

Steranko considered this. "I think you must once you reach your destination. Countess. If you do not, you will have no part of your brother's wealth once you've arrived in London. According to these documents, he has sizable holdings there."

"And why not now?" she asked.

"It would not be be completely wise. Countess. You see, your brother's name is too well known in this country, and the fate of the sailors on the
Demeter
only added to his reputation. You might end up on a ship where some part of the crew knew the
Demeter's
story and would wish you harm. And by day…" He left the thought unfinished, a polite gesture.

Joanna shut her eyes, struggled to remember the distant past. "There is another name that is also rightly mine," she said at last. "Princess Joanna Mezid-Bey."

Steranko bowed again, lower this time. "I thought I detected some eastern blood in you. I'm sure it will do for your travel papers. Princess. I will also prepare a second set for London."

Joanna glanced in Colleen's direction, but the girl seemed to understand the language as poorly as she understood the meaning of the words. Frowning, Joanna faced the man again, adding another request in quick, dated Romanian.

It was his turn to be confused, and she repeated herself more slowly. "I wish a private cabin for myself and my servant. She will watch over me to be certain there are no mishaps."

"It shall be done. Princess," Steranko said when she had finished. "And may I remind you that this will be a long voyage with few stops. I suggest that tonight, you head north from the wharfs. The area is poor and wild. You will dine easily there, and the one you choose will not be missed."

Joanna did giggle then, out of joy, not confusion. With that quick statement she felt more at home than she had in the long, confusing days that preceded it.

On the other hand. Colleen felt suddenly ill. She didn't understand every word the man said, but it seemed that he spoke of murder as casually as he might the food at a well-respected inn. When Joanna gripped her arm. Colleen had to fight the urge to pull away, to dig in her heels as Joanna led her into the darkness outside.

"Will you… kill?" she asked Joanna when they were some distance away from the building.

Joanna shrugged. Her grip on Colleen's wrist had grown painfully tight as she led Colleen in the direction Steranko had suggested.

The streets grew narrower and muddier, though there had been no recent rain. A stench filled the air, one far too familiar to a girl who had spent too many months in the London slums. Under normal circumstances, she would be keeping to the shadows, moving in quick, silent bursts, hoping to escape notice. Now she walked with her mistress, and though she was still frightened, it was not for herself.

A man reeled out of an open door, falling against her. She pushed him away with all the force she could muster. He looked at her, eyes glazed, mind clouded with drugs or drink, illness or exhaustion. "Go!" she ordered in a harsh whisper.

Close to her, so close that Colleen could feel the chill of her flesh beneath the layers of cloth, Joanna tittered.

"Please," Colleen begged softly. "Please."

Joanna's hand covered Colleen's eyes, her free arm circled Colleen's waist, pulling her closer. Colleen felt her feet leave the ground, her body propelled upward. Lips were pressed to her neck, drawing blood with deceptive delicacy. When she opened her eyes, she saw the stars whirling above her, then slower, and slower, until they vanished, leaving only darkness…

When she came to her senses, she was stretched out in the cart, in the narrow space between its sides and her mistress's shelter. Steranko was standing at the back of it, holding a plate of spicy stew and a mug of beer. "I suggest you keep your strength at its peak," he said. "It's going to a long journey for both of you."

He left the plate and mug on the edge of the cart and turned his back to her, walking away as if she were one already dead.

When he left the restaurant after meeting with Jonathan and Van Helsing. Arthur Holmwood had vowed not to read the translation they had given him.

He managed to ignore it until a week after the reading of Gance's will. That afternoon, still exhausted from a long, sleepless night brought on by too much wine at an impromptu wake for Gance that Wilde had tossed with his legacy, he found himself too weary to run away from his curiosity any longer.

He made a grand gesture of uncorking a bottle of Gance's well-aged Merlot and pouring a glass before opening the transcribed journal of Countess Karina Aliczni. When he came to the reference that implied that perhaps vampires did not need to kill, a shudder rolled through him, then another as he realized that he was thinking not of Lucy but of Mina and what they might have done to her had their mission failed.

Though he had loved Lucy, he understood her shortcomings. She had been loyal but flighty, a bit eccentric but lovely, flirtatious, but in time she would have made a marvelous mother for his children. All in all, the perfect wife as long as she did not face undue adversity.

Then she would have wilted and given in.

And yet?

He recalled Jonathan's words to Mina—that if she were to change, he would change with her so she would not go alone into that dark and terrible half life. It had seemed a grand gesture at the time, but not now.

Suppose that when Lucy had tried to give him that dark, eternal kiss, he had pushed back the others with their crosses and their stakes and their hosts and holy water. Suppose that he had let her change him as Dracula had changed her. Would he have possessed enough self-control for both of them?

He didn't know. He had never looked closely at his own defects. But he was certain of one thing: The faith that might have sustained a better man had long ago left him. It would not have been God that kept him from breaking that most basic of all commandments—it would have been the memory of what human contact had once meant to him.

No. In the end it would not have been enough.

Mina, on the other hand, would only grow stronger in adversity. She had already proven that far more than once.

He thought of her, of Lucy, and last of himself. Then he cried, until there were no tears left in him—one final grand gesture of grief for her memory.

In the morning, he took stock of his pounding head, his eyes red-rimmed as some widowed woman's, and vowed to take Gance's advice from months before and put the matter behind him.

It was not so easily done. Arthur had lost his own parents when he was thirteen—a father to a riding accident, a mother to grief. He had been raised by a bachelor uncle who had more money than common sense. Some ten years after his parents' death, he lost his uncle when the ship taking the man to India sank off the Cape of Good Hope.

With a title and the money to accompany it, Arthur drifted for a few years until he met Lucy. No sooner had he started courting her than her family adopted him as their own.

He'd reveled in their exuberant attention. But they were just as exuberant in their grief. The family still draped their doors in black ribbons and their bodies in black wool, and most still had to reach for kerchiefs when her name was mentioned, as if she had been laid to rest last week instead of nearly a year before.

He has lost a fiancée. Would he lose her family too?

Yet he knew that the best way to begin his own healing was to stop his constant visits to her family and instead mourn with the stronger ones who also had loved her.

And so his thoughts turned to Mina. He intended to send her a letter telling her that he was coming to Exeter and wanted to call. Before he could do so, he received a telegram from her, inviting him to come and visit and see her new home.

He'd heard about the house; all Gance's close friends knew of it. But it had been Gance's private retreat. Few even knew the address, and of those who did, none had ever been invited inside.

Seeing Mina had been a pleasant idea. Now curiosity made the journey downright irresistible.

He sent a quick wire to her asking that she meet him at the station. The following morning he packed a traveling bag and caught the first train west.

When Mina received the telegram, she immediately realized the turn their conversation would take. In a house the size of hers, privacy was nearly impossible. Working side by side with Essie on setting up the house, Mina realized how rare their camaraderie was. And though Essie would undoubtedly learn part of the vampires' story someday, she hardly needed to hear it all so soon, and thinking her employer mad, or worse, resign. So Mina suggested that the woman take a few days off to visit a cousin in Plymouth whom she had not seen for the year she had nursed Mrs. Proctor.

Mina walked into town with Essie, seeing her off on the northbound coach as if they were friends, not mistress and servant. She had just enough time for a quick cup of tea at a little cafe near the station before Arthur's train pulled in.

He was easy to spot, with his fair hair seeming to glow in the precious rays of midmorning sun breaking through the interminable British mists. When he reached her, he dropped his small satchel and gave her a long hug, smiling while she rearranged the jade green bonnet that had gone askew from his exuberant greeting.

"I only saw you for a few hours while you were in London and have been missing your company ever since. Has it only been two weeks?" he asked as he linked her arm in his and patted her hand. "It's an unnaturally lovely day. Is your house too far away to walk?"

"A bit of a hike. Nothing I don't do often."

"Then let's walk. Are there places you need to stop along the way?"

"A number of them. I'm glad you asked, since I could use your advice. If you had come just a week later, you would not have seen the house as it was when Gance was alive."

"You're changing it?" he asked, his shock half serious, as if the museum to licentiousness must remain completely intact.

"Expanding it is a better term. It's more of a cottage than a house. And scarcely big enough for one, let alone my servant and occasional guests."

"If space is a problem, I could stay with the Westernas."

"There's absolutely no need. Essie and I have been making do. I've given her a couple of days off so we can catch up on things."

She took him to the job site of a carpenter she was thinking of hiring, to a woodworker's shop, a seamstress to get fabric swatches for draperies for the new rooms. He offered advice when asked, seeming just as content to watch her excitement as she planned her addition.

When they were close to her home, he suggested that they stop for an early dinner.

They chose a place he knew well, one that served excellent Cornish hens and brewed its own ale. They were midway through dinner before she realized that his gaity was strained, and probably had been since his arrival.

She reached across the table and rested her hand on his, a gesture that she hoped would reveal what she felt in her heart but did not have the words to say.

"There's not an hour that passes…" he said and looked away. When he turned back to her, his expression seemed almost merry again, as if he had shrugged off Lucy's memory one more time. He ordered them each a snifter of brandy, drank his fast and ordered another.

It was early evening when they reached the cottage, all the magnificent shades of the late summer walkway muted by the dusk. She led him up the walk and inside without speaking, as if it were a museum, then took him through the back doors and into the garden.

"Gance said this was his favorite place," Mina told him after he'd taken it all in.

"No wonder. All the flowers, and the huge bare windows that expose your life to the world, even if the world is filled only with roses and delphiniums. Not at all like the shutters and draperies of polite society. I've grown to hate those velvet cages."

"So have I," she said. Then added, "Damn them all."

She poured them both a drink—sherry for her, scotch and water for him—and they settled into the slatted wooden chairs in the garden. "How is your friend Rose Lewis?" Mina asked, recalling the showgirl Arthur had been seeing.

"Off touring the Continent, this time with the London Opera. The last note I received from her was condolences when she heard of Gance's death. She asked me to come to see her perform in Berlin, but I have no interest. I'm afraid I've become a bit of a recluse as of late."

"I'm sorry to hear it. Are you still in mourning?"

"If you mean are my doors draped in black, not anymore. Now I merely want to tell everyone I care about exactly what happened to all of us. I suppose it's no secret anymore, but I doubt anyone would believe it. Most would think me mad. So it's better to avoid polite company altogether."

"I've told some people. They believed me."

"But you're so sensible, how could they not?" He smiled as he said the last, sheepishly, as if realizing that some women might take his words as an insult. "I did take your advice, though, and finally read the journal." He paused for another large gulp of his drink before going on. "Then I read it all twice, then some sections again. I admit that I did not like it at all.

"I can see no point in asking Van Helsing his opinion on the story since he's convinced of the justice of what we have done. As for Seward, he's far too rigid to think beyond black and white. And Jonathan's response would be colored by what happened to you.

"That leaves only you, and your opinion is the one I value above all others. Tell me, did we do the right thing in killing Lucy?"

She had to force herself to look at him while she considered how to say the truth as gently as possible. "I can only say what I believe, and that is that given everything we knew and everything that happened, we did what we thought best."

He stood and came to her, towering over her. "You didn't answer me," he said.

"It was all we could do," she went on.

"I could have followed my instincts. I could have loved her, as she asked. Then she would have come to me—"

"And killed you in the end, or changed you into what she had become. Could you have resisted that constant desire to do the same to strangers, especially if you hunted with the one you loved beside you?"

She diffused his anger with that, but with it gone, there was little else. He sat beside her and, as he had at the reading of Gance's will, took her hand. "I know it's insane, but I would give my fortune to spend an hour or two with one of those creatures and see for myself what they are like."

Evil, she thought, but knew it wasn't true—not of Karina, probably not Joanna, either, though from everything she knew about that one no one could be sure.

He looked down the hill at the river, now a dark ribbon in the dim light of the stars. "My friend Beardsley says that Death is an entity, hovering close and watching us all. That's how I feel about Lucy sometimes, like she is on the edge of sight, watching and reproaching me for what I thought I must do."

Dracula had been an entity at the end, Mina thought. Incorporeal. Waiting. And Lucy? No, she decided, Lucy could never have done the same. She never had the power. And Gance?

The shadows suddenly seemed too close, too alive. "It's getting chilly out here. We should go inside," she suggested.

He sat in one of the wicker chairs in the solarium, watching her intently as she moved through the room, lighting lamps and candles, filling the space with soft, dancing light. She was a beautiful woman, with that mane of bright chestnut hair and those arresting dark eyes. Was she the real reason he came here?

"I don't want to pry, but I am curious. What's happened with you and Jonathan?" he asked.

The candle she was holding to light another lamp flickered for a moment as her hand trembled. "He won't find the time to discuss anything. I think that even the thought that there might be a scandal unnerves him."

"Brave women invite scandal."

Mina turned to look at him, a smile dancing on the edge of her lips. "Did Rose tell you that?"

"Actually, my mother. She was giving advice on the sort of woman I should not marry. I've always found the other sort boring, though." He hesitated, then made a quick decision and blurted, "Jonathan's a fool."

"Arthur!"

"Don't pretend to be shocked. He is. And I feel… I feel as if we are all related now through what we have been through. And if Jonathan wishes a separation or divorce, then may I be considered as an alternate?"

"We scarcely knew each other before this all began."

"And no one else will ever know us as well as we know each other because they can never understand what we have been through."