Night of the Vampires (24 page)

She was afraid that Trudy was going to start crying in gratitude, so she rose quickly.

“Oh, Lord,” she heard Cole murmur, and she quickly knew why.

“What in God's name is going on?” Lisette demanded angrily. “Where are you all?”

Dickens seemed to hear the voice of authority in her cry, and he quickly answered by rote—the soldier accustomed to command. “Come on up, Miss Annalise. We're all here, ma'am.”

Cole glared at Dickens, who went white. But it was too late. Lisette Annalise was already stomping up the stairs.

She looked around and seemed to quickly assess the situation. “One of them got in here,” she said flatly, and she stared at her assistant.

“It wasn't her fault. It was mine,” Megan said. “And we've handled the situation.”

“Were you near the diseased?” she demanded, staring at her assistant.

“Um, um—” Trudy stuttered.

“You were!” Lisette said.

The woman might have been working with the archers on the field all day, but now she was dressed elegantly in a silk gown, and her hair was perfectly coiffed in an up-sweep. She looked as ladylike and poised as a plantation wife greeting her husband's guests, but there remained that unmistakable air of steel about her.

“Did you see everything that happened?” Lisette demanded.

Cole said, “Lisette, it's over.”

“So, no, you didn't. And I believe there was a time when Trudy must have been alone with—whatever creature made its way into this house! Megan, accompany me, if you will. I'm afraid we'll have to have a complete inspection of my assistant, and don't you dare start
blubbering, Trudy, that's the way it needs to be and every one of you knows that I'm right!”

“Oh!” Trudy cried out, and she swayed on the sofa, crashing down into a dead faint once again.

C
OLE PACED THE
parlor area, waiting for the women to come out of the bedroom. He wished he'd had an argument with which to counter Lisette, but it was true that they needed to make sure that Trudy Malcolm had not been bitten covertly, despite Megan angrily declaring that it wasn't possible for her to have been bitten so quickly.

Lisette was not to be dissuaded, reminding them all that the things could strike with the speed of a cobra and incubate inside someone for a long time.

Dickens alone remained with him, pacing in the opposite direction. Newcomb and his men had taken the corpse back to the graveyard. Betsy would now rest in peace.

The two men had passed each other five times when Cole finally barked out, “Dickens! Grab a whiskey. Quit that walking up and down.”

Dickens jumped. He stared at Cole, but was too polite to mention that Cole was doing the same thing.

“I'll have a whiskey, too,” Cole said.

“That poor woman. She must be humiliated. She is such a lady.”

“Trudy. Trudy Malcolm?” Cole said, pouring the whiskey himself since Dickens seemed to have it in mind that he was an officer.

“She's—she's gentle, she's kind. A true lady.”

“Okay.” Cole wasn't sure how to respond. He poured the portions of whiskey and handed a glass to Dickens. “Well, don't worry. We…will…all treat her like a lady, have no fear, Dickens.”

“Yes, sir. Well, you would, sir. You're always courteous. Not everyone is.”

“Well, probably there are those who wouldn't say I was always courteous,” Cole told him. “But, we will take special care of Miss Malcolm.”

Lisette came out of the bedroom. His bedroom. Since the child-vampire had exploded just inside Megan's bedroom, Lisette had lifted her nose and headed into his.

Neither would prove to be a comfortable place, conducive to a romantic evening, he thought.

“She's clean. Not a mark on her,” the Pinkerton said, heading straight for the liquor. She poured herself a sherry and sipped it, then spun around to stare at Cole and Dickens. “But mark my words, gentlemen, this is a brutal war we fight. Nothing can be taken for granted.” She looked at Cole, and, apparently, realized the sheriff eyed her like one might an icy dictator. She instantly managed one of her sweet smiles. “You know, Cole, that we can't be too careful. We can't trust in children, and we can't allow ourselves a the naive niceties of life, not all the time.” She scanned him with a head-to-toe gaze, and then glanced at the clock. “The general has been waiting supper so that we all might join him, but…” Her voice trailed. “I will tell him another hour, Cole, dear. That should give you time to clean up.”

“Yes, Lisette, I will need an hour. Digging up corpses and beheading them has been dirty work.”

“Cole, you needn't be so crass,” she said, as if she
hadn't just forced her assistant to strip for a puncture search.

“Dickens, you can escort Miss Malcolm back to the general's when she's finished dressing. I'll go on over and inform him that dinner will be delayed.”

She swallowed down the sherry and headed for the stairs.

Megan emerged from the room, looking as if she was about to explode. She closed the door behind her, giving Trudy the privacy she surely needed.

“She's gone?” Megan asked Cole.

“Yes. We're invited to the general's for dinner again.”

Megan didn't look happy. She glanced at the boyish corporal mindfully, and then decided that she was going to explode anyway. “Lisette Annalise is her own form of monster!”

Dickens gasped and then laughed, and then sobered.

But Cole was glad, because Megan managed to smile. It occurred to him then that it was odd: a vampire
could
strike with the speed of a cobra, yet it hadn't gone for Trudy. Rather, it had rushed to attack Megan when her back was turned.

The church had never been under attack.

The vampires had broken into the schoolroom section of the church while Megan had been there—at her weakest.

He kept quiet then because Dickens was with them, and Trudy Malcolm emerged from the bedroom at last, redressed, but with a face as bright red as that of a lobster. To the young spinster, an inspection must have been mortifying.

“Miss Malcolm,” Dickens said politely, “I'm to see you
back to your quarters at the general's lodgings, whenever you're ready to go.”

Trudy didn't say anything. She just nodded miserably.

She headed for the stairs, and then stopped. She looked back at Megan. “Thank you.”

“I'm sorry, Trudy. I'm so sorry,” Megan said.

Trudy smiled weakly. “I'm all right. I mean, I might have been viciously attacked by that child…and…I guess it's better to know for sure that I'm not bitten…. Oh, it's so terrible that a baby like that could be…” She let her voice trail, and then she lifted her chin. “I'm not sorry. We still have to look for the good in people, right?”

“We do have to be very careful these days,” Cole said.

“But, no, tenderness and caring are not bad things, Trudy,” Megan said.

Trudy nodded, and then started down the stairs. Dickens looked back at Megan and Cole and then followed her out.

They were alone, and for a minute, they stood in silence.

“I'm supposed to wash up,” Cole said at last. “For dinner. I suppose I'm not in any shape to dine politely with a general and an actress.”

“I'll go out back and fetch more water from the well,” Megan offered.

She started for the stairs and he caught her arm. She looked at him, waiting. But he wasn't sure what he wanted to say, and to his relief, she spoke.

“I'm sorry, Cole. I'm really sorry. I just felt that I had to go back there today. And I believe that Daniel is going to prove invaluable to us. He was stricken badly, yet he
managed to survive. He didn't attack human beings—he sucked the blood out of rats, for God's sake. It was important. Please, I don't intend to ignore your wishes all of the time. Honestly.”

“Just when you think you're right,” he said quietly.

She was silent.

“I was right—you were severely weakened today.”

“But we don't know what could have happened to him,” she reminded him.

He didn't know how to end the argument. He certainly didn't want it going on through the night.

“Didn't you find the last hour strange?” he asked her.

“Oh, yes. Very strange. You didn't have your actress friend making a pathetic girl strip and turn in circles so she could assure herself there were no bite marks. Oh, yes, that was strange—perhaps
acutely uncomfortable
is the better term.”

“No, I mean before that. Tell me what happened.”

He released her arm. She frowned, thinking, and wandered back toward the liquor table. She poured herself a whiskey neat, and swallowed it in a gulp. She set the glass down.

“I've seen children turned before,” she told him.

“But you brought that child into this house.”

“Trudy was convinced that she was but a lost child, and I'm sorry to admit, I wasn't as resolute as I should have been. I was a little taken in myself. Betsy was able to maintain tears, to speak, to lure us into believing in her, and I'm usually pretty good at knowing when I see—when I see one of my own kind.”

He strode over to her, taking her by the arms. “There are only two people I know who are exactly your
kind
.
You two are nothing like the others.” He winced. “I know a few people who have been turned and somehow managed to retain their souls.”

She studied his eyes. “Alex's father?” she asked.

He nodded.

“And maybe mine?” she queried softly.

He shook his head. “Megan, a vampire doesn't get as practiced as that child without the help of some kind of a—a mentor, I suppose you could say. When they behave just as beasts, attacking wildly, at anyone, then you know that they were turned, taken for food, and then just deserted. But that child—someone had to teach her to control her hunger to get what she wanted. To lure people to a point where she could attack.”

She studied his eyes, and he knew that she agreed with his train of thought.

“But, we've known that…we've known that someone has been out there. Since the Wilderness, at the very least. It seems we can track all this back to that battle. The fires and the carnage were so terrible…no one knew where bodies would be. No one knew who many of the dead were…. Some bodies were burned so badly, no one knew which side they'd been fighting for. And this has all come from then, the best that I can tell,” she said.

He nodded. “You're probably right. So, if we're figuring this correctly, there's an older, practiced vampire out there who decided it was time to get into the war.”

“On which side?” she asked drily.

“This vampire doesn't care which side. This vampire has started a war against humanity, and intends to take it as far as it can.”

She pulled back, studying his face again. “Not my father, Cole. Not my father.”

“That's what you want to believe.”

“I think I learned a lot about belief, that it's a good thing. Father Costello believes, and his belief keeps him strong.”

“Don't mix up faith with what you want to be truth, Megan.”

“I'm not doing that!” she protested.

“Look, we don't know if your father still exists, Megan. You want to believe that there's someone really evil out there, and that your father does remain, that he's out there combating the evil. You're stretching the limits of probability.”

She shook her head. “But not of possibility.”

He looked into her golden eyes, and at the hope there, and he knew that he'd found another argument he wasn't going to win.

“No, not possibility,” he agreed. He stepped away from her. “I'll go downstairs. My Federal boys will be back and they'll get enough water in for me to do a nice cold cleanup job. Get a little more rest, if you can. I'll collect you when I'm ready.”

 

T
RUST WAS SOMETHING
that had to be earned.

Despite everything that had happened during the day, that was the one thought that kept going through Megan's mind. She'd been so gratified that he'd leaped over the remains of the child vampire to check on her that she hadn't realized that there was now a new distance between them. A distance that became evident when they had spoken.

She took another swallow of whiskey, watching the fire that burned in the hearth. It was probably going to be their last night for such simple pleasures as a fire, the
comfort of a plush sofa, the solace of a liquor table. But though she enjoyed such niceties, they weren't necessary to her—she'd spent far too long on far too many battlefields, praying for alcohol just to ease some pain, not for fun, and for fire, just because the earth was so damp and the temperature freezing.

What disturbed her was Cole himself, and the fact that he had left her to freshen up, preferring the company of the Union men to a prolonged conversation with her. She tried to reason with herself that there might be a real bathtub down on the ground level. And yes, of course, the well was much closer and it was easier to haul water in on the first level than the second.

And she asked herself if there was anything she might have done differently that day, and there wasn't.

But she had just lost ground again in that effort to be really trusted.

Maybe there was
trust,
and then a different kind of trust.

She looked around the rooms that she had so enjoyed when they had somehow belonged to—or, at least, were borrowed by—just her and Cole. Now, the remnant of ash from a diseased and cunning vampire lay about her bedroom, and she didn't think she could even venture into Cole's again after the humiliation that Lisette Annalise had inflicted on Trudy.

Trudy had stood shaking like a windblown branch while she removed her clothing. It had been worse when she had shed it all and stood in there with her eyes closed in her nakedness. Then, she had been trembling like a terrier who knew that his master was going to beat him again.

It had been horrible to witness, but she didn't doubt that
Lisette would have dragged one of the men in as a second set of eyes if Megan herself hadn't been there. She'd tried to speed up the process as best she could, at least helping Trudy with the many ties on her garments.

Megan leaned back, hating what had happened. Even worse was the breach of trust for Trudy, owing from her simple, desperate determination to give love and help to a little girl.

“Well,” she said aloud, lifting her glass to the fire. “At least, I'm not jealous anymore. Any man who might want Lisette Annalise could not be a friend of mine!”

“Here, here!”

She startled and swung around. Cole was back at the landing, grinning at her. She flushed, and she felt slightly warmed and renewed by the light in his eyes.

“Liar! You admired her and found her attractive,” she accused him.

“Well, guilty, once. I admired her. I never said that I wanted her.”

“But—surely, you did. You don't need to lie. I'm not in the least naive, you know. She does have certain assets.”

“Yes, and if she'd never spoken, never looked about a room with her ever-watchful and plotting eyes, yes, possibly, she'd have been appealing. A puma can be beautiful—but far too deadly.”

Megan studied her glass. “Would you say that of me?” she asked.

“Are you fishing for a compliment—or worried that I might see you as a puma?”

She looked up, flushing. “I don't fish for compliments.”

He smiled and joined her on the sofa. “I'm sure you've never had to,” he said.

“That's nice,” she told him gravely. “But it doesn't answer my question.”