Prince of Hearts (21 page)

She was too terrified to scream. Tall, built like a brick wall, he was dressed in filthy, bloodstained garments. His skin was pasty-pale, and he panted like a thirsty dog.

But Aline knew one thing for certain:
it
wasn't human. The whites of its eyes were filled with an amber-colored glow, and its canine teeth dipped past its lips to razor-sharp points. An evil smirk turned up the corners of its lips. It lowered its head nearer her and sniffed. Its eyes glowed even brighter, and a look of ecstasy suffused its expression.

"Hello, my little bird. I could resist meeting you no longer. You smell as good as promised. I shall truly enjoy this." He tilted his head, studying her closely. "But first, shall we have some fun?"

Aline didn't know where she found the nerve, but she shook her head.

It laughed as if she'd delighted it.

And with that, it tore her out of the closet, tossing her across the room as easily as it had the door. Aline finally found her voice as she sailed through thin air, and she screamed as loud as she could. Somehow the villain managed to cross the room fast enough to catch her at the other end. He clutched her against his unwashed body so tightly Aline gagged – from his hold and from the stench.

She struggled frantically, which only seemed to amuse him further. She heard the sound of her gown ripping as he clawed at her, and then his head was descending, his fangs growing even longer, as if he meant to bite her in the neck.

Aline screamed, and all she could think, before all hell broke loose, was that she was going to be murdered. By a vampire.

WHEN Sasha heard Aline's first scream, he was at the bottom of the boarding house stairs, having rushed across town after receiving Fyodor’s tickertext. Employing all of the superhuman speed at his disposal, he was up the stairs and at her door in the blink of an eye.

He spared a glance for Fyodor, sprawled across the hallway, and his stomach bottomed out with dread. Nothing
human
could fell Fyodor. With no small measure of guilt, he turned away from his old companion without checking his condition. He had no time to lose, and could only hope that Drexler and Rowan were not too far behind him.

Aline screamed again, and Sasha didn't even bother opening the door. He kicked it inwards and scanned the flat. He saw the hellhounds in one corner of the room, blood everywhere. Only Ilya was attempting to regain his feet, dazed, one of his Welding eyes smashed, its innerworkings dangling out of the metal socket. Ikaterina was unmoving next to him, and Sasha's blood ran cold at the sight. But he forced the hellhounds from his mind.

He could mourn Ikaterina later, if he had to. But he would not mourn Aline. He would not lose her.

Sasha was still trying to accept the fact that vampires existed at all, so seeing one with fangs poised to sink into Aline's fragile neck was terrifying. Seeing the monster simultaneously tearing away Aline's gown, exposing her prim white undergarments, then the pale, untouched skin beneath, was something else altogether. Rage shot like molten lava through his veins.

He would kill this bastard, and he would relish it. He was beyond caring what that made him.

He didn't even remember moving across the room, so black was his fury. He didn't even remember tearing the hulking animal away from Aline's neck, microseconds before its fangs sank into her jugular. He threw the creature as far away as he could, through the plate glass and wrought iron of the balcony window, knocking over Aline's plant collection outside.

Shattered glass clung to the monster's clothes, and brackish blood oozed from a hundred tiny nicks on his face and forearms, but the wounds, Sasha saw, were quickly closing up, as if they never were.

The monster quickly regained its feet. It grinned at Sasha as it stepped over the remains of the window and back into the room, eyes aglow with their strange amber fire. "My Prince!" it sneered. "How lovely to see you again, in the flesh, after all these years."

Sasha tensed, his eyes flying wide. The creature spoke in a dialect of Russian he'd not heard in three hundred years. It seemed Rowan was right all along and the killer was from his Russian past. A past he'd tried so hard to forget.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

The creature feigned a hurt expression. "For shame, brother. You don't recognize your own blood?"

He searched the vampire's features with dawning horror. Beneath the fangs and the glowing eyes, this man was too familiar. He was one of the monsters who still haunted Sasha's worst nightmares.

"Vasily!" he breathed. His father's oldest and most vicious bastard. He'd tormented Sasha in secret as a child, and it seemed he was tormenting him still. But how? How was it possible that Vasily had been alive all this time as this creature? And why?

"Why are you doing this?" he demanded.

"I was breakfasting, My Prince," Vasily said disingenuously, in English this time, smirking at Aline, who shuddered and backed away from the both of them, clutching the ruins of her bodice against her chest. "Pity we were interrupted, little bird."

Vasily leered at Aline with such a lascivious, thirsty look in his eyes Sasha snapped. He roared his fury and charged. The creature in Vasily was strong and easily blocked Sasha's fist. It was fast as well, stepping around Sasha and moving with inhuman speed towards Aline, as if it could not resist the temptation of her blood. Sasha was just quick enough to seize his brother by the arm and jerk him in the opposite direction so hard he heard a bone snap.

Vasily landed against Aline's spindle bed, and it collapsed underneath the impact. He quickly regained his feet and came at Sasha with blinding speed, growling like the feral creature he was. He barreled into Sasha so hard he knocked both of them through a wall and into the hallway.

Sasha could hear Aline screaming. So did Vasily – he seemed to respond with glee to Aline's terror. He raised his head and sniffed the air, as if scenting where she was, and shot back inside the room.

Sasha shook off the impact of his landing and leapt in front of Vasily before he could reach Aline. He shoved him into a corner.

Realizing he was trapped, Vasily hissed and swiped Sasha's face with a long claw-like nail, ripping Sasha's flesh from his forehead to his chin. Sasha’s light, acidic blood sizzled down his face and into his collar, momentarily blinding him in one eye. He groaned as he felt the wound quickly, painfully mend itself.

Aline screamed behind him again, and he feared
he
was the source of her terror this time.

The creature laughed wildly. "I think your dear one just discovered how inhuman you are, brother. I was never allowed to call you that, though, was I, My Prince? You were our father's precious heir, unworthy as you were."

"I have never denied my unworthiness, Vasily. I hadn't our father's taste for rape and murder, as you did," he said quietly.

"You were always a coward, brother, to the end. And a liar. You murdered our father, after he gave you everything!"

Sasha laughed wildly. "You think he gave me everything? He took everything from me, and then he gave me an eternity to remember what he'd taken!"

Vasily just sneered at this. "You always had a woman's heart. It was an embarrassment to watch you snivel and weep after your whore of a wife died. Father should have let
you
die then. That heart was meant to be mine, and he made that old man give it to
you
instead. And then you killed him with poison, coward that you are."

Sasha had no response to this. How could he deny what Vasily said, when so much of what he'd said was the truth? He
had
been a coward for too long as Ivan Ivanovich, and it had cost him everything. He wouldn't make that same mistake again, even if he lost the rest of his soul in the process.

But he'd never regretted what he'd done to his father. "He did not deserve honor. He deserved a coward's death. And it was a pleasure to watch him pay," Sasha said at length, enraging Vasily further. "Just as you'll pay for all that you've done. I may have been a coward, but I was never a monster like you."

Vasily smirked. "But it has been so much fun, watching you suffer. Especially this time. I always knew one day your weak nature would betray you, and you'd fall in love again. Imagine my delight to learn that your secretary is the sweetest prize of all to one of my kind. Such lovely blood. That was not planned, I assure you." He paused and sniffed the air as if savoring something. "So lovely. Shall I tell you what I plan to do to your little bird there? Before I drink her dry?"

Sasha growled at the creature and blocked its line of sight to Aline. "You touch her over my dead body."

The creature laughed. "But I would rather you were alive to watch, My Prince. You've always been so good at
watching
. Sometimes
I've
watched
you
as you study the bodies, but you never seem to suffer enough. But you'll suffer when I take her. And I will take her, My Prince. In
all
ways. You do remember how good I always was with the women back in Russia."

Sasha shuddered with revulsion. He was through with this conversation. Vasily was his half-brother, but even when they'd grown up together, Sasha had despised him and all of the atrocities he'd committed as their father's henchman.

When he looked at Vasily, he didn't see family. He saw the blood of dozens of butchered victims, and all the women he'd raped, from Moscow to London. He saw Novgorod, and the blood Vasily had shed with such glee in that city in the name of the Tsar. He saw centuries of hidden anguish as he hunted for a phantom.

Moreover, he saw Aline, and what would have happened to her had he been one minute later in arriving.

And it was unbearable.

Vasily's eyes widened at the murderous rage in Sasha's expression, as if realizing he had said too much, and backed away. But there was nowhere for him to go.

"You look just like father now. I never thought you had it in you, brother," Vasily breathed with something like awe, and it twisted Sasha's insides to hear those words.

But Sasha just smiled an awful smile. "I've always been my father's son. And watching him die was one of the rare pleasures of my life. I wonder how it will feel to kill my brother."

Vasily saw his intent and flashed to the right. But Sasha had the strength of centuries of fury to give him the advantage. He moved quickly, unhesitatingly. Drexler had recommended beheading as the only sure way to kill a vampire, but Sasha had nothing to use but his bare hands. It would not stop him. He'd studied human anatomy for years and knew exactly what he was about.

He gripped the creature he'd once called a brother by the neck and bore one hand through its flesh to the bone of the spine beneath. There was no point in having inhuman strength if he wasn't going to use it.

And so he used it. He ripped the creature's head from its body in one clean swoop, its brackish blood coating his arms and splattering his clothes and face. He tossed aside the head and kicked the feet from underneath its body, then turned away in disgust before it had even hit the ground at his feet.

It took some time before he was able to come back to himself, and it was like awakening from a nightmare, his vision clearing, his abominable heart slowing. He glanced around the wrecked flat, taking it all in as he tried to measure his breathing.

Gradually he realized he was not alone. Aline stood near the ruined door, next to Drexler, Matthews and Rowan, who must have arrived just in time to witness the end, if their slack-jawed expressions were any indication. All of them were staring at him as if they'd never seen him before. But Aline...

Aline looked at him as she had looked at the vampire. As if he were a monster.

And would she be so wrong?

He looked down at the strange, congealed blood covering his forearms, and it dawned on him what he'd just done in his rage. He'd torn off a man's head – his brother's head – and he wasn't the least bit conflicted about it. The only thing he regretted was that Aline had witnessed his monstrousness, because he had the awful suspicion Vasily had spoken true about one thing.

He loved Aline, and he had for some time, without even knowing it.

And he had lost her forever.

Drexler finally broke the awful silence by clearing his throat uncomfortably, sheathing the sword he no longer needed back into his hollow walking stick. "Well, I've never seen it done
quite
like that before," he said with the darkest of wit. "Perhaps you lot
are
stronger after all."

Chapter 8

Her Majesty made a rare public appearance at the British Museum’s latest exhibition, featuring artifacts of Ancient Egypt recovered by a team led by Egyptologist, Dr. Charles Netherfield, recently appointed to the faculty at London University…

-from
The London Post-Dispatch, 1893

"OH, dear, I confess I forgot how you take your tea. Cream? Sugar?" Lady Christiana inquired, her hand pausing over the sugar tongs.

For a long moment, Aline was too incredulous to reply. She couldn't believe Lady Christiana was asking how she took her tea, as if Aline had just popped in for a visit. Just to make sure, she glanced down at her skirt, which was stained with vampire blood – vampire blood! – and then back at Christiana. But instead of screaming bloody murder, she said, "Both, please," in a surprisingly sane-sounding voice.

Though she could not possibly be sane. She'd lost her mind. That had to be it. Nothing else could explain the odd turn her life had taken in the past twelve hours. But here she was, sipping tea with Lady Christiana in the drawing room of Llewellyn House, as if it were an ordinary day. And Christiana
seemed
quite real. And quite sane, even though every word she'd spoken since Aline had arrived a half-hour before had been utter nonsense.

She set her tea aside for a moment, took off her spectacles and polished them on her handkerchief. She'd polished them a dozen times already since she'd left her flat – or what was left of it, anyway – just to be sure she'd removed all of the blood. She'd adamantly refused to return to Sasha's townhouse, the one clear thought she'd had all morning, and so the Earl had brought her here, and into the keeping of his sister – who wasn't his sister at all.