Seven for a Secret (10 page)

Ruth closed her eyes. She could see it. A rose bush by the door, at the little table a pair of white-painted chairs. They could be like bachelor sisters, and nobody needed to know otherwise. „That would be sweet,” she said.

She climbed back into bed to try to ride out the burning. Down the hall, clear as bells tolling, the footsteps receded still.

5.

In the night and the rain, nothing could touch the wampyr. He was as at home in these savage elements as a statue: as obdurate, as immutable, as immune—to chill, to neglect, to solitude. But not to loneliness.

Oh, if only.

The boarding school—set amid its extensive garden—that hosted the operations of the Bund Englischer Mädel was well-enough known for God-fearing Englishman to avoid it. If Abby Irene had at first been reluctant to assist the wampyr, logic (he flattered himself)—or perhaps her knowledge that lacking her assistance would not stop the wampyr from attempting the rescue anyway—had swayed her. So he went with his wrists spiraled in copper wire, and copper coins in his shoes, spells of silence and stealth hung all about him.

Due to the weather and the distance of travel, the wampyr availed himself of the Tube, and emerged near Tottenham Street in a gentler rain than had driven him underground. He’d caught the last train; as he stood on the street corner, umbrella cocked into the wind, he imagined it rumbling on towards its den for the night, like an asthmatic dragon.

For a moment, he stood listening to the rain, the way it swept in veils like the walls of a moving labyrinth. If he’d been human, he might have drawn breath or squared his shoulders, any of the small comforting gestures people performed to settle their resolve. Those had fallen away over the centuries, until only the wampyr was left behind, chill and still.

It didn’t matter. His own gestures, if he even remembered them, would be the habits of a foreigner to modern eyes. In human company, he mimicked the mannerisms of those with whom he interacted, reflecting them like the mirrors that could not reflect him in turn.

He was a corpse.

The wampyr snorted at himself.
Almost by definition. Enough petulance, creature. Faint heart never won fair maiden.

He turned along Tottenham Street, blown by the satin-cold wind. The walled grounds of the boarding school that had once been a country house occupied several acres, a snatch of parkland preserved in the center of a pseudopod of city stretched along Tottenham Court Road as if London groped blindly down a wire.

The wampyr passed a spiked gate flanked by gas lamps, hunkered under his umbrella as if he had not noticed the break in the fourteen-foot wall. A chill wind blew through the grille, still adorned with the wrought-iron monogram of the family who had dwelt there before the conquest. The scent of blood wound heavy through the rain, sharpening the wampyr’s senses. The blood was not human.

He kept his stride even, unhurried, a professional man walking home late, and did not lift his head to breathe deep and savor. In the darkness beyond the mantle of the lamps, he leaned against the wall, umbrella cocked at an awkward angle and one foot lifted as if he had kicked a stone into his shoe. He held himself still as only a wampyr could, straining into the darkness, and heard feet on patrol inside the wall. Two sets, light and quick, and the smell of freshly-bathed young women overlaid by the blood he’d noticed before. Wolf-blood, and the girls themselves smelled musky, musty, as if a patina of tarnish overlaid the sweetness of their skin. They smelled of bitter herbs and rendered fat, even more so than they smelled of themselves.

The wampyr made sure he stayed upwind.

When the patrol had passed, the wampyr turned his attention to the wall. Fourteen feet, of dull gray granite repaired here and there over the centuries with patchy mismatched brick, the mortar along the top studded with broken glass. An amendment of the Industrial age, that last.

To the wampyr, an obstacle unworthy of consideration. He closed his umbrella with a rattle and lay it in the shadows along the bottom of the wall. His gloves in his pocket, he laid cold hands on cold stone and lifted himself off the ground.He was light and dry and strong, and so he hunkered atop the wall in instants, balancing on flexed toes among the knives of glass. From here, he could see perfectly—through the dark—the two women in white (a ridiculous affectation, even for Prussians, whom the wampyr found consistently preposterous) their backs bisected by the black outlines of machine guns.

Glass sliced bloodless flesh when the wampyr let himself drop lightly inside of the wall. The wound sealed instantly, before the earth even dented under his shoes. He crouched into the shadow of a rain-huddled yew as one of the girls turned, scanning the wall with a frown.

Good ears.
He waited until she’d shaken her head and turned away before he rose from his shadowed corner and slunk forward along the wall. There were dogs; he could hear them in the runs, and at least two loose in the gardens. But he was less worried about dogs than about the patrolling Ulfhethinn. And they were Ulfhethinn, if they were not
lycanthropes—or both. It would be senseless to deny it now.

The smell of blood was stronger here, and he was walking towards the source. That wasn’t the scent he needed to follow, though, and the girls on patrol weren’t the ones he needed to talk to first. The rain intensified scents, both those of the girls he hunted and those of everything that could distract him from them.

The young women he had followed and protected shared a bedroom, which the wampyr found unsurprising. He paused below it, beside the grape arbor and the climbing roses, and craned his neck back so the rain fell on his face. Bad options, both—too much noise, and too much chance of leaving evidence behind. And if he did, there was probably a Zaubererdetektiv somewhere in London that could link it back to him.

And that would not be very much like either Amédée Gosselin or the Scarlet Pimpernel. As well as dangerous to his court. No, he would climb the brick. The room he needed was on the second story anyway, and not too long a climb.

He surmounted it with ease, brick-grit enough purchase to defeat the slipperiness from rain, and—counting on the cat-curiosity of teenaged girls—scratched at shutters barred against the storm.

Movement answered within. The wampyr dropped below the edge of the casement as the bar was slipped, only to rise again after the shutters swung wide. A girl leaned out. Her icy-pale hair, braided for bed, fell forward over her shoulders and was instantly jeweled with raindrops. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” the wampyr said, clinging to the window-ledge, from so close that he would have had only to turn her face to kiss her.

He expected her to recoil, but she didn’t—neither like a startled child, nor like a threatened wild thing. Rather, she turned deliberately enough to convince the wampyr that she had been aware of his presence all along. She met his gaze unblinking. “You,” she whispered. “Doctor Chaisty.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he’d let her have the advantage. “You know me?”

“From the street,” she said. “You protected us. You smell different, you know.” She glanced over her shoulder, into the dark room behind. “This isn’t safe. They made us sleep with the door open. And Adele—”

“I shall come in,” the wampyr said, and with an easy swing brought himself through the window and onto the floor beside her. The old warped floorboards, rough and splintery, did not even creak under his weight as he crossed the felted rug in the center of the room and placed himself in the corner behind the door. The blonde hurried to him, her footsteps nearly as silent, fearless as she backed him into the corner. “Adele is
sleeping
—”

“Then be soft,” the wampyr said, too low for human ears to hear. From the movement of the young woman’s eyes, he knew she suffered no failure in understanding. “And we shall not wake her. Are you Ruth?”

Surprised, she nodded. The surprise falling away, she said, “You heard us, too.”

“I know Adele is happier here than you.”

She stood back, allowing him the freedom of the room.

He considered her. It was a contemporary conceit, time spent alone, sleeping single in a bed. A modern luxury made possible by coal fires and inexpensive, machine-woven bedding. The wampyr found privacy a convenience, but centuries of experience had proven that it was hardly a necessity. Even while dealing with Ulfhethinn? Well, it would be an interesting challenge, in any case.

And if he failed, that would be interesting, too. The wampyr was too old to believe in the sanctity of human governments or human religions. He’d seen too many rise and fall, too many fragile, ephemeral men and women give everything to support or oppose them. He did believe in justice, and in the greatness of the human spirit, and in the correctness of a human desire to live in relative safety, comfort, and freedom. But Abby Irene was still young, as the Blood reckoned the centuries—”fourscore is but a girl’s age,” Christopher Marlowe had written, when he had barely a score himself—and her England, and her King in exile still mattered to her. And Abby Irene—mattered to the wampyr.

The older he got, the simpler the world was revealed to be.

The girl said, “You’re not human, are you?”

The wampyr smiled. Even in the dark, he knew she saw it, as well as might one of his own Blood. He could tell by the way she licked her lips and dropped her eyes. “As human as you,” he said. “Which is to say, I was born it.”

She stared at him, as if considering that took all her concentration. And then she nodded curtly.

“Then come with me. Herr Professor has gone to bed, Can you hear him snoring?”

The wampyr could, two floors below, if he listened very, very carefully over the warm-air grate by the door. The girl, from her smile, heard him plainly, and was amused at the evidence of how superior her senses were to the wampyr’s. “Herr Professor,” she said, “thinks he knows how to deal with us. But he does not really.” She widened the gap of the door with her fingertips. Her eyes shone in the reflected light like any predator’s. “We can talk in the library. The books soak up sound.”

The library was just across the hall, and its door was shut tight, only darkness showing underneath. Still, the girl paused beside it, tilted her head, and breathed deep. The wampyr mimicked her; the room beyond, insofar as his nose could tell him, stood empty. The girl licked her lips, glanced over her shoulder, and turned the handle with such exquisite slowness that the vampire did not even hear the click of the latch. She ushered him inside, into a hushed cold space that smelled of leather and camphor and the residue of pipe-tobacco. Thick carpets dented almost imperceptibly under cat-light footsteps and Ruth shut the door behind them. Then she came to him, surefooted in nearly unrelieved dark, and paused less than a yard away.

She said, “What’s your name? It’s not really Chaisty, is it?”

“I am too old for names,” he answered. “But you are young. You probably still remember yours.”

“I also know better than to give it to monsters,” she answered—just the shape of words on her lips, a sound so low even the wampyr could have convinced himself he imagined it.

He let his smile widen. He admired self-determination. He said, “Ruth Grell.”

Her surprise could not be feigned, not with the way it came with the scent of sweat on her skin, the acceleration of her pulse in the soft places of her neck. “How did you learn that? You didn’t overhear it all in the alley.”

The wampyr leaned forward. What he had to say, he wouldn’t say out loud, even so softly no one but Ruth might learn its rhythms. “Your family is Jewish,” he murmured against her ear. “And of German descent. You have lost loved ones to the Prussians and their extermination camps.”

She folded her arms across the white overlapped lapels of her dressing-gown and said, “Since you have no name of your own, perhaps I shall call you Dracula.”

Bravado would do; sometimes it matured into courage, and if not, sometimes it could take the place. He said, “We know why you are here, Ruth. You are an infiltrator. At first we thought to intervene, to rescue you and the other girls.”

“I won’t leave,” she said flatly. “I’ve come too far.”

“We know,” he said. “We realized this could not be the only such school, is it? Ruth, do you hate the Prussians? Are you going to turn your classmates against them? Because we can help.”

He wasn’t expecting her bitten lip, the turned-away face of suppressed laughter. “You don’t know as much about what I’m doing here as you think. It’s too late. We killed the wolf tonight, and we must swear an oath at dawn. To the Chancellor. A sorcerously binding oath. After that, they are going to send us to Berlin, where we will become the first of the Sturmwölfe.”

She glanced back, eyes raised to study his face under flickering lashes. The sideways light from the door cast blurry shadows through them, making exhaustion-bruised eyes seem as if she had painted around their rims like an older woman. “The Chancellor’s private guard,” she said.

From her face, her tone, the way she angled her head, the wampyr understood that there was more. He waited, though, and watched her face, and eventually she wound her hands one around the other and said, “Adele believes in this. In the Prussian homeland. In the empire. She’s not the only one.”

“You?” he asked.

She opened her mouth to answer, caught herself, and said more carefully, “I am here because of what I believe in. And because the Chancellor requires my service, to keep the empire strong.”

As if what she believed in and what the Chancellor required were separate things, to be separated by a long weighty pause.

The wampyr said, “What you believe in? It is not simply that where Adele goes, you go?”

Ruth chewed her lip. The wampyr would have put his arms around her if she were his, but when she looked up again he saw the cold yellow spark floating in blue irises
like the killing sun in a noonday sky. No creature of the night, this wolf-maiden. Not the moon-touched shape-changer of painful experience. She was something else, and in the face of it, even the wampyr stepped back. He thought she might even be fiercer and more terrible than a lycanthrope, because there was no lack of awareness in her gaze, and lupine cunning had not replaced human intellect—but supplemented it. She said, “It has nothing to do with Adele.”