The Hunger (30 page)

Beatrix stood outside Sixteen Albemarle Street, blinking. As she came to herself, she realized that something was wrong in the still, narrow street.

Vibrations cascaded over her. She squeezed her eyes shut. There was a vampire in that house. The vibrations were only a murmur. The creature was newly made, not strong. The implications poured over Beatrix. Had John betrayed his mentor to Asharti, who made him vampire instead of killing him? If Asharti had made him vampire . . . he must serve her.

And if Beatrix could feel him, he could feel her. She should depart immediately. Another thought intruded. Either Asharti had come to London and managed to avoid Beatrix feeling her very powerful vibrations, or Asharti had sent another vampire to make the one inside.

A man presumably high up in England’s confidence, in thrall to Asharti—the consequences of that . . . There was but one way to prevent the damage this one could do. What was her obligation here? She had never stooped to killing another of her kind . . .

Beatrix drew her power, dread of what she might do suffusing her. She could not let her courage fail. Asharti could
not
prevail.

She trembled into space in front of an old man, warming his hands by the fire. It was him. He started in surprise. “Who are you?” she asked. She did not use compulsion. Yet.

“Sir Thomas Barlow,” he answered, wary. “What do you want here?”

“I am from her,” Beatrix lied.

Barlow relaxed. “We are well positioned. The agents are all dead, or soon will be. I have information on Wellington’s plans in the Peninsula. Bonaparte can have Portugal for the asking if he sends Soult’s forces to support Masséna. Here is an outline of Wellington’s weaknesses.” He moved to his desk.

“I am curious.” Beatrix tried to breathe evenly. “How did she turn a lifelong servant of the British crown? I would follow her lead.” She needed to know this.

The man’s great eyebrows rose. “The nephew of my housekeeper. He brought me to her in Dover. We talked. Then he turned me and gave me his blood while I was sick.” He glanced at Beatrix. Those eyes had seen all of man’s dirty soul in a single lifetime.

Suddenly Beatrix had to know one more thing. “How long ago did you turn?”

“Last quarter day.” He said it casually. But it showered relief over Beatrix. Two months. It was not John who had betrayed this man to Asharti. Light dawned. The footpads, the night there had been a shot outside her house just as John left . . . the reverse was true! Barlow had been trying to have John killed. Not directly, and he used none of his vampire powers . . . he must have been trying to be discreet. But Beatrix was sure he had tried to kill John. Even sending John to the hulks could have been an effort to kill him. Had he killed Dupré, too? But he hadn’t killed John. So perhaps he had sent John to Asharti so she could dispose of him.

But why would he do this? “She can’t control you when you are in London and she in Paris, so she must have your sympathies.” Would she need to force him? She could. He was new.

He shrugged, and she knew compulsion wasn’t necessary. “One gets tired of the stupidity of government officials. Endless arguing, recriminations even when the path is clear. They don’t do what they must. That means Bonaparte will prevail.” Barlow stared at the brandy swirling in his glass as though he could read the future there. “He is a military genius on land. His navy is rebuilding at a frantic pace. Our ships are aging, worn to death by blockade duty. We starve our sailors and our new-built ships crumble because our suppliers are corrupt. It is only a matter of time until the French break the blockades and invade England. Especially now that we can invade a ship, drain the crew and render it harmless. The experiment breaking the blockade at Brest was only the first.” He looked up at her.

“So you wanted to be on the winning side.” Beatrix put an iron clamp over her anger. He had betrayed John for avarice and greed for power. She had only seen it a thousand times.

“You despise me, I see.” He smiled, as though indulging her. “But you follow her, too. Her vision of a new society for our kind is powerful. She is direct. She takes action. None of this dithering or ambiguity. She will transform the world. I am an old man. The grave was going to remove my ability to affect anything in a few years. For me the chance to live forever and change the world was . . . attractive.”

“So you betrayed your country?” She managed not to shriek at him for betraying John.

His eyes flashed. “My prince and my parliament betrayed my country. The suppliers who shortchange the navy betray their country. England was already doomed. I have moved on to shape what will be the next empire. We will start fresh.” His expression grew wary. “You do not serve her, do you?”

Beatrix felt her eyes fill as the inevitability of what
must happen here suffused her. She let her eyes go red. He struggled. His own eyes glowed. But she was older. She had him firmly before she answered. “I did once.” She must be sure before she acted. “Did you betray Langley?”

The sharp eyes went dull. “I sent agents against him in France. They wounded him, but he prevailed. I tried twice in England. Then he was supposed to die on the hulks with Dupré Sending him to Asharti was the last resort. She can deal with him.”

Beatrix shuddered. As she had guessed. There was no cure for what this man had become. There was no leaving him in place to continue undermining all John worked for and believed in. Her breath came shallowly. “And Asharti—where is she?”

“Paris. Rue Bonaparte.”

There was only one more thing to ask. “What is the nephew’s name and direction?”

“Jerry,” Barlow croaked. “Jerry Williams. He lives in Woolcomber Street in Dover.”

Beatrix closed her eyes. There was one last way out. When she opened them, Barlow had his will back. “You are helping evil take the world, man. I have known Asharti for seven hundred years. She is twisted, perhaps by experience, perhaps by being made, but hers is not the way. Give it up. Together we can serve her out.”

Slyness flashed through his eyes for an instant, before he said, “Perhaps you are right.”

The slyness was her answer. There was no more excuse to delay. There was no alternative. She had never done this. She gasped and let her eyes go red.
Companion! More power . . .
She advanced on Barlow.

“Old man, you’ve had your run.” She watched his eyes widen as she caressed his temples. “I hope the service you rendered most of your life outweighs your betrayals in your maker’s eyes. May he forgive you, for I cannot.”

She took a breath, looking into Barlow’s eyes as a
penance for what she was about to do. Then she squeezed. And twisted.

Blood sprayed the walls, her face, her dress. She was holding Barlow’s head. It gaped at her as his body toppled. With a shriek, she dropped it. She bent over, sobbing, gasping for breath as her Companion deserted her. The head rolled to the hearth and stopped, face up, eyes staring, blood pooling on the carpet.

A knock sounded on the door. “Sir Thomas?” The housekeeper.

Beatrix stumbled to the window, called her Companion, weakly. The housekeeper’s scream echoed through the blackness that enveloped her, before the room melted from view.

Beatrix stared out of the carriage window as it bowled briskly along behind its four matched grays. She felt numb. The moon drifted through diaphanous clouds. Asharti was making new vampires to do her bidding. She was bent on creating a new world. What kind of world would someone like Asharti create? The possibility was unthinkable.

The cartel was to sail from Dover. Where Jerry Williams lived. The horror she had just committed had to be repeated. Her breath caught in her throat. Had she not begun life ripping throats from those she fed on? Had she not drained the last drop with Asharti, or killed in battle as only one of her strength could?

But she had not killed in cold blood in six hundred years. She had sworn it was behind her. She let her mind skitter on past that. France. She was going to the land of the guillotine to beard Asharti in her den, and find out from evil’s own lips what she had done to John. He was dead, no doubt. Beatrix couldn’t stop Asharti. The whole exercise was probably pointless. It would end in her own death at Asharti’s hands, in the same way she had just killed Barlow.

But it couldn’t be avoided. She couldn’t just abandon John the way she had abandoned that knight and his squire, the way Stephan and Rubius had abandoned whole continents to Asharti as though they didn’t matter. Anger coiled in her belly. Foolish, really, but she wanted the confrontation. Her fingers squeezed the squabs of the upholstered seat. Asharti couldn’t win.

Maybe her death was meant to be. She was going to find out.

The unkempt town of Dover sprang up around the carriage. She leaned out of the window into the air now tinged with the fecund smell of the sea. “Woolcomber Street, at the base of the castle,” she called to the coachman. Even from here she could see the cliffs with the Roman lighthouse silhouetted against the bright moon. She told the groom to wait at the bottom of the hill and slipped out into the night. It was still an hour until the dawn tide. Plenty of time.

She drew her Companion and shimmered into the front bedroom of the little house that clung to the hill in back of its tiny, bedraggled garden. He was awake there, in the dark. She could feel his vibrations just as he felt hers.

“What . . . what do you w-want?” Her night vision told her he was a skinny youth, spotted, with large ears set away from his head. And he was afraid of her. As he should be.

She made herself hard, refusing to think, refusing to feel. “Not out foraging?” she asked softly. “Or are you hiding here in this house with your mother? What kind of vampire are you?”

“One as done what he were told.” The voice had a definite quaver.

“Did Asharti not tell you about trespassing on another vampire’s territory?”

“No. But I’m gone for good tomorrow night,” he whined.

“You are gone for good tonight.”

“Please,” he almost wailed. “I just done what I were told. I don’t know this Asharti person, you’re a-talkin’ of. I swears I don’t.”

“Who made you vampire?” she snapped. “Are you telling me it was not Asharti?”

“LeFèvre,” he gasped. “LeFèvre made me drink his blood. I never wanted it, I swears.”

“Where is the one who made you now?”

She saw his eyes fill. “He went back to France, miss. And how will I go on without him to tell me what to do?”

She growled and shoved Jerry back onto the bed. The one that made him was out of her reach. But this one wasn’t. She knelt on Jerry’s chest and took his neck in both hands.
Numb
, she thought, panting.
Be numb. No choice
. She squeezed, closed her eyes, and prepared to twist.

“It warn’t my fault. He woulda killed me and worse!” he sobbed. Beatrix tried to breathe as Jerry heaved with tears under her.

And she couldn’t do it.

She pushed herself off him and stood, panting. God, what was she about? He was made, and by one of Asharti’s tools. He had to die. She could still do it. She would.

But this one did not hold a position where he could change England’s destiny.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Jerry panted. “I swears you ain’t never going to regret this.”

Beatrix pressed her lips together, shamefaced. Asharti would not have hesitated. She sighed and looked at the acne-scarred young vampire. “Come on,” she growled, and jerked the thin man up. “We sail for France. If you prove useful, I may even let you live.”

New fear welled in his eyes and washed over his countenance. “France? But
she’s
there.”

“So you do know Asharti.”

“Not personal. LeFèvre talked about her all the time I was sick.”

“Perhaps I shall introduce you.” Beatrix set her mouth. “We are for France and Asharti.”

It had been two days. Or at least a plate of food had been brought in four times and he was made to eat by one named LeFèvre, a heavy brute. He could compel John, but not as easily as Asharti did. Still John ate the food with little urging. Asharti thought there was a possibility he could withstand Quintoc’s compulsion and he wanted every advantage. He was weak from loss of blood. His body bore the wounds, some healing, of Asharti’s attentions.

During the long darkness, he clung to his image of Beatrix. He knew she had rejected him; that he meant nothing to her. But he reconstructed their last words into commitment, and he envisioned her as a virtuous widow, sought by all but possessed by none but him. He did not allow himself to imagine their lovemaking, but in the heat and darkness he could feel her kiss on his lips, his neck, her lovely hands running through his hair. She loved him. That was what he wanted from that dream. Love, light, freedom.

He was in the middle of one of these dream-visions, when the door creaked open on a silhouette. Beatrix’s haunted eyes dissolved. Quintoc swaggered in, holding a torch. LeFèvre was right behind him, glowering. John swept his courage into a heap, hoping it would bolster him.

“Good Lord!” Quintoc wrinkled his small, straight nose, and gestured toward the chamber pot. “Remove his soil, LeFèvre.” He eyed John. “And you . . . you are foul with sweat. Perhaps I shall take a page from Asharti’s book and bathe you.”

LeFèvre took out the chamber pot. John shuddered. He must not give in to fear. He could feel that underneath
Quintoc’s bravado, he was not sure of controlling John as Asharti did.

“Sounds like a good idea,” John whispered.

Quintoc stepped forward quickly and gave John a backhanded cuff that sent his head snapping to the side. “Don’t think you can disrespect me, English dog. I will take you like a dog tonight, and you will whimper under me.”

John deliberately licked the blood from a split lip and glared up at Quintoc’s baby face. Quintoc’s eyes began to glow. The blood excited him. LeFèvre stalked back into the room.

“Unlock him, LeFèvre,” Quintoc ordered. “First the bath, and then I want to take him out of this heat to somewhere more comfortable.”

“What about the servants?” Resentment echoed in LeFèvre’s voice. John wondered why.