Chapter 2
Chapter Two
December, Three Weeks Later
“Master. You’re needed.”
Kendrick looked up from his copy of Wolfhead Tree by E.D. Saxon, which he was reading by the light of the glowing lamp. He had taken a break from poring over the poorly kept and piecemeal law codes he’d found in the Ossuary to reread a favorite tome.
“What is it?” he asked the vampire at his door, masking his distaste for the appellation of “Master.”
“Markham has the madness. He’s killed two humans by the East End exit—nearly in the main thoroughfare. We have restrained him and brought him down for your judgment.” Joseph stared at him with no expression on his scarred face.
Joseph had been one of the vampires to apprehend Kendrick and his friends in Yorkshire when Rupert, the previous master of the London vampire Ossuary, had attempted to crush the knowledge that he had sold his own vampires to human scientists and graverobbers in return for gold.
Kendrick did not believe Joseph had had strong loyalties to the previous master—but that didn’t mean he had any loyalty to Kendrick, either.
“Will you come?” Joseph asked, his mouth firming in a line.
Kendrick set aside the book and stood to his full height, which was well above average for a man of his time. He picked up the longsword gifted to him during that Yorkshire misadventure and slung it over his shoulder. “Lead the way.”
Joseph led him from the chamber down the rough corridor of stone and brick.
It smelled of earth and damp and rock, plus the tang of blood and death.
These were the passageways of the dead, a honeycomb of tunnels carved out below London, at first merely a handy connection between fine Mayfair houses but expanded throughout the city as the rivers were paved over and enclosed underground.
If he listened hard, he could hear the susurrus of the water—and likely, sewage—as it flowed to the Thames and out, ever onward, towards the whale road, the swan’s riding place, where his people had sailed… had it been his people?
Kendrick probed the thought like a bad tooth.
Memories faded and crumbled with age like old parchment, and he had been a part of the world lit by heaven’s candle for a comparatively small portion of time, more than a thousand years ago.
Something like a thousand. He knew the tongues of the Saxons, the Celts, the Normans, the Danes, but which he had learned at a mother’s knee?
All that had passed away, but stories… Ah, the stories told around hearth fire, the tales of men and monsters—those, he remembered.
It was a monster he encountered in the main chamber of the Ossuary, the gathering place where a ruler more pompous than himself would call his people to him at his every whim to make demands and pronouncements.
Five vampires held a frothing fellow down by arms and legs and barely kept him still.
The vampire’s eyes glowed red, and his clothes were drenched in blood.
Other vampires in the room stared furtively at the spectacle in front of them, hanging back, creating an uneven circle around the tableau.
“Speak,” Kendrick said. “Where are the witnesses?”
“I, sir.” A vampire with a cleft chin stepped forward. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I guard the easternmost door.”
“What is your name?”
“Orson, sir.”
“Say on, Orson.”
“Markham went out at dusk, sir,” he said.
“He had…a strange countenance. I did not like it. Not long after, a cry went up. I left my counterpart, Anne Wright”—he gestured to another woman—“and went to see. He had killed a beggarwoman, and a man had come upon them and cried out. By the time I had reached him, he had torn the human’s throat out with his teeth.
I detained him long enough for Miss Wright to call for reinforcements.
With their help, we were able to wrestle him back belowground. ”
Kendrick paced around the monster named Markham. The vampire growled, his eyes completely red.
“Come in from the cold dark,” Kendrick said, “or be lost to it evermore.”
Markham made no response. The vampire threw himself against his fetters, growling wordlessly.
He was well and truly lost, then.
“Markham has broken the law. He has killed not one, but two humans. He has endangered the secrecy of his brothers and sisters. His life is forfeit.”
At Kendrick’s nod, the vampires wrestling their mad brethren let go and jumped free with inhuman speed. Markham hissed and whirled on the only vampire within reach—Kendrick. He readied himself and sprang—
Only to find the end of Kendrick’s blade.
The body fell one way, the head another. That was the surest way to end a vampire. Part them from their head.
Kendrick flicked the dark blood from the blade. “What was done with the bodies aboveground?”
“We removed them to a different neighborhood, Master.”
“Good. Their people, if they have any, should have the chance to claim them.” Kendrick wiped the dark blood from the sword as the body before him slowly crumbled to dust. “How old was he?”
“Sixty, Master.”
“Sixty?” Kendrick repeated, eyebrows flying up. He should not have lost himself to the madness. Vampires burdened by the weight of centuries in the dark were the ones who lost some necessary part of themselves and succumbed to the bloodlust. It should not have occurred in one so young.
I am failing at this, Kendrick couldn’t help but think.
From the reports he had read, incidents of madness had spiked in recent years, vampires younger and younger succumbing.
Perhaps they could have done something to hold Markham back from the madness and the dark.
But if there was something, he didn’t know it.
When he turned on his heel and left the spectacle in the chamber, Kendrick thought the bloodshed for the night was over. But that was not to be.
A knife came at him from the dark.
Not again.
Back in his rooms, Kendrick eyed the dark blood on the blade of his sword and glowered.
Etienne handed him a cloth. He had arrived at Kendrick’s door with Addie, his fiancée, after news of the night’s events reached them. “That was closer than I would like, mon ami.”
With quick, efficient movements, Kendrick cleaned the blade. The action was as deeply ingrained in him as blinking. Then he pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket, read it again, and crumpled it in his hand. “And yet someone knows before word reaches our ears,” he murmured.
Beware Safina and Titus. They are conspiring to kill you, the note read.
Just like the previous two notes.
And the conspirators had indeed attacked him in a dark corner of London’s vampire Ossuary, but they had forgotten, like the other schemers, that he carried the sword with him everywhere he went.
Vampires were strong and powerful but grew set in their thinking.
Adaptation was not one of their strong suits.
He’d probably be putting down plots years from now, dealing with holdouts from the old regime who had been too cowardly to challenge his right to rule from the start.
“At least you are doing something to combat the overpopulation problem,” Etienne said with rueful dark humor. He pulled pince-nez glasses he did not need from his nose and polished them with a silk handkerchief.
“What I want to know is how the informant is getting this information.”
The quarters were the finest in the catacombs, from what he had seen.
They had belonged to Rupert, and Kendrick had only moved in after a thorough cleaning.
He had a fine four-poster bed with rich coverlets and treasures scattered about the room.
If he so desired, he could have fine clothes and any woman he wanted and all the blood he could drink. A king’s privilege.
He felt lonelier here than he had in all his years wandering.
“Do you mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, as the English say?” Etienne asked. “I should think you would welcome someone watching your back among these saboteurs.”
“Well, I have you, don’t I?”
“I am not enough, and you know it, cher ami,” Etienne said, turning serious.
Too right, but Kendrick did not like to dwell on it. It hurt to think of old friends long gone. “Who else is there who knows me, besides you and Salem? It feels like the whole Ossuary is full of spotty youths under a hundred.”
“What about Dominic?”
“Dominic? He’s in London?”
“You have been gone a long time. Rupert liked to keep the older vampires close and under his thumb. Dominic and many others were forced to relocate years ago. I’ll find his direction for you.”
“Thank you.” He and Dominic went back a long way; it would be good to see him again. Kendrick tapped the note. “Back to the matter at hand—beyond their knowledge, I can’t fathom how no one saw them come and go.”
“Worrying, if this mysterious note-leaver can breach your chamber. Can others?” Etienne mused.
“Well, it isn’t like I lock the door,” Kendrick muttered. “Even so, the notes could have been slipped under the door. But I can’t even catch a scent from the scrap of paper. Nothing to identify the sender.”
“You ought to thank her,” Addie said from her chair at the end of the table. “She’s saved your life.” She set her head in her hands.
“Yes, but how is she learning of these plots?” Etienne asked.
Kendrick said, “She?”
“The handwriting,” Addie said, rubbing her eyes with her fist.
Etienne moved to her side. “Do you have the headache, mon chaton?” He ran a hand over the crown of her head, stroking her hair.
“I don’t like it down here. Everything echoes off the stone and it’s all close.” She shivered.
“Then we shall go. Kendrick, can you manage to stay alive another night?” Etienne asked. “I will take Addie home.”
“Home to Brompton?” Addie lifted her head hopefully.
“For now, mon ange, but I have secured us apartments on a basement level of a house. Only a little more time until the work is finished, and then we can take up residence.”
“In time for Christmas?” Addie sat up straighter, her eyes sparkling.
Etienne kissed her hands. “Perhaps. I had meant to surprise you but then thought better of it. I will take you to see it, and then you shall beggar me furnishing it to your taste.”
“A real home of my own,” Addie said wonderingly. “With you all to myself.”
“To be sure, ma chère.”
Kendrick noted with some amusement that Etienne’s eyes were suspiciously moist behind his pince-nez. He ribbed Etienne cheerfully in French, and advised, “Take a cab. It will be light soon.” He waved them both off.
With his sword set close at hand, Kendrick reached for the note again and spread it flat on the table, staring at the script once more.
Fashionable handwriting style and script changed from century to century, but it could have been a woman’s. It was a quickly scrawled cursive hand—an attempt to disguise a known script, or dashed off in a hurry?
He brought it to his nose and breathed in again.
No scent.
Who could have left it?
He had not had much to do with the vampire women in the underground Ossuary besides Addie, and Gisela, who had been Rupert’s woman.
He suspected she would not spit on him if he were on fire, though she uttered all the right blandishments when he came upon her in passing.
He could not bring to mind any other woman’s face with clarity, though there were many down here—more than the men.
And several had given him looks he could not misinterpret.
Kendrick leaned back, fingering the scrap of paper.
He had not had a woman in several decades, and it would be a good long while before he had another, he suspected.
If he was de facto lord of the London Ossuary and its surrounding demesnes and stayed as such for an extended period, those he took to his bed would seek to gain what status and gifts they could from him, so he would have to be choosy and politically minded about it.
Not go through the Ossuary like a randy lord bedding his house servants.
Not that he was randy. Nothing had sparked his blood for years, though in long ages past, he had had animal spirits in abundance. All things passed away, it seemed.
Was the note-leaver an innocent bystander or somehow tangled in a web of conspiracy? Did he need to worry over her safety? Why wouldn’t she just speak to me, instead of leaving cryptic notes? he wondered. I’m not going to eat her.
Well, she wouldn’t know that, would she?
Not many vampires knew him at all anymore.
Kendrick pondered the note again. It was not a neat piece of stationary. It looked more like a corner of dirty newsprint ripped free. He squinted at the ragged edges and brought the paper to his nose again.
There was no vampire scent to the note—but there was the faint scent of stone, damp, horses, and the live scent of whoever had sold the paper. If he could track the human, that might provide a clue.
That was what he would do. Just as soon as dusk fell again, he’d take to the streets and see what scents he could follow. After all, it had been some years since he had prowled this city. It was time to make himself known to London again.