Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
If Genevieve’s heart could still beat, it would have been seizing in her chest. Her lungs gasped as she wrenched unsuccessfully at the grip of his hands.
He felt like stone—immovable. The old panic rose in her throat.
He was frowning, saying something, but she could not hear him over the roaring in her ears. Her lungs kept doing the completely unnecessary heaving. She was dead; it didn’t help anything. They were not susceptible to reason, it seemed.
You’re dead; nothing can hurt you, Winnie sometimes said, but Genevieve knew that was a lie.
Kendrick’s free hand came around her waist, and he lifted her, whisking her back to his room. He shut the door and set her down. Genevieve fumbled instinctively for the doorknob and yanked on it, but the weight of one large hand held it shut. Kendrick didn’t touch her again. He was still talking.
Her ears stopped roaring.
“Easy, love,” he was saying. “I mean you no harm.”
Genevieve clenched her hands together, feeling the small hole in her left glove rub against her finger.
I need to mend that, she thought, swallowing.
She’d do it tonight. Envisioning the neat, tiny stitches she’d use calmed the tremors in her body, and her lungs came back under her control.
No help for feeling like a shivering, panicky fool in front of this man, though.
As terror left, embarrassment and anger with herself flooded in.
She hadn’t had a bad turn like that in years.
“There,” he said, in a voice like smoke. “Better?”
She pursed her lips and lifted her chin. She would not fall to pieces in front of a stranger. Or not any further. She threw her shoulders back and turned to face him.
From far away, the man had seemed larger than life.
This close, he took her breath away—even after the panic had subsided.
His mane of hair filled her vision. She had never seen a man with such long hair before.
Broad shoulders strained the seams of his shirt—of a rougher quality than she’d expect for the master of the London Ossuary, who could afford the finest London’s tailors could supply.
But his coat was working man’s tweed, a support against the elements, and his waistcoat corduroy.
He wore no cravat or collar—only a cloth wound around his neck—again, a working man’s attire.
His bright-gold eyes fixed on her with interest and a too-canny insight. What did he see in her?
He gripped the sword still. A man out of time, as all vampires were. A warrior, a fighter.
He looked as though he might have stepped directly from the pages of Wynnflaed’s Knight or Finwold Law, tales of heroism in early Britain, before the Norman conquest, when the Saxons and Vikings had invaded and come to make the land their own, mingling with the British tribes and carving kingdoms from the heather and bracken.
He had lifted her with one hand. The rational part of her knew that was vampiric strength. Another part thought he probably could have done it when he had been human, too.
A smile curled over his mouth. “I have been combing the news sellers and the printers for my mysterious note-leaver, and here she comes to see me, instead.”
Her eyes widened.
The smile broadened, his teeth flashing white in his closely trimmed beard. “Your eyes are very expressive. Did you know that, Miss…?”
“Dryden.” She forced the word through her throat.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Dryden. Will you tell me his name?”
Her brows drew together. “Who?”
“The man who put that look on your face.”
Her suspicion deepened. “Why?”
“So I can kill him.”
The woman was tall enough to nearly look him in the eye, her head covered by a badly dyed black bonnet. Her worn gown, also dyed black, looked nearly two decades old. The woman’s colorless eyes were blown wide with panic, and her face was bloodless, even for a vampire.
Kendrick kept his expression deliberately calm and warm, even though a knot of anger burned in his gut and grew stronger by the second.
Someone had frightened her very badly in the past. Hurt her, almost certainly. The knowledge lit a fuse in him. What it led to, he had no idea.
Her lips pinched, her eyes narrowing with disapproval. “Is that your only approach to problems?” she shot back. “Killing them?”
Her tart response increased his fascination.
He lifted a sardonic brow. “Because swinging a sword is the only thing I know how to do? I confess that it was my main function for many a year. I am very good at it.” He looked down at the weapon in his hand and set it on the desk, the naked blade gleaming in the lamplight. “But I am a man of many talents.”
She lifted her pointed chin at him in challenge. “I am sorry to inform you that he is already dead. In fact, it’s likely you dispatched him a month ago.” Her gaze sharpened as if to ask, Now what?
Good. A dark surge of satisfaction flared in him—shocking and surprising. “Ah, efficiency—another of my talents.”
She snorted.
His eyebrows shot up. “You disagree, madam?”
She stilled, a mouse in front of a lion.
He didn’t like it. The flash of spirit she had displayed had intrigued him, and her height put him in mind of a shieldmaiden. So who had made this woman feel so small?
“I assure you, Miss Dryden, you have nothing to fear from me. I only decapitate vampires after they’ve tried to kill me.”
Her lips pursed. “Or those whose names I give you.”
He acknowledged this with a tilt of his head. “I feel sure you will bear the weight of this responsibility with good sense, Miss—what is your Christian name?”
“It isn’t appropriate to address me by my Christian name.”
He grinned. “Ah. Propriety, Miss Dryden? At this late date? Tell me, do you always sneak into men’s bedrooms to deliver clandestine notes?”
She drew herself up very straight. “Only when someone is trying to kill them. Do you always grab women and sling them around?”
“Only when they ask nicely.”
Her eyes sparked ruby for less than a second—but he saw it.
There you are, sweetheart.
“All right, Miss Dryden. Suppose you explain why you were leaving me notes about murder plots? I would love to know how you came by your information.”
“Should I not have bothered?” Genevieve snapped, confused and furious with herself.
She should have turned around and walked away.
Let him fend for himself for once. Instead, he had caught her—he must have had ears like a bat!
—and she had reacted like a frightened animal. All because he had touched her arm.
“It does raise the question of how you’ve managed to intercept the plans of—three? four?—separate conspirators.”
“I am not involved, if that is what you mean,” she forced through numb lips.
“Don’t look like that, Miss Dryden,” he said, unrolling her last note. “I have told you; you are quite safe. Tell me, how do you hear these whispers? ‘Horace and Gisela plan new attack. Watch yourself.’ Thank you. I suspected Gisela was not as pleased with me as she pretended. But who is Horace?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” His eyes narrowed. “Then how did you hear this name? For that matter, how did you come by this information at all?”
“I overheard them speaking in the dark and heard her call him by name.”
He pondered this. “Why should I trust you, Miss Dryden?”
“Besides the fact that I have not been wrong yet?” She lifted her chin. “I have a talent for not being noticed. People are more loquacious when they believe they plot in secret.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That would be why I saw no one in the passage when I opened the door?”
Genevieve pursed her lips.
“It’s a useful talent to have,” Kendrick acknowledged. “And impressive. I didn’t sense anything until your foot scraped on the stone around the corner. I’ve never encountered anything quite like true invisibility. All right. We’ve covered how. Now let’s address why.”
Genevieve frowned. “What?”
“Leaving the notes. Why bother warning me?”
“Because you obviously need help!” she snapped.
He raised an eyebrow. “Do I now?”
“Yes! If I happen to overhear such plots muttered, how many are voiced that I do not hear? Have you considered they’re trying to kill you because you aren’t doing anything?”
“No.”
“No?” Her mouth dropped open in outrage. Why was he smiling?
“Firstly, because I have been ‘doing things.’ Second, vampires don’t like change, and I am the change that they don’t like. So ergo, they are trying to dispatch me before I do any more…things.”
She scoffed. “That won’t turn back time!”
Kendrick said dryly, “They don’t seem to have realized that yet. However, I am interested by your assertion.”
She paused. “Why is that?” she asked slowly.
“It may not be what the rest of the Ossuary believes, but I think it is what you believe. What is it that I am not doing, Miss Dryden?”
Her pent-up irritation with his tenure so far as ruler warred with her survival instincts, ones who screamed standing up to male vampires and telling them they were wrong only invited pain and suffering.
Irritation won.
“It’s your laws,” she finally forced through her teeth.
Amusement glinted in his eyes. “My laws?”
“Yes.”
“What about them?”
“You haven’t made any.”
His head jerked back.
Genevieve forged ahead before he could resume his arrogant, vaguely amused air. “You have ousted the previous master, true, and you keep order, but so do occupying armies. You have made us no oaths. We have nothing to depend on.”
He tilted his head to the side. “What oaths would you like, Miss Dryden?”
“At the very least? An assurance of peace, prohibiting all ranks of men from wrongful deeds, and justice and mercy in all judgments. And that is the bare minimum.” Genevieve clenched her firsts.
“Binding yourself to keep your own laws would not go amiss, either. Kings should not be exempt from justice.”
He asked gently, “Do you think me unwilling to make such oaths?”
She threw out a hand. “I don’t know! None of us know! You are a stranger to us. And we have gotten less than nothing for all the years that I have been a vampire! I have not known peace, and wrongful deeds still persist, and where is the justice and mercy? Where is it?”
“Miss Dryden—”
“What is the point of you?” she demanded. “If all you plan to do is enforce the status quo that we have had for years and which has helped no one and hurt many, go ahead and fall on your sword, let those assassins overtake you. See if I care.”
She choked to a halt. At some point in her tirade, she had reached out and seized him by the open collar of his shirt, the better to rage at him. Her hand was fisted in the material, and she stood close enough that she could feel the heat of him through his clothes.
Vampires were not supposed to be warm.
What had she done? She had behaved as if she were still Genevieve Dryden, confirmed bluestocking and daughter of Ezra Dryden, tutor, writer, and expert in ancient languages for Oxford students, able to speak her mind to any man who condescended to her.
“I—I’m sorry,” she forced out. She unclenched her hand from around the fine linen and stared at the crisp, curling hair that showed through the partially undone plackets, the skin that somehow still carried the memory of the sun, even centuries later.
She had never touched a man like that. Not since—well, she had never touched a man like that.
Kendrick intercepted her hand and held it loosely in his own.
She stared at her glove—dingy, and with that hole coming through—held in his broad, capable hand, hair curling where his cuffs were turned back.
“You don’t have to retreat from me, Miss Dryden.
I was telling the truth when I said I only smite people who try to kill me first.”
Genevieve swallowed under the weight of very male interest. She could recognize looks of desire, but usually, they carried an element of superiority. As if bestowing their interest on her was a favor.
This man stared at her like he beheld a queen and a conundrum all at once. It made her knees shake.
“My experience has been that vampires do not like women who talk back.”
His face darkened. “I would never hurt a woman.”
“You killed Safina.”
“As I said, she tried to kill me first. And I let her slice me before I ended her. I think that was more than fair.” His free hand came up to run his thumb over her cheekbone, a feather-light caress that abraded her nerves.
His voice turned smoky and persuasive. “You don’t need to fear me, Miss Dryden. Won’t you tell me your given name?”
“Saying that in a honey voice doesn’t automatically make me trust you,” she said tightly. “May I go now, please?”