Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Our rented wagon rumbles over the cobblestones, jostling me roughly and making my teeth chatter as we roll toward our fated performance.
We roll over a rut, and one of the sharpened ivory fangs cuts into my lip, but I can do nothing about the trickle of blood that runs down my chin.
My hands are tied behind me, my feet bound beneath me.
My belly lurches as we near White Point Gardens.
Hundreds of people have gathered—a crowd so dense, their noise and excitement hum like a plague of locusts, even at a distance.
Torches and lanterns glimmer in the darkness.
There’s even a band playing music. Vendors selling refreshments.
“Look at that, Lil,” Kate says over her shoulder, slowing the horses. “Just look.”
“I’m terrified,” I whisper. I’m nearly in tears, my worries about all the ways in which this could go terribly wrong multiplying by the minute.
“Good. I want you terrified. Terrified and angry. A trapped animal.”
“This isn’t one of your plays, Kate! Those people want to see me dead.”
But Kate is gone. As we approach the path leading into the park, Winthrop’s stiff, formal coldness steals her bravado. The shift in her demeanor sends a quiver of unease down my spine.
When we enter the park, the crowd roars.
Something sails toward me, and lands next to me in the wagon bed.
It’s a rotten apple, crawling with maggots.
I gag as more rotting fruit, offal, and spoiled oysters bombard me, stinking and foul.
I can do nothing to shield myself from the volley. I’m bound and helpless.
Suddenly, a rock bounces into the wagon bed.
Then another, this one glancing off my shoulder painfully.
I duck, cowering against the side boards.
If I was afraid before, I am utterly panicked now.
Kate had better get things under control, and quickly, or they’ll kill me long before Winthrop ever draws his stake.
Still, I muster my courage, compose my fear into what they’ve come to see.
What they want me to be. I growl, baring my teeth, my eyes wild as I whip my head from side to side, taking satisfaction in their wide eyes and fearful gasps.
Kate parks the wagon alongside the road, stands, and cracks the horse whip.
The crowd stills. “Ladies and gentlemen. I have tracked, captured, and delivered your enemy. Just as I suspected, she was hiding in the marshes, lying in wait for her next opportunity to kill.” Kate tosses a disdainful look at me.
“And now, I will bring you justice. But I must insist on order at this execution. For your own safety, there must be no more heckling. No rioting. Am I understood?”
A murmur rumbles through the crowd of well-dressed animals.
I see so many faces I recognize. Their expressions are a mixture of wonder, fear, and hatred.
Georgina McClintock, dressed in a lavish gown, as if she’s just come from a party.
William and his wife, her pretty mouth set in a scowl.
Patrick Calhoun, a young woman clutching his arm, her eyes brimming with tears.
But there’s no sympathy on her face. Only fright.
Leroy Burrows is there, with his diary and pencil in hand, scrawling down all the details of my plight for the papers.
Most disturbingly, children are everywhere, laughing and playing, and running about, as if this is a summer carnival.
And then my heart lurches. At first, I believe it to be a trick of the light. But it isn’t.
My mother stands near the pathway cutting through the park, her face pale and drawn, dressed all in black. Her eyes meet mine, and I nearly cry out with longing. Dr. Broadbent stands next to her, his mouth set in a frown.
Kate, now fully Winthrop, climbs down from the wagon, the whip still in hand, the stake and mallet lodged in the waistband of his trousers.
He unlatches the wagon’s rear boot, and stands there looking at me for a moment, calculating with his frigid eyes.
With his free hand, he grasps the rope binding my feet and drags me toward him.
I gasp as my head falls back and hits the baseboards of the wagon.
A shower of sparks flickers over my vision.
He unties my feet and hauls me out roughly, holding me close, just as we rehearsed. If I were hoping for any warmth, any comfort, I’m sorely disappointed. Kate has so thoroughly become the scoundrel that no traces of tenderness remain. No love. Not even desire. Only the act.
“Move. Your. Feet,” he commands.
The crowd, my mother’s face, the torches all blur together in a swirl as he forces me forward, the onlookers parting for us.
The clearing at the center of the park, shielded on both sides by an alley of live oaks, is to be my planned place of execution—mere feet from the place Arabella Meade died.
The scent of jasmine mixes with the smoky tallow from the torches and the stinking sheep’s bladder tucked into my bodice, sickeningly sweet with an earthy gaminess.
Winthrop drags me forward, and the crowd gathers close, leering at me with curiosity.
I do my part. I roll my eyes, sneer, wriggling in his arms. He grasps me by the hair, exposing my throat, and cracks the whip against the tabby path.
I flinch, involuntarily. I can feel his heartbeat against my back. He’s excited. He’s enjoying this.
“A vampire—this undead creature—can be killed in one of two ways,” he says, his voice commanding.
“By fire, or by destroying the creature’s heart.
This evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll slay this monster by the latter means.
” He drops the whip and produces the sharpened stake, brandishing it.
“I promise you, after tonight, your daughters will no longer fear this monster’s lurid hunger.
They need no longer hide themselves away. ”
This is the challenge. The hidden message to the real killer. You’ve been found out. If this continues, you’ll no longer have a scapegoat.
A scapegoat. Because that’s all I’ve ever been.
For Rebecca’s murder. And now, for all the others after.
I begin to shake. But this time, it’s not out of fear.
It’s out of anger. Out of hatred for these well-bred men and women who would rather make me a monster than examine the rot corrupting their core.
How they use the enslaved to prop up their vanity and build their kingdom, how they play at being royalty, when their souls are anything but noble. It is they who are the real vampires.
Suddenly, my long-hidden rage comes roaring out, fierce, hot, and hungry, like a wildfire burning unchecked.
I thrash and howl, breaking free of my bonds.
I lunge toward Patrick Calhoun, remembering the cruel way he spoke about my father.
My sister. “Good god!” he swears. The young woman at his side swoons into the arms of the older gentleman next to her.
I laugh, wickedly, then turn and growl at Georgina McClintock. She places one gloved hand over her mouth, averting her gaze. None of them can bear to look me in the eye. As I scan their faces for any scrap of empathy, I come away lacking.
“Lillian!” My mother pushes through the crowd, her eyes brimming with tears, her heart-shaped face still lovely, despite all her years of grief.
Dr. Broadbent reaches for her, restraining her, at the same time Winthrop tackles me, throwing me to the ground.
She fights her way free and holds out her hand.
I grasp it, desperately, her fingers gripping mine.
“Mama . . .” I say, reverting to my childhood name for her, hot tears falling from my eyes.
“Oh, Lil, my darling, my angel.”
“I love you,” I say. “I’m sorry. I wish. I wish . . .” The words come out as a garbled lisp, thanks to the ivory fangs, and my panic, but I fight for the right things to say to her all the same.
“Why, Lillian?” she asks. “What have you become?”
And then I realize. She believes it. She believes their lies.
This ridiculous myth, that I’m a monster.
An inhuman killer. The pain of it lances through me like a poisoned barb.
But she convinced herself I killed Rebecca, too, didn’t she?
She believed her own lies, and mine. And I so willingly took the fall.
Better I die than accuse the one I’ve always protected.
The one who murdered her own daughter, slowly, year after year, until the poison finally overcame her.
Instead of saving my sister, instead of saving myself, I saved my mother.
And she let me.
“Mama, I didn’t—”
“Enough!” Winthrop slaps a hand over my mouth, his knee in my back. “Shut up, Lil,” he growls in my ear. “Shut up.”
Dr. Broadbent pulls Mother away, though her heartrending wails hang in the air long after she disappears into the crowd.
I’m thankful she won’t witness what comes next.
Winthrop flips me over, straddles my hips, pinning me to the ground.
I strain and buck as he leans forward and grasps the stake.
Its polished point gleams in the lantern light.
I see a chilling hardness in his eyes as he regards me.
The harsh torchlight etches the face I love—Kate’s face—into that of a stranger. My heart gallops. This is it.
He lifts the stake and brings it down. The first, hard blow from his mallet sends it into the sheep’s bladder.
A fountain of cold, stinking blood gushes forth.
The crowd gasps. I scream, and it’s as if I’m watching the scene from above, as if my soul has separated from my body.
The mallet comes down again, and I close my eyes.
Pain cascades over me as I feel the sharp point pierce my flesh.
He’s gone too far. Too deep. Blood trickles down the collar of my dress, warm this time.
My blood. My eyes snap open, shock cutting through the fog of my surreal, dreamlike state, followed by panic.
Winthrop smirks down at me, his eyes utterly devoid of feeling. Had he intended this all along? Had Kate intended this? We must make it convincing, Lil. They have to believe it.
Rebecca’s words echo inside my head. Do you trust her?
My vision blackens around the edges, a high-pitched whine sharp in my ears. This time, when Winthrop rolls me over, I don’t have to pretend. I don’t have to act. I faint, dead away, the crowd, the lights, the screams of the onlookers fading as I plunge into oblivion.