Chapter Thirteen
Something was wrong with Marcus’s livestock.
He might not have noticed it were it not for Winifred’s blood restoring his heightened senses.
His concoctions had always tasted awful, but the most recent mixture had a mildly spicy and sour flavor that could only have come from the blood itself.
He lifted a vial to the flame of a candle on his workbench and tilted it back and forth so the thick liquid inside formed a film on the sides of the glass.
Before Lucina’s warning, he might have dismissed the change as inconsequential, but now he had to consider the possibility that the hunters were running a much subtler campaign than he’d expected.
What better way to weaken an adversary than to poison their food supply?
He was still considering that problem when his valet, Smith, arrived with his evening flask on a silver tray.
The lean, wiry man wore his black hair neatly parted and slicked back with lemon-scented pomade, revealing a high forehead.
He was in his early forties but had the weathered look of a man who had spent much of his life laboring beneath the sun.
He was also the only member of his staff other than Mrs. Gillanders and her husband, the butler, whom Marcus trusted with the secret of his nature.
Marcus waved the flask away. “The animals have been compromised. Do not draw from them further.”
Smith cleared his throat. “Shall I procure additional beasts from the village?”
Marcus shook his head. “If this is a hunter tactic, I do not wish to alert them.”
He’d already had his groundskeeper check their wells and feed storage for any visible contaminants, but it was likely too late to discover the source of the problem. Whatever had been done to his livestock might already be affecting him. That would explain the sudden worsening of his symptoms.
He cracked the window open and poured his latest concoction out, then rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefinger.
Perhaps Jonathan had been right, and it was time to draw the hunters out of hiding so they could begin a direct assault.
Knowing they were nearby, possibly observing him within the walls of his own home, was not helping his already rattled nerves.
“There is another option,” Smith said. “I would gladly bleed for you.”
Marcus clenched his eyes shut. “No.”
Drinking human blood might solve his immediate problem, but he had been down that road before, and he didn’t like the creature that waited for him at the end. Too many innocents had died by his hand. He would not risk further death until he had ruled out every other possibility.
“Marcus?”
He spun around so quickly that he became dizzy and had to throw out his arms for balance. Winifred stood in the doorway behind Smith, looking as pale as a sheet. She glanced between the two men with her brow furrowed. “I-I did not intend to interrupt.”
“You didn’t,” Marcus said quickly. “Please, come in.”
Winifred stepped hesitantly through the threshold as Smith exited.
Marcus did not miss the unusually penetrating look she gave the man.
It was behavior he’d have expected between his quarreling brothers, not his wife and valet.
But that was a concern for another day, as he had more than enough to deal with for the moment.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Now that she’d come to him, he would attempt to rebuild the trust he’d damaged in the library.
“I owe you an apology. I should not have spoken to you so harshly earlier.”
She was much more than a mere assistant.
As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he’d bedded dozens of men and women, but none had drawn out his protective instincts the way she did.
He had practically strangled his own brother because Jonathan had suggested touching her.
If the hunters had implanted her in his life as a spy or saboteur, they had chosen exceptionally well.
She stared at the wall. “Our guests have departed early.”
“They have?” He hadn’t expected them to leave for several days. “Why?”
Her jaw trembled. “Because I married you. My uncle said there is a feud between our families, and I chose my side.”
It didn’t make sense. He’d never even met any of her relatives before they’d arrived, as far as he knew. Perhaps Cordon had been right and the Belltree family was responsible for the murders in Glasgow and the defacement of the tavern in the village.
She wiped her damp cheeks. “My uncle won’t even let me write to Felicity.” Her voice broke on a sob. “I wish I’d stayed in Toronto.”
His heart clenched. She would have had to have been a talented actress to fake such misery.
Winifred’s family was not above suspicion, but he could no longer believe she was plotting against him.
Which meant she deserved even more of an apology than he’d delivered.
He cupped her elbow. “Tell me how to make this right.”
She rubbed her tears away. “Were you serious when you said you can’t leave the castle?”
He sighed but could not regret telling her, given how many other lies he’d told. She deserved better than a husband who kept so many secrets. “Yes.”
“Why?”
He took her hand and rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. That was a tough question to answer without revealing facts she was not prepared to learn. “It’s… a long story.”
“Marcus!” She jerked out of his grasp. “If I’m going to be trapped here with you, at least tell me why.”
This wasn’t how he’d wanted her to learn, but if it would appease her and salve his guilt for treating her so poorly, then he would tell her.
“As you wish.” He dragged two unvarnished spindle-backed chairs out of his pile of half-completed woodworking projects and set them in the middle of the room.
“Please, sit. You’ve had an exhausting day. ”
She grasped the arched back of her seat and rattled it as if expecting it to fall apart before gathering her skirts and sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her back perfectly straight.
He matched her pose, took a deep breath, then began. “It started ten years ago. I’d prepared an invention to present at a symposium, a flask intended to keep liquids at a constant temperature through the application of vacuum force.”
That was the closest he could get to the truth, that the event had been organized by vampires with the goal of finding new ways to operate in a human-dominated world without detection.
He’d attended, intending to convince his peers that the biggest threat to their existence was their dependence on humans.
He was proof that it was possible to sever that connection by consuming frequent small doses of animal blood, a task made easier using his flask.
“I was terrified, to be honest,” he said.
Winifred scoffed. “You?”
He rubbed his damp palms along his trousers.
“I’ve never been adept at speaking. Especially to people I don’t know.
Lucina—my youngest sister—was the one who encouraged me to attend.
She escorted me down the line of chairs to the podium even as I was certain I’d fall over faint the moment I turned around and looked out at all those expectant faces. ”
He’d known his peers might reject his ideas.
For many vampires, drinking from animals was disgraceful.
It was akin to a wolf scavenging from what other predators left behind, a sign of weakness.
He’d hoped that presenting the idea through a scientific lens would help his peers understand why they needed to adapt to the changing world to survive.
He’d been wrong.
“A member of the audience stood and called me a… a fraud.”
Every time he closed his eyes, he returned to that moment, trembling before the man, with his long, black beard; dusty bowler hat; slicker coat; and gold-tipped cane. What the man had actually done was insinuate that Marcus could not hunt his own prey, a grave insult.
“No one rose to your defense?” Winifred asked.
“No.”
He clenched his teeth as the most shameful part of that day returned in a flash.
“You would defile your body,” the man said. “Did you get this idea from your maker?”
Marcus felt as if he’d swallowed a stone.
His carefully constructed arguments vanished beneath the heckler’s sneer.
“M-Marguerite has n-nothing to do w-with this,” he said as he shuffled through his notes.
“W-Wh-When—” Something wet dripped out of Marcus’s nose.
He slapped his hand to his face as a murmur swept through the crowd.
“Wuh, wuh, wuh, what?” the man asked, in what was an obvious mockery of Marcus’s stutter.
A sharp prickling started in Marcus’s toes and swept up his body.
He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.
He was an embarrassment to his kind, a vampire rendered speechless by nothing more than cruel words.
It would be better for his siblings if he walked into the sun and allowed them to be absorbed by other nests.
“The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground.”
He’d never learned the name of the man who’d stood up during his presentation, nor did he care.
The awful thoughts that had assaulted him that day had made several reappearances over the following week, buzzing around his mind like irritating gnats.
Unable to stand the noise in his own head, he’d fled to his family’s ancestral castle.
The room fell silent, except for the howl of the wind outside and the crackle of the fire.
He tilted his head back and stared at the patchwork of stones that made up the ceiling, not wanting to see the disgust or pity on her face.
He was supposed to be the head of his family, the eldest of his nest, but was trapped in his own home.
Were it not for Cordon and Jonathan visiting him every few months, he wouldn’t have seen his siblings in years.
Marguerite would have been so ashamed.
The weight of his sorrow seemed to crush him into his seat, but he choked out a laugh.
“I would give anything to walk freely in society again, but I fear it has been so long that I would not know what to do. It’s become so bad that…
” His throat tightened, but he forced himself to continue.
“I have to follow a strict, regimented schedule because any amount of stress can trigger an attack.”
It was like a barbed net had been dropped over his life that was slowly drawing tighter, forcing him to contort into increasingly uncomfortable shapes to keep from being sliced to pieces.
“So that is the aim of your experiments,” Winifred said. “You’re not treating your livestock. You’re looking for a cure to your attacks.”
He flushed. “Yes.”
Her warm fingers touched the back of his hands. “What have you tried?”
He met her gaze. “Pardon?”
She gestured around them. “You’ve been here for a decade. Tell me what you’ve learned. Maybe I can assist you in finding a treatment.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. She wanted to help. After everything he’d done—failing to disclose his physical limitations before luring her to Scotland, rejecting her in the library when she’d been so earnest, causing her family to disavow her very existence.
He did not deserve her.
“I…I believe it is some manner of illness,” he said.
One unique to his species, although he would have to find a different way of approaching that subject.
“I haven’t identified the cause, although I suspect it is my diet.
” That would explain why none of his siblings were similarly afflicted.
They subsisted on human blood. He’d never been more tempted to give up his prohibition, but each time he considered taking Smith up on his offer, he remembered the gurgling sound of his father dying after Marcus had torn out his throat in his fledgling rage.
“You said the attacks started after you were heckled?” Winifred asked.
He nodded, even as memories of blood-spattered windows and the cackling laughter of his gleeful maker crowded his thoughts.
She shoved to her feet and began pacing the room.
“Consider the Tusculanae Disputationes. Cicero distinguished between worry regarding the future and a burst of emotion. Angor. In Latin, suffocation.” She waved her hands, as if lecturing in front of an entire hall of students.
“There are records of animals fleeing Helike in the days before a significant earthquake. To the citizens of the city, that behavior would have seemed irrational, until it wasn’t. ”
Her sudden enthusiasm was amusing enough that it succeeded where he’d failed and banished the unpleasant echoes of his past to the depths of his mind. “What does my condition have to do with ancient Greece?”
She continued as if she hadn’t heard him, walking faster as she spoke, as if growing excited by her theories. “The event itself wouldn’t precipitate the attack. No, it would be anticipation. If we could interrupt the association—”
He caught her hand as she crossed his path for the fifth time. “Winifred. Slow down.”
She blinked several times before smiling ruefully. “I apologize. When I get fascinated by a problem, I lose track of everything around me. What I am trying to say is, have you considered your attacks are a symptom of an illness not of the body, but of the mind?”
“I-I had not,” he said, which was the truth. He did not want to offend her by dismissing her theory outright, but he could not believe any soul that had lived as long as he had could develop something as simple as a neurosis.
“You’re skeptical,” she said. “I can see it on your face.” She put her hands on his shoulders.
“But you’ve been at this for a decade. Give me a chance, Marcus.
Let me try to help. My uncle won’t listen to me, which means you are the only chance I have of ever seeing my cousin again.
I need you healthy and able to fight, if need be. ”
His eyes burned with tears, but he refused to blink and let them fall.
After so many years of trying to be like Marguerite and holding everything he felt tightly inside, he was no longer sure how to express emotion in a way that she would understand.
He leaned his head so his icy cheek rested atop her warm fingers.
“As you wish.”