Chapter 2 Gideon
Gideon
Callista: Gideon, I’m sending this to you since my son will not pick up his phone. Baylor Godsven is innocent of the crime of killing and husking those two men.
I’ve just received word from the Conclave representatives that they found a human man tied up in the basement of his manor.
The human has provided a complete and graphic timeline of Baylor’s depraved activities over the past two months, and we can conclude that Baylor was otherwise occupied during the times of both murders.
He is guilty of numerous other crimes, including hurting your friend Isis, so his conviction by the Mora holds, but you should know there is still a killer and husker loose in Argleton.
The Conclave are going to use this against you. You are drawing their ire, which could reflect upon my son and his human betrothed.
Bring this beastly creature to justice, lest I’m forced to return and see to it myself. And if any harm comes to my son or his new fiancée, I will personally peel your testicles and serve them up with a Sunday roast.
HER.
I pick up the apple from where it landed at my feet, staring down at the perfect imprint of Arabella’s fangs. Those same fangs once grazed the skin along my neck and brought me to heights of pleasure no human or vampire has since been able to match.
Arabella Lestrange.
When I knew her – when I broke her heart and she tried to have my neck broken in return – she was Arabella Macquart, courtesan and proprietress of the most infamous horror burlesque theatre in Paris. Like the innocent fly, I wandered into her web and she sank her poison into me.
I lied to her earlier. I looked for her many times after our parting in Paris. I spent my considerable criminal resources trying to hunt her down, just in case she’d survived the fire. But I found nothing. I’d given her up for dead.
There were so many times when I thought I heard her laugh on the breeze or saw her gold-rimmed eyes in the darkest depths of midnight.
She’s good at covering her tracks. Vampires usually are. They’re used to living in the shadows.
I’ve never been particularly good at that, for my sins.
Lestrange suits her.
My phone beeps. It will be Sinead. There are a million things to do on Sanctus Estate as we get our first residents settled into their new homes, and with the vampire courts railing against us, I’m poised for trouble.
A few members have pulled out of their contracts, which isn’t ideal.
But the Conclave’s public condemnation of Sanctus Estate doesn’t seem to have had the effect they wanted.
We’ve been flooded with inquiries from uncourted vampires and those willing to renounce their court affiliations.
My major investor, Lord Hamish Aeternus of the Blood Aeternus – one of the richest and most influential vampire property magnates in the world – is still supporting us.
I need to move fast if I’m to fund the next stage of the development and add even more amenities.
And now I’m to hunt a killer for Callista…
I do not have time for a ghost from my past. Not even a delectable ghost like Arabella.
Especially not one with homicidal intentions regarding my plums.
I pay for the apple and watermelon damage. As I wander onto the street in a daze, I wipe red splatters from the apple and take a bite – as if somehow I might be able to taste her. Of course, I can’t taste a thing. It’s like chewing on a chunk of sawdust.
I spit the mouthful into a rubbish bin and drop the apple in too.
Being a vampire is mostly brilliant, but I do miss food. And sunlight. And opium.
The neck of a fresh young woman or a decent blood mocktail almost makes up for it.
But there’s one taste that has haunted me since before my Kiss.
Arabella.
For nearly a hundred and fifty years, I’ve longed to forget her.
I tried to bury my feelings for her long ago, when I buried the last of our mortal acquaintances – the painter Claude Monet, by then a dear friend who pretended not to notice that I did not age.
It was for the best that I forgot Arabella, because she was human, because she too lay in the cold earth, her stillness the last great, sad beauty in a wretched world.
But I could never forget her.
And she isn’t human.
If only I’d known.
One whiff of her ginger and myrrh scent and I’m back in her Parisian theatre during La Belle époque, Arabella sweeping around her pole, her flawless skin shimmering beneath the lanterns as she wove magic with her body.
She was a vampire then.
I’ve been in love with a vampire since 1879, and I didn’t even know it.
How did I not know?
With trembling fingers, I pick up my phone and dial my closest friend. He picks up on the twenty-seventh ring.
“This better be important,” Alaric snarls into the phone. “I’m in the middle of finishing this pox-ridden sculpture.”
Alaric is a much older, grumpier, and more terrifying vampire than me.
He was once a fierce warrior – well, he’s still a fierce warrior, which is why I try not to piss him off – but he’s spent the past five hundred years mastering every artistic pursuit that humans have invented.
Recently, he’s taken up sculpting, which means his fiancée, Winnie, is constantly yelling at him to stop dragging giant hunks of marble over the newly waxed floors.
Inspired by my old friend Auguste Rodin, I’ve commissioned Alaric to create a series of sculptures for the small community garden I’m creating within Sanctus Estate.
But of course, none of them are finished yet because Alaric is an annoying perfectionist.
Being around him frequently makes me feel like a naughty younger brother, which only makes me miss my younger brother. It also makes me remember my Parisian artist friends, and it makes me remember her.
“Arabella Lestrange,” I grind out into the phone.
“What of her?” Alaric sounds impatient. “She’s one of Winnie’s friends from that infernal book club.”
“How come I’ve never seen her before?” I growl. “I didn’t know there were any vampires in the Nevermore Coven. You’d think Winnie might have mentioned that.”
“Winnie only found out recently,” Alaric explains. “Humans cannot spot our kin as we can.”
They certainly cannot.
“Why do you care about Arabella Lestrange?” Alaric’s voice darkens.
I do not want to give him the full sordid story right now. “I’ll tell you once you finish your sculptures. But you’d better explain to Winnie that if any more of her friends turn out to be ghosts from my past, it’s going to cause problems.”
Alaric sighs as if my distress is the greatest inconvenience. “What did you do to Arabella?”
“Why do you assume it’s something I did? She’s the one who tried to have me killed.”
“Did you deserve it?”
She certainly thinks so. “We could have solved our problem with a heartfelt talk over a bottle of vintage blood. Instead, she went straight for the vampicide. Yes, I deserved it, but now she’s here in Argleton, and she hates me, and with the Conclave on my beautiful arse, I can ill afford to entertain her revenge. This is a disaster.”
“And what do you expect me to do about this?” Alaric sounds tired.
“Just… if Arabella comes knocking, asking to borrow your testicle-severing sword, could you tell her that you lent it out to someone else?”
“I have many fine testicle-severing swords,” Alaric says with utmost seriousness. “She may take her pick.”
“Some friend you are.” My phone beeps. Sinead again. It must be urgent. “I have to go. Sanctus business.”
“Yes. I hear the doorbell,” Alaric says. “Perhaps it’s Arabella, come to discuss torture methods with Winnie. I have many woodcuts that will assist them.”
“Die on a stake, Allie.”
“Don’t call me Allie—”
I hang up before he can think of a devilishly sadistic means of punishing me, and find my way back to the car – a Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato in a stunning shade of crimson, since you asked.
The Huracán may look a little conspicuous zipping around the countryside, but I like being conspicuous.
If you’re going to live forever, you might as well have no shame.
I don’t have anything to hide. (Well, only the precarious state of the Sanctus finances, but I’ll find a way to fix that. I always do.)
As I sink into the luxurious leather, my head spinning, my phone rings. Sighing, I answer.
“Did you get the beer and snacks?”
“Huh?” I’m a million miles away, happily ensconced between a pair of exquisite thighs laid out on French silk bedsheets.
“The booze and snacks? The whole reason I sent you to the market.” Sinead sighs. “You promised the human workers a party because they got that little sewage issue sorted out. If all I have to serve them are bloody biscuits, they’re going to get pissed. And suspicious.”
I groan. All I have to show for my trip is a soaring heart rate and a lifetime ban from the Argleton village market. “I got distracted.”
Sinead sighs. “I’ll send someone else out for them. Honestly, Sir. This is the only labouring crew in the village willing to work for Sanctus, and we can’t risk losing them, unless you’re willing to get out there with a plunger and clean up vampire shit. What is the matter with you?”
What’s the matter with me is that the woman I betrayed in 1879 has shown up in my life again, and I’m still in love with her but she hates my beautiful, elegant guts.