Chapter 61
Chapter Sixty-One
I glanced down at the two tickets representing the best seats in the theatre.
The Royal Playhouse, situated on the south bank of the River Thames, had attracted the city’s most accomplished playwrights.
Over the last eight years, Jacob and I enjoyed so many evenings here watching the stellar performances.
Tonight, I’d arranged to meet with him, but he was running late, which was uncharacteristic.
I suddenly had the sense I was being watched.
Although I didn’t make eye contact with the man in his twenties who stared at me from across the street, I did take in his well-educated demeanor. I strolled away from the theatre and turned down an alley, and then ascended to the roof, waiting for him to pass beneath me.
I landed behind him, and he spun around, his face full of fear, and backed up against the wall.
I pressed him against the cold brick. “Archer sent a boy to do a man’s work.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled.
“I can read your mind, boy.”
He squealed like a girl, and I laughed and stepped back.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked, his voice shaky.
“Where’s Archer?”
“I…I don’t know.” He surreptitiously gave me the answer.
“Tell him that if he isn’t out of London by morning...”
Looking distraught, he withdrew a small wooden cross from his coat pocket and waved it in my face.
“That’s a lovely thirteenth century artifact.” I wrapped my fingers around his throat. “Whatever they told you, it wasn’t adequate. I’d reconsider this vocation if I were you.”
“You’re going to let me go?” His lips quivered.
I leaned into him again. “You’re a pretty young thing,” I revealed my fangs. “I imagine if I were to turn you, you’d be more fun?”
A tell-tale patch of wetness at his groin spread down his trousers.
I laughed.
Marcus appeared out of nowhere.
You have to go home, he said telepathically, his expression fraught. He glanced at the young man and gave me a wary look. It’s Jacob.
“What?”
He has it.
The ground beneath my feet became unsteady. I knew what he was saying but I had trouble believing it.
“Go.” Marcus glanced at the boy. “I’ll take care of him.”
Archer was relentless. The Stone Masters were a threat that needed my full attention – but they would have to wait.
The stark reality of human frailty sent chills down my spine.
The Black Death. Anger struck me that Jacob had caught it, probably while tending to a patient – my most awful fear realized.
“Which room?” I asked Sunaria as we headed up the stairway.
She grasped my arm. “Ours.”
I pulled away and stared at the door, dreading what I’d find on the other side. Sorrowfully, trying to keep my emotions in check, I entered.
Jacob was in a fevered sleep, lying beneath a sweat-soaked bed sheet on our four- poster bed. His face was eerily grey.
I settled beside him, trying to steady my hands.
He shuddered, caught in the terrible grip of a nightmare. Peeling back the sheet, I saw that his chest was covered with dark pustules and his lymph nodes were swollen on his neck. He mumbled something.
Suppressing a moan of despair, I tried to comfort him, fighting back tears.
I wiped away a few damp locks that had fallen into his eyes, and then grasped his hand, pressing it against my lips, as though the very action might help him.
Sunaria gave my shoulder a squeeze.
“How long has he been like this?” I asked her.
“He came here soon after you left,” she said. “Marcus was right behind you.”
“Jacob was supposed to meet me at the theatre.” I pulled out the two theatre tickets and stared at them.
“He’s been asking for you.”
I touched his cheek and found it hot. “We have to cool him down.”
Sunaria’s gaze was insistent. “At least give him some of your blood.”
“I promised him.”
She sighed. “He’s dying.”
I stared back at her. “I need you to be strong for me.”
She stepped back and turned away, frustrated.
A rasp escaped Jacob’s lips. I pulled him to me and hugged him, rocking with him in my arms.
Turn him. Save him.
Jacob pushed himself away from me in a moment of lucidity.
What if there is no heaven?
“Do it.” Sunaria’s hushed voice willed me on.
Not ready to let him go, I bit my wrist and bright red droplets appeared.
Jacob’s eyes met mine.
He whispered into my thoughts. No, father, do not tempt me with this sin.
I ignored his accusation against me, that I was unholy.
I lowered my arm. The candlelight vacillated, as though with its very wavering it foreshadowed the unthinkable.
“Don’t leave me,” I whispered. “I can’t go on without you.”
Jacob’s eyelids fluttered and then closed. I clutched him to me, my sight blurry from tears, the anguish unbearable. “I love you.”
The words had barely left my lips when Jacob stopped breathing.
Finding no air in the room, I ran from it.
I lost all track of time.
Standing on the bridge of sanity, I felt it giving beneath my feet.
A flash of lightning lit up the night, and rain drenched everything beneath the heavens, including me.
Archer headed out of the house that had once served as his headquarters, and he caught sight of me.
I glared back at him full of rage.
“Don’t turn me!” Archer backed away. His eyes shone with terror. “I’d rather die.”
Seconds later, he lay in my arms on the forest ground, fading with me in his thoughts.
I stripped away any chance of him taking comfort in a vision of his loved ones.
As I drank, all unfolded, images revealing secrets passed on from one generation to another and, as an ancient legacy dissolved, I grasped a few of them.
Others slipped by, taken to the grave, like the underhanded remark Archer had made about a threat in the heart of London, which I could find no evidence of within him, and therefore didn’t believe.
Surrounded by the dark, dense woods, I cried out, my screams shaking the trees, causing the birds to scatter and the animals to burrow deeper. An eerie silence followed, as though nature itself feared to utter a sound, aware that what stood in its midst was not natural.
Holding on, I felt myself scrambling for the last remnants of humanity, fighting the drag into the very center of the unknown. Entranced, I flew through the forest, as it transformed into an urban landscape, an array of habitation.
Just inside the front door of Belshazzar’s, I took a moment to gather my thoughts.
With a renewed fascination, I considered my ability to move with lightning speed.
The more I resigned myself to my authentic nature, the more my supernatural adroitness increased.
Having fought it, I’d stunted my potential.
Finally, I welcomed in the shadows and surrendered.
I collapsed on the first step of the staircase and slid down, rolling onto my back, gazing up at the ceiling. The low-hung central chandelier, heavy with crystal prisms, refracted candlelight in every direction.
But not the light that really mattered.
This place was no longer a home.
With a flash of thought, I now lingered at the top of the stairs, my hand resting on the thickly carved, rosewood banister that swept up and around to both east and west corridors.
What an illustrious setting, a gothic place of extraordinary character that reflected the decadent lifestyle we’d once enjoyed.
Just as Sunaria had predicted, Belshazzar’s could one day become a sanctuary.
The bloodhounds kept their distance, watching me from the end of the corridor.
I entered Jacob’s study, desperate to hold on to memories that were already threatening to fade.
Before the bridge completely gave way.
I picked up the letter opener from the desk and attacked the mahogany mantelpiece, scratching the design, gouging the fleur-de-lis, with confused thoughts that it had somehow betrayed me, betrayed Jacob. Failing to completely deface it, I withdrew.
Finding one of our discarded coffins in Belshazzar’s’ lower chambers, I lay down in it.
Sunaria caught me before I lowered the lid. She wavered and ran her fingertips over the edge of the casket. She appeared distraught, searching but failing to find the right words.
I yanked at the lid, trying to shut it.
Sunaria prevented it from closing. “Orpheus.”
I stared blankly at the ceiling, waiting. “Will you take care of it?”
“I have,” she whispered. “Jacob is asleep now.”
The eternal slumber of mortals – final and unyielding – leaving us, the forsaken, to dwell in endless torment, steeped in sorrow.
She climbed in beside me, softening against me, and I closed the lid on us.
Sleep edged closer, its somber promise of oblivion beckoning.