Author: C. E. Murphy
Category: Vampires
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She remembers, too, the grandfather who played at cards and magic tricks when she was a child, a man whose livelihood came from the skill to distract as much as to shuffle a deck. She turns her cuff up to consider how an astonished dragonlord and a delighted vampire never thought to check her sleeves after she’d taken their prize away from them, and smiles.
After all, she is only human, and could never manage to cheat the Old Races.
Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight
She was too young, even for a man with no age, but she caught his eye. Slim, dark-haired, with long fingers caught in the skirt of a shapeless dress, she was clearly not a child of wealth. She no doubt belonged to the riverboat upon which she stood, a shabby thing that had seen better days. Even so, in the fire’s light they both bent toward beauty.
It was her gaze, fixed on the sky, which arrested him. Others watched the fire, drawn in by its glow and movement, but she looked upward as though she could see what soared above the smoke. That was quite impossible: even knowing who danced there, Daisani could barely see them himself, but the girl watched as if she knew. Such seeing eyes were enough that he might have gone to her then, despite her youth, but tonight; tonight Chicago was burning.
***
New York, 1923
Flame trembled, danced, then fell into darkness. Vanessa murmured a sound of impatience and rose to find matches. Her lush speakeasy refuge had electric lighting, but she preferred the warmth of fire. She had since childhood, though there’d been no electricity then to weigh it against. Then, she had loved its power, even when it destroyed, even when it haunted her dreams; now, she loved its gentleness on her eyes, on the lines of her face, though she, of all women, had little cause to worry in that regard. Still, she read and played chess and cards by candle-light, and the flame that had died left the room just that much too dim.
A spark; a scent of sulfur; and an idle thought that the guttering candle would have been better served with the living flame from another rather than the recalcitrant matches. A second strike woke a second spark, but no blaze caught. “For pity’s sake.”
“Allow me.” A man’s voice where there’d been no one a moment before, first startling and then waking a whole new level of impatience. He stood behind her, close enough to be a lover, and folded long cool fingers over hers, as though he’d strike a new match himself. He didn’t: a scrape of his thumbnail against his fingerpad brought flame to life, and the candle’s glow warmed the cup of her palm as he guided her hand to light it. “There,” he said with evident satisfaction. “Much better, isn’t it?”
“It might have been, if your arrival hadn’t blown it out in the first place.” Vanessa turned in his arms and put her fingertips against his chest, pushing him away. He fell back one step, expression all jade-eyed injury, and was obliged to step backward again as Vanessa returned to her chair.
Well: not obliged, perhaps. She had known the red-haired man more than thirty years, and if obligation had ever sat on his shoulders at all, it had done so lightly indeed. Book in hand, seat re-taken, she turned a deliberately piqued gaze on him. “What on earth do you want, Janx? Eliseo isn’t here.”
“My dear Miss Grey.” Janx cut a more extravagant bow than usual, then fell into the chaise lounge across from her and cocked a knee up, fingers spread wide in supplication. “It’s not Eliseo I want at all. Surely you know that by now.”
It wouldn’t do to laugh; it would never do to laugh at Janx’s theatrics. He had everything Eliseo Daisani lacked: fire, vitality, humor; a face which would see him beloved in the moving pictures, if he were fool enough to take vanity that far. He was not, though, a fool. A fop, yes; a showman, without question. But never a fool, and Vanessa dragged her gaze from him to the surrounding walls, the better to remind herself of who and what else he was.
No one else—no one else human, at least—had ever seen the tapestries from whence the speakeasy’s abstract glass windows came. Curved to fit into subway walls, as they stood they were beautiful rushes of color, lit from behind because this room was buried, a secret meeting place for a handful of men who were not human at all.
Men who had, as it happened, lost its ownership to Vanessa herself, and who now came and went from it only at her whim. Largely, at least; Janx was ever disinclined to follow someone else’s strictures. Truthfully, she was surprised any of them obliged her winnings and her privacy as much as they did. She was only human, and a clever bit of card-play could hardly stop them if they chose to make this place their own again. But Eliseo and Janx admired cleverness, and what they deigned to accept, the others tended to follow.
Unless the chosen object was a thing one of them had chosen to accept, and by doing so left the other to want it. “You don’t want me, Janx. You only want what Eliseo has.”
“And are the two not one and the same?”
“Not,” Vanessa said with a faint smile, “from where I’m sitting. I doubt you came down here alone to try to seduce me. Half your entertainment comes from doing that in front of Eliseo. So what do you want?”
“I want to know how you won this place.” Janx spread his arms, encompassing the room’s curved walls, the rich carpets and heavy, warm furnishings. “I want to know how you managed to cheat us. Oh, I don’t care, I’m not going to eat you.” Fluttering hands made light of the way her heart lurched. “It’s simply curiosity, my dear, and I’m so much like a cat. My curiosity shall kill me.”
“My concern is that it shan’t kill me .”
He gave her a smile, candle-light never dim enough to hide the too-long curvature of his canines, or their too-sharp points. “Of course not. Not if it finds an answer.”
She doubted he would do it. Not for any love he had for her, but because of the delicate dance between himself and Eliseo. If she were to die here, in the speakeasy she’d won as her own, Eliseo would have no doubt as to her murderer. It would lack subtlety, and Janx was too much a master of their game for that.
And yet it wasn’t a bluff to call. Not so obviously, at least, as by refusing him. Vanessa set her book aside, studying the lanky red-head across from her. The firelight was good to him, making his skin gold, bringing life to his reposed form. Living shadow danced where light would not fall and brought with it memories so long occluded she could only half believe they were real. No: more than half, now, and for a long time since, but there were questions she had never dared lay at the feet of the men she’d come to know.
Questions which now, unexpectedly, had an opportunity to be asked. “A curiosity for a curiosity, Janx. I’ll tell you for a price.”
He sat up in an explosion of movement, interest brightening his jade eyes. “You surprise me, my dear. Name your price, and we shall see if I’ll play your game.”
“No.” She knew better. Neither Janx nor Daisani, nor any of the others she’d met, were men with whom to settle the details of a bet after the fact. “This is the game. One of your curiosities satisfied in exchange for one of mine, or we both go away unsatisfied.”
The impulse for low-brow humor scampered across his face, but she’d been right, before: it was only in Eliseo’s presence that Janx truly enjoyed flirting with her. His humor was replaced by petulance and he waved a hand sullenly. “Oh, very well. What do you want to know?”
Triumph spattered through her. “Tell me what happened in Chicago.”
Janx’s silence was so complete, so still, that it seemed the candle-light had died. That Vanessa was alone in the dark, with no companion but her heartbeat, and then he said, oh so softly, “Her name was Susannah, and like the best of you, she was only human.”
***
Chicago, September 1871
Her fear gave her away.
That was to be expected; that was, indeed, part of the plan. But knowing a man could count the rapid beat of her heart or breathe in the scent of her terror was one thing. It was a different thing entirely to see flat hunger in his eyes as he disengaged from conversation, searching the room for a tantal
izing prize.
She had every right to be afraid: gamblers’ halls and saloons were men’s territory, the only women to walk among them prostitutes and actresses. Susannah was neither, nor even pretending to be one of them. Her dress was of extraordinary quality, better than anything she’d ever owned, and her hair was done by the expertise of an upper class ladies’ maid. The scenting man was not the only one whose attention she’d gained, though of all of them, he was the most dangerous. He was also, of course, the target.
She’d been warned. She’d even watched, from a distance, as he and his kind moved through the city. She’d been taught to recognize their slightly-too-smooth movements, and to notice how even the most elegant of humans seemed a little thick and clumsy in their wake. She saw it again now as he made his way through rough and gentle men alike. The gambling hall equalized them, sinners to a need.
“Madame,” her quarry said with utmost courtesy when he reached her, “you cannot possibly belong here.”
“No.” Her voice was far too frail. She swallowed, trying to strengthen it, and felt the pulse in her throat. Saw his gaze go to it, and felt it leap again. She would be no use at all, if her fear stayed this real. She swallowed a second time, then pulled a nervous, determined smile into place. It suited both her barely-contained panic and the role she was meant to play.
It had seemed easier, this part, before she walked on stage.
“My brother,” she managed, then tightened her hands in their gloves. Soft kidskin gloves, as fine as the dress; finer than a secretary could ever own. But tonight she wasn’t a secretary, nor would she be for many nights to come, if this first encounter was successful.
If it wasn’t, well. She would be dead, and so not a secretary then, either.
“Your brother,” he prompted. “A ne’er-do-well?”
Offense welled up in her, genuine enough to be funny if she didn’t need it so badly. “I should think you’re not one to talk, sirrah, given that you’ve come from a gambling table to greet me.”
A smile cut across his face, making him compelling, if not handsome. That surprised her: she had expected beauty, but he was merely tall and rangy and graceful. Combined with the sharp smile, it could be mistaken for attractiveness, but it was by no means the seductive masculinity she’d imagined.
Then again, she knew what he was, and that, perhaps, colored her perceptions. “Would it help my case,” he wondered, “if I swore I never gamble? That these premises are mine to run, but not to indulge in?”
“No,” she said as acerbically as before. “A man who profits from a den of iniquity is no better than those who lose their money to them.”
“Such as your brother,” he said smoothly, and Susannah winced even as she admired the circle she’d been run in.
“He looks like me,” she said more quietly. “His hair is sandier, perhaps, but his eyes are the same, green and wide-set in his face. His jaw is stronger, and…please, has he been here? He’s only seventeen, and I was meant to care for him after our parents died. I’ve done all I can, but he’s drawn to the cards and the horses, and I’m at my wits’ end.”
His gaze darkened, another sharp smile sliding across his lips. “Alone in the world. How tragic for both of you. I’ve seen no youths of such rare beauty, miss. Oh, but he must be,” he said as she blushed. “If he looks like you, he must be. Perhaps you would accept my escort to some of the less reputable establishments on Hairtrigger Block, that you might search for him in safety.”
“Please.” It took no effort at all to put a quaver of relief in the word, nor any thought to slip her hand into the crook of his elbow when he offered it. Her heartbeat was dizzyingly high, and she wondered what he made of it. If he thought it heightened from gladness that she needn’t face the gamblers’ row alone, or if he imagined, as many men here would, that she had come to sell herself for the first time, and that terror had the best of her. There were other explanations, but those were the two most likely, and neither had any bearing on the truth.
It was unseasonably warm beyond the gambling hall walls. Within them it had been muggy and smelled of sweat; desperate men made a stench difficult to wash from the skin. But outside was almost no better, though a breeze took the smell away. Torches threw scattered light on the street, alley-way openings gaping between them like dark maws. Susannah glanced down them nervously, and her escort offered a reassuring squeeze. “The heat is making everyone temperamental, but you’re safe enough with me.”
“It’s just I fear I’ll look down one of these and see him,” Susannah whispered. “That all the years of watching over him will come to naught. See—!” Her breath caught on the word and she pulled away from her escort, taking quick steps toward a shadowed alley. “I saw, I saw—!”
“You saw nothing.” Impatience colored by deliberate tolerance filled her escort’s voice. “I would have seen, or heard—”
“No, I’m sure of it!” Susannah gathered her skirts and dashed down the alley, heartbeat pounding in her ears. The gambler behind her cursed, then followed after; in someone else, it might have been a gentlemanly gesture.
Even running blind, she knew how many steps to take. She had practiced so many times, wearing this very dress, these very shoes. Running over rough cobbled streets, over smooth paved stones, over mud and dry dirt, over mucked-out straw; over every kind of earth she could think of, until she was confident in every step, certain of every possible fumble. Fourteen strides, so far back into the alley that no hint of torchlight danced there, before she flung herself to the ground, sprawling crosswise across the filthy alley floor.
Her escort’s boot caught her ribs, tripping him, and he fell forward into a black iron cage, invisible in the alley’s darkness.
She rolled to her knees, no pretense of getting to her feet, and dragged a wooden stake from within her right sleeve: from the arm he had been unlikely to take, when he offered her his. This was the part she’d never done before, never driven wood through a living man’s body, though she’d practiced hundreds of times on pig cadavers, and twice on the bodies of dead men whose presence she had not questioned. Surprise was on her side. Surprise and so many rehearsals that it was easier than she expected, plunging oak into his back.
Neither the pigs nor the dead men had screamed the way the vampire did.
It tore at her skin, a sound of knives and pain in a register no human voice could reach. On and on, his body arching back against the stake, fingers gone to black claws as they tried to reach her. The heart is best, she had been told. Best, but not necessary: it’s the wood impaling them that binds their form. Even as she repeated the promise to herself in words whispered aloud, his changing fingers shriveled and became human again. She dropped her weight down on the stake, shoving it through until it moved more easily. Until his screams lost air, for she’d struck a lung, she thought, not the heart.
Only then did she dare seize one of his hands and manacle it within the cage, and then the other. He fought, even without air, but that was two. Two of the four elements of a spell to bind a vampire. It wouldn’t hold forever, but it would hold long enough.
When the cage was closed, a vast darkness came out of the sky and beat wing above the alley. Taloned feet reached for the cage, seized it, carried it high. Vampires, it was said, could not die. But they could be bound, and once bound, there was another thing never yet tried. Drowned by water. Staked by wood. Bound by iron. Buried in earth.
Burned by fire.
Susannah, shaking, exhausted, fell back in the mud to stare skyward at the black shape a dragon made against the stars.
It had not started this way, but then, she never could have imagined where it would lead, when it began.
***
August 1871
The doorbell’s quiet chimes were flat in air bitter with heat. Susannah glanced toward the door, but whomever had entered had already stepped away, beyond her line of vision. All that was left to see were the etched glass words, arching backward on this side
of the door: THE PINKERTON AGENCY. It was the agency’s files she had in hand, tucking them away into neatly labeled drawers. “One moment, please. I’ll be right with you.”
“Miss Stacey?”
A woman’s voice, rare on this side of the door; even when a woman was in need, she usually came with a male proxy. More often, she simply trusted a man to plead her case. Crossing beyond the threshold of a Pinkerton office suggested desperation, and a lady was never desperate.
Susannah Stacey, at twenty-eight and unwed, with a temperament poorly suited for nursing or teaching, had long since passed over desperation and taken up a banner of independence. She called it independence, at least: there were men who would be grateful to rent a room in their uncle’s home and accept employment at their uncle’s business. By that standard, she could be as satisfied with her lot as any man.
“Miss Stacey,” the woman said again, more urgently. “I must speak to you.”
That was the sole reason her uncle had agreed to employ her. Once in a while, a great while, a woman did pass through the agency doors. Almost inevitably, those women were more comfortable speaking with another woman in the room, pouring out their stories to what they saw as a kindred spirit. Very few of them, Susannah imagined, ever thought through what it meant that she was there at all. They would hardly consider her of their class, worthy to share anything with, if they realized she worked as the agency’s secretary. She expected they saw her as more of a prop, a convenience brought out in order to sooth their worried souls.
It was, she reminded herself daily, a better fate than preparing meals and exchanging wifely gossip. Her uncle wanted to believe education had put her above herself, but was stymied by the bare fact that she’d had none beyond the necessary accounts and letters to run a household. His wife thought her unnatural, which made Susannah smile each time she recalled it. She was still smiling as she put the files aside and stepped around the wall separating the foyer from the stacks.