Author: C. E. Murphy
Category: Vampires
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The woman waiting for her was not, though she put on a brief grimace approximating pleasantry when she saw Susannah’s expression. It hardly mattered: she didn’t need a smile to take the air from the room. Susannah’s uncle would call her full-blown , though the phrase did no justice to the woman’s lush figure or rich coloring. Red highlights in black hair and coppery skin tones hinted at Indian heritage, common enough in Chicago, and her strong features had enough of the exotic in them to lend credence to the thought. A deep red cloak hid her dress, but even so it was clear she’d foregone wide skirts and bustles. Susannah thought she’d only be half-surprised if the cloak disguised trousers and suspenders, rather than something befitting an appropriately modest woman.
She made Susannah feel pale, wan, and slightly amused at her own despair. “I’m afraid Mr. Stacey is out at the moment. Would you care to wait?”
“Mr—” Incomprehension slid across the woman’s features, then faded into dismissal. “You mean the Pinkerton? No, I’ve no use for him. It’s your help I need. You are Miss Stacey, are you not?”
“I am, but—”
“And you know something of the Pinkerton methods? Of searching out missing persons, of apprehending dangerous men?”
“I suppose I do, but—”
“Then I wish to hire you.”
Susannah folded her hands in front of her stomach, a poor show of holding astonishment inside. “Madame, you must misunderstand. I’m only the secretary here, hired help to keep the paperwork in order. I’m not a detective. I don’t investigate. I—I’m a woman .”
“Yes.” This time a genuine smile flashed across the other woman’s face, and the brittle dry air in the room warmed as though she’d brought a small fire back from the embers. “As am I,” she said as if in confidence. Then, less slyly, she added, “And I assure you, this is not a job that can be done by a man. It may not be one you people can do at all.”
A flare of injured family pride stiffened Susannah’s spine. “I’m quite certain the Pinkerton Agency is capable of—”
“No, my dear.” The woman’s smile gentled and she patted Susannah’s cheek with cool fingers. “Not the Pinkertons. I mean you charming, fragile, foolish human beings.”
***
She ought to have something witty to say. That was her only clear thought, repeating itself like the wash of lake waters on the shore. There must be something clever to say, in the face of preposterous statements. She could think of nothing else, only that she should be able to meet absurdity with drollery, and became faintly aware that the desire to do so was a cocoon, keeping her safe from trying to comprehend impossibilities.
“My child is missing,” the woman said into Susannah’s silence. “I know who, or rather what, has taken him, but I can’t hunt them myself. It’s against the covenants of my people. I believe in this case I might be offered some leniency, but I prefer a subtler hand if it can be found. I cannot trust a man, Miss Stacey. They’re too easily challenged, too determined to prove themselves master of what they face. And a woman is less likely to be seen as a threat, which is of some importance to your survival.”
A trill of frightened laughter burst from Susannah’s throat as she was given something to hold on to. “My survival? Are you mad? What are you talking about? I’m a clerk , madame, not a, a—”
Words failed her, but the woman took up where she left off. “You’re a clerk, perhaps, and unquestionably a woman, but a woman of some rare boldness, my dear. You might have taught, you might have governed, you might have sewn; those are the legitimate occupations offered a woman in this city. Instead you bullied your sole remaining family member into hiring you as secretary for a business which deals in dark and dangerous acts. I know who you are, Miss Stacey. The question is whether you’re willing to find out.”
“How do you know?” Susannah wet her lips. “How do you know any of that? Who are you?”
Sympathy slid over the woman’s face. “I think your uncle would keep you sufficiently protected that my name would mean nothing, but if it’s of any assurance, he knows it. You may call me Fina.”
Susannah echoed, “Fina,” obediently, then took a sharp breath. “Fina. Serafina Durke! Chicago’s dark lady. You run brothels,” she said accusingly. “You seduce girls from good homes, you—”
“Not just girls,” Fina said in mild offense. “So you do know who I am. And I pay so well to keep my name out of the papers.”
Susannah glowered. “That’s what my uncle says. But you can’t keep your name out of his files. Your bruisers take tithes from shopkeepers in the city, you have your hands in the fur trade, in the railroad, in politics, in—I thought you were dead. Everyone thought you were dead. It’s been more than two years since we’ve had a case that involved you.”
“I’ve been indisposed. The child,” Fina murmured. “Given who I am, given what you know about me, do you think I would come here if I had any other choice? I don’t believe you’ve yearned for adventure, Miss Stacey, because I don’t believe its possibility was ever tangible enough to make it a worthwhile dream. I could change that. I could give you excitement beyond your imagination.”
The air was unseasonably warm, but not warm enough to account for the flush of heat that rose in Susannah’s cheeks. Her heartbeat soared, giving the lie to any hint of sensibility she might have clung to. Men struck out on their own, chasing adventure through hazardous territory; women faced too many greater challenges—their more frail bodies, their desirability, their feminine weaknesses—to follow suit. If she had ever had such dreams, they’d died a-borning.
But the desire for them, it seemed, had not. It had only slept, able to be awakened by rash promises in an office lobby. Susannah raised her hands to her cheeks, fingers cold against their warmth, and Fina smiled.
“We have very little time, and all I can tell you before you choose is that it is as dangerous for me to make it as it will be for you to accept. To explain myself I’ll have to break the commandments of my people. To ask what I must of you will mean the sacrifice of my own life if we’re caught. Adventure,” she concluded with a brief smile, “is not for the faint-hearted. Choose now, Miss Stacey.”
Curious alarm made a difficult knot to breathe around. She felt buffeted by wind, by heat, as though Fina’s presence took away the need for thought and consideration. Susannah flattened her palms against her skirts, chin lifted in determination. She’d spent all the years since her parents’ death refusing to be bullied by family, refusing to set herself on the path they most desired. She would not permit a domineering stranger to change her ways now. “Why so little time?”
Exasperation rolled across the woman’s face. “Because I’m impatient, my enemies are quick, and my child in danger. Choose.”
You fragile, foolish human beings. As if Fina herself was something else. As if she could be something else, and if she was, what a host of wonderful, terrible things that would mean. A modicum of sense prompted one question: “Will I regret this?”
Fina laughed, warm rich sound, and ducked her head before looking up through her lashes. “Almost certainly. The real question is, will you regret not accepting even more?”
Nervous excitement fluttered in Susannah’s belly and she pressed a hand over it, trying to calm herself before whispering, “I suppose there’s only one way to know.”
Fina’s astonishing smile blossomed and she offered Susannah her elbow, taking her out of the hot dry office and into the streets. “This is a violent city, Miss Stacey, you know that, yes?”
A chill of anger buoyed by fear spilled through Susannah. “Frontier towns are violent. I’m not afraid of Chicago, Miss Durke.”
“Fina,” the other woman said. “Those tongue-tangling longer names are for your people, not mine. How violent? How many homicides would you say are perpetrated annually, my dear?”
Susannah frowned. “I don’t know. Dozens.”
“Hundreds. And those are the ones which are reported and investigated to som
e degree. There are so many more disappearances.”
“Something you know more than a little about.”
Fina gave her a sharp look. “I rarely have cause to make people disappear, Miss Stacey. There are enough gamblers and whores already, without thieving more off steamboats and trains. Come, step along lively.” Amusement dashed the sharpness off her features. “Or are you wary of Hairtrigger Block?” The streets were still broad, but pervaded with the scent of alcohol now, and the men and women who lingered there looked hard up. Susannah’s conservative dress of wintery brown wool looked exceedingly well-made and well-fitted amongst the other women, and Fina’s brilliant deep red cloak made her a fox among wolves. “I’ll bring you worse places than this before we’re through, dear heart, and you’ll bring yourself to worse places yet. This way.” She snapped her fingers and a disreputable-looking man stepped forward, dragging a card house door open.
Susannah balked, color in her cheeks high all over again. “I can’t go in there. I shouldn’t be here at all!”
“Ah.” Fina pursed her lips, examining her, then shrugged. “Then there’s less to you than I thought there was. Nevermind, my dear, though I’ll not trouble myself to walk you home. I may be able to find some other woman with a real Pinkerton heart.” She breezed through the open door, and her erstwhile doorman looked Susannah up and down with a leer.
Outraged frustration forced her through the door to hiss, “You’re manipulating me!” at Fina’s cloaked back.
The dark-haired woman smiled over her shoulder without a hint of repentance. “Of course I am, dear heart, but look how well you’re responding to it. And in just a few minutes it won’t be a matter of manipulation anymore, that I promise. You’ll be eager to help.”
Susannah, warily, said, “…or?”
Fina opened a second door on wooden steps leading into darkness. “Or you’ll be dead.”
***
A dragon filled the room.
It was unlike any dragon Susannah had ever seen renditions of: the classic paintings were all of squat creatures with bulky bodies and long necks, but she had no other word for what she saw, and no doubt that dragon fully applied. The beast was long and lithe and slender, with spiny wings and long narrow claws, and it twisted on itself to stare down at her with fathomless black eyes. There was nothing of Fina the woman in that gaze, and yet Susannah had stood and watched, agape, as the one became the other.
She wasn’t fully certain how she’d traversed the distance between the cellar door and the enormous sewer room she now shared with a dragon. Fina’s words—her threat—had been so calm, so matter-of-fact, that it was as if Susannah hadn’t fully heard them. Hadn’t fully comprehended their meaning, and so had tripped lightly down the stairs aware but uncaring of her encroaching doom. Fina had said nothing until they reached the cavernous room beneath the city, and then had said, “The rest will be easier to believe once you see what I have to show you.”
Then a blast of air had knocked Susannah against one of the curved walls, hard enough she fastened on the idea that she’d hit her head and was imagining things. But she hadn’t: there was no throb of pain in her skull, no stars dancing in her vision. There was only a dragon, vast and black with hints of red gleaming in its scales’ depths.
It would take two bites, she judged. It would take two bites to eat her, and made the manner of her likely death clear. She hoped the corsets would stick in Fina’s gullet and choke her, though from the size of her teeth it seemed unlikely. Whalebone and human bone alike would no doubt be pulverized with ease. It was a curiously neutral observation for a woman studying a dragon, and she recognized it as the same protective, cocoon-like thought that had wrapped her earlier. Someone said, “I can see why this is easier to show than explain,” in a cool voice, and only belatedly realized it must be herself: it seemed impossible that the writhing monster before her might speak.
The explosion of air as Fina transformed back into human shape was as rattling as the first. Susannah put her palms against the sewer wall, pressing herself there as she waited. Long seconds passed, long enough to count, and then long enough to worry, before Fina spoke. “Chicago is dangerous, my dear, because the oldest of the Old Races have come here in their numbers. Vampires hunt this city.”
A woman had just become a dragon, and changed back again, as Susannah had watched. She only nodded, accepting the impossible as fact.
Approval flickered in Fina’s gaze. “One has taken my child. My egg. I had only turned my back.” A snarl came into her voice and distorted her face, leaving a mark of the dragon there, to Susannah’s eyes. “They are fast , the vampires. They have no especial strength, no deadly wit, but they have speed, and by the time its scent reached me, it was already gone, and my child with it. I cannot fight it, Susannah. Even if I could catch it, the strictures of our people, of the Old Races, forbid battle between one race and another.”
“The Old Races.” Susannah’s voice echoed in the chamber in a way Fina’s did not. “Dragons and vampires?”
“There are others.” Fina made a throw-away gesture, disdain curling her lip again. “A few children of an era far older than humanity’s, who still survive. They do not matter, Susannah Stacey. It is the vampires who are my enemy. The vampires, whom I would train you to fight.”
***
New York, 1923
“This,” Daisani said from the shadows, “is not a story I would expect you to tell, Janx. Ah, here you are, Vanessa. I wondered where you’d gone.”
Never, not if she should live ten centuries, would she become accustomed to the silence with which he and the others could enter a room. Nor would she ever be able to control the leap of her heart when he arrived and announced his presence in such a way. A rush of breath left her, but it was Janx who spoke first.
“I delight in doing things you don’t expect, Eliseo. What are you doing here? Vanessa and I were having such a fine time together without your interference.” Janx folded his hands behind his head, feet kicked up as he leaned back in the chaise lounge.
For show, Vanessa thought: all for show. He’d been more intense, more intimate, before Eliseo’s appearance. She wondered which was the facade: the easy relaxed man he was now, or the one offering confidences in the protected light of candles. Watching him—as she rarely did; it was simply easier not to, given his relationship with her lover—it seemed that both were the dragonlord in equal parts, and probably more besides.
She moved her belongings—the book she was reading, the deck of cards she whiled away hours with—to the chess table beside her, offering Eliseo space to sit. He smiled as he passed by, but shook his head and took another seat. Playing a part just as much as Janx did, perhaps; playing that they weren’t close, so that she might be less a temptation or target to his ancient adversary. None of them was fooled, but in five decades she’d learned the rules, and was content with them.
“It seems I’ve come to make certain all of the tale is told,” Eliseo answered. For a moment Vanessa thought he spoke to her own thoughts, then remembered Janx’s question, for all that it hadn’t really wanted an answer. “How much have you left out, Janx? Susannah’s story is barely yours to tell.”
Janx made a dismissive sound, flicking away the scolding with his fingertips. “It’s frightfully dull, Eliseo, you being proper all the time. Besides, who better to tell it than myself? After all, ‘dragonlord’ has its place as titles go, but don’t you think ‘Father of the Dragons’ sounds better yet?”
“I think you never earned it, at the end of the day.” Daisani lowered his lashes, almost coquettish, then looked up again so sharply as to emphasize how deliberate the shy glance had been. “Or am I not to remind you of that, old friend?”
***
September 1871
“Did he burn?” The question came unwillingly, and yet couldn’t go unasked. Susannah’s hands were a Gordian knot in front of her stomach, and like that knot, seemed they would require the sword to loosen them. Whethe
r it was anxiety or excitement that drove their wringing, though, she was unsure. Both, perhaps: there was no reason they couldn’t be coupled. Hours after the vampire’s capture she still suffered moments of shaking limbs and weakness in her body that were thrown at odds with a terrible, breathless pride. “Is he dead? Did he…know anything of your child?”
Fina paced, sinuous exploration of the room which seemed to be not so much movement as a transference of her attention from one place to another. It was impossible to see her dragon form when she’d taken the human shape, but that vastness lent weight and heat to her presence. It had dried the air the day Susannah had first met her; now, at least, she understood why. That day, though Susannah hadn’t known enough to recognize it, desperation had driven the dragon female. Now it was success, though the questions brought her up short. “He burned. Whether he’s dead…” She shrugged. “His ashes lie scattered around a stake of oak, bound and drowned in an iron casket, and all of it is buried far beneath the earth. If he isn’t dead, he certainly isn’t well. You must hunt again tonight.”
She swung toward Susannah, gaze gone black in the torch-lit underground room. “Tonight, before they notice one of their own is gone. He knew nothing, this one, not even bragging tales told from one idiot to another. Someone will know, in time, but time is so short. The egg will hatch, Susannah. The egg will hatch, and unmothered the dragon will die. It has been eight hundred years and more since one of my kind was born. I cannot let it die.”
“So you’ve said.” Susannah sank against the wall, grateful that Fina had insisted on new corsets. It had been weeks since the dragon discarded Susannah’s fashionable steel-lined stays and offered her new ones which had boning of corded twill cotton. Nor would the dragon have them tight-laced beyond what was necessary for support; the point, Fina insisted, was flexibility and the ability to breathe freely in battle. Susannah argued that she wasn’t of a class to train her shape to a wasp-waist, that her corsets were comfortable and permitted free movement, but the new ones were astonishing in the range of motion they allowed. She would not have wanted to run from the vampire in her old stays. She could not have sunk against the wall as she did now. “I don’t see a difference between you playing bait for them and me doing it, Fina. You’re the one who took him away and burned him. Isn’t that breaking your covenants?”