Author: C. E. Murphy
Category: Vampires
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Given a choice, though, she would simply remain with Fina. Help to save the child, and then to watch it grow however quickly a dragon might, and hunt or fight to keep it safe. To keep them both safe from a world which loathed the prospect of offering women adventure and autonomy, nevermind facing the profound truth that humanity was not the only wily race to walk the earth.
The thought lent her strength and quickness, and she was nearly out of the docks when the second vampire struck.
Fina had warned her of their speed, but none of the eight or nine she’d trapped had shown signs of it. Too late, Susannah knew she’d been complacent. More, that she’d been a fool to believe she ever had the upper hand with the creatures she’d fought. She’d had trickery, that was all: the thing that came at her now moved so quickly that in the darkness she couldn’t lay eyes on it, not truly. Still, she knew how to fight, and miraculously threw up a wrist to block a blow whose speed jarred her to the bone.
Pain ruptured through her arm, fingers going numb as fire spilled toward her elbow. Fina had never hit so hard, and through bright sparks in her vision Susannah realized the dragon had held no illusions about Susannah’s ability to survive if their traps should turn to a fight. There’d been no need to introduce her to real agony: if it had gone that far, she was already as good as dead.
Still, the vampire’s second blow missed. Not because of her newly-honed fighting skills, but because she’d simply fallen, clutching her arm and gasping for breath. A little of the pain receded as she hit earth, and she scrambled forward on hand and knees, searching the dry dark dirt for anything that might be a weapon. The vampire pounced after her, weight bearing her to the ground, and she screamed as he caught a hand in her hair and drew her head back.
The nerve in her elbow shrieked dismay as she slammed her arm back, catching the vampire in the ribs. He let go of her hair, more surprised than injured, and she surged forward again, hands still spread in search of a weapon.
Her fingers jammed against a slab of something cold. Wood, stone, something laid down to mitigate the filth dredged up from the river during wetter days: she didn’t know. But it came free in her hands and she swung around, throwing her weight with it, and caught the vampire in the temple.
He collapsed as obligingly as a man might, blood leaking from his skull. His form trembled, then shriveled and changed, darkness too complete for her to fully grasp what she saw before a man’s quiet voice said, “No one sees a vampire’s true form and lives to speak of it,” almost conversationally.
Susannah shrieked again and scampered backward again, stepping on her skirts and collapsing the few inches to the ground. Three: three was unfair. Three was, without question, more than she could survive. But the third vampire stepped from one shadow to another, crouching above the one she’d knocked unconscious, and from there gave her a mild and interested glance. “Susannah Stacey, I presume.”
Hysterical laughter burst from her lungs. “Why do you all know my name?”
“Janx thrives on gossip. What were you going to do with him now that he’s down?” The third vampire nodded at the prone one, then lifted an eyebrow at Susannah.
“Stake him and manacle him and throw him in the river,” she snapped, taking refuge in asperity so fear wouldn’t control her. “I don’t think I’d have time to dig a grave, not with the ground hard with drought.”
“You’ve been well taught.” He straightened, caught in a bit of torchlight from somewhere down the river. Like the other vampires, he lacked the outrageous attractiveness shared by Janx and Fina. Instead, his slicked-back dark hair and expensive black coat lent him an air of fastidiousness. “By Fina, I suppose. I applaud her ingenuity. How many have you taken?”
Susannah swallowed. “He’s the ninth. Who are you?”
He stepped forward to offer her a hand up without answering. Helpless, she took it: she would be dead already if he wanted her that way. His hands were warm, almost hot, unlike Janx or Fina’s, and she wondered at the differences in their creation that made one Old Race run so warm and another so cold. Especially when those with cold hands seemed to have, as the adage went, warm hearts, whereas the vampire before her seemed the personification of cool regard.
He was only barely taller than she, a diffident height for a man at best. But his gaze was absolute, making her feel as if she were the unchallenged center of his regard. Everything else faded away: the ache in her arm, the danger presented by the unconscious vampire, even her intention to escape back to Fina’s home. He smiled, brief expression with none of Janx’s charm, then inclined his head slightly and took a small step back from her. “I’m Eliseo Daisani.”
“Oh,” she said, unwisely. “The insignificant one.”
Daisani’s eyebrows shot upward. “Excuse me?”
Horrified heat rushed Susannah’s cheeks. “I’m sorry. That was unforgivably rude.”
“Without doubt, but what on earth would possess you to say it?”
Susannah mumbled, “Janx. He said you weren’t important right now.”
A hnf of offense slipped through Daisani’s teeth. “I trust that was before he determined the need for my presence here to keep my people in rein.”
Susannah said, “I’m sure it was,” in a tiny voice, and for a moment wished she dared hide her face in her hands, embarrassment nearly stronger than the desire to survive. “Can you?”
“Keep them in rein?” Beyond Daisani, the fallen vampire stirred, then came to his feet in a blur of outraged speed. Susannah made a choked sound, fear suddenly bright and strong, outweighing shame. Daisani snapped his head toward the second vampire, jaw extending too far as he let out a dangerous hiss, and to Susannah’s astonishment the second creature froze, snarling angrily. “You,” Daisani murmured to him, “are most certainly indebted to me, as this young woman has means and willpower beyond nearly any I’ve met, and your pathetic life would have been hers to end had I been a single moment later.”
Susannah thought she’d never experienced so many heady emotions so quickly. Pride made her chest tight, and she wondered briefly if it was misplaced given the source of the compliment, or whether the unlikely source made it that much more powerful an endorsement.
“Go,” Daisani said, still softly, still speaking to the other vampire. “Leave Chicago, and do so now, never to return. Your scent is known to me; in ten minutes I will follow your trail, and if it doesn’t lead miles beyond this city’s streets I’ll return for the woman, and allow her to finish what she began. Go ,” he said again, and the vampire was gone.
Susannah fell back a step, heartbeat so quick she feared it might seize, as her father’s had. Daisani turned his gaze back to her, casually slow and disconcerting when she knew the speed he could command. “Well,” he said after a while. “I see why they like you.”
“Faint praise from an executioner,” Susannah whispered, and complex emotion slid over Daisani’s features.
“It was meant as sincere praise, and what makes you think I’m an executioner?” Daisani turned a palm out, modifying his words: “Your executioner?”
“Fina said I’d be killed if I was discovered.” Susannah was surprised and pleased at the steadiness of her voice. Repeated exposure to the likelihood of death, it seemed, had calming, rather than distressing, effect. She could face its reality with equanimity, in due time.
“Does one condemn the bullet or the man who holds the gun? You’re a tool, Miss Stacey. A deadly weapon set loose by another. Fina’s right, of course. Almost any of us would see you dead.” The corner of Daisani’s mouth turned up, pretense of a proper smile. “But in this instance, I understand her rage, and admire her choice of weaponry. Janx and I are both…intrigued,” he decided. “By extraordinary women. He might never have come here, but I would have, eventually. Word of a hunter would have reached me. I would have come to kill him, and found you instead. And, in so finding, would likely have found clemency to grant as well.”
A ghost of humor rippled through Susa
nnah. “So I may go about my business?”
His eyebrows shot up again, expressively. “The business of binding vampires? I’m not sure I can condone that, Miss Stacey. Isn’t it enough I let you live?”
“No,” she said, surprising herself. “Not until Fina’s child is found. I promised her.”
“As I now promise you. I intend to bend my considerable talents to finding it. Anything else begets war, and that’s a game we can’t afford. Your people would notice. Imagine. If you, a solitary woman, can trap and bind eight vampires, then armies of men with great intent could hunt us to extinction. I will not permit that to happen.” He glanced toward the riverside, then back again. “Surely we can find somewhere more pleasant to discuss these matters.”
Susannah gestured at her doxy’s dress. “With me in this? We couldn’t. I’m the only one who knows how to trap your kind, Master Daisani. Why let me go?”
He gave her a look that suggested he wore pince-nez, and was peering over their top edge in disbelief. “Would you prefer I killed you now?”
A spike of alarm went through her, making faint mockery of her belief that she’d gone beyond fearing death. “Not at all, but I—” She stepped forward suddenly, hands extended but knotted together. “I want to understand. You have so many rules, so many laws, and none of you are paying heed to any of them. I know the circumstances are unusual, that the child makes everything different, but…you’re creatures of magic,” she whispered. “I’m only mortal, and on the edge of your world. I want to know it better.”
“Laws,” Daisani said after a moment’s pause, “are for the law-abiding. Which even I must be, most of the time, the better to set an example for my brethren. But some one among them has gone beyond the law in spirit if not in letter, by taking the dragon’s child. If Janx and I choose to go beyond it in pursuit, there’s no one to tell us no. So you, Miss Stacey, may live, and Fina will in time be convinced to release the vampires you and she have bound. I may even allow her to keep the one responsible, as a warning to other fools.”
Susannah clenched her fists in her skirts, head lowered in hopes that her gaze wouldn’t give her away. Fina’s captured vampires had burned, all of them, and Susannah couldn’t imagine that they might rise again from that. Daisani clearly didn’t know, and her own life might be the price for the dragon’s thoroughness.
But not tonight. Skirts gathered, she dipped a curtsey, then looked up again. “Will you walk me home, Master Daisani? A woman could have a worse escort than you, I think.”
“Far worse,” he agreed, and offered an elbow. “We understand each other, then?”
“We do.” Understanding wouldn’t prevent Susannah from hunting, but between Janx and Daisani, she doubted she would be the first to happen on the vampire mad enough to kidnap a dragon’s egg.
They spoke of inconsequentialities on the journey home: the unseasonably dry weather and the scent of smoke in the air from a fire across town; common gossip about society; the threat of the city’s darker side. They might, Susannah thought, have been any ordinary couple out for a walk.
Might have been, at least, until Daisani took his leave of her, and in so doing sped away so quickly there was only dust left behind him, and not the shadow of a man. Susannah stared after him, then sank down onto the steps of Fina’s grand home, and put her face in her hands.
Long minutes passed before the door opened behind her, and Fina, without speaking, came down the stairs to sit beside her. Cool fingers touched her shoulder, then tugged her sideways, and Susannah leaned into the embrace, gaze still downcast. Fina’s heartbeat was slow, solid, reassuring: not the flighty thing Susannah’s had been all evening.
“Are you afraid?” the dragon eventually asked.
Susannah lifted her head, finding Fina’s warm smile and fiery gaze close enough for reassurance. There was strength there, unimaginable, inhuman strength. Some part of it had become Susannah’s own, wending its way inside her to take up residence in her soul. “I met Eliseo Daisani tonight,” she said instead of answering directly. “He’s…less comfortable than Janx.”
Laughter creased Fina’s eyes. “I think they would both be pleased to hear that. And what am I, if Janx is comforting and Daisani is not?”
Susannah said, “Beautiful,” as thoughtlessly as she’d said it to Janx, then blushed in surprise at the confidence of her answer.
Fina’s smile deepened. “I could ask for nothing more. Come, dear heart. A glass of brandy, and I’ll warm a brick for your bed.”
“It’s much too hot for bricks.” Susannah let Fina draw her to her feet, both women smiling, though Fina’s expression turned wicked as she led Susannah up the stairs.
“Then I’ll have to find something else to warm, won’t I, my dear?”
“The brandy,” Susannah suggested, and blinked with puzzlement as Fina’s laughter preceded them into the house.
***
“Wake up. Wake up, dear heart.” The words were breathed by Susannah’s ear, so quiet they barely had the strength to carry warning. For a moment they made no sense, neither the words themselves nor the import they had, but then Susannah’s eyes flew open to thin dust-laden strains of golden morning sunlight, and to Fina’s cautiously tense expression.
Her bedchamber was stifling. It had been weeks since Susannah had awakened early enough to see morning sunshine, a detail which would scandalize her uncle’s wife. In that time, she’d become accustomed to Fina’s housemaid slipping in and opening windows so that by the time she woke, what movement of fresh air could be had, had taken some of the unbearable late-season heat from the room. Waking to it was almost as alarming as Fina’s presence, and her air of worry.
That concern was almost washed away beneath a warm smile, but lines of tension remained around the dragon female’s eyes. “Good morning, my dear. I’m afraid you must go. Now.”
Susannah came fully awake, pushing up on her elbows. “What? Why? What’s happened? Did they find—?”
“No.” Fina put a fingertip to Susannah’s lips, stopping the rush of questions. “The child hasn’t been found. But I’ve made a miscalculation, Susannah. An error that will very likely cost your life, if you don’t leave Chicago now.”
“Leave Chicago ? Are you mad?” The thought that she might have to had crossed Susannah’s mind, but to be ordered to do so ran deeper than anger and into pure astonishment. “Why?”
“Because it seems Eliseo Daisani’s precipitous arrival here hasn’t gone unnoticed. Nor, I’m afraid, has the disappearance of so many vampires. They know there’s a hunter now, Susannah. I will not have you exposed to them.”
“I’ve been exposed all along.” Susannah sat up, tugging the shoulder of her night-dress into place. “No one has found me yet.”
Fina whispered, “Susannah,” and took her hand, leading her from the bed. Leading her to the curtained window, where she flicked back the drapes a few inches to expose the street below.
At a glance, it was full of the pleasantry of a Sunday morning, well-dressed families and individuals pausing to speak with one another on their way to and from church. Coaches drew by, or riders on horse-back passed through, though neither with the business to be expected on a weekday. The startlement of a sudden waking still ran through Susannah’s blood, but she shook her head, seeing nothing out of place.
Fina said nothing, only waited as Susannah glanced at her. Susannah frowned, then breathed deeply to steady her heartbeat, and turned her attention back to the street below.
It took another full minute to understand. Not all: oh, not all, not by any stretch, but far too many of the men and women below moved with unnatural grace. With astonishing fluidity, as they paced from one end of the street to the other, exploring the block but always returning to mark a path in front of Fina’s home. A dozen, perhaps even one or two more, all watching and waiting.
Vampires.
Susannah fell back from the window, arms clutched around herself. “I thought they were night creature
s. I thought that’s why we hunted them at night.”
“Not at all.” Sorrow and surprise mingled in Fina’s voice. “If they were bound to the night I would have sent you hunting in the day with iron manacles and wooden stakes. We hunt at night because I can’t take to the skies during daylight hours. I would be seen.”
Heat rushed along Susannah’s jaw. “Of course. Why are they here ? Not in Chicago, I understand that. But at your home?”
“I have two suppositions for that.” Fina glanced out the window again, then retreated to Susannah’s bed, smoothing the duvet as she sat on it. She was no more prepared for the day than Susannah, wearing a silken dressing gown over her nightdress. “I’m the mistress of this city, which is no secret. If there’s a hunter in my streets, I should know about it. So perhaps they’re watching to see how I react to being watched. There are one or two others whom I imagine might also be under their observation.”
“Dragons?” Susannah came to sit across from her on the bed, knees drawn up to wrap her arms around them. She should be getting dressed, preparing to make an escape, but a core of calm certainty rose in her at the realization she would not, despite Fina’s demand, flee.
“No.” Fina smiled, but shook her head. “Not unless they’re haranguing Janx, which isn’t an unpleasant thought in itself. No, there are a few others who interfere with or belong to our world. A bookseller downtown, and a gargoyle guardian or two. Though they’re dull to observe in daylight, frozen in stone as they are. Nevermind,” she added more gently, as Susannah felt confusion spill over her face. “They’re waiting, perhaps, to see if any of us acts out of character. Which means I shall have to challenge their presence, and means you, dear heart, must escape the city while you can. We’ve been careful, but if one of them should have your scent….”
“One escaped last night.” Susannah got up again, moving to her wardrobe, though she had no intention of acquiescing to Fina’s wishes. It was something to do, though, action to steady herself with as she spoke. “Eliseo Daisani let him go and banished him from Chicago. If he met with others, told them about me, they could have come from far and wide, could they not? Given how fast they are? And perhaps they would have my scent, but if they did, I would think they wouldn’t wait on your move. They’d have come after me already, whether I was in your home or not.”