Christabel
“I’m so sorry,” Connor mumbled at me before he crumpled, falling onto the floorboards. Dawn lit the dust motes as they danced over him. I dropped to my knees, searching him for wounds. He didn’t move at all. And he was cold to the touch, as if he’d been hiding all night in the snow-dusted forest.
“Did you kill him?” I gaped at Aidan.
Aidan shook his head. “He’ll be fine come sunset. He’s young, and daylight hits them hard.”
I sat back on my heels, stunned. “What?” For someone so in love with words, I was repeating “What?” an awful lot.
“You called him Connor. He’s one of the Drake brothers.” Aidan crouched and lifted a trapdoor in the floor. “This may work to our advantage, actually.”
He reached over to grab Connor’s arm. I clutched his other arm. “Don’t!” I wasn’t sure what I was telling him not to do, but I felt strongly about it regardless.
“I’m not hurting him,” Aidan said patiently. “I’m helping him. He’ll be sick as a dog if he sits in the sun all day. And if anyone else comes across him like this, he’ll be defenseless.”
“Oh.”
Aidan hadn’t lied to me yet, unfortunately. I watched glumly as he rolled Connor over the floorboards and then dropped him into the cellar below. The trapdoor fell with a bang and a cloud of dust.
“You can try to run,” Aidan said wearily. “But he won’t move a muscle until sunset. You’d have to leave him behind. Are you willing to do that?”
Leave the guy who’d crawled into this broken old house to save me?
Of course not.
And Aidan knew it.
“Try to rest,” he suggested, not unkindly. He looked tired but not tired enough to fall over like Connor. “There’s water in that jug and food in the basket.”
“Thank you.” Was I thanking my kidnapper, as if he’d offered me chocolate? I suddenly felt like a Jane Austen heroine, proper in the face of adversity. Never mind, I still wore my combat boots. I must be tired, too—I wasn’t making sense, even in my own head. But I knew I couldn’t sleep, so I went out to the porch. Aidan was already gone. There was no one around except for Connor under the floorboards. The mountains were a hundred shades of gray and indigo as the sun rose.
I really was in a ghost town, full of weeds and muddy lanes and leaning houses that looked like they might fall right over if the wind changed direction too suddenly. The saloon doors creaked. The general store had no windows, but it did have faded gingham curtains. The wooden horse trough outside was filled with dead leaves and pine needles. I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised to see a mail coach or a sheriff with a gun holster. The historical geek inside me bounced on her toes and wanted to skip into every deserted building. A very thin layer of frost coated the peeling shingles, already melting in the morning light. The sky was a field of red roses, pink tulips and lilacs.
It might have been beautiful if I wasn’t suddenly afraid I was going to be stuck here. No hundred-year-old gingham curtains or pretty sunrises could make that okay.
I picked at the cuts on my palms, from where I’d dug my nails in. Vampires didn’t exist.
Never mind the pile of blue gray ashes in the middle of the road from the thing Aidan had staked. Never mind Connor’s cold, pale body in the cellar.
Just never mind.
I went down the stairs, avoiding the rotting step. The sun was higher now, shooting sparks off the dew and melting ice. I decided to explore the rest of the ghost town, which was really just one street, since my other option was to stand there and go quietly insane.
Luckily, anything antique, poetic, or just plain old always distracted me. I went into the saloon first, the red paint peeling off the creaking wooden doors. The floor was slanted, the bar polished wood. Behind it was a shelf full of old whiskey and sarsaparilla bottles. There was a staircase in one corner, missing most of its stairs, leading to a balcony where women in red corsets would have lounged. The tables tilted drunkenly, missing legs and covered in dust. I even found a bullet hole in one wall and couldn’t resist sticking my finger in it.
I went into the general store next and poked about, lifting lids off glass jars dusted with sugar inside and lined with broken candies, finding a mouse-nibbled bonnet with moth-nibbled flowers, a barrel of flour full of insects, and rusted horseshoes. I explored a small house, the iron stove still filled with long-dead embers. There was a ladderback chair and clay jugs in one corner and hooks with pewter mugs. I could write poetry about all of this, once I was safely back at Uncle Stuart’s house.
Outside, the sun was high now, warm enough to chase winter’s breath off the mountain. Birds sang and squirrels rushed back and forth, carrying pinecones and acorns. I paused to listen for weird snorting or jaw clacking, anything that might herald one of those blue monsters. When I heard nothing but ordinary autumn sounds, I reminded myself that I was trying not to think about blue skin and ashes and fangs.
I was feeling tired, nearly drunk with fatigue, which made the not-thinking easier. I was actually shuffling my feet because it felt like too much work to lift them off the ground. Combat boots were heavy when you were exhausted. It must be an adrenaline crash—and the fact that I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours straight now. I just needed a nap and some food. And to be rescued, of course. I was pretty sure that would cure all my ills.
I stopped at the end of the road, the wind kicking up the dirt around my feet. I wanted to start running and not stop.
“ ‘When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, a highwayman comes riding,’ ” I murmured to myself, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
Sighing, I turned slowly back toward the crumbling ghost town.
“You don’t leave a man behind,” Saga said from the doorway of a crooked house. “Good girl.” She was leaning on one shoulder, the light glinting off the tarnished silver buttons of her frock coat. She wore tight black rolled-up jeans underneath and a frilly white tank top.
I froze, then frowned. “Wait. Sunlight.” I lifted my chin. “I knew you guys were insane. If you were a vampire, you’d burst into flames.”
She extended one hand so that the light fell on her pale blue skin. It was like she’d been painted with watercolors, versus the man last night who looked as if he’d been smeared with rancid oil paint. She didn’t burn or blister or smoke like charred meat. The scars on her hands and forearms went a little pink, but that was it. The vampire thing was a delusion. It was some sort of historical prank, or they were garden-variety crazy people.
Which didn’t explain Connor’s dead faint.
Or make me feel any better, actually.
“Sunlight won’t kill me,” she said, amused. “I’m too old. But too much will make me feel worse than I would the morning after a barrel of bad rum.” She straightened. “Come in, girl. Aidan’s snoring like a wildebeest and I’m in need of easy company.”
I crossed the street hesitantly.
She smirked. “Not going to turn lily-livered on me, are you?”
I cleared my throat. “No.” I stumbled when I noticed the blue hand nailed to the door.
Saga shrugged nonchalantly, as if everyone decorated with body parts. “It’s a warning.”
I swallowed. “To who?” And of what, exactly? Extreme grossness?
“To the Hel-Blar.”
“The Hel-Blar? That sounds like a bad rock band.”
She just waved me inside the old house. I went with a great deal of trepidation. I really didn’t want anything cut off to be used as decoration, but someone who sawed off hands wasn’t someone I wanted to defy. Not until I got my bearings, anyway.
The house was swept free of dust and there was a shelf covered in pewter mugs and a big harvest table. Several muskets hung on the wall along with a few curved daggers, but no body parts. A basket of stakes whittled to such a fine point you could have embroidered with them stood by the door. Huge clay jugs crowded one corner. It looked old-fashioned but normal.
She poured something amber colored out of a smaller pitcher and slid a mug over toward me. “Have a seat and have a drink.”
I smelled it gingerly. It was like paint thinner. I wrinkled my nose and took the smallest sip possible, then choked violently when it burned down my throat and turned into fire.
“What is that?” I croaked, sitting on the bench with a thump. I wouldn’t have been surprised if smoke came out of my mouth.
“Grog.” Saga laughed loudly and drained her cup, slamming it down. “Finest moonshine rum there is. Makes me think of home.” She refilled her cup and then leaned back, crossing her bare feet at the ankles and resting them on the edge of the table. She licked her lips. “Your heart’s like cannon shot.”
I cringed back, looking around for a weapon. There were dozens everywhere but none within reach. She ran a hand over her mouth. She scraped her chair closer to mine and all I could smell was wet soil. “Relax,” she said. Against all odds, I did. My shoulders didn’t feel like they were going to shatter.
She turned and drank from a narrow fluted bottle that looked as if it was once meant for perfume. There were tight lines around her gray eyes and her lips. I was pretty sure it wasn’t alcohol in that bottle. For one thing, it was too red. “Never mind, lass. I’ve fought harder battles than this. I was born in Tortuga, and I sailed with the best of them. Grace O’Malley, Anne Bonny, Mary Read.” She smiled with what I could only term as nostalgia. “Once a pirate, always a pirate.”
“Is that why you took me? So I could be a pirate?” This was making less and less sense.
“I stole you because I’m a pirate. It’s what we do.” She leaned in, whispering conspiratorially. I jerked back, but her eyes gleamed with laughter, not hunger. Whatever was in that bottle had sated her. “We like to steal things.”
I nearly smiled. She was scary, with the daggers and muskets hanging all over the place, not to mention the needle-sharp teeth, but she was kind of fun, too. It didn’t make sense. She didn’t act like a kidnapper or a monster, or even like someone who claimed to be hundreds of years old.
Maybe I really had been kidnapped by a pirate.
That was so bizarre, it was almost cool.
And the smell of mushrooms and dirt, when they weren’t rotten, wasn’t so bad.
“Doesn’t matter how old I get,” she said. “I still miss the sea and the deck of a fine ship. As soon as the Blood Moon’s done, I’m getting out of this cursed place. I wasn’t meant to be a landlubber.”
“What’s a Blood Moon?”
“A gathering of the vampire tribes. Very rare. It’s my chance to prove myself, to steal back a little respect for my people and my bloodkin. We’re tired of being shot on sight. We deserve better.”
“You and the pirates?” I asked, confused. “You know this is the twenty-first century, right? There are no pirates.” Not like Johnny Depp, anyway.
“For us,” she corrected me, her expression as grim as hardtack. “Worst of the worst, or so they’d have you believe. No one can control us.” She sounded more than a little proud of that. “Except me and mine. We’re not like the Hel-Blar, despite what we look like.” She admired her skin. “The blue puts the fear in them, sure as flying the pirate colors used to. I like to think it’s the color of the ocean. The others will tell you it’s the color of death.” She sighed, tilting her head back lazily. “You’ll have to make up your own mind, I guess. Regardless, you’re our warning shot across the bow. And what’s done is done.” She yawned. “Go on back to your prince now.”
I stood up, weaving slightly on my feet. The fatigue came back, all at once. Before I closed the door behind me she spoke again.
“Christabel.” When I turned around, she tossed me a silver flask. “Grog. You might need it. I hope you make it through the next few nights. I truly do.”
It took me too long to get back to the apothecary. I was stumbling, as if I’d had a jug full of Saga’s awful rum instead of the barest taste. I briefly contemplated eating an apple or the bread Aidan had left in a basket. Chewing seemed like a monumental task, though, so instead I drank some of the water from the jug, sniffing it first to make sure it wasn’t grog.
Even though daylight burned at the windows, I lit one of the oil lamps with the matches I found in an iron box shaped like a bird. I didn’t want to wake up in the dark, if I did manage to fall asleep. I stretched out on the floor on my belly, peering through the wide gap between the boards. Connor’s face was as pale as a consumptive Romantic poet. Shelley might have envied that kind of translucence. His eyes were closed and he looked restful, as if it were an ordinary kind of sleep, except he wasn’t snoring and he didn’t move at all, not even when a spider crawled across his cheek. I shuddered on his behalf.
Even lying there all creepy and corpselike, he was comforting. So I stayed there in the dust, staring down at him until my eyelids finally lost the battle with my fear.
Of course, I dreamed of vampires.
I was walking down a deserted road, the same one where I’d been taken. It was raining but the stars were still out, about a million of them, whirling white, like cream in coffee. I was soaked through and shivering. I was running but I didn’t know if it was away from someone or toward someone. And then suddenly I was in the middle of a field of tall goldenrod and roses, in the shadow of a gray castle crumbling into an ocean that shouldn’t be there.
And I wasn’t alone.
A man in a dark suit, with brown hair and a brown beard, stood leaning on a walking stick. He was decidedly Victorian.
Bram Stoker.
Another man came toward us, through the grass. He wore a white cravat and had wild hair, strewn with red poppies. Two women trailed behind him, one in a silk dress with a cold smile, the other younger, in a dress and bonnet. I’d know her anywhere. Christabel. The one from the poem—so that made the man the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His was the first poem I’d ever memorized, about a girl named Christabel who is hunted by the vampiric Geraldine.
They were closing in and my only escape was suddenly blocked by who I assumed was Lord Byron himself, limping toward me, corsets creaking. He held a bleached skull filled with red wine, from which he drank and then grinned at me, teeth stained red.
I whirled, trying to find a way out, but they tightened around me like a poisonous flower closing its petals for the night.
Ordinarily this would have been a great dream, full of poets and lace cravats.
But it felt wrong.
And my neck hurt.
When I lifted my hand away from my neck, it was covered in blood.
I wiped it frantically on my jeans but the blood kept pooling, dripping between my knuckles. And then it sparked and burned like embers before catching fire, as if my palms were filled with gasoline instead of blood. I smelled scorched flesh, smoke, spilled wine.
I woke up choking on a scream, my hair damp with sweat.
I couldn’t immediately figure out why everything hurt and there was dust up my nose. I was just glad I wasn’t really on fire. I lay there, cataloging my pains: the bruised hipbone from lying on the ground, the aching arm from where Aidan had grabbed me. No burns.
I knew the sun had gone down because I was in near darkness, except for a sliver of honey-tinted light from the lamp. If I moved my head slightly, the light fell between the floorboards and onto Connor’s face. He really was beautiful, crazy or not. He’d risked himself to find me even though we barely knew each other. And for a computer geek, he had all sorts of interesting muscles. His eyes were impossible, mesmerizing.
Open.
They opened so abruptly, I started. Before I could say anything, his blue gaze caught mine, held it, trapped it. His lips lifted off his teeth; fangs lengthened and gleamed violently. I didn’t see him lunge, but the trapdoor by my head suddenly snapped open, showering me with splinters and dirt. I scrambled backward as Connor landed in a crouch, still watching me hungrily.
Hungrily.
“Not good,” I muttered, straightening. “Not good, not good.” I swallowed, tried to smile, tried to make my tone soothing and not shrill. “Connor.”
He rose slowly, so slowly I couldn’t help but stay where I was, enthralled. I felt like a deer freezing in the shadow of a predator, hoping not to be noticed.
It was not a nice feeling.
Especially when he’d made me feel safe not a handful of hours ago. But whoever this Connor was, he wasn’t human. Even I could see that, unbeliever that I was. He wasn’t playacting or deluded. He was dangerous. And struggling for control.
I put my hands up, as if that would stop him. He just kept moving, stalking toward me, backing me into a corner until I had nowhere else to go. I remembered Lucy, when I assumed she was drunk, telling me to move slowly, and Aidan telling me I could never outrun them. It wasn’t a theory I wanted to test. But just standing there didn’t seem like a good idea, either. And I was getting annoyed. I was used to people being scared of me or not seeing me at all. This wasn’t a pleasant alternative.
“Connor, stop it.”
He half smiled. It was more of a smirk, and it made him look like his twin. “I just want a little taste, Christabel.”
“What?” I scowled. “And ew.” He took a step closer. I slapped a hand on his chest. “Hey! Back off.”
He stopped but was still close enough that all he had to do was bend his head to run his mouth along the side of my neck. I shivered despite myself. His fingers clamped around my wrist, lifting my hand off his chest. His very still chest. I frowned over that while he lifted my hand to his nose, sniffing me as if I were a rose. There was a dangerous edge to him that he hadn’t possessed before.
It shouldn’t have made him more attractive.
Damn that bad-boy thing.
I should have been furious. I should not have been feeling ticklish. I tried to jerk my palm away from his gentle nuzzling. His nostrils flared. Something moved across his face, something angry and cold.
“Connor?”
“No. Can’t,” he muttered to himself, as if I were a bottle of wine turned to vinegar. He tilted his head. “But …”
And then he was pressed against me and I was pressed against the wall and there was nothing but his mouth on mine. His palms were flat against the wooden boards on either side of my head. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted.
I didn’t want to.
Instead I kissed him back.
A lot.
His kisses were the opposite of his laid-back, friendly personality. They were wild and burned all the way down to my knees. I barely had time to catch my breath between kisses. His tongue touched mine, I gently bit his lower lip, he made a sound in the back of his throat that made me feel faint.
And then he pulled away, still leaning on the wall, head next to mine. His hair tickled my cheek and his hands were clenched into fists. His eyes sparked like embers.
“Connor?”
He didn’t say anything but I knew he was fighting some kind of battle. He wanted to advance, wanted to retreat, wanted something I couldn’t recognize and didn’t know how to give him.
“Are you okay?”
When he finally spoke, it was like his voice hurt. “No,” he forced out. “Get out of here.”
Where exactly was I supposed to go? Not only was he blocking me, but I was kind of kidnapped in the mountains. Not a lot of options.
“I’m not … safe,” he said. “Need blood.”
“Gross.”
“I’m serious,” he ground out. He lifted his head, fangs poking out of his gums, expression both hot and cold.
Before I could react, the door swung open and Aidan barreled through it. “Christabel, behind me!” he ordered.
But Aidan was technically my kidnapper, even though he’d already saved my life once. To say I was confused was an understatement.
“Christa, listen to him,” Connor said, shifting to give me an exit. His jaw clenched. “Please.”
It was the “please” that galvanized me into moving. I darted under his arm. Aidan shifted, meeting me halfway. I saw Connor twitch at the movement, like a cat suddenly focused on a fly, getting ready to swat it out of the air and eat its wings. Aidan shoved a jug toward him. It looked heavy but neither of them seemed to notice. Connor started to drink from it and I eased around Aidan’s shoulder to look at him, then frowned. Was that blood?
It was getting really hard not to believe in vampires.
Connor looked at me, made a strange sound, and then turned around so I couldn’t see him drinking. He tilted his head back to get the last drops.
“He’s a young’un,” Aidan explained. “Sunset makes them a mite ornery. It can take years, decades even, before a vampire can wake easily. He’s already done better than most. Give him a minute.”
Connor finally turned around, wiping his mouth. He looked partly chagrined and partly defiant. And mostly human again. I fought a small sigh of relief. Aidan looming next to me made it hard to feel true relief.
“Let’s go,” Aidan said.
Yup, no relief at all.