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Yannick de Wynter, Lord Brookshire, bent and brushed a kiss to Althea’s cheek as she slept.
Her nightgown was a satin tangle around shapely silken legs. The bodice had slid down, giving a tempting hint of her breasts. It was true—enceinte women did glow—she seemed to shimmer like a star. Althea had always possessed a special magic that had captured his heart. He couldn’t let her put herself in danger, not even to save a girl who had no one else to champion her.
As Yannick joined Bastien for one last swallow of brandy before dawn, he met his twin’s wary and concerned gaze.
Bastien handed him a glass, half-filled with French brandy. “We have to get Althea out of England—away from the reach of the Society.”
Yannick could hear the vicious edge to his brother’s words. Bastien was afraid.
As the eldest twin, he’d always been the cool, rational one of the two. But where Althea was concerned, emotion ruled him too. He had to force himself to plan carefully. “I agree, brother. But we aren’t going to the Carpathians.”
“What in hell are you talking about? We have to leave—those blasted vampire slayers are not going to allow a vampire child to survive.” Bastien stalked around his open coffin, ran his hand through his tangled hair, and tossed back his glass of brandy like water. “I fear they want to destroy our child—and Althea. I think this Serena Lark is a tool of the Society. The bastards are using her to get to Althea, to make her vulnerable.”
Yannick shook his head. “They might be using Miss Lark, but I don’t believe she’s a willing participant. I hadn’t told you yet, but I’ve purchased a villa in Italy—very discreetly. We will make it appear that we have gone to the castle as we had planned, but instead we will travel to the villa and stay there.”
Bastien’s face set in a restrained fury. “You suspect they’d pursue?”
Grimly, Yannick nodded. “As you said yourself, our child is a great threat to the Society. For once, brother, we are in total agreement. We need to do anything to protect Althea.”
Bastien set down his empty glass and strode back to his coffin. He leaned on it, arms braced, obviously warring with his emotions. “Althea had her heart set on returning to the Carpathians to see her father again.”
Yannick finished his brandy. He hated lying to Althea. Hated hurting her. Their unusual marriage—between he, his brother, and Althea—had been forged by honesty. It was only when he and Bastien could be honest with each other, honest about their pasts, that they had captured Althea’s love. What would it do to their marriage to lie to her? “We have to protect her,” Yannick vowed, “even if it means breaking her heart. Even if she hates us for it.”
The slim blade caught the reflection of light and sent it shimmering through the gloom.
Jonathon adjusted the metal platter in front of him. He glanced up at the clock, and with his left hand he scrawled a note.
Dissection of the brain taken from Miss Abigail Litchford, vampire,
commenced at 1:30 p.m.
With his right hand, he aligned the blade, even before he’d finished the sentence. He could carry out tasks with both hands at once. He could even write with both hands at once—forward and backward. His father had been both delighted and unnerved by his skill, but he’d followed his father’s advice and ensured no one else learned about it.
His father had been correct. The world feared those who were different.
Jonathon steadied the tray—the soft, gray brain was fixed in place by taut wire attached to thumbscrews. The blade sliced through cleanly. He had his father’s dozens of journals of Blood Rose ©Sharon Page 2007 Email: [email protected] 52
meticulous detailings of the vampire brain. Pictures. Weights. Notations of similarities, differences—in color, in structure, in unusual construction or markings.
None of it had given any answers.
Damn, he hated this work, hated the smell of it, the very act of it. He tried to be dispassionate.
What was a body, after all, when the soul had left?
A clue
, his father had said.
The most valuable clue we possess to understand the vampire.
But after four decades of study, his father had been no closer to understanding the vampire.
How could he hope to do it before All Hallow’s Eve? He had nine days to save Serena Lark’s life.
He needed those bloody books of his father’s. Repeating these experiments would get him nowhere. He had to hunt down those books—
The sharp knock surprised him. Enough to slip a fraction of an inch, to slice where he hadn’t intended. Damn and blast!
Cursing, he strode to the door. Abruptly opening it, he found Rumpole behind it with a note on the salver. Jonathon flicked it open and scanned Ashcroft’s summons.
His mission as guardian to the tempting Miss Lark was about to begin.
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“Good evenin’, Mr. Swift.”
Drake flinched at Ma Bellamy’s loud, coarse voice. The madam scurried through her dimly lit parlor to reach his side. She put out her hand, lightly resting her gloved fingers on his arm, and leered into his face. Ma Bellamy was a bloody revolting sight, her face marred by burn scars, pockmarks, and a knife wound that had cost her an eye but that was why he came here. No gentlemen did, so Ma Bellamy appreciated his money. She kept her mouth shut and was clever enough not to be tempted by blackmail.
“What be yer fancy tonight?” she cooed, and candlelight sparked on the diamonds at her throat, her ears, and on her bejeweled eye patch.
“Solange is my fancy, tonight, Mrs. Bellamy.” Drake threaded a gold sovereign through his fingers.
She shook her head, her greasy hennaed curls waving. “The apothecary bloke ’asn’t been tonight, sir.”
Goddamn. The apothecary knew he would pay any price; why deny him the supply?
Drake flicked Ma Bellamy’s clutching fingers from his arm and turned to leave.
She grabbed his wrist. “But the twins are ’ere, sir, if you’ve a fancy for fine tits. And I’ll send Crenshaw round to that apothecary. Ma will take of ye, sir, just ye leave it to her. The twins are pining for ye, Mr. Swift.”
The “twins” were no more twins than he and the Bellamy were. But Kitty and Emma possessed large breasts, a boundless enthusiasm for cock sucking, and surprisingly sunny smiles for hard-working jades.
Drake felt his arm begin to tremble. His eyelids were starting to twitch. Two whores in a bed would take the edge off the need, but it was not what he wanted anymore. He wrenched his shaking arm free of Ma’s grip. “Not tonight, Mrs. Bellamy.”
Serena had thought he would never leave.
Fog rolled over the circular drive and swathed Lord Sommersby’s waiting carriage in an eerie mantle of silvery white. Clad entirely in black—her raven hair an advantage now—Serena waited in the shadow of an oak, hidden behind its large trunk.
She had waited here since dusk, armed with two vital tools—a lock pick and a description of the location of his laboratory. Serena prayed Mr. Bastien de Wynter had remembered its location correctly—he’d admitted to only being inside it once, while the late earl was alive. He hadn’t shown any suspicion as she’d idly asked him questions.
Boot soles crunched on the gravel. The lamp glow touched the tall, massive, dark figure as he crossed to the open carriage door. It must be Sommersby. No other man was quite so large. The earl vanished into the carriage, the door closed with a decisive snap, and the traces jingled as the four grays began to walk.
Serena gave a triumphant smile in the dark. The arrogant man had sent a note to Althea insisting she be locked in her room for her own protection. At least Althea had crumpled his Blood Rose ©Sharon Page 2007 Email: [email protected] 54
presumptuous missive and had tossed it in the fire.
Now it was time for her to get to work. The moon lit up the night, but cloud soon slid past.
With her hood up, Serena crossed the gravel path toward the kitchen entrance. The door would be unlocked—there would be scraps and waste going out, along with used washing water and such. At least here, in Sommersby’s mansion, she would not have to worry about being captured by six vampires.
As for being captured, it…rankled. The humiliation of it was worse than the fear.
Serena darted across dew-damp grass and slipped around the rear corner of the house. Other houses along the street blazed with light, even at this time of year, and carriages filled the street.
But Sommersby’s house was silent. Large and dark—like its master.
Squaring her shoulders, she moved along the rear façade, her shoulder brushing the stone. The door to the kitchen opened and an elderly woman sauntered out, balancing a basket on her hip.
Plastered back against the wall, Serena held her breath—this had to be the cook. Sommersby kept only a handful of servants. Taking a deep breath, Serena sprinted in through the door, into his lordship’s house.
The strangest smell wafted at her through the door. Serena glanced once more down the shadowed hallway and stayed motionless, listening.
In a distant room, windowpanes rattled as a gust of October wind struck them. A clock ticked beyond the locked door at which she was crouching. No other sound reached her ears—no footsteps, no voices, no clink of a servant’s keys. It appeared no servants ventured in this part of the house with the master out.
Moonlight glinted through an undraped window, striking the lock in front of her. Serena eased the long, slim end of the lock pick into the keyhole, just as Mr. de Wynter had taught her. There had been something quite naughty about “getting the feel” for the insertion and engaging the lock with the gorgeous gentleman leaning over the back of her neck.
Click! The lock sprang open, and Serena turned the knob carefully. Soundlessly the door swung wide, revealing a large well of blackness, with only slivers of bluish light giving a hint of what might be inside. Was it the laboratory? Widening her eyes, she fought to focus on the gloom.
There was a wardrobe beside the door, and a candleholder sat upon it—with a stub of a candle, but a flint at least. She could suddenly see surprisingly well in the faint silvery glow cast by the moon, but she doubted she could read without a lit candle.
This part of the mansion overlooked the high stone wall that surrounded the property. The light would not be seen from another part of the earl’s house. She struck the flint, and the spark took to the wick. It flared as the wax fed it, and the light grew. But that new light blinded her for the moment, and she held the candle ahead of her, blinking.
A skull grinned at her.
Serena bit down on her lip, holding in a scream. Her hand moved, sending light glancing off another skull, and another. A row of them sat on a set of shelves. Her stomach whirled in horror—
half of the skulls were tiny. Children.
The flickering light gleamed on bones of every description—the long bones of legs, the tibia and fibula of arms, rib bones, even wide, intact pelvic bones. They were all stacked on the shelves, and tags hung from them, tags with numbers, place names, dates.
Jars sat on the other shelves, beside curious pieces of scientific equipment. She recognized a set of scales and burning apparatuses, but the others she did not know. She held the candlelight close to the jars—she had no idea what the parts were, but she guessed they must be organs.
Human? Or vampire?
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Serena swallowed hard, her mouth filled with a horrid taste—it was as though she could imagine the taste of the organs in the jars. She could certainly smell an acrid, sharp scent. Was it the liquid in which they floated?
Books. What she wanted was his lordship’s books. But even as she turned away from the jars, she shuddered. What did she fear—that the intact hand she had seen in the jar would reach for her shoulder?
But what did Lord Sommersby do with these macabre keepsakes? She knew that physicians—
training surgeons—used the bodies of the dead for practice. Sommersby must be carrying out some kind of experiments. But what kind? Did he hope to find a way to change vampires back to human?
Concentrate on the journals!
Her half boots shuffled over the floor; she was afraid of what she might step on. A discarded corpse? Body parts stacked on the floor?
Serena rounded one of the large tables in the center of the room. Her hip hit a shelf and sent the jars pinging against one another. Oh no!
Now she saw that the rows of shelves reached from floor to ceiling and that they ran along the width of the room and stretched for half the length. The rest of the space was used for the massive wooden tables. She tried the other end of the room, which led her far from the door—to more shelves with more jars. Two shelves held displays of jawbones, dozens of them, all mounted on boards with pins. They sported fangs of every imaginable size.
Books covered the last row of shelves, and these stretched around the walls. Serena held up her candle and stared at row upon row of leather-bound books. There were hundreds. She slid out the one directly in front of her.
A shiver tumbled down her spine. Lord Sommersby must have read his father’s books. If the truth of her past was in any of these books, Lord Sommersby must know.
Hesitantly she walked the length of the shelves. At the row nearest the end, she found a space in the crowded shelves and a sheath of papers laying flat. Serena’s heart almost ceased to beat as she read her own name in faded sepia ink on the top sheet.
Cut slices of her brain? Examine her heart?
Serena’s stomach roiled, and she let the journal fall back to the table. Lord Sommersby’s father had believed she was going to change into a vampire and he’d planned to dissect her—while she was alive.
There were only three pages of text in this horrible book. Where were the others journals?