Kitty Steals the Show

  Ned quoted: “‘Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, that time may cease, and midnight never come.’”

  It was obviously supposed to mean something. I stared, blank.

  He tried again: “‘What are kings, when regiment is gone, but perfect shadows in a sunshine day?’”

  Still nothing. “Is it Shakespeare?” I ventured.

  He rolled his eyes. One more time … “‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’”

  “Oh, that’s Marlowe,” I said. “Wait a minute. Edward Alleyn—the actor?”

  “I told you she’d get it,” he said to a beaming Emma.

  “You knew Christopher Marlowe. And Shakespeare, you knew Shakespeare—” I put my hand on my mouth. I was now two degrees of separation from William Shakespeare. Back home, Rick gave me such a hard time because I was always bugging him for stories about the famous people he’d met in his over five hundred years of life, how I constantly assumed that vampires must have some kind of insider information, when really, why would they be any more likely to know famous people than the rest of us? But here it was, the reason I asked all these questions in the first place, because sometimes, sometimes, I got the answers I was looking for. What secret corners of history could vampires illuminate, if I could figure out what to ask?

  At this point, though, all the questions seemed moot. This man had known Shakespeare. He was a window into an amazing time and place—and I didn’t know where to start. So I teared up and tried to wave away the burst of emotion. Everyone was staring at me and all I really wanted to do was cry from the wonder of it all.

  “Is she okay?” Emma asked Ben.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

  “I get this reaction quite a lot,” Ned said cheerfully. I imagined it was one of the reasons he didn’t bother keeping his identity secret—he’d been a celebrity his whole life, why stop just because he’d become a vampire?

  “How?” I managed to stammer. “How did you go from … from there to this? What happened?”

  “That’s a much longer story, Ms. Norville. May I get you a drink?” Ned asked.

  “I would very much like a drink, yes.”

  Ned rang and an attendant—the young woman who’d greeted us when we arrived—brought in a tray with a couple of decanters and several glasses, and we gathered on the chairs and sofas around one of the small tables in the library. Emma poured scotch for Ben, Cormac, and I, and she and Ned sat back to watch us sip. It was probably excessively expensive and luxurious, but all I tasted was the burn. I was still staring at Ned in bewilderment, imagining some scene in an Elizabethan tavern, the actors and playwrights of the day, Shakespeare and Marlowe and so on, gathered around, laughing and drinking, the music of lutes and pipes in the background …

  Ben grinned at me. “Hey Kitty, now you’re supposed to ask if Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”

  That broke the spell. “Oh, don’t even start with that. It’s not even up for debate.” But I looked at Ned sidelong. “Is it?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Good. You know, you could end a lot of epic academic debates if you’d just come out and say that.”

  “And ruin all the fun? Not me.”

  I sighed. “What was it like? All of it—I mean, did he have any idea? Did Shakespeare have a clue that people would be performing his plays four hundred years later, that they’d be held up as the pinnacle not just of theater but of literature?”

  Ned shook his head. “You must understand, we weren’t trying to create fine art. We were trying to tell stories. All of us, we loved to tell stories. Well, and we loved the attention. For those who were successful at it, the theater was a very good way to make money. Several of us, including Will, made our fortunes at it, but not from writing or acting—it was from investing in the theaters themselves. We worked for shares and retired when we had enough cash to do so. Of course, most of us didn’t mind a little fame in the meantime. I admit, it’s been an odd experience watching what’s happened to Will’s work over the years.”

  “Oh my God. You’re on a first-name basis with William Shakespeare.” My vision went a bit hazy.

  “Perhaps a little more scotch, there,” he said, and poured another finger into my tumbler.

  My companions hadn’t taken more than the tiniest sips of their own drinks. Ben sat next to me on a sofa, but Cormac had taken a seat apart, in his own chair, and had been studying the room around us, maintaining a bodyguard’s stance.

  Now, he leaned forward, setting his glass back on the tray. “I imagine a lot of folks are coming in from out of town for this conference. You probably know just about all of them.”

  “You want to know if there’s anyone you need to worry about? Anyone with designs on our Kitty?” Ned said, and Cormac gave an offhand shrug in agreement. “I imagine there are. Many of the Master vampires of Europe or their representatives are here, as well as some from farther afield, along with their entourages. Lycanthropes are attending the conference in some official human capacity or another. Others are here simply because they’re curious. Many vampires and lycanthropes are unhappy with the light that Kitty and others have been shining on our activities, and are here to add their opinions to the conversation. Those are just the ones I know about—there are shadow realms that I know little about and have no control over that surely have a presence here. It’s as if everyone wants to see what’s going to happen next. In the meantime, I’ve declared London neutral territory for the duration of the conference. No battles, figurative or literal, will be fought here. No one will act against you, or they’ll face me. I so will it.”

  Cormac turned away to hide a wry grin, which gave us all an idea of what he thought of Ned’s will. “You aren’t worried? All those rivals, right in your backyard.”

  “No,” Ned said evenly, a smile curling. “I’m not. If they make a move against me or mine, they lose any protection they had here and their existences are forfeit.”

  “We’ll be fine,” I said to Cormac, more for something to say than trying to be reassuring. I wasn’t sure I could be reassuring—the assembled vampire aristocracy of Europe? Not at all intimidating … I asked Ned, “You’ll be there, right? At the conference. There’s a whole track on vampirism.”

  “We’ll be keeping an eye on things from a distance,” Ned said.

  “If that many vampire Masters are going to be there, don’t you think you’d better be there, too?”

  “You’re assuming they’re going to be at the hotel with all the hoi polloi. May I make a suggestion?” Ned asked.

  “Sure.”

  “A convocation assembles Monday night. Come and meet them.”

  “Convocation?”

  “A gathering of the vampires who’ve come to London. A little conference of our own,” he said. “You’ll get a good look at them all, they’ll get a look at you. No surprises on either side. What do you think?”

  I looked at Ben for his opinion.

  “Walking into a room full of Master vampires?” he said with a huff. “You’d either be a rock star or completely screwed.”

  “You’d have my protection,” Ned said.

  “Until you leave the room,” Cormac added.

  The vampire turned to me, chuckling. “You have staunch defenders.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “I think I’d rather face them all at once. Get a good look at them. Besides, it’ll be interesting.”

  “You always say that just before we get into the weirdest shit,” Ben said.

  No doubt. One of these days I’d have to go for uninteresting. Spend the weekend in front of the TV eating popcorn. What were the odds?

  Chapter 4

  WE SPENT the night at Fortune House, in rooms that would have outdone the most spectacular five-star hotel: antique furniture, silk sheets, attentive room service bringing eggs and toast and fresh-squeezed juice for breakfast, and views of a quiet suburb out th
e window. In the morning, a horde of teenage boys decked in blue jerseys flooded one of the pristine grassy lawns outside the school to play soccer. Football, rather. It was a scene from a movie.

  We got more of Ned’s story. He’d founded Dulwich College, at least its earliest incarnation as a charity hospital, back in his previous life, at the start of the seventeenth century. He’d had no children of his own so he funneled his fortune into various charities. He’d been watching over them ever since. I still didn’t know how a man who’d lived a full life, been famous and successful, became a vampire at the age of sixty. I’d looked up the official date of his death. There was some debate about the exact day—with a three day difference, which suddenly made sense, if you knew about the vampirism. An infected person lay effectively dead for three days before rising again. I wondered if Ned had been attacked and turned against his will, and I wondered if he’d ever tell me how it had happened.

  Emma and Ned had made plans to send us on ahead to Ned’s Mayfair town house, where he stayed when he wanted to be in London proper. It was near the conference, and we’d have a day to get settled, sleep off more of the jet lag, and take a look around before the conference started. Andy the driver took us north in the sleek black cab, and I got my first look of Britain in daylight.

  The city was a mix of ancient, modern, and everything in between. Nineteenth-century brick row houses mingled with 1960’s concrete office blocks, then suddenly the gray stone spire of an old church would rise in the distance, past supermarkets and subdivisions. Springtime made everything green—green lawns in parks, a bright green fuzz on trees, carpets of daffodils blooming on roundabouts. I had to quell an instinctive panic from being on the wrong side of the road.

  London proper was a big city, with countless traffic-filled streets, tall buildings occupying entire blocks, and the sense that I had seen all this before in a movie. I imagined people felt the same thing when they visited New York City or Los Angeles.

  Ben nudged me. “Kitty, look.” He pointed out the window to an iconic red double-decker bus. I started to “ooh” in admiration, when I realized he was actually pointing to the ad on the side of the bus: MERCEDES COOK IN CONCERT, THIS WEEK ONLY! The vampire’s gorgeous, smiling picture showed her in a spectacular black sequined gown, arms flung out to take in the audience she was singing to.

  Oh, just great. Just horrible.

  If I was the world’s first celebrity werewolf, Mercedes Cook was its first celebrity vampire. She’d been a star on Broadway since the sixties, and people had started to notice that she was looking remarkably well-preserved for her age. She hadn’t graduated to crazy mother and grandmother roles like most of the actresses of her generation. Turned out she was well preserved because she was undead. A vampire. She broke the story on The Midnight Hour, and I’d thought we were friends. Right up until she plotted to get my friend Rick killed, to prevent him from taking over as Master of Denver. She failed, he took over, and sent Mercedes packing.

  So, at some point this week I was probably going to have to face the vampire who tried to take over Denver, probably on behalf of my archnemesis.

  “That’s so not cool,” I stated.

  “Ned called a truce, right?” Ben said. “What can she do?”

  “I hesitate to even imagine,” I said.

  “What you’re saying is I ought to keep a couple of stakes handy,” Cormac said.

  “You mean you don’t anyway?” I said.

  He shrugged. “There’s handy, then there’s handy.”

  We rounded a corner and passed a stretch of sloping lawn lined with trees that were brilliant with new foliage. Andy identified it as Hyde Park. Wolf perked up her ears at the wide open space in the middle of the city—would it be useful in a pinch? I didn’t particularly want to find out. But as urban pastoral spaces went, the place was gorgeous.

  I’d asked Ned and Emma about the local werewolves, and he’d said he’d be sure to introduce me to the alpha at the earliest opportunity. When, I’d whined, and he’d promised it’d be soon. Would the alpha be at the conference? At the vampire convocation? If I’d had the time, I’d have gone looking for werewolves myself. I’d heard that London was a good city for lycanthropes: tolerant, serving as it had as a crossroads for the world since the days of the British Empire, Indian were-tigers rubbing elbows with were-lions from Africa, and so on. I wanted to see it for myself.

  There’d be time.

  The neighborhood where Ned’s place was located looked like it had traveled through time: blocks full of stately façades, rows of windows, decorated molding, wrought-iron accents, elegant in the midday light. I flashed on any number of Jane Austen films or Sherlock Holmes reruns on PBS. There should have been fancy horse-drawn carriages clopping past.

  The car turned onto an impossibly narrow lane packed with town houses, and through a gateway into a small, cobbled yard with a lovely, reaching tree in the corner. The building overlooking the yard was four stories of pale brick. The windows had white frames and stone balconies to lean on, and the roof was made of sloped gray slate.

  Andy let us in through the front door. The interior was as much a time capsule as the neighborhood. A vestibule let out into a parlor with brocade wallpaper, age-darkened paintings decorating the walls, a carved mahogany mantelpiece over a marble fireplace, and so on.

  “He did say make ourselves at home, right?” Ben said. “I feel like I’m going to break something.”

  “It does feel a little like a museum, doesn’t it?” I said.

  Cormac gave a shrug and slumped into a velvet-upholstered wingback chair, sprawling out and propping his booted feet on what must have been an extraordinarily valuable lacquered circular coffee table. “It’s a little much,” he said.

  I had to admit, the right kind of vampire hospitality was impressive.

  We were directed to bedrooms upstairs. There were six, and we got to pick. I pounced on the one in the corner, with a view down the street which gave me the feeling of falling back through time. I could imagine the horse-drawn carriages, the women in huge bell skirts and men in frock coats, walking on the cobbled streets, the glow of gaslights and smoke curling from clay chimneys.

  We battled jet lag by taking a walk. Found Hyde Park, then Green Park, and explored all the way to Buckingham Palace, which seemed even more excessive with all its gilt, statuary, and unflinching guards. Thinking of someone living there was a little like thinking of someone being a billionaire. I had no frame of reference.

  “What do you think of Ned?” Ben asked us both.

  “He’s a vampire,” Cormac said. “Talks a lot. Who knows what he really wants.”

  “I’m still getting over him knowing Shakespeare,” I said, sighing.

  “Don’t get too starry-eyed,” Cormac warned.

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t know what to think. Alette trusts him or she wouldn’t have put me in touch with him. He seems to be taking good care of Emma.”

  “They’re all vampires,” Cormac said. Which meant that we ought to be careful about trusting any of them, including Emma.

  “We don’t have to stay at Ned’s place,” I said. “It’s not too late to find a hotel.”

  We walked several steps before Ben said, “It’ll be fine. This way we can keep an eye on him, right?”

  Cormac made a noise that was almost a laugh.

  * * *

  AFTER A good night’s sleep, Ben and I went downstairs in the morning to find breakfast—and Cormac—waiting in the dining room. We learned that Ned and Emma had arrived before sunrise, after we’d gone to bed, and that we would see them this evening.

  Eggs, tea, toast, slices of thick bacon, stewed tomatoes, and beans—which had never even occurred to me to eat for breakfast—waited on expensive-looking china, dense with a blue floral pattern around the edges. One of the staff stood by and seemed pleased at my gaping reaction. Cormac was cleaning up the last bit of egg yolk with a piece of toast.

  “Don’t wait for us or
anything,” Ben said.

  “You’re not going to need me the next couple of days, are you?”

  “Why?” I said.

  “It’s Amelia,” he said. “She wants to check some things out.”

  “What, like her old haunts? No pun intended.”

  “Her older brother had kids. Assuming they had kids … she may still have family.”

  “That’s so weird,” I said absently. He was talking about kids who were born over a hundred years ago—tracking a family tree for real. “What happens if you do find these great-grandnieces or nephews?”

  “Cross that bridge when we get to it,” he said, spreading butter on a second slice of toast, not looking at us.

  “You okay with this?” Ben said. “Is she making you do this?”

  “I want to do this. Why do you follow Kitty around on her crazy expeditions?”

  “Hey,” I said, and Ben snorted a chuckle. I considered what Ben’s answer to that question might be, and what that said about Cormac’s answer. I didn’t know why I was worried—he could take care of himself. Rather than dig, I said, “You’re sure we’ll be okay without you standing guard?”

  “Keep your eyes open. Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “If you need me, call.”

  I looked at Ben for backup, but he just shrugged. Cormac left on his mysterious errand.

  Ben and I walked to the conference hotel, which was only a mile and a half away. The housekeeper, manager, whatever she was at Ned’s Mayfair house offered to loan us the use of a car and chauffer, but I declined. I wanted to get a sense of the place. An idea of where the escape routes were.

  We were still a block away from the hotel when I heard what sounded like a lot of people shouting, more people than should have been at what was billed as a scientific conference. A rumbling of conversation was punctuated with shouting. Someone hollered through a bullhorn.

  Then we saw the signs. People held up poster board on sticks, others strung banners between them.