Balthazar

  Balthazar wore a cloth mask over his face as he walked along the street making his “rounds.” Although he of course could not contract the flu—death provided the only absolute immunity—he would have attracted too much notice by not wearing it. Everyone wore the masks now in a futile effort to keep the epidemic at bay. Now he looked the part in his dark brown suit, high-collared shirt, and low-brimmed hat; a long coat and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses allowed him to look a few years older than he was. A police paddy wagon farther down the road took a small bundle wrapped in a sheet and tossed it unceremoniously in the back; that would be a young child, dead in a city that no longer had the wood for coffins.

  Witnessing the devastation of the influenza had made Balthazar wish desperately that he could do something beyond providing a merciful death for the sickest among them. When he’d been alive, medicine had been little more than guesswork; anything approaching an actual drug had been condemned as witchcraft. But in the twentieth century, maybe he’d have the opportunity to learn more. Maybe someday he could be a healer instead of a bringer of death.

  For now, though, death was his only gift.

  As he approached the house he sought, he saw a young nurse walking along, white headdress falling past her cheeks, a basket of food for the sick clutched in her hands. She was the first legitimate medical professional he’d seen in days; the few who weren’t ill were too busy to leave the clinics. Balthazar raised a hand to her in greeting, but she stopped in her tracks as if startled.

  Above her mask, he recognized Charity’s eyes.

  The first words Balthazar could find were: “Where’s Redgrave?”

  “France.” She said this in her tiniest, most childlike voice.

  Of course he would still be on the battlefields. Balthazar relished the spoils of war, the way any vampire had to, but crossing the ocean merely to feast on the dying was too much for him. Not for Redgrave. “Are you alone in Philadelphia?”

  Charity shook her head. “Constantia’s here, too. The others stayed with Redgrave.”

  Disappointing that she wasn’t entirely alone, but not surprising: Balthazar could tell just from the cleanliness and appropriateness of Charity’s disguise that someone had helped her with it. Still, this was the closest to freedom Charity had come since the day of her death—and Balthazar’s best chance to help her.

  She hadn’t attacked him. Hadn’t turned away in anger. Was it possible his sister was finally ready to be helped?

  “Let’s go,” he said. “You and me. Come with me now. Right away.”

  “Go where?”

  “New York. Toronto. San Francisco. It doesn’t matter. Someplace far from here, where Redgrave can’t find us.”

  Balthazar reached his arm out, meaning to stretch it across her shoulders and lead her off, but Charity shrank back as if he were going to strike her. The old fear still lingered inside her, and Balthazar knew that was his own fault. “I can’t,” she whispered. “He’ll find out. He’ll find me. He always does; you know that.”

  So she had tried to run away before, and failed. His heart ached at the thought of his little sister’s long captivity—and his own wretched inability to protect her. Now, though, things could be different. He had to make her see that. “Look around you,” Balthazar said, gesturing at the deserted streets. “Nobody will stop us.”

  “Constantia would.”

  “She’s not Redgrave.”

  “She’s just as bad. Worse, maybe. You’ve never seen that, but I have.”

  Charity was talking nonsense—who knew Constantia Gabrielis’s bag of tricks better than he did?—but Balthazar persisted. “Where is Constantia now?” With his luck, she’d come storming out of the nearest house, stake in hand.

  “She’s at the house up the hill, the one we took. Everyone inside was sick, so they couldn’t fight us off. Well, the old man wasn’t sick, but he couldn’t fight us off either.” Charity’s pink tongue darted to the corner of her mouth, as if she were licking her chops at the memory. “I don’t like this flu. It makes everyone taste funny.”

  “Charity, concentrate. If Constantia isn’t here, then she can’t stop us from going.” Could it really be as easy as this? It seemed impossible, and yet nothing stood in their way. Wild hope Balthazar had thought long dead sprang up inside him. They might flee this ghost town and start over somewhere. He could show her how to exist among humans without causing harm. How there were a few friendships to be had, a few deeds worth doing. That sometimes, just sometimes, their time on earth could feel like it mattered.

  His sister furrowed her brow, deep in thought; it was the first time he’d seen her so focused on anything since well before her death. “She’ll know. She’ll figure it out.”

  “Only that you’re gone!”

  “We can’t leave her behind to tattle.” Charity’s dark eyes lit up with glee. “We’ll have to finish her off.”

  Balthazar had never slain a vampire before—though not because he hadn’t wanted to. There had been nights he’d been unable to sleep because his thoughts were too full of what he could do to Redgrave: beating his smug, porcelain face until it cracked. Slicing through his neck and watching him turn to bones. Setting him on fire and lingering long enough to hear him scream. Before Redgrave, Balthazar hadn’t even known it was possible to hate that much.

  Constantia … he hated her, but not like that. Not enough to enjoy killing her.

  But he would do what he had to do.

  The plan was mostly his, in the end; Charity could hardly focus on anything past telling him where the house was and what time to come. Just at sunset, she said: Constantia liked the anonymity of the streets after dark and would often go out prowling. During the day, she’d almost certainly be sleeping.

  That seemed unlike the Constantia he remembered—Balthazar recalled her minding sunlight less than any other vampire he’d ever encountered—but he hadn’t shared her bed for 140 years or so. Habits could change.

  Wasn’t he proof enough of that?

  He dressed as if for a fancy party; she’d see it as a compliment. Then he went to the address Charity had given. Evening shadows falling across the stricken, eerily silent city, Balthazar made his way up the steps and simply rang the doorbell.

  It took a long time for anyone to approach. His sensitive ears picked up the swishing of skirts, the click of her boots against wood. Balthazar leaned close to the door. If Constantia breathed in deeply, she would recognize even his scent. Already he recognized her. For a few moments, he simply remained there motionless while she did as well; he knew they were aware of each other, poised only inches apart, at the intersection of wrath and desire.

  Finally Constantia opened the door. She stood there, blond hair down and loose as if she’d just risen from her bed. “Balthazar,” she said. “My God. Charity told the truth. With her, you never know.”

  He’d told Charity to inform Constantia that he was in town. That he was lonely, regretting his isolation from other vampires. That he’d been excited to learn they were without Redgrave. Lies were always strongest when mixed with the truth: Redgrave had taught him this much.

  “Constantia.” He managed a smile for her; it was bent and uncertain, but that was all right. She wouldn’t have believed an overly enthusiastic welcome. “May I come in?”

  Instead of welcoming him, Constantia merely stepped backward. Balthazar walked into that space and shut the door behind him. They stood very close. She was the only woman he’d ever known tall enough to look him in the eyes.

  “Where’s Charity?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.

  “Wandering the streets, as usual. She can hunt on her own now. Quite well, in fact. You’d be proud of her.”

  Proud wasn’t exactly the word. Still, his sister had followed the plan. She was away from the house, away from any potential blame should he fail. Already he could see that her description of this place had been entirely accurate; she could focus better than he’d realized before. Celadon paper wreath
ed with white vines covered each wall, and the home possessed newfangled electric lighting and a broad stairwell just next to the door. That meant the room he could barely glimpse upstairs was the bedroom Charity and Constantia weren’t using … the one his sister would have hidden the stakes in.

  All he had to do was get Constantia upstairs.

  To judge by the quick rise and fall of her breath as she looked at him, Balthazar thought he could manage.

  “You’re finally done with Redgrave,” he said.

  “We don’t always travel together. You know that by now.”

  “I realize that. I meant it as … a suggestion.”

  Constantia cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t want to come back to Redgrave’s tribe. You want us to start a tribe of our own.”

  “You and me and Charity. A good place to start, don’t you think?” Balthazar leaned forward, slid one hand along her waist. Apparently she’d joined the fad of doing without corsets; only thin fabric separated his skin from her flesh.

  She whispered, “You hate me.”

  “I hate Redgrave. You—you I miss, from time to time.”

  A lie mixed with the truth. He hated his old desire for her; that didn’t meant it wasn’t still a part of him.

  “You wouldn’t want us to hunt the same way.”

  “There are other ways to hunt, Constantia. Ways that let us lead lives almost like normal.”

  “Since when did we care about normal?”

  “You can’t like existing this way,” Balthazar insisted. “Always on the fringes. Always in the dark. Always coming and going at Redgrave’s command. Take control, Constantia.”

  He came closer still to her, so close that their lips almost touched.

  Balthazar finished, “Take me.”

  Impossible to say who kissed whom first, or where the lies ended and the truth began. For a few moments, he knew only that Constantia was familiar to him, darkly beautiful even now, and how good it had felt to drown his soul in her night after night.

  But even as he backed her toward the stairs, Balthazar reminded himself, I’m about to kill her.

  Conscience pricked at him, but not as much as the need to finally rescue his sister. He could finally do it—set them both free. Constantia had helped imprison them to begin with; now she had to pay the price.

  They found their way into the bedroom and fell together on the bed. Balthazar cupped her face in his hands, kissing her deeply even as he opened his eyes to look for the bedside table on the right. That was where Charity would have hidden the stakes. Once he’d staked Constantia and paralyzed her, he could burn this house down.

  He pushed her back, not roughly, but an old signal he thought she’d recognize. Sure enough, Constantia began to shrug off her dove-gray dress, laughing throatily. Her perfect body could still move him. “You haven’t learned any new tricks these past centuries, have you?” She grinned at Balthazar as she scooted across the bed, the better to undress. “I see I still have a lot to teach you.”

  “I’m ready to learn.” Taking off his shirt gave Balthazar the cover he needed for the swift movement toward the bedside table. In a flash he opened the drawer to find—nothing.

  He looked up to see Constantia sitting still on the other side of the bed. Where the drawer of the bedside table on the left was open. And where she’d no doubt found the stake now in her hand.

  Her eyes were almost sad. “Do you know, I’d hoped Charity was lying?”

  She betrayed me, Balthazar thought in the split second before the stake slammed into his chest.

  The rest was a kind of darkness that couldn’t be seen, a silence that couldn’t be heard. Balthazar knew he was not dead, but he knew nothing else. At times his stunned senses delivered a signal—the sight of Charity standing above him, triumphant and proud, or the smell of burning wood—but his mind could not process the information. It slipped in and slipped out, unheeded and barely remembered.

  Until the moment a great weight fell upon him and dislodged the stake.

  Balthazar screamed. The stake now jabbed through his chest, if not his heart, with the full pain of a deep stab wound. He sucked in a breath and found his lungs filled with smoke; when his eyes would see again, he realized that Charity had fulfilled his plan to the letter—she’d simply turned it against him instead of against Constantia. He was the one now trapped in a burning house, half a smoldering timber across his gut searing his skin, only seconds from oblivion.

  Charity, why?

  But he knew why. He had killed his sister. She was returning the favor.

  Despair settled over him, heavier than the beam that pinned him down. It would be easy to just lie back and let it happen. And yet he couldn’t. Maybe that made him a coward. Maybe the instinct to survive outlasted death itself.

  Using all his remaining strength, Balthazar shoved the fallen timber off his body. His remaining clothes were singed, his skin blackened and blistering. The tips of his fingers stuck to the stake he yanked from his own chest, peeling away from his flesh. He staggered toward the nearest window and threw himself through it; glass stabbed into him, just one more layer of pain to mingle with all the rest.

  The fall hurt, too; the bones in one forearm snapped as he hit the ground, but somehow he managed to stifle a shout of pain. Balthazar crawled away from the burning house, expecting Constantia and Charity to arrive at any moment to finish him at any cost.

  But no one was there. In Philadelphia during the influenza epidemic, even firefighters weren’t risking their lives for anyone else. And apparently Charity and Constantia had already written him off.

  Balthazar found his way to the edge of town, to an abandoned building where rats dwelled and made for easy eating. He remained there long after his burns and broken bones healed. Long after the flu epidemic ended. He spoke to no one. He let his beard grow. He spent long days watching a rectangle of light from his room’s one window crawl from one side of the room to the other as the sun rose and set.

  Dozens of days.

  Hundreds of days.

  Without human blood, he felt himself changing: his flesh hung more loosely on him, and his fingers increasingly curved into claws. The monster was taking over, but the monster could feel no pain, so Balthazar accepted it. Filth matted his hair and beard, and his torn clothing turned into mere rags. When vermin scurried close enough to be caught, he devoured them. He was as low as he deserved to be; that was as much as he thought about the matter, when he bothered to think of anything at all.

  One evening, though, as he lay on the floor halfway between stupor and slumber, he heard a low, guttural laugh. “Lookit this. Some damn hobo.”

  “Trash, if you ask me.”

  “Might have something in here, though.”

  “Not this guy. Lookit him. He don’t need a squat. He needs a grave.”

  “We can take care of that, can’t we?”

  Balthazar breathed in, smelled human blood, and the monster had killed and devoured them both long before his mind told him he’d even been in danger.

  He stood over the corpses of his victims for nearly an hour as he tried to process his return to human consciousness. Already Balthazar could feel his body restoring itself, taking on the muscular form he’d had in life. His tangled beard disgusted him now, as did the grime coating his body, but he’d have to clean himself later.

  First he had to figure out just how long he’d been in this place.

  One of the dead men was at least close to his size, so Balthazar put on his shirt, coat, and shoes before venturing outside. It was late at night—but that was all he recognized. The entire neighborhood had been rebuilt around him. The roads were repaved, and no horses and carriages were to be seen; instead, automobiles rolled past, faster and more contained than they’d been before.

  Buying stock in General Motors was a good idea, Balthazar thought. But his portfolio wasn’t his main concern at the moment.

  Moving more naturally and decisively now, Balthazar went to a nearby
trash bin and pulled out a crumpled newspaper. The headlines blared unfamiliar information—Depression, Dust Bowl—and one unexpectedly familiar phrase—President Roosevelt? Again?—but he’d read this and absorb the contents later. Right now he cared about only one thing: the date.

  April 26, 1933.

  Almost fifteen years gone, and he hadn’t even noticed them going.

  He would have to return to Evernight Academy and enroll again. There he could find out what the world was like these days and start to adapt. Balthazar hated the process of starting over, but he could do it when he had to.

  And he would this time, too, though his weary heart still held only the thought of his sister, and the knowledge of pain.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  BALTHAZAR KNEW HE SHOULD BE RELIEVED AT the news that Skye had a date. It was a definite sign that she was willing to walk away from—whatever it was that had been building between them. She was no angrier than his bad manners deserved; she wasn’t going to cry or carry on like a woman scorned. They could cooperate in figuring out her powers; they could work together to ensure she remained safe from Redgrave. She wouldn’t ask anything else of him. That was exactly what he should hope for.

  Instead, as he drove back to his home through the winter storm, he kept thinking about Skye in Keith Kramer’s arms.

  Keith Kramer. A mere boy. And not even a particularly intelligent, dynamic, or kind one. One who turned in history papers late, and despite repeated corrections kept confusing your and you’re. He was handsome in a generic sort of way, though, and apparently a football star—some girls went for that, but Skye? Not her. She was special. There was nothing ordinary about her. Keith was the definition of earthbound.

  Damn, but he needed a cigarette. His resolution to quit had never been as difficult as it was right then. He wanted to light one up, suck it in, blow out smoke that could kill other people. Such as Keith Kramer. How could she even think of going out with that … blond lump?

  She can think about it because you cast her aside, he reminded himself. You don’t have the right to control who she sees.