Lady Killer

  Clio was so entranced by the sight of Miles, by the expression in his eyes, by the heat in his voice, that she forgot all about Corin’s insulting test. The sound of the door shutting behind him and Toast was the only thing that broke the spell of Miles’s gaze.

  “I have interesting news,” he told her, crossing to the bed and taking her hand.

  “You are feeling subtle?” Clio inquired.

  The corners of Miles’s lips curled up into a half smile. “I always feel subtle when I am with you. But this is too important. I just received this from Which House.” He held out a wrinkled piece of paper.

  A line zigzagged through the middle of it, twisting around groups of squares and rectangles, and ultimately ending up where it began. It took Clio a moment to understand it. “A map. This is a map.”

  “Of your itinerary last night,” Miles agreed triumphantly.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Inigo drew it. Apparently he was worried you were not working hard enough and followed you to see how the investigation was going. Your clients certainly are demanding.” Clio blushed and was about to interrupt when Miles went on. “It goes from Which House here, and from here around the neighborhood. But nowhere on that map do you even approach Lady Starrat’s house.”

  “Which means—”

  “You did not kill her and you are not the vampire,” Miles finished the sentence for her. He watched quietly as the news really settled in and felt a strange sense almost of loss. She had needed him when she thought she needed someone to protect the world from her. Now that need had vanished.

  “Then the note must have been sent by the vampire himself, to upset and confuse me.”

  “Note?”

  “The afternoon of the day we found Flora in my bed, I received a note that said, ‘You do not know what you are.’ I assumed that someone was warning me that I was the vampire. But now I think it must just be part of the vampire’s plot to scare me. It was because of that note that I went to the meeting today, in the crypt. Because the message was written in the same hand. I was hoping that whomever had summoned me—” Clio’s voice trailed off as she caught at an idea. “If the vampire sent me those notes, then it must have been him I was supposed to meet. He must have hurt Justin after I lost consciousness. But Justin’s presence scared him away before he finished with me.”

  Justin. Miles did not like the idea of being beholden to Justin Greeley for anything. “Are you sure Justin was not the person responsible?”

  “Positive. He just followed me there and decided to take advantage of finding me alone.” She paused. “He really is locked safely away in Newgate?”

  “Yes,” Miles answered, amazed that he had ever been jealous of the man. “He is safe inside Newgate.” He was reminded of something. “Do you have either of the notes you received? Can I see one?”

  Clio shook her head. “I no longer have them. I destroyed them.”

  “How?”

  “First I tore them into very small pieces. Then I, well—I ate them.”

  Miles stared at her for a moment. “You ate them,” he repeated. He tipped his head back and laughed. “Of course. So that no one would see them and be concerned. You did it because you are always trying to protect other people from yourself.”

  Clio spoke without thinking. “At least I am not always trying to protect myself from other people.” She regretted the words almost as soon as she had spoken. “I am sorry, Your Lordship, I shouldn’t have—”

  “If you are going to probe the secrets of my soul,” Miles said, interrupting with a wry smile, “you really should call me ‘Miles.’ ”

  “Miles,” Clio repeated.

  “Better. I never trust anyone who addresses me ‘Your Lordship.’ ”

  “Corin does,” Clio pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Miles nodded. “I met Corin when he broke into my country estate years ago. Definitely not to be trusted.”

  “What about people who call you ‘viscount’?”

  “Worse. Miscreants of the lowest order.” He rose, crossed to a table, picked up a silver salver, and returned, holding it toward Clio. “Does this look anything like either of the notes you received?”

  Clio reached for the piece of parchment on the silver platter, but Miles pulled it from her. “Don’t touch it. Just look.”

  “ ‘Do not try to fool me, Dearbourn,’ ” Clio read aloud. “No. Why?”

  “It was found clutched in the hand of the person I sent to Newgate to impersonate you,” Miles explained succinctly.

  “Clutched in her hand?”

  “His hand. I had a man impersonate you. And yes. He was dead.”

  “Someone killed my imposter?”

  “Yes. Just before someone tried to kill you.”

  “Not kill. Justin only wanted to kidnap me. But—” She got a faraway look.

  “What?”

  Clio shook her head. “Nothing.” She did not really think Justin was the person behind the death of the imposter. Although it would clarify what he had meant when he had spoken of the “precautions” he had taken to prevent anyone from reporting her missing. If everyone thought she was dead, no one would notice her absence. “How was sh—he killed?”

  “By this,” Miles nodded at the paper. “He crushed it in his hand when he died, but you can still make out the lines of the original folds. I’ve seen it before in Europe. When you unfold the packet, the center leaps up, propelling whatever is there into the air. In this case it was poison, probably white arsenic. The warden reports hearing a sneeze when he opened the message, which would certainly have expedited things, but that would not have been necessary. One good breath and he was dead.”

  Clio shivered. “Do you have any idea who could have sent it? Any idea who went to see him? Or rather, me?”

  “Yes. You are very popular. Sixty people materialized to try to get a look at you, but they were only allowed to peer in through a small slit so that the imposter would go undetected, and they had to leave their names. My men are still going over them.”

  Clio nodded, lost in thought. Then she looked up. “At least the note shows that whoever did the murder knew it was an imposter and was not deliberately trying to kill me,” she said with an attempt at airiness. “That counts for something. And the vampire, or whomever ordered the meeting today, also failed to kill me. I must be very lucky.”

  “Yes, I expect that explains it. One sharp blow to the ankle, one blunt object to the head, and one knife to the ribs. Luck.”

  “My ankle does not hurt at all anymore,” Clio said. “At least not compared to my side.” A frown flickered across her features.

  “Are you in a great deal of pain, Clio?”

  “No. But I am very frustrated. In a normal investigation, you can try to figure out why someone is doing something bad, and at least use that as a guide and possibly a lever. But with a fiend, there is nothing to hold on to, no rational explanation. The vampire is killing people because he needs their blood to live. Period. Which leaves us no closer to catching him than before. And I feel like time is running out.”

  In so many ways. She looked toward the window, toward the sliver of moon that hung high in the sky. Learning that she was not the vampire did not bring her the relief she had expected, did not make the waning moon any easier to look at, and she knew why. It was because it still meant the passage of time. It was past midnight. In four days she would still lose Miles.

  “Tell me again about finding the vampire three years ago,” she said, breaking the silence. “About exactly what it was like when you came upon him.”

  Miles stiffened, but he answered. “We followed him into a room. He was leaning over a girl. I put my sword behind his back. He turned around. There was blood everywhere. Blood on her pillow. Blood on his clothes. Blood on his hands. Blood on his lips. We fought. He escaped. I chased him.”

  Clio continued to stare out the window, but she did not see anything. She was lost in thought. She knew she was missing som
ething, something vital, but she could not figure out what it was. Finally, she turned her gaze to Miles. He had begun fiddling with an object he had picked up from the table beside the bed and she realized it was the inner workings of the clock she had kicked over three days earlier.

  “I am sorry I broke that,” she offered.

  “It does not matter. Time marches on indefatigably whether or not the clock counts it,” Miles replied with a hint of bitterness. “Besides, it’s not broken. Only misaligned.” He tinkered with something, then turned a little knob and the clock began to click in a steady rhythm.

  Clio could see the spring moving, the golden gears spinning, each into the next, with finely tuned precision. “It’s like an ideal little world, where everything fits together perfectly,” she said with real admiration. “It is beautiful.”

  “It is an illusion.” Miles brought his fist down on the clock, hard, reducing it to a pile of bent metal, and now the bitterness was palpable. “Even the slightest change in pressure or temperature can upset the balance, and as soon as the balance is upset it stops working.” With a casual motion, he swept the pieces onto the floor, then looked at her with strangely blank eyes. “Nothing perfect can endure, Clio. No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy time.”

  He stood and began moving from her, but Clio reached out and grabbed his hand. “No,” she agreed in a low voice, crackling with urgency, “but you can steal it.”

  He turned back toward her, slowly. “Steal it?”

  Clio nodded. “By ignoring it. By filling it impossibly full. By losing track of minutes and hours.” She pulled him toward her and he came. “I will show you how.”

  He looked down at her, her magical smile, the hope in her eyes, and his face was impassive. But his mind was reeling. He did not, could not, deserve her. “Why me?” he asked finally. The question was almost inaudible.

  “What?”

  “Why me? Why did you let me make love to you?”

  Clio hesitated. Looking at him, gleaming in the moonlight before her, she felt her breath catch in her throat. She longed to tell him the truth, but she was terrified of his reaction. What if he laughed at her? What if he frowned? What if he did not say anything at all? What could he say, really, that would not make her ache inside? What could he say besides ‘thank you but I am marrying your cousin in four days’? What could telling him possibly accomplish except to make him pull away faster?

  “Because I love you, Miles,” she said simply.

  He frowned. “You do not know me. You can’t mean that.”

  There was so much pain in his voice that Clio knew she had to tell him everything. She swallowed hard. “I do know you. You were my first investigation. I began reading about you and following you the summer I was fifteen, simply out of curiosity, to see what Mariana’s betrothed was like, and once I started I could not stop. I followed you every night, when your father thought you were out drinking and your cousins assumed you were with one of a dozen mistresses. I know where you went and what you did. When you stood outside the glass-less windows of those small houses on the outskirts of the city through the night, watching as parents held their children and laughed with them and kissed them fondly even though they barely had enough to eat, I stood next to you. I saw you leave piles of gold for them on their dusty windowsills after they went to bed. I saw you wait to see that the food you sent them anonymously each day arrived, and I saw you leave every time before they began to eat it. I saw the children go out in new clothes, the fathers walk around with the confidence of men who have found better jobs, the mothers smile, really smile, for the first time in years. I saw you bring enormous joy to thirty families that summer. And none to yourself. Every night, before the sun came up, I followed you to the river and watched as you stood at the edge and I knew exactly how you felt. You were alone. Like me.” She paused. “You were the best man I had ever seen, Miles. You still are. That is why I wanted you to make love to me. Because I love you. Because I have loved you with my entire heart for ten years.”

  He stood rigid, looking at her, his eyes, his face, his posture unyielding, unexpressive, and Clio feared the worst.

  Then he said, “It was you.”

  Clio gazed at him. “What?”

  “I thought it was some sort of apparition, but I should have known. It was you all along.”

  “You mean, you saw me? Ten years ago?”

  “No. But I knew you were there. When you were close by I felt peaceful. Like everything inside me made sense. And then one day you just disappeared.” He moved his glance from hers. “Do you know how long I looked for you? I went back to the river every night that fall but you were never there. I finally gave up and decided that it had been a figment of my imagination.”

  Clio could not believe what she was hearing. “Why didn’t you ever speak to me?”

  “I was afraid to do anything in case I scared you away. That was why I went to the river. I hoped you would come out and talk to me.” He returned his eyes to hers. “Why did you leave?”

  “We moved back to the country and there was no way that I could stay behind. But I read all about you, everything I could put my hands on.” Clio put her palm on his chest. “And in the end you did find me. You have me now.”

  “Yes.” Miles looked down at her, no longer a grown man but instead the boy she had followed along the Thames years earlier, the boy who chose to spend his nights not in pleasure but in watching parents treat their children with love, the boy whose loneliness had resonated so powerfully with her own, the boy who had wanted her to talk to him. “Tell me again, Clio,” he whispered forcefully, almost pleading. “Please, Clio, say it again.”

  Clio did not need to ask what he meant. “I love you Miles,” she told him, not whispering it. “I love you.”

  He would have liked to make her promise she would never leave him again, that she would always be his, but it was a promise he could not ask and she could not give. Instead he bent down and pulled her to him and held her against him with a fierce, overwhelming possessiveness.

  “Say it again,” he begged, over and over again, as he pulled her nightgown over her head, “again,” he implored as he admired her in the moonlight, as he kissed her breasts, her neck—his, all his, only his, had always been his. “Again,” he entreated, tumbling her onto his lap, her wetness leaving a glistening trail up the black velvet of his breeches- as he pulled her toward him. “Again,” he demanded as she ran her hands across his chest, pulling his doublet off, kissing him, short nails scratching down his smooth, hot skin. “Again” he ordered as she pushed him onto the bed, “again,” he pled as he slipped inside of her. “Again,” this time a ragged cry as she sat astride him, touching herself while he moved into and out of her body. She was incredible and gorgeous and everything he had not known how to name, and she was his and she loved him. “Again, again again,” he shouted as she collapsed on top of him, panting and moaning, her body pulling him into her, pulsing around him, squeezing him, teasing him, demanding him through one release, and then another. For a long moment Miles floated outside his body, somewhere between consciousness and death, hovered, soared, rose higher and higher on a steadily building surge of pressure and pleasure commingled, and then all of a sudden he heard her say “I love you Miles,” one final time, and his climax slammed through him with an intensity that left him gasping and pleading and shouting her name.

  They held each other tightly, neither daring to move, to upset whatever fragile balance they had attained.

  Then, suddenly, Clio rolled over and said, “E’en rises and die else young fatter is every moon hide can then and comely.”

  Miles had begun to grow accustomed to her flashes of insight, but this was something else. Something more like insanity. “What?” he asked, suddenly worried that the exertion had not been good for her wound. Wounds, he corrected.

  But Clio only beamed at him. “Of course,” she said with the air of someone who was not speaking nonsense. “Look in th
e mirror. It is not how you begin, it is how you end up. I need a piece of paper and some ink.”

  Miles, still bewildered by her earlier disclosure, managed to decipher that at least the last sentiment was lucid and reached to the table next to his bed to get her some.

  “E’en rises and die else young fatter is every moon hide can then and comely,” she repeated, then added, “E-R-A-D-E-Y-F-I-E-M-H-C-T-A-C,” pronouncing the first letter of each word as she wrote it.

  “He are a dee if I’m ache sea tea?” Miles asked, misunderstanding what she had said. “Is that supposed to be a poem? Because, amore, I’m a bit rusty bu—”

  “No. It’s E-R-A-D-E-Y-F-I-E-M-H-C-T-A-C. Which, read backward, as in a mirror, is C-A-T-C-H-M-E-I-F-Y-E-D-A-R-E. ‘Catch me if ye dare.’ ”

  At least now she was speaking in sentences that resembled English. “Catch me if ye dare. Is that part of a poem?”

  Clio held the paper out to him. “No. It is what is underlined in your copy of A Compendium of Vampires. I saw it two nights ago when I was waiting for you to yell at me. Remember, when I asked you why you had marked up your book?”

  “I would like it to be noted that I didn’t yell at you,” Miles put in, studying the paper. “I did nothing like yell at you.”

  “You have a remarkably forbearing nature,” Clio said. “Which is one of the things I love most about you, and which we will discuss at another time.” At the word “love” Miles smiled enormously and it was all Clio could do to stay focused on her explanation. “Those were the words underlined. At first I could not figure out what they meant, but then in the crypt it became clear.”

  “How did you find the passages with the underlining in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. I think—that is right. When I picked up the book there was a page marked with a yellow ribbon. As if someone had been reading it.”

  “Or wanted to draw our attention to it,” Miles said, growing suddenly more serious. “Was that the first time you had noticed the bookmark?”

  “Yes,” Clio began, then stopped. Braided yellow ribbon. Braided yellow ribbon. Something clicked in her memory.