A Dark Heart (3 page)

He cried out in agony and fell back, into the flames and smoke, until
the darkness swallowed him completely.

London,
1897

"WAKE up,
you overgrown leech. You're not dead yet."

Elijah groaned and put an arm over his eyes, blocking out the thin light
trickling through a broken shutter and the uninvited visitor hovering at his bedside.
Percival Parminter wasn’t the most welcome sight to greet him in the morning, certainly
wasn’t the maddeningly beautiful, forever unattainable lady of his dreams.

Unfortunately, however, his visitor
had
been in his most recent dream,
a dream that Elijah didn’t care to remember in the light of day. Percy was the
twin he’d risked all to save that night so long ago – another reason
Elijah didn't want to open his eyes. He hated the reminder.

But reminded he'd been nearly ten years ago, when he'd arrested the
mysterious and very dangerous Percy the Pinch for thievery – and for
attempting to disembowel him – and recognized him. Or her. The woman wore
a thousand masks, but only Elijah knew the truth – just as Percy knew the
truth about what Elijah had been as a street lad, and about what he was now.

But they kept each other's secrets. They weren't exactly friends, but
they were bound together by that dark night, and by their shared need for vengeance
against the men who'd ruined both of their lives.

Percy, who'd hidden behind a dead brother's name, a pair of trousers and
a sharp knife, had grown up hard and fast in Whitechapel after the fire,
graduating from pick-pocket to blade-for-hire by the time she was ten. She
seemed to know every fence and pimp in the East End, could pick a lock with a
cravat pin, and was extremely skilled at gathering information on anything
ranging from the current contents of a duke's wardrobe, to the timetables and inventory
of every smuggling vessel that unloaded along the air docks.

And Elijah had never seen anyone handle a blade like Percy did, which
explained how she'd survived for so long on the streets, despite her size and
sex. She was as quick as a bird of prey and as devious as a snake. Elijah
didn't trust her as far as he could throw her ... or at least as far as he once
could have thrown her before he'd been turned into a monster of infinite
strength.

But their relationship worked. In exchange for information and the
occasional favor, Elijah turned a blind eye to Percy's schemes ... though
Elijah doubted he knew even half of what Percy was involved in.

In Percy's latest manifestation as Percival Parminter, Bond Street
peacock and valet-for-hire to gentlemen of the
ton
, she'd certainly
outdone herself. She actually flaunted her feminine attributes. Beneath the
short, mannish tow hair, she had delicate, angelic features and pale, milky
skin, and she clothed her long, sleek, and seemingly fragile body in fastidiously
tailored clothes in colors that most men wouldn't be caught dead in. The only
nods to masculinity were the thin little false mustache she wore across her
upper lip, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles to obscure her long-lashed, womanly
eyes, and the anatomically correct bulge in her too-tight trousers.

Elijah didn't want to know
what
she stuffed down there.

But her disguise, perhaps because of its embrace of her effeminacy,
worked. No one had ever suspected she was anything other than what she appeared
to be: a man – a preening peacock who doubtless enjoyed the company of
other men – but a man nonetheless. She was a very good actress.

Quite literally, for in another one of her identities, she was Polly
Penry, darling of the Covent Garden stage.

At the moment, however, Percy was rocking on her heels, surveying him in
dismay over the edge of her spectacles. She was dressed to the nines as usual, reviving
the fashion of the fops of the previous century with a bottle-green cutout
coat, pink –
pink!
– silk jacquard waistcoat, and tall
riding boots polished to a painful sheen. But the
pièce de résistance,
as Percival Parminter would have drawled, was an old-fashioned cravat that fell
from the neck in an elaborate waterfall cascade. She looked ridiculous.

And she smelled too good. At least her blood did, especially to a newly
awakened leech like himself who'd not fed in days. He couldn't stop his fangs
from descending, so violently that he nicked his own lip.

"Damn it," he growled, flopping over in his bed and burying his
face in the pillow, fighting the urge to feed on his houseguest.

"Thirsty, are we?" Percy said, too brightly for his taste,
poking him in the buttocks with the tip of his own cane. The blighter.

Elijah swatted her away and slowly sat up, willing the craving away. It
didn't work. And though she tried to, even the street-hardened confidence
artist couldn't hide her unease at the sight of his fangs and glowing eyes. She
took a few steps away from the bed, holding his long cane between them.

As if
that
would protect her. She might have been able to defend
herself against him before he was turned – he'd once had the knife scars
to prove it – but she wouldn't stand a chance against him if he lost
control now. And once he lost control, he'd drink her dry.

And still the thirst would remain.

She was either incredibly brave – or incredibly stupid – to
bait him now, to even be here at all. The last person who'd disturbed his
slumber had not lived to tell about it. Granted, the intruder had been a
murderer he'd been hunting for months, who'd made the mistake of trying to hunt
him
. But Elijah hadn't discovered the man's identity until
after
he'd thrown the bloodless corpse across the room.

Percy's eyes widened slightly as Elijah stood up and stalked in her direction,
her hand pointlessly reaching inside her waistcoat for one of the dozen or so
blades she kept hidden on her person. He glared at her and passed her by, his
sights set on the cabinet behind her – though she'd no idea how hard it
was for him to resist the call of her blood as he brushed her shoulder. For
some reason, her blood had always smelled particularly delicious to him –
not like Lady Christiana’s, of course, or even Aline Romanov’s before her
Bonding – but it was special all the same, and it took the last of his
willpower to resist.

It
hurt
not to drink Percy dry.

When he reached the cabinet, he pulled the familiar tin box from its
hiding place behind a false panel and began fumbling with its contents: a
half-empty vial of liquid morphine, needle, and tourniquet. He hurriedly
prepared his morning breakfast, his hands already beginning to shake from both
his withdrawal from the drug and his raging thirst for blood.

He cinched the India-rubber tourniquet tight and stabbed the needle in
his arm in a lightning-quick move, injecting the rest of the vial into his
bloodstream before his inhuman body could reject the needle. He could feel the
sweet, deliciously warm opiate slowly spread throughout his veins, gelding the
beast inside of him. At least for the moment.

His metallic fangs receded, his hypersensitive vision returned to normal,
and when he looked at Percy now, he didn't want to rip her throat out.

Well, he
did
. But he didn't ache like a giant streetcar was
crushing his body when he resisted the animal urge to do so. Now the bloodlust
was just an itch. An annoying, unscratchable itch, granted, but one that paled
in comparison to the blessed numbness of the morphine.
Thank God
.

Percy's elegant little nose wrinkled in disgust as she stared at the
tourniquet that remained around his scarred arm. "Is that really
necessary?"

"Would you rather I drank you dry, Percy?" he growled, ripping
off the tourniquet and tossing it back into the tin box. He pocketed the empty
vial. He'd have to replenish his supply soon. He'd run out even more quickly
than usual. It was taking more and more of the drug to quell his thirst, to
send him into oblivion. A sure sign that his time was running out.

"You need some real ... food. And soon. That poison is killing
you," Percy insisted, looking at his arms pointedly.

Elijah was surprised at the genuine concern he heard in Percy's voice. He
glanced down at his bare arms and had to admit they looked fairly gruesome.
Black and blue and crusted in scabs, his arms were a rotting mess. The sites
where he injected the morphine were the only things – besides the scar on
his cheek – that never healed. He'd shot himself through the head,
stabbed himself through the heart, and, on one memorable occasion, jumped out
of an airship a thousand feet in the air. He'd survived all of these
excruciatingly painful attempts to end his life without a scratch. But
something about the morphine – most likely the same property that
diminished his bloodlust – overruled his unnatural ability to heal. It
was
killing him.

He shrugged. "Good," he said gruffly.

Over the nine years since his turning, he'd learned that there were at
least three ways to kill his kind. Beheading. Incineration – though this
had to be quite thorough, as he'd learned the hard way when trying to kill a
leech who'd been particularly tenacious of life. And starvation. But not
ordinary starvation. It was one unique to his kind, which happened only when
deprived of a maker's blood for long enough. It was a slow death that took
years, and it was this method, hastened along by his habit, that would be his
eventual death, for he'd never take a drop from
his
maker again.

Lady Christiana hadn't saved his life. She'd merely postponed the
inevitable.

Percy pursed her lips at his remark but said nothing, just watched him
disapprovingly as he pulled on a half-clean shirt and waistcoat for the day.

"What do you want, Percy?" he demanded, snapping the false Iron
Necklace in place around his throat and then struggling in front of a shattered
mirror to affix a brass-worked, binocular-lensed eyepiece to his head. The
eyepiece was a replica of the Welding eye he'd once had implanted before his
transformation. It distorted the sight out of his right eye, but it was a
necessary disguise, as was the limp he affected.

He couldn't very well show up at Scotland Yard with a regrown eye and an
even gait, much less no Iron Necklace. To most of the world, such things as
regeneration and vampires were still firmly in the realm of fiction. And the
only people of his generation who went around without Iron Necklaces were the fanatic,
Bedlam-bound Luddites. With their freakish scars and Biblical crusade against
Welding technology of any kind, they’d ripped out their implants the moment the
air was safe enough to breathe without them. The hypocrites.

He’d almost rather be one of them than what he was.

An abomination.

He fumbled with the discreet leather straps near his ear. His hands were
still shaking – they shook all the time now, to be honest, another
symptom of his pending demise. He cursed when the eyepiece slid down his cheek,
refusing to cooperate.

Percy rolled her eyes in exasperation, took the eyepiece out of his hands
and guided him to a chair, where she proceeded to put him to rights. He was too
tranquilized by the morphine to fight her meddling.

"You need a shave, and a haircut wouldn't go amiss," she
muttered as she worked.

He just growled at her, which shut her up, but not for long.

"Have you ever tried ... well, just taking a sip or two?" she
asked.

"What?"

"When you feed. Must you drink a person dry every time? I know you
don't like doing it. Have you tried to take just a little?"

"Yes," he said shortly, hoping that would be the end of it. He
hated when she asked him questions about his
condition
.

"Well, did it work?" she pressed, finishing her work and
stepping away.

He turned his head and met her eyes. Whatever she saw in his expression
was enough to drain the blood from her face. "No, Percy," he said
softly. "It did not work."

"Oh," was all she could manage.

He tried not to care that she looked disappointed by his response. They
weren't friends, and the sooner she gave up on him, the better off they'd both
be. 

The
safer
she'd be.

He had tried to take "just a little", as Percy had so
euphemistically put it. In the early days of his transformation, he'd
experimented on his victims, seeing if it was possible to pull away from the
feeding before it went too far. But it wasn't. Once the frenzy set in, nothing
could stop him.

But he couldn't
not
feed. When not even the morphine could curb
his appetite, he had to find a source of blood, or risk losing control
completely, endangering everyone in his path. He'd seen it happen before, when
a rogue vampire like himself, cut off from his maker, had tried to stop feeding
completely. The creature had ended up sucking his way through half a
neighborhood before Elijah had managed to put him down like the rabid animal
he'd become.

Always wary of sharing such a fate, Elijah had managed to restrict his
hunting to the lowest of the low in an effort to appease his conscience. He
sought out the rapists and murderers he couldn’t catch legitimately in his
profession as an Inspector for Scotland Yard, and those of his kind who haunted
the slums at night – abominations like himself the world wouldn't miss.
And his conscience
was
eased ... if only a little.

"Don't ever wake me up like that again, Percy," he said softly.
"It was a close thing."

Her hands dropped away, and she finally met his eyes. "How
close?"

He held up his thumb and pointer finger until a hair's breadth separated
them.

Her shoulders slumped a little. "That close?"

"That close," he confirmed.

She sighed, sounding exasperated. And just a little bit sad. "But
there must be a better way to control it, besides pumping yourself full of that
shite," she muttered.