Balthazar (28 page)

“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 wreathed 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.

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
.

Yet the mere thought of Keith's hands on Skye's lithe body made Balthazar furious with jealousy.

For one moment, he couldn't see the road in front of him, even his hands clenched on the steering wheel. All he saw was his dark vision of Skye lifting her face for someone else's kiss—

And that was the moment someone walked into the road in front of his car.

He shouted in wordless horror at the thump of his car striking flesh and bone. Even as he slammed on the brakes, sending his car careering into the thicker snow alongside the road, the body was flung up onto the hood, onto his windshield, limp and in tatters. For a moment he could only stare, aghast, at the crumpled form that lay in front of the windshield. Then, slowly, his victim lifted her head to stare through the glass at him.

“Gotcha,” Charity said, before bursting into peals of laughter.

Balthazar slammed his fists against the steering wheel in frustration. “Jesus, Charity! You scared the hell out of me.”

She grinned at him, wriggling with pleasure as if she were a little girl telling riddles again. “Just think! If it had been a human, you could've eaten it! And no guilt about biting that one at all.”

“Your idea of guilt and mine are very different.”

Her expression darkened. “They are, aren't they?”

Balthazar got out of the car. His feet sank in loose, powdery snow almost up to his knees. The darkness around them was nearly total, and by now almost nobody else was foolish enough to be out on the road. He and Charity were alone. Her white dress and pale hair made her appear to be part of the snowstorm around them.

“You've gone back to Redgrave,” he said. “Thought you had your own tribe.”

“I do. They're with me. But you never forget your first love, do you?”

Once again he remembered the barn where he'd drawn his last breath as a living man, and how slick with blood and gore it had been when he'd finished murdering her. No moment in his existence had greater horror than the one when he'd seen Charity dead by his hand—lying next to his first love, the woman he'd tried to save by sacrificing his sister. Tried and failed.

Charity was thinking of it, too. Her high, youthful voice shook, as if from the cold. “Why do you never choose me? Why am I never the one you want to save?”

“Why do you always choose to go back to Redgrave? How can you be on his side after what he did to both of us?”