Balthazar (6 page)

Tires screeched, and Skye flung herself against his side as a car on the nearby road—its driver apparently startled by the explosion—ran off the pavement into the ditch so hard that the entire hood crumpled. For one moment Balthazar looked up at the gas station, just in time to see Redgrave's car speeding past them, back on the highway.

Well, he hadn't finished off the bastard, but at least he knew the old crew remained as afraid of fire as he was. And Skye was safe from further vampire attacks … for the moment.

“Are you okay?” Skye called toward the driver of the wrecked car as she stumbled through the snow. “Hello?”

Balthazar pushed himself up to follow her. The driver of the car looked dazed, and on his forehead—

Blood. Lots of it. He stopped in place, not trusting himself near such weak prey at such a moment; it was too soon after the fight, too soon after he'd let himself be a hunter again.

“Mr. Lovejoy!” Skye got the car's door open to lay one hand on the injured man's shoulder. He was apparently too weak to answer her. “It's okay, Mr. Lovejoy. I'm calling nine one one right now.” As she pulled out her cell phone, she said to Balthazar, “It's my history teacher. He's hurt. Are you all right?”

Desperate for blood. Bound to protect her from a danger he didn't understand.

“Yeah,” Balthazar said. “I'm fine.”

Weary, dizzy, he knelt in the snow and lowered his head, thinking only to collect himself. But on the snow was a small cluster of blood droplets—those of the man from the crash. Mr. Lovejoy. Or Skye's cut hand. Maybe even his own, if he'd gotten banged up worse than he realized.

But Balthazar soon lost the capacity to think about them in any rational way. His mind focused on only one thing: blood.

Just a taste, one taste, you'll get your strength back
—

He dipped his fingers into the stains on the snow. The blood had already chilled. But he slid his fingers between his lips—even cold blood would be glorious to him right now—

And then the world went away.

Replaced by a better one.

Massachusetts, 1640

BALTHAZAR BREATHED IN DEEPLY. IT HAD seemed to him, for a moment, that there was something strange about the fact that he needed to draw breath—but why should that be? They had just walked up a steep hill, which was enough to make anyone pant.

That brief oddness was quickly forgotten, replaced by a rare, deep satisfaction. According to his parents, and to the rest of their community, one's best was never good enough—no life was industrious enough, virtuous enough, ever. But right now he was alone, save for his sister and his dog, neither of whom judged him. At market in Boston, he had sold the cow for fifteen strands of wampum, three more than his father had expected him to get, which would surely make his parents happy. Goodman Cash had even given each of the Mores an apple—a rare treat, for free, out of nothing but kindness.

As Fido bounded ahead in the high grasses, Charity leaped after him. Her natural exuberance was too great for the strict rules under which they lived, but try as he might, Balthazar could see nothing sinful in it. Perhaps it was not prudent for a young girl to dance around in the sunshine in front of others—that could be seen as immodest, he guessed, though he understood Charity had no such intention. Here and now, though, with nobody else to watch, his little sister could be free, and she knew it.

“Why can't every day be market day?” Charity said, holding out her hands as if she wanted to catch the sunlight in her palms.

“Because we don't have something to sell every day, just as nobody needs to buy something every day.”

“I wish we could.”

Balthazar had a flicker of a thought about markets that really were open all the time—even at night—but the peculiar daydream faded in an instant.

“If it were market day every day, then we could have jugglers and singers every day, too.”

“You've never even seen a juggler in your life.”

“Mama told us, and she even tried to show us with the potatoes before Papa came in that time. I think it would be fun.”

Their mother made life back in England sound much more enjoyable than life in Massachusetts Bay Colony, Balthazar thought. Their father often reminded them that they were building a city greater than London could ever be—the city of God on earth—but that was poor comfort in winter when the snow piled high, the wind whipped through the crevices at the corners of their two-room house, and there'd been nothing to eat for days but deer jerky and root vegetables. Then their mother's stories of London—with shops that sold a fragrant hot drink called “coffee” every day and singers that performed in the marketplace for anyone to hear—well, it sounded closer to heaven than Massachusetts Bay Colony was likely to get.

“You like market day, too,” Charity said. “Because you get to see Jane.”

In front of his parents, Balthazar would have denied it; for his sister, he had only a smile. “She looked well today, didn't she?”

“A green dress. Green!” Charity—who had never worn any color dress but black or brown, and was surrounded by women who considered colorful clothing a sign of pro-England sympathies at best, immodesty at worst—couldn't get over it. Truth be told, Balthazar himself had understood for the first time just how bright colors could inspire lustful thoughts.

Or maybe that was just Jane. Her sweet face, heart-shaped because of the widow's peak to her lustrous dark hair, the deep shade of her skin, the lines of her slim waist sheathed in that beautiful green, the way she smiled at him—above all, the way she smiled at him—

Don't think of it
, he told himself.
It can never be
.

Jane was not from a family among the Godly, the only group with whom Balthazar's father wanted him to associate. Though they were not currently members in good standing with the church, due to his mother's dangerous flirtation with the heresies of Anne Hutchinson, his father knew they could regain that acceptance and respectability. Jane never would. She traveled about with her father, an itinerant merchant who peddled his wares up and down the coasts of the colonies. They certainly were not members of the church, and only a special act by the governor allowed them and their kind to be in Massachusetts at all.

Rumor had it they were papists. Among the Puritans, this was beyond redemption—far worse than the heathenism of the Natives who dwelled nearby.

But Balthazar could not see sin embodied in anyone as good as Jane. Though they had only ever spoken at market days, he knew that he cared for her, and that she thought well of him, too. The way her eyes lit up whenever she saw him made the whole world seem to melt—

It can never be
, he reminded himself.

“When I grow up, and Mama doesn't make my dresses any longer, I'll wear green, too,” Charity said. “Green dresses, green caps, green aprons, even green shoes. Every day.”

“You'd look like an asparagus.”

His little sister stuck out her tongue. “A
beautiful
asparagus.” He jokingly swatted at her, so she dashed ahead, beyond his reach.

Charity might have fared better in London, Balthazar thought. There her dreamy, unfocused temperament might have been seen merely as eccentricity, or even creativity. Their mother's family, a warmhearted, friendly group to judge by their annual letters, might have shown her more acceptance, and that might have made Mama strong enough to stand up to Papa on her daughter's behalf.

Instead, here she was looked at as peculiar at best, wicked at worst. He'd heard the occasional ominous whisper—
witch
—but he suspected her troubles would be far more ordinary than any trial for consorting with Satan. Though only fourteen years old, Charity was already widely considered unmarriageable, even in a country where men outnumbered women. The few talents allowed to ladies—cooking and sewing—were too meticulous for her, with her wandering attention, to master. Nobody else saw her as she was now: bounding through the grass, sun painting her fair curls with light as she whipped off her cap, beautiful not in spite of her strangeness but because of it.

I will always have to look out for her
, Balthazar thought. It wasn't a new realization, but the weight of it felt heavier somehow.

As Charity rounded the hill, skipping down faster ahead of him, he stooped to pet his dog. He noticed again the cracking in the leather of his boots; they were worn thin, and really they'd been made for him too early—he'd still had a little growing to do, and so the toes of the boots were too tight. Might his father consider using the extra wampum to buy him some new ones before winter? Unlikely, but it was worth asking.

He heard Charity laughing and saying something—it wasn't unusual for her to talk to herself.

But this far from the road, it was odd to hear someone else reply.

Balthazar rose to his feet and hurried over the hill, where he saw Charity standing beside a wagon driven by two people—a man and a woman—neither of whom was known to them. They must have come to market, but he hadn't seen them there; two people like this would have stood out, dressed in brilliant colors, the woman's hair loose and free like a small child's. Like Charity's.

Strangers were rare in this part of the world, the only part Balthazar had ever known; perhaps that was why he became suspicious so quickly. He hurried down to Charity's side.

“You would look enchanting in green,” said the man holding the reins. He was a handsome man, and Balthazar would've known it even without Charity's adoring gaze to guide him. His hair, his skin, even his eyes all seemed to be touched with gold, and he had a fine, patrician profile. His clothes seemed well made, and the new, uncracked leather of his boots shone. “Ah, and who have we here?”

“My older brother, Balthazar More.” Charity went up on tiptoe to confide, “He's not as strict with me as my parents.”

“Then perhaps he will not mind an introduction,” said the blond-haired woman, whose locks would have looked lustrous if she had not been sitting next to the strangely dazzling man. Perhaps they were brother and sister as well. She was beautiful in her statuesque way, but there was something avid about the way she looked at Balthazar. It was the way some of the ruder men looked at women whose hair was not partly covered, or girls just leaving childhood whose skirts were not yet fully long. He hadn't known women could look at men this way, too.

If it had been Jane looking at him so hotly, Balthazar thought he might have liked it. But she wasn't Jane.

“Good day to you, sir,” Balthazar said, turning his attention to the man. “Forgive my sister. She is eager to make friends.”

“How wise of her,” the man said. “Call me Redgrave. I think we shall be very good friends indeed. Don't you agree, Constantia?”

“Oh, I do,” Constantia whispered, leaning past Redgrave's shoulder to peer at Balthazar again, the sunlight catching her hair—

“Balthazar?”

He tensed as the phantasms of the past vanished, leaving him back in his own mind, in the here and now. He still knelt in the snow, the taste of blood fading on his tongue. Skye's face was pale with worry.

“How long?” His voice croaked as though he hadn't spoken in months. “How long was I … out?”

But Skye said, “Maybe a minute and a half? I don't know. Are you okay?”

“I think so.” What the hell had just happened to him?

The smell of smoke and gasoline reminded him where they were; at the sound of distant sirens, she looked past him. “I don't want to leave Mr. Lovejoy—we have to stay—but how are we supposed to explain this?”

“Leave it to me.” Balthazar summoned all his strength of will to stand upright again. “I've got a lot of experience in covering this stuff up.”

The police were told that Skye had been walking home from school, and that Balthazar was headed toward downtown, when they separately saw the explosion. Mr. Lovejoy's car had then jumped the curb; no doubt he'd been startled. Another car had sped away afterward, but they couldn't say what it had to do with the explosion. They were bewildered, innocent bystanders, no more.

“I still can't believe they bought that,” Skye said as they walked away from the scene, smoke still thick in the darkening sky overhead.

“Why not? It's actually more plausible than the truth.” Balthazar glanced back at the police cars behind them. None of the officers suspected they had any greater involvement. It was frightening how good he'd become at lying over the past few centuries.

“I just—I feel awful. Mr. Lovejoy's all banged up, because of me—”

“It's not your fault.” He spoke so forcefully that she stared at him, but it was important that she understand this. “What happened is not because of you. It's because Redgrave and his crew came after you. All of this is their fault. Nobody else's. Never forget that.”

“Redgrave?” Skye frowned. “I thought you said his name was Lorenzo.”

“The one hunting you last night and this afternoon is Lorenzo. The one who drove up at the end, the guy with gold hair? That's Redgrave. He's much older and much more powerful. Almost anything Lorenzo does, he does because Redgrave wants him to.”