Camille (26 page)

He did not move his head, but his heavy dark
lashes fluttered open a moment as he peered down at my hand. He
closed his eyes again. “You shouldn’t have pounced off the bench
like that.” A long sigh flowed from his lips. “God, Camille, we’re
a sorry lot, aren’t we?”

I sank back against the wall next to him. The
stone was shockingly cold.

His hand moved to cover mine. We sat there
slouched against the wall of the chamber, lost in our own thoughts.
What a scrambled haze my mind was in tonight I thought as I leapt
from the bench clutching my side. “Your friend, Hale, he was headed
this way earlier!”

Strider shot up from the bench as well. His
tall figure flashed past me, and he was at the door first. He began
pounding on it. The door creaked and shuddered as if it might
splinter beneath the force of his fist, but it did not budge. He
yelled to Hale, and I hollered with him, but there was no
reply.

After several minutes of Strider pounding and
kicking the door, he turned and stared down at me. His expression
fell somewhere between now what and bloody hell.

“I believe I was right.” I smiled up at him.
“It will hold you . . . and me as well.” My voice sounded amazingly
light considering I was frightened out of my wits.

Strider scrubbed his face hard with his hands
and began pacing wildly. “Tis hot as Hades inside here.” He yanked
off his beloved sailor’s coat and tossed it on the floor.

I watched him pace and inched toward the gun
he’d left lying on the bench. His anguish made him forget the
pistol. I was able to grab it and tuck it beneath my cloak. As if
he’d sensed my actions, he spun around quickly.

His breath heaved beneath his white shirt,
and tiny beads of sweat rolled down his neck and across the hollow
at the base of his throat. “Camille, give me the pistol.” He
stepped closer, and I gasped at the amount of heat radiating around
him.

If the candle had blown out I was sure I’d
see the air surrounding him glowing red. My feet took two tiny
steps backward. The back of my knees hit the bench.

“You know I can take if from you,
Camille.”

I shook my head. “Not without hurting me.” I
peered up at him. “And I know you won’t do that, Nathaniel.” For a
moment it looked as though he might wrestle it from me. His hands
opened and closed, and it seemed as if I could hear the blood
pulsing through his veins.

“You must kill me, Camille. If I come at you,
promise me, you’ll kill me.”

His words slammed against me. I nodded. I had
no idea if I would be able to do it, but at this point, I needed to
assure him of it. He turned, walked to the adjacent wall, and
pulled his shirt off over his head. He pressed his skin against the
cold marble and closed his eyes. “Tis as if someone has placed hot
coals beneath me skin.”

He was exquisitely beautiful from head to toe
and I could not take my eyes from him. There was no mistaking why
he’d become the heartbreak of the East End and now of the West End.
Every inch of him was magnificent. And for a moment I’d forgotten
what he was about to become. I glanced around for a hiding place
knowing full well that it would be impossible to hide from his
acute senses.

Still leaning against the cooling marble,
Strider seemed to slip into his own world and hardly noticed my
presence. The transformation was taking hold of him. I scurried to
the far end of the vault and into the furthest recess, where
according to the monument, a Marybeth Hampton lay at rest. Her
sarcophagus had been delicately adorned by an endless vine of roses
and frail doves. The inscribed dates showed that she was twenty,
only four years older than me, when she died, and I momentarily
wondered how she’d died. No doubt, it was something far less
dreadful than what I faced now.

I reached under my cloak for the pistol and
crouched between the stone sarcophagus and the solid wall of the
chamber and realized with a violent shudder that it was all
happening again. Only this time I didn’t have the comfort of my
sister nearby. This time I was completely alone, and if no one in
the Hampton family succumbed to any disease or accident in the near
future, it was entirely possible that I would die at the hands of
the boy I loved, and my corpse would rot right here amongst the
stone monuments, never to be discovered again.

There was no sound coming from the other end
of the mausoleum. The love of my life was somewhere in the main
chamber transforming into a murderous beast, and thanks to my
brilliant planning, I was his only prey. The pistol felt heavy in
my shaky hand. I knew little about the weapon and could only assume
that a bullet remained in the chamber. It mattered little anyhow. I
could not shoot my own father. If it hadn’t been for Emily, I would
have been torn to shreds by him. I had little faith that I would be
able to shoot Strider.

An agonizing roar filled the chamber and the
gun slipped from my hand and smacked the floor with a clang. I
grabbed for it. Then the only sound in the chamber was my own
frenetic breathing. I tucked myself into a tiny ball. The
surrounding atmosphere was dense with silence and a frigid cold.
With the torment I faced, astonishingly, I found myself growing
sleepy from the icy air. I’d read somewhere that people lost in
snow fell into a deadly slumber from the cold, and I had no doubt
as my feet, hands and face grew numb, that this could happen. In
fact, the drowsiness I now felt beckoned me. It comforted me and
seemed to dull my senses. My eyelids grew too heavy to hold. Then
the sound I knew too well shook me from my dreamlike state.

My eyes shot open when an earsplitting sound
echoed through the chamber. It was stone splintering against stone.
I hugged my knees to my chest and gripped the gun in my hand. A
shadow loomed across the entrance to the small alcove. Dizziness
swept over me, and I rocked unsteadily on my feet bracing myself
against the stone box to keep from falling over.

Heavy breathing, his breathing, radiated
throughout the room. But the odor did not follow. The usual scent
that preceded the beast was not there. I convinced myself it was
the frigid temperatures that kept the odor from penetrating the
air.

The shadow disappeared and another explosion
of shattering stone jarred me from my thoughts. Several agonizing
cries followed the crash of stone. I squeezed my eyes shut as if
somehow that would block out the sound. Then I don’t know whether
I’d been squeezing myself too hard or the dangerously low
temperatures had slowed my pulse, but the sleepiness took hold of
me again, and I had no will to stop it. As I drifted into
unconsciousness, I wondered if I would be fortunate enough to sleep
through my own murder.

****

I turned over in my sleep and smacked my head
on something hard. It was not my bed post. My eyes searched in the
darkness. Solid white stone. I sat up remembering where I was. I
looked down at myself. Aside from a stinging pain in my side, I
seemed to be completely intact. Still numb with cold, I used
Marybeth’s sarcophagus to stand. Morning light seeped beneath the
opening in the door to the vault. There were chunks of marble
everywhere, and the carving of the family patriarch was gone. And
lying there amongst the rubble, half naked and trembling
uncontrollably was the boy I loved. I raced to him, stumbling
through the debris, and sat down hard on the floor next to him. He
lifted his head and laid it in my lap. My hand smoothed his black
hair.

I took off my cloak and threw it over his
bare shoulders. “What happened, Nathaniel?”

“It tried to take hold, but my body wouldn’t
allow it. Your blood must have stopped it.” His voice trailed off,
and he drifted in and out of sleep. I glanced around at our rather
inhospitable surroundings.

“Nathaniel?”

“Hmm?”

“How often do these mausoleums get
opened?”

“Far as I know, only when someone in the
family dies.”

“Well then, let’s hope that someone in the
Hampton family is on their death bed.”

“Bloody hell,” Strider muttered.

When Strider had regained his strength, we
strolled briskly around the chamber trying to warm ourselves before
deciding that we were probably burning up to much oxygen during our
trek. We sat down against a wall and huddled together beneath his
coat for warmth. The face from the sculpture lay at our feet.
Except for a severed ear, it was completely whole. I pushed it away
with my foot. “He has a terrible scowl. I’ll bet he wasn’t a nice
man.”

Strider’s arm went around my shoulder. “Rich
men are generally not nice men. You have to step on a lot of people
to make money. Me, all I need is enough food to eat, a warm place
to sleep, and a sweet angel to kiss.” He leaned over and kissed my
forehead.

“If we get out of here, Nathaniel--“

“What do you mean if? I’ll figure a way out
of here even if I have to dig through the marble by gnawing it with
my teeth.”

I laughed. “That would be a sight to see.
Well then after you chew our way out of here, I think you should
stay with us permanently.”

He dropped his arm. “I don’t know. After all
I’ve got a lot of ladies waiting for me on the east side of
town.”

I pushed away from him. “You bloody bastard!”
I smacked his chest with the palm of my hand.

He smiled and grabbed my wrist and kissed the
same palm. “I guess those girls will just have to live without
me.”

I yanked my hand from his grasp. “Never mind.
They can have you. I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to search for an
altogether more appealing boy to court me.” I waved my hand. “Why
don’t you start over there. The walls look thinner on the far
side.”

He pulled me into his lap and held me against
his chest. His stubble-cevered chin rubbed the top of my head.
“First of all, you will not find any boy more appealing than
Nathaniel Strider. And secondly, I would have to kill any boy who
tried to come near you. You are mine and only mine.”

He held me for a long time, then voices
outside the mausoleum door made us jump to our feet. “Thank
heavens! Somebody died!”

As the door creaked open and more light
filled the chamber, the havoc Strider had wreaked on the sacred
monuments became more evident. How would this destruction be
explained? We squinted into the harsh morning light at the figure
in the doorway. But it was not a member of the Hamptom family. It
was Dr. Bennett.

His eyes were bloodshot as he stepped into
the vault. “Thank God, you are both alive.”

I ran to him and threw my arms around him. He
returned the hug as if he never intended to release me.

The cemetery worker who’d opened the vault
stepped inside. His mouth dropped open, and he scratched his head.
“What happened here?”

Dr. Bennett turned to him. “Isn’t it obvious?
Earth tremors.”

The man did not look completely convinced of
the explanation. “Well, let’s get out of ‘ere before they come
again.”

“Grand idea,” I said.

I had not realized how much I missed fresh
air until we stepped out into it. A cab waited outside the cemetery
gates. We crawled inside and onto the warm soft seats.

I pressed back against the seat. “When I die,
please make sure I’m surrounded by cushioned fabric and not cold
marble.”

Strider smiled. “And don’t forget the
laughing angel.”

“Precisely.” I glanced over at Dr. Bennett.
His face was nearly washed of all color, and he looked wearier than
I’d ever seen him before. “I am sorry, John, about the chloral
hydrate, but I had to.”

He put up his hand. “We’ll talk about that
later. My head is throbbing, and I don’t have the energy to discuss
it right now.”

I shrank back against the cushion realizing
now that he was plenty angry with me. “How did you know where we
were?”

“I’d overheard you in my office. We had to
open several mausoleums until we found the right one.” He shook his
head. “I never would have expected you to do something so
foolhardy, Camille.”

“The important thing, John, is that the
experiment worked. My blood does contain immunity.”

Dr. Bennett stared out the window. “So it
seems,” he said, “so it seems.”

I tucked myself next to Strider’s side. It
always felt so right being next to him.

We rode in silence for a long while, then Dr.
Bennett turned to me. “Camille, I’ve had a letter from the
continent, from a minister in a church in the city of Transylvania.
There have been a number of attacks there these past few months. We
set sail in a fortnight.”

“We?” I sat forward and Strider followed.

“Yes, we. I cannot go without my partner.” He
looked at Strider. “And I’ve gotten you a position on board the
ship.”

“A job on board a ship?” Strider could not
contain the excitement in his voice.

“It’s a local vessel, so you’ll be in port a
great deal of the time. But I know it’s what you wanted. And
Camille will not have my head for sending you far away.”

Strider reached forward and shook his hand.
“Aye, thank you, sir.”

We pulled up in front of the townhouse, and
Dr. Bennett paid the driver. He gave me a hand out of the cab and
held it for a moment. “When we return from our trip, Camille, we
will bring you sister home.”

I smiled up at him. “Absolutely.”

Dr. Bennett climbed the steps, but Strider
and I stayed outside. He turned me toward him. “Now I seem to
remember something about a kiss like it’s never been done before.”
And he kissed me long and hard.

###