Garden of Darkness (22 page)

“Did you think it would make me happy? Did you think this was somehow going to add something to my life? To know that my great-grandfather was the Pale Immortal?”

Why had he really been so eager to share such awful news? Because he thought this made her more like him? Had he wanted to hurt her? Was he so caught up in Old Tuonela that it hadn’t occurred to him that she would find such information devastating? Or was it to deliberately drive an even bigger wedge between them?

For a second he seemed poised to open up; then she saw his brain shift. “Are you okay?” Not what he’d originally intended to say.

“I was fine until a few minutes ago.”

“I’m sorry. I thought you should know. If not for yourself, for the baby.”

For the baby?
“What are you saying?”

Once again he seemed to be struggling with a decision, and seemed reluctant to speak his mind.

“Are you trying to tell me I might give birth to a vampire? My God, Evan. Not you, of all people. Is that what you really think?”

“Of course not, but that’s what people will say. That’s what the child will have to deal with.”

“Have you mentioned the contents of the journal to anyone else?”

“No.”

“Evan, nobody can know about this. About the journal.”

He looked dismayed. “We can’t keep it to ourselves. This is history. Not just your history, but the history of most of the residents of Tuonela.”

“I understand, but you’re talking about ruining a child’s life, a child’s future.
Our
child.”

“We will never see eye to eye on this, will we?”

“What difference does it make if people never know what happened?” She couldn’t keep the anguish from her voice. “Oh, why did you go out there? Why did you buy that damn place? Sometimes I think you did it to hurt me. What have I ever done to you other than love you?”

He flinched as if she’d confessed hatred rather than love. He flinched at words that brought most people joy.

She held out her hand. “Give me the journal.”

He didn’t move.

“Give it to me.” She was crying. He tucked it in his coat. “I’m sorry, Rachel.” He turned and left.

Thirty minutes later Rachel finally managed to pull herself together enough to return to the autopsy suite, where she realized she hadn’t turned off the handheld recorder. She picked it up, rewound, then pushed play.

The constant roar of the fan.

Expected.

Sh, sh, sh.

She held the device close to her ear—and could detect the murmur of voices beneath the roar of the exhaust fan.

Like the wind the other night.

The audio documented Evan’s arrival, and she heard his voice softly speaking her name. That was followed by her exclamation of surprise. The roar stopped; she’d turned off the fan. Then came conversation, followed by the snap of her gloves and their footsteps as they left the room.

Sh,sh,sh.

Whispers.

More than one voice, continuing even after the sound of the fan ceased.

Rachel shut off the recorder. The click of the stop button was deafening.

Oh, Jesus.

She moved to the door and hit the wall switch, flooding the room with light.

The body looked the same.

She stepped close enough to grab one corner of the sheet and jerk it free.

She was a coroner. A medical examiner.

But sometimes the dead talked to her. It was why she’d become a coroner. Facing her fears. Subconsciously she’d thought she’d dig deep into death until it finally left her alone.

The great-granddaughter of the Pale Immortal . . .

Did she finally have an answer to a question that had haunted her most of her life? Was that why death followed her? Because she came from a lineage that had somehow traversed death?

No!
Those were crazy thoughts.
Crazy, crazy!

Richard Manchester had been human. A human who had done some very sick and evil things.

Stop thinking these thoughts right now.

Nonsense. Total nonsense.

She inserted a fresh tape and pushed the record button. She turned on the exhaust fan and snapped on a new pair of latex gloves. She opened a clean set of instruments.

She did her job.

When she was finished, she wheeled and slid the body into the cooler.

Without replaying the audio track, she placed the recorder on her office desk. She would type up her notes tomorrow.

She took a shower in the claw-foot tub, washing with lavender soap. After drying off she slipped on a pair of jogging pants and an oversize white T-shirt. She opened the refrigerator and stared at the transparent container of liver.

So why did she crave raw meat if she wasn’t the pregnant great-granddaughter of a vampire?

Iron deficiency. Easily explained. It certainly made more sense than being the descendant of a vampire.

The phone rang.

David Spence.

“How about I bring something by? Chinese. How does that sound?”

She didn’t want to be alone. Did he sense that about her? Her loneliness? But she couldn’t be with David Spence. She’d been fooling herself about that. He wasn’t the one she wanted. And being with David would be worse than being alone, because now she had so much more to hide.

She told him she was tired and was going to bed. She hung up and drank the blood from the liver container. With her bare hands, she ate the raw meat.

Then she went to bed.

Daughter of darkness.

Chapter Thirty-two

A scraping sound woke her. Rachel looked at the window above her head and saw the shadow of a bare branch.

Only the wind.

The sound came again. Not from the window, but from inside her apartment.

Someone in the hall.

She groped for her portable phone. Touched it. Grabbed it.

Scrape.

Moving closer.

A kind of dragging and a
thunk
, combined with a rustle—like dry leaves or the hem of a taffeta gown.

A fetid odor drifted nearer. Probably her clothes or shoes, she reasoned. That went with the job.

She moved from the bed, the noise of the shifting mattress magnified a hundred times. A night-light, plugged into a low hallway socket, illuminated the path to the bedroom. A shadow crept across the floor.

With her heart hammering, head roaring, Rachel tried to dial 911. Wrong buttons, then a dial tone that filled the room. She tried again and failed.

She watched the open doorway. Up, back down at the phone. Hands shaking, breathing labored, fingers blindly hitting numbers.

The smell getting stronger.

Coming from whoever—whatever—was in the hall.

And then there it was.

Standing in the doorway, blocking the light. Maybe five feet tall, with an indistinguishable shape. Narrow at the top, wider at the floor, with trailing, draping pieces that had the appearance of wrinkled fabric.

Not Victoria.

And not Evan.

She did something you’re never supposed to do when faced with an intruder: She reached for the bedside lamp and turned on the light.

Oh, my God.

The dangling bits of fabric were shriveled fingers tipped with curved nails. Blond hair hung down each side of the face. Instead of eyes, two opaque black pits stared back at her. The mouth was a gaping hole.

She knew what she was looking at, although her mind refused to believe it: a human skin.

Standing.

Moving toward her.

Chapter Thirty-three

The skin moved deeper into the room.

Rachel stared, her body and mind frozen.

It came closer, nails clicking and scraping against the wooden floor.

Move.

Without taking her eyes from the wrinkled flesh, Rachel dragged the quilt from the bed.

The skin moved closer, a heavy stench wafting with it.

Click, click, click.

Blond hair.

It was the girl’s skin. The dead girl’s skin. Claire’s skin.

Dear God.

No.

Impossible.

When the skin was a couple of yards away, Rachel gripped the quilt with both hands—and tossed.

Cotton print sailed over the nasty mess, covering it, knocking it to the floor.

Rachel ran.

With bare feet she shot around the blanket and bolted from the room. Halfway down the hall, she skidded to a stop.

Go back. Shut the door. Lock it in there.

Couldn’t do it.

She ran from her apartment. She took the stairs to the basement and morgue. In her office she called 911.

It seemed like hours, but it was probably only ten minutes before she heard sirens outside. She met a police officer at the delivery door.

“An intruder?” he asked. “Where?”

“Upstairs.”

Another officer pulled up and stepped from his patrol car. They went ahead of Rachel, weapons drawn.

Up two flights of stairs to the third story and her apartment.

“Wait here,” the first officer whispered over his shoulder.

“In the bedroom,” she told them.

He nodded and they moved forward.

She put a hand to her heart. Some people said that intense fear could harm an unborn baby.

I have to get out of here.

One of the officers returned. He shook his head. “Nothing. Nobody.”

She pushed past him. “I’ll show you.”

In the bedroom she grabbed one corner of the quilt and gave it a tug, then quickly dropped it. The officer strode across the floor. She let out a shriek of alarm as he scooped up the blanket.

He shook it. “Nothing.” He brought the quilt to his face and sniffed. “It is a little rank, though. You might want to toss it in the wash.”

“Did you get a look at the intruder?” the other officer asked. “Enough for us to put together a composite?”

She glanced around the room. Was it under the bed?

The officer saw her concern, got down on his knees, and checked. “Nothing.” He straightened and walked to the closet. He shoved the hangers of clothes back and forth. “Nothing.”

But a skin . . . A skin could make itself very flat. It could hide a lot of places. Maybe even a crack or a seam in the wall. Maybe even under a layer of wallpaper.

The house was old. There were a lot of places for a skin to hide.

“Did you get a look at him?” the first officer on the scene coaxed.

She shook her head. “No. It was dark.”

“But the light was on when we came in.”

“I ran. I didn’t look.”

Had she really seen anything?

She
had
been asleep. And she
had
just autopsied the body of Claire Francis. And she
had
just eaten a container of raw meat.

Pregnancy did strange things to a person. She’d never been one to have night terrors, but that must be what had happened. Dreams that were so lucid and so frightening that the dreamer insisted they were real.

The officers went over the building thoroughly, from the attic to the coolers in the morgue. “He’s long gone,” the younger cop said, sliding his weapon into his belt holster. “But I’ll have someone keep an eye on the place, at least until morning.”

She walked him downstairs so she could lock the dead bolt once he was gone. At the door, he bent and picked up something. “This yours?”

The journal.

Florence Elizabeth Cray’s journal.

Evan must have changed his mind.
Thank you, Evan.
She tried not to appear too eager as she took the book. “Yes, it’s mine. Thanks.”

She bolted the door behind him.

The journal in her hands felt familiar.

It smelled old. Like leather and paper and damp earth.

She would put it away. She would lock it in the safe in her office, where no one would ever find it.

Something slipped out and hit her foot. A photo. Old, on heavy cardboard. She picked it up.

A young girl with blond hair wearing a low-waisted dress with a dark bow on the hip that matched her Mary Jane shoes. The child’s eyes held a look of death and defeat.

Rachel turned the photo over.

Our sweet, darling Sarah.

Chapter Thirty-four

Ever since the night he thought the Pale Immortal had been trying to get out of the display case, Matthew Tor-rance had been a little spooked. Sometimes when he had his iPod going and his headphones on, he heard strange sounds. Like whispering. Like a lot of people whispering. Like some kind of gathering was going on in the museum basement. He couldn’t make out what anybody was saying; he just picked up the roar.

Now, as he ran the buffer across the entry hall of the museum, the whispers started again.

Sh, sh, sh.

He who dies will live again. He who lives will die again.

He tugged the headphones from his ears, letting them loop around his neck. He shut off the buffer and surveyed the room.

Nothing.

Nobody.

Fuck.
He was so paranoid. And he hadn’t even smoked anything yet. Maybe his friends were right; maybe he needed to cut back. But every time he thought about it, he panicked. What the hell would he live for if he didn’t have his weed?

Sh, sh, sh.

In case he was picking up sounds from a distance, he reached down and paused his iPod.

He who dies will live again. He who lives will die again.

The voice was in his head. Coming from inside him. He smacked a palm against the side of his face.
Shut up in there.

More chanting.

He was losing his goddamn mind.

He pulled out his cell phone. Should he call his brother? Just for the human contact? What would he say? He and his brother didn’t chat. They didn’t have that kind of relationship.

He scrolled down the list of names, then punched the dial button.