Incarnation (26 page)

How close had my species, as much as a halfling could claim it as her own, come to extinction at their hands?

“You, too, want the destruction of vampires.”

He was shaking his head before I finished speaking. “Not all of us. Not even most. Not anymore. We realize as Mordred did that we have to find a way to share this planet.”

I wanted to believe him, truly I did. But what I had seen
since coming to London weighed heavily against him. “What has happened to the trolls, the gnomes, all the rest of them? Only a few remnants still exist.”

“I have no idea,” he said. “You can’t hold me responsible—”

“You are human! You claim control over all the earth. And you . . . your kind is trained, as you yourself said, from childhood to kill vampires. Don’t tell me you have suddenly discovered tolerance.”

“I claim no such thing,” he insisted. “But we have a right to preserve our own existence. Surely you would not argue otherwise?”

“Have you read Darwin?” I demanded. “Nature favors the fittest. You can’t believe that a species that lives forever is not more fit than your own and therefore a threat to your very existence.”

“And you cannot argue that a species incapable of emotion, creativity, and all the rest deserves to inherit the earth!”

There we were, faced off against each other in the subterranean refuge surrounded by the dolomite walls. A halfling and a human. Somewhere the gods were cheering and laying bets.

“I am incapable of emotion? Let us not forget that you left me because you could not deal with the emotions I provoked in you. Mordred judged you perfectly. You were his foil.”

It was cruel, I admit, but it was also accurate. As Marco surely knew full well.

I waited, daring him to respond, and perhaps he would have done so. But just then Cornelia screamed. A long, drawn-out sound of agony and fright that came down to a single word.

“Nicolas!”

CHAPTER 20

I
scarcely recognized the man who lay bloodied and battered on the office couch. He was covered by a blanket but otherwise appeared to be naked. His powerful arms and broad shoulders were bare, as were his feet. All were dark with dirt and gore. At a glance, I made out several deep wounds in the vicinity of his neck that looked severe enough to have killed him. Yet he was still breathing, if only barely.

Marco hurried to his side, joining his mother who was kneeling beside the couch grasping the man’s hands and visibly struggling not to weep. I approached cautiously and looked more closely. Only then was I able to acknowledge that he really was Nicolas. My first thought was that he had run afoul of footpads in the dark streets, desperate men who were known to slit a throat for a fat enough purse or sometimes for no purse at all. But in such duress, I was reverting to memories of the London of my childhood before the Watchers and the dirigibles. In our new times, crime, at least the sort that can be seen, had been stamped almost out of existence.

“What happened—?” The moment I spoke, his eyes flew open. He stared directly at me. His teeth barred in a snarl
before he seemed to recollect himself. With a low groan, he fell back against the couch.

Turning, Cornelia shouted at me. “Get out! How dare you be here? Get out!”

Marco laid a hand on her arm gently. “Easy, Mother, this isn’t her fault.” To me, he said, “There are bandages under the sink in the bathroom. Also a basin, if you could fill that with warm water and bring soap as well.”

Cornelia started to object but I did not wait, hurrying instead to help as best I could. My hands were shaking as I filled the basin. Coming on top of the horrific events at the stone table, the violence done to Nicolas by unknown agents shattered any sense I still had of safety or stability. I felt myself spiraling into depths from which there could not be even the hope of escape. In my duress, I clung to the certainty that a person of character does not fall apart in even the most difficult circumstances. To the contrary, adversity should bring out the best in us. So I had been taught as a child and to that teaching I clung with all the strength I could muster.

With the bandages and a bar of soap tucked under my arm, I returned to the office. The smell of blood was beginning to affect me. As Marco went to work cleaning his brother’s wounds, I backed away a little but did not think of leaving. Whatever had happened, I had a part in it.

“It is her fault,” Cornelia insisted, throwing me a look of rage. Tears that she could not hold back coursed down her cheeks. “You cannot deny that they were after her.”

Marco made no attempt to do so but he did say, “You know that Nicolas would never allow a pack of vampires to rampage through the streets of London without doing his utmost to stop them whatever their reason.”

Cornelia’s mouth worked in anger but she did not contradict him. To her credit, she gave all her attention to caring for her son. Swiftly but carefully, Nicolas’ wounds were cleaned and bandaged. They were even more extensive than I had realized. Deep gashes scored his chest and back. One in particular reached almost to his abdomen, where it could have ripped out his intestines.

Through it all, Nicolas did not make a sound, but I saw the muscles of his jaw clenching. When he was finished, Marco turned to me. He was very pale, his eyes dark pools of anguish, yet he spoke calmly. “There’s a bottle of whiskey in the desk.”

I fetched it quickly along with several glasses. Marco filled one almost to the top and pressed it to his brother’s lips. “Drink.”

Nicolas emptied half the glass in a single swallow. When he was done, he sighed deeply, opened his eyes again, and said faintly but unmistakably, “It isn’t as bad as it looks.”

Cornelia murmured something under her breath that I did not catch. More clearly, she said, “What a fool you are.” The harsh words were at odds with her gentle, loving tone. She brushed her son’s hair back from his forehead and managed a weak smile. “Rest. The more you do so, the sooner you will heal.”

Even as she spoke, his head sagged against her shoulder. In the next moment, he was asleep. Marco stood up slowly. He filled the three remaining glasses, passing two of them to his mother and me before drinking deeply from his own. Cornelia took only a few sips. I did better after discovering that the liquid not only tasted of peat smoke and heather but also had the ability to steady the nerves. No wonder my father had kept it on hand.

“I will bar the door inside and out when you have gone,” Cornelia said. She had pulled a chair from behind the desk so that she could sit next to her sleeping son. “No one can see him like this.”

“You know that his strength and stamina are unequaled,” Marco said. “He will recover in a few hours.”

Cornelia leaned a little closer, gazing at her son. She seemed to have forgotten the other momentarily but I was not misled. “He is lucky to recover at all,” she said. “I had thought to be spared this with him at least but now it seems not.”

Marco crossed the room and knelt again beside the couch. He spoke gently to his mother. “He has your courage, as do I. It will serve us well.”

Her violet eyes swam with tears as she cupped his face in the palm of her hand. “We pay a heavy price for what we are. I hope that it will prove to be worth the cost.”

He nodded, kissed her fingers lightly, and rose. With a glance at the clock, he said, “It is almost dawn. We must go.”

Before we did, I took a long look around the office—the sleeping man, the mother keeping watch, the bloodied bandages disposed of neatly, all seemed to speak of a crisis successfully surmounted. Yet the more I looked, the more I realized that what was not present was far more telling than what was.

I saw only one pendant—that around Marco’s neck. And no clothing such as would be removed from an injured man prior to treating his wounds. But on the front of the door leading to the lane beside the Serjeant’s Inn, I noted freshly made scratches, as though the wood had been clawed by something in a rush to enter. Someone?

Outside, I paused for a moment to clear my senses. The
smell of blood had been very strong and with it had come hunger. I did my utmost to push that aside as together Marco and I started toward Fleet Street. At that early hour, only a few peddlers were about making their way under a dank yellow sky carrying the threat of rain. They stepped around the ample evidence of disorder without giving any sign of noticing it. I, on the other hand, was aware of everything that was out of place and seemed to shriek of what had happened in the dark hours of the night.

A wooden cart left chained beside a building had been wrenched loose and thrown into the street. Clumps of rough, gray fur were snagged around a lamppost. Nearby what looked like blood stained the pavement. A fragment of red silk caught my eye. It hung from a creaking iron sign outside a newsstand. Not far away were the torn and crumbled remains of an evening jacket. Both were the sort of apparel commonly worn at the Bagatelle. Where the owners of those garments had gone I could not say.

“There was a battle,” I observed, rather unnecessarily.

“If there hadn’t been, there would have been even more carnage,” Marco replied. “Lady Blanche’s decision to set vampires upon London amounts to a declaration of war.” His manner could scarcely have been more somber. I hesitated to worsen it but the conviction that under the present circumstances we could not afford to have any secrets between us overrode all else.

“How long has Nicolas been a werewolf?”

A hiss of surprise escaped him. He gripped my arm. “What are you talking about?”

I ignored the instinct to wrench free and spoke matter-offactly. “Do you really mean to deny it? It’s not as though I’m
going to run off shrieking in fright or worse yet not believe you if you tell me the truth.”

When he remained silent, I ticked off the evidence. “Nicolas’ wounds appear to be largely from fangs. The absence of any pendant like yours suggests that he was not injured while performing his duties as a Protector. There was no evidence of damaged clothing. But most important, I had the sense from the moment I met him that we had crossed paths before and I finally realized where. I encountered the wolf pack the first night I came to the Bagatelle and they were there again last night when I fled.”

He let go of me and pushed both his hands through his thick hair in a gesture of pure frustration. “You don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Then explain it to me.”

Marco sighed deeply. “Nothing is ever simple with my brother.”

Amanda could have said the same of me but I never had any reason to doubt her feelings. Nor did I doubt Marco’s.

“Yet you love him.”

He shot me a look in which caution mingled with gratitude that someone, however unlikely, understood how he felt. “How can I do otherwise? He was my best friend when we were growing up. We made all sorts of plans to travel the world together as Protectors, keeping humans safe. And then . . .”

Gently, I asked, “What happened?”

“What we always knew might but still hoped would not. He . . . turned.”

I frowned, not understanding. “People can’t just spontaneously become werewolves, can they? Surely there must be some catalyst involved as with vampires.”

“There is, but it is of a particularly insidious type. Are you familiar with the work of Gregor Mendel?”

I had not been until the weeks spent in the library at Whitby when I had come across references to the Austrian scientist who had died a few years before. Belatedly, I wondered about my father’s interest in such matters. Did it perhaps have to do with his awareness of my mother’s background and what she might have passed to their children?

“Mendel studied inheritance patterns in plants,” I said. “His findings convinced him that in many cases the chances of inheriting a particular trait can be computed by reference to basic mathematics and rules of probability.”

Marco nodded. “His work was largely ignored until recently when it began attracting attention from a variety of sources. Unfortunately, not all of them are benign. There is talk of using Mendelian genetics to breed a super race of humans better adapted to the new world that is being shaped by advances in science and technology.”

I needed a moment to grasp what he was saying, so extraordinary was the idea. The course of natural selection was incredibly complex, involving as it did millions of species developing over vast stretches of time. Until Darwin had come along a few decades before to explain it, humans had been completely ignorant of how life changed and advanced. Yet some among them imagined that they were capable of taking charge of the process?