Lady Killer (34 page)

“Maybe,” Miles agreed, but it did not feel right to him. “Or maybe he is deliberately leading us to him. Reeling us in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To show us how confident he is. To emphasize that he knows who we are but we do not know him. That he is right here, sharing a house, a roof with us, every day. That he can get to us anytime he wants.”

“To terrify us,” Clio whispered.

“Yes.” The word hung cold and precise and still in the air.

Clio felt a chill pass down her spine. “I think it is beginning to work.”

Miles wrapped his arms around her, around the most precious possession he had ever had, and pulled her back onto the bed, next to him, to his warmth. “I won’t let anything happen,
amore.
I will protect you. The vampire will never hurt you. I promise.”

4 hours after midnight: Moon—quarter-full. Waning.

Miles really did not mean to lie.

Chapter Eighteen

“I still cannot believe it,” Clio whispered to Miles as they pressed themselves into the darkness alongside the Curious Cat Tavern and waited for their man to come out. Tendrils of mist swirled in front of her face, and seemed to curl inside of her, leaving her ill at ease and with a bad taste in her mouth. “I cannot believe it is him. Or that we are here. That it has been this simple.”

“Neither can I,” Miles said in a voice that seemed almost dead. “But I am more convinced then ever that he is the vampire.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain later.” Miles spoke without turning around. He hoped his tone was dismissive.

He looked up at the sign swaying creakily back and forth above the door he was watching. It was peeling, but the outline of a black cat within a cage was still visible. At least he thought it was. He might just be remembering it from the last time he had seen it.

“I wonder what he is doing in there,” Clio whispered, just to make conversation.

“Don’t,” he told her in the same dismissive tone.

“Don’t what?”

“Wonder. Talk. Anything.”

Miles clenched his hands and tightened his muscles and wished like hell that he had a drink.

And that he had not brought Clio along. That he had not let her help in the search, that he had found some way to keep her locked away, safe. In his house. In his room. Like she had been that morning.

That morning. Hours ago. Years ago. That morning he had felt like anything but a failure. He and Clio had still been lying in bed—he had just been working up the nerve to ask her if she still loved him, even in sunlight—when Lady Alecia’s raised voice in the outer chamber of his apartments made the walls seem to vibrate.

“I thought you said my grandmother was not in the habit of visiting your apartments,” Clio had whispered to him urgently.

“She wasn’t,” he replied, pulling the linen sheets over her head and moving quickly from the bed. He had grabbed a robe from his armoire and had just gotten the belt knotted when Lady Alecia burst into the room, dragging a harried looking footman with her and trailed by Mariana.

“This is an outrage,” Lady Alecia began.

“I entirely agree.” Miles had given her one of his steeliest looks. “I do not take well to having my sleep invaded.” He stood, hands on his hips, legs spread wide, barring the entrance to his bedchamber.

Lady Alecia, unfazed, stepped past his blockade. Mariana followed behind her, craning her neck to take in the furnishings. “I shall have to redo this room,” she announced, interrupting Lady Alecia’s renewed shouts. “This color gray does not suit me at all. I prefer blue like the color of a baby rob—”

“Be quiet,” Lady Alecia told her, and for once Miles thought he could like the woman. “I do not apologize for upsetting your sleep, Viscount, for I do not take well to having my privacy invaded. This man says you ordered him to search my room.”

“Not your room,” Miles corrected, but before the gleam at the prospect of disciplining the young man violently could settle into Lady Alecia’s eye, he went on. “I ordered him to search all the rooms in that wing of the house. He and his men have already been through this wing and the connecting rooms.”

“Then you do not deny it?” Lady Alecia spoke with such vehemence that her Lisbeth Willard wig—the red ringlets of a dear little seamstress who sewed her mother’s mouth shut so the woman starved to death—slipped sideways on her head.

“Why should I? The men were acting on my orders. Now if you would please leave my chamber—”

“Your orders?” Lady Alecia glared at him. “You had them checking on my guests. Mine?”

“They were not checking on your guests, Lady Alecia. They were looking for something I had lost.”

“What?”

“I would rather not say.” Miles crossed his arms over his chest. “And I would like to remind you that this is my house.”

“I am afraid, Viscount, that you do not have that luxury. This may be your house, but my granddaughter will be mistress here in only five days—”

“—four,” Mariana corrected. “Since we are not going to postpone the wedding because poor dear Clio died. It is only four days until my birthday.”

“—Four days,” Lady Alecia went on, “and neither she nor I will tolerate this behavior.”

“Really, viscount,” Mariana said, moving toward him, “you are acting like a naughty baby bear. Bad viscount. Bad, bad, bad,” she scolded, shaking a finger at him.

Miles thought he heard a choking noise from his bed, but it might have been from his own throat. He had never felt quite so much like running from an adversary as he did at that moment. “Very well,” he conceded finally, addressing Mariana. “I did not want you to worry, so I was keeping it from you. I lost a necklace. The famous Loredan amethyst necklace. In the commotion of the parties honoring our betrothal, it was misplaced. My mother received it as a wedding present on her wedding day. I had hoped to find it before—” Miles stopped, swallowed, and resumed, “—before the happy day of our marriage.”

“The Loredan amethysts,” Mariana proclaimed. She had never heard of them, but they were famous, the viscount said so, which meant they must be large. And they were to be hers. Perhaps she could trade them in for sapphires. Or even emeralds. Purple was not her best color. “I am so sorry we distributed you, Viscount,” she said with her loveliest smile, taking her grandmother by the arm and pulling her from the room. “By all means have your men search every inch of the house. We should not keep them any longer.”

The door closed behind Mariana with a thud. Clio just had time to flip the covers from her face and then flip them back before it swung open again.

“Oh, Viscount, darling, how thinkful of you,” Mariana gushed as she swept back into the room.

There was a long pause and Miles seemed to be having trouble speaking, so Clio made a peep hole in her cocoon and peered out. Only Mariana’s complete self-absorption covered Clio’s gasp of horror.

Clutched in Mariana’s arms, straining vainly to escape, was Toast.

“You knew I had been loitering for a baby monkey like this one and you got it for me to show that you are not mad about the scandal my horrible cousin caused,” Mariana cooed. “Oh, look how darling he is,” she went on as Toast tried to climb her hair and poke out her eyes. “He absolutely loves me.”

Miles found his voice then, largely because he was worried that if he did not Clio would leap naked from his bed. “Why don’t you have Corin look after him? So he will not trouble you. Leave him here, and I will have him bring the monkey to you before the ball tonight.”

Miles heard a strangled grunt from his bed at the suggestion, but fortunately Mariana did not.

“I couldn’t dream of such a thing,” Mariana said. “I would not want you to think I did not fancy your present. I shall call him ‘Darling Baby.’ That is a nice name, don’t you think? And I shall have a new suit of clothes made for him at once. This one is so musty.” Then she frowned at Toast. “Don’t you think he would look dreamy with some darling little earrings? I know just where to get them. You will send your man for them, won’t you? Tell him they must have pearls. Baby pearls.” She fluttered her long eyelashes at Miles, simpered, “Oh, Viscount, you are a naughty baby bear,” and, finally, left.

Miles had locked the bedroom door then, but he and Clio could not escape from what they had started forever. Reports filtered in from the various footmen assigned to the search, as well as from Which House where messengers with notes of condolence about Clio’s supposed demise had clogged the streets since morning, and a pile of flowers left by well wishers had turned the front steps into an impromptu and impassable shrine. But none of that—not even the information that Princess Erika had apparently been dreaming of Clio’s death every night for a year and did not know whether to be sad at the loss of her friend or delighted that another of her prophesies had come true—could take Clio’s mind off the fact that Mariana had kidnapped Toast and wanted to make him wear earrings. Her primary consolation was that Toast—or rather, Darling Baby—could undoubtedly hold his own against Mariana and that, according to Miles, he was already wearing his Jungle Beast expression, which always proceeded his Shrieking Wild Monkey Tantrum, by the time she carted him off.

Their afternoon had been spent listening to Miles’s footmen recount the details of their searches. Clio had been impressed by the questions Miles asked—where did Saunders Cotton’s eyes move first when he heard you were looking through his room, did Doctor LaForge fidget with his hands, how did Sir Edwin’s voice sound when he answered your questions—and even more impressed by the degree of observation evident in the answers his footmen gave. During one of these recitals they had received a frantic visit from Elwood, who had suspected there was something untrue in the reports of Clio’s demise and in the tepid confirmation of them he received at Which House. Over his protestations of relief, Clio managed to ask him if he had been responsible for sending her the hazelnut cakes five days earlier. With much embarrassment, he had admitted that he had not, but that he should have, and in the future he would send her dozens. He had finally left, with a curiously probing glance in Miles’s direction.

But even this lengthy interruption had not bothered the footman, who had resumed his narrative exactly where it had been interrupted. From him and the others Clio and Miles had learned that Doctor LaForge had to mop his head with a kerchief every three seconds whenever anyone approached his bed, that Sir Edwin clenched and unclenched his fists when people touched his writing desk, and that only Saunders Cotton had reacted to the search with anything like outrage or indignation—that is, reacted in what Clio described as a normal way.

“If you call going pink in the face, stammering about the unholy imposition it is on Lady Alecia, and almost losing your voice you are so mad, normal,” Miles had demurred.

“At least it approximates the sort of outrage you would expect. The sort of thing my grandmother was exhibiting this morning,” Clio offered.

“I suppose you are right,” Miles had conceded. “Which means we have two people who acted in individually strange ways and one who acted normal. Who stands out most?”

Clio did not hesitate. “The normal one.”

Miles nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking. We start with Saunders’s room.”

Clio, dressed in the yellow doublet and breeches of a Dearbourn footman, had waited in Miles’s apartments for him, and once the ball was underway they had crossed to Mariana’s wing together using service corridors. When they entered the peacock sitting room, Miles had stopped dead in his tracks.

“My God,” he muttered in a whisper. “This place is horrible.”

“You haven’t seen it before?” Clio asked.

Miles shook his head, his mouth a thin, grim line. “It terrifies me to think that any portion of my house looks this way.”

“If I recall from her outburst this morning, Mariana did not like the way your part of the house looked either.”

Miles made a sound between a groan and a snort, and crossed toward a row of three gilded doors on his left, leading to the three rooms they had come to search. From the plan of the house she had studied, Clio knew that Saunders’s door was at the far left. It was unlocked, so Miles only had to push it open. He did, waited a few moments before entering, and when he was sure there was no one within, motioned Clio inside.

The furniture consisted of a bed with a writing table next to it, a large armoire and a small chaise, all done in peacock blue silk. Besides being outraged, Saunders had not seemed particularly sensitive about any part of his chamber, so they had decided to go over the entire thing. But after opening every piece of furniture that bore opening, looking under every surface that had an under, examining inside all the insides there were in the room, and even sniffing every bottle of ink in Saunders’s secretary box, they were forced to conclude that there was nothing there. Miles remembered a secret compartment in the mantelpiece that they slid open, but there was nothing inside it, not even dust.

“I wish Toast were here,” Clio sighed. “I can’t believe she dressed him in a toga.”

“Yes. I was unaware that there was a Baby Monkey God on Mount Olympus. But when I left he seemed to be enjoying himself.”