William
Authors: Claire Cray
Tags: #paranormal romance, #historical romance, #gay vampires, #vampire romance, #yaoi, #gay paranormal, #male male
A Sequel to Merrick
By Claire Cray
Copyright 2015 Claire Cray
Smashwords Edition
CHAPTER ONE
By July of 1800, I was supposed to be an
immortal. Instead I was still just a drunk dandy sulking on the
rooftop of my best friend’s tavern, watching dawn break over lower
Manhattan with a half-empty bottle of port between my knees.
Said friend was dozing peacefully beside me,
hands laced behind his head, slim and handsome in his brown
trousers and waistcoat, buttons undone and shirtsleeves exposed at
some point during the muggy night we’d drunk away. The top edge of
a book peeked out of his breast pocket. Plato, probably. I turned
back to watch the light grow along the horizon.
“You know, Will,” Jeremy mumbled, startling
me. The shingles creaked as he shifted and propped himself up on
his elbows to squint at me. "For a lad poised to dive into a sea of
Italian tits, you’re still gloomy as all hell."
I spared a wan smile and lifted the bottle to
my lips. Hours before, I’d announced to Jeremy and the rest of our
usual crew that I would soon set sail for Italy. As I’d told it, I
was going in the employ of Silas Merrick, the mysterious man from
upstate to whom I’d been briefly apprenticed the year before. There
was a grain of truth in that, or as much as I could manage. After
all, as far as anyone knew, Merrick was an old apothecary and
healer, well respected among the people of the Hudson River Valley,
who had been impressed enough by my manners and prospects to buy me
out of my indenture and send me back home.
Some assumptions were best left intact.
Jeremy had been my friend for all the
nineteen years I’d been in this world, and there had never been
secrets between us. But of my current circumstances, he knew less
than nothing. It was a shame to keep him in the dark, particularly
since he was too smart not to know the score. Ever since I’d
returned from my strange journey to the woodlands upstate nearly a
year before, I’d been cryptic and distracted. I could see in his
green eyes that my secrecy struck a bitter chord in him, but he
remained my steadfast friend as always.
It meant a great deal that he still cared
enough to prod me when he’d long since grown tired of my riddles.
How I wished I could hold fast to his friendship. How I wished,
indeed, that I could tell him the truth of how and why I was due to
leave, and that I would never return.
But what was I supposed to say?
I’ve
fallen in love with a man, and I’m off to become a
murderer?
I grimaced and scrubbed my face with my hand,
then took up the bottle for another long drink.
Jeremy cocked his head, leaning over to get a
better look at me as he rummaged in the pocket where he always kept
his tobacco. "What's the matter with you?"
“Nothin’. “
"You miss me already?" Jeremy asked wanly,
the words a bit muddled by the pipe between his lips. He struck a
match and lit the bowl, puffing a few times with his eyes on the
glowing tobacco, a furrow of concentration between his brows. Then,
exhaling a plume of smoke, he met my eyes. "Is that it?"
"I will miss you painfully," I said. Jeremy
had been with me at every important moment in my life—even that
night, nearly year before, when I was arrested after a night of
idiotic mischief and sentenced to five years of servitude. But this
time I was on my own.
"Lacy, if you don't want to go, don't
go."
"It's not as simple as that."
"Why the hell not?” he asked crossly. “What
do you owe him?"
I couldn't meet his gaze. The horizon was
pale. The sky was the color of linen above the treetops of Staten
Island.
"If money’s the matter, to Hell with it. Now
that this dump’s in my name I’ve got a coin or two to spare."
My heart turned over slowly, aching, as I
shook my head. How I'd taken him for granted before this all came
about! It was a fine life I was to abandon for love, with a friend
like him in it. “It’s not that I don’t want to go,” I said, and I
meant it. Certainly, I meant it. And anyway, even if I hadn’t meant
it, I’d already chosen my course. I was committed to it, despite
the off-road being much longer than I’d expected. I was committed,
despite having been abandoned to my thoughts all these months,
despite the doubts and fears that had sprouted and run wild as
weeds in my mind.
I was committed to it. I was. If Merrick
could just get on with it…
Jeremy scoffed suddenly, jarring me from my
thoughts. “All right,” he said. “Enough fribble. I don’t like this
business. I don’t like it at all. Least of all that old
geezer.”
“Bugger off,” I sighed blandly. “I’ve told
you a hundred times he’s been nothing but kind to me.”
"Yeah, yeah, and I’ve told you a hundred
times you’ve been right miserable since you crossed his path. Or
since he turned you loose, at least, and it makes no sense in the
first place. You told us all he torched your indenture last fall
after you served him for a month. So what’s this hold he has on you
if you ain’t his apprentice anymore?”
“He has no hold on me,” I argued, casting him
a scowl to cover up my wariness. Damned if he wasn’t on a warpath
tonight. I had always admired his insistence upon the truth, but if
there was one thing I didn’t need to fall under scrutiny, it was
the nature of my relationship with Merrick. “Look,” I said, “You’ve
got the wrong end of the stick. You know I always wanted to sail
the Seven Seas and all that. And he’s a generous man. He’ll let me
do my own business when I’m not assisting him. I’m glad to go with
him.”
“You don’t look glad.”
“Well,” I stalled, holding out my hands, and
once again skimmed close to the truth. “It’s a bit heavy, isn’t it?
Not knowing when I’ll be back. Could be years.”
Could be
centuries
, I thought, but I certainly couldn’t say that.
Jeremy said nothing, but after a moment he
gave a sigh and scooted down to sit flush beside me. He took the
bottle from me and shook it lightly, frowning down at the opening
as though pondering the many things he might say next. At last he
said, “Will.”
“What?”
“If—” Jeremy shut his mouth before he got any
further, grimacing faintly, and raised the bottle to his lips.
After a long pause he spoke again, now with unusual delicacy. "Are
you so...
occupied
with him?"
My face went smooth. The emphasis on that one
word was all he needed to get his real meaning across. Damn, damn,
damn! I’d been so careful not to speak of Merrick often, not even
to reveal that he’d come back to Manhattan with me last fall. Leave
it to Jeremy to figure it out, anyway. “Bloody Hell,” I muttered,
lost for any other response.
"You know I wouldn't judge you. It's..." His
voice dropped to a murmur. "It's what they all suspect."
"I might've bet," I muttered. My ears were
burning.
“Well,” Jeremy winced faintly. "Think about
it, Lacy."
"I’d rather not," I said crossly, but I had
to admit there was room for the interpretation from the get-go.
After all, half the boys I knew had been so initiated—not always
kindly—during their years as servants or apprentices. Anyway, none
in our group were saints; and with my own reputation as a budding
libertine, I knew there’d been jokes about my unexpected release
from bondage.
Put those charms to use, did you, Willy? Old man
found you too distractin’, eh, Lacy? Get him with your big brown
eyes?
Scoundrels. They knew nothing about it!
Jeremy took the bottle back. "Sorry, Will."
he said quietly.
"No," I said, and with a sudden burst of
pride, I added, "It's true."
The words left a bitter taste in my mouth.
For all I loved Merrick, I was not yet free of shame. But why
bother hiding anymore? I'd be gone soon enough—no one I knew would
ever see me to judge me again. And if Jeremy remembered me
differently now, well, all the better, I supposed. Less reason to
wonder why I’d up and gone.
"It doesn’t matter to me, Will,” Jeremy said.
“I’m just tryin’ to make sense of it.”
I looked sharply at him, then blinked at the
skyline in confusion. Well, Hell. That was a better reaction than
I’d mustered when I’d first realized my own inclinations. Where was
Jeremy when I was all tied in knots, terrified of the lust I felt
for the “old” apothecary? Criminy. I was all the more sorry I would
have to lose such a friend.
Not that he was completely at ease with it.
“But ain’t he old, and all? Don’t you want a woman to marry? I just
don’t like…"
Old
. I almost laughed at that,
remembering my own shock when I’d finally struck a match to get my
first glimpse of Merrick’s face. Of course, by that time I had
already fallen under his spell. But that was yet another thing I
couldn’t explain to Jeremy. Rubbing my eyes, I looked at the
horizon again, which was turning orange and pink. “Don’t like
what?”
"If he..." Jeremy sounded sad now. "If it's
for the money and whatnot…if it’s not to your
liking
,
Lacy."
"No,” I said firmly, for despite my
reluctance to cop to buggery, I couldn’t have anyone thinking Silas
Merrick would exploit me that way, or that my affection had been
bought. "He’s a good man. I respect him unconditionally."
That was a bit much for Jeremy, perhaps, for
he looked slightly taken aback. But at least his dudgeon had all
but disappeared, even if it was replaced by an air of resignation.
"Right, then,” he said at length, and ignoring the sunrise, he
fixed his gloomy eyes on the rickety shingles between his feet.
Just when I was about to crack a joke to cheer him up, he suddenly
said, “My fault, anyhow.”
“What do you mean it’s your fault?” I scoffed
at the notion. But then Jeremy lifted his gaze toward the sunrise,
and the awful look in his intelligent green eyes twisted my heart.
“Jeremy,” I said, surprised.
“It’s my fault you got sentenced in the first
place. I left you there in the garden that night. I ran off when
the night watch came.”
“We were drunk as all Hell, you dolt. I was
the idiot who crawled under a hedge for a nap. Nobody knew I was
there.”
“But I wondered where you were.” Jeremy shook
his head as though disgusted with himself. “And I laughed along
while those half-wits smashed the windows. You told me they’d get
us in trouble, you remember that?”
“I don’t remember having feet that night.
Same as you, I reckon.”
“If I’d listened you’d have never wound up in
shackles in the first place. You did nothin’ wrong and your whole
life got turned all upside-down because of it. You had that fine
trade going, with the books and all, and now it’s all up for
chance. It’s my fault and I’m bloody sorry, Will.”
“No, my friend.” I slung an arm about his
shoulders, jostling him gently. “No.”
Jeremy let himself be jostled, the portrait
of gloom. “Then you swear to me you’re all right with this, this
Merrick business, and leavin’ with him.”
“I swear,” I said easily.
Jeremy pointed at my face, demanding my gaze.
“Look me in the eye. ‘Cause if you’re not, I swear to Christ we’ll
get you out of it.”
I met his gaze as earnestly as I could,
summoning every scrap of confidence left in my soul. “I swear,
Jeremy.”
Jeremy searched my eyes for one long moment,
and then finally he gave a grudging nod. “Fine.” He took the bottle
back.
I exhaled a secret breath and let my arm fall
from his shoulders.
“When do you expect to leave, then?”
“Wish I knew. Could be any day.” I squinted
up at the pale cerulean sky, weary from my brain to my bones. “When
he’s ready.”