Vanished

CHAPTER 23

This had been one freakish day after a weird damned week even by my standards, and my mind was still trying to catch up to it all. The time difference had also left me a bit disoriented. I missed Quinton’s easy ways and willingness to listen to my strange tales. I felt like a clinging idiot—or just a plain one—for thinking of him so often, and after the cold set-down I’d had from Cary, that was the last thing I wanted to be. I let go of my urge to page Quinton and told myself there was nothing he could say or do that would help and I didn’t want him to worry about me. I’d been gone only a day, after all. What I wanted most after his sympathetic ear was a meal and a nap before I tried to make sense of the puzzles I’d been handed in Clerkenwell, but I thought I’d have to settle for just one or the other.

After I’d changed clothes and eaten, I returned to my room to make notes and call Bryson Goodall, who was acting as my contact to Edward for this trip. It would be dark here in a little while, but it was still daylight business hours back in Seattle, I thought.

Goodall answered his phone on the second ring. “Goodall. Go ahead.”

“Mr. Goodall, Harper Blaine.”

“How’s England?”

“Mixed. I arrived at the hotel about six hours ago. Since then I’ve tried to contact Purcell, but he was abducted about eighteen days ago. Looks like some faction within the local branch of the fraternal order of bloodsuckers, but I don’t know whose yet or where Purcell is now. Purcell’s. assistant is still around, but he’s not much use—he’s homicidal and disinclined to help, to be blunt about it. The upside is that Purcell is still walking around somewhere. Or that’s my guess based on the relationship between Purcell and his flunky.”

I heard his thoughtful grunt and the sound of typing. “So no idea where Purcell is or who’s got him. Any leads?”

“Not specifically. His office had been stripped of papers, except a few incomplete items. I’m following up on those tomorrow, since the business offices are closed here now.”

“What sort of items?”

“Some bills and letters about taxes and rents. A lead from Jakob—the minion—that might be undevelopable. It comes off as gibberish, but he’s not an idiot, so I’ll have to see if I can make anything of it. It’s not quite dark enough here yet, but I’ll be going out again soon to see about Edward’s other local contacts. No idea how that will go. So far, it’s looking bad.”

“Anything else?”

I didn’t say I’d been followed. The sinister Mr. Marsden didn’t seem to be part of the vampire community—quite the opposite—and I thought it was wiser to keep his presence to myself for now.

“That’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

“I’ll report. Stay in touch.”

“Planning to.”

We disconnected and I took my map out again to plan my evening stalking vampires. Prep can make up for a lot when you’re not familiar with an area and I was going to do my best to case the vampire neighborhoods before I hit the streets again. At least this time I might not walk down an alley that had ceased to exist unless I wanted to.

Funny thing about vampires: They’re arrogant. Sometimes stupid-arrogant, and I’ve used that to my advantage in the past. This was tricky, however. I couldn’t just say I was there on Edward’s behalf, since something had gone against him and I couldn’t risk bringing the wrong attention to myself.

I made the rounds of pubs and clubs, looking for signs of vampires on the prowl. Drunks and romantics were easy marks, and in the right kind of club, the herd would be especially pliable. Any place that catered to the emo and the fashionably disaffected would provide a preselected pool of easy, even willing, victims, but frankly any bar or club could do the same once the hour was late enough.

Clerkenwell hosted a lot of possibilities around Cowcross and across the road from Smithfield, as well as farther up St. John’s Street, where another fairy ring of pubs and clubs had sprung up around Clerkenwell Green near the small church of St. James Clerkenwell. The rowdy workingmen’s establishments were unlikely to be useful, and I quickly learned to recognize them from their traditional signs and loquacious crowds spilling onto the street. The more avant garde and exclusive places with quiet frontages proved better stalking grounds.

As I poked about, I began to discern a pattern of local investment and caching that was interesting but not entirely clear. Several of the buildings that housed pubs heavily favored by vampires appeared to be in office blocks that were otherwise empty but very well-maintained. One of the pubs was located near the only gas station—petrol station, as the sign read—in the area. It also had a small, locked yard nearby where cars, motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles were stored. Remembering what my limo driver had said about the difficulty of negotiating traffic on anything bigger than a bike, this seemed to be a storage yard for a transportation pool. It looked like the vampires of Clerkenwell had collectivized a bit. Whether they could afford it as individuals or not, in such a close-packed environment owning a private car would be comment-worthy, and vampires don’t like to draw comment. London’s vampires were being discreet and careful. Centuries do that for you, I supposed.

I found a pale, pale woman in a club called Danse Noir. I’d never seen a vampire who looked so much like one—more than most—but I knew what she was by the gruesome red and black of her energy corona and the odor of things rotten and painfully dead. Her face was long and gaunt. Her skin was translucent, almost pearly, with the palest of blue lines suggesting veins and cold vessels in a vague reticulated pattern below. Her long hair was naturally colorless, a dead, icy shade of white that had been streaked with wide swaths of artificial black gleaming like an oil slick. I glanced at her eyes, not wanting to be caught in her stare, and found them a strange, flat brown. The color was like my own, but lifeless as paint. Then I realized they were contact lenses, dry from a lack of tears but seeming to gleam from some inner light the color of hellfire.

I started backing away, some instinct urging me to flee, though I’d backed away from only one vampire in my life. Then she stood up and lunged, grabbing my wrists and pulling me onto the bar stool beside her.

“No,” she whispered. “Can’t have you causing a scene. I’d like to stay a while longer. So you stay, too.” Her fingernails bit into my skin like claws.

“I’ll stay if you let go of my hands.”

She looked surprised. “But if I hold on, you can’t leave. Can you?”

I smirked at her—I had tried to smile but the still-panicking part of myself had twisted it a bit—and shifted aside through a cold ripple of temporaclines, wrenching my hands from her grasp as I slipped.

She twitched in surprise but didn’t try for my hands again. “That’s a wicked trick.” Her voice was low and a little sibilant, with broad vowels. “You must be the American creature there’s been so much talk of.”

“Who’s talking about me?” I asked.

“Can’t you guess? I’d heard you were clever.”

“I prefer not to make wild suppositions,” I replied, still feeling a ridiculous urge to get away. She reminded me a bit of Wygan, and the fear and disgust that particular vampire engendered in me was welling up in the back of my mind as I sat next to this one.

“Oh, but I don’t want to tell you. What fun would that be? It’s so much more delightful to feel you fret. Let’s play a game.”

“No.”

She snatched my hand again and twisted my wrist. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t,” she hissed. “She won’t like it. She wants it to be a surprise, but I think it’s much more fun to build the fear a bit first. I’ll be doing you a favor if I tell you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, keeping my voice steady with effort. Was she schizophrenic and referring to herself or to some other “she”? I didn’t know if vampires could be insane, since the human value for sanity wasn’t applicable to them, being human only in their outer shape and pure monster at the core.

“Of course you don’t. Not yet. And she won’t know it was me that stopped her from wrecking the Pharaohn’s plans. Oh, this will be fun! So much fun!” She was almost wiggling with excitement at whatever delight she anticipated. “Here’s a clue: The deacon of Christ Church wrote her name up and down and side to side.”

It meant nothing to me. I liked mysteries, but that sort of riddle had never been my fascination. I didn’t know where to start with it.

“No?” the vampire said, disappointed. “Oh, here’s another, then: She isn’t small so much as little.”

That was no better, but a feeling of dread was building in my guts as if some part of my brain had figured it out and wasn’t telling the rest. She wanted me to guess something that would terrify. Toying with me brought a smile to her wide-cut mouth that made me queasy by its almost sexual excitement.

She chuckled and it rolled over me like the first wave of an Arctic storm. “Now you’re thinking and you’re scared. I like that. That’s the difference between terror and horror.”

She leaned very close and I could smell her breath of dust and carrion. “Terror is the instinct that tells you to run, dear God, run,” she murmured. “Run for your life. But it just makes you into meat. Predators take the ones who run. Horror is the mind-thing, the worm of knowledge you can’t stop turning over no matter how awful it is. It grows in your mind and destroys you by your own intelligence. That’s why humans are the best prey. That is the thing that will drive you to despair if I tell you Mr. Dodgson’s little heroine does not intend to let you go.”

My heart lurched and stuttered in my chest. I wasn’t a student of British literature and I had never been crazy for fantasy books or fairy tales, but even I knew the Reverend Mr. Dodgson had been Lewis Carroll. Alice Liddell had been the model for his “little heroine.” I knew—had known—an Alice Liddell who’d looked just like the grown-up version of the photo by Dodgson in the front of The Annotated Alice. I’d seen it in a hundred bookstores. Not possible, I thought. She’s just trying to scare me, though I don’t know why—how—she’d know to pick that.

The Alice I’d known had been an ambitious vampire and tried to use me to break Edward’s power and take control of Seattle herself. She’d interfered when a contingent of vampires and I, along with Mara Danziger and Quinton, had dismantled a dangerous magical artifact and accidentally set fire to a building. She’d spied on me for Wygan. Then she’d forced me into a magical binding that stopped me from helping Edward against her so she could grab the artifact for herself. In the struggle, I’d finally given in to the Grey and survived, sealing my fate as a Greywalker. But Alice had been staked to the floor of the burning building and left behind when the rest of us barely escaped alive.

It’s not possible, I repeated to myself, but I had the awful feeling it might be. She could not have survived. But we’d never seen a body. And if anyone might hate Edward enough to come to England and ruin him, it was Alice—if she wasn’t permanently dead. Alice had been good at grudges, good at hate. If she’d escaped from the flames of the doomed building, she would hate me with red passion and black spite.

I stood up slowly and stepped away, keeping my eyes on the pale monstrosity on the bar stool. She glanced over her shoulder toward a door at the back. Then she returned her gaze to mine. She smiled so wide her fangs seemed to grow over her lip—more like the venomous hooks of a viper than the usual vampire’s. Behind her dull contact lenses, her eyes flared with orange fire.

I had to look. I raised my gaze over her shoulder and saw Alice stepping through the rear doorway. My lungs seized and I thought my heart had stopped.

Alice had changed; in the crowd and at such a distance, details were lost, but it was her. She was in the company of two men wrapped in the fire and darkness of her aura. But they couldn’t be men. They were something magical, though in the mess of swirling energies between us, I couldn’t tell what.

I backed to the front door, unable to keep the fear from rising in my chest like smoke that choked my lungs and made my head ring. Alice and her companions didn’t see me, but the pale horror in front of me did and she laughed with sickening joy.

Outside in the street, I could still hear the white vampiress laughing, and the sound raked my spine and made me shudder. I steeled myself against it, but in the end, I ran. I dashed across Clerkenwell Green and down to the Tube station. I bolted away—anywhere away from that taunting laugh. Away from the impossible vision of Alice walking through the door.