Iron Night (36 page)

And Prudence went. There was no walking on her horribly broken leg, so my sister crawled, pulling herself one painful inch at a time across the floor. My mother didn't say another word, simply watching my sister's agonizing progression. I pulled myself into a sitting position as she passed, my head finally ceasing its spinning, and Prudence looked at me just once as she crawled out of the room, leaving a long, red trail behind her.

My sister had once joyfully sent me to what she had hoped would be my death. Over the past few days she had been my strangely willing ally. And now I had stopped her from killing Matt and then Henry. In that one look there had been rage, plus a venomous dollop of bitterness and betrayal, but there had also been something else in the way that she had looked at me, something that my mind shuddered back from even naming. Because what she'd done tonight in defying our mother, she had done, somehow, in my name and for my sake. I shivered at the sight of what I'd seen in that look, because part of it had been the same kind of love that I was used to seeing from Chivalry, and it terrified me. I watched in silence as she left.

Madeline came over to me, pressing her wrinkled hands against my face and cataloging every injury, clucking as she saw the long slashes that the skinwalker had left in my forearms an hour and a half and a lifetime ago. But apparently finding me in no truly concerning condition, she gave me a small pat on my head and went to where Henry lay.

Irritation crossed her face as she looked down at him, and she poked at the open wounds that Prudence had given him with one finger, testing how deep and serious they were. Henry didn't blink even when her questing finger dipped to the second knuckle, instead just lying limply and staring at her. Madeline gave a grumpy huff when she finished assessing his injuries.

“Back to your cage, Henry,” she ordered flatly. “You'll need my attention, but I'll put you back together later.”

Like a puppet, he stood at her command and shuffled back into his cage, stepped around its ruined door, and crossed to its center, where he sat down heavily. His weird gaze found my mother again and watched her, unblinking. I'd never seen my mother interact with my host parents before, and it was disturbing, as if her presence had removed those last shreds of a personality that still clung like spiderwebs to the inside of his brain.

Ignoring her creature, Madeline finally crossed over to Mr. Albert's body, leaning down and pressing her palm briefly to his forehead. “Ah, Albert,” she sighed, “faithful to the last.” The regret in her voice was real. I only wished that the regret had been more than that of the lady of the manor memorializing the death of a loyal hound.

“Tell me why this happened.” My voice sounded strange in my own ears. It was hoarse, as if I'd been screaming, but I knew that I hadn't been. And there was no entreaty or request—it was a demand. I'd never used that tone with my mother. I hadn't been aware that my voice was even capable of that tone in the same room as my mother.

Madeline swung her head toward me and slowly straightened up from Mr. Albert's body. Whatever she saw in me was enough that when she answered, she didn't bother to pretend to misunderstand me. “Your sister wished to complete your transition.”

“Now tell me the rest,” I said. “Tell me what she meant about my transition being held back. Tell me what she meant by it ruining me. Tell me how you
made me different
. Tell me everything.”

“Everything, my darling sparrow?” Her eyes narrowed and became speculative. “Perhaps, my son. Perhaps.” She held out one deceptively fragile hand, the skin pulled tight against the knuckles and age spots dotting it. “Give me your arm, Fortitude. Escort me back to my rooms, and we will have a conversation.”

I hauled myself painfully to my feet and the room spun around me at first, but it quickly steadied. I touched one hand tentatively to the back of my skull and could feel the blood matting my hair, but after a moment I felt better. Not good by any stretch of the imagination—every part of my body felt battered and various levels of painful or sore. But I could walk, and I went to my mother and offered my arm in the best gentlemanly manner that my brother had drilled into me. We walked out together, and it quickly became apparent that there was more than etiquette at play here—in sharp contrast to how she had come down to the basement, now my mother was distinctly weak and wobbly, more and more of her weight resting on me as we continued. The walk to her rooms was slow, and as we arrived back into the main house we were surrounded by a horde of the staff members, all quietly and efficiently descending with mops and scrubbing rags to remove all signs of the conflict that had taken place. I saw one woman down on her hands and knees, carefully wiping up the blood trail that my sister had left as she passed this same way. It ended at the top of the stairs, so I could assume that some of the staff had carried Prudence the rest of the way to her old rooms. A pair of grim-faced men armed with tranquilizer guns brushed past us and headed down the stairs into the basement, followed at a distance by a small fleet of outdoor staff members carrying sheets of plywood to serve as temporary doors. But there was no running or yelling, and every staff member we passed nodded their heads and greeted us respectfully.

Eventually we reached Madeline's mother-of-pearl-gilded sitting room, and I gently assisted her into her favorite pink satin armchair. She relaxed into it with a grateful sigh, for once relaxing the excellent posture that had been drilled into her from centuries of corsets. There was a red light blinking from a small, innocuous device on her side table that I had never quite noticed before, and I realized that Mr. Albert must've hit the panic button in his room at some point, which was how she'd known to come downstairs and save the day.

I eased myself down onto the sofa, not worrying whether I might leave stains on it. People had died tonight. The sofa could be reupholstered. I watched my mother and waited.

For a moment Madeline paused, seeming to sink even farther into her armchair. She gestured to the table in front of us, where her favorite Sevres tea service was set up on a tray, the pot still steaming gently. Apparently this was the activity that she had interrupted to come downstairs. Without saying anything, I leaned over and poured a cup of tea, then passed it over to her. She nodded her thanks and took a long sip, then swallowed carefully and began speaking.

“Our kind has always been slow to mature, slow to reproduce.” Her voice was slow and almost academic, and I hung on every word. “When my grandfather was young, it was not uncommon for a vampire to boast four offspring over the course of a lifetime, but by the time I was ready to leave my own nest and establish a territory, two offspring was something to strive for. I came to this new land, where no other vampires lived, and when I was ready I brooded—and was rewarded with Prudence. I followed all the old traditions with her—when she was born, I killed both of her host parents, and their blood was her first meal when she was less than an hour old. And she is everything that I as a parent could've wished for, everything that our kind hold ideal—she is intelligent and vicious and a survivor.”

She paused and took another long drink from her teacup. I measured what she had told me and said, “But that's not how you made me.”

Madeline set the teacup down carefully in its saucer. “No,” she agreed. “Because Prudence is my pride and my joy, but she is not what our species needs.” She put the saucer decisively down onto its tray and sat back in the chair, her posture perfect and elegant again, and steepled her fingers. “Humans have always vastly outnumbered our kind, but that is as natural and acceptable as deer outnumbering wolves. They were not a threat. This began to change when technology developed and the humans became more organized. Our kind slipped into the shadows, just as most other sentient or magical species did, and any who did not at once learned their lesson during the Inquisition or the witch burnings. To many we are a myth, and that is safe. But it has never been possible to hide our existence from all—some are useful, and when properly deployed can serve in their own way or maintain the secrets. But others know what we are, and seek to kill us. As technology passed from wooden clubs to steel swords, from swords to pistols, those who sought to kill our kind found success easier to attain, and there were those who died. When I was a child in my mother's castle, our kind did not find this a cause for concern—many who died were young or stupid or weak. The strong remained, and we fought among ourselves for territory or prizes, not fearing a decline in our kind at first, for too many assumed that stronger offspring would be brooded to replace the dead. And there were so many that were foolishly squandered and lost . . . my own first fledgling, my little girl, killed at barely half a century over a squabble. I left England then. . . .”

She went silent for a long moment, frowning. I didn't say anything. She almost never talked about Constance, my sister who had died in England before Rhode Island had even been granted the royal charter that brought it into existence. Then Madeline seemed to shake herself out of older thoughts, and continued. “I crossed an ocean, settled in a new land, had another daughter to replace what I'd lost, but I was paying attention. And even we who live as long as we do can stand to learn the lessons of a new age and join them with the lessons of history. There were wolves in the forests of England when I was a child—great wolves. But they were long gone at the dawn of the 1800s, hunted to extinction. Other extinctions were happening in this time, and I realized that our species was very precariously perched. We are long in maturing, longer in reproducing. As great as we are, we are vulnerable.”

This made sense to me. “An apex predator,” I suggested. “Like a great white shark.”

Madeline nodded. “Precisely. The words for what we needed would not come until Darwin's studies, but I had already realized before the
Beagle
sailed that what we needed was to change. To adapt. So when your brother was born, I killed the host father at birth, but I left the host mother alive until he was twenty. I discovered that her life held his transition at bay—your sister, like me, transitioned naturally as she left childhood and passed through puberty. But for your brother it did not happen until the day his host mother died.”

I stared. I'd known for months that something about me was different from the average vampire, but I'd had no idea that my brother was also different. “Chivalry . . . ?”

“Yes. And you can see the differences. His lack of fixated self-interest, his devotion to his wives, the real love he feels for them. This is different. The bonds between vampires are always strong from parent to child, but less within the sibling nest—more from socialization than instinct—and beyond that there is rarely anything.”

I was confused. “So, by leaving both Henry and Grace alive . . . by having Jill and Brian raise me . . . you wanted me to be able to
love
?” The thought set my foundations, not to mention everything I'd ever thought of my mother, reeling.

Madeline chuckled softly, amused. “You make me sound like such a romantic, darling. No, love for your fellow man and the empathy that seems to hound you to the point of immobility were side effects that must be lived with.” The smile disappeared from her face, and she was entirely serious again. “No, my darling. I wanted you to have self-control, and an understanding of humans and their behavior that your sister and I, and even your brother, lack.”

“Did your experiment work?” I asked.

A slow smile that had nothing to do with humor and nothing particularly nice about it spread across my mother's face. “Who can say for sure, my darling? Transition, despite your sister's best efforts, has not been completed. Who can know what butterfly will emerge from your chrysalis?” I shuddered as the realization of how much I could lose, and how close I'd come to losing it tonight, filled me. Madeline's sharp eyes caught it, and her smile widened. In deceptively gentle tones, she asked, “Now, why don't you tell me what action you took that so enraged your sister that she would defy me in such a way? I find myself quite curious.”

There was no point trying to lie to her or to sugarcoat the situation. I knew that Prudence would be only too eager to fill in any gaps that I left, and in the worst way possible, so I forced myself to tell my mother the unvarnished truth about what had happened with Matt, what he had seen, and how I had stopped Prudence from killing him. The smile was long gone from Madeline's face when I finished—she was grim, and her lip had curled back from those long fangs. Clearly she was very unhappy and the focus of that unhappiness was on me, not my sister. There was a long silence when I finished, broken only by the soft sound of my mother tapping a nail thoughtfully against one of those heavy fangs. It was a creepy sight and an even creepier sound. I waited, barely able to breathe, knowing that Matt's life hung in the balance.

When Madeline finally spoke, it was slow and almost reluctant. “You are close to an adult,” she began, her blue eyes considering as she assessed me. “I will let you make this decision—but remember that he and his actions are your responsibility now. If Mr. McMahon is dangerous to us, you will have to kill him. Not me. Not your sister. Not even your brother.
You
.”

I nodded as a surge of relief filled me, followed almost immediately by an equally strong rush of dread. Everything rested now on whether I could convince Matt to keep quiet and hide the explosive truth that he'd seen in the clearing. I wasn't sure if I could live with myself if I had to kill Matt—frankly, I wished I could be sure that I wouldn't be able to—but at least this was a chance. Such a slim one, but if Matt could be persuaded not to talk . . . if, if, if. But it was a chance, and I grabbed at it with both hands, even if its edges were as sharp as knives.