Kitty Steals the Show (Kitty Norville) (5 page)

Ben laughed. “Wow, he actually answered!”

I gaped. “I have never, ever,
ever
gotten that specific an answer from any vampire
ever,
” I said. I might have fallen in love with the man in that instant. I did a bit of my own math—it took a couple of tries. “Fifteen sixty—”

“Fifteen sixty-six,” Cormac said, and Ned nodded.

“And you were born in London,” I said.

“Born, bred, proud to be so.”

“Wow,” I said. “We have to talk, you have to tell me everything, what was it like, what did you do, who did you know—Queen Elizabeth, did you ever see her? Meet her?”

“You were right,” Ned said to Emma. “She doesn’t stop, does she?”

“Most vampires are so secretive, they won’t say anything about how old they are, where they came from. Like that life is dead to them and they’ll be damned if they talk about it. Why aren’t you like that? Why just let it all out there?”

“Of all the secrets I could keep, the ones about myself are the least useful.”

A vampire not interested in keeping secrets. Oh, the things I could ask … “Next question. Why Ned? Most vampires I’ve met are a little more fancy-pants with their names. Not Rick, it’s Ricardo, that sort of thing. But it’s Ned, not Edward?”

“My friends call me Ned. I’ve been known by both names all my life. Why do you prefer Kitty instead of Katherine?”

“Fair enough.” I looked around, taking in the thousands of rich leather spines, smelling the vast collection of paper, parchment, and ink, and guessing that every item was here because Ned wanted it to be. This wasn’t a museum, these were his
things.
“You’ve been building your library for over four hundred years, then. You want to point out the highlights?”

“Look around and tell me what catches your eye.”

I did, my gaze skimming over shelves and glass cases, having trouble stopping on any one thing because there was too much to focus on. Start with the books or the artifacts? Try to read one of the rare editions? But which one?

One of the cases held sheets of papers, letters maybe, some drawings, individual pages with short pieces of writing. The old-fashioned handwriting was hard to make out, but I spotted a phrase that repeated: Edward Alleyn. Or Alleyne, or Allan, and a few other variations of spellings. At the tops of letters, on lists of names, and in the title of what seemed to be an admiring poem.

“Edward Alleyn, that’s you, yes?” I said to him.

“It is.”

I continued to the next case, which held only one large book, as big as an old picture atlas, open on its stand. The object had been well cared for; its pages were only just aging to yellow. The text was typeset rather than written, but it was still antique, hard to read. Even so, I only needed a few lines to understand what it was—one of Hamlet’s soliloquies.

“This is a First Folio,” I said to Ned.

“Are you a scholar of the Bard, then?” he asked.

“More like a fan. I majored in English lit, if that means anything. It looks like it’s in really good condition.”

“Hot off the presses you might say,” he said. “It isn’t even listed in the official census of how many First Folios still exist.”

“That’s so cool! You must have seen the plays when they were first being performed—oh my God, I can’t even imagine.”

“I saw most of them, I think. You might say the theater was my life, back then.”

At that, a synapse in my brain clicked into place—the English major coming back online and earning its keep. “Edward Alleyn,” I murmured. “I’ve heard that name before.”

Ned quoted: “‘Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, that time may cease, and midnight never come.’”

It was obviously supposed to mean something. I stared, blank.

He tried again: “‘What are kings, when regiment is gone, but perfect shadows in a sunshine day?’”

Still nothing. “Is it Shakespeare?” I ventured.

He rolled his eyes. One more time … “‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’”

“Oh, that’s Marlowe,” I said. “Wait a minute. Edward Alleyn—the actor?”

“I told you she’d get it,” he said to a beaming Emma.

“You knew Christopher Marlowe. And Shakespeare, you knew Shakespeare—” I put my hand on my mouth. I was now two degrees of separation from William Shakespeare. Back home, Rick gave me such a hard time because I was always bugging him for stories about the famous people he’d met in his over five hundred years of life, how I constantly assumed that vampires must have some kind of insider information, when really, why would they be any more likely to know famous people than the rest of us? But here it was, the reason I asked all these questions in the first place, because sometimes,
sometimes,
I got the answers I was looking for. What secret corners of history could vampires illuminate, if I could figure out what to ask?

At this point, though, all the questions seemed moot. This man had known Shakespeare. He was a window into an amazing time and place—and I didn’t know where to start. So I teared up and tried to wave away the burst of emotion. Everyone was staring at me and all I really wanted to do was cry from the wonder of it all.

“Is she okay?” Emma asked Ben.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

“I get this reaction quite a lot,” Ned said cheerfully. I imagined it was one of the reasons he didn’t bother keeping his identity secret—he’d been a celebrity his whole life, why stop just because he’d become a vampire?

“How?” I managed to stammer. “How did you go from … from there to
this
? What happened?”

“That’s a much longer story, Ms. Norville. May I get you a drink?” Ned asked.

“I would very much like a drink, yes.”

Ned rang and an attendant—the young woman who’d greeted us when we arrived—brought in a tray with a couple of decanters and several glasses, and we gathered on the chairs and sofas around one of the small tables in the library. Emma poured scotch for Ben, Cormac, and I, and she and Ned sat back to watch us sip. It was probably excessively expensive and luxurious, but all I tasted was the burn. I was still staring at Ned in bewilderment, imagining some scene in an Elizabethan tavern, the actors and playwrights of the day, Shakespeare and Marlowe and so on, gathered around, laughing and drinking, the music of lutes and pipes in the background …

Ben grinned at me. “Hey Kitty, now you’re supposed to ask if Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”

That broke the spell. “Oh, don’t even start with that. It’s not even up for debate.” But I looked at Ned sidelong. “Is it?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“Good. You know, you could end a lot of epic academic debates if you’d just come out and say that.”

“And ruin all the fun? Not me.”

I sighed. “What was it like? All of it—I mean, did he have any idea? Did Shakespeare have a clue that people would be performing his plays four hundred years later, that they’d be held up as the pinnacle not just of theater but of
literature
?”

Ned shook his head. “You must understand, we weren’t trying to create fine art. We were trying to tell stories. All of us, we loved to tell stories. Well, and we loved the attention. For those who were successful at it, the theater was a very good way to make money. Several of us, including Will, made our fortunes at it, but not from writing or acting—it was from investing in the theaters themselves. We worked for shares and retired when we had enough cash to do so. Of course, most of us didn’t mind a little fame in the meantime. I admit, it’s been an odd experience watching what’s happened to Will’s work over the years.”

“Oh my God. You’re on a first-name basis with William Shakespeare.” My vision went a bit hazy.

“Perhaps a little more scotch, there,” he said, and poured another finger into my tumbler.

My companions hadn’t taken more than the tiniest sips of their own drinks. Ben sat next to me on a sofa, but Cormac had taken a seat apart, in his own chair, and had been studying the room around us, maintaining a bodyguard’s stance.

Now, he leaned forward, setting his glass back on the tray. “I imagine a lot of folks are coming in from out of town for this conference. You probably know just about all of them.”

“You want to know if there’s anyone you need to worry about? Anyone with designs on our Kitty?” Ned said, and Cormac gave an offhand shrug in agreement. “I imagine there are. Many of the Master vampires of Europe or their representatives are here, as well as some from farther afield, along with their entourages. Lycanthropes are attending the conference in some official human capacity or another. Others are here simply because they’re curious. Many vampires and lycanthropes are unhappy with the light that Kitty and others have been shining on our activities, and are here to add their opinions to the conversation. Those are just the ones I know about—there are shadow realms that I know little about and have no control over that surely have a presence here. It’s as if everyone wants to see what’s going to happen next. In the meantime, I’ve declared London neutral territory for the duration of the conference. No battles, figurative or literal, will be fought here. No one will act against you, or they’ll face me. I so will it.”

Cormac turned away to hide a wry grin, which gave us all an idea of what he thought of Ned’s will. “You aren’t worried? All those rivals, right in your backyard.”

“No,” Ned said evenly, a smile curling. “I’m not. If they make a move against me or mine, they lose any protection they had here and their existences are forfeit.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said to Cormac, more for something to say than trying to be reassuring. I wasn’t sure I could be reassuring—the assembled vampire aristocracy of Europe? Not at all intimidating … I asked Ned, “You’ll be there, right? At the conference. There’s a whole track on vampirism.”

“We’ll be keeping an eye on things from a distance,” Ned said.

“If that many vampire Masters are going to be there, don’t you think you’d better be there, too?”

“You’re assuming they’re going to be at the hotel with all the hoi polloi. May I make a suggestion?” Ned asked.

“Sure.”

“A convocation assembles Monday night. Come and meet them.”

“Convocation?”

“A gathering of the vampires who’ve come to London. A little conference of our own,” he said. “You’ll get a good look at them all, they’ll get a look at you. No surprises on either side. What do you think?”

I looked at Ben for his opinion.

“Walking into a room full of Master vampires?” he said with a huff. “You’d either be a rock star or completely screwed.”

“You’d have my protection,” Ned said.

“Until you leave the room,” Cormac added.

The vampire turned to me, chuckling. “You have staunch defenders.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “I think I’d rather face them all at once. Get a good look at them. Besides, it’ll be interesting.”

“You always say that just before we get into the weirdest shit,” Ben said.

No doubt. One of these days I’d have to go for uninteresting. Spend the weekend in front of the TV eating popcorn. What were the odds?

Chapter 4

W
E SPENT
the night at Fortune House, in rooms that would have outdone the most spectacular five-star hotel: antique furniture, silk sheets, attentive room service bringing eggs and toast and fresh-squeezed juice for breakfast, and views of a quiet suburb out the window. In the morning, a horde of teenage boys decked in blue jerseys flooded one of the pristine grassy lawns outside the school to play soccer. Football, rather. It was a scene from a movie.

We got more of Ned’s story. He’d founded Dulwich College, at least its earliest incarnation as a charity hospital, back in his previous life, at the start of the seventeenth century. He’d had no children of his own so he funneled his fortune into various charities. He’d been watching over them ever since. I still didn’t know how a man who’d lived a full life, been famous and successful, became a vampire at the age of sixty. I’d looked up the official date of his death. There was some debate about the exact day—with a three day difference, which suddenly made sense, if you knew about the vampirism. An infected person lay effectively dead for three days before rising again. I wondered if Ned had been attacked and turned against his will, and I wondered if he’d ever tell me how it had happened.

Emma and Ned had made plans to send us on ahead to Ned’s Mayfair town house, where he stayed when he wanted to be in London proper. It was near the conference, and we’d have a day to get settled, sleep off more of the jet lag, and take a look around before the conference started. Andy the driver took us north in the sleek black cab, and I got my first look of Britain in daylight.

The city was a mix of ancient, modern, and everything in between. Nineteenth-century brick row houses mingled with 1960’s concrete office blocks, then suddenly the gray stone spire of an old church would rise in the distance, past supermarkets and subdivisions. Springtime made everything green—green lawns in parks, a bright green fuzz on trees, carpets of daffodils blooming on roundabouts. I had to quell an instinctive panic from being on the wrong side of the road.