Lady Killer (3 page)

She frowned at the boy, trying to look simultaneously maternal and intimidating and authoritative, and he frowned back at her in blatant defiance. She puffed out her cheeks and he puffed out his, she squinted at him and he squinted back, she bit her lip and he bit his, too, with even more vehemence. Clio had received enough lectures on the evils of stubbornness during her growing up to be able to teach an Oxford course on the topic, but she felt she had never really understood its drawbacks until now, and finally, when he out-sneered her, she had to concede that she had met her match.

She gave in with a sigh. “Very well. You can help me. However, if we are going to do this together, it must be very clear that I am in charge.” The boy looked past Clio, as if he could not hear her. “That means that you will do whatever I say,” she repeated. “Otherwise, I shall find this fiend alone. Do you agree?”

The boy frowned slightly and then gave a slow nod in agreement.

Clio, who had not realized she was holding her breath, exhaled loudly. “Good. Excellent.” Now that he had agreed to be led by her, he no longer looked quite so formidable and Clio felt herself relax slightly. As she did, she remembered the piece of blue silk she had taken from next to the mattress. She held it toward him and asked, “Have you ever seen this before?”

The boy fingered the fabric, then shook his head, and shook it again when she asked if it had belonged to his sister. Having confirmed that the kerchief had been imported into the house, and recently, made finding its owner a top priority. Perhaps whoever left it there saw someone around the property before the girl died. Or, perhaps it belonged to whomever—
whatever
—killed her.

It had been so real.

Clio did not know if it was the memory of the girl’s face or the feel of a hairy arm brushing against hers that made her shudder. She looked down and was just in time to see Toast bring the blue handkerchief to his face and sniff it suspiciously. Then, before she could stop him, he turned into the alley and dashed out into the press of people on the main street.

Now it was Clio’s turn to do the dragging. Without pausing to think, she grabbed the boy by the arm and set out after the monkey. During the several-year term of their acquaintance, Toast had demonstrated two outstanding qualities: a tendency to purloin small objects, and an incredible sense of smell. Generally he exerted these only in pursuit of meat pies, but on occasion, and Clio hoped this was one, he had been invaluable in helping her track down suspects by following their scent. If Toast could find the owner of the kerchief, Clio would certainly be closer to finding the killer. Possibly much, much closer.

Her mind keeping pace with her feet, Clio forced herself to consider that Toast might be leading her directly to the Vampire. Even if one discounted that he was a demon, he was indisputably a most cunning, dangerous criminal. It had taken a madman to capture him, and even then, as Clio now suspected, the capture had been only temporary. What in the queen’s name did she plan to do against someone like that?

She had never faced a murderer alone before, and never a fiend. Suddenly the knife she always carried in her bodice for protection when she went out on investigations felt very small and ineffectual. But even as she considered the wisdom of turning around and waiting until a constable could be found, she saw Toast turn abruptly and go into a tavern door and she knew she had no choice but to follow him. As she reached the tavern and saw the sign with a picture of a heavily made-up woman hanging over it, Clio felt a flicker of surprise and relief. Despite its name, the Painted Lady Tavern was one of the most respectable houses in the area, more often hosting poets and playwrights than the ruffians and rakes who crowded the benches at other establishments.

What was more, she knew the proprietor well. Indeed, Clio had recovered Lovely Jake’s prize pig for him that spring, and so was relieved to see him standing behind the bar as she entered. Whispering to her young companion to stay by the door and not move, a request to which she got only a barely visible sullen nod, Clio scanned the length of the dimly lit room looking for Toast. It was empty except for a solitary figure hunched over the table near the stairs and snoring loudly, around whom Toast was dancing ecstatically.

The thought that a vampire would sleep all day in order to be fresh for his kills flashed through Clio’s mind, but was quickly dispersed by a hearty welcome from Lovely Jake.

“Miss Thornton, it is an en-orm-ous pleasure to see you,” he boomed. Lovely Jake had earned his nickname playing the Maiden in numerous plays to packed playhouse crowds in his youth three decades earlier. Although it was hard to imagine the now enormous man as a captivating damsel, his voice, particularly when he chose to exercise it, could still command the attention of even the farthest boxes. He was exercising it now. “How is the Triumvirate these days?” he bellowed, as if in proof. “They have been
off scene,
if you will pardon me a theatrical expression, this long month. Have they a new project afoot?”

“It’s a pleasure to see you, too,” Clio said quietly, her eyes not leaving Toast. Then, moving close to Jake, she stood on her toes, pointed in the direction of the sleeping figure, and whispered, “Who is that man?”

Jake looked remorseful. “It would bring honor to us both if I could speak his name,” he replied, in his idea of a confidential whisper, audible in Southern Kent. “But I cannot—nay, I must not. I do hate to wear the mask of secrecy, but you see, I took a stack of gold as long as my shoe and promised to, as we thespians say,
stand mute upon my mark.
” Clio eyed Jake’s enormous shoe and felt her heart sink. There was no way she could match that offer. “I can tell you this, though, my dear Miss Thornton,” Jake went on. “That is neither a happy man, nor a content man. His role upon the stage of life hangs heavy upon him. I begrudge no man my company, but one would think he would have had enough of it by now. He has been here, much as you see him at this moment, since yesterday midday, or as we say in the theater,
intermezzo,
and I must confide that I do not see any sign of
exit, End Act I,
on the near horizon.”

If the man at the table had been in the tavern since the previous noon, there was no chance that he had made the muddy footprints Clio had seen at the doll house, which meant there was little chance he was the vampire. Clio’s relief that she was probably not facing a fiend just now was undermined by what that meant: the murderer was still out there, possibly getting ready to kill another victim. Her only consolation was the bizarre dance that Toast was performing around the sleeping man. The monkey’s sense of smell was as unerring as a dog’s, so there had to be something linking this man to the dead girl. Impatient to question the sleeping man at once, she just nodded her thanks to Lovely Jake and headed straight for the table.

The man was snoring contentedly, his head down over his arms, his body covered with a red silk cape. Clio stood over him, watching him sleep for a moment, then suddenly remembered the expression of horror she thought she had seen—
it had looked so real
—on the girl’s face.

She was not afraid. She was not afraid. She was
not
afraid.

She cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me.”

The man resettled himself in the crook of his arm, but did not stop sleeping—or snoring.

“Excuse me,” Clio said again, this time louder.

Still nothing. Rationalizing that Jake would not allow her to be killed
center stage
in his tavern, Clio ventured closer. She tapped the man on the crown of the head while bending near his ear and whispering “excuse me” directly over it.

Miles Loredan, Viscount Dearbourn, was feeling belligerent. He would not kill whomever had replaced his head with a pumpkin, that was all right, but the scurvy villains who were trying to carve it out were going to find themselves facing the sharp point of a sword. Wasn’t it enough that they had pulled him from wonderful oblivion? Did they need to compound their sins by beating his head with cudgels? What had he—

A vague thought seeped into his ale-soaked head, a memory of his cousins towering over him several days earlier, as they left the Turkish bathhouse, and promising that if he was not home by four bells to prepare for his betrothal ball, they would send an escort who was sure to rouse him. Aha, Miles realized triumphantly, the devils playing squash-the-squash with his head were his cousins’ minions of evil. Perhaps if he showed a sign of alertness the minions might go away. And if that didn’t work, he would fight them to the last man.

With great effort, he snarled and opened one eye.

Then very quickly opened the other one. What he saw in front of him, a dancing monkey and an elf, was surely an apparition. He had not reckoned on real demons and was beginning to worry that they might be harder to kill than normal men, when he raised his head completely and saw that he had made a mistake. There was a dancing monkey. But the elf was a woman. A woman with a smear of dirt on one cheek and a tattered gown and long brown hair and enormous, challenging brown eyes. An absolutely stupendous looking woman.

There was only one thing to do with a woman like that. Reaching out, Miles pulled her toward him and pressed his lips hard against hers.

She tasted like a memory, like summer, and youth, and his favorite kind of ink all rolled together, and he could have gone on kissing her all day if she had not pulled away, leveled a knife-sharp look at him, and said, “You moldy mongrel.”

It was not the kindest thing anyone had ever said to him, but coming from her it sounded lovely. As did the “You contemptible, cantankerous cur,” and the “You repellant rat terrier,” that followed, along with the probing question, “How dare you sit there and stare at me with such insolence?”

Miles would have liked to reply it was because he could not help himself, that he had never before been pegged down by the
Dog Breeders Almanac,
but he was completely speechless, another first for him. Instead he smiled.

“You would grimace at me, bug-eating beagle?” Clio demanded, her glare intensifying as she rubbed the place on her chin where his overgrown whiskers had abraded her.

His cousins had really outdone themselves, Miles thought. Listening to her was almost better than kissing, he decided, brushing a lock of dark hair from his forehead so he could watch her more easily, but only almost. Taking advantage of a lull in her tirade, he reached out, this time pulling the woman all the way onto his lap. She smelled delicious. He licked the comparison between himself and a spineless spaniel from her lips and kissed her deeply.

That was when all the demons of hell attacked him. Someone punched him from behind and the girl pushed away from him from below, and nearby someone else was twittering. When he could finally collect his thoughts, he saw that the monkey seemed to be making a toast to a young boy standing behind him, who had the defiant posture of a pugilist. Next to the boy, speaking soothingly, was the woman, but her expression was anything but soothing when she turned it on Miles.

Clio was having to work hard to convince herself not to run the man through with the small knife she always carried, when she was spared the argument by the arrival of three rough looking armed men. They pushed past her and surrounded her potential victim on all sides.

Not actually trusting her restraint even in their presence, she grabbed the boy’s hand, made a sign to Toast, and almost ran out into the open air. Clio was heedless of the racket that followed her from the Painted Lady, heedless of the gruff voice of one of the armed guards saying, “Come along, Lord Dearbourn, your cousins sent us to escort you home,” heedless of the fact that the boy was growing winded trying to keep up with her, heedless that she was muttering to herself. She stalked down the street, completely absorbed in thought, or rather thoughts, for there were two that cycled around in maddening relay between
how dare he?
and
who was he?

If anyone had told her that answering those questions was going to cost her everything she had, everything she believed, everything she held most dear, she would have laughed and said “impossible.”

She would have been wrong.

She was heedless of the dark-caped figure who slid from shadow to shadow, following her home.

Chapter Two

“Just dump him in there,” the tall man instructed, and the three guards who had carried Miles from the Painted Lady tipped him headfirst into the tub of iced water sitting at the center of the sparsely furnished chamber.

The guards left then, and for a moment the room was completely still. There was only one chair in the vast space, so Crispin, Tristan, and Sebastian stood around the tub, watching impatiently, while Ian turned to his wife, Bianca, who was standing off to the side, and asked, “Are you sure this won’t kill him?”

She looked up from the conversation she was having with her sister-in-law, Sophie, and shook her head. “I never said that. I said it would not kill a woman. My medical expertise only applies to women. I make no guarantees about your part of the speci—”

Before she could finish, there was an enormous splash and Miles leapt from the tub. “What in Hades did you think you were doing?” he demanded, glaring at each of his cousins in turn. “Are you trying to kill me?”