Ravensclaw (19 page)

It signified that she was beyond foolish for being without both her pistol and her umbrella. Emily would have to rely on her wits. What was left of them.

Lisbet’s voice grated on her ears. “You have been neglecting me. Leaving me too much to my own devices. You know how much I dislike that, Val.”

Val smiled down at her. “I haven’t entirely neglected you. Must I remind you of the other night? As for abandoning you to your own devices, some bothersome details have taken up my time.”

She
was a bothersome detail? Emily’s cheeks burned. When she recalled her behavior— She reminded herself that Val had been the one to set her in his lap.

Emily imagined he had done a great deal more than set Lisbet in his lap. There was little question of what ‘haven’t entirely’ meant. Val’s glance flickered indifferently over her and away.

He might as well have plunged a knife into her heart.

Peawit! Cabbagehead! Beetbrain!

Michael frowned at her. “Emily?”

“I have made my decision. I will marry you, Michael.”

Emily had spoken loudly enough that everyone in the vicinity heard her. Lisbet appeared mildly interested. Val looked distinctly annoyed. Michael recovered from his astonishment to raise her hands to his lips.

Oh, heavens, what had she done? Lady Alberta whispered, “Smile!”

When you are an anvil, hold you still;

When you are a hammer, strike your fill.

(Romanian proverb)

The skirt of Emily’s voluminous dressing gown swished along the bedroom carpet. Late though the hour was — or early — she was unable to sleep. She had tried to pass the time in reading, had discovered that to protect herself from danger she should carry the tip of a calf’s tongue; that safety in battle was achieved by rubbing oneself all over with leeks; that one’s home might be protected from witches by hanging the diseased leg of a calf near the hearth, or keeping a bull’s heart stuck with pins in the chimneypiece; had finally flung the book into the fireplace and with some satisfaction watched it burn. That would show Val.
What
it would show him was uncertain, unless it was that Emily could behave as badly as anybody else.

The rest of the household had long since retired. Only Machka remained, less to share her vigil, Emily suspected, than because the cat was loath to give up her warm spot in the center of the bed.

She walked to the window. Dawn would soon break. Emily didn’t want to dwell on Ravensclaw and what he might have been doing in the hours since they’d left the Assembly Rooms.

Didn’t want to dwell on it, but couldn’t help herself. Emily indulged in a string of oaths that would have distracted even her papa from his studies. Machka pricked one ear and buried her nose beneath her tail.

Men! What blessed use were they?
Vampir
or not, in that regard Ravensclaw was very much a man. Emily no sooner suggested she was his
ailalta
than he decided to marry her off to someone else, because what other reason could he have had to noise her fortune about? And where had he come up with the figure of fifty thousand pounds? Emily picked up a pillow and threw it at the wall, then plopped down in a chair and glared at her open door. She was determined to waylay Val the moment he set foot upon the stair.

Unaware of the freckled fury awaiting him — although he surely would have been, had he opened his mind to her, which he had no intention of doing, because he was very cross — Val walked through the late-night streets. First Emily had suggested she might be his
ailalta,
then she announced she meant to marry Michael Ross. Val didn’t know which displeased him more.

Yes, he’d thought that she should marry. He’d even meant to provide her with a choice of suitors, not realizing, until he surveyed the prospects, that the field of eligibles was so thin. One of Emily’s new admirers was a close-fisted clunch, another a corny-faced cod’s head, a third a lascivious old goat. The unmarried gentlemen of Edinburgh might have been astonished to discover that Ravensclaw considered them all twiddle-poops, beau nastys, and jaw-me-deads. Val might have been amused to discover himself so high a stickler, had not his sense of humor abandoned him.

The air was chill, not that the weather much concerned him. Val was largely impervious to extremes of heat and cold, the latter most common to this city, which lay a scant mile from the sea. On a rainy night like this, Edinburgh seemed a strange piling up of rocks, with roads rushing downhill like rivers, and buildings soaring up to the sky as if spit out by the old volcano on which the city had been built. He remembered when Heriot’s Hospital had been erected, the first stone laid for the North Bridge. When the Old Town had been a fashionable address, instead of the dangerous and overcrowded slum it was becoming. When the narrow passages between the tall medieval houses had doubled as sewers and cesspits, and it had been forbidden to empty waste into the street until the curfew bell rang at ten o’clock.

Sometimes change was for the better. Val was unlikely to forget how Edinburgh had smelled. Auld Reekie the city had been, and to Val always would be. “The Athens of the North,” they called it now.

As for progress, he conceded that gangs of apprentices, the youngest of them as little as twelve years old, no longer roamed the streets at night, to bludgeon and rob anyone unlucky enough to cross their path. Instead, factory boys had their earlobes nailed to a board if too many of the spikes they produced were bent, while in the Lothian mines young women hauled coal carts through the suffocating darkness using harnesses that twisted them into hunchbacks. Val hadn’t needed Emily to
tell him of the plight of chimneysweeps. He could hardly be unaware of the vast injustices in the world, having had more than ample time to observe them all. However, he didn’t know what he might do about such things. It had not previously occurred to him that he
should
do
something, his kind generally being exempt from any civic responsibility other than not draining away the life of one of mankind’s benefactors.

He doubted Emily would agree. Which, since Val was at the moment in huge disagreement with Emily, suited him very well.

What the devil had she been thinking, to betroth herself to Michael Ross? Oh, he knew
what
she’d been thinking, because he’d heard it clearly, and only remained uncertain whether ‘peawit’, ‘cabbagehead’, and ‘beetle-brain’ applied to her or to himself.

Val opened his front door. Why was no one standing guard? His temper soured further when Emily popped up in the stairwell like a ghost. These days, Val was somewhat sensitive on the subject of ghosts. Surely he hadn’t spent good money on that shroud of a night-rail.

She got in the first blow. “Pray tell me why in
Hades
you put it out that I’m an heiress, you— You toad!”

Val found his own mood perversely improving: Emily was fit to murder him. He scooped her up and carried her, protesting, into her room; dropped her without ceremony into the middle of the bed. Machka opened one eye, blinked, and went back to sleep.

Emily struggled upright among her pillows. “I passed
such
a charming evening, thanks to you. Have you any idea what it’s like to be besieged by lovesick swains — sick of love for my pocketbook, that is! I am extremely angry with you. Perhaps I shall scream until I am purple in the face.”

“I beg you will not.” Val seated himself on the bed’s edge, a prudent distance from her. “Think what Isidore would say.”

Emily pushed up her glasses. “Isidore informed me earlier that those who eat cherries with great persons must expect to have their eyes squirted out with the stones.
Why
did you do it, Val?”

He wasn’t certain. What had seemed a splendid notion at the time seemed remarkably wrong-headed now. “Perhaps I sought to see you comfortably bestowed?”

“Perhaps you wished to entertain yourself.” Emily pointed an accusing finger at him. “I understand you, Ravensclaw.”

Val wasn’t so lackwitted as to respond to that accusation. “Speaking of cork-brained behavior, you’re the one who’s on the verge of being leg-shackled to Michael Ross.”

“That was because—” Emily broke off.

“I know what it was because of,” retorted Val. “And it makes me fit to murder
you.
I
told you already that Lisbet is of no consequence.”

“Of no consequence, is she? So where
did
you spend the evening? Forget I asked you that, it’s none of my affair. I’m not going to marry Michael. But I wanted him to think I was. He is more likely to confide in me if he believes I’m to be his wife.”

Cezar believed Emily was using Michael Ross as a diversionary tactic, a smoke screen of sorts. Val did not. If Emily couldn’t draw out the young man, Val would take steps of his own.

She was regarding him suspiciously. “Did you flutter your lashes?” Val asked.

“And simper like a ninny? He asked if I had something in my eye.” Ruefully, she smiled. “When I said I’d marry him, poor Michael was shocked.”

Poor Michael, indeed. Within grasp of a tidy fortune, only to see it snatched away. And it
would
be snatched away. If Emily didn’t break off the betrothal, Val would do it for her.

He marveled at himself. From whence had come this dog-in-the-manger attitude? This feeling of protective possessiveness? Val could not remember when he’d last felt this way. Not for Ana, certainly; and sometime during the countless years since then, he had ceased to care. One willing body had been much like another. While he had enjoyed them all, he had also known that any interaction must be temporary, because of what he was.

Emily was broadening his horizons. Pillowy breasts and quivering thighs were all fine in their place, but eventually a man grew hungry for something different. Specifically, a stubborn, brown-eyed, redheaded termagent whom he couldn’t have. Whom he would have taken anyway, and the consequences be damned, if not for the interference of a certain ghost.

Val supposed he should be grateful to Ana. He rose and moved toward the door.

Emily looked very small perched in the middle of the bed. The sight of her would have tugged at his heartstrings, had he any, which he didn’t. At least, he wasn’t supposed to. “I apologize for my high-handedness. In the future, I promise not to act in your best interests without consulting you first.’’

Emily flushed. “I daresay I should apologize also, for calling you a toad.”

“Toad is the least of the things I have been called, elfling. Now I will bid you a good night.” He walked out of the room and softly closed the door.

Emily lay back beside Machka on the bed. She had been behaving badly, and enjoying every moment of it. Interesting, how it was so much more gratifying to misbehave than the opposite.

Ravensclaw had been in her bedchamber. They had shared a bed. At least, they had both sat upon it. Sharing a bed with Ravensclaw had put her in a much better frame of mine.

A toad, she’d called him. How ironic it all was. Aberrations had been lurking in the shadows ever since Adam’s first wife coupled with fallen angels near the Red Sea, yet humans refused to concede that supersensible beings might exist outside the pages of sensational fiction. Mankind was very good at believing what it wished.

Herself, Emily chose to believe that Ravensclaw would in time come to realize that she was his
ailalta
. She was smiling as she fell asleep.

Don’t play with the bear if you don’t want to be bit.

(Romanian proverb)

Princes Street — named for the sons of King George III after His Majesty objected to christening it after the patron saint of the city, on the grounds that St. Giles was not only patron saint of lepers but also the name of a notorious London slum — divided the Old Town from the New. Wealthy residents lived here, on the one side of the street where building was permitted: they could afford to insure nothing spoiled their panoramic view. Cezar Korzha was among those residents, his home a surprisingly plain house of three stories and a basement with a small garden behind — plain, that was, save for the conservation where he experimented with exotic plants. Stables and a coach-house were entered from a mews lane at the rear, Rose Lane to be precise, the haunt of prostitutes, and what better place for blood-drinkers to quench their thirst?

Cezar Korzha, whose current enthusiasm was cycads, an ancient group of plants that were growing when dinosaurs ruled the planet. He also had a curiosity about Gesneriaceae and Zingiberaceae. Even now he sat with his nose deep in
The Botanical Register: or, Ornamental flower-garden and shrubbery, consisting of coloured figures of plants and shrubs, cultivated in British gardens; accompanied by their history, best method of treatment in cultivation, propagation, etc.,
a golf club propped against his chair.

As always, Andrei Torok was with him. Andrei’s company was hardly more stimulating, his main interest being warfare, specifically the battle strategies of ancient China: ‘Hide the Dagger Behind a Smile’, ‘Lure Your Enemy Onto the Roof, Then Take Away the Ladder’, and ‘Tie Silk Blossoms to the Dead Tree.’

And then there was Ravensclaw, whose passion was for pleasure, and who—

What? He didn’t know.

The slender man knew none of these things, these people, and yet he did.

He stared at Cezar Korzha’s house.

Headless bodies. Corpses drained of blood.

The first had been a warning, the second a promise of things to come.

The third would test even the Stapan’s power.

How long had he lingered in the shadows? The slender man had no recollection of his arrival here.

He had forgotten many things. Others, he wished he might. The stink of blood. The impact of axe against bone.

Beyond the filled-in Nor’ Loch towered the tenements of the Old Town. On the west, Castle Hill sloped down toward Holyrood on the east.