She Dies at the End (November Snow #1) (18 page)

“That’s a stereotype we have of humans, especially young ones.  We think you’re all about the histrionics,” Zinnia confessed.

“Histrionics got me committed.  I go for hiding my feelings as much as possible,” November replied.

“That sounds healthy,” Zinnia commented sarcastically, finally managing to provoke a snort of laughter from her friend.

  “Who all in the house knows what happened?  Who knows about Lady Esther?” November asked.  What she meant to ask, of course, was how mortified should she be and how much would she need to lie about what had occurred?

“Everyone, I think, knows that your apparent romance is over, but not everyone knows why.  I think the cover story is that you weren’t fast enough about jumping into his bed and he got tired of waiting.”  November made a face, but at least that story made him the bad guy instead of her, and discouraged others from thinking she was easy prey.  “Lord William is still trying to keep Lady Esther’s condition secret, but that may be impossible now.  Since the person who planted her necklace seems to know, it’s evidently not much of a secret.”

“How long have they been married?” November asked, torturing herself a little.

“Um . . . about 500 years, on and off,” Zinnia responded.

“On and off?”  This new information only made November feel even more silly for her infatuation with Lord William.  How could anyone compete with 500 years worth of love and trust and knowledge, a continuing marriage that had already lasted half a millennium?

“They had a few rough patches, I heard.  Not uncommon, really, when you’re married for centuries.  It’s been about 70 years since they were last separated.”  Zinnia paused before adding, “The last time was when he made Agnes.  It was after they reconciled that Agnes ran off with Philemon.”

“Oh.  Wow.”  November suddenly had a lot more sympathy for Lord William’s wayward daughter.  She was amazed at William’s level of emotional cluelessness.

“Yeah.  I think Lord William feels pretty guilty about it.  I suspect that’s why he’s never really tried to hunt her down, despite her frequent provocations,” Zinnia said quietly.

“Is that why he hunts mostly animals?  Was that over Agnes?” November asked.  She’d been wondering about that.  He seemed perfectly happy to drink her blood, but Philemon and Dogwood had made fun of him for drinking animals’ blood, which implied that this was a well-know eccentricity of his.

“That, I’m afraid, is a bit more complicated,” Lord William said, appearing suddenly in the doorway.  Zinnia jumped up, chagrinned at being caught out gossiping about the boss.  November just sighed. 
That super speedy, sneaking-up-on-me thing is getting really old.

“Give us the room, please, Zin,” he said, and her friend looked to November to make sure she was okay before high-tailing it.

Lord William turned the desk chair around and sat facing her with his arms crossed over the back of the chair.  “I wanted to make sure you were alright, and to thank you for your work today.”  He took a breath.  “I am especially appreciative given how I have wronged you.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll get over it,” she replied frostily, ignoring the ache in her chest from being so close to him.  She willed herself to hide her sadness.  “As for the work, I don’t do the work for you.  I was never doing it for you.  You never had to go through that ridiculous charade,” she continued, with a little more heat.

“I can see that now,” he said, accepting her criticism without comment.  “I am not used to trusting humans with such important things.  I am also not used to having to take human feelings seriously.  But it is evident to all of us that you are not dissembling or holding back information.  We can tell when mortals lie, and you are no liar.”  He was quiet for a moment before adding, “If not for me, then why?  We kidnapped you and won't let you leave.  We are practically strangers to you.  A month ago, you didn’t know us.”

“That’s not exactly true.  I knew that once day we’d be comrades of some sort, since you were at my pseudo-funeral.  I do the work for the dead and the people who love them, and for the people who might be saved.  I do the work because for the first time my gift actually matters for something important.  My whole life, I have had to look the other way when I saw bad futures for people, because there was no way for me to save them.”

November was struggling to articulate something she was only herself beginning to be fully aware of.  She’d been asking herself for weeks why she cared so much about this work, these people.  “People almost never believed me.  I had to learn not to care.  But now, someone is doing something horrible to people, and my gift might actually be able to make some positive difference.  I’ve always wondered why I have been cursed with this ability when it’s never done anybody any good, least of all me.  I want all I’ve suffered from being born like this to finally be worth something.  Now all those years of pain have meaning.  Nobody wants their pain to mean nothing.  Even Luka knows that.  That’s how he gets people to blow themselves up.”

  “He has always been good at taking advantage,” he agreed.

“Evidently it’s a family trait,” she replied bitterly.  “Bu at least it appears that your cause is just rather than evil.  If I find out that it isn't, you will wish you'd never found me," she vowed with a vehemence that surprised them both.

“I will bear that in mind.  And I will miss our . . . whatever it was,” William admitted quietly.

“We’ll both just have to find other ways to amuse ourselves,” she said, turning cold again to conceal her heart.

“I was never laughing at you, for what it’s worth,” he replied.

“So why is it?” she asked, ignoring this thread, desperate to change the subject.  "Why do you mostly drink animal blood?  You didn’t seem to have any trouble drinking mine.”

“Everyone assumes that it is because I am too soft-hearted toward humans,” he said with a little smile.  “They call me a self-hating vampire, a sorry excuse for a predator.  The truth is, I’m terrible at enthralling.  It’s rather embarrassing, and it has made it difficult for me to survive this long without betraying our secret.  Vampires that defective usually die young.  Or are culled,” he added darkly.

November gulped before asking, “But you enthralled my mother, didn’t you?  I saw you.”

“Her mind was weakened by years of drug abuse,” he explained.  “It was easy to make her forget, and any damage I did would be written off as due to her habit.  And I despised her, so I didn’t care about harming her,” he admitted matter-of-factly.  “Most of the time, if I bite a human and enthrall her to make her forget, or to make her serve me and keep our secret, she goes back to her daytime life noticeably mad.  In addition to the ethical issues this might pose, accumulating crazy humans near my residence would not do anything good for our secrecy. The only other option is to always kill my prey, but accumulating bodies is also . . . problematic.”  He shrugged.

“I should think so,” she scolded.  It always unnerved her, this cold vampire practicality about death, though probably not as much as it would have were she any kind of normal human being.

“You, of course, already know of our existence and cannot be enthralled.  You will eventually become one of us, it seems, and in any case you are in our possession, so my deficiency presented no obstacle to consuming your blood.”

“How convenient for you,” she said, drily, not particularly enjoying being described as in anyone’s possession.

“Yes, well . . .” he replied awkwardly, clearing his throat before continuing.  “Because of these difficulties, generally, I only bite criminals who won’t be missed and whose death will cause no surprise due to the plethora of people who wish them dead, and even them I take only rarely.  A few people know of my difficulty: my father, my sister, my wife.  Sometimes we will feed together so one of them can assist me.  But most of the time, it’s simply less trouble to hunt animals.  And, very rarely, if I find a human interesting enough to turn, I will feed on her for a time until she becomes one of us.”

“Is that what happened with Agnes?” she asked, her face and voice carefully blank.

“In essence,” he replied with a sigh.  “I thought I loved her.  It turned out that I loved my wife more, and that fact destroyed my progeny.  And, as I said, she did not have the temperament to make a good transition to our life.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

He nodded.  “I suppose you actually are.  Most people in your position would not be so sympathetic.”

“You are lucky that I have a forgiving turn of mind,” she said, managing a brief, cold smile.

“Indeed, I am,” he said gravely.  He stood.  “I should let you have some peace.  You look exhausted.”  His eyes went briefly to her neck, and he opened his mouth to offer her a dreamless sleep.

“Don’t say it.  Don’t even think about it,” November said, cutting him off, denying herself a comfort that would only accentuate her pain. 

“Of course,” he said nodding.  He halted, seemingly debating with himself before sharing his next words.  “I must ask that you do not allow anyone else to bite you.  It would undermine my authority and might be dangerous to you.”

“Yes, I figured that out already.  People still need to see me as your human right now, even though we’re not . . . whatever,” she answered, rolling her eyes.  “And we still don’t know who the spy is, and the last thing I need to do is accidentally exchange blood with whoever that is.  I’m not an idiot, you know,” she added with pointed irritation.

“Yes, I figured that out already,” he replied with a small smile.  And with that, he left November alone, with only her visions and breakup music for company.

November slept fitfully, waking up again and again, tangled in her sheets, chased by bad dreams and visions all in a jumble.  She felt trapped: trapped in the house whose grounds she hadn’t left once in nearly a month, trapped in her apparent future as a vampire, trapped in this spider web of centuries-old plots spun by cruel strangers.  For a few weeks, her infatuation with William had provided enough distraction for her to put out of her mind the fact that someone in this house was working for the enemy and intended her harm.  No longer possessing that luxury, she found that she was afraid.  She feared being taken, hurt, forced to help Luka do bad things.  She feared failing in the use of her gift to help win this fight.  She feared that when death changed her into a new creature, she would become a monster.  She feared finding out the identity of the mole and the pain that discovery might cause, but she feared even more continuing to live with the viper in her nest. 

It was afternoon before she finally fell asleep, so she was still dozing when dusk came.   She was finally up and brushing her teeth, still in her nightgown, when Pine and Greg fairly flew into her room without so much as a knock on the door.  That was the first indication that something was seriously wrong.  The second sign came when Pine threw her over his shoulder as Greg moved faster than she could see, clearing her room in a whirl and hiding all obvious evidence of her existence.  Previously unknown to her was a false wall in the back of her closet.  It concealed a cubby into which Greg tossed all her personal belongings.

Pine rushed her out the door with Greg hot on his heels, moving so quickly that November closed her eyes tight with instinctive fear, her breath frozen in her throat.  Her fairy bodyguard threw open the door to the linen closet down the hall and revealed a hidden trapdoor in the floor. He then murmured, “We’re going through the chase.  Don’t scream,” and dropped dozens of feet straight down, landing lightly on his toes.  And scream she certainly would have, had she possessed any ability to draw air into her lungs.  Pine barely paused before racing along a barely lit, narrow hallway, Greg following close behind.  Down a few more ladders they went, emerging finally into a slightly wider but similarly ill-lit passageway.

November realized then that they were in the escape tunnel she’d intuited the existence of on her first day in the house.  As they ran, November caught a glimpse of someone else in the passageway, running quickly and silently ahead of them.  They finally came to a small room whose hidden door Greg secured firmly behind them, turning on the room’s dim light only after the three of them were sealed in the underground tomb.  The whole race had taken perhaps 15 seconds.

“Welcome to our bolt-hole,” Pine said quietly as he lowered her gently to the floor.  “We’re about 20 feet underneath the gazebo, if you’re wondering.”  Her knees buckled as soon as her feet touched the ground, and she wound up half in his lap.  The two men helped her sit with her back against the wall, and she looked up at them in mute confusion, shaking with equal parts adrenaline, fear, and cold. 

She was barefoot, wearing only a cotton nightgown that barely came to her knees and left her arms bare, and it was about 20 degrees colder down here than it was in her room.  Greg took off the jacket of his suit and draped it over her, bringing a whispered, “Thanks,” out of the trembling teenager who still could not process the fact that she was no longer in her bathroom.  She was too freaked out to catch any visions off of the blazer, which she supposed was rather a mercy.  She looked down and realized that her toothbrush was still clutched tightly in her hand.  Greg gently peeled her fingers away from it, and she let it fall to the ground.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be safe in here.  It’ll only be for a little while, until the police leave,” Pine said in a reassuring tone that did not quite jive with the rather dramatic sprint they had just completed.

“Police?” she managed.

Greg explained, “They found the body of one of the women who works for the cleaning crew we use, a woman by the name of Carly.  They think she was killed the day before yesterday, the same day she was here to clean our house.  So, they’re here as a matter of routine.”

November closed her eyes, sad to learn that her fears about the maid were correct, horrified to hear that another innocent had died over her gift.  It also occurred to her that she should probably be careful how she reacted and what she revealed.  She did not know if the two men guarding her had been brought into the loop with respect to Esther’s planted necklace.  She sighed inwardly.  She was not cut out for this cloak and dagger nonsense. 

“William asked us to hide you until they depart.  He didn’t want them interviewing you,” Greg continued.

“He thought they might wonder why a barely-eighteen-year-old girl with a missing mom and no I.D. was living in his house?” she asked.

“Pretty much,” Greg answered.  Something in his voice convinced her that there was more to the story.

“What else?”  The men were silent, avoiding her eyes.  “Spill it,” she ordered, her irritation finally subduing her fear.

They looked at each other, and Pine took a deep breath before admitting, “Someone sent in a tip to the police and the newspapers about 10 days ago saying that there was a runaway girl by the name of November living in Oakland.  The individual described you, said they feared you might be a victim of human trafficking.  They supplied a photo, which has been all over the news, in the papers, on the internet.  Best we can tell, this was all done over e-mail, from a local coffee shop with free wifi.”

Now that was a rather unexpected piece of information for the flustered young woman to take in.
Holy. Cow
. “For serious?  And no one bothered to tell me?”  Irritation bloomed anew.  “You know, I’m getting really tired of being the last person informed about things affecting my life.”  The men held a guilty silence before November continued, “Who would do that?  The only friend I have from the carnival doesn’t even know how to use a computer.”

“Presumably the same people who are looking to kidnap you,” Pine answered.  “This way, if you go anywhere off these grounds, you run the risk of being recognized by someone or picked up by police.  That would help the enemy to find you and get their hands on you.  Now half the state of California has their eyes looking for you, along with their phone cameras.  Quite the force multiplier.  It’s pretty clever, actually.  Of course, involving human authorities in an internal dispute of our realm is both illegal and very taboo.  I think our spy is getting pretty desperate, which, of course, makes things more dangerous.”

“That’s a tad alarming,” November said flatly.  She was even more trapped than she had realized.  Here was a good reason to be happy that she had not run away when she had found out about William’s wife and his deceit. 
I would have run straight into the spy’s trap no matter where I had gone, thanks to the mole’s little media blitz
.  “But if it was the spy who did it, then why not go all the way and tell the cops that I’m in this house?”

“Actually, we think he or she may have done just that,” Pine confessed further.  “We have spotted people watching the gate.  Humans, plainclothes police.  An anonymous tip wasn’t enough to get them a warrant, especially for the home of someone like Lord William.  He contributes a lot of money to a lot of important peoples’ political campaigns.  Throw in a dead housekeeper, though, and now they have enough to get inside the house.”  November shuddered, prompting Pine to turn to her and say, “Hey, it’s going to be alright.  They’re not going to get anywhere near you with Greg and me around, okay?”

November nodded, feeling silly that she was afraid of the police when evil supernatural creatures were out to get her.  After all, her own father had been a policeman.  When she had been very small, she’d loved her father’s uniform.  She would sit on his lap and play with his badge.  Her innate affection for police had lasted until the day they had been called to her mother’s residence because the neighbors had heard November screaming from inside the trunk of the broken-down car in the yard.  This fateful day had occurred a few months after her grandmother’s death, and her drug-addled remaining parent had not exactly risen to the occasion of renewed motherhood.

At first, the child had been grateful for the rescue.  It had been ninety degrees that day, and she had been roasting alive.  But once the social worker had arrived and the police had dragged her away, screaming in fear at being separated from her only family, her feelings had begun to change.  Subsequent encounters with law enforcement hadn’t been much more pleasant, always charged with the anxiety that her mother would end up in jail again and that November would go back into the system.  November knew intellectually that the officers had been trying to help her, but still she still assigned them some of the blame for her years-long hospitalization, and she had developed an instinctive fear of them, their sirens, their weapons, and their power to disrupt a person’s whole world. 

“Well, let’s hope that we’ll be able to get some info about Carly’s murder that will help us identify the traitor in our midst,” Greg said after a brief silence.  “There’s a fairy lieutenant in the police department, so he should be able to be of some help.”

November tried to focus on Greg’s words rather than on her anxiety and her frozen toes.  It made November feel a little better, having something practical to think about while they were stuck in that dark room.  “My examining the body is obviously out of the question, but maybe we could get hold of a personal object of hers?  I might be able to see who killed her,” she offered.

“We’ll discuss this with Lord William after the police leave,” Pine promised.

As she calmed down, a thought occurred to her.  “Who was that in the chase?  Running ahead of us?” she asked.

“There was no one in front of us, child,” Greg replied with a raised eyebrow.  “Was it a vision?”

“Maybe.” 
Or perhaps it was just the stress and a trick of the light.  Right now, I don't even care.

They settled in to wait.  November tried to relax, closing her eyes and snuggling down underneath Greg’s jacket.  In spite of the vampire’s chivalry and the impressive heat generated by the fairy, November felt terribly cold.  She hated being cold.  Their house in the winter had always been cold.  Her nose was running from the chill, and soon she began to shiver.

When the light went out to protect its battery, she hit her limit.  Claustrophobia, cold, fear, hunger, and lack of sleep combined to be more than she could handle.  Tears began rolling down her face as she tried without success to keep her breathing even, tried to keep her companions from noticing her distress.  With their acute senses, of course, this was impossible.  “Hey,” Pine said softly.  “Let me try to warm you up, okay?” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder.  November startled at the touch despite how desperate she was to no longer be cold.  “I’m not going to try anything.  I’m not going to hurt you.  But you need to get warm.  I didn’t realize how chilly it was down here.  We should have planned for that.”

As the fairy pulled her onto his lap and began rubbing her hands between his own, November did her best to keep her blinders on.  She let the fragments of Pine’s life pile up around her without picking any of them up.  The last thing she wanted right then was to have a vision.  Once the blood had come back into her hands, she curled up against Pine with her head on his shoulder, and Greg gave her his socks to put on and readjusted his blazer to cover her again.  She was still crying a little, and she was sure she looked ridiculous, but at least she wasn’t quite so cold.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Greg asked gently.  “It’s okay if you don’t.”

She was silent for several minutes before everything came out in a flood.  She told them of her fear of enclosed spaces, her anxiety about the mole in the house, her terror of getting kidnapped again, her anger at Lord William’s deceit, her rage at being kept in the dark about everything all the time, especially this missing person nonsense.  She spoke of her guilt over her mother’s murder, and Carly’s, and even the deaths of the fairies from the gas station.  She described how trapped she felt, trapped in her life and in this house and by her gift, the feeling so reminiscent of how she used to feel locked up in that awful hospital in Idaho.  By the time she finished, the tears were gone, and she did feel a little bit better if seriously embarrassed about losing her composure.

It seemed like they were trapped in there forever.  In truth, about three hours passed before Lord William arrived to give them the all clear.  She looked at him balefully and said nothing as she began to trudge back down the long passageway to the house proper.  He tried to apologize for neglecting to keep her informed about her newly minted fame as a missing person, but she just shook her head and kept walking.

The ladders presented a bit of a problem.  She absolutely refused to have the men in a position to look up her nightdress, but they for their part did not want to let her climb up behind them in case she were to fall.  In the end, she had to compromise and allow herself to be carried, as it was marginally less mortifying than the alternative.  This indignity did nothing to improve her black mood.

Once they emerged from the linen closet, she turned to them and thanked Pine and Greg for their help and suggested that next time they bring a goddamned blanket along. She then informed them all that she required an hour to get herself together before she wanted to exchange another word with anyone.  She stalked down the hall to her room and propped a chair under the doorknob as a makeshift lock, fully aware of the futility of that measure but angry enough not to care.