She was born in the time of one of the Georges in the north-east of England, not long before the thirteen colonies broke away from the Crown on the other side of the world. That mattered nothing to Helen Fletcher and her sister. There was a manor-house; a small village where they raised cows and red clover and wheat; woods that surrounded the path from manor to village and that flowered in beds of blossoms in spring: meadowsweet, golden creeping-jenny, pimpernel and tansy, small scented wood anemone, tufted buttercup, soft violets by pathways, birds'-eye speedwell, white campion, columbine and pink meadow-rue and ox-eye daisy. The squire's under-gardener had two daughters; the daughters grew to be maids in the house; and to matins or to spend a half-day in the village they'd pass through the trees, knowing each branch and each footfall-made path. She gathered flowers.
And the fair man came striding through the woods.
In Helen's story the gentleman came upon her quietly and surprised her to turn around and see him standing in the dappled shade of an aged oak tree: a pale man of middle height, his dress too costly for walking but untarnished by it, speaking to a maiden with her hands full of flowers and her loose hair tumbling down. For she was not so far grown as a woman that she could not seem like a girl.
Yet his intentions were honorable. She fled like a deer at the moment she could, but he was not a gentleman who ruined women like a wolf. A welcome guest of the squire who talked of philosophy and microscopic experiments with him; a man of independent fortune but scarce antecedents; a man with odd, black eyes, seeing everything before him. Even then, Helen said, he scarcely fed. He was a man of control.
And in the woods—deliberately, most like—his steps would overlap with the under-gardener's daughter, and he would speak of plants and tell her of the Linnaean names, learning from her the country knowledge and lore and where herbs of rare kind could be found. It was wrong for a maid to be seen in that manner. But the gentleman treated her with distant virtue as if she were of his class.
After the visit of the gentleman the life of the squire altered far for the worse, though the visitor had seemed all that was charming to most. His investments were overturned; a lawsuit was brought against him for an overrunning byway that had seemed settled for the past seventy-five years; and a fire broke out in his wing where he sought to replicate an experiment, depriving him of sight and right hand.
In these reversals of fortune the squire retired to a small villa with only a few servants to attend his illness and the other servants were turned to make their own way in the world. The fair gentleman offered several of the womenservants a place in London: to expand his household for his young sister and his foreign ward.
Helen named her sister as Esther, a twin, and described her as the more well-favored: more lively and outgoing, a delight to all, and the cynosure of all eyes. Ellie and Ettie, I could almost hear inside my head. Esther willingly chose to travel to the metropolis and seek a chance, the more so as the salary was fair and part given in advance; and they were alone in the world, father and mother having quietly departed several years before.
And in the city the fair gentleman with dark eyes made certain offers that did not step against the bounds of the church in essence, though so in propriety. He educated them, Helen said: offered a governess in a small private house to remedy reading and writing above the small amount learned from their first home, a music instructor, drawing-master, even a lecturer in botany. He spoke of an experiment that even girls such as they could be taught to be ladies and fit companions for gentlewomen, swearing to respect their characters.
Helen learned enough for a lady; her sister learned this and more, to play the pianoforte and sing like a lark. The facts of her life as a human were spoken as dispassionately as if read from a book about another, except when Helen mentioned this—or spoke of plants. It seemed she had kept diaries of the last part of her life.
The fair gentleman wished her to sketch the leaves of a flower with taxonomic accuracy; pronounce the Latin names; press flowers and grow different strands in windowboxes as experiments. She wished to learn of the flowers she had loved in the home woods in the village, and he arranged for her education. Often there were rides into the countryside, travelling with a hired chaperone, and these were joys to the country maid.
For what purpose? Ettie would ask, fingers dancing across a tune, Ellie placing a cut flower in a delicate china vase. Why should he continue this? Why should we not leave—I as music-teacher or singer and you as lady's maid? It starts to seem unending...
I could never feel that time ran slowly with him. For he speaks of so many things. And he is always gentle with us.
With you, and I would not begrudge it, sister. But we do not know what he wants.
One was tranquil; one curious; Jon Icarus—for that was still a name he went by then—piece by piece showed them the other world. And his dark sister, vicious and playful, though Helen used softer words for it, and the foreign princess who was his ward, began to speak with the humans.
Jon delayed a turning because vampires were frozen in their time, Helen said. He wished her to grow and learn as far as she could. But he had gathering enemies—who sometimes drank from humans. Time caught up on Helen and her sister.
You do not have to kill humans, Helen, he promised. Long ago I learned we can survive on animal blood. You may feel differently once you learn our hungers, and neither for that will I blame you.
It is sinful to live on another's death.
Religion is childish superstition, he chided. People have mistaken my sister for a goddess.
The books you have given do nothing to shake my faith, and much to teach me of it, Jon. If I am to be yours I will murder no human.
He offered her immortality, power, beauty. He made it clear that he would not abandon her to the ravages of time. Or to any of his kind. He brought her to a church and wed her in the tradition of her faith, and swore to keep every word that he avowed and more.
He tried to change the sisters both. Their blood seemed potent and identically so. He did nothing like his past experiments on Adelaide to alter either Helen or her sister; only did what he could to ensure their survival of the process.
"It is agony, an agony that few can bear, and after it passes the old life is a tangled dream through a dark mirror," Helen said. "Only then do you learn what it truly means. My twin was taken and I was left.
"I threw away my human life and gave her death. And though I rose with a gift I abused it in a test on a red-eyed one."
The one with the lump of flesh and wriggling vine: once he was a predator and before that human. Trees bent and flowers bloomed to Helen's will when she rose from death, a power far stronger than her human life. Her sister's silvered voice was silent in a true grave. She did not try to excuse herself for conducting the experiment.
"Then we travelled, Jon and I and the others," she said: in Monty's tale it was Jon Cullen and his three brides. "We crossed the ocean to the west coast of the Americas, to live isolated from humans and temptation, where the only supernatural creatures in the territory lived to protect humans. We made certain that we could live without human blood. It was peaceful here. It is better not to kill. The mind is taught to think of more than food.
"When there is no human life left to live. When we live lightly on human ground. Veronica did not throw away her human life: she was to be executed. Antony and Killigan would have died in war. Alora suffered as cruelly as humans can cause. I did wrong to accept the change."
"Jon and Bodhi."
"Their story is older and is their own." Helen's face closed across itself, smooth as marble. "Jon treats me gently. He has never fed on human blood since we wed."
She swore to obey him. People did at the time.
"You urge me not to try joining you."
Helen pressed one of my hands, lightly and gently for stone. "Yes. A human life and soul has worth. There will come a time when a way will show itself. Have faith."
Never in her. My cheek touched the coronet of hair bound closely around her head, strands of fine cold wire.
"You are kind," I lied to her.
Water streamed from above and Helen waited somewhere outside. Steam fogged the glass door on the inside, the air heavy and wet, almost thick enough that patterns of clean air could have been drawn in the fog like a finger tracing a line on frosted glass. I wasted water.
You could picture a girl with loose red-gold hair and flowers in her hands, in a meadow with close-set spring trees and soft-eyed cows like a postcard. That cow, Bodhi would say. It meant that she thought the same of all humans. And in slaughterhouses some were gentle to cattle before knocking them on the skull and slitting their throats, and some cruel.
I was clean—red-skinned with hot water, scrubbed with soap. It was a human who invented plumbing. The room was empty beyond the glass. Sterile as Jon seemed and sealed without windows. Bare-scrubbed white ceiling—was it Helen who cleaned?—and inset mirror and metallic fittings.
Plenty of destructive possibility but few of escape. Fog blurred my sight. Steam-fog, nothing like that dust. Most of the long dark scabs were slowly mending, soft after the water soaked them, though the mark that Adelaide left on my back twinged each time I shifted too quickly. I leaned back against the clean tiles. I knew how it ended and couldn't—
Human but not quite helpless. The main door opened.
It was oddly satisfying to think that they too could touch dirt and walk away with it on their hands. The heavy, smooth footfall was Antony's—like a locker room at school. Easy enough to tell from his shape behind grey shadows. I reached for a towel.
The fog soon cleared; he wasn't what a human would call dirty, slightly grass-stained, rain-damp, cuffs of his sweater disarranged. I looked away quickly.
Not enough.
"...and some of you refer to us as leeches."
You follow the rules of not looking, get the clothes, and dress again as quickly as you can.
He didn't let it go. "You will listen when spoken to, human." His eyes seemed dark and impatient in his face. Not such a dramatic color on him as Bodhi or Jon. He strode forward.
"Helen sent you?" Once Veronica played scavenger hunt for your pieces and I know it.
"Hardly. Do we need an excuse to walk in our home? Your kind never knows your place."
Antony was taller than the others, but broad enough to look squat. Deepset eyes below long thick brows, a straight flat-boned nose running through his sallow face, a rounded chin poking forward. Not to be provoked any more than some school bully.
The sleeves of Alora's shirt were glossy and slightly awkward. I reached for buttons, sitting on a bench from the wall. "You dislike humans but don't eat them. Curious."
He didn't move: his face was inhumanly still and I realized he did not bother to blink. "You may have noticed that female Adelaide selected. That is the sort that the nomads of our kind are driven to consume. Street harlots, drug fiends, and feeble-minded beggars. The worthless among you."
That shouldn't be enough. The water had reddened the scabs and the skin as if angry. It snapped quickly out. "So you'd rather eat the President?"
"A foolish jest." His mouth thickened over itself in anger. "Besides, I consider the alleged government of the union illegitimate. I do not eat those beneath me—I have killed brutes in human form and allowed none of their blood to touch my mouth. But my record is not so clear as Helen's. I have drunk, twice, when Veronica instructed me to know what I lay aside." He leaned over me; I tried to look away.
You will get out of here. Get out, get out, get out. Shirt, trousers, belt.
"Very generous of her."
"Yes," he said, and it didn't seem he'd caught a trace of sarcasm. Veronica was beautiful like a statue and had a keen quick mind like a knife, but away from her glamor for me it was akin to remembering a wooden sculptured figure in a park. Antony spoke of her the way some people speak of their gods. "It sates a hunger but makes us less than what we are. Dependence on humans is a weakness. There is nothing you have that we cannot better on a whim. Veronica took me from the fires of battle and gave me a gift.
"There is nothing," he repeated, but leaned too close. A hand struck the skin on my neck—too cold, too solid— "But that you are warm."
I jerked away. He held on; he could have held on more, fingers pressing into soft skin of neck and chest. There was a flash of white teeth in a face too close, whitened by a liquid that flowed over them, cold sickly-sweet breath blowing by my face— I fled and the hands stopped touching me.
"I expected as much," I thought I heard him say. The tiles were slippery as I ran.
"You seem startled." Helen grabbed me by the shoulder—again—and looked into my face, pale gold-eyed. Light from a window behind her gave a time as daylight. "You can tell me."
"Am I warm?" She released me when I moved. "Too warm? Too much blood? Breaking down a cow? Tracing a—tracing the wrong thing? I can't—"
Helen placed a cold hand on my forehead, ghosting across the skin. "You should not be fevered. I can't feel if so."
"No. I don't think I am. Don't touch me." She stood like a statue in the way, calm ice. She'd block me from running past her or catch up trying to run back. She kept standing around me. Water started running again from behind.
She lies. She'll always lie.
"Then come back and rest. You're not even dry." Wet drops fell behind my neck. "I can give you something for calmness. Jon will see you soon..."
Please don't.
"Not now. I don't feel—well enough to talk with him. I don't want to help him. Are you going to send me to him? He's—cold, you must know how cold he is—"
"Has Jon ever harmed you?" Helen said steadily. As far as it went that was true—but I didn't need to name the other ones; had she known of the others when she'd changed—? "He is a doctor. He is curious about you, but you will not be hurt."
She'd sit down with me and wipe a salve around the scabs, coolly and distantly, touching but never as a human would. There were no bruises.
"He has told the children not to distress you," Helen said. "Bodhi can be...impulsive, Antony proud; Alora as impulsive in her way. We are not human but we have some common points with you..."
If her face blurred then she seemed almost human, but look at her the right way and take note of her strange symmetry, ageless and unblemished and a grave inside. She tried fragile as colored paper to pretend to be otherwise.
"Oh, I'm starting to know them," I said.
And sounds and metallic creaks ate into the night like cockroaches feasting and clicking over their legs. I sat up and tried not to sleep. When I felt where Adelaide had kicked the skin was heavy. I'd seen it reflected in a mirror only afterwards, after Jon had touched it: loose flaps of cleaned skin running down like a flayed knot. It wasn't charity that she had not broken bones or kicked deeper, splitting stomach and liver apart like rotting tomatoes.
Jon Cullen, Jon Cold-one, Jon Icarus, Jon the wax-winged monster.
Jon ground Perdita to dust.
Nobody said that in so many words. Alora, in the car, There are things you must tell, Jon. The white dust here with the others.
One tested for mental limits, one for physical, and the third for Helen's gift.
Something made of crystallized white bone like a pepper grinder, for their own bodies were capable of cutting each other open.
Most people in the town seemed to like him. Helen did. He was softer to her. He restrained himself—controlled like ice so frozen that cold steamed from him. And restrained Bodhi. Brother and sister. After Adelaide came Alora.
Grind them to death and they could not die.
Adelaide was not the reason why I was frightened of Jon Cullen.
I slammed a shoulder into where the door hinge should be, the thin line best visible to touch rather than sight. Joints were always vulnerable.
It didn't budge.
I leaned against the wall. Tired. Helen had made a milky tea.
That was bad. That could be very bad. Calm, cool, clear, collected—tired—if coldness was wanted Jon Cullen had more than enough of that—
And if brute force was the answer then Bodhi or any of the others could break out here if they wanted to—
Sitting and waiting for him was wrong. It didn't matter if Helen meant a vampire's soon. Fight it as long as you can even in the dark.
Press your fingers over your eyelids and they spark false light no matter how black it is.
"Hey, freak." Bodhi shouldered in the door and did not wake me with a kick. Keys jingled in her right hand. "Wanna blow this joint?"
—