“Who’s talking about me?” I asked.
“Can’t you guess? I’d heard you were clever.”
“I prefer not to make wild suppositions,” I replied, still feeling a ridiculous urge to get away. She reminded me a bit of Wygan, and the fear and disgust that particular vampire engendered in me was welling up in the back of my mind as I sat next to this one.
“Oh, but I don’t want to tell you. What fun would that be? It’s so much more delightful to feel you fret. Let’s play a game.”
“No.”
She snatched my hand again and twisted my wrist. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t,” she hissed. “She won’t like it. She wants it to be a surprise, but I think it’s much more fun to build the fear a bit first. I’ll be doing you a favor if I tell you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, keeping my voice steady with effort. Was she schizophrenic and referring to herself or to some other “she”? I didn’t know if vampires could be insane, since the human value for sanity wasn’t applicable to them, being human only in their outer shape and pure monster at the core.
“Of course you don’t. Not yet. And she won’t know it was me that stopped her from wrecking the Pharaohn’s plans. Oh, this will be fun! So much fun!” She was almost wiggling with excitement at whatever delight she anticipated. “Here’s a clue: The deacon of Christ Church wrote her name up and down and side to side.”
It meant nothing to me. I liked mysteries, but that sort of riddle had never been my fascination. I didn’t know where to start with it.
“No?” the vampire said, disappointed. “Oh, here’s another, then: She isn’t small so much as little.”
That was no better, but a feeling of dread was building in my guts as if some part of my brain had figured it out and wasn’t telling the rest. She wanted me to guess something that would terrify. Toying with me brought a smile to her wide-cut mouth that made me queasy by its almost sexual excitement.
She chuckled and it rolled over me like the first wave of an Arctic storm. “Now you’re thinking and you’re scared. I like that. That’s the difference between terror and horror.”
She leaned very close and I could smell her breath of dust and carrion. “Terror is the instinct that tells you to run, dear God, run,” she murmured. “Run for your life. But it just makes you into meat. Predators take the ones who run. Horror is the mind-thing, the worm of knowledge you can’t stop turning over no matter how awful it is. It grows in your mind and destroys you by your own intelligence. That’s why humans are the best prey. That is the thing that will drive you to despair if I tell you Mr. Dodgson’s little heroine does not intend to let you go.”
My heart lurched and stuttered in my chest. I wasn’t a student of British literature and I had never been crazy for fantasy books or fairy tales, but even I knew the Reverend Mr. Dodgson had been Lewis Carroll. Alice Liddell had been the model for his “little heroine.” I knew—had known—an Alice Liddell who’d looked just like the grown-up version of the photo by Dodgson in the front of The Annotated Alice. I’d seen it in a hundred bookstores. Not possible, I thought. She’s just trying to scare me, though I don’t know why—how—she’d know to pick that.
The Alice I’d known had been an ambitious vampire and tried to use me to break Edward’s power and take control of Seattle herself. She’d interfered when a contingent of vampires and I, along with Mara Danziger and Quinton, had dismantled a dangerous magical artifact and accidentally set fire to a building. She’d spied on me for Wygan. Then she’d forced me into a magical binding that stopped me from helping Edward against her so she could grab the artifact for herself. In the struggle, I’d finally given in to the Grey and survived, sealing my fate as a Greywalker. But Alice had been staked to the floor of the burning building and left behind when the rest of us barely escaped alive.
It’s not possible, I repeated to myself, but I had the awful feeling it might be. She could not have survived. But we’d never seen a body. And if anyone might hate Edward enough to come to England and ruin him, it was Alice—if she wasn’t permanently dead. Alice had been good at grudges, good at hate. If she’d escaped from the flames of the doomed building, she would hate me with red passion and black spite.
I stood up slowly and stepped away, keeping my eyes on the pale monstrosity on the bar stool. She glanced over her shoulder toward a door at the back. Then she returned her gaze to mine. She smiled so wide her fangs seemed to grow over her lip—more like the venomous hooks of a viper than the usual vampire’s. Behind her dull contact lenses, her eyes flared with orange fire.
I had to look. I raised my gaze over her shoulder and saw Alice stepping through the rear doorway. My lungs seized and I thought my heart had stopped.
Alice had changed; in the crowd and at such a distance, details were lost, but it was her. She was in the company of two men wrapped in the fire and darkness of her aura. But they couldn’t be men. They were something magical, though in the mess of swirling energies between us, I couldn’t tell what.
I backed to the front door, unable to keep the fear from rising in my chest like smoke that choked my lungs and made my head ring. Alice and her companions didn’t see me, but the pale horror in front of me did and she laughed with sickening joy.
Outside in the street, I could still hear the white vampiress laughing, and the sound raked my spine and made me shudder. I steeled myself against it, but in the end, I ran. I dashed across Clerkenwell Green and down to the Tube station. I bolted away—anywhere away from that taunting laugh. Away from the impossible vision of Alice walking through the door.
CHAPTER 24
Once again, bad dreams about Will roused me from sleep several times but they were amorphous things that couldn’t keep my sleep-addled self up for long. Considering the state of my mind when I’d returned to my hotel, it wasn’t surprising my sleep was disturbed. In the light of day, I told myself it was impossible for Alice to be walking around—she’d been burned to cinders—but I could not pretend I hadn’t seen her, and the enraptured laughter of the vampire in the club at my hor her, and the enraptured laughter of the vampire in the club at my horror drove a nail through the heart of any hope that it wasn’t true.
How? Why? What was she doing? Was she responsible for what was happening or was it a coincidence? The questions chased each other through my mind in a debilitating circle until I forced them aside. Alice wasn’t the solution to Edward’s questions, only a new facet to the problem. Even if she was causing the problem, she wasn’t doing it alone. I crawled out of bed to work out until my brain relinquished the useless panic and let me concentrate on other angles. I put my mind to the scanty information I’d gathered at Purcell’s and turned it over and over, looking for patterns, for leads and clues. When I picked them out, I concentrated on seeing where they led, not worrying about a dead vampire.
The hotel’s concierge was very helpful when it came to finding the right places to ask questions about the import duties and real estate issues I’d glimpsed at John Purcell’s.
The rents turned out to be a group of terraced houses in the suburb of Bishop’s Stortford that had been, as the agent said when I found him in his office, in the Purcell family for a donkey’s age. In fact, he couldn’t find a record of the land ever having belonged to anyone else. The same was true for the narrow house in Jerusalem Passage—land and building had been the property of a Purcell since the beginning of record keeping.
“Pro’ly back to the Romans,” the estate agent joked. It wasn’t impossible that it had been the same Purcell then, too, though it was unlikely. Vampires would have stood out a bit more back when the population was smaller. And whoever heard of a Roman named Purcell? So the land was Purcell’s own little nest egg. His kidnappers wouldn’t have cared about it if they were only interested in making trouble for Edward. They’d done nothing about his properties, which argued that Purcell’s value to them was strictly as a lever against Edward.