“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, exactly. Archie just sees some visitors coming soon. They know we’re here, and they’re curious.”
“Visitors?”
“Yes… like us, but not. Their hunting habits are not like ours, I mean. They probably won’t come into town at all, but I won’t be letting you out of my sight till they’re gone.”
“Wow. Shouldn’t we… I mean, is there a way to warn people?”
Her face was serious and sad. “Carine will ask them not to hunt nearby, as a courtesy, and most likely they won’t have a problem with that. But we can’t do more, for a variety of reasons.” She sighed. “They won’t be hunting here, but they’ll be hunting somewhere. That’s just how things are when you live in a world with monsters.”
I shivered.
“Finally, a rational response,” she murmured. “I was beginning to think you had no sense of self-preservation at all.”
I let that one pass, looking away, my eyes wandering again around the big white room.
“It’s not what you expected, is it?” she asked, and her voice was amused again.
“No,” I admitted.
“No coffins, no piled skulls in the corners; I don’t even think we have cobwebs… what a disappointment this must be for you.”
I ignored her teasing. “I didn’t expect it to be so light and so… open.”
She was more serious when she answered. “It’s the one place we never have to hide.”
My song drifted to an end, the final chords shifting to a more melancholy key. The last note lingered for a long moment, and something about the sound of that single note was so sad that a lump formed in my throat.
I cleared it out, then said, “Thank you.”
It seemed like the music had affected her, too. She stared searchingly at me for a long moment, and then she shook her head and sighed.
“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” she asked.
“Will there be piled skulls in any corners?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Well, okay, but my expectations are pretty low now.”
We walked up the wide staircase hand in hand. My free hand trailed along the satin-smooth rail. The hall at the top of the stairs was paneled in wood the same pale color as the floorboards.
She gestured as we passed the doors. “Royal and Eleanor’s room… Carine’s office… Archie’s room…”
She would have continued, but I stopped dead at the end of the hall, staring with raised eyebrows at the ornament hanging on the wall above my head. Edythe laughed at my expression.
“Ironic, I know,” she said.
“It must be very old,” I guessed. I kind of wanted to touch it, to see if the dark patina was as silky as it looked, but I could tell it was pretty valuable.
She shrugged. “Early sixteen-thirties, more or less.”
I looked away from the cross to stare at her.
“Why do you have this here?”
“Nostalgia. It belonged to Carine’s father.”
“He collected antiques?”
“No. He carved this himself. It hung on the wall above the pulpit in the vicarage where he preached.”
I turned back to stare at the cross while I did the mental math. The cross was over three hundred and seventy years old. The silence stretched on as I struggled to wrap my mind around the concept of so many years.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“How old is Carine?” I asked quietly, still staring up.
“She just celebrated her three hundred and sixty-second birthday,” Edythe said. She watched my expression carefully as she continued, and I tried to pull it together. “Carine was born in London in the sixteen-forties, she believes. Time wasn’t marked as accurately then, for the common people anyway. It was just before Cromwell’s rule, though.”
The name pulled up a few disjointed facts in my head, from a World History class I’d had last year. I should have paid more attention.
“She was the only daughter of an Anglican pastor. Her mother died in childbirth. Her father was… a hard man. Driven. He believed very strongly in the reality of evil. He led hunts for witches, werewolves… and vampires.”
It was strange how the word shifted things, made the story sound less like a history lesson.
“They burned a lot of innocent people—of course, the real creatures that he sought were not so easy to catch.
“Carine did what she could to protect those innocents. She was always a believer in the scientific method, and she tried to convince her father to look past superstition to true evidence. He discouraged her involvement. He did love her, and those who defended monsters were often lumped in with them.
“Her father was persistent… and obsessive. Against the odds, he tracked some evidence of real monsters. Carine begged him to be careful, and he listened, to an extent. Rather than charge in blindly, he waited and watched for a long time. He spied on a coven of true vampires who lived in the city sewers, only coming out by night to hunt. In those days, when monsters were not just myths and legends, that was the way many lived.
“His people gathered their pitchforks and torches, of course”—she laughed darkly—“and waited where the pastor had seen the monsters exit into the street. There were two access points. The pastor and a few of his men poured a vat of burning pitch into one, while the others waited beside the second for the monsters to emerge.”