Acquainted With the Night (9781101546000) Read Online Free Page B

handful of syringes and bent closer to the girl. While he drained her, he couldn’t decide if he should sell the blood or add it to his private collection.
    Keep it, mate , he told himself. Keep the lot of it.

CHAPTER 3
    HEATHROW AIRPORT, TERMINAL FIVE
LONDON, ENGLAND
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    Caro walked past the gated shops in Terminal Five, wasting time until the duty-free boutique opened. She’d forgotten to pack a hairbrush, and if her curls were allowed free rein, they’d weave together of their own accord, hardening into woolly knots, and she’d have little choice but to shave her head.
    She walked under paper globes that hung from the ceiling. Way off in the distance, a baby cried and cried.
    Tears burned the backs of her eyes as she drifted down the sunlit corridor. The Harrods window display caught her attention. A Portmeirion tea set had been arranged on a spill of green velvet, each cup showing a different British flower. These same dishes were in her uncle’s Oxford kitchen, lined up in the Welsh cupboard.
    Her eyes filled and she pressed her fingertips against the glass. When she was five years old, thieves had set fire to her family’s home in Crab Orchard, Tennessee. An elderly couple had found her wandering on Millstone Gap Road, and they’d driven her to a hospital. Caro was suffering from smoke inhalation, a third-degree burn on her hand, and singed hair. The next day, a man in a brown fedora showed up at the hospital. He had a barrel chest and red cheeks, and he spoke with a strange accent.
    â€œI’m your uncle Nigel,” he said. “Well, technically I’m your third cousin, but let’s dispense with the proprieties, shall we?”
    He checked her out of the hospital, pausing to steal her medical chart from the nurses’ station. The uncle had explained that all traces of her had to vanish. “Or those bad men’ll get me?” Caro asked, blinking back tears. She wiped her bandaged hand over her eyes.
    â€œNot on your nelly,” Uncle Nigel said.
    They drove to New Orleans and somehow he’d obtained a new passport for Caro without producing her birth certificate. The next day they’d flown to England and made their way to a cozy, book-lined house in Oxford, then he’d tucked her into a poster bed in the guest room. Caro had tried to sleep, but a striped cat had leaped onto her chest and begun kneading, its claws tugging the wool blanket.
    Tears pricked Caro’s eyes as she remembered her old house in Tennessee—a white clapboard with green shutters, deep porches, and a flying pig weathervane. Their driveway had a gate that ran on solar power and no one could pass through without a code—or so they’d thought. She remembered limestone, black dirt, coal mines, copperheads, biscuits, syrup running down the blade of a silver knife. Her mother had painted an Alice in Wonderland mural in the nursery. Clocks, chess pieces, the Caterpillar’s mushroom, a croquet game with hedgehogs and flamingos. Now everything was gone; the white house had burned.
    The next day, Caro and her uncle took the train to London and went shopping at Harrods. They stepped onto the Egyptian Escalator, and her uncle steadied her when her bandaged hand skidded on the rail. In Toyland, her uncle bought her a Paddington Bear, and then they drifted over to the Georgian Restaurant, where a man in a tuxedo led them past tea carts that overflowed with tiny cakes and lemon tarts, to a table in the center of the room. Their waiter’s head reminded Caro of a giant volleyball, white and round, with fine black hairs combed just so. He recommended the high tea, twenty-four pounds per person; a glass of champagne added nine additional pounds.
    Caro sucked her bottom lip, trying to understand how one drink could cause a sudden weight gain. Her mother, Vivi, had often served champagne and she hadn’t grown or shrunk.
    â€œAnd what for the lass?” The waiter smiled.