The Kindred of Darkness Read Online Free Page A

the Christmas rose, in a green painted tin box under her bed.
I’d better get them out, festoon the windows like some demented heroine in a penny dreadful
…
    Lock the bedroom door whose knob and hinges James had had replaced – at startling expense – with solid silver.
    All those rituals and precautions with which Dr Millward had bored everyone who came within twenty feet of him, letting them know that he never went to sleep without a wreath of garlic around his throat (his clothing reeked of it) and that he practiced three times a week, shooting moving targets with silver bullets by moonlight.
    What made us trust their word? What made us think this WOULDN’T happen in time?
    OF COURSE we trusted their word
…
    She remembered another vampire saying to her:
It’s how we hunt
…
    She wanted to put her head down on the desk and cry.
    Instead she searched through five drawers crammed with dressmakers’ bills, silk samples, sketches of other peoples’ kidneys, three half-written articles on the effects of vitamins on the endocrine system (‘I hope you publish under a pseudonym!’ Aunt Harriet had protested over dinner), a
Votes For Women
handbill that her friend Josetta Beyerly had given her and invitations to a score of parties to which she was supposed to chaperone Emily. She finally unearthed a couple of Post Office telegraph forms.
    On one she wrote the address of the hotel where James was staying in Venice.
And if he’s gone on to some secret location in the Balkans I will KILL HIM
.
    Jamie, come home at once. Grippen has done something terrible
.
    Even the bare facts would be torture to him, in the three days it would take him to reach Oxford. Grippen’s name alone – and the fact that she would wire him to return at once – would tell him that the matter was urgent.
    She looked at the other yellow form for a long time before writing anything on it. After she did, she found the teacup (and two of Mrs Grimes’ biscuits) on the desk beside her, but couldn’t remember Ellen either entering or leaving. So entangled her mind had been, with thoughts of the Undead.
    Walking corpses that drank the blood of the living. That devoured the psychic energies released by death.
    Beings who could use those energies to make people not see the fangs and the claws and the catlike, shining eyes. Who could make people trust them, or believe their promises, or lust after them with insane intensity …
    Who could read the dreams of the living, and whisper illusions into those dreams.
    Who stalked the streets of London in the dark hours when the forces of law and reason slept.
    Grippen had been a vampire since 1555. At an abstemious rate of one victim a week that was eighteen thousand dead, the mortality rate of a flood or an earthquake. Nothing that produced such carnage could be trusted.
    Should
be trusted.
    Her reason told her this.
    But after a long time, she wrote on the second sheet of paper:
Please come. I need you
.
    She folded it up, wrote on the outside:
    Don Simon Ysidro
    2, Piazza della Trinità dei Monti
    Rome

THREE
    H e was in this house.
    In her dream she saw him – a massive, pockmarked shadow – pass through the kitchen. Mrs Grimes and Tilly slumped unconscious at the scrubbed table, the tray for the servants’ evening tea between them. Bread and butter, yesterday’s cinnamon cake toasted to revive its appeal.
    Gaslight gleamed in the dark of his eyes as he passed up the stair.
    The heavy hand with nails like dirty claws on the handle of the nursery door.
    No
…
    Mrs Brock asleep on the old striped Chesterfield that had belonged to Uncle Ambrose, a tiny dress half-embroidered in her lap. Nan – plump and fair, with a sad tenderness that spoke of a child loved deeply and lost, somewhere in the past that seventeen-year-old nursery maids weren’t supposed to have … Nan in the chair beside the white-painted crib.
    Miranda