Lady Killer Read online

  Or supposed to be. He had been killed three years earlier, shot down in broad daylight as he tried to escape pursuit by stealing a boat and making off down the Thames. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw the first shot go into his thigh, saw him waver, and then watched as the second shot went directly into his heart. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw him look toward his assassin with surprise, saw him stretch his throat to yell, “You’ll be sorry Dearbourn,” and saw him fall backward into the swirling rapids of the Thames at the base of London Bridge. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw the body pelted against the strong supports of the bridge once, twice, three times, until it was sucked into the powerful vortex of the river and disappeared entirely. No one had ever survived a fall that close to the bridge’s supports—even the most seasoned boatmen avoided the rapids at all cost—but the river was dredged religiously anyway, for three months, without a sign of the vampire’s body. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens swore that the vampire was dead and the entire city of London rejoiced.

  But Clio knew something that the Upstanding Citizens did not know, a detail that had been kept secret by the special commission the queen dispatched to look into the public menace. She knew that next to each corpse had been found a pure, white gardenia. And now, looking at the windowsill next to the mattress on which the dead girl lay, Clio saw what she had failed to see before. There was not a bouquet of flowers there. There was a flower. A white gardenia.

  Two hundred Upstanding Citizens, Clio thought grimly, were wrong.

  Clio, rational and unafraid and not at all having trouble keeping her breathing steady, rose from the bed and crossed the floor. She looked more closely at the larger set of footprints now. The previous night’s short rain had been the first London had seen in over two weeks, which meant that both the girl’s muddy footprints and those Clio tentatively assigned to the vampire had been made last night, between an hour before midnight when the rain started, and three hours afterward, by which time the ground would have been dry. Clio filed these observations away clinically, as if she had never seen a dead woman scream, and was about to leave when her eye fell again on the cupboard.

  The door was not quite closed. It had been closed—hadn’t it?—when she looked before, but now it hung open, just a crack, just enough for someone to be watching her, just enoug—

  Clio crossed to it and threw open the door. It was empty. EMPTY she told herself. But she stood looking at it, into it, for a moment, to steady herself. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Not in the course of an investigation. Cool. Levelheaded. Unafraid. Those were the words people applied to Clio. She did not believe in supernatural killers—there were enough bad people in London alone to logically explain all the murders in the world, she had said numerous times. No need to go into the realm of true demons. She had not even believed in the Vampire of London when she first heard about him. She knew that if she had been in the city at the time, she would have found a logical explanation for his behavior. She was convinced that he was no more than a man cloaking himself in a legend.

  But suddenly, for the first time, she had to wonder. No man had ever survived the rapids that sped under the supports of the Thames. No man had ever resurfaced from that particular swim in the river. But the Vampire of London had. Shot through the heart, he had survived. Which meant…

  Reason came to her aid. No man had survived, but it did not mean that no man could. Things were not necessarily what they seemed. It was just this room, this place that was playing with her mind, the heat, the smell, the dolls, and the fact that she had not really eaten anything in two days.

  The vampire was just a man, she told herself firmly. A girl had been murdered by someone and she simply had to find out who. This was no different than any other investigation she had undertaken, she was just hotter, and hungrier, her mind was playing tricks, but it would stop, now. She gave the cupboard a scornful look, cast a final glance at the corpse, and stepped out into the courtyard.

  Toast had climbed atop a stump of wood and was delivering one of the lengthy performances for which he was named—consisting largely of lifting an invisible glass and drinking it down with intermissions of loud and somber sounding twittering—while the boy sat on the ground before him. From the way he rolled his eyes at her, Clio could tell that Toast was finding the boy an unsatisfactory audience, probably because he had not yet yielded up the packet of meat pies, and the monkey was only too happy when she sat down next to the child.

  The boy turned hollow eyes to her, then gestured with his head toward the room and pointed two fingers at his neck.

  “Yes,” Clio said, searching his face, “I saw them. The pricks. Did you find her like that?”

  The boy looked down at his lap, his face hidden by his dark hair, and nodded.

  “When? Today?”

  The boy nodded again.

  “Is she your sister?” Clio asked. The question was almost unnecessary. Their features were very similar and the girl looked to be only three or four years older than the boy, but Clio wanted to be sure.

  The boy answered in the affirmative, this time raising his face to hers. Anger flashed across his hollow eyes, and then expectation.

  Despite his lack of speech, Clio understood the boy’s request instantly. “Of course. As soon as I have settled you at home, I will dedicate myself to learning who hurt your sister,” she replied. For most people in London, such an assurance from her would have been all they needed to sleep more soundly in their beds, because Clio’s reputation for wresting the truth out of mysteries was well known. There were a few skeptics who suggested that a person who would willingly take into their home any being—man, woman, child, animal—who merely seemed hungry or lonely or even just sad could not be nearly as intelligent as Clio was said to be, but her supporters far outnumbered her naysayers. People had begun to come from all over England not only to seek her aid—which was how she supported her menagerie—but merely to cast eyes upon her, causing the ancient ruin of a house she and her companions occupied on the corner of Milk and Honey Streets to become something of a tourist attraction, rivaling even the gallows at Tyburn in popularity. Indeed, so often did visitors stop her neighbors on the street with the question “Which house is Clio Thornton’s?” that they had forgotten the true name of the rambling old building with the rose bushes growing over the facade and now called it simply Which House.

  But Clio’s assurances seemed not to placate the boy at all. He frowned and poked a finger in his chest, then pointed at her. When she appeared not to understand, he did it again.

  “Oh,” Clio said finally. She tried to smile a boy-soothing smile. “That is a very kind offer, but I am afraid that I only work alone. The best way for you to help me would be to go and eat—”

  The boy shook his head fiercely and again went through the pointing regimen.

  Clio began to worry that she had not been firm enough with the boy at the beginning and she felt a twinge of panic. When she said she only worked alone, she had been telling the truth. Those who kept track of such things could tell you that Clio Thornton had solved exactly 203 mysteries in the past three years, and she had wrestled with all of them solo. She might turn to others for information, but she always worked by herself. It was a rule she had made years earlier, and it was a rule that no one, especially not anyone under the age of thirteen, was going to get her to break.

  She frowned at the boy, trying to look simultaneously maternal and intimidating and authoritative, and he frowned back at her in blatant defiance. She puffed out her cheeks and he puffed out his, she squinted at him and he squinted back, she bit her lip and he bit his, too, with even more vehemence. Clio had received enough lectures on the evils of stubbornness during her growing up to be able to teach an Oxford course on the topic, but she felt she had never really understood its drawbacks until now, and finally, when he out-sneered her, she had to concede that she had met her match.

  She gave in with a sigh. “Very well. You can help me
. However, if we are going to do this together, it must be very clear that I am in charge.” The boy looked past Clio, as if he could not hear her. “That means that you will do whatever I say,” she repeated. “Otherwise, I shall find this fiend alone. Do you agree?”

  The boy frowned slightly and then gave a slow nod in agreement.

  Clio, who had not realized she was holding her breath, exhaled loudly. “Good. Excellent.” Now that he had agreed to be led by her, he no longer looked quite so formidable and Clio felt herself relax slightly. As she did, she remembered the piece of blue silk she had taken from next to the mattress. She held it toward him and asked, “Have you ever seen this before?”

  The boy fingered the fabric, then shook his head, and shook it again when she asked if it had belonged to his sister. Having confirmed that the kerchief had been imported into the house, and recently, made finding its owner a top priority. Perhaps whoever left it there saw someone around the property before the girl died. Or, perhaps it belonged to whomever—whatever—killed her.

  It had been so real.

  Clio did not know if it was the memory of the girl’s face or the feel of a hairy arm brushing against hers that made her shudder. She looked down and was just in time to see Toast bring the blue handkerchief to his face and sniff it suspiciously. Then, before she could stop him, he turned into the alley and dashed out into the press of people on the main street.

  Now it was Clio’s turn to do the dragging. Without pausing to think, she grabbed the boy by the arm and set out after the monkey. During the several-year term of their acquaintance, Toast had demonstrated two outstanding qualities: a tendency to purloin small objects, and an incredible sense of smell. Generally he exerted these only in pursuit of meat pies, but on occasion, and Clio hoped this was one, he had been invaluable in helping her track down suspects by following their scent. If Toast could find the owner of the kerchief, Clio would certainly be closer to finding the killer. Possibly much, much closer.

  Her mind keeping pace with her feet, Clio forced herself to consider that Toast might be leading her directly to the Vampire. Even if one discounted that he was a demon, he was indisputably a most cunning, dangerous criminal. It had taken a madman to capture him, and even then, as Clio now suspected, the capture had been only temporary. What in the queen’s name did she plan to do against someone like that?

  She had never faced a murderer alone before, and never a fiend. Suddenly the knife she always carried in her bodice for protection when she went out on investigations felt very small and ineffectual. But even as she considered the wisdom of turning around and waiting until a constable could be found, she saw Toast turn abruptly and go into a tavern door and she knew she had no choice but to follow him. As she reached the tavern and saw the sign with a picture of a heavily made-up woman hanging over it, Clio felt a flicker of surprise and relief. Despite its name, the Painted Lady Tavern was one of the most respectable houses in the area, more often hosting poets and playwrights than the ruffians and rakes who crowded the benches at other establishments.

  What was more, she knew the proprietor well. Indeed, Clio had recovered Lovely Jake’s prize pig for him that spring, and so was relieved to see him standing behind the bar as she entered. Whispering to her young companion to stay by the door and not move, a request to which she got only a barely visible sullen nod, Clio scanned the length of the dimly lit room looking for Toast. It was empty except for a solitary figure hunched over the table near the stairs and snoring loudly, around whom Toast was dancing ecstatically.

  The thought that a vampire would sleep all day in order to be fresh for his kills flashed through Clio’s mind, but was quickly dispersed by a hearty welcome from Lovely Jake.

  “Miss Thornton, it is an en-orm-ous pleasure to see you,” he boomed. Lovely Jake had earned his nickname playing the Maiden in numerous plays to packed playhouse crowds in his youth three decades earlier. Although it was hard to imagine the now enormous man as a captivating damsel, his voice, particularly when he chose to exercise it, could still command the attention of even the farthest boxes. He was exercising it now. “How is the Triumvirate these days?” he bellowed, as if in proof. “They have been off scene, if you will pardon me a theatrical expression, this long month. Have they a new project afoot?”

  “It’s a pleasure to see you, too,” Clio said quietly, her eyes not leaving Toast. Then, moving close to Jake, she stood on her toes, pointed in the direction of the sleeping figure, and whispered, “Who is that man?”

  Jake looked remorseful. “It would bring honor to us both if I could speak his name,” he replied, in his idea of a confidential whisper, audible in Southern Kent. “But I cannot—nay, I must not. I do hate to wear the mask of secrecy, but you see, I took a stack of gold as long as my shoe and promised to, as we thespians say, stand mute upon my mark.” Clio eyed Jake’s enormous shoe and felt her heart sink. There was no way she could match that offer. “I can tell you this, though, my dear Miss Thornton,” Jake went on. “That is neither a happy man, nor a content man. His role upon the stage of life hangs heavy upon him. I begrudge no man my company, but one would think he would have had enough of it by now. He has been here, much as you see him at this moment, since yesterday midday, or as we say in the theater, intermezzo, and I must confide that I do not see any sign of exit, End Act I, on the near horizon.”

  If the man at the table had been in the tavern since the previous noon, there was no chance that he had made the muddy footprints Clio had seen at the doll house, which meant there was little chance he was the vampire. Clio’s relief that she was probably not facing a fiend just now was undermined by what that meant: the murderer was still out there, possibly getting ready to kill another victim. Her only consolation was the bizarre dance that Toast was performing around the sleeping man. The monkey’s sense of smell was as unerring as a dog’s, so there had to be something linking this man to the dead girl. Impatient to question the sleeping man at once, she just nodded her thanks to Lovely Jake and headed straight for the table.

  The man was snoring contentedly, his head down over his arms, his body covered with a red silk cape. Clio stood over him, watching him sleep for a moment, then suddenly remembered the expression of horror she thought she had seen—it had looked so real—on the girl’s face.

  She was not afraid. She was not afraid. She was not afraid.

  She cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me.”

  The man resettled himself in the crook of his arm, but did not stop sleeping—or snoring.

  “Excuse me,” Clio said again, this time louder.

  Still nothing. Rationalizing that Jake would not allow her to be killed center stage in his tavern, Clio ventured closer. She tapped the man on the crown of the head while bending near his ear and whispering “excuse me” directly over it.

  Miles Loredan, Viscount Dearbourn, was feeling belligerent. He would not kill whomever had replaced his head with a pumpkin, that was all right, but the scurvy villains who were trying to carve it out were going to find themselves facing the sharp point of a sword. Wasn’t it enough that they had pulled him from wonderful oblivion? Did they need to compound their sins by beating his head with cudgels? What had he—

  A vague thought seeped into his ale-soaked head, a memory of his cousins towering over him several days earlier, as they left the Turkish bathhouse, and promising that if he was not home by four bells to prepare for his betrothal ball, they would send an escort who was sure to rouse him. Aha, Miles realized triumphantly, the devils playing squash-the-squash with his head were his cousins’ minions of evil. Perhaps if he showed a sign of alertness the minions might go away. And if that didn’t work, he would fight them to the last man.

  With great effort, he snarled and opened one eye.

  Then very quickly opened the other one. What he saw in front of him, a dancing monkey and an elf, was surely an apparition. He had not reckoned on real demons and was beginning to worry that they might be harder to kill than normal
men, when he raised his head completely and saw that he had made a mistake. There was a dancing monkey. But the elf was a woman. A woman with a smear of dirt on one cheek and a tattered gown and long brown hair and enormous, challenging brown eyes. An absolutely stupendous looking woman.

  There was only one thing to do with a woman like that. Reaching out, Miles pulled her toward him and pressed his lips hard against hers.

  She tasted like a memory, like summer, and youth, and his favorite kind of ink all rolled together, and he could have gone on kissing her all day if she had not pulled away, leveled a knife-sharp look at him, and said, “You moldy mongrel.”

  It was not the kindest thing anyone had ever said to him, but coming from her it sounded lovely. As did the “You contemptible, cantankerous cur,” and the “You repellant rat terrier,” that followed, along with the probing question, “How dare you sit there and stare at me with such insolence?”

  Miles would have liked to reply it was because he could not help himself, that he had never before been pegged down by the Dog Breeders Almanac, but he was completely speechless, another first for him. Instead he smiled.