James Asher 02 by Traveling & The Dead

Author:Traveling & The Dead [Traveling & Dead, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Frozen in mid-motion, Lydia only stared at her, too shocked to speak.

Margaret, who had clearly hoped that she would say something and spare her the completion of her sentence—and in fact the completion of her own thought—trailed off uncertainly, and for a moment there was only the clutch and jerk of her breath. Then she burst out, “You don’t understand him!”

“You keep saying that.” Lydia crossed to the bed and dropped the robe beside the nightgown the maid had laid out, and began to unbutton her shirtwaist. The tiny pearl fastenings of the sleeves were awkward, but she’d dismissed the servant after she’d unpacked for them, and didn’t know enough modern Greek to summon her back. She wondered what the servants had made of the silver knives and silver-loaded gun among the masses of petticoats, skirts, shirtwaists, lingerie, and dinner dresses—wondered, too, if she could communicate to them a request to purchase garlic, whitethorn, and wild rose on the morrow. Or as Ysidro’s servants, would they refuse to obey such a request?

Margaret reached out and took her by the sleeve, her face bracketed with lines of distress deepened by the lamps’ heavy shadows.

“You can’t forbid him to hunt!” she insisted desperately. “It isn’t as if he… as if the people he… he takes…”

“You mean ‘kills’?”

She flinched from the word but lashed back almost at once with, “It isn’t as if they didn’t deserve it!”

Lydia only stood for a time, her fingers still on the pearl buttons but her task forgotten. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet.

“Did he tell you that?”

“I know it!” The governess was on the brink of tears. “Yes, he told me! I mean, I know—I mean, in the past—in past life-times—

in dreams I’ve had about our former lives together… And don’t tell me they’re all lies,” she veered away suddenly, “because I know they’re not! I know you think they are, but they’re really not! They’re not!”

She flung herself in front of Lydia when Lydia tried to turn away, her face red, blotchy as if with the approach of tears. “You see, if a vampire doesn’t… doesn’t hunt to completion…”

She was still avoiding the word “kill.”

“They feed on the energy, the life, the vital force!” she went on in a rush. “It’s the life they take that gives their minds the powers they need to protect themselves!”

“You mean to kill other people?”

“You’re starving him to death!” Margaret cried. “Robbing him of his powers to defend himself from danger, now, here, where the peril is the greatest! That’s why vampires take so long to hunt, or at least why he takes so long to hunt, he told me, because he’s hunting the streets of the city to find a thief, a murderer, a… a blackguard who deserves to die! You know the world is full of them.

He’s hunted that way for hundreds and hundreds of years! It’s only from those kind of people that he takes the life he needs! And he’s too honorable to go

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