Vampire 3 - Time Without End by Linda Lael Miller

Author:Linda Lael Miller [Miller, Linda Lael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-14T14:01:05+00:00

They deserved that much, I reflected, after all their suffering.

When I had made considerable explorations, striding this way and that, dredging my memory and all my senses, I divined the presence of a large, common grave, well away from the place where the village had been, and hurried toward it, gliding silently through the grass like a specter.

Standing beside that unseen tomb, with its great, dry jumble of bones, I closed my eyes and fixed my concentration on days so long past that only immortals remember their like. After a time I began to see images of the bodies in that grave as they had been before the plague struck.

I saw Old Tom, the tanner, and Ben Willy, who milled the corn into meal. I saw their wives and their children, and so many others as well—fishermen, crofters, the baron himself. They were ghosts, some joyous, others full of sorrow, and they cast dancing shadows into my mind.

I saw my mother, the uncommonly beautiful Seraphina, and knew her remains lay disjointed and brown within the pit. My father's bones were there, too, far from hers and reaching out to her even in death, but I felt no impression of Krispin, no echo of his laughter or his quick fury.

I frowned. If he did not lie here with the others, then where? Had he escaped to the sea, onboard one of the ships he was forever sighting on the horizon? Had he gone to London, or taken up the Christian cross, as the good brothers had bade me do so long ago?

I heard Tobias's voice in my head.

Return to Dunnett's Head. The answer is there—and not there.

I frowned, and another chill struck me, coming not from the cold and treacherous sea but rising from within my own being.

Could it be? Was this my enemy, then—my own brother, Krispin?

No, I insisted to myself. He loved me, and I loved him.

Krispin would have been unable to keep his existence from me for so long. Besides, we had been brothers, friends. He had followed me everywhere, looked up to me, laughed with me…

And wanted to do everything I did.

Everything.

I shuddered and tipped my head back to search the starry sky with eyes that burned. "No," I whispered. "Not Krispin."

But I knew even then that my brother had not returned to dust, like our father and mother. He was aboard, and he was my avowed foe. Some vampire, most likely Challes, had transformed Krispin into a blood-drinker.

My despair was absolute, all-encompassing. It drove me to my knees, there beside that mass grave, where I wept with fresh grief.

"Krispin." I whispered. "Why?"

There was, of course, no answer, for my brother, as it happened, was very busy elsewhere.

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