Damn the Consequences by Erin Hayes

Author:Erin Hayes
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Erin Hayes Books
Published: 2019-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Catherine’s story ends here, but you can read Hazel’s story when it comes out later this year in I’ll be Damned, Book One of the Harker Legacy. To read more about the Harker of the present day, read Edie Harker’s story in Damned if I Do, Book One of the Harker Trilogy.

O Little Town of Bedlam

A Christmas Short Story

“Well, if they thought me insane before, I wonder what they would think now,” I mutter as I wipe my sword on a handkerchief. I’d found the handkerchief in the breast pocket of the doctor I had just killed.

Dr. Thomas Monroe. Physician to the insane. And a vampire.

Really, the doctor had been such a bastard, I wonder why it took me so long to realize that he was my target. It should not have taken me ten days to determine who was killing patients.

“It is because you are losing your touch, Hazel,” I chide myself. “That is why it took you so long.”

And here I am, talking to myself. No wonder the nurses and doctors were so eager to admit me.

I am at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark—Bedlam, as it’s more commonly known—under the guise of one of the insane. I came here acting as a patient in order to see who was killing inmates. Bedlam didn’t have the best reputation about patient safety and conditions previously, but there had been telltale signs that the most recent deaths were from something far more sinister.

Really, it should come as no surprise that the doctor was a depraved, bloodsucking vampire. I had simply expected it to be one of the patients, honestly.

As the newest Harker, I have seen things outside these walls that would make the most ironclad of minds break. I could act like one of the depraved, and my family’s neighbors on Baker Street are always trying to have me committed. They claim it is because I sneak out of the house after dark or my hair is unkempt.

I wonder what they would think if they could see me right now.

I fling the dirtied cloth back on the body of the doctor, his head severed and laying a few paces away. This is as clean as I could get the blade. Vampire blood always seems to be thicker than human blood, and it still hangs in red strings around the the blade, despite my best efforts to clean it.

“You had better not infect me,” I tell the doctor’s body as I call the magical sword back through my palm. “I don’t want your blood touching mine.”

The doctor’s body, of course, does not answer.

I may truly be insane.

With a heavy sigh, I inspect my palm through my gloves. There is a long, skinny slit through it, where I had called forth the sword. I have been ruining my favorite pairs of gloves since becoming the Harker two months ago. Mrs. Hudson, my family’s housekeeper, has had to do her best repairing my gloves, although I think this particular pair could be considered a lost cause.

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