Bleeding Hearts
Page 43

Maybe I really had been kidnapped by a pirate.
That was so bizarre, it was almost cool.
And the smell of mushrooms and dirt, when they weren’t rotten, wasn’t so bad.
“Doesn’t matter how old I get,” she said. “I still miss the sea and the deck of a fine ship. As soon as the Blood Moon’s done, I’m getting out of this cursed place. I wasn’t meant to be a landlubber.”
“What’s a Blood Moon?”
“A gathering of the vampire tribes. Very rare. It’s my chance to prove myself, to steal back a little respect for my people and my bloodkin. We’re tired of being shot on sight. We deserve better.”
“You and the pirates?” I asked, confused. “You know this is the twenty-first century, right? There are no pirates.” Not like Johnny Depp, anyway.
“For us,” she corrected me, her expression as grim as hardtack. “Worst of the worst, or so they’d have you believe. No one can control us.” She sounded more than a little proud of that. “Except me and mine. We’re not like the Hel-Blar, despite what we look like.” She admired her skin. “The blue puts the fear in them, sure as flying the pirate colors used to. I like to think it’s the color of the ocean. The others will tell you it’s the color of death.” She sighed, tilting her head back lazily. “You’ll have to make up your own mind, I guess. Regardless, you’re our warning shot across the bow. And what’s done is done.” She yawned. “Go on back to your prince now.”
I stood up, weaving slightly on my feet. The fatigue came back, all at once. Before I closed the door behind me she spoke again.
“Christabel.” When I turned around, she tossed me a silver flask. “Grog. You might need it. I hope you make it through the next few nights. I truly do.”
It took me too long to get back to the apothecary. I was stumbling, as if I’d had a jug full of Saga’s awful rum instead of the barest taste. I briefly contemplated eating an apple or the bread Aidan had left in a basket. Chewing seemed like a monumental task, though, so instead I drank some of the water from the jug, sniffing it first to make sure it wasn’t grog.
Even though daylight burned at the windows, I lit one of the oil lamps with the matches I found in an iron box shaped like a bird. I didn’t want to wake up in the dark, if I did manage to fall asleep. I stretched out on the floor on my belly, peering through the wide gap between the boards. Connor’s face was as pale as a consumptive Romantic poet. Shelley might have envied that kind of translucence. His eyes were closed and he looked restful, as if it were an ordinary kind of sleep, except he wasn’t snoring and he didn’t move at all, not even when a spider crawled across his cheek. I shuddered on his behalf.
Even lying there all creepy and corpselike, he was comforting. So I stayed there in the dust, staring down at him until my eyelids finally lost the battle with my fear.
Of course, I dreamed of vampires.
I was walking down a deserted road, the same one where I’d been taken. It was raining but the stars were still out, about a million of them, whirling white, like cream in coffee. I was soaked through and shivering. I was running but I didn’t know if it was away from someone or toward someone. And then suddenly I was in the middle of a field of tall goldenrod and roses, in the shadow of a gray castle crumbling into an ocean that shouldn’t be there.
And I wasn’t alone.
A man in a dark suit, with brown hair and a brown beard, stood leaning on a walking stick. He was decidedly Victorian.
Bram Stoker.
Another man came toward us, through the grass. He wore a white cravat and had wild hair, strewn with red poppies. Two women trailed behind him, one in a silk dress with a cold smile, the other younger, in a dress and bonnet. I’d know her anywhere. Christabel. The one from the poem—so that made the man the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His was the first poem I’d ever memorized, about a girl named Christabel who is hunted by the vampiric Geraldine.
They were closing in and my only escape was suddenly blocked by who I assumed was Lord Byron himself, limping toward me, corsets creaking. He held a bleached skull filled with red wine, from which he drank and then grinned at me, teeth stained red.
I whirled, trying to find a way out, but they tightened around me like a poisonous flower closing its petals for the night.
Ordinarily this would have been a great dream, full of poets and lace cravats.
But it felt wrong.
And my neck hurt.
When I lifted my hand away from my neck, it was covered in blood.
I wiped it frantically on my jeans but the blood kept pooling, dripping between my knuckles. And then it sparked and burned like embers before catching fire, as if my palms were filled with gasoline instead of blood. I smelled scorched flesh, smoke, spilled wine.
I woke up choking on a scream, my hair damp with sweat.
I couldn’t immediately figure out why everything hurt and there was dust up my nose. I was just glad I wasn’t really on fire. I lay there, cataloging my pains: the bruised hipbone from lying on the ground, the aching arm from where Aidan had grabbed me. No burns.
I knew the sun had gone down because I was in near darkness, except for a sliver of honey-tinted light from the lamp. If I moved my head slightly, the light fell between the floorboards and onto Connor’s face. He really was beautiful, crazy or not. He’d risked himself to find me even though we barely knew each other. And for a computer geek, he had all sorts of interesting muscles. His eyes were impossible, mesmerizing.