A Dark Heart (The Elders and Welders Chronicles) Read online

  “Sir,” he said in the quiet, breathy tone O’Connor liked best from him. O’Connor turned absently in his direction while his men scrambled to put out the fast-spreading inferno.

  He knew he’d not have another chance to get it right, to have surprise on his side, so he lunged forward with all of his strength and sent the poker precisely where he’d dreamed of sending it in hundreds of his darkest fantasies. The sharp end quickly tore through the thin fabric of O’Connor’s trousers and kept going, straight in the direction of the man’s groin.

  Elijah was rather shocked how easily it went in. He’d been certain he’d not have enough strength to leave more than a small wound. But he’d had two years of fury on his side, and absolutely nothing to lose. He could feel the metal shaft tearing its way through flesh and sinew, hitting something hard and impenetrable at the other end. Bone, perhaps.

  O’Connor howled and fell down with the poker sticking out of his privates, blood gushing everywhere. The sight was almost comical, almost made Elijah laugh. It certainly made him happy.

  Only eight years old, and he was happy to kill a man.

  At least he hoped he’d killed him.

  O’Connor’s men, even the yellow-eyed stranger, were too busy stopping the fire to go after him, so he was able to move across the smoke-filled room unimpeded. The girl, now free of her captors in the chaos, clutched her brother’s body close, despite her bonds. Elijah’s heart did a strange flip at the sight, but he ignored it and jerked the girl to her feet, unlacing the ropes from her wrists.

  When he was done, he pushed her towards the exit. “Run.”

  She shook her head and tried to return to her brother, but Elijah shoved her hard, angrily. He didn’t know why he cared so much about saving the girl, but he was not about to let her ruin everything now because she couldn’t let go of her dead brother.

  So he gave her a reason to live, the same reason he gave himself every day when he was close to giving in to his despair. “Go now, or you’ll never get to make them pay.”

  The girl stopped struggling at those words and looked straight into his eyes, sucking in her breath. Whatever she saw there made her nod her head and straighten her shoulders. After bending down once more to her brother and removing something from around his neck, she ran from the room.

  Elijah moved to follow her.

  But then the yellow-eyed toff stepped into his path, and Elijah felt himself flying through the air, his vision going black. It took a moment for the crushing pain to catch up with him, and for him to realize he’d been hit hard, straight in his right eye. Before he could even land, the toff was there once more, his angry face swimming in and out of Elijah’s stuttering vision.

  “Worthless gutter whore,” the man spat from above him as Elijah crashed against a wall. He felt fractured in a million pieces.

  The man raised his hand, and somehow Elijah knew that one more blow was all that it would take to finish him. The man was inhumanly strong, and it would be so easy to just let the man end it all, to stop struggling in this life. For it was clear now that he would not be leaving the brothel tonight with the tow-headed girl.

  He should have known things would end badly for him. They always did.

  He spied something shiny sticking out of the man’s waistcoat. The knife, still wet with the blond boy’s blood.

  He couldn’t figure out how he managed to find the strength to reach for the knife. Nor could he figure out how he managed to use the knife, slitting through the man’s raised forearm in one deep pass of the blade.

  The man cursed in surprise and pulled away, but not before Elijah noticed something even more horrifying than anything else he’d seen that evening. Elijah didn’t know what it was sizzling up through the rip in the man’s jacket, but it didn’t look like blood. And when it spattered down one side of Elijah’s face, it certainly didn’t feel like blood.

  It felt like a thousand knives stabbing him all at once, down to his skull.

  He cried out in agony and fell back, into the flames and smoke, until the darkness swallowed him completely.

  London, 1897

  "WAKE up, you overgrown leech. You're not dead yet."

  Elijah groaned and put an arm over his eyes, blocking out the thin light trickling through a broken shutter and the uninvited visitor hovering at his bedside. Percival Parminter wasn’t the most welcome sight to greet him in the morning, certainly wasn’t the maddeningly beautiful, forever unattainable lady of his dreams.

  Unfortunately, however, his visitor had been in his most recent dream, a dream that Elijah didn’t care to remember in the light of day. Percy was the twin he’d risked all to save that night so long ago – another reason Elijah didn't want to open his eyes. He hated the reminder.

  But reminded he'd been nearly ten years ago, when he'd arrested the mysterious and very dangerous Percy the Pinch for thievery – and for attempting to disembowel him – and recognized him. Or her. The woman wore a thousand masks, but only Elijah knew the truth – just as Percy knew the truth about what Elijah had been as a street lad, and about what he was now.

  But they kept each other's secrets. They weren't exactly friends, but they were bound together by that dark night, and by their shared need for vengeance against the men who'd ruined both of their lives.

  Percy, who'd hidden behind a dead brother's name, a pair of trousers and a sharp knife, had grown up hard and fast in Whitechapel after the fire, graduating from pick-pocket to blade-for-hire by the time she was ten. She seemed to know every fence and pimp in the East End, could pick a lock with a cravat pin, and was extremely skilled at gathering information on anything ranging from the current contents of a duke's wardrobe, to the timetables and inventory of every smuggling vessel that unloaded along the air docks.

  And Elijah had never seen anyone handle a blade like Percy did, which explained how she'd survived for so long on the streets, despite her size and sex. She was as quick as a bird of prey and as devious as a snake. Elijah didn't trust her as far as he could throw her ... or at least as far as he once could have thrown her before he'd been turned into a monster of infinite strength.

  But their relationship worked. In exchange for information and the occasional favor, Elijah turned a blind eye to Percy's schemes ... though Elijah doubted he knew even half of what Percy was involved in.

  In Percy's latest manifestation as Percival Parminter, Bond Street peacock and valet-for-hire to gentlemen of the ton, she'd certainly outdone herself. She actually flaunted her feminine attributes. Beneath the short, mannish tow hair, she had delicate, angelic features and pale, milky skin, and she clothed her long, sleek, and seemingly fragile body in fastidiously tailored clothes in colors that most men wouldn't be caught dead in. The only nods to masculinity were the thin little false mustache she wore across her upper lip, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles to obscure her long-lashed, womanly eyes, and the anatomically correct bulge in her too-tight trousers.

  Elijah didn't want to know what she stuffed down there.

  But her disguise, perhaps because of its embrace of her effeminacy, worked. No one had ever suspected she was anything other than what she appeared to be: a man – a preening peacock who doubtless enjoyed the company of other men – but a man nonetheless. She was a very good actress.

  Quite literally, for in another one of her identities, she was Polly Penry, darling of the Covent Garden stage.

  At the moment, however, Percy was rocking on her heels, surveying him in dismay over the edge of her spectacles. She was dressed to the nines as usual, reviving the fashion of the fops of the previous century with a bottle-green cutout coat, pink – pink! – silk jacquard waistcoat, and tall riding boots polished to a painful sheen. But the pièce de résistance, as Percival Parminter would have drawled, was an old-fashioned cravat that fell from the neck in an elaborate waterfall cascade. She looked ridiculous.

  And she smelled too good. At least her blood did, especially to a newly awakened leech like himself who'd not
fed in days. He couldn't stop his fangs from descending, so violently that he nicked his own lip.

  "Damn it," he growled, flopping over in his bed and burying his face in the pillow, fighting the urge to feed on his houseguest.

  "Thirsty, are we?" Percy said, too brightly for his taste, poking him in the buttocks with the tip of his own cane. The blighter.

  Elijah swatted her away and slowly sat up, willing the craving away. It didn't work. And though she tried to, even the street-hardened confidence artist couldn't hide her unease at the sight of his fangs and glowing eyes. She took a few steps away from the bed, holding his long cane between them.

  As if that would protect her. She might have been able to defend herself against him before he was turned – he'd once had the knife scars to prove it – but she wouldn't stand a chance against him if he lost control now. And once he lost control, he'd drink her dry.

  And still the thirst would remain.

  She was either incredibly brave – or incredibly stupid – to bait him now, to even be here at all. The last person who'd disturbed his slumber had not lived to tell about it. Granted, the intruder had been a murderer he'd been hunting for months, who'd made the mistake of trying to hunt him. But Elijah hadn't discovered the man's identity until after he'd thrown the bloodless corpse across the room.

  Percy's eyes widened slightly as Elijah stood up and stalked in her direction, her hand pointlessly reaching inside her waistcoat for one of the dozen or so blades she kept hidden on her person. He glared at her and passed her by, his sights set on the cabinet behind her – though she'd no idea how hard it was for him to resist the call of her blood as he brushed her shoulder. For some reason, her blood had always smelled particularly delicious to him – not like Lady Christiana’s, of course, or even Aline Romanov’s before her Bonding – but it was special all the same, and it took the last of his willpower to resist.

  It hurt not to drink Percy dry.

  When he reached the cabinet, he pulled the familiar tin box from its hiding place behind a false panel and began fumbling with its contents: a half-empty vial of liquid morphine, needle, and tourniquet. He hurriedly prepared his morning breakfast, his hands already beginning to shake from both his withdrawal from the drug and his raging thirst for blood.

  He cinched the India-rubber tourniquet tight and stabbed the needle in his arm in a lightning-quick move, injecting the rest of the vial into his bloodstream before his inhuman body could reject the needle. He could feel the sweet, deliciously warm opiate slowly spread throughout his veins, gelding the beast inside of him. At least for the moment.

  His metallic fangs receded, his hypersensitive vision returned to normal, and when he looked at Percy now, he didn't want to rip her throat out.

  Well, he did. But he didn't ache like a giant streetcar was crushing his body when he resisted the animal urge to do so. Now the bloodlust was just an itch. An annoying, unscratchable itch, granted, but one that paled in comparison to the blessed numbness of the morphine. Thank God.

  Percy's elegant little nose wrinkled in disgust as she stared at the tourniquet that remained around his scarred arm. "Is that really necessary?"

  "Would you rather I drank you dry, Percy?" he growled, ripping off the tourniquet and tossing it back into the tin box. He pocketed the empty vial. He'd have to replenish his supply soon. He'd run out even more quickly than usual. It was taking more and more of the drug to quell his thirst, to send him into oblivion. A sure sign that his time was running out.

  "You need some real ... food. And soon. That poison is killing you," Percy insisted, looking at his arms pointedly.

  Elijah was surprised at the genuine concern he heard in Percy's voice. He glanced down at his bare arms and had to admit they looked fairly gruesome. Black and blue and crusted in scabs, his arms were a rotting mess. The sites where he injected the morphine were the only things – besides the scar on his cheek – that never healed. He'd shot himself through the head, stabbed himself through the heart, and, on one memorable occasion, jumped out of an airship a thousand feet in the air. He'd survived all of these excruciatingly painful attempts to end his life without a scratch. But something about the morphine – most likely the same property that diminished his bloodlust – overruled his unnatural ability to heal. It was killing him.

  He shrugged. "Good," he said gruffly.

  Over the nine years since his turning, he'd learned that there were at least three ways to kill his kind. Beheading. Incineration – though this had to be quite thorough, as he'd learned the hard way when trying to kill a leech who'd been particularly tenacious of life. And starvation. But not ordinary starvation. It was one unique to his kind, which happened only when deprived of a maker's blood for long enough. It was a slow death that took years, and it was this method, hastened along by his habit, that would be his eventual death, for he'd never take a drop from his maker again.

  Lady Christiana hadn't saved his life. She'd merely postponed the inevitable.

  Percy pursed her lips at his remark but said nothing, just watched him disapprovingly as he pulled on a half-clean shirt and waistcoat for the day.

  "What do you want, Percy?" he demanded, snapping the false Iron Necklace in place around his throat and then struggling in front of a shattered mirror to affix a brass-worked, binocular-lensed eyepiece to his head. The eyepiece was a replica of the Welding eye he'd once had implanted before his transformation. It distorted the sight out of his right eye, but it was a necessary disguise, as was the limp he affected.

  He couldn't very well show up at Scotland Yard with a regrown eye and an even gait, much less no Iron Necklace. To most of the world, such things as regeneration and vampires were still firmly in the realm of fiction. And the only people of his generation who went around without Iron Necklaces were the fanatic, Bedlam-bound Luddites. With their freakish scars and Biblical crusade against Welding technology of any kind, they’d ripped out their implants the moment the air was safe enough to breathe without them. The hypocrites.

  He’d almost rather be one of them than what he was.

  An abomination.

  He fumbled with the discreet leather straps near his ear. His hands were still shaking – they shook all the time now, to be honest, another symptom of his pending demise. He cursed when the eyepiece slid down his cheek, refusing to cooperate.

  Percy rolled her eyes in exasperation, took the eyepiece out of his hands and guided him to a chair, where she proceeded to put him to rights. He was too tranquilized by the morphine to fight her meddling.

  "You need a shave, and a haircut wouldn't go amiss," she muttered as she worked.

  He just growled at her, which shut her up, but not for long.

  "Have you ever tried ... well, just taking a sip or two?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "When you feed. Must you drink a person dry every time? I know you don't like doing it. Have you tried to take just a little?"

  "Yes," he said shortly, hoping that would be the end of it. He hated when she asked him questions about his condition.

  "Well, did it work?" she pressed, finishing her work and stepping away.

  He turned his head and met her eyes. Whatever she saw in his expression was enough to drain the blood from her face. "No, Percy," he said softly. "It did not work."

  "Oh," was all she could manage.

  He tried not to care that she looked disappointed by his response. They weren't friends, and the sooner she gave up on him, the better off they'd both be.

  The safer she'd be.

  He had tried to take "just a little", as Percy had so euphemistically put it. In the early days of his transformation, he'd experimented on his victims, seeing if it was possible to pull away from the feeding before it went too far. But it wasn't. Once the frenzy set in, nothing could stop him.

  But he couldn't not feed. When not even the morphine could curb his appetite, he had to find a source of blood, or risk losing control completely, endangering everyone in his path. He'd
seen it happen before, when a rogue vampire like himself, cut off from his maker, had tried to stop feeding completely. The creature had ended up sucking his way through half a neighborhood before Elijah had managed to put him down like the rabid animal he'd become.

  Always wary of sharing such a fate, Elijah had managed to restrict his hunting to the lowest of the low in an effort to appease his conscience. He sought out the rapists and murderers he couldn’t catch legitimately in his profession as an Inspector for Scotland Yard, and those of his kind who haunted the slums at night – abominations like himself the world wouldn't miss. And his conscience was eased ... if only a little.

  "Don't ever wake me up like that again, Percy," he said softly. "It was a close thing."

  Her hands dropped away, and she finally met his eyes. "How close?"

  He held up his thumb and pointer finger until a hair's breadth separated them.

  Her shoulders slumped a little. "That close?"

  "That close," he confirmed.

  She sighed, sounding exasperated. And just a little bit sad. "But there must be a better way to control it, besides pumping yourself full of that shite," she muttered.

  There was one way, one way to stop the torment, to have some semblance of a normal life, but he'd never tell her, and he'd never do it. He'd only replace one torment with another, far greater one. He really would rather die.

  Percy looked annoyed by his silence. "One day you're going to take too much, and then I'll be..." She broke off and shook her head. "Never mind."

  He stood up and strode to where he'd pitched his jacket the night before and jerked it on. "Don't worry. I'll be there when we bring down O’Connor, you have my word on that," he said.

  She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but at the mention of O’Connor, her expression hardened, and something dangerous passed over her eyes.