Callista:Gideon, I’m sending this to you since my son will not pick up his phone. Baylor Godsven is innocent of the crime of killing and husking those two men.
I’ve just received word from the Conclave representatives that they found a human man tied up in the basement of his manor. The human has provided a complete and graphic timeline of Baylor’s depraved activities over the past two months, and we can conclude that Baylor was otherwise occupied during the times of both murders. He is guilty of numerous other crimes, including hurting your friend Isis, so his conviction by the Mora holds, but you should know there is still a killer and husker loose in Argleton.
The Conclave are going to use this against you. You are drawing their ire, which could reflect upon my son and his human betrothed.
Bring this beastly creature to justice, lest I’m forced to return and see to it myself. And if any harm comes to my son or his new fiancée, I will personally peel your testicles and serve them up with a Sunday roast.
HER.
I pick up the apple from where it landed at my feet, staring down at the perfect imprint of Arabella’s fangs. Those same fangs once grazed the skin along my neck and brought me to heights of pleasure no human or vampire has since been able to match.
Arabella Lestrange.
When I knew her – when I broke her heart and she tried to have my neck broken in return – she was Arabella Macquart, courtesan and proprietress of the most infamous horror burlesque theatre in Paris. Like the innocent fly, I wandered into her web and she sank her poison into me.
I lied to her earlier. I looked for her many times after our parting in Paris. I spent my considerable criminal resources trying to hunt her down, just in case she’d survived the fire. But I found nothing. I’d given her up for dead.
There were so many times when I thought I heard her laugh on the breeze or saw her gold-rimmed eyes in the darkest depths of midnight.
She’s good at covering her tracks. Vampires usually are. They’re used to living in the shadows.
I’ve never been particularly good at that, for my sins.
Lestrangesuits her.
My phone beeps. It will be Sinead. There are a million things to do on Sanctus Estate as we get our first residents settled into their new homes, and with the vampire courts railing against us, I’m poised for trouble.
A few members have pulled out of their contracts, which isn’t ideal. But the Conclave’s public condemnation of Sanctus Estate doesn’t seem to have had the effect they wanted. We’ve been flooded with inquiries from uncourted vampires and those willing to renounce their court affiliations. My major investor, Lord Hamish Aeternus of the Blood Aeternus – one of the richest and most influential vampire property magnates in the world – is still supporting us. I need to move fast if I’m to fund the next stage of the development and add even more amenities. And now I’m to hunt a killer for Callista…
I do not have time for a ghost from my past. Not even a delectable ghost like Arabella.
Especiallynot one with homicidal intentions regarding my plums.
I pay for the apple and watermelon damage. As I wander onto the street in a daze, I wipe red splatters from the apple and take a bite – as if somehow I might be able to taste her. Of course, I can’t taste a thing. It’s like chewing on a chunk of sawdust.
I spit the mouthful into a rubbish bin and drop the apple in too.
Being a vampire is mostly brilliant, but I do miss food. And sunlight. And opium.
The neck of a fresh young woman or a decent blood mocktailalmostmakes up for it.
But there’s one taste that has haunted me since before my Kiss.
Arabella.
For nearly a hundred and fifty years, I’ve longed to forget her. I tried to bury my feelings for her long ago, when I buried the last of our mortal acquaintances – the painter Claude Monet, by then a dear friend who pretended not to notice that I did not age. It was for the best that I forgot Arabella, because she was human, because she too lay in the cold earth, her stillness the last great, sad beauty in a wretched world.
But I could never forget her.
And she isn’t human.
If only I’d known.
One whiff of her ginger and myrrh scent and I’m back in her Parisian theatre duringLa Belle Époque, Arabella sweeping around her pole, her flawless skin shimmering beneath the lanterns as she wove magic with her body.
She was a vampire then.
I’ve been in love with a vampire since 1879, and I didn’t even know it.
