Kendrick turned. He dug his fingers into the stone behind the dais and with one large hand, he wiped out the crude runes. With his finger, Kendrick dug into the rock and began to write.
Genevieve’s lips parted in shock. He was writing new words into the stone. Ones that made her throat tighten with emotion.
Sceal þeodna gehwylc þeawum lifgan,
eorl æfter oþrum eðle rædan,
se þe his þeodenstol geþeon wile.
How did he know that phrase? And did he mean to live up to it?
“Genevieve,” Elspeth whispered, “you’re crushing my fingers. What does it say?”
Genevieve swallowed, belatedly releasing Elspeth’s hand. “It’s from an Old English poem. It says, ‘Let every leader live aright, earl after earl in honor rule, who thinks to thrive and his throne maintain.’” Her shattered hopes sliced like a knife.
“We shall know a man by his fruit,” Genevieve murmured as Kendrick finished the phrase.
ChapterTwo
December, Three Weeks Later
“Master. You’re needed.”
Kendrick looked up from his copy ofWolfhead Treeby E.D. Saxon, which he was reading by the light of the glowing lamp. He had taken a break from poring over the poorly kept and piecemeal law codes he’d found in the Ossuary to reread a favorite tome.
“What is it?” he asked the vampire at his door, masking his distaste for the appellation of “Master.”
“Markham has the madness. He’s killed two humans by the East End exit—nearly in the main thoroughfare. We have restrained him and brought him down for your judgment.” Joseph stared at him with no expression on his scarred face.
Joseph had been one of the vampires to apprehend Kendrick and his friends in Yorkshire when Rupert, the previous master of the London vampire Ossuary, had attempted to crush the knowledge that he had sold his own vampires to human scientists and graverobbers in return for gold. Kendrick did not believe Joseph had had strong loyalties to the previous master—but that didn’t mean he had any loyalty to Kendrick, either.
“Will you come?” Joseph asked, his mouth firming in a line.
Kendrick set aside the book and stood to his full height, which was well above average for a man of his time. He picked up the longsword gifted to him during that Yorkshire misadventure and slung it over his shoulder. “Lead the way.”
Joseph led him from the chamber down the rough corridor of stone and brick. It smelled of earth and damp and rock, plus the tang of blood and death. These were the passageways of the dead, a honeycomb of tunnels carved out below London, at first merely a handy connection between fine Mayfair houses but expanded throughout the city as the rivers were paved over and enclosed underground. If he listened hard, he could hear the susurrus of the water—and likely, sewage—as it flowed to the Thames and out, ever onward, towards the whale road, the swan’s riding place, where his people had sailed…had it been his people?
Kendrick probed the thought like a bad tooth. Memories faded and crumbled with age like old parchment, and he had been a part of the world lit by heaven’s candle for a comparatively small portion of time, more than a thousand years ago. Something like a thousand. He knew the tongues of the Saxons, the Celts, the Normans, the Danes, but which he had learned at a mother’s knee? All that had passed away, but stories… Ah, the stories told around hearth fire, the tales of men and monsters—those, he remembered.
It was a monster he encountered in the main chamber of the Ossuary, the gathering place where a ruler more pompous than himself would call his people to him at his every whim to make demands and pronouncements. Five vampires held a frothing fellow down by arms and legs and barely kept him still. The vampire’s eyes glowed red, and his clothes were drenched in blood. Other vampires in the room stared furtively at the spectacle in front of them, hanging back, creating an uneven circle around the tableau.
“Speak,” Kendrick said. “Where are the witnesses?”
“I, sir.” A vampire with a cleft chin stepped forward. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I guard the easternmost door.”
“What is your name?”
“Orson, sir.”
“Say on, Orson.”
“Markham went out at dusk, sir,” he said. “He had…a strange countenance. I did not like it. Not long after, a cry went up. I left my counterpart, Anne Wright”—he gestured to another woman—“and went to see. He had killed a beggarwoman, and a man had come upon them and cried out. By the time I had reached him, he had torn the human’s throat out with his teeth. I detained him long enough for Miss Wright to call for reinforcements. With their help, we were able to wrestle him back belowground.”
Kendrick paced around the monster named Markham. The vampire growled, his eyes completely red.
“Come in from the cold dark,” Kendrick said, “or be lost to it evermore.”
Markham made no response. The vampire threw himself against his fetters, growling wordlessly.
