“I have to say,” Aunt Lucy said, “I couldn’t have picked a better time to pull myself back together. I’ve been waiting for you to go off on that Jakob for at least a decade, and I almost missed it! The way he treated you is absolutely abhorrent, and after you were so close as children!”
“You were... waiting for it?” Sam said. Aunt Lucy sounded more as if she were discussing the characters in her favorite series of books than her niece’s life. But then, that’s what Sam’s life had been to her, hadn’t it? She could watch but never intervene. At least, until she’d come to Ireland.
“I just said I was, didn’t I?” Aunt Lucy said. “Though I don’t know why I was surprised by Van Helsing’s treacherous turn of heart. I had three suitors, you know, all of whom declared their love for me on the same day. I was quite overcome.”
Sam knew the story; it was one of many stories about Lucy her mother had told her. And she knew what came next.
“Though I might have been less so if I’d known that only weeks later, they’d be weeping for joy as they drove a stake through my heart,” Aunt Lucy mused. “You should have heard them, telling each other how good they were, how it wasn’t me in my body anymore but a devil wearing my skin. How their Lucy was pure and beautiful, could never have wants, needs...desires. To say nothing of the looks on their faces as I writhed in pain. To be perfectly honest, I think they enjoyed it a little too much.”
“Didn’t you murderchildren?” Sam said.
“Well.” Aunt Lucy gave Sam a liquid shrug. “Nobody’s perfect.”
She was a monster, Sam reminded herself. Even if she did seem to care for Sam in her strange way. Sam would do well not to forget that.
“Was it truly channeling that changed you?” she asked. “That made you?—”
“A monster?” Aunt Lucy chuckled. “It’s perfectly all right, you can say it. It is true, after all. To answer your question, I don’t think it was the channeling itself. In my case, at least, I suspect the vampire had something to do with it. But the way channeling made me feel certainly made it easier for Dracula to get his hooks in. The things I did, it felt as if I were in a dream, you see. It didn’t feel real. Certainly not dangerous.”
Sam could believe it. She was talking with a monster right now, had bled for it. Listened to it. Everything she’d been told not to do her whole life. Not to mention, the monster had turned out to be her mother’s dearest friend. It was utterly surreal.
“Wait, you said you’ve been with me since I was ten years old,” Sam said. Which was to say, she’d been watching over Sam ever since her grandfather had disappeared. “Did my grandfather have something to do with this?”
Aunt Lucy clapped her hands delightedly. “He always said you were clever.” Which meant she was right and her grandfather was amedium. Sam thought of all the times she’d heard her grandfather talking to himself, staring at something that didn’t appear to be there. She had thought him merely quirky.
No wonder Professor Moriarty wanted him. Those who could commune with the dead were as rare as a white hart, possibly rarer. If they could find her grandfather, he couldaskthe ghosts who had set them on their quarry. He might even be able to commune with the Wild Hunt; after all, one of the primary theories was that they were the unforgiven dead.
Which meant he might just as easily be behind everything. An uneasy feeling twisted in her gut. Still, Sam couldn’t believe her grandfather would ever put her at risk.
“Why did he do it?” she asked before she could think better of it.
“Ah,” Aunt Lucy said. “He was worried about you. See, channels are susceptible?—”
“To the influence of evil, I know,” Sam said.
“Well, that wasn’t what I was about to say, so I guess you don’t know everything,” Aunt Lucy said. “I was going to say we’resensitive. It’s not a good thing or a bad. Or maybe it’s both. But it attracts, shall we say, an unhealthy amount of interest from those of a more monstrous persuasion. As soon as your grandfather found out he would have to leave, he couldn’t bear it. With me by your side, at least, he could call on me and hear that you were all right.”
“You’ve seen... surely noteverything?” Sam said, a blush creeping up her cheeks.
“Oh, don’t worry! I was careful in what I told him,” Aunt Lucy assured her. “He wanted more, of course. Were you doing well in your lessons, were you talking to any boys, were you eating enough. But I told him I’d tell him you weren’t being eaten, not by monsters, at any rate?—and that no, I absolutely would not explain what I meant by that?—but that he could go ahead and stop worrying, because you were doing just fine. Though, now that I think of it, doyouneed someone to explain it? You and Hel were getting quite close there for a while now?—though you’ve been more distant lately, haven’t you?”
“It’s complicated,” Sam said.
“Mmmm,” Aunt Lucy said. “A word of advice, Samantha? You never know how long you have left. One moment I was engaged to the most wonderful man, and the next, well. You know the story. I never got more than a kiss, and a chaste one at that. Blood transfusions. Professor Van Helsing tried to insinuate blood transfusions are the same thing as marital relations! Let me assure you: They are not. Anyway, you have the opportunity for so much more.”
“Thank you, Aunt Lucy,” Sam said, feeling as if her ears were about to burn off despite the cold. Aunt Lucy laughed, a cheery, tinkling sound that felt out of place coming from a ghost. Sam hurried on before she could tease her further: “Do you have any idea where my grandfather is?”
“It’s not like I have an address,” Aunt Lucy said, her attention drifting somewhere beyond them.
“He’s alive, then?” Sam said. She’d thought the notion would bring her more pleasure. Instead, an uneasiness churned in her gut.
“Last I checked,” Aunt Lucy said. “He rings this bell to draw me to him. Without it, I can’t stray far. I can’t even seem to manifest outside Ireland. But here? Oh, you should see it, Samantha. The veil is so thin, and getting thinner by the day. I can almost taste again. Oh, what I wouldn’t do to taste a croissant, that burst of butter on my tongue.”
Samhain. The night when west windows were left open for the ancestral dead, whose shivering souls sought the shelter of the place they once called home, where they were welcomed with a feast. The night when the Wild Hunt would ride without restraint, and whoever was left on the murderer’s list would be their quarry?—marked, quite literally, with a moonlit sigil.
And Sam was struck with that sudden sense of unease. What if the tattoos were the source of the haunting? She had no proof, nothing but a suspicion formed from the coincidence that all of the victims had that same Vespertine tattoo. Besides, Sam didn’t have one. At least, she didn’t think she did. It seemed the sort of thing she would have noticed.
Sam needed to talk to her grandfather.
