Night of the Vampires

Maybe it was natural that Lisette should subtly suggest that Megan Fox wasn’t here with the noblest of intentions, to insinuate to those who understood the undertone that Megan might possibly hold an agenda that involved infesting the capital with the plague—and thus getting the Union to capitulate to the South.

To her credit, Megan was composed. “Rivalry? Oh, Miss Annalise, I wouldn’t dream of attempting any form of rivalry with my brother. I’ve been hoping to meet him for so long! No, miss, I assure you, I shall do nothing but follow in my brother’s wake, and hope to be so fine a—being.”

“How utterly charming,” Lisette said. She rose from her position at the table, smiling graciously. “Would you please forgive us? In these dreadful times of war, we never know when we will meet. Cole and I would like to take a bit of a walk.” She smiled at him, blinking, as if she were about to burst into tears—as if there were far more between them than there had ever been. She was the ultimate actress.

Megan quickly and awkwardly rose, as well. “How nice! How very lovely. Yes, yes, the two of you must up and away for a lovely stroll. Pity the streets are little but mud and the dust flying about is terrible, but I’m sure you’ll have a charming walk, so sweet when time is precious and two people are together.”

One woman wanted his company, another was evidently more than anxious to get rid of him. He needed to see the one, and he was afraid to take his eyes off the other.

Megan was Cody’s sister. And Cody certainly knew the score.

“Of course, Lisette,” Cole said. “The streets are not so bad here—the house is not on a direct march line for the troops coming and going into and out of town. Let’s do stroll.”

“You will excuse us?” Lisette asked Martha, her beautiful smile all encompassing as she looked around the room.

They left by way of the rear door, the carriage entrance.

When they came around the front, Cole saw a sad-looking young woman standing on the front walk, an envelope and a clipboard in her hands. He started toward her.

“Cole, just walk, she’ll come,” Lisette said, taking his arm.

“She’ll come? Who is she?”

“It’s just Trudy.”

“Who is just Trudy and why is she standing there?” he demanded.

Lisette sighed. “She’s my assistant. The agency seems to think I need one, but I loathe being followed around. Luckily, she’s a little mouse and stands wherever I tell her.”

“You had her just standing outside while you came into the house?” Cole asked.

“Well, outside and around the corner. I wanted some time alone with you. Besides, it’s her job. She serves me. And she’s paid to do it,” Lisette said, waving a hand dismissively in the air.

She might be a mouse—a paid mouse—but Cole didn’t intend to be that rude. He walked over to the woman, extending his hand. “How do you do, Trudy? I’m Cole Granger.”

The young woman flushed and nervously shook his hand. “I’m fine, thank you, sir. How do you do?”

“Well enough, thank you. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Lisette slipped her arm through his. “Come. I have things to discuss with you.” She moved ahead. Trudy waited, then followed them at a distance.

Lisette didn’t speak at first as they walked from the house toward the mall, all manner of men and women moving past them, many of them soldiers. Though it had grown immensely and was a bevy of storage, manufacturing, industry and all things associated with war, there was still something inviting about the Union capital. The president spoke daily with his constituents—and his enemies—in the White House. He took his carriage out daily, often with his Mary, and despite the fact that there were those who despised him for the war, Lincoln was a man of the people. Cole had only seen him at a distance and heard him speak to crowds; Alexandra Fox knew him. She had been arrested for knowing what she shouldn’t have known once because Alex had her own special gift. Her dreams could be prophetic. And she had tried to stop a battle, which had meant that she had found herself arrested for espionage. Lincoln had stepped in. They were friends.

Alex was no form of monster, as Cody sometimes called himself. But she was a different person. She had those dreams, or dream-visions. Alex often said that it might just be intuition, her senses warning her of what was to come.

She had never—she had assured Cole once—ever seen what the war would become.

“This is extremely distressing,” Lisette said, when they had come to the Mall at last, looking to make sure that Trudy was still a good distance behind them. The great expanse divided the streets and had been designed as park area—though it was now most often muddy terrain where troops drilled—and it finally seemed to afford Lisette some sense that they were isolated enough to speak freely. They stood in front of the Castle, the first building of the Smithsonian Institution, where even now, in the midst of the war, the work of scientists went on. James Smithson had never set foot in the United States, but the country’s dream of democracy had appealed to him, and he’d bequeathed the funds to an ideal. While troops drilled, business went on, and so the museum and the Mall were dreams and ideals loved by the people, constants amid chaos.

“This?” Cole asked.

“Megan Fox,” Lisette said.

“We didn’t bring her. She found us last night at the prison.”

“Convenient. Are you certain that she hadn’t been in the prison?”

“She had several chances to inflict damage on us and she didn’t,” Cole said. “She seemed to be fighting with us.”

“Seemed!” Lisette said.

Cole listened to the sounds of the street, children still being children, playing on doorsteps and in patches of grass, carriage wheels running over potholes, line riders avoiding those potholes and even the rustle of fabric as ladies picked up their cumbersome skirts to cross the streets.

“Seemed?” Lisette repeated sharply.

“Look,” Cole said. “I’m here with Cody and Brendan on a mission. I’m not here as part of a war. Cody says that she’s his sister, and that’s that in my book. I don’t believe she’s here on a sinister quest to rid the country of Union forces by setting forth a league of vampires. Take the war out of this when you’re speaking to me, or I’m done.”

Lisette had her hands on her hips as she stared at him; no one would mistake them for lovers at that point.

“I forget. You’re one of them,” she said. “Texas!” She nearly spit out the word.

“Humanity,” he said flatly. “Look, are you going to tell me where we stand and what’s needed, or are you going to spout political rhetoric?”

“The South will lose!”

He lowered his head for a minute. “Yes. Eventually. The blockades grow tighter, and for every Federal killed, another steps off a ship from another country, barely speaking English, ready to die like a canary sent into the coal mine of freedom. I’m done talking, Lisette. Tell me what you want, but, please, make no more references to the evil of Texas and my brethren. Just tell me where we are with the trauma at hand.”

She pursed her lips with displeasure. “You did well last night. Extremely well. But we know that a number of the creatures escaped.”

“How?”

“Have you seen the paper this morning?”

He shook his head. “No.”

She reached into her bag and produced the morning’s newspaper, unfolding it so that he could see the headline—Murder on Florida Avenue.

He took it from her hands and read the article. A Joshua Brandt, his wife, mother and two servants had been found dead. The bodies, white as sheets, had been discovered strewn about the house.

BREAKFAST HAD LONG been cleared away. Martha had gone to be with her children. Alex had tactfully taken Brendan for a “constitutional” walk. And Megan sat with Cody in the parlor, sensing what was coming next.

“You knew about me all your life?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “No, not all my life. But I knew about my father. Well, when I was young, my mother would tell me that he’d been a wonderful man, but that he didn’t stay long in one place. That he…that he had a quest in life, and that his quest was important and undertaken for the sake of all humanity. I never saw our father. I was born in North Carolina, where my mother had friends. I would tell the children that I played with at parties and so on that my father was a great man, but when I was about six, I think, one of the older boys told me that my father was a drifter and I was a bastard. Shortly after, we moved to Richmond, my mother married a fine man named Andrew Jennison and my life went on from there.”

She had barely finished speaking when the door opened and Cole stepped in. The woman, Lisette Annalise, was not with him. Megan had to admit she was glad. She didn’t like Cole Granger and she liked him less alongside the actress who seemed to think she was the Army of the Potomac.

Cole looked at them then closed the door carefully. He walked over to Cody, placing a newspaper on his lap.