But there was no safety, out in the streets. Only a blur of faces and shrieking and pain. A building burned, sending flames jetting like blood into the sky, and there was a riot going on, and he and his angel were caught in the middle of it. A man rushed them, face twisted, and Myrnin leaped for him, threw him down on the rough cobbles, and plunged his fangs deep into the man’s throat.
As good as the fresh blood his angel had delivered had been, this, this was life . . . and death. Myrnin drained his victim dry, every drop, and was so intent on the murder of it that he failed to see the club that hit him in the back of the head, hard enough to send him collapsed to the paving. More men closed in, a blur of fists and feet and clubs, and he thought, I escaped one hell to suffer in another, and all he could do was hug the book, the precious book of his own insanity and suffering, to his chest and wait to die.
But then his angel was there, his fiery angel. She needed no sword, only her own fury, and she cleared them from him. She was hurt for it, and he hated himself that he was the cause of her pain, but she drove them back.
The head wound must have sparked visions, because he saw himself, a different self, sober and sane and dressed in brilliant colors, and he saw himself in an embrace with his angel—no, his Lady Grey, his savior; he remembered her name now. He remembered that much, at least.
The book was gone. He did not know where he’d put it. But somehow it didn’t seem so important now. He had her. Her.
The vision vanished, and then Lady Grey turned to him, with something strange in her wide eyes as she helped him to his feet.
“Come, my lord,” she said. “Let us have you out of this place.”
? ? ?
Escape was difficult to achieve, but she changed from her blood-spattered gown and wrapped him in layers of heavy clothes, then hired a carriage to rush them out of London. The streets were unsafe around them, and he was, he admitted, not the most pleasant of companions. The filth on him had been unnoticeable when he was locked away, but now, with the clean smell of the countryside washing through the windows, and Lady Grey in her neat dress seated across from him, he knew he stank horribly. As neither of them breathed to live, though, it was a tolerable situation. For now.
But in addition to the filth, he was also given to fits, and he knew they distressed her. Sometimes he would simply leave his body while it thrashed hard enough to snap his bones; sometimes, the fit came as a wave of terror that drove him to cower in the footwell of the coach, hiding from imaginary agonies. And each time such things came to devour him, she was there, holding his hand, stroking his foul and filthy hair, whispering to him that all was well, and she would look after him.
And he believed her.
The trip was very long, and the fits passed slowly, but they lessened in intensity as his vampire body rejected Cyprien’s poisons from it; he slept, drank more blood, ate a little solid food (though that experiment proceeded less well), and felt a very small bit better when the carriage finally rocked to a stop at the ruins of an ancient keep set atop a hill.
“Where are we?” he asked Lady Grey, gazing at the old stones. They seemed familiar to him. She looked at him with a sudden, bright smile.
“That’s the first you’ve spoken,” she said. “You’re getting better.”
Was he? He still felt hollow as a bell inside, and yet full of darkness. At least there were words in him now. Yes. That was true.
“You will remember this place,” she said. “Come. It looks worse than it is.”
She must have paid the driver off, or bewitched him, because the coach thundered off in a cloud of dust and left them in the moonlight beside what seemed a deserted pile of tumbledown walls . . . and then he blinked, and the ruins wavered like the shimmer of heat over sand, and rebuilt into what the keep would have been, in its prime. Small but solid.
And he did know it. He’d visited it often in his dreams, trapped in Cyprien’s cells.
“I remember,” he said. “I had a bath.”
“And you’ll have another, for all our sakes,” Lady Grey said, and linked her arm in his. “Can you walk?”
“Yes,” he said. His voice sounded rusty and uncertain, but his will was strong, and he put one clumsy foot before another as she walked him forward. The gate opened as they approached, and servants bowed them in.
One of them, a tall, lean man, approached and said, “Shall I take him and see him presentable, my lady?”
Myrnin shrank back. He couldn’t help it. The man wasn’t Cyprien, but he seemed to be, in that moment, and he clung to Lady Grey’s arm like a fearful child. She understood, he thought, for without a flicker, she said, “No, I will attend Lord Myrnin for a while. Draw a bath, as hot as can be done. He’ll need a long soaking. Fetch him clothes, too.”