Author's note: You'll notice that William doesn't need an invitation to enter the house in this chapter. This is because women weren't allowed to own property in the Victorian era, if they had a husband or male children. Upon his father's death, William inherited the property. Even though he is now dead, Anne would not have owned the house yet, anyway. For a woman, property did not exchange over until it was determined that there were no male heirs to inherit. So, technically, no one owns the house, at the moment. I just wanted to let you guys know this, so no one will think it's a plot hole. :)


Chapter Twenty-Nine




The surreal feeling did not leave him until they arrived at his house. Then it broke like a fever. It wasn’t his house anymore, he realized. It was not the same; it was not a home. Not without her. Not with this strange creature standing at his side, not with her alien scent upon his flesh and the almost preternatural need he felt for her presence. Drusilla. He did not love her; he did not feel anything for her. Yet he needed her. Somehow, he knew that she was essential to his survival.

Into the darkened foyer they crept. The house was asleep. Quiet but for the rhythmic sound of the servants’ breathing, the harsher and less predictable grate of Edward’s snoring. All so soft, that at one time, William would not have heard it at all. Now his senses seemed unusually receptive, and the softness was not softness at all but full of keen edges. He heard everything, smelled everything, felt everything. For the first time, he knew his house fully.

The scent of it was different than he remembered. Not one scent at all but dozens of them all intermingled. Blood and sweat, unwashed bodies and unclean hair. The acrid stink of carbolic, the bland aroma of floor wax. And above it all—overpowering it all— there was the odor of his mother’s illness. It was a most unpleasant smell, one of rot and infection. Of death. He could almost taste it on his tongue it was so pungent.

Drusilla did not seem to notice it.

“Is this your house, William?” she asked him. Her dark eyes darted around curiously, taking it all in.

“Yes,” he said dully.

“Mmm,” she sighed. “It smells of daisies and viscera.”

“Don’t get too attached,” he snapped, for some reason irritated by her accurate description. “We won’t be here long.”

She pouted briefly, but cheered up once she caught scent of the people sleeping downstairs.

“Have you many servants?”

“A fair few.” He knew what was coming next.

“May I have them?”

“If you like,” he said. His voice was flat. He just couldn’t bring himself to care anymore.

She jumped like a little girl and leaned up to kiss his cheek.

“I shall go now. May I?”

“Of course you may. I will be down shortly. I have…something I must do.”

He waited until she had gone and then climbed the staircase. Even before he reached his mother’s door, he could hear the irregular, wheezing sound of her breath. The smell of death was stronger here.

He wiped his mouth clean of blood before he entered her room.

She was not asleep when he approached the bed. He could tell from her expression that she had not slept at all, these past three nights. At first, she didn’t see him standing there in the darkness. Her eyes were glazed, and she was lost in thought. When he cleared his throat, she jumped.

“William!” Her exclamation was little more than a weak whisper, her voice very hoarse. When she tried to rise up, he took her hands and gently pressed her back.

“Stay,” he told her. “Keep underneath the covers. The room is chill.”

She sat back down, clutching his two hands, as if afraid he would suddenly bolt from her.

“Where have you been, William? Where? I have been so worried—”

“I’m sorry, Mother. I didn’t mean to frighten you. There were circumstances beyond my control. But I am back now.”

“I’m so glad! So very glad!”

She embraced him, then. He slid his arms around her thin body and held her close. She trembled, coughed in her customary, paroxysmal way.

“Your breathing seems bad.”

“Some worse,” she admitted, once the fit passed.

“Has the doctor come?”

“This afternoon. Edward was concerned; he sent word to Dr. Gull.”

“And what does Dr. Gull say?” he asked.

Silence from her. However, that told him more than words ever could: she hadn’t much time left. He held her even more tightly.

“Mother, if I could cure you…”

“Well, you can’t,” she said lightly. “So, let us not speak of it anymore. Pray tell me where you have been, William. But first, ring for the servants. You look chilled and pale; call Livvy to bring you some tea.”

“I am fine,” he insisted. “Quite well. You could be, too. Mother, if you would let me…you could be, too.”

“Let you what?” She sounded bewildered. William drew her head against his shoulder.

“Let me cure you,” he said.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




Afterward, he could not think of burying her.

Not for his mother, to be thrust into some shallow, hastily dug pit. Nor would he entertain the notion of putting her into that same dreadful situation in which Drusilla had placed him. Instead, he left her on her bed, pulled her blankets up to her chin and covered her face with a silk shawl. He was not certain it would work like that, her not being in the ground. But he refused to do it in any other way.

When he left Anne’s room, Drusilla was still downstairs. William could hear the servants shrieking in pain and terror, but the sound meant nothing to him now. Nonetheless, he was not interested in joining her in her massacre. He moved down the hallway to his own room.

What did one take with him, when he became a vampire? What did one leave behind? William stood in the center of his bedroom, staring around him with something akin to bewilderment as he pondered these questions. Clothing, he supposed. Not much else. He pulled a clean pillowcase from the wardrobe and began filling it with trousers and shirts, an extra pair of shoes. It all felt like a dream.

His sentimentality should have been erased when he became a vampire, but it had not been. Elizabeth’s ring was still in his trouser pocket; he would not remove it, nor show it to Drusilla. It was his. One of the only things he had left that was.

When he caught a glimpse of the book lying on his night table, he felt a rush of the same possessive feelings as he had for the ring. He picked it up and traced the gold lettering with his fingertips. The Song of Hiawatha. Her birthday gift to him. A gift made doubly precious, because it was all he had left of her. He slipped it into his pillowcase—but gently, not willing to toss it carelessly as he had everything else. After this, he could think of nothing else he needed.

He made his way back down the stairs. Matthew was standing in the entryway, just beyond the landing. He seemed frozen in place, one hand pressed into the wall for support. From the cellar came the sounds of agonized screams, of pleading, and of death. Matthew’s indecision was plain in his face: he wanted to help them, but he was afraid. When he heard the sound of William’s footsteps, he turned around, and for just a minute, their eyes met.

Neither of them spoke. From his expression, William could see that Matthew understood. Perhaps not all of the details, but he understood. His master was not the same anymore.

A spark of hatred caught in William’s heart, but it flared briefly and then died. Matthew had been partly responsible for Elizabeth’s death, but William knew he held the lion’s share of guilt in the matter. Matthew was not an evil man. He had trained the bay and made it the best hunter in the country. He had been William’s constant companion during the long rides over the estate. He lived in the coach house with his wife and a little child. He had been as good to Elizabeth as he had known how.

William’s desire to kill the man left him, replaced with a weary feeling of defeat. Drusilla’s heels were clicking on the cellar stairs; the servants were silent. William looked down the darkened hallway and then back to the coachman.

“Run,” he said.

And Matthew did.

Drusilla appeared shortly after, humming a little tune: her eyes as vague as ever, her dress spattered with blood.

“All finished,” she told him; her voice was contentment itself. She added, “They screamed so delightfully when I sent them away. Are there any others?”

“Not a one. You did them all.”

“Oh…” Her expression changed to one of remorse. “I did not keep one for you. How terribly selfish of me, not to share with my William.”

“It’s all right,” he answered. “Shall we leave now?”

“Oh, no,” she told him. “No…the sun will be up before we can stir a step. We must wait here until night comes again.”

William glanced toward the gray light of the window.

“What would happen if we did not?” he asked her.

“Then we should fall away like hearth ashes carried on the wind. You mustn’t go out into the sunlight, dear William. It burns.”

At this, he fell into a brooding silence. Drusilla touched his cheek lightly with the tip of one finger.

“You seem melancholy.”

“Only tired. It is a lot to take in.”

She motioned to the staircase. “Shall we take our rest, then?”

He nodded and dropped his pillowcase to the floor. Together they walked up the staircase. He suffered her hand on his arm as they ascended. In a way, he even liked the feeling. At least it was physical contact of some sort, with someone. But when she reached for the knob of the nearest door—Elizabeth’s door—he flung her off angrily.

“Not that room!”

She might have knocked him down for his insolence, but she did not. Instead, she smiled at him, as if pleased by the sudden act of violence.

“Where, then?”

William took her down the hallway to his own bedchamber. There wasn’t anywhere else to go. When they climbed into bed together, she put her head on his shoulder. He did not try to make her do otherwise.

He slept well, when he finally went to sleep. A heavy, dreamless slumber carried him well into the afternoon, and when he awoke, it was to the pressing of her body against his. Her tongue slid into his mouth; his sex was in her hand. She was gentler this time, almost tender. She put his hands on her, and he clumsily returned some of her caresses. He let her have her way.

But when he closed his eyes, hers was not the face he saw.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




Just after sunset, they went out again. This time, she encouraged him to stalk and catch his own kill. He did so with ease, a natural skill. Another young girl, but this one a prostitute; her blood had a bitter taste. Something in it made him angry, and he was rougher with her than he might have been.

Afterward, he did not feel satiated, so he killed again.

Drusilla was not prepared to return home with him. She killed for pleasure as well as for food, and she wanted to hunt a little longer. William left her and walked by himself to the dark, silent house. When he reached it, there was a corpse on the front lawn. William didn’t recognize the man; he must have been a passerby. But he understood the implications of that strange person…a body that had not been there when he and Drusilla left earlier that evening.

It had taken William three days to awaken as a vampire, but his mother had risen in just one.

He ran into the house. There was an orange glow coming from beneath the parlor door: a lamp had been lit, or else the fire. He wrenched open the heavy oak door and stepped through it. There was a grin across his face, now. A purely happy expression that would not return for some weeks hence.

Anne was standing on the far side of the room, playing idly with one of her whatnot trinkets. It was a wooden music box that he had given her on her last birthday. She was opening it, listening briefly to the tinkling tune, and then shutting it again. Over and over, she did this. A small, secret smile was playing about the corners of her mouth. Her cane stood, unused, against the arm of the brocade sofa.

William paused just on the other side of the sofa from her. The grin threatened to crack his face. She looked so much younger. She looked so…alive. When she saw him standing there, her smile became different.

“William,” she said. There was no surprise in her tone. She had been expecting him.

“Mother, look at you! You’re all better.”

He stepped forward around the sofa, wanting to hug her, wanting to dance with her. Wanting to celebrate the fact that one person he loved, at least, would remain intact. However, she sidestepped quickly, moving to the corner and making pretense of doing so in order to replace the music box to its shelf. Only he did not realize that it was pretense.

“I suppose I have you to thank for that,” she said softly. “How ever shall I repay you?”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




It all went wrong from there.

After it ended, he could not bear to be in the house any longer. He snatched up his pillowcase and ran out into the night. Finding Drusilla was not hard. She was near to the area where he left her. In an empty warehouse, now. But he could easily detect her scent on the air. He could easily read her presence in the soft, stifled screams that filtered through the broken window glass of the building.

She was kneeling in a swath of moonlight, not far from the door. There was a small child stretched out on the dirty floor just in front of her. From all appearances, she was torturing the little boy instead of feeding from him. William didn’t even bother to avert his eyes. He had just experienced something much worse.

She looked up at him with her big dark eyes, and her expression suddenly changed. “Naughty William. What have you been up to?”

He leaned against the wall, trembling. “It—it wasn’t right,” he mumbled senselessly. “Went all wrong.”

He made no further explanation, but somehow she seemed to understand. She put a quick end to the child, dashing it against the wall in a single, practiced move. Then she took William in her arms, pressed his head into her narrow shoulder.

“Poor boy. You’re too young to garden. Didn’t you know?”

Blessed understanding. He buried his face into her neck, choking back a pained sob.

“Does it always happen, like that?” he asked, desperately. “Does it always—”

She stroked his hair in a kindhearted, absentminded sort of way. Her voice was hushed and oddly peaceful as she answered him.

“Not with you and I.”

She held him until the moment he was ready to pull away. Held and stroked him until his trembling ended, and his heart felt soothed. She seemed so different to him now, than when he pulled himself out of the grave. And although he did not yet realize it, this was the moment when his affection for her began. Drusilla: the only creature in the world who still cared for him.

“All better now?” she asked him, once he drew back from her embrace.

Of course, it was not all better. It would never be all better. Nonetheless, William nodded, and Drusilla repaid him with an approving smile.

“The night is getting old, now. Shall we go home?”

“I cannot return there,” he insisted. “I won’t—”

She tilted her head at him. It seemed, briefly, as if those dark eyes could pull from him every memory he’d ever had.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




“Home” turned out to be a suite in the Royal Hotel. They barely beat the sun into the empty lobby, and by the time they finished their four-flight walk, it was high in the morning sky.

The rooms were opulent. Gold silk damask on the walls, rich gold-scrolled red carpet. The woods were glossy and dark, sparkling in the indirect sunlight that filtered through the big French windows. William looked around curiously, his pain somehow assuaged by the beauty of the place. By the delightful smell of fresh blood that it contained.

“Is this where you live?” he asked Drusilla, much impressed.

“Where they live,” answered Drusilla. She nodded to a divan near the windows, and for the first time, William noticed the dead couple sitting upon it. The woman’s head was resting on the man’s shoulder, and they almost looked alive but for their empty eyes, the small streams of blood that had trickled down their necks to dry upon the shoulders of their garments. Drusilla looked at them almost affectionately, before she turned back to William and whispered, with a conspirational wink, “Well, where they lived. Until Angelus took them for dinner.”

“Angelus?” echoed William confusedly. “Who the bloody hell is Angelus—”

As if offering himself as a visual aid, Angelus suddenly appeared in the bedroom doorway. Even bathed in shadows as he was, William could see that he was a big man, tall and wide-shouldered. At first, he neither moved nor spoke, just watched them.

Drusilla seemed quite pleased to see him. She said to him proudly, “Look what I made. It’s called Willy.”

“William,” he corrected irritably. She had never gotten his name wrong before.

For a moment, she looked properly chastised. Then, she resumed her happy expression. “Where’s Darla?” she asked Angelus. “I want Darla to see William!”

Darla, thought William, frowning. Good God, how many of them are there?

Angelus stepped out of the shadows, slowly moving nearer to them. He answered Drusilla’s question dispassionately, in a raspy voice thick with brogue. “Darla and I had a little spat. Her precious Master sent for her. You know Darla. Master’s pet.”

Drusilla pouted. “Poor Angelus.”

“Ach, don't fret, Dru,” he answered. “We'll make up. Always do. After a little tit for tat. Shouldn’t let that spoil our fun here.”

His dark eyes roved over William, appraising his face, his body. Whatever he saw there, it made him smile. He turned to Dru. “So, instead of just feeding off this William…you went and turned him into one of us. Another cock in the henhouse.”

“You’re not cross with me, are you?”

“Cross?” Angelus’ voice sounded almost disbelieving. He reached out with the speed of a viper, and his hand closed over William’s arm. He dragged him over to the curtain and forced his arm into the sunlight. It burned.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like, having nothing but women for traveling companions? Night in and night out…”

William struggled out of his grip. The crazy bastard. What was he playing at?

“Touch me again—”

Angelus sighed. To William’s amazement, he stuck his own hand out into the sunlight, watching almost appreciatively as his skin smoldered beneath the rays.

“Don’t mistake me,” he said. “I do love the ladies. It’s just lately…I've been wondering what it’d be like to share the slaughter of innocents with another man.”

He looked over at William and grinned. “You don’t think that makes me some kind of a deviant, do you?”

Unexpectedly, William felt surge of affection for the other man. He was odd, and William was almost certain that the honest answer to his question would be a resounding yes. However, there was still something appealing about him. Something William suddenly found himself able to appreciate. He tilted his head at Angelus and smiled.

“Not at all,” he said.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




Almost immediately, he loved Angelus. It came viscerally, from the gut. It was a need stronger, even, than that for his sire. A love that was twice as powerful and not even remotely as sexual, as what he felt for Drusilla. His father had died when he was young; he had never had male friends. The off-handed affability of the other vampire seemed to fill some deep-seated need in him, offering him something he’d never experienced before. In those very early days in London, nothing was more important to him than Angelus’ approval.

After all, it was Angelus, not Dru, who taught him how to hunt.

For the first few nights of his new life, William was concerned only with feeding. He seized a victim as quickly as possible, drank of it as quickly as possible and moved on to another victim, until he had his fill. The pursuit of the kill meant nothing to him compared to the kill itself. In fact, he did his best to ensure there would be no pursuit, no real effort involved in gaining his reward. It was Angelus, who taught him something better.

Rarely, did Angelus hunt with them. Usually, he and Darla went off by themselves. But since Darla was still gone to see the Master, Angelus now went alone. He often met up with the others just before daybreak, to talk of what the night had brought. But never did he invite them to go along with him. However, there came a night when Dru was having one of her queer spells (she was spending much of her time sitting in a bath of stale water and talking to her dolls), and she was in little condition to hunt. Angelus felt that William, as a fledgling, should not go alone. So on that night, William and Angelus went out together.

It was a warm night, and hunting was good. Dozens of couples were strolling down the dim paths in the park, enjoying the fresh air. A young woman and her husband were playing a game, chasing one another in and out of the trees, hiding and then showing themselves, having wonderful fun. It would be an easy kill, but more than that, it would be a pleasantly vengeful one. Seeing that happy couple made William’s heart burn with jealousy. He hated them for having what he had once had…for having what he would probably never have again. He wanted to destroy them.

He stood in the shadows of a birch tree, and the girl practically ran into his arms. She was panting, laughing. She excused herself politely and then tried to turn away. William, of course, would not let her.

He put a hand to her mouth to keep her quiet and immediately bent his head to her neck. However, before he could deliver that deadly bite, Angelus’ voice spoke from right behind him.

“Let her go,” he said.

William twisted around to face him, all the while keeping the girl in an iron grasp. “What?” he said disbelievingly. Angelus never showed compassion.

“You’ve made it too easy on yourself. Let her go.”

“But…”

Angelus looked impatient.

“Do you think this is just a kill? Feeding like a street dog in the garbage? We’re above that; we make it into art.” He leaned inward, speaking in a soft whisper that the girl could not hear. “You let her go, and you let her run. And just when she thinks she’s got away…you take her.”

William released the girl.

His natural instinct, when she bolted, was to go after her. But Angelus held him back, one strong hand clamped in his shoulder. “Not yet,” he said. “Challenge yourself.”

The girl fled down the dark, woodsy path, tripping over her long skirts and calling her husband’s name. Just when she almost reached him—just as she disappeared from William’s sight—Angelus’ hand dropped away.

“Go get her,” he said.

He followed her in an almost effortless run. In and out of the trees he went, allowing her glimpses of him. She always turned away when she saw him, and this was what he wanted. He was herding her away from her husband, herding her deeper into the trees, deeper into solitude. Just when the moment was right, he lunged for her legs, dragging her down with the weight of his body. She squirmed beneath him, screaming. When he flipped her onto her back, she clawed at his arms, spit in his face.

Let me go, let me go…

But he wouldn’t.

He didn’t use his full strength. Several times, he let her think that she was escaping. Several times, he let her crawl along the wet grass, sliding her body from underneath him. Once, he even let her stand up. Yet always before she could run, he pulled her back down. Angelus had been right. It was a wonderful feeling, the struggle. All violence and adrenaline, and fear. It was arousing. When, finally, he allowed himself the release of the kill, he almost came from the extraordinary physical pleasure of it.

He was still sprawled on top of her body, feeding hungrily, when Angelus appeared at his side.

“Now, see, William? Wasn’t that a good deal better?”

And William, overwhelmed by just how much better it was, could only nod in agreement.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~