Page 25 of Fangs, Frost, and Folios
The young woman reached out her hand. “Look, you must eat.” She glanced at Beatrice. “He’s terrible about this. Come, Nicholas. I’ll warm something in the kitchen.” She looked at Beatrice again and her eyes held. “Nothing for you to eat in here, is there?”
It was quick but telling. There was a look, a knowing, a moment of awareness in Elise’s eyes.
“Nothing but a bit of cheese,” Beatrice said. “Go ahead, Nick. I’m really not thirsty, and I have a lot of work to do.”
The woman gave Beatrice a slight nod, then drew Nick into the hallway, away from the fire, the wine, and the strange woman.
Beatrice had no way of knowing how Elise had discerned it, but there was no question in her mind that the woman knew Beatrice was a vampire.
René was paging carefully through a large leather-bound volume on the library table when Beatrice returned. “I have found what I think are all the Ben Jonson volumes in this section and have put them on the table. I put everything else back in slightly better order than we found it.” He spread his arm. “So I suggest that we focus on this group.”
“Nick’s fiancée knows I’m a vampire.”
That got René’s attention. “How?”
“That’s a question, isn’t it?” Beatrice walked through the library, checking the windows and the one door at the back of the room, which led to a mudroom attached to the back of the house. “There was just a look in her eyes, and I know that look.”
“Yes, we all know that look,” he muttered. “Some of them, they know. They sense our strangeness, I think. The others? Pfft.” He waved a hand. “They know nothing.”
“Nick is oblivious,” she said. “He doesn’t even seem to think it’s strange we only work at night.” Beatrice’s senses were raring. She could hear every sweep of paper in the room, every scuttle of a rodent along the wall. The moths near the green library lamp fluttered in a delicate cacophony, and the air smelled of dust, candle wax, and mold.
“Do you think she will tell him?”
“Tell him what?” Beatrice wasn’t as worried about that as she was about the sudden, ominous weight of knowledge in the manor. “She probably knows he’d never believe her.”
“You and your professor vampire…” René sighed. “I was going to break in and forage in the darkness, wiping the minds of anyone who caught me,” he said. “You are Giovanni are so… polite.”
Beatrice tried to focus on the job at hand. She opened a volume and looked for the table of contents to search forThe Alchemist.
The Alchemist. To find a clue from Penny. To find a play that might or might not exist.
“Allegedly,” she whispered.
“Allegedly what?”
“Nothing.” She didn’t want to let on to René that she wasn’t certain that this lost Shakespeare play was anything more than a game that Lady Penny was playing with an old flame. “Any luck?”
“I am always lucky.” René lifted his chin and looked down his nose at the dusty book he was paging through. “I make certain of it.”
They worked in silence for another three hours, but they had no luck, contrary to René’s assertion. They still had two more large volumes of collected poetry to go when Beatrice heard something in the mudroom.
Her eyes narrowed on the door. “René?”
“Yes?” He looked up. “Someone is here.”
“Yes.” She quietly set down the book and walked soundlessly toward the door, padding toward the noise she heard coming from the far room. René moved behind her, as silent as she was.
She stopped her breathing and winced when the door squeaked on its hinges.
René let out a slight humph when they saw what was making the noise. “It is a dog.”
Sitting in the middle of the cramped mudroom was a scruffy hound of some sort, long legged and damp up to its knees.
“I thought all the dogs lived in the stables.”
René walked past Beatrice and crouched down, holding his hand out for the animal to sniff. “This one must have found its way into the house. Hallo, toutou.” He scratched the animal behind the ears. “Look at you, my beautiful girl. What are you doing in this big house on your own?”
Another creak had Beatrice looking beyond the mudroom to the hallway where a door was cracked open and she could see a drift of snow coming under the door.
