Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) (5 page)

“I agree. I have some contacts I can reach out to.  But for now…”

She placed the letter on the bed, carefully, as if it might explode.  I had hoped her next step would be to offer me a spot on the bed about where the letter was, but that didn’t look as if it was going to be happening.  Instead, she stood and extended her hand.

“I think our business is concluded for this evening, Christoph.”

I stood as well, and kissed her extended hand.  “If you’re sure you’re safe here.”

Anna laughed.  “You’re going to stand guard at my bedside in case the vampire climbs in through the window?”

“I’ve already told you, this isn’t a vampire.  And yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“And perhaps while you stood guard we could entertain ourselves in
other
ways?”

“Yes, if the mood struck.”

She reached up and brushed my cheek with her knuckles, gently, as if I had soot on my face that required tending to.  “You’re a fascinating man, and I’m still not convinced you’re fully sensible, but I like you.  Another time.”

*   *   *

The steps involved in smuggling me back out of the building were a little easier than the ones that got me in, only because it was later and The Frau was sleeping.  It still involved two confederates and a shawl that I had to wear until I reached the exit, at which time I handed it over to the eye-rolling young woman who saw me out.  I believe the eye rolling had to do with assumptions made regarding the reason for my visit.  Specifically, she assumed I was there for sex, and given I was leaving so soon after having arrived, my prowess was not being held in high regard. 

This might have been justified.  There was a time when I was on my game enough to talk my way into the bed of someone like Anna.  I could have been losing my edge, but there might have been something else going on that was far worse.

Being immortal can have a surprisingly negative impact on one’s ability to carry on a romantic relationship.  Sex, sure, I’m good at that, and I’m also pretty good at doing the things one does in order to get sex.  I can be charming when I want, basically, and if I don’t feel like being charming I can always find someone who’s looking for money and not charm.  But romance? That’s more complicated. 

I’ve
cared
for
a lot of people in my life.  But at the same time I keep most people at a safe remove, because emotionally I just can’t get too invested when I know that even if I spend the rest of
their
life with them, it won’t be the rest of
my
life.  It won’t even be a tiny piece of that life. And that’s what love is: it’s realizing you don’t want to live in a world without that other person in it.  Outliving someone who means
that
much to you is difficult to do once.  I’ve done it a hundred times, and it never gets easier.

But I’m still human, and I still connect with people, and that means I still fall in love, and it’s not really something I can control.  It doesn’t seem to matter that everyone I have ever loved is dead; it keeps on happening.

Now, I’m not saying I had fallen in love with Anna.  I’m saying a part of me might have recognized that I
could
, and that was what kept me from trying a whole lot harder to get her into bed.

Although the possibility existed I just wasn’t as charming as I thought I was.

*   *   *

It was nightfall by the time I left. 

You’ve probably spent your entire life in a world lit by electricity and likely can’t appreciate what it was like in a night illuminated only by gaslight, or before that, one brightened by nothing but stars and the moon.  It was often not pleasant.  Darkness to me has always meant I should expect predators, so for the longest time I was in the habit of staying where I was from sundown to sunrise.  That was one reason I tended to sleep in bars, although certainly not the only one.  It was also a reason a more persistent version of me might have tried harder not to leave Anna.

But leave I did, and the flat I was staying in wasn’t particularly close to her building, so I had to wander the streets.  It wasn’t all that terrible, because in a city you’re always surrounded by people and guided by secondary light sources: windows in taverns, lanterns on passing carriages, and so forth.  It was also a cloudless night and the moon was near full.  It wasn’t pitch dark, by any stretch. 

All of that was good, because my understanding of the Viennese streets was not fully comprehensive.  Yes, it was a grid, but most of the streets were unmarked, and it was too dark to read what street signs did exist.

I could have ducked into the nearest tavern and spent the rest of the night the same way I’d spent most of the past month, but that meant possibly losing track of time and Anna and quite possibly the rest of the year.  (It could happen.  I’ve lost my grip on entire decades.  They were boring decades, I’m pretty sure, but I lost track of them nonetheless.)  Something made me think I wanted to stay sharp for as long as this congress was happening.  Treaties weren’t unusual things, and they usually lasted only as long as it took to dry the ink, but this one felt important.  It felt like an era I didn’t want to forget I lived through.

Another really good reason to stay sharp was that there was somebody following me.

I didn’t notice him right away.  There were enough people out in the streets—milling about in various directions and without any concern for potential large predators—that it took a while to pick up on the one person sharing the night who was also sharing a destination.

He was mostly staying back about a half a block, keeping people between us when he could, and stepping into alcoves when I stopped and/or turned to check. 

It was much too dark to get a clean look—tall man, upturned collar, hat—but he had a distinctive footfall.  He dragged and scuffed his right foot on the cobblestones every five or six steps.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to pick him out aurally.

I opted against trying to lose him in a tavern, mainly for the above reasons, but also because I can handle myself.  (In hindsight, this was a little arrogant of me.  I’m very good in close combat, but only against other humans.)  I could think of only one or two reasons someone might want to follow me, and they were really interesting reasons, so I didn’t try and shake him.  I hoped he’d catch up and I would get a good story out of it.

I kept giving him a chance to get closer—I slowed my pace and lingered in front of empty shops, cut down vacant alleys and doubled back a few times—but he stubbornly refused to take the opportunity.  It made me think he was only tailing and had no intention to engage. 

And then, a few blocks from my building, he disappeared.

I didn’t see this happen, but I heard it.  At first I lost him in the shuffle caused by four loudly non-sober men exiting an alley between me and my shadow, but when the noise they were making faded, I couldn’t hear him walking any more.

I couldn’t see him either.  I only had the moon by then.  There were no open shops on the block, carriage lanterns required carriages and there were none, and I had no independent source of illumination.  The moon was inadequate.  But I didn’t think he was there.

I ruminated on the facts for the next two blocks, trying to decide if I had been imagining the whole thing, when quite suddenly he reintroduced himself.

I’m ashamed to admit that someone without a gun or projectile of any kind got the drop on me, but this guy did.  In my defense, he wasn’t technically a “guy” at all, but I still should have seen it coming.

He launched himself from the alleyway only a few yards from the stoop of my building, and had his arm around my neck before I could do anything about it.  I recognized the grip.  It was the kind a strong enough man could use to break another man’s neck.  I’d used it myself a couple of times.  There were a few defenses against it, but I needed to be still to employ them, and that was impossible so long as I was being dragged into the alley, so I let him take me there.

“Tell me,” he hissed into my ear.  His breath was hot, and smelled unpleasant.  He’d eaten pickled eggs recently.  “Who is your master?”

“Who is my what?”

He tightened his grip, which made it hard for me to use any words at all for a few seconds.  He was definitely strong enough to break my neck.

His point made, he allowed me to breathe again.

“The woman answers to you.  To whom do you answer?”

“Ah, I understand.  You’re mistaken, she doesn’t work for me.”

He had an odd accent.  He was speaking German, but not in the way of a native European.  I couldn’t pinpoint where he hailed from, though.  I needed more sentences.

“Then you for her!  How far does this go?  Tell me and I will kill you without pain.”

“That’s an appetizing offer.”

His grip changed subtly.  The proper way to break a man’s neck using this particular technique involves both arms, with one forearm pressed against the back of the neck and one around the front and jerking backwards.  There are other methods, but this is the one that I’ve found to be the most consistently successful.  I felt the arm at the back of my neck release and the one in front tighten.  It happened too quickly for me to do much of anything, but since my best defense involved driving him backwards into the wall, the change in grip didn’t alter my circumstances much.  Or, so I thought in the half-second I had to act.  After that it was too late.

“In my other hand is a dagger,” he said.  “The tip is pointed at your spine.  I can take away your legs and saw you open at my leisure.  Do not doubt this.”

“I was wondering what that was.”

“You joke when you should be answering.”

“Right.  Well thank you for telling me what your other hand was doing.”

In response, he pushed the point of the knife forward exactly enough for me to feel the prick of it on my back.

I’m frankly accustomed to people attacking me without knowing exactly what they’re doing, only because when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, most people legitimately
don’t
know what they’re doing.  He did, because as I said, the best defense against being choked was a head-butt and a shove backwards until we made contact with the wall of the alley.  This was especially true if his second arm wasn’t pressing against the back of my neck any more.  The problem was I couldn’t very well propel him backwards if there was a knife between us. 

More than knowing what he was doing, he appeared to assume I knew what
I
was doing too, because he had summarily removed my cleanest defensive approach.  All I had left was moves that were likely to get me stabbed.

The other choice, I suppose, would have been to tell him something he wanted to hear.  I just didn’t have any idea what that was.

“What makes you think I’m working for anybody?” I asked.

“I am not a fool.  I…”

The rest of what he was going to say got lost in a shout of surprise. 

Since we were standing on top of one another I actually felt the impact of the knife, which struck him somewhere in the shoulder area.  I didn’t waste any time wondering who had thrown it, not when that gave me an opportunity to act on my own behalf.

I put the heel of my boot on his foot and pivoted so my elbow was inserted between us, something he wasn’t going to be able to counter effectively because he needed his balance to do that, and he didn’t have it as long as I was standing on his foot.  It would have been tough to pull off this maneuver if he still had a solid hold of my neck, but that went away when he took the blade in his shoulder. 

I shoved away from him and fell over, because I was also not in balance for having pivoted on his foot.  But when I hit the ground, my neck wasn’t broken and my lower spine was intact.  I’m a pretty good healer, but I don’t think either of those injuries are the kind I can recover from. 

He shrieked, and when he did it his jaw opened wider than a human’s jaw is capable of.  The teeth were double-rowed and sharp.  It was Anna’s vampire. 

“Assassin!” he yelled—not at me—pulling the knife out of his back. 

I no longer had his attention.  It belonged to whoever stood at the other end of the alley.  This would have been an excellent time to get up and either attack him or get the hell out of the alley. 

I stayed where I was.

His knife was sharp.  I hadn’t even felt it cut me.  Not in the spine, thank goodness, but in my side.  It wasn’t deep, but only because it wasn’t a long knife.  I knew this because it was still stuck in me.

In the near-dark of the alley, there was a struggle.  I heard metal against metal, and grunting, and then I saw legs running past me.  He was fleeing.  I didn’t much care.  I had just pulled the knife out, which was maybe not the best idea ever.  But it was an unusual knife and I wanted to get a better look at it.

I knew what the vampire really was.

*   *   *

I woke up to sunlight on my face from an un-curtained window in my own flat.  I was on the bed, propped up in a sitting position, and there were bloody cloths and a bottle of cheap whiskey next to me.  The bottle was empty and the blood was mine.

There was clean dressing wrapped around my stomach.  From a wood chair at the foot of the bed, a young man was looking at me.