Page 44 of The Vampire's Guide to Wooing a Curator
“I’m not leaving here without answers.” She lowered the tip of the stake until it pressed against mottled, gray skin. “I’ll kill every single one of you if I have to.”
“Such passion,” a croaking voice said from behind her.
She spun around. The robed figure flipped back his hood, revealing an ancient, leathery face with sunken eyes and cracked lips. The furrowing of his eyebrows and slight tilt of his head were so unexpected, it took a few seconds for Felicity to recognize that he was looking at her with sympathy.
He was so thin, she could have toppled him with a flick of her wrist, but he pitied her.
“What is your name, child?” the man asked.
She kept the stake where it was. “You don’t need to know my name.”
The creature laughed, a sound like rustling leaves. “You may call me ‘Mordecai.’”
“Mr. Mordecai—”
“Just ‘Mordecai.’ We do not follow your human rules of address here.” He produced a lit cigar from within his flowing robe and took a long draw. “Now, what has you so riled up?”
She glared at the woman cowering beneath her. “This one has information I need.”
Mordecai gestured to the dagger that had fallen to the ground. “What did its owner do to you?”
Her legs were sore from holding the awkward position on the bed. “It murdered my parents.”
Mordecai exhaled a cloud of smoke and nodded.
“You’re not surprised?” She put the stake away and crawled off the bunk. “You must know what I intend to do.”
Mordecai uttered another rustling laugh. “My dear, all of us have taken countless lives. We are here as penance. We wish to suffer for our sins.” He pointed his cigar at the wall to his right. “Tell her, Laurence.”
She turned her attention to a bed she’d assumed was empty. The blanket moved, and what emerged from the darkness was a figure that she could hardly believe had once been human.Its spindly arms and legs were so coated with tar that they resembled the branches of a scorched tree. The thing leaned against the wall of its cubby as if it didn’t have the strength to hold itself up yet managed to bring a long pipe to its lips. When it had exhaled an enormous quantity of smoke, it held out hands tipped with ragged, yellow nails.
“I took a thousand lives with these hands,” it whispered. “To atone for that sin, I became a doctor. For three centuries, I saved as many as I could and released the ones who begged for death.”
She tried to imagine the vampire younger and less decrepit. It—he—was trying to atone for all the lives he’d taken.
“All of us have similar stories,” Mordecai said. He pointed to the bed next to Laurence’s. “My mate, Annabelle, was a nurse.” He pointed to the woman Felicity had accosted. “Laurence’s mate, Yelena, served in the army medical corps.”
Laurence gave a raspy cough, then lay back down on his bed.
“So, you see,” Mordecai said, “we have no fear of death.”
She stood there, with the weight of their silence pressing down on her shoulders, knowing that she would have killed all of them without a second thought if she had encountered them a week earlier.
Mordecai stubbed out his cigar. “Show me the dagger.”
She grabbed the weapon, but it slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor. Mordecai reached down and retrieved it.
“Interesting,” he whispered. “Yes, I have seen this before.”
Her pulse pounded in her ears. “Whom does it belong to?”
“You will not like the answer.”
“Tell me!”
He ran the pad of his thumb along the gold dog’s broken ear. “The one you seek is long dead.”
“No, that’s not—no!” She couldn’t have been dead, not after everything Felicity had done to find her. “You’re just… trying to distract me.”
