Midnight Kiss Read online

  By the time Louis arrived, shortly after nightfall, she was raw of nerve and struggling for composure. In a pinched voice, she asked for his coat, and her hands were shaking as she accepted it. She couldn’t meet his gaze though she felt it, intense and probing, upon her. Passing the heavy greatcoat to a disapproving Mrs. Kampford, who carried it away, Arabella murmured, “If you will come with me, my lord, I believe my father is ready.”

  As she turned from him, blinking back an insistent moisture, his long fingers curled about hers, drawing her up, drawing her close. He said her name in that low, caressing tone, and everything inside her quivered in response. Still, she wouldn’t look up at him. He cupped her chin in his other palm and slowly raised it, gently forcing a linking eye contact. His fingertips soothed away the reluctant trail of tears.

  “What is it, little one?”

  Little one. Such an odd endearment, as she was hardly slight, young, or fragile. But he made her feel small and vulnerable with his soothing presence.

  “Do you fear for me?”

  That was painfully evident, yet still she strove to erect a brave front before his probing gaze. “My father has assured me that you will be fine.”

  “Believe him.”

  She nodded jerkily. Her fingers laced tightly through his and she pushed her cheek into the well of his palm, washing his thumb with a series of quick, damp kisses.

  “Bella.”

  It was a quiet rumble. Then his hand speared back, knifing through the careful arrangement of her hair, yanking her forward and wrenching her head up for the sudden hard possession of his mouth. It was a necessarily brief but wild union of thrusting tongues and tortured breaths, then he dragged her away.

  “When it is done and all is well, I should like very much to pursue this with you.”

  “Yes,” was all she could manage in a weak little voice.

  “Your father is waiting.”

  Sobered by that statement, Arabella scrubbed her cheeks with trembling fingers and nodded. “This way, my lord.” And as she led, she was very aware that he continued to hold to her other hand.

  Stuart’s office was agleam with artificial light, all its surfaces clean and clinical. When Arabella hesitated at the doorway, Louis nudged her forward with a gentle bump.

  “Ah, there you are, Radman. Shall we get started? Bella, you may go.”

  Contrarily, her fingers clenched about the marquis’s. In a strong voice, she said, “I should like to stay. I have assisted in many studies, and think I could be of help.”

  She looked to Louis, her features calm and competent, her eyes beseeching.

  He weighed her request for a long moment, plumbing the depths of her gaze with an intense scrutiny before giving a brisk nod. “Very well.” But as she expelled a breath of relief, he followed it with a soft warning. “Do not be afraid of what you might see.”

  “Arabella, take the marquis’s outerwear, if you please.” Once Louis made the decision to allow her to remain, Howland seemed content with it. He knew his daughter was more than capable to assist. However, as she carried Louis’s fine jacket and waistcoat away, he touched her arm meaningfully and told her, “Stay, but do not interfere and do not ask questions.”

  “Yes, Father.” She was happy to comply with any terms so long as she could be close.

  Stuart dismissed her from his thoughts and busied himself with his radical invention, an odd assemblage of tubing connected to a glass receptacle and a bellows-like hand pump. “My lord, on the table, if you would. How is the hand?”

  Louis extended it palm up to show the unscarred flesh. “Nicely healed. At one time, such a wound would have taken years, even decades to repair.”

  And as she promised, Arabella asked no questions, though they were burning to be spoken.

  Once Louis was stretched out upon the lower of the two tables, Stuart lifted a heavy leather strap and draped it across the supine man’s ankles before feeding it through a buckle secured on the other side. Louis immediately looked wary.

  “What is that for?”

  “Safety.”

  He chuckled low and cynically. “Mine or yours, Doctor?”

  “Both,” came the candid reply. “Once the procedure begins, you must be completely still.”

  Louis shifted his feet, testing the bonds. His mouth pursed. “Do you think to hold me with such flimsy ties?”

  Stuart was busy buckling a second strap across his sturdy thighs. “Indeed.” Another pulled across Louis’s broad chest and secured his left wrist. His right arm remained free. Then, Stuart placed a heavy crucifix upon the snowy shirt front, and Louis inhaled sharply. The crucifix was made of solid silver.

  The sudden display of Louis’s distress was almost as peculiar to Arabella as her father’s use of the religious symbol. Was there some significance she missed? A morbid reminder of the last rites that had the marquis so upset?

  “Take it off.”

  Then her father’s strange comment. “Does it burn you?”

  “No, but I can’t breathe.” He was taking short, suffocating gasps for air, as if the cross had a mass a thousand times greater and a weight dense enough to crack ribs. “Take it off!”

  “I think not, my lord. Relax. Don’t fight against it. It’s for your own benefit.”

  He thrashed, contrarily, within the bindings, but the movements were weak and ineffective, as if the cross exerted a tremendous downward pressure. Finally, Louis surrendered and lay panting shallowly, a gleam of fury glittering in his amber eyes. When Stuart drew near, talon-like fingers shot out to clench the doctor’s throat. Stuart showed no sign of alarm even as Arabella gasped. Easily, he caught the marquis’s wrist and pulled.

  “Release me, my lord. We were going to trust one another, remember?”

  “This is not a measure of trust, Doctor.”

  “It is one of caution. Now, let me go, or we will forget the entire matter.” Powerful fingers opened, and Stuart stepped back to a safe distance. “Arabella, bring me that basin.”

  When she broke her puzzled trance and did so, Stuart positioned the bowl beneath the dangle of Louis’s right arm and pushed up his shirt sleeve.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, ignoring her vow to be silent.

  “Bleed him, of course. The foul humors must be removed first.” And he tied off Louis’s forearm to encourage the swelling of an appropriate vein.

  Arabella held to her skepticism. Though bloodletting was an accepted practice, she had never fully supported it. Theories that it restored vessels which had collapsed under the weight of too much blood sounded farfetched to her. There was something amiss when physicians were more concerned with spilling blood than with staunching it. The only advantage she could see was that, once a patient was bled white, he was too lethargic to be much trouble and rested because he was too weak to do otherwise.

  “Hold the bowl, Bella.” With that, Stuart cut open an engorged vein with a quick slash of his lancet. The instant he released the tourniquet, the steady purge of blood began.

  “An irony of sorts, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?” Louis smiled wryly and closed his eyes. And the basin grew heavy in Arabella’s hands.

  After what seemed like an interminable time, when the streaming rush of crimson had slowed to a weak trickle, she risked a glimpse at Louis’s calm features and knew a shock of alarm. They were more than pale; they were translucent. Taut skin hugged the bold angles of his bone structure, creating frightening caverns and ridges. His respiration had dwindled until she could detect no movement. Even his lips had taken on a bluish tinge.

  “My lord, are you all right? Louis? Father?” She looked about in a panic, but he had left the room. And she was alone with a man she was sure was dying.

  Setting down the full basin, she bent near, touching unsteady fingertips to a t
hroat as cold and immobile as marble. Nothing. “Louis? Oh, God, no.” As her hand frantically stroked one chill cheek, dark lashes flickered against them and she could hear the faint expulsion of breath. “Louis, can you hear me?”

  “C-cold. So cold.”

  And his eyes opened, eyes that were glazed and streaked with red. They fixed upon her, affecting a sudden paralysis. Moving fast, so fast it was almost impossible to track, his hand flashed out, twisting in her hair, slamming her down across him. Momentarily winded, she couldn’t struggle, but gasped a pitiful “No—” as her head was wrenched by the powerful grasp until tendons strained in her neck. She felt his breath—not hot, but icy—upon that bared bend and the brush of his lips, colder still.

  “Louis—”

  Her heart was hammering wildly as ungoverned terror surged. Such strength he had, such unimaginable strength. And the sound he made, that deep, vibrating sound, no more human than the growl of a wolf or the snarl of a panther.

  “The cross—remove the cross,” came his harshly grating voice. “Now!”

  “No—”

  “Take it off, or I will—I will—” He broke off, panting raggedly. Abruptly, his imprisoning hand opened and she was able to bolt back to safety on wobbly legs. Pinned inexplicably beneath the gleam of silver, Louis twisted and writhed, jerking against the binding straps with restless, helpless movements.

  Upon return from his study with the journal in which he meant to make notes, one look at his patient alerted Stuart Howland and he was quick to race to his daughter’s side.

  “Bella, did he harm you?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Charlatan,” Louis roared. “Release me.”

  “I think not, my lord,” he murmured grimly, as he hurriedly secured the free arm to the table with another heavy restraint. “Here. Drink this. It will help.”

  Louis stared at the cup he offered, his gaze black with fear and a frustrated fury. Then he lifted to obediently swallow down the potion, letting his head fall back and his eyes close as he waited for the powders to work. He fell once more into that almost coma-like state that so alarmed Arabella.

  Seeing his daughter’s strained expression, Stuart patted her arm and reminded her, “You asked to be here, my dear. I didn’t promise it would be pleasant.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “It’s nothing that can be explained away with simple science.” But the rest of his explanation was halted by a staccato tapping on the rear door. When Stuart went to answer it, the dim light revealed Mac Reeves and his henchmen and the slumped figure of a man, a man whose head was lolling loosely on his shoulders.

  “Fresh enough for you, Doc?” the sinister Reeves queried with an awful grin.

  Then the man they restrained groaned and one quick jerk wrought a snap and a telling silence.

  “Pay up, gov.”

  “Place him on the table,” Stuart said without inflection.

  As they did the gruesome deed, one remarked, “Looks like you gots yer corpse already. Whatcha meanin’ to do, what with two of ’em?”

  “It’s none of your concern, now, is it?” Then Stuart flashed the payment and it was snapped up by a greedy Reeves.

  “None a our business a-tall. G’night, Doc, Missy.”

  As Stuart began to prepare the newly deceased, he acknowledged Arabella’s horrified stare, challenging it with a fierce look of his own.

  “We’ve seen murder done,” she whispered hoarsely.

  Chapter Seven

  “ARE YOU HERE to help or theorize?” Stuart Howland snapped. He waited, his expression hard and unrepentant in that midnight hour. Then he softened just a bit. “Bella, we are not to blame for the activities of men such as Reeves. We can stand here and argue the humanitarian and legal aspects all night, but that will not serve his lordship. I am a scientist, not a theologian, and I refuse to apologize for that. Every minute we wait, the risk triples. Are you going to help, or do you prefer to wait until our donor’s blood is the consistency of clotted cream?”

  Arabella’s gaze lingered on Louis, who looked every bit as deathlike as the graverobber’s victim. Then she swallowed convulsively and braced her resolve. “What would you have me do?”

  “Good girl. Come over here and work these bellows when I tell you. Do not stop until I tell you. Keep up a steady rhythm.”

  She did as told and soon her father had the warm corpse hooked to his transfusing machine and bade her to begin the pumping. Vital fluid trickled into the bottom of the glass catch bottle, tracking it in a slow, vivid circle, then pooled thick with increasing volume. As soon as the level rose to the top, Stuart shoved up the marquis’s other sleeve, slit a vein, and inserted the end of a quill he’d attached to the tubing. Then he went to tie off the other arm so they wouldn’t lose any of the new flow entering his body.

  Haemolytic shock and agonizing death, her father had said. Arabella held her breath and continued to work the bellows. For a time, both donor and recipient were equally still, equally pale. Then a rattly sighing breath shook through Louis, and he began to gasp in labored gulps. With his eyes still closed, he tossed his head from side to side, the movement growing more and more violent. His hands worked at his sides, fingers scrabbling, tearing at the wood like claws. Knees snapped up against the belts and buckles as his body warped frantically atop the table.

  “Keep going,” Stuart commanded when Arabella’s tempo lagged. “You can’t stop now.”

  With anguished tears blurring her eyes, she continued.

  Stuart moved to adjust and tighten the strap on Louis’s left arm to stop the quill from being pulled loose. He was concentrating on that task and didn’t notice when the marquis’s eyes opened. But Arabella did, and she screamed an instinctive warning. For the gaze was wild and blood-red, and alive with hatred and pain.

  With a howling roar, Louis jerked his right arm free, ripping through thick leather like it was paper and the metal fasteners as cheap tin. He grabbed Stuart Howland by the shoulder. Had he caught him by the neck, the doctor would have been killed instantly. As it was, hooked fingers bit right to bone, tearing flesh and muscle until Howland bent across him, maneuvering so that the back of Louis’s hand brushed the silver cross. And shrieking, Louis let him go.

  Stuart staggered back, clutching at his injured shoulder. “Don’t stop,” he yelled at Arabella, who seemed ready to fall into shock herself, because she couldn’t look away from those red eyes flaring with such fierce and primal fury, eyes that fastened upon hers and burned right to her soul.

  She felt his words batter against her conscious mind.

  Arabella, the cross. Lift the cross.

  She tried to shake her head, but the daze deepened. His voice increased and intensified in its silent demand.

  Arabella, take away the cross. Free me.

  And she was reaching numbly, dutifully... until her father slapped her. The sting of it woke her and she blinked at him stupidly, unaware of what she’d been about to do.

  “Work the bellows, child,” Stuart instructed firmly, and she nodded, close to tears and not certain why.

  On the tabletop, the mad thing lunged from side to side, unable to escape the weight of silver upon his chest. Arabella couldn’t think of it as Louis anymore, not after what he’d done to her father. Not the way he—looked. She was no longer afraid that he was dying. Not with that superhuman strength. He was alive and alert and angry and hurting. Unnaturally sharp teeth gnashed and chomped in a wild rage, gashing his lower lip and spraying a cold spittle. In her mind, no single word formed to describe what she was seeing, no name for the creature writhing on the table. Logic couldn’t contain it. She was too scared, her arms too tired from plying the bellows up and down, for theory or fantasy to take root. She accepted what she saw and didn’t try to make sense of it.

 
Finally, the reluctant donor was emptied. The last of the life-giving fluid passed into the demented being half-strapped and totally dangerous on the next table. Stuart, who was all but unconscious from his own injuries, cautiously withdrew the quill shunt and bound the marquis’s arm before sinking to the floor in a swoon.

  She couldn’t be sure how much time passed while she stood in the shivery stupor, unable to act, unable to think rational thoughts. Then, finally, Louis called to her. It was Louis, not that thrashing, snarling, fiendish thing of moments ago. Not the thing with a name she couldn’t speak.

  “Bella?”

  And he sounded so weak, so fragile, she went to him without hesitation, so grateful she was in tears. “Oh, Louis, are you all right?”

  “Burning. Burning.”

  She saw the blistering welt on his hand as she took it up in hers. She remembered seeing his flesh actually smoke when it touched the silver crucifix, another odd occurrence she couldn’t begin to explain. “Your poor hand.”

  “No,” he moaned. “The blood—it’s burning. Not so bad now. Not so bad.” And his eyes opened, their color a deep green, and his gaze slowly, swept the area. “Your father—?”

  “Father!”

  She knelt down within the tight wrap of her skirt and bent over the doctor’s huddled figure. The wound in his shoulder was ghastly, but he was fighting his way back to awareness. And the first thing he thought of was not his health, but his work.

  “The transfer—”

  “Was a success,” she told him. When he struggled to sit up, she tried to restrain him. “No, you must stay still. You must rest.”

  “No. Help me up, Bella. I must see for myself.”