82 Varden St London 3 Sept 1852 3.18 a.m. Merillion Buckland Hall, Brecknockshire Iacobus murdered by vampire STOP Wexley Gardens, Erith STOP Come at once STOP Edward James Signals Ministry

Merilyn Justinia Worthing née Murray climbed the spiral staircase of the Wexley Gardens Hotel more quickly than advisable. She was weighted down and thrown off-balance by the ungainly weapon strapped to her back, and by the clumsy leather gauntlet and cuirass she wore to protect herself from it. The goggles she wore made fine work of what remained of her balance; every step seemed to move her in a different direction. The witch who had sold her the goggles claimed they would show Merilyn the true world beneath the glamour, but all Merilyn could see through them was a chaos of impossible geometry and colors that hurt her head. Thankfully, Martins’s steady hand remained on her back, ready to right her if she tipped.

Despite the extra three stone she carried and the stairs evading her feet like the foam slipping off the bow of a steamer, Merilyn stormed around the spiral, hardly using the polished brass handrail for support. She dared not – one moment the rail was in easy reach, and the next it stretched off to the horizon. An ornate lift cage stood like a grand brass column at the center of the spiral, but Merilyn had no time for such a slow, mannerly ascent. She was brimming with all of the anger that had built to a boil during her train ride to London, and she wouldn’t have been able to keep from fidgeting while waiting.

At the top of the stairs, Martins shouted and pointed at the woman hastily shoving her way through the lift doors. Through the goggles Merilyn could not make out the other woman’s features. Martins shouted again before Merilyn could motion him back to safety behind her. She whipped the handle of the weapon out of the basket on her hip and trained its nozzle on the woman standing between the doors. “Do not press that button, vampire.”

The woman glanced up quickly, with a bird-like flick of her head. She took in Merilyn and the weapon she held, and – alarmed – she stumbled back through the parting lift doors to fall against the panels of tufted velvet upholstery.

Merilyn took another step forward, and only then remembered to prime her weapon with the plunger jutting out from behind the nozzle. The sloshing liquids in the tanks on her back began to sizzle as they mingled together and built pressure; the nozzle she held in her hand like a pistol and the curling hose that fed it grew warm within seconds. She couldn’t be certain through the goggles, but the bulbs atop the nozzle appeared to glow as the liquids within them effervesced. She turned her attention back to the woman and brandished the nozzle, as the woman had again reached for the button panel. Merilyn kept her voice steady, as she’d seen the court inspectors do when they confronted criminals. “Are you called Anežka?”

At the sound of her name, the vampire’s demeanor changed from one of fear to confidence, or perhaps arrogance. “You are the wife?” Her accent was thick, like that of nearly everyone Merilyn had encountered southeast of London. Merilyn placed the accent east of Hanover and south – perhaps even across the Danube. Anežka had a long nose, round eyes that appeared more world-weary than innocent, and full, sneering lips. Merilyn knew better to trust the facial features of a vampire – even one who wore so many cosmetics – but when they remained still through the goggles, they matched the drawing she had seen. “There have been so many wives… and husbands.” Anežka smiled an empty apology, and her piercing fangs emerged like a viper’s from behind her lips, sliding into place across her human teeth.

Merilyn stood her ground, and narrowed her aim on Anežka’s hand as it lingered by the button panel. “None of those have been the wife of Jacob Worthing.”

The vampire cocked her head again, regarding Merilyn through one eye. “As you say. What do you want of me, wife of Worthing?” Her fangs had retreated, and she looked like a mortal human again, like a victim of the War, like any other woman forced to prostitute herself. Except… Except that her skin was too pale beneath the blacks and reds and purples she wore, and her cheeks and lips too rosy. Her striped corset was tight-laced to a waspish diameter only one with liquefied organs could manage. Her perfume said too much – more than just spice and jasmine, it was an invitation. And when Merilyn focused carefully through the goggles and allowed herself to really see, the woman did not have the pale blue tree of a human soul within her, but a twisting, thorny black vine that mocked the natural locations of the human chakras.

The vampire took a sauntering step forward, closer to Merilyn. “Is it really revenge you seek, wife? Or would you prefer to be reunited with him? I could accommodate you.” Her heavy-lidded eyes slipped down Merilyn’s far more conventional frame, and her pink tongue appeared between her lips like a kitten’s. “They stay inside me.” Her gloved fingers rested on the taper of her corset.

Merilyn’s jaw clenched. “I seek answers, villainess! You must tell me why. Why did you kill him, when the Ministry has been such a friend to your kind? Who purchased his murder?”

Anežka’s laugh was a mocking, tinkly thing. “Murder? Wife of Worthing, you imagine drama where there is only economy. He would not pay for services rendered. I took my payment. That is all.” She shrugged, and reached again for the lift buttons.

“Do not press that button!”

“Or what? Will you shoot me, wife of Worthing, with this alchemical witchery you wear? Will you shoot me here?” Her fingers slid up the corset and past the deep neck of her blouse to rest on the supple skin bared above her breast. Through the goggles, Merilyn saw only a thick, red eddy behind the pale skin. “My heart is not there. Only blood.” The word was tangible coming from her lips – like clean autumn air, tea with honey, and sex rolled into a single syllable. “The blood of an airshipman, the blood of a typewriter, of a lamplighter and two dockhands. English blood, all. Blood of my chambermaid, spicy like Istanbul. Blood of Jacob Worthing. Thick with money and privilege – but honest? Pure and passionate? Or bitter with the bile of corruption?” Her lids lowered to drape her eyes with threat. “Shoot me here and you will spill his blood on the floor and never know what I do of its flavor.”

Anežka reached for the button a last time, and Merilyn squeezed the lever on the nozzle. A stream as fine as a pen stroke splashed against Anežka’s gloved hand, but lasted less than a second before it became a brilliant ray of yellow-white light. The heat from the weapon scorched Merilyn like the blast from a furnace, and she was thankful at last for the heavy leathers she wore.

Anežka’s hand immediately burst into flame.

The goggles saved Merilyn’s eyes; though the light from the stream seemed as blinding as the sun, she could still see the vampire beyond. The physical form of a woman, with all of her satin and lace and leather and bone and cosmetics, was like the glass in a window. Behind the pale flesh, blood flowed in roiling currents around that black vine of a soul with thorns in place of gem-like chakras. The vine wasn’t rooted behind her navel, like Merilyn’s own human soul, but tangled instead behind the great predatory flower of the vampire’s sex. Behind the flower and nestled in the tangle, the vampire’s heart squeezed. Merilyn traced a line up Anežka’s arm and arced down across her torso to the point where her hips met the tops of her legs. When ray met heart, the vampire erupted in blood and blue flame.

Victoria Stn London 18 May 1889 8.03 a.m. Rhys Martins 4 Bwich Ln, Brecknockshire Please see to Buckland until Elaine arrives STOP Your service appreciated as ever STOP Attend reading of will as you are named STOP Merilyn (Worthing) James Buckland Hall

Time was not kind to Wexley Gardens.

Of course Merilyn had purchased the hotel and turned out the other thirty-four vampires and their madame, though she knew even then that they played no part in Jacob’s murder. She was not heartless – she gave them better use elsewhere. The hotel she left vacant, to be claimed by soot and fog and the overgrowth of the untended walled garden, but the building was as much Jacob’s cenotaph as it was a testament to Merilyn’s moldering grief.

She visited her hotel frequently the first few years, when business on Varden Street kept her in London for months at a time. How could she not with Erith only two hours by brougham from the city, or – better – a somber boat ride drawn by the receding tide of the Thames? She came by daylight, when the sun turned harsh eyes on tawdry deeds and Erith was as still as a cemetery. Her hotel was a blight on the gay colors of the town – the iron gates had quickly rusted, and the green and white painted panels above the stonework had begun to blacken around the edges. Windows as high as the second story were broken out by miscreants who threw pavers pried from the street. But always – always, even after Merilyn had the gas feed to the building crimped and cut – the two yellow lamps in the lift burned.

Martins refused to let Merilyn enter the building herself, bless his soul. At least the first several times. Eventually he wouldn’t even step foot within the gates; and would only wait in the mews with the carriage. His fears that the hotel would harbor squatters at best and criminals at worst was unfounded – nothing living moved inside its walls. The mattresses in the beds sagged, but the same dents left by their last occupants remained unchanged. The heavy muslin curtains in the women’s rooms remained closed unless Merilyn opened them, and then they remained open. Whatever decoration and furniture they’d been forced to leave behind in their hasty eviction remained unbothered – even Anežka’s. Merilyn’s footprints lingered in the accumulating dust on the hallway carpets when she returned after a season in Buckland. Not once in all of the hours she spent inside the building did Merilyn see a fly circling through a shaft of sunlight or hear a mosquito buzz past her ear, though Erith was thick with them both.

The witches in their shops along the water said Wexley Gardens was haunted, and were not reluctant to stop Merilyn on Pier Street to tell her. They lifted their goggles to fix her with their piercing, green-eyed stares as they told her stories of the scavengers who had entered the hotel and never left. They backed her against her own carriage to warn her of Wexley’s gardens, which had reached over their walls to choke neighboring trees and burrowed into the soil after any creature that broke the surface there, as lowly as an earthworm.

As if Merilyn didn’t know. As if the velvet-walled lift didn’t wait for her on the ground floor whenever she entered, its two lamps burning. The lift’s cage doors – screens of sheet brass cut into a lattice of vines and leaves – slid open on their own whenever she drew near, and the scent of jasmine and spices and invitation rolled out like a thick fog to meet her. A breeze light enough to be her fancy carried the whisper, “wife of Worthing.” Merilyn avoided the lift, pressing against the rail at the outside of the spiral staircase whenever she came to lay heliotrope in Jacob’s last resting place. In Anežka’s bed. Still, though she refused to approach it, Merilyn felt his presence emanating from the lift rather than the bed. She imagined sometimes she could smell his musk – a scent like wood oil, and just a whiff of it as the lift doors opened – before the jasmine struck her nose.

This time, though, Merilyn did not skirt the outer wall of the lobby, where her boot heels would grind over the broken marble tiles of the floor. Her fingers did not trace the tarnished brass rail that wound around the staircase, and she did not linger at the third floor landing where the blast of her sun ray had burned reversed shadows into the wallpaper around her shape and those of the onlookers she hadn’t noticed at the time. She had no flowers for Jacob’s sunken divot in the bed, nor murmured words of forgiveness for him. There was nothing to forgive – he was always too intelligent to be clever, and he had been lured into a trap. He had been used; he was a pawn of the War. Merilyn had forgiven him anyway, for her own sake.

This time Merilyn took slow, deliberate steps up the faded carpet runner leading across the lobby floor. What began as tattered, weathered scraps near the hotel doors became a lush, vibrant amaranth as it neared the lift. The twin flames in the lift’s lamps did not gutter, not even when the lift doors slid open at her approach.

Merilyn hesitated. No one waited for her outside the hotel – she’d sent the driver on. Martins had retired to the cottage she’d given him behind Bwich Chapel, and her daughter had married away to a Dane. Ned – lovely Ned – had found room in her heart but had never replaced Jacob. Six years was long enough to wait for Ned’s return from Cartagena. The Ministry had listed him as “Probable Deceased” when his fingers arrived in a box with the bishop’s seal.

Merilyn stood a few yards from the open lift doors. The scents of jasmine and spice washed over her; she had never lost her sensitivity to them.

It wasn’t suicide she intended, not exactly. Merilyn had no meaningful life left to squander. No one wrote or even cabled beside her daughter, Elaine, whose messages grew shorter and more infrequent. She had lost her shape beyond the ability of a corset to fix, and her health was declining. Her mind wandered, most frequently back to Jacob. She didn’t want to forget him, but already she could not quite picture his face when she wasn’t looking at his portrait. She heard his voice, though, in the silent halls of Buckland. She could recall exactly how he held her from behind. She half-lived in those happy years before the War and duty took him away from her to London.

Merilyn wasn’t seeking death, so much as bypassing a long, graceless senescence. Maybe it was suicide, then, but she didn’t worry about the effects on her immortality the way the papists did. Her soul wouldn’t be going to heaven or hell.

W i f e o f W o r t h i n g .

Merilyn stood inches from the open lift doors. It wasn’t a voice that she heard, just a sensation in her chest. It wasn’t clear, and it took a moment for Merilyn’s dulling mind to understand.

“Anežka.” It felt significant to finally say the name aloud again. She hadn’t uttered it in years.

Y e s . I t i s m e .

“I thought as much.” Merilyn took a step into the lift and reached out to the velvet-covered tufts on the wall panels. After all of these years, the fabric was still supple under her fingers. The doors remained open behind her. “Is Jacob still with you?” She resented the way her voice warbled.

A l l r e m a i n i n m e .

Merilyn nodded, and allowed herself the luxury of sinking back against the velvet pillows. The fabric was cool against her cheek. “After all these years, Anežka, are you still angry with me?”

The response built slowly like a crescendo, or like the current of water that rushes out to the next wave before it crashes against the shore. Anežka’s answer was a swirl of emotion that took Merilyn minutes to understand. T h a t b o d y w a s a t h i n g , n o t m e . H o w l o n g d i d y o u b e a r m a l i c e w h e n y o u r d a u g h t e r s o i l e d y o u r p r e t t y g o w n ? A warm gust drew into the lift like a breath. E t e r n a l l i f e i s t o o l o n g f o r g r u d g e s . I n t h e s e y e a r s I h a v e n o t s t a r v e d . H o w s h o u l d I b e a n g r y ?

Merilyn sighed, as much with regret as relief. She nodded, and reached toward the button panel. “Then you would now extend the same offer, and reunite me with my Jacob?”

I c a n a c c o m m o d a t e y o u .

With a withered, trembling hand, Merilyn pressed the button for the third floor.

Then she cursed herself, and with a frantic shuffle as the lift’s doors drew shut, Merilyn slipped her very old goggles down over her eyes and rotated the lenses into place.

The familiar, material world fell from her eyes, replaced with nebulous, swirling clouds of blood the same color as the lift’s velvet panels. Black vines with thorns for chakras replaced the brass cage of the lift; beneath her the floor had become the spread petals of a dark-veined blossom. The heart beneath the petals beat as slow as the tide. Merilyn could still see hints of the twisted, deglamoured natural world beyond the veil of blood around her, but that was not her world anymore. It was all an infinity away, a distance beyond imagination. Within the island universe of blood and vines, bright lights like stars speckled against the crimson. They clung to the vines like nascent rosebuds. Hundreds of them – thousands of them – filled the space around Merilyn with the same cool blue glow that her own soul now did. Merilyn’s fingers were like wings of light, stretching feathers to fade into the cloud around her. She saw through her flesh, through her bones, to the tree of her soul inside her.

Gears churned above Merilyn, and the lift cables snapped taut.

Most of the stars were weak, only vestiges of life, as though the buds were returning to the vine instead of blossoming. A few still shined brilliantly. On closer examination these brighter ones revealed themselves to be stripped-bare soul trees, seen at a very great distance. “One of these is Jacob,” Merilyn assured herself.

Though her eyes saw the deglamoured world, Merilyn still smelled, heard, and felt the world as it was. The floor of the lift surged beneath her, the gears whirred, and the velvet tufts pressed against her back. As the lift gained speed, she felt as though she had been driven into the pillowed fabric – engulfed by it, as it wrapped around her shoulders and waist to press against her every side. Her own weight had doubled – tripled – and she drowned in velvet. She couldn’t breathe. Her entire body had been wrapped in a corset cinched tight.

There! She could not say how she knew – it was the absence of conscious thought that allowed her to know it – but that star was Jacob. It had his essence; it had the spark of him she’d known when he’d first courted her, before the cares of business and the Signals Ministry and the War built a typically British shell of civic responsibility about him. The vine he clung to was not too far for her to reach.

She drowned in velvet and in blood. Beneath the crush of the lift – of Anežka – around her, there was no pain, only the alien horror of the violation of her body’s integrity. No, not just her body: her self. Through the glimpses she gained beneath the billows of crimson, her skin was no longer a barrier between herself and Anežka. The lift, the velvet, the dark-veined flower, Anežka – whatever it was that had swallowed her – had mingled inextricably with her own body’s fluids, with the interstitial space that glowed around the tree of her soul. She was no longer a self, but a skeleton articulating that which had become Anežka. Still the lift accelerated upward.

“I drown in it, so I might swim in it,” Merilyn thought. She had no lips with which to murmur to herself. She recognized that she was being stripped of faculties, of memories, of that which was her mind’s possession but not her. “So much the less to carry.” She didn’t need those things. “Let Anežka have them.” They would fall like shreds of the cocoon discard by the butterfly.

The warning senses of her body faded away, as chills seep away beneath a warm blanket. Her body was dead or dying, she knew, but it was her body no longer. Anežka could sate herself on that bag of fat and flesh and blood.

Had Jacob’s death been the same? Had he given up so readily? When he abandoned his worldly cares to the vampire, had Merilyn been among his discards?

Through the starry nebula Merilyn swam, like a porpoise racing against a tide, like a single tern flitting to some half-remembered icy nest. Jacob. The light of his star was her beacon.

Despair crept into her thoughts. Anežka still drew from her. Like a comet, a trail of Merilyn’s self littered her wake and disappeared into the blood. How much more of herself could she shed before she was exhausted? A twisted vine hung nearby. She could rest there.

For all of her swimming, was she any closer to her goal? Was her end inside Anežka to be a hell of eternal solitude and deconstruction? She swam toward Jacob, but his light grew no brighter. The vine came nearer.

She had no staff by which to measure – how long ago had she entered the lift – seconds or millennia? Was Jacob’s star inches away, or miles?

Perhaps this was Anežka’s revenge upon her after all. Jacob’s star was an illusion. It had always been the vampire’s intent to consume her entirely. She was the Devil.

Merilyn faltered, and reached for the vine to give what little of her remained some rest.

Then Jacob turned, and his soul beamed recognition and joy. Merilyn swam onward.