Little Doll (Blackmoth House #1)

Chapter 25

Nova

Fane’s blood tasted bitter and poisonous, and it was cold before he was even dead. But I knew when he died because I saw something.

My eyes slammed shut, and I was transported. To a small, dingy room and a young woman who was dirty and thin, wearing tattered clothes. She sat in a derelict wooden chair next to a potbelly stove. She held a wee dark-haired child on her lap. She clung to him and howled. The little boy wrapped his arms around her neck and also cried.

A big broad-shouldered man wearing a coat with a hood obscuring his face strode across the room and took the little boy out of his mother’s arms. The little boy screamed and kicked, hopelessly attempting to fight off the big man. The mother lowered her face into her hands, sobbing. But she did nothing to try to stop the man from taking her child.

The vision left me feeling even more awful than I already felt with my brother’s dying blood on my tongue. I was eaten alive by regret and shame, choking on his blood. But my shame would only worsen.

When my venom took effect, snaking into his blood cells and returning him from the brink of eternal death, the spasms caused me to come so violently that I passed out.

Echoes of Fane and Ren’s ecstasy followed me into the darkness.

I couldn’t bear to check in on Fane during his three days of letting the infection work its way through his veins. I couldn’t bear to see the revolving torturous nightmare of pain and arousal that his writhing, sweating, black veined body would go through.

I couldn’t bear to see what I had done.

Three days later, Ren came to me and told me he was done. He was safe and well. I still didn’t want to visit him, but she begged me and guilted me into going. He was in another stone tower room like mine, another story in the same spiral where I lived, I supposed. When Ren led me into the room, he was finishing dressing. He turned when we entered and bestowed upon us the most dazzling smile I’d ever seen. Fane was always a dashing and darkly handsome man.

But now, he was devastating.

His long limbs moved fluidly like he was liquid flowing instead of a man moving. His voice was lower with a slight sexy rasp to it. His hair was even longer, falling in smooth waves down his back. When he smiled at us, his fangs extended.

He was ready to go out on the town. I thought it was a terrible idea, but unsurprisingly, no one listened to me. Carmilla and Varney arrived in their own carriage out front, and Fane and Ren piled into it to accompany the ancient pair into London. Despite their repeated attempts to get me to go, I refused.

As I feared, Fane was out of control, almost immediately.

Ren had promised to care for him and to help him curb his appetites. But it was ridiculous to think that would ever have been possible. Fane was an impossible pain in the ass before he was a vampire. When supernatural strength and animal magnetism were added to that mix, the result was a disaster.

London was soon embroiled in an alarming rash of missing persons while subsequently undergoing a bizarre infestation of black moths.

Ren and I would fight over her inability to control him. In truth, I didn’t think she even tried. I think she enjoyed accompanying my brother on a vicious murdering spree. I feared he would make her a vampire next.

One night, when they had all once again left me at Blackmoth House to check in on Astrid while they ventured out for a night of pure depravity, I went to my old bedroom and curled into my bed. I had Cleo’s book of poetry with me. I read it for a while, but then curled my body around the little book and clutched it to my chest while I wept.

“I’m sorry, Grandmother,” I whispered. “I’ve made a mistake.”

I was a marionette in a dark play with other people pulling my strings.

I wanted my grandmother so badly that it hurt. I missed my father, too. Most of all, I missed my mother. The fact that she was very much alive, and a member of the same household made the loss of my relationship with her the worst by far of all my recent losses. Every aspect of my former life felt like it had fluttered away on the papery wings of black moths.

Lonely in the quiet house in the dead of night, I decided to return to the attic where I had discovered the bones of poor lost Wilhemina Payne. I was desperate to find mementos and reminders of our family’s life before all was lost. Before all was destroyed.

I stepped from my room into the dark and with a simple thought; I was next left standing in the dusty attic. My memories of it were mostly of the terrible steamer trunk containing Wilhemina’s remains and tattered wedding dress. I had forgotten how crammed full of things that the attic was. Whispers of memories that were long since dead and gone filled the dusty space. A headache bloomed behind my eyes, and I winced. I was tempted to abort the mission and return to my room to mope and cry myself to sleep all alone.

But then I spotted the trunk across the attic. It was still there, still hanging open like the gaping mouth of a monster.

I don’t know what I thought I would find over there, but the ghastly trunk seemed to call to me. It certainly wouldn’t contain memories of my beloved grandmother… Or anything good.

Nonetheless, I drifted to the trunk as if I were a ghost.

I looked down into it and found to my surprise that the trunk still contained one item. It must have been missed in the chaos of retrieving Wilhemina’s bones.

It was a black paper book, closed in the trunk’s bottom. I stared down at it for a long time as the pain in my head intensified. I didn’t hear scratching, but I recalled the troubled time when I was tormented by it, and I began to hyperventilate. Every fiber of my being wanted to turn and run from the attic. But my feet felt bolted to the ground.

I bent and plucked the book from the trunk.

With trembling hands, I opened the frail and brittle book. It contained a collection of tintype pictures. Each of the pictures featured a younger, happier version of my father, Costel. And in each of the pictures, he was holding a beautiful woman. In one of the pictures, the beautiful woman was even wearing the self-same wedding gown I had unearthed here in this trunk, wrapped around fragile bones.

A beautiful woman who was not my mother, Arcane.

But I recognized the smiling girl in her beautiful dress.

The picture album slipped from my fingers and fluttered back to the floor of the trunk, and I began to scream.

The woman in the picture of my father as a young man was Ren Ripley.