After Midnight Read online

  TERESA

  MEDEIROS

  After Midnight

  Dedication

  To the memory of Hellen Chism.

  It was an honor, a privilege,

  and a blessing from God to call you “Granma.”

  I will keep you in my heart

  until we meet again.

  For my darling Michael,

  for being generous enough

  to share his love, his life,

  and his “granma” with me.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  He prowled the fog-shrouded alleys, searching for prey. His footfalls…

  Chapter One

  “Our sister is marrying a vampire,” Portia announced.

  Chapter Two

  “What if it’s not an invitation, but a trap?” Portia…

  Chapter Three

  “Would you care for some port, Miss Cabot?”

  Chapter Four

  The moon was riding low in the starless sky when…

  Chapter Five

  “Despite being a vampire, I found Lord Trevelyan to be…

  Chapter Six

  Caroline sagged with relief, cradled by the sandalwood-and-bay- …

  Chapter Seven

  “Pardon me?” Kane muttered hoarsely, fighting Caroline’s frantic grip.

  Chapter Eight

  Everyone in the parlor turned to gawk at her as…

  Chapter Nine

  Rain lashed against the plate glass windows of the coach, obscuring…

  Chapter Ten

  Caroline stumbled backward. As the rough stone of the parapet…

  Chapter Eleven

  Caroline snatched her hand back from the painting as if…

  Chapter Twelve

  Larkin’s teacup clattered into its saucer. Portia’s mouth fell open.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “When did you first realize there was something wrong?” Caroline…

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sunlight streamed over the stone wall surrounding the castle garden, …

  Chapter Fifteen

  Caroline slipped into the tower’s inner sanctum, easing the door …

  Chapter Sixteen

  Caroline blinked up at Adrian, reminding him of a small…

  Chapter Seventeen

  “What do you mean I can’t go to the ball?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Afew soaring notes of a Viennese waltz, a dizzying…

  Chapter Nineteen

  The silence within the castle’s library was worse than any…

  Chapter Twenty

  “While I realize that my sister had only my best…

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Portia’s bedchamber was deserted, but the window nearest the bed…

  Chapter Twenty-two

  It’s the little one who keeps following me around like…

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Julian came staggering through the crypt door, bearing Portia like…

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Dawn was coming, but not for Adrian.

  Epilogue

  “Who on earth ever heard of a midnight wedding?”

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Teresa Medeiros

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  London, 1820

  He prowled the fog-shrouded alleys, searching for prey. His footfalls were mere whispers on the cobblestones as he slipped from shadow to shadow, his cloak rippling behind him. Although his passing drew more than one hungry, sidelong look from the cutpurses and whores slouched in the doorways, he didn’t spare them so much as a glance. For him, the night held no terrors. At least none that the living could provide.

  Of late, the darkness had become both his lover and his enemy, the thing he craved and the thing he most longed to escape. When a gust of wind whipped through the narrow alley, driving both the mist and the clouds before it, he turned his face to the moon, his senses starved for light. But even its pale, silvery rays were no longer any balm for the bloodlust that had infected his soul. Perhaps it was too late. Perhaps he was already becoming the very thing he was hunting. A predator without mercy or remorse.

  He heard it then—a soft ripple of feminine laughter followed by a man’s low murmur, smoky with promises and lies. Drawing back into the shadows, he slipped a hand into his cloak and waited for his prey to come into view.

  The man could have been any young buck, fresh from a recent triumph at some Covent Garden gambling hell or brothel. His beaver top hat was set at a cocky angle on his fashionably trimmed curls. The woman stumbling along in his possessive embrace was little more than a girl, her shabby finery and rouged cheeks marking her as one of the lightskirts who lingered outside of the seedier gambling hells, hoping to find a protector for more than just one night.

  Humming a snatch of drunken song, the man swung her around in a clumsy parody of a waltz before pinning her against the nearest lamppost. Her shrill giggle held a note of both desperation and defiance. Even as the rogue slipped a hand into her bodice to cup her naked breast, he wound her thick auburn hair around his other fist and tipped her head back, baring the pale curve of her throat to the moonlight.

  The sight of that throat—so tender, so graceful, so pitiably vulnerable—stirred an unnatural hunger in his own belly.

  Striding out of the shadows, he grabbed the man by the shoulder and spun him around. When she saw the feral gleam in his eye, the girl’s pretty face went slack with fear. She stumbled a few feet away and dropped to her knees, clutching at her gaping bodice.

  Closing his hand around his prey’s throat, he slammed him up against the lamppost. He lifted him effortlessly, tightening his grip until the man’s booted feet flailed at the air and his icy blue eyes began to bulge. In those eyes, he saw both fear and fury. But most gratifying of all was the bleak recognition that came a moment too late for it to matter.

  “Pardon me, mate,” he growled, an affable smile curving his lips. “I hate to trouble you, but I do believe the lady promised this dance to me.”

  Chapter One

  “Our sister is marrying a vampire,”

  Portia announced.

  “That’s nice, dear,” Caroline murmured, making another neat notation in the open ledger on the writing desk.

  She’d long ago learned to ignore her seventeen-year-old sister’s rioting imagination and penchant for drama. She couldn’t afford to abandon her responsibilities every time Portia spotted a werewolf sniffing around the trash heap or fell back upon the sofa in a semiswoon and announced that she was coming down with the Black Plague.

  “You must write Aunt Marietta immediately and insist that she send Vivienne home to us before it’s too late. We’re her only hope, Caro!”

  Caroline glanced up from the column of numbers, surprised to find her baby sister looking genuinely distressed. Portia stood in the middle of the dusty parlor, clutching a letter in one trembling hand. Her dark blue eyes looked stricken and her normally rosy cheeks were as pale as if some cloaked fiend had already sucked all the blood from her tender young heart.

  “What on earth are you going on about now?” Her concern growing, Caroline laid aside her pen and slipped off the stool. She’d been hunched over the writing desk for nearly three hours, struggling to find some creative way to subtract the monthly expenses from their household accounts without making the final tally add up to less than zero. Shrugging the tension from her shoulders, she pried the letter from her sister’s hand. “Surely it can’t be as grim as all that. Let me have a look.”

  Caroline immediately recognized their middle sister’s flowery scrawl. Brushing a pesky strand of pale blon
d hair from her eyes, she quickly scanned the letter, skipping over the endless descriptions of tulle-draped ball gowns and sprightly curricle rides down Rotten Row in Hyde Park. It didn’t take her long to hone in on the passage that had drained all the color from Portia’s face.

  “My my,” she murmured, arching one eyebrow. “After only a month in London it appears our Vivienne has already acquired a suitor.”

  Caroline refused to recognize the familiar pang in her heart as envy. When their aunt Marietta had offered to sponsor Vivienne’s debut, it had never occurred to Caroline to point out that her own Season had been indefinitely postponed when their parents had perished in a carriage accident on the very eve of her introduction to court. And Caroline had soundly dismissed those same pangs when Vivienne departed for London with a trunk packed with all of the beautiful things their mother had chosen for her own postponed debut. It was a waste of valuable time to mourn a past that could never be changed, a dream that could never be realized. Besides, at four-and-twenty, Caroline was now so firmly entrenched on the shelf that it would take an earthquake to dislodge her.

  “A suitor? A monster, you mean!” Portia peered over Caroline’s shoulder, one of her sable ringlets tickling Caroline’s cheek. “Did you fail to note the blackguard’s name?”

  “On the contrary. Vivienne has transcribed it in her boldest hand with a number of lovingly lavish embellishments.” Caroline grimaced at the second page. “Good heavens, did she actually dot the i with a heart?”

  “If the mere whisper of his name doesn’t strike terror in your own heart, then you must be unaware of his reputation.”

  “I am now.” Caroline continued to scan the letter. “Our sister has thoughtfully provided a most extensive catalogue of his charms. From her glowing recitation, one can assume the gentleman’s list of virtues is rivaled only by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s.”

  “While she was extolling the fine cut of his neck-cloth and his many kindnesses to widows and or-phans, I don’t suppose she bothered to mention the fact that he’s a vampire.”

  Caroline rounded on her sister, her scant patience evaporating. “Oh, come now, Portia. Ever since you read that ridiculous tale by Dr. Polidori, you’ve been seeing vampires lurking behind every curtain and potted shrub. Had I known ‘The Vampyre’ would seize your imagination in such a ruthless grip, I’d have tossed the magazine on the trash heap as soon as it arrived. Maybe one of the werewolves you’ve spotted digging through the refuse would have carried it off and buried it.”

  Drawing herself up to her full five feet and two inches, Portia sniffed. “Everyone knows that Dr. Polidori didn’t write that story. Why, he himself admitted to publishing it on behalf of his most famous patient—one George Gordon, Lord Byron himself!”

  “A claim which Byron staunchly denied, I should remind you.”

  “Can you blame him? How could he do otherwise when the ruthless and brooding character of Ruthven was only a thinly disguised version of himself? He can deny it all he likes, but ‘The Vampyre’ revealed his true nature for all the world to see.”

  Caroline sighed, a vein in her temple beginning to throb. “His true nature being that of a bloodsucking creature of the night, I presume?”

  “How can anyone doubt it after reading The Giaour?” Portia’s eyes took on a distant sheen Caroline knew only too well. Lifting a hand and striking a suitably dramatic stance, Portia intoned:

  “But first, on earth as Vampire sent,

  Thy corpse shall fall from its tomb be rent:

  Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

  And suck the blood of all thy race:

  There from the daughter, sister, wife,

  At midnight drain the stream of life.”

  As Portia’s voice faded on a suitably ominous note, Caroline massaged her throbbing temple with two fingers. “That doesn’t prove Byron is a vampire. It only proves that he, like every other great poet, is on occasion capable of spouting momentous drivel. I can only hope you have more substantial evidence to convict Vivienne’s new suitor. If not, I shall have to assume this is just like the time you shook me awake before dawn and insisted that a family of fairies was living beneath one of the toadstools in the garden. You can imagine my keen disappointment when I stumbled barefoot through the morning dew only to discover your family of fairies was nothing but a family of grubs with not a gossamer wing or a sprinkling of fairy dust to be found among them.”

  Portia’s blush did little to temper the sulky jut of her bottom lip. “I was only ten at the time. And I can assure you that this isn’t a fancy of my own making. Don’t you remember the scandal sheet gossip during his last visit to London? Not once during all those months in Town was Vivienne’s suitor ever seen abroad during daylight hours.”

  Caroline let out an unladylike snort. “That’s hardly a habit reserved for the undead. Most of the young bucks in Town spend their days sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. They only emerge after the sun has set so they can start the cycle of drinking, gambling, and wenching all over again.”

  Portia clutched at her arm. “But don’t you find it the least bit odd that he arrived at his town house under the cover of darkness and took his leave the very same way? That he insisted that every curtain in the house be kept drawn throughout the day and that every mirror be draped with black crepe?”

  Caroline shrugged. “He could have simply been in mourning. Perhaps he had recently lost someone very dear to him.”

  “Or something very dear to him. Like his immortal soul.”

  “I should think that such a reputation wouldn’t make him a very desirable dinner guest.”

  “On the contrary,” Portia informed her, “the ton love nothing more than a delicious hint of scandal and mystery. Just last week in the Tatler, I read that he is to host a masquerade ball at his family seat this Season, and half of London is vying for invitations. From what I’ve read, he’s one of the most sought after bachelors in the city. Which is precisely why we have to get Vivienne out of his clutches before it’s too late.”

  Caroline shook off Portia’s clawlike grip. She could hardly afford to give in to her sister’s dark flights of fancy. She was the eldest, the sensible one, the one forced to step firmly into both her mother’s slippers and her father’s boots after their untimely death eight years before. The one left to comfort two sobbing, grief-stricken little girls when her own heart still lay in broken shards in her aching breast.

  “I’m not trying to be cruel, Portia, but you really must rein in that imagination of yours. After all, it’s not every day that a viscount pays court to a dowerless girl.”

  “So you don’t mind if Vivienne weds a vampire, as long as he also happens to be a viscount? You don’t care that he’s probably just prowling the ton looking for some innocent soul to steal?”

  Caroline gently tweaked her sister’s cheek, restoring its rosy hue. “As far as I’m concerned, he’ll not take possession of Vivienne’s soul for anything less than a thousand pounds a year.”

  Portia gasped. “Have we become such a terrible burden to you? Are you so eager to be rid of us?”

  Caroline’s teasing smile faded. “Of course not. But you know as well as I that we can’t depend on Cousin Cecil’s largesse forever.”

  After their father’s death, his second cousin had wasted no time in claiming his rightful inheritance. Cousin Cecil had considered it the very height of Christian charity to move the girls out of Edgeleaf Manor and into the ramshackle old cottage tucked away in the dampest, dreariest corner of the estate. They’d spent the last eight years there, with only a sparse monthly allowance and a pair of elderly servants to look after them.

  “When he called on us last week,” Caroline reminded her sister, “he spent most of his time hemming and hawing and strutting about the parlor, muttering about his plans to turn the cottage into a hunting lodge.”

  “You know, he might be more charitable to us if you hadn’t so soundly spurned his suit all those years
ago.”

  Remembering the night the fifty-eight-year-old bachelor had graciously invited them to move back into the manor—on the condition that she, at seventeen, become his bride—Caroline shuddered. “I’d surrender my own soul to a vampire before I’d wed that gouty old lech.”

  Portia sank down on a faded chintz ottoman that had been hemorrhaging cotton batting long before they’d moved into the cottage, rested her chin on one hand and shot Caroline a reproachful glance. “Well, you could have refused nicely. You didn’t have to shove him out the door and into that snow bank.”

  “It cooled his ardor, didn’t it? Among other things,” Caroline muttered beneath her breath. After striving to convince her of what an attentive husband he would be, Cousin Cecil had snatched her against him with his thick, fleshy hands, thinking to sway her with a kiss. Needless to say, the hot, greedy press of his tongue against her tightly clamped lips had inspired revulsion, not devotion. The memory still made her want to scrub her mouth with lye.

  She sank down heavily next to Portia on the ottoman. “I didn’t want to alarm either you or Vivienne, but when Cousin Cecil came calling last week, he also hinted that we might have strained the limits of his charity. He implied that unless I grant him certain…” She swallowed and glanced away, unable to meet Portia’s innocent gaze. “…favors without benefit of matrimony, we might be forced to look for another situation.”

  “Why, that miserable wretch,” Portia breathed. “Hunting lodge indeed! You should have mounted his fat head on our parlor wall!”

  “Even if he allows us to stay on at Edgeleaf, I don’t know how much longer I can go on squeezing every pound of our allowance down to the last halfpenny. Only last week I had to choose between buying a goose for supper and a pair of new leather soles for your boots. Our winter cloaks are all growing threadbare and we’re running out of pots to put under the leaks in this moldy old roof.” Caroline’s helpless gaze drifted from her sister’s outraged profile to her gown. The faded white poplin had been handed down from herself to Vivienne, then finally to Portia. Its ruched bodice was stretched taut over Portia’s plump breasts, and the threadbare hem dragged the top of her scuffed boots. “Don’t you ever miss the little luxuries you and Vivienne used to love so well when Mama and Papa were alive—the pots of watercolors, the pianoforte music, the silk ribbons and pearl combs for your pretty hair?”