Damn the Consequences Page 3

  Hazel.

  I have not taught her everything that I wanted. There is still so much to learn and pass on. If she survives beyond tonight, she will be alone in her own new world.

  Please protect her, I pray to our ancestors.

  Resignation at my fate pulls at me as my vision blurs from tears and lack of oxygen. My mouth works uselessly, but nothing comes out. Nothing can be said anymore.

  I feel my life blood leave me, and there is no more pain, only numbness. A sudden calm comes over me, as I know that it will all be over soon.

  I look back over to Hazel’s form, and, despite everything, smile. Be strong, sister.

  I see a white light, a void of nothingness just beyond our reality. There is a sense of familiarity waiting for me, like a presence that my soul calls to. For a moment, I am caught between both worlds, a contrast between the dank, dark alley, and the beautiful emptiness beyond. With every heartbeat, I feel myself pulled more and more into the white void.

  And, then, the mortal coil snaps, and I am completely in the blank nothingness. Heaven? No. Something else.

  A hand touches my cheek, and I look up, recognizing the face that smiles down at me. Suddenly everything makes sense. I smile back and lean into the warm touch of the woman standing before me. This is where I belong now. With those who love me. The future is bright. No more pain. No more anguish.

  I have passed on the mantel to my younger sister, and I am just Catherine again.

  “Hello,” I say, feeling at peace. “Hello, Mama.”

  Catherine’s story ends here, but you can read Hazel’s story when it comes out later this year in I’ll be Damned, Book One of the Harker Legacy. To read more about the Harker of the present day, read Edie Harker’s story in Damned if I Do, Book One of the Harker Trilogy.

  O Little Town of Bedlam

  A Christmas Short Story

  “Well, if they thought me insane before, I wonder what they would think now,” I mutter as I wipe my sword on a handkerchief. I’d found the handkerchief in the breast pocket of the doctor I had just killed.

  Dr. Thomas Monroe. Physician to the insane. And a vampire.

  Really, the doctor had been such a bastard, I wonder why it took me so long to realize that he was my target. It should not have taken me ten days to determine who was killing patients.

  “It is because you are losing your touch, Hazel,” I chide myself. “That is why it took you so long.”

  And here I am, talking to myself. No wonder the nurses and doctors were so eager to admit me.

  I am at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark—Bedlam, as it’s more commonly known—under the guise of one of the insane. I came here acting as a patient in order to see who was killing inmates. Bedlam didn’t have the best reputation about patient safety and conditions previously, but there had been telltale signs that the most recent deaths were from something far more sinister.

  Really, it should come as no surprise that the doctor was a depraved, bloodsucking vampire. I had simply expected it to be one of the patients, honestly.

  As the newest Harker, I have seen things outside these walls that would make the most ironclad of minds break. I could act like one of the depraved, and my family’s neighbors on Baker Street are always trying to have me committed. They claim it is because I sneak out of the house after dark or my hair is unkempt.

  I wonder what they would think if they could see me right now.

  I fling the dirtied cloth back on the body of the doctor, his head severed and laying a few paces away. This is as clean as I could get the blade. Vampire blood always seems to be thicker than human blood, and it still hangs in red strings around the the blade, despite my best efforts to clean it.

  “You had better not infect me,” I tell the doctor’s body as I call the magical sword back through my palm. “I don’t want your blood touching mine.”

  The doctor’s body, of course, does not answer.

  I may truly be insane.

  With a heavy sigh, I inspect my palm through my gloves. There is a long, skinny slit through it, where I had called forth the sword. I have been ruining my favorite pairs of gloves since becoming the Harker two months ago. Mrs. Hudson, my family’s housekeeper, has had to do her best repairing my gloves, although I think this particular pair could be considered a lost cause.

  Two months...

  Has it really only been two months since my sister Catherine died?

  I clench my hand into a fist and feel the fabric stretch around my knuckles. How much longer do I have to do this? Fight vampires, put myself in harm’s way, and subject myself to grueling trials.

  If I am able to get out of Bedlam, that is. I had myself admitted here—it is not like I can merely walk out. I think there would be plenty of patients who would have done so a long time ago. I had told myself that I would worry about it when it came to it.

  And here I am, on Christmas Eve, with the blood of a hospital doctor on my hands and no way out. Nine days longer than I thought it would take to root out the murderer, and after Catherine’s death, I know my presence for Christmas is more important than ever before. I should have planned this better. I should have told them where I was going.

  I’m sure Father is wondering where I am, and Margaret and Jonathan are beside themselves. I hope it’s not too late to surprise them and make it up.

  “Look at me.” I chuckle hollowly. “Being all festive with blood on my hands.”

  There is one more thing I need to do.

  “Your contemporaries will think the stress got to you and you finally fled,” I tell the doctor as I summon flame to my hand. “Or that you went insane. Or...well, I don’t really care. You deserved to die.”

  I watch, impassive, as I set Dr. Monroe’s body on fire. It combusts and burns to a quick crisp. The fire is contained and burns it to ash quickly. Really, I am almost surprised by how rapidly it happens. I nudge the ashes with the toe of my boot. Someone would think that a patient had carried cinders to this basement to stay warm. After all, the hospital itself it a frigid, inhospitable place.

  An inhospitable hospital.

  There is an irony to this place, even in spite of its many horrors and faults. A vampire isn’t the worst of what the patients here have been subjected to. Killing a vampire, unfortunately, is the only thing I can contribute. Maybe in a different time and a different place, a woman could make a bigger difference, but as it is…

  There is a cruelty to the world that I cannot correct, no matter how hard I try.

  I sigh and straighten, putting my hands on my hips. “Now, how to get out of here,” I mutter, casting my eyes about.

  There are nurses up at every hour who patrol the premises. They can sometimes be worse than vampires—I had the coldest baths of my life in here. I may have even cracked a tooth from the chattering. Doctors will be around too, as well as security.

  It will be tricky finding my escape. If they catch me, who knows how long it would be before I find an opportunity to leave.

  Only one way to go about it. I must figure this out for myself.

  I turn on my heel and leave the ashes of the doctor’s body behind as I pace around the basement, checking for weaknesses in the barred windows or a way out. I could go upstairs and risk it, but I don’t want to try just yet. As the Harker, I’ve learned to test all outlets before going for the obvious. Otherwise, whatever I’m hunting will track me down easier.

  I pace around the perimeter of the basement, looking for any sign of vulnerabilities in the windows or in the walls. For an old hospital, they truly did think about the crafty ways a patient could try to escape.

  The place, eerie and sad during the daytime, takes on a more sinister feel at night. Shadows seem to leech all light from the environment, threatening to swallow up any hope. I see movement in the corner of my eye every so often, playing tricks on my mind.

  I’m not easily spooked. As a vampire hunter, I’ve had to leap headfirst into situations that would make other piss themsel
ves. But there’s something about this place that makes me feel restless. Not necessarily scared, just uneasy.

  I believe in ghosts, having seen them all my life. I certainly believe in vampires, and they believe in me, because I’m their own personal bogeyman. I’ve never had the opportunity to truly believe a place could be inherently evil. Yet it’s seeping out of every crevice here.

  It’s unsettling, to say the least.

  “Bollocks,” I mutter, shaking my head. Time to give up on escaping from the basement and move to the ground floor. Where my likelihood of getting caught grows tenfold.

  I whip my head around at a clatter on the far side of the basement. It sounds like heavy iron hitting stone. I summon my sword from my palm and allow the dim light in the room to gleam down the length of the blade in warning. I’m not going to vocalize my warning—if it’s a vampire, they’ll know exactly what that gleam means. If it’s a nurse, then I won’t call attention to myself.

  “Whoa, Hazel, calm down, it’s me.”

  I blink, taken aback. “Lizzie?” I venture, unsure if it’s my cousin Elizabeth Cypher or a trick. I wouldn’t put it past vampires—or my own mind at the moment.

  Yet my visitor steps out from the shadows, and as the light moves across her, I see that it is, indeed, my cousin. She’s holding a torch in her hands as well as a pair of goggles, courtesy of my father’s inventions. She must have cut through the iron bars with heat. Ingenious.

  Lizzie gives me a tentative wave as she pushes the goggles up on her head. “Happy Christmas, Hazel?” Her voice pitches higher on my name, and I realize that I’ve scared her.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I call back my sword and rush forward to help her. She hugs me back fiercely.

  “I’ve come to rescue you,” she says simply.

  I draw back and give her a hard look. “How did you know I was here?”

  She grins wickedly. “Your neighbors gossiped again about your disappearance, thinking you were finally committed. I put two and two together, and—”

  “And you just ended up breaking into Bedlam as I’m trying to break out?” I find that hard to believe, but she just shrugs.

  “It’s a Christmas miracle, that’s all I can say,” she says. “I wanted to get you home before Christmas morning. Your family is worried sick about you.”

  I nod. “I was admittedly getting a little worried there myself.”

  She chuckles. “You’re the Harker, Hazel. You can get yourself out of any situation.”

  “Heh,” is all I say as I cross my arms. I look up at the space in the window where Lizzie had cut through the bars to break into the hospital. The space is small, and Lizzie is a slimmer woman than me, but I will be able to shimmy my way through. I suppose the staff of the hospital would rationalize it as Doctor Monroe’s escape route. I doubt they’d care about my escape or even remember it.

  And that is a good thing.

  I kneel and clasp my hands together. “I’ll help you up.”

  Lizzie obliges without further instruction. She and I have done this many, many times in our lives, and we both know that it’s easier for the smaller, lighter person to pull themselves up. After all, as the Harker, I could pull myself up with my enhanced strength, courtesy of my powers and title.

  I jump up and pull myself through the opening. As I had suspected, it is a tight fit, but I manage and gasp as I see the sky for the first time in ten days. As a warrior, there’s nothing worse than being caged for this long. I let out a contented sigh of relief as I flop onto the grass of the hospital grounds, blinking up at the night sky.

  “I never realized how much I need my open spaces,” I murmur to Lizzie.

  She frowns. “You’re a wild beast, Hazel. You hate cages.”

  I give her a wry smile as I sit up. No use in being caught mere steps from the broken window. We have to keep moving. “Funny, I was just thinking about being caged.”

  She glances back at the building as we both get to our feet. “We should try helping those poor souls in there,” she murmurs softly.

  I shake my head. “Not right now. We have bigger things to worry about.”

  “Such as?”

  I lick my lips. “Vampires.”

  A shadow passes over her face. “Right. Right.” She’s voiced many times that the Harkers shouldn’t be so obsessed with hunting vampires, that we’d find ourselves in an early grave if we aren’t careful. She was entirely correct about Catherine.

  And my own prospects are fairly dim as well. I block that thought from my mind, however. Time to live in the present. And the present is Christmas day tomorrow.

  “Are you and your family coming over for Christmas dinner?” I ask her as we start walking, keeping to the shadows to avoid being caught. “I wonder if Mrs. Hudson is making her famous roast goose.”

  “She is. And we are.” She chuckles. “And they are going to love the present I got them.”

  “Which is?”

  She spears me with a glance. “You.”

  I let out a laugh before I realize the truth in her words. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Lizzie.”

  She shrugs. “It’s the least I could do.”

  “But I don’t have anything for you.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t need anything. Just a Happy Christmas. That’s all I ask for.”

  I smile at her. “Happy Christmas, Lizzie.”

  And I am happy. Delighted, in fact, even thrilled, to be returning to the loving arms of my family. But as we leave Bedlam behind, forever I hope, I can’t help but wonder how many more happy Christmases I have left, now that I’m the Harker.

  About the Author

  New York Times Bestselling Author Erin Hayes writes what she wants to read, which includes paranormal romance, contemporary romance, and urban fantasy sprinkled with vampires, billionaire princes, mermaids, steampunk and all the stuff you love.

  She lives in San Francisco with her husband and a giant cat, along with too many Sailor Moon figurines and pieces of art she brought back from her travels. When she’s not writing, well, she’s planning her next big trip or watching sci-fi movies.

  And if you like Star Wars, we’re already best friends.

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