Balthazar wore a cloth mask over his face as he walked along the street making his “rounds.” Although he of course could not contract the flu—death provided the only absolute immunity—he would have attracted too much notice by not wearing it. Everyone wore the masks now in a futile effort to keep the epidemic at bay. Now he looked the part in his dark brown suit, high-collared shirt, and low-brimmed hat; a long coat and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses allowed him to look a few years older than he was. A police paddy wagon farther down the road took a small bundle wrapped in a sheet and tossed it unceremoniously in the back; that would be a young child, dead in a city that no longer had the wood for coffins.
Witnessing the devastation of the influenza had made Balthazar wish desperately that he could do something beyond providing a merciful death for the sickest among them. When he’d been alive, medicine had been little more than guesswork; anything approaching an actual drug had been condemned as witchcraft. But in the twentieth century, maybe he’d have the opportunity to learn more. Maybe someday he could be a healer instead of a bringer of death.
For now, though, death was his only gift.
As he approached the house he sought, he saw a young nurse walking along, white headdress falling past her cheeks, a basket of food for the sick clutched in her hands. She was the first legitimate medical professional he’d seen in days; the few who weren’t ill were too busy to leave the clinics. Balthazar raised a hand to her in greeting, but she stopped in her tracks as if startled.
Above her mask, he recognized Charity’s eyes.
The first words Balthazar could find were: “Where’s Redgrave?”
“France.” She said this in her tiniest, most childlike voice.
Of course he would still be on the battlefields. Balthazar relished the spoils of war, the way any vampire had to, but crossing the ocean merely to feast on the dying was too much for him. Not for Redgrave. “Are you alone in Philadelphia?”
Charity shook her head. “Constantia’s here, too. The others stayed with Redgrave.”
Disappointing that she wasn’t entirely alone, but not surprising: Balthazar could tell just from the cleanliness and appropriateness of Charity’s disguise that someone had helped her with it. Still, this was the closest to freedom Charity had come since the day of her death—and Balthazar’s best chance to help her.
She hadn’t attacked him. Hadn’t turned away in anger. Was it possible his sister was finally ready to be helped?
“Let’s go,” he said. “You and me. Come with me now. Right away.”
“Go where?”
“New York. Toronto. San Francisco. It doesn’t matter. Someplace far from here, where Redgrave can’t find us.”
Balthazar reached his arm out, meaning to stretch it across her shoulders and lead her off, but Charity shrank back as if he were going to strike her. The old fear still lingered inside her, and Balthazar knew that was his own fault. “I can’t,” she whispered. “He’ll find out. He’ll find me. He always does; you know that.”
So she had tried to run away before, and failed. His heart ached at the thought of his little sister’s long captivity—and his own wretched inability to protect her. Now, though, things could be different. He had to make her see that. “Look around you,” Balthazar said, gesturing at the deserted streets. “Nobody will stop us.”
“Constantia would.”
“She’s not Redgrave.”
“She’s just as bad. Worse, maybe. You’ve never seen that, but I have.”
Charity was talking nonsense—who knew Constantia Gabrielis’s bag of tricks better than he did?—but Balthazar persisted. “Where is Constantia now?” With his luck, she’d come storming out of the nearest house, stake in hand.
“She’s at the house up the hill, the one we took. Everyone inside was sick, so they couldn’t fight us off. Well, the old man wasn’t sick, but he couldn’t fight us off either.” Charity’s pink tongue darted to the corner of her mouth, as if she were licking her chops at the memory. “I don’t like this flu. It makes everyone taste funny.”
“Charity, concentrate. If Constantia isn’t here, then she can’t stop us from going.” Could it really be as easy as this? It seemed impossible, and yet nothing stood in their way. Wild hope Balthazar had thought long dead sprang up inside him. They might flee this ghost town and start over somewhere. He could show her how to exist among humans without causing harm. How there were a few friendships to be had, a few deeds worth doing. That sometimes, just sometimes, their time on earth could feel like it mattered.
His sister furrowed her brow, deep in thought; it was the first time he’d seen her so focused on anything since well before her death. “She’ll know. She’ll figure it out.”
“Only that you’re gone!”
“We can’t leave her behind to tattle.” Charity’s dark eyes lit up with glee. “We’ll have to finish her off.”
Balthazar had never slain a vampire before—though not because he hadn’t wanted to. There had been nights he’d been unable to sleep because his thoughts were too full of what he could do to Redgrave: beating his smug, porcelain face until it cracked. Slicing through his neck and watching him turn to bones. Setting him on fire and lingering long enough to hear him scream. Before Redgrave, Balthazar hadn’t even known it was possible to hate that much.