Guilty Blood Read Free Page B

resident. I'd never had any reason to enter, though. Yet when my screaming legs brought me to the gate that night, things were terribly different.
    I easily surmounted the spiked iron barricade and, hardly treading upon the dewy grass, was up the lion-flanked stairs and upon the creaking, whitewashed porch in an instant. My knocks seemed to echo within the heavy oaken door, and I noticed for the first time that my knuckles were bleeding.
    No answer.
    I banged again, harder this time. Faster. As if my urgency might influence fate on whether or not the antique townhouse's resident was at home.
    No answer still, but maybe the creak of a floorboard within.
    "Ma'am! Hello? I need your help!" It all came out at once. "I'm Laurel Cylphra—I'm looking for Ailson Kindler! We've done something terrible."



Chapter Two: Decay by Degrees
    What had been a blood smear began to run, dribbling down the whitewashed door, trailing a sticky shadow. Whatever scrape was accentuating my banging with bursts of pain hardly registered as I railed upon the author's darkened porch. I was shouting, but only caught snippets of my own pleas as they rebounded off the stolid door, echoing with the same hollow, desperate inefficacy as my bursts of frantic knocking. The question of how long I would go on banging at a probably empty house began to form in one of the few still lucid districts of my mind. Gradually it dawned upon me, the sickening depth of the desperation that brought me howling like a lunatic at the threshold of a stranger's home. I knew I had nowhere else to go, and the first twinge of a shrinking, helpless sensation began to crowd my fear. I felt it coming at last, a chill panic. I was going to scream.
    The faintest creak of a door latch being withdrawn spared the final tattered remnant of my composure.
    The door opened no more than the finest crack, revealing nothing but a column of absolute dark and the faintest glint of multiple door chains. No sound issued forth—no greeting, no challenge, nothing.
    "Miss Kindler?" I hazarded, straining to see inside. "I'm so sorry to… call… at such an inexcusable hour. I'm Laurel Cylphra, I need—"
    "Something terrible," interrupted a voice like a rusty, slowly drawn knife. I halted, momentarily unsure of what was said.
    "Excuse—" I was cut off again.
    "You were blithering about 'something terrible,' you wouldn't be referring to your manners, mayhap?"
    "I'm sorry to wake you, ma'am, but—"
    "But still you're going on. You've went to greater lengths than a drunk would, and if you're a thief you're going about it all wrong—so what is it? And be brief."
    I understand that I roused the woman, but this reception was not quite what I expected. Somewhat sobered by the chiding voice rasping from the dark, I tried to be both concise and reasonable sounding—goals very much at odds.
    "Yes ma'am. I was at Evercrown earlier tonight, with others. We trespassed upon one of the resting places… the countess's family's mausoleum. We woke something there accidentally, something lingering from one of the crypt's residents. When we tried to flee it… it was terrible. It cut down two I was with. I ran. There was no where else…." I had done well keeping the tremble out of my voice, but choked on the memory of that final horror—of Sayn and Garamand death's and the terror in Liscena's eyes as I fled, leaving her to the apparition.
    "Two with you, eh? Quite a minx. I suppose you've learned better for future trysts, hum?" A dusty chuckle followed from inside.
    I gaped. She was making a quip. I was retelling the most terrifying incident of my life, still shuttering from it in fact, and the only person I could think of to help me, a stranger and a spinster, was making jokes at my expense. Certainly I was imposing. Certainly I was trying to cast my plight in a sympathetic light—or, at least, trying to avoid presenting myself as too much of a criminal. But I expected my reception to be met with something other