Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Read Free Page B

grey-lashed eyes and she set the bowl aside. Outside, the snow was falling again, and the wind yowled wolf noises around the corners of his old house. She shivered, tried to listen instead to the warm crackle from the fireplace, the Professor’s labored breath. In a moment, he was coughing again, and she was helping him sit up, holding his handkerchief.
    “Tonight, Madam Mina, tonight…” and he smiled, wan smile, and trailed off, his words collapsing into another coughing fit, the wet consumptive rattle. When it passed, she eased him back into the pillows, and noticed a little more blood on the ruined handkerchief.
    Yes, she thought, perhaps.
    Once she would have tried to assure him that he would live to see spring and his damned tulips and another spring after that, but she only wiped the sweaty strands of hair from his forehead, and pulled the moth-gnawed quilt back around his bony shoulders.
    Because there was no one else and nothing to keep her in England, she’d made the crossing to Amsterdam the week before Christmas; Quincey had been taken away by the influenza epidemic after the war. So, just Mina now, and this daft old bastard. Soon enough, there would be only her.
    “Shall I read for a bit, Professor?” They were almost halfway through Mr. Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold . She was reaching for the book on the nightstand (and saw that she’d set the soup bowl on it) when his hand, dry and hot, closed softly around her wrist.
    “Madam Mina,” and already he was releasing her, his parchment touch withdrawn and there was something in his eyes now besides cataracts and the glassy fever flatness. His breath wheezed in, then forced itself harshly out.
    “I am afraid ,” he said, his voice barely a rasping whisper, slipped into and between the weave of the night.
    “You should rest now, Professor,” she told him, wishing against anything he might say.
    “So much a fraud I was, Madam Mina.”
    did you ever even love
    “It was my hand that sent her, by my hand .”
    “Please, Professor, let me call for a priest. I cannot…”
    The glare that flashed behind his eyes – something wild and bitter, vicious humor – made her look away, scissoring her fraying resolve. 
    “Ah,” and “Yes,” and something strangled that might have been laughter. “So, I confess my guilt? So, I scrub the blood from my hands with that other blood?”
    The wind banged and clattered at the shuttered windows, looking for a way inside. For a moment, an empty space filled with mantel-clock ticking and the wind and his ragged breathing, there was nothing more.
    Then he said, “Please, Madam Mina, I am thirsty.”
    She reached for the pitcher and the chipped drinking glass.
    “Forgive me, sweet Mina.”
    The glass was spotty, and she wiped roughly at its rim with her blue skirt.
    “…had it been hers to choose…” and he coughed again, once, a harsh and broken sound. Mina wiped at the glass harder.
    Abraham Van Helsing sighed gently, and she was alone.
    When she was done, Mina carefully returned the glass to the table with the crystal pitcher, the unfinished book, and the cold soup. When she turned to the bed, she caught her reflection in the tall dressing mirror across the room; the woman staring back could easily have passed for a young thirty. Only her eyes, hollow, hollow, bottomless things, betrayed her. 
     
    May 1930
    As twilight faded from the narrow rue de l’Odéon, Mina Murray sipped her glass of chardonnay and roamed the busy shelves of Shakespeare and Company. The reading would begin soon, some passages from Colette’s new novel. Mina’s fingers absently traced the spines of the assembled works of Hemingway and Glenway Wescott and D. H. Lawrence, titles and authors gold or crimson or flat-black pressed into cloth. Someone she half-recognized from a café, or a party, or some other reading passed close, whispered a greeting, and she smiled in response, then went back to the books.
    And then Mlle. Beach was asking