Gail Carriger - Heartless

Alexia looked at Lyall.

Channing cocked his head. “Is this about the past? I told you no good could come of your meddling.”

Lyall raised his head, smelling the air. Then he turned to look at Channing.

For the first time, Alexia realized the two men were probably old friends. Sometime enemies, of course, but only in the manner of those who have been too long in each other’s company, possibly centuries. These two had known each other far longer than either had known Lord Maccon.

“You know?” Lyall said to the Gamma.

Channing nodded, all patrician beauty and aristocratic superiority as compared to Professor Lyall’s studied middle-class inoffensiveness.

The Beta looked at his hands. “Did you know all along?”

Channing sighed, his fine face becoming suffused with a brief paroxysm of agony. So brief Alexia thought she had imagined it. “What kind of Gamma do you take me for?”

Lyall laughed, a huff of pain. “A mostly absentee one.” There was no bitterness to the statement, simply fact. Channing was often away fighting Queen Victoria’s little wars. “I didn’t think you realized.”

“Realized what, exactly? That it was occurring? Or that you were taking the brunt of it so he’d stay off the rest of us? Who do you think kept the others from finding out what was really going on? I didn’t approve of you and Sandy—you know I didn’t—but that doesn’t mean I approved of what the Alpha was doing either.”

Alexia’s previous self-righteousness disintegrated under the implication of Channing’s comments. There was more to Lyall’s manipulations than she had realized. “Sandy? Who is Sandy?”

Professor Lyall twisted his lips into a little smile. Then he reached into his waistcoat—he always seemed to have everything he needed in that waistcoat of his—and pulled out a tiny leather-covered journal, navy blue with a very plain cover dated 1848 to 1850 in the upper left corner. It looked achingly familiar.

He walked softly across the room and handed it to Alexia. “I have the rest as well, from 1845 on. He left them to me on purpose. I wasn’t keeping them intentionally away from you.”

Alexia could think of nothing whatsoever to say. The silence stretched until finally she asked, “The ones from after he abandoned my mother?”

“And from when you were born.” The Beta’s face was a study in impassivity. “But this one was his last. I like to keep it with me. A reminder.” A whisper of a smile crossed that deadpan face, the kind of smile one sees at funerals. “He didn’t have an opportunity to finish it.”

Alexia flipped the journal open, glancing over the scribbled text within. The little book was barely half full. Lines jumped out at her, details of a love affair that had altered everyone involved. Only as she read did the full scope of the ramifications come into focus. It was rather like being broadsided by a Christmas ham.

Winter 1848—for a while he walked with a limp but would not tell me why,

said one entry. Another, from the following spring, read:

There is talk of a theater trip on the morrow. He will not be permitted to attend, of that I am convinced. Yet we both pretended he would accompany me and that we should laugh together at the follies of society.

For all the tight control of the penmanship, Alexia could read the tension and the fear behind her father’s words. As the entries progressed, some of his sentences turned her stomach with their brutal honesty.

The bruises are on his face now and so deep sometimes I wonder if they will ever heal, even with all his supernatural abilities.

She looked up at Lyall, attempting to appreciate all the implications. Trying to see bruises almost twenty-five years gone. From the stillness in his face, she supposed they might be there—well hidden, but there.

“Read the last entry,” he suggested gently. “Go on.”

June 23, 1850

It is full moon tonight. He is not going to come. Tonight all his wounds will be self-inflicted. Time was once, he would spend such nights with me. Now there is no surety left for any of them except in his presence. He is holding his whole world together by merely enduring. He has asked me to wait. Yet I do not have the patience of an immortal, and I will do anything to stop his suffering. Anything. In the end it comes to one thing. I hunt. It is what I am best at. I am better at hunting than I am at loving.

Alexia closed the book. Her face was wet. “You’re the one he’s writing about. The one who was maltreated.”

Professor Lyall said nothing. He didn’t need to respond. Alexia was not asking a question.

She looked away from him, finding the brocade of a nearby curtain quite fascinating. “The previous Alpha really was insane.”

Channing strode over to Professor Lyall and placed a hand on his arm. No more sympathy than that. It seemed sufficient. “Randolph didn’t even tell Sandy the worst of it.”

Professor Lyall said softly, “He was so old. Things go fuzzy with Alphas when they get old.”

“Yes, but he—”

Lyall looked up. “Unnecessary, Channing. Lady Maccon is still a lady. Remember your manners.”

Alexia turned the small slim volume over in her hand—the end of her father’s life. “What really happened to him, at the last?”

“He went after our Alpha.” Professor Lyall removed his spectacles as though to clean them, but then seemed to forget he had done so. The glasses dangled from his fingers, glinting in the gas lamplight.

Channing seemed to feel further explanation was necessary. “He was good, your father, very good. He’d been trained by the Templars for one purpose and one purpose only—to hunt down and kill supernatural creatures. But even he couldn’t take on an Alpha. Even an insane, sadistic bastard like Lord Woolsey was still an Alpha with a pack at his back.”

Professor Lyall put his spectacles down on a side table and rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I told him not to, of course. Such a waste. But he was always one to pick and choose listening to me. Sandy was too much an Alpha himself.”

Alexia thought for the first time that Professor Lyall and Lord Akeldama shared some mannerisms. They were both good at hiding their emotions. To a certain extent, this was to be expected in vampires, but in werewolves . . . Lyall’s reserve was practically flawless. Then she wondered if his very quiet stillness were not like that of a child climbing into hot water, afraid that every little movement would only make things hotter and more painful.

Professor Lyall said, “Your father’s death taught me one thing. That something needed to be done about our Alpha. That if I had to bring down another pack to do it, so be it. At the time, there were only two wolves in England capable of killing Lord Woolsey. The dewan and—”

Alexia filled in the rest of his sentence. “Conall Maccon, Lord Kingair. So it wasn’t simply a change of leadership you were after; it was self-preservation.”

One corner of Lyall’s mouth quirked upward. “It was revenge. Never forget, my lady, I’m still a werewolf. It took me nearly four years to plan. I’ll admit that’s a vampire’s style. But it worked.”

“You loved my father, didn’t you, Professor?”

“He was not a very good man.”

A pause. Alexia thumbed through the little journal. It was worn about the edges from countless readings and rereadings.

Professor Lyall let out a little sigh. “Do you know how old I am, my lady?”

Alexia shook her head.

“Old enough to know better. Things are never good when immortals fall in love. Mortals end up dead, one way or another, and we are left alone again. Why do you think the pack is so important? Or the hive, for that matter. It is not simply a vehicle for safety; it is a vehicle for sanity, to stave off the loneliness. Our mistrust of loners and roves is not only custom, it is based on this fact.”