Winter's Bite (Belle Morte 0.5)

Chapter Three

Ysanne

The thieves had struck just a couple of miles from the house, and that was no distance at all to a human, let alone a vampire, but halfway there, Edmond crumpled into the snow, shaking so hard Ysanne thought she could hear his bones rattle.

He needed to get warm, and he was running out of time.

Ysanne had no body heat to share with him, but he clearly couldn't walk the last mile to the house. She'd have to carry him. But she couldn't move properly in this accursed dress. Heavy chunks of ice had formed a crust on the hem, and though the extra weight didn't bother her down, the frozen chunks acted like anchors, sticking fast in the snow and slowing her down.

There was no choice, really.

Ysanne tore off her dress, leaving herself clad in four layers of petticoats, and wrapped the heavy brocade fabric around Edmond's limp form, before picking him up. Free of the weight of the gown, she could move faster, but the snow was so deep that even she couldn't run. Edmond's head lolled against her chest.

"Do not die," Ysanne warned him, though she wasn't sure if he could hear her.

She was almost at the house when she realised she'd left Julien's apple tree behind, and her long-dead heart twisted with pain, but she couldn't go back for it now. The life of the boy in her arms was more important than the symbolism of a dead man; Julien wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

And then they were there, at the house that she simultaneously loved and hated, the house she fled from, but always came back to. It had been more than thirty years since she had been here, and her throat hitched as she walked through the front door and into the stone-flagged hallway. The air was stale and musty, undercut with the pungent reek of animal urine. No one had lived here for a long time, but people had come in her absence.

Come, and ransacked.

There had been a wooden trunk in the hallway once, and that was gone, leaving not even an imprint in the thick layer of dust. Ysanne suspected that the other rooms would be much the same.

She should have known that this would happen, but the realisation still hit her like a slap.

Before Julien, she had always paid a groundskeeper to take care of the place whenever she went away – just because she didn't want to live here permanently didn't mean she wanted the place to fall to ruins. Then Julien died, and she just . . . stopped caring. She'd left the house untended all this time, and people had taken advantage of that.

Richart had tried to make this house perfect for her.

Julien had made it perfect for her.

Now it was tainted.

But there was no time to wallow in self-pity.

"Where are we?" Edmond mumbled as she carried him through to the largest room on the ground floor, and laid him down on the rough bare boards. There was no furniture left in here either, and cobwebs hung in huge loops from the beamed ceiling, but the windows were still boarded over, and the fireplace was still functional, and that was all that mattered.

"My house," Ysanne replied.

He blinked, slow and sluggish. "Yours? Where's your husband?"

Ysanne swallowed. "My husband is dead."

Edmond didn't seem to know what to say to that.

As he lay on the floor, Ysanne pulled the folds of her dress away from him and rummaged through his pockets. Surely he wouldn't have been so foolish as to venture out on a night like this without fire steel or tinderbox – she never carried them herself because she didn't need to worry about keeping warm.