home?”
The other man made no answer. His eyes remained fixed, as if staring at something over Peregrine’s shoulder in the middle distance. He appeared to be mesmerized, like the carriage driver.
A maid in a black dress and spotless apron so heavily starched that it crackled helped Peregrine out of his cloak. She, too, was unresponsive when he thanked her as she disappeared with his coat.
The front parlor was filled with people talking gaily and drinking champagne. The men were in formal evening clothes, and the women wore elegant gowns with pearls around their necks and jeweled bracelets on their arms. Peregrine was the only one wearing a uniform.
The uniform!
Peregrine’s heart began to pound. He stood perfectly still, waiting for the inevitable reaction while he wondered how he could have been so stupid. He was just too far inside the room to turn away and retreat without attracting notice. Moving only his eyes, he scanned the party from left to right. Either they were blind or the Union uniform was of no concern to them, though both possibilities seemed equally implausible. Still, it was impossible to imagine that he could walk into a Garden District party wearing the uniform of a federal general without drawing, at the very least, looks of cold disapproval, if not outrage, insults, and challenges to fight duels.
A woman directly in Peregrine’s line of vision smiled at him, and the man she was talking to nodded. Peregrine tipped his head slightly in return.
Who were these people?
What kind of party was this?
With what he hoped looked to the others like a perfectly casual gesture, he brought his hand to the pocket where he carried the derringer, only to remember losing it on the filthy hallway floor in the Quadroon Ballroom.
A servant came through the room with a silver tray of glasses filled with champagne. Peregrine took a glass and drank, wishing it were whiskey.
Music resumed in the next parlor, the piano playing the overture to an opera Peregrine could not identify. The other people began to filter toward the sound. Peregrine followed, putting the empty glass on a drum table next to a couch where two women leaned against each other, their eyes closed. Peregrine saw at once that they were different from the other women at the party. Their dresses were cut from cheap fabric, the tailoring inferior and showing evidence of wear. The toes of their boots needed polish, while rouge, powder, and lipstick were far too liberally applied to their faces. They did not belong in the house on Chestnut Street any more than Peregrine did.
The women were dead, Peregrine realized with a lack of surprise that was in itself surprising.
No one paid him the least attention as he bent slightly forward from the waist for a closer look. A set of neat, almost fastidious bite marks disfigured each woman’s neck. The skin around the bites had a purplish discoloration, a sign that mouths had suckled greedily from these mortal fountains. The tissue around each individual wound was raised and swollen, a ring encircling a red center glistening with blood that was still wet and, Peregrine guessed, as warm as it had been in life only a few minutes earlier.
8
Memento Mori
P EREGRINE PICKED UP a second glass of champagne as the others moved past him into the music room, and stood turned away from them, pretending to admire an English landscape painting on the wall.
The wounds in the dead girls’ necks had already faded from what they had been barely a minute earlier. The torn skin was pulling itself together, the purplish discoloration fading. Some unknown mechanism—Peregrine refused to consider the possibility that supernatural powers were involved—was causing the corpses to heal themselves of the only outward evidence of the attacks that had killed them.
Peregrine felt himself almost physically lifted on a wave of relief as he realized that there was an explanation for it all that didn’t involve madness—the bite marks
The other man made no answer. His eyes remained fixed, as if staring at something over Peregrine’s shoulder in the middle distance. He appeared to be mesmerized, like the carriage driver.
A maid in a black dress and spotless apron so heavily starched that it crackled helped Peregrine out of his cloak. She, too, was unresponsive when he thanked her as she disappeared with his coat.
The front parlor was filled with people talking gaily and drinking champagne. The men were in formal evening clothes, and the women wore elegant gowns with pearls around their necks and jeweled bracelets on their arms. Peregrine was the only one wearing a uniform.
The uniform!
Peregrine’s heart began to pound. He stood perfectly still, waiting for the inevitable reaction while he wondered how he could have been so stupid. He was just too far inside the room to turn away and retreat without attracting notice. Moving only his eyes, he scanned the party from left to right. Either they were blind or the Union uniform was of no concern to them, though both possibilities seemed equally implausible. Still, it was impossible to imagine that he could walk into a Garden District party wearing the uniform of a federal general without drawing, at the very least, looks of cold disapproval, if not outrage, insults, and challenges to fight duels.
A woman directly in Peregrine’s line of vision smiled at him, and the man she was talking to nodded. Peregrine tipped his head slightly in return.
Who were these people?
What kind of party was this?
With what he hoped looked to the others like a perfectly casual gesture, he brought his hand to the pocket where he carried the derringer, only to remember losing it on the filthy hallway floor in the Quadroon Ballroom.
A servant came through the room with a silver tray of glasses filled with champagne. Peregrine took a glass and drank, wishing it were whiskey.
Music resumed in the next parlor, the piano playing the overture to an opera Peregrine could not identify. The other people began to filter toward the sound. Peregrine followed, putting the empty glass on a drum table next to a couch where two women leaned against each other, their eyes closed. Peregrine saw at once that they were different from the other women at the party. Their dresses were cut from cheap fabric, the tailoring inferior and showing evidence of wear. The toes of their boots needed polish, while rouge, powder, and lipstick were far too liberally applied to their faces. They did not belong in the house on Chestnut Street any more than Peregrine did.
The women were dead, Peregrine realized with a lack of surprise that was in itself surprising.
No one paid him the least attention as he bent slightly forward from the waist for a closer look. A set of neat, almost fastidious bite marks disfigured each woman’s neck. The skin around the bites had a purplish discoloration, a sign that mouths had suckled greedily from these mortal fountains. The tissue around each individual wound was raised and swollen, a ring encircling a red center glistening with blood that was still wet and, Peregrine guessed, as warm as it had been in life only a few minutes earlier.
8
Memento Mori
P EREGRINE PICKED UP a second glass of champagne as the others moved past him into the music room, and stood turned away from them, pretending to admire an English landscape painting on the wall.
The wounds in the dead girls’ necks had already faded from what they had been barely a minute earlier. The torn skin was pulling itself together, the purplish discoloration fading. Some unknown mechanism—Peregrine refused to consider the possibility that supernatural powers were involved—was causing the corpses to heal themselves of the only outward evidence of the attacks that had killed them.
Peregrine felt himself almost physically lifted on a wave of relief as he realized that there was an explanation for it all that didn’t involve madness—the bite marks
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