Mrs. Smith was looking down at his lightly restraining fingers with an elevated eyebrow when he came back to himself, a moment later. "Don
Sebastien—"
"One moment," Sebastien said. "Hold that thought." Still holding Mrs. Smith's warm right hand in his left—produced the red-violet garnet ring that Jack had brought downstairs. "I must ask you to wear this, for your safety."
"A ring?" She lifted it to the light, her tone teasing. "I wasn't aware that you felt for me so strongly. Although finding a priest who would perform the sacrament of marriage for a wampyr might be challenging—"
He let her make him laugh. It helped a little. "It indicates that you are under my protection." Reluctantly, he let her hand slip from his grasp. "Should another of the blood come calling."
Her eyes widened, but she didn't flinch. "Is that likely?"
"More likely today than yesterday," he said, and made a needle-threading gesture.
"Well then." But she handed the ring back to him and held out her left hand. It was innocent of her wedding ring; she had switched the emerald band to her right hand when he and Jack moved in. He imagined the neighbors were talking.
He kissed the stone, all mocking courtship, and slipped his signet on her finger just as the front door banged open.
Her breath had quickened, her pupils dilating. She spun at the sound, her newly-adorned hand lifted to her throat. Sebastien stepped back reflexively, away from any possible fall of sunlight, but turned, when he turned, more slowly.
"Hello, Jack."
Jack pushed the door closed and lifted the evening paper by the bottom corner. The cheap newsprint was already ink-smudged and friable.
"Sebastien—"
"Yes." Sebastien crossed the parlor with quick small steps, the heavy carpet squishing under his weight. "Phoebe was just telling me. A murder in the Back Bay?"
"No flies on you," Jack said, affecting a peculiarly horrible accent he perhaps imagined to be American. "Did she tell you the gory details?"
"I was just about to," Phoebe said. With a glance at the curtains, she joined Sebastien and Jack by the door. She stepped between them, and while Jack held his hands wide so as not to stain her pale green silk noil dress with ink, she cupped his neck between her hands and kissed him on the lips. Sebastien plucked the paper from his grasp and turned to give them a moment's privacy.
Not that they required it. Jack was a young man, and Phoebe had been widowed for some time. And there were pleasures Sebastien could not provide his still-warm lovers, just as there were pleasures no one living could provide for him. Also, Sebastien suspected that Jack enjoyed rubbing his nose in it.
The banner headline had to do with sinking of two English-flag ships in the North Atlantic, attributed to the French. War was no longer an inevitability: although it had yet to be declared, it had become a fact. But below the fold, Sebastien found the gaudy account of a young man slashed to death in his bath.
When Phoebe and Jack broke the kiss, he turned back. "An insinuatory article."
"Yes," Jack said. He disentangled himself from their hostess, who went to fetch a rag. "I believe you would say the victim had no visible means of support."
"He was a whore," Phoebe called, from the kitchen.
Sebastien entered the dining room, Jack in tow, and craned around the kitchen doorway to blink at her. "Such language."
"Words are my business." When she returned, she dropped a soapy rag into Jack's hands. "I'll use them precisely. Don't put that newspaper on my clean tablecloth, please."
Sebastien stepped into the kitchen to lay the paper on the counter and rinsed his hands under the tap. Boston was the most modern city Sebastien had lived in; there was even a system under the pavements by which water was piped for use in fighting fires. In fact, Boston had largely electrified, a process New Amsterdam was still struggling through, but the residents of Beacon Hill had been resistant to the stringing of unsightly cables.
Here, they were to be buried, and so for now, the wealthier citizens still made do with gas. But electric street cars ran throughout the city. It was only a matter of time until the trunks were tapped, or until the broadcast power that was—supposedly—already being tested in Paris crossed the Atlantic.
That, of course, would have to wait for after the war. But still, this was the age of miracles.
"Whores don't usually have the means to live in the Back Bay," he said,