“And the others?” he asked.
“Ah.” Beth nodded solemnly. “There were several of them who wept at the loss of their youth and looks and would have happily accepted immortality. But there were just as many who didn’t want it at all, or only briefly considered it but feared it like me.”
“Feared it?” he asked with a frown.
“This was the eighteen hundreds, Scotty,” she said dryly. “Dracula may not have been out in print yet, but Dorian Gray was, and we were a superstitious lot. Nothing so fine as remaining young and healthy forever could be a good thing and without a steep cost.”
Scotty smiled faintly at the words and nodded in understanding. He had lived through that era as well.
“Anyway, as I say, nearly two years passed. I know Dree didn’t mean to stay away so long. Time flies when you’re having fun, as they say, and there was no reason for her to think she had to come back. And although we missed her, we were also feeling guilty for how we’d monopolized her all those years. So in our letters we told her we were having a grand time and she should too. And we were,” Beth assured him with a grin. “We enjoyed our new respectable rank. We made friends with the neighbors, had them in to tea and were invited into their homes as well. We did needlepoint, read books, played cards, and made up the most fanciful and tragic tales for each of us as to how we’d ended up widowed and in that house together.
“It was lovely,” Beth said with a wistful smile, and then the smile faded, and she added, “Right up until the day Jimmy came.”
“Jamieson Sterne,” Scotty said solemnly.
“Aye,” she murmured. “Apparently he’d seen Mary at the market. He’d considered making a meal of her, but when he slipped into her mind, he saw Dree there.” Beth paused and focused her gaze firmly on him. “You must never tell her this, but he said that seeing her there in Mary’s head was what made him follow her home rather than just feed. He used to be a privateer, you see, like our Dree, and they’d had something of a rivalry, but our Dree always beat him to the finest plunder. He hated her for always showing him up like that, and the way he saw it, by tormenting and turning us into his lackeys, he’d finally win.”
“The turning ye part may have had something to do with Dree, but the tormenting was all him,” Scotty said grimly. “He tortured all his victims. ’Tis what set us onto him. He had cut a wide swath of blood and terror through England forty years before.”
“Odilia?” Beth asked at once.
Scotty wasn’t surprised she’d recognized the similarities in their stories, and nodded grimly. “Jamieson killed her family and several others forty years earlier, and then disappeared. But we knew at once it was him when it started up again. He had slaughtered half a dozen families this time around ere he encountered yer Mary. If anything, finding Dree in Mary’s thoughts may have kept him from simply slaughtering ye all outright and not turning ye. It was his habit to pick up on someone and follow them home and slaughter the whole clan in front o’ each other, causing the most torment.”
“Aye,” Beth breathed. “And that’s what he did, but without the killing. He just followed Mary in the door and said, ‘Good evening, ladies. My name is Jamieson, and I’ve come for dinner.’ And then, quick as a snake-like, he grabbed Mary, dragged her back and tore into her neck.”
Beth swallowed, her eyes swimming with the memory. “It was nothing like when Dree fed. Blood squirted everywhere. More splashed on the walls than could have got in his mouth I’m sure, and then he slurped like a child at a Popsicle.”
Scotty winced, his jaw tightening as he saw the remembered terror on her face.
“We were all too stunned to move at first. We were a gaggle of old ladies who’d seen and been through a lot, but this was . . .” She shook her head, took a deep breath and continued, “Then he tore open his wrist and pressed it to Mary’s mouth for several seconds before dropping her like a rag doll and reaching for the next woman. It was only then that we regained our senses enough to start to move. Some simply made a run for it, some grabbed for anything that could be used as a weapon, but we were all screaming and shrieking and running about. In the end it didn’t matter what our choice was, whether to run or fight. He was wicked fast, seemed impervious to our blows, and if anyone got close to the door or a window, he just took control of them. In no time at all, every last one of us was rolling on the floor in our own blood, screaming in agony as the turn began.”
“His bleeding you first would have sped up the onset of the turn,” Scotty said quietly. “The nanos would have recognized that your systems were in distress, needed urgent repair, and they would have started duplicating rapidly to attend to that.”
Beth nodded, but told him, “Things got blurry after that. All I remember is pain and blood and terrible nightmares. It went on for a really long time. Dree said it goes much more quickly when the turnee is given blood, and we obviously hadn’t been given any, which drew out the process.” Her mouth flattened briefly, but then relaxed again, and she continued, “When I woke up, I was lying on the parlor floor, covered in dry blood with no idea how I’d got there or what had happened or who the women around me were.”
“Ye did no’ recognize them?” Scotty asked, thinking that the horror of the mass turning must have been what had twisted her mind and made her mad, for the Beth he’d first met all those years ago had definitely been a madwoman. Her next words made him pause, though.
“No. Well, how could I?” she asked. “I may have lived with them for nigh on thirty years, but it had been a long time since I’d seen them young and healthy . . . Of course I did not recognize them.”
“Oh, aye,” Scotty said, smiling wryly.
“Except for one,” Beth said suddenly, her expression turning sad. “Nelly hadn’t survived the turn. She must’ve had a heart attack early on, because she hadn’t changed much.”
“I’m sorry,” Scotty murmured.
“Yes, well, she may have been the luckier of us,” Beth said quietly.
Scotty remained silent. He for one was glad that Beth had survived the turn. And while he’d already determined that her past wasn’t important, hearing more of her history had sealed his acceptance of it. It wasn’t learning that she’d been sold into the business as a child of ten. Or the fact that she’d tried to escape over and over again despite the beatings and abuse it brought on. What had finally sealed his acceptance was the reason she’d given for why she’d continued after Dree had arrived on the scene. Not because it was easy coin, or because she enjoyed the power of controlling men with her body. She’d continued in the business because she hadn’t been able to envision another road for herself. Beth had seen herself as too damaged to be accepted as a wife and mother, or anything but the prostitute she’d been forced to become. She and the other women had all been made to feel that way by people like him, he realized with shame, and vowed never to be so judgmental and holier-than-thou again. All flowers did not have thorns, and all prostitutes were not heartless gold diggers. Elizabeth Sheppard Argenis was nothing like his mother.
Scotty closed his eyes briefly. God, he loved this woman. Unfortunately, everything she’d said had merely made him more determined than ever to convince her to agree to having her memories removed. He hadn’t been there to protect her from her father’s betrayal, or the years of rape and abuse. True, he had saved both her and Dree from the murderous Jamieson, but he hadn’t been able to do so before the man had turned her home into a house of horrors and ensured the deaths of her friends, who were essentially her family. Scotty’s heart ached for what Beth had gone through, and he wanted nothing more than to take that pain away for her. A three-on-one mind wipe would do that. It might also change her so that they weren’t life mates anymore, as Matias had suggested, but he would risk that, for Beth. She deserved a future free of such horrors.
“Anyway,” Beth continued on a sigh, “the others woke up just as confused and terrified as me . . . a state that didn’t last long. Jimmy was quick to tell us that now that he’d made us all young and beautiful again, he owned us and we would do his bidding.”