Kitty Steals the Show

an air of casual elegance. All this wealth and centuries’ worth of collected riches were his and he was quite comfortable with it. He stood hand on hip, shoulders back, posing like the man in the portrait over the fireplace— maybe because he was the man in the portrait.

“This is Ned,” Emma said proudly. “Ned, may I present Kitty Norville, Ben O’Farrell, and Cormac Bennett.”

“Excellent work, Emma,” he said. “Any trouble at Heathrow?”

“None at all,” she answered.

“Hi,” I said, waving, feeling a bit inadequate for the surroundings. “It’s quite a place you have here.”

He smiled broadly at us, like we were new acquisitions for his collection. “I bet you say that to everyone.”

“Oh no,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “Not everyone.”

“Please, look around if you like. Ask questions. I rarely have a chance to show off for visitors.”

“Questions, huh? Anything?” I said.

“Here it comes…” Ben murmured.

“How old are you?” I asked.

His gaze went soft, as if he was doing math in his head. “Four hundred forty-three years old.”

Ben laughed. “Wow, he actually answered!”

I gaped. “I have never, ever, ever gotten that specific an answer from any vampire ever,” I said. I might have fallen in love with the man in that instant. I did a bit of my own math—it took a couple of tries. “Fifteen sixty—”

“Fifteen sixty-six,” Cormac said, and Ned nodded.

“And you were born in London,” I said.

“Born, bred, proud to be so.”

“Wow,” I said. “We have to talk, you have to tell me everything, what was it like, what did you do, who did you know—Queen Elizabeth, did you ever see her? Meet her?”

“You were right,” Ned said to Emma. “She doesn’t stop, does she?”

“Most vampires are so secretive, they won’t say anything about how old they are, where they came from. Like that life is dead to them and they’ll be damned if they talk about it. Why aren’t you like that? Why just let it all out there?”

“Of all the secrets I could keep, the ones about myself are the least useful.”

A vampire not interested in keeping secrets. Oh, the things I could ask … “Next question. Why Ned? Most vampires I’ve met are a little more fancy-pants with their names. Not Rick, it’s Ricardo, that sort of thing. But it’s Ned, not Edward?”

“My friends call me Ned. I’ve been known by both names all my life. Why do you prefer Kitty instead of Katherine?”

“Fair enough.” I looked around, taking in the thousands of rich leather spines, smelling the vast collection of paper, parchment, and ink, and guessing that every item was here because Ned wanted it to be. This wasn’t a museum, these were his things. “You’ve been building your library for over four hundred years, then. You want to point out the highlights?”

“Look around and tell me what catches your eye.”

I did, my gaze skimming over shelves and glass cases, having trouble stopping on any one thing because there was too much to focus on. Start with the books or the artifacts? Try to read one of the rare editions? But which one?

One of the cases held sheets of papers, letters maybe, some drawings, individual pages with short pieces of writing. The old-fashioned handwriting was hard to make out, but I spotted a phrase that repeated: Edward Alleyn. Or Alleyne, or Allan, and a few other variations of spellings. At the tops of letters, on lists of names, and in the title of what seemed to be an admiring poem.

“Edward Alleyn, that’s you, yes?” I said to him.

“It is.”

I continued to the next case, which held only one large book, as big as an old picture atlas, open on its stand. The object had been well cared for; its pages were only just aging to yellow. The text was typeset rather than written, but it was still antique, hard to read. Even so, I only needed a few lines to understand what it was—one of Hamlet’s soliloquies.

“This is a First Folio,” I said to Ned.

“Are you a scholar of the Bard, then?” he asked.

“More like a fan. I majored in English lit, if that means anything. It looks like it’s in really good condition.”

“Hot off the presses you might say,” he said. “It isn’t even listed in the official census of how many First Folios still exist.”

“That’s so cool! You must have seen the plays when they were first being performed—oh my God, I can’t even imagine.”

“I saw most of them, I think. You might say the theater was my life, back then.”

At that, a synapse in my brain clicked into place—the English major coming back online and earning its keep. “Edward Alleyn,” I murmured. “I’ve heard that name before.”

Ned quoted: “‘Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, that time may cease, and midnight never come.’”

It was obviously supposed to mean something. I stared, blank.

He tried again: “‘What are kings, when regiment is gone, but perfect shadows in a sunshine day?’”

Still nothing. “Is it Shakespeare?” I ventured.

He rolled his eyes. One more time … “‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’”

“Oh, that’s Marlowe,” I said. “Wait a minute. Edward Alleyn—the actor?”

“I told you she’d get it,” he said to a beaming Emma.

“You knew Christopher Marlowe. And Shakespeare, you knew Shakespeare—” I put my hand on my mouth. I was now two degrees of separation from William Shakespeare. Back home, Rick gave me such a hard time because I was always bugging him for stories about the famous people he’d met in his over five hundred years of life, how I constantly assumed that vampires must have some kind of insider information, when really, why would they be any more likely to know famous people than the rest of us? But here it was, the reason I asked all these questions in the first place, because sometimes, sometimes, I got the answers I was looking for. What secret corners of history could vampires illuminate, if I could figure out what to ask?

At this point, though, all the questions seemed moot. This man had known Shakespeare. He was a window into an amazing time and place—and I didn’t know where to start. So I teared up and tried to wave away the burst of emotion. Everyone was staring at me and all I really wanted to do was cry from the wonder of it all.

“Is she okay?” Emma asked Ben.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

“I get this reaction quite a lot,” Ned said cheerfully. I imagined it was one of the reasons he didn’t bother keeping his identity secret—he’d been a celebrity his whole life, why stop just because he’d become a vampire?

“How?” I managed to stammer. “How did you go from … from there to this? What happened?”

“That’s a much longer story, Ms. Norville. May I get you a drink?” Ned asked.

“I would very much like a drink, yes.”

Ned rang and an attendant—the young woman who’d greeted us when we arrived—brought in a tray with a couple of decanters and several glasses, and we gathered on the chairs and sofas around one of the small tables in the library. Emma poured scotch for Ben, Cormac, and I, and she and Ned sat back to watch us sip. It was probably excessively expensive and luxurious, but all I tasted was the burn. I was still staring at Ned in bewilderment, imagining some scene in an Elizabethan tavern, the actors and playwrights of the day, Shakespeare and Marlowe and so on, gathered around, laughing and drinking, the music of lutes and pipes in the background …

Ben grinned at me. “Hey Kitty, now you’re supposed to ask if Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”