“Or killing more humans?” Buxton asked, entering the room.
“Are you in love?” Percy asked, leaning his elbows on his knees and glancing up at me jealously from the corner table, where he was playing a game of solitaire. Percy clearly loved women, but his childlike face made him look like a boy of fifteen, and often the women he was most attracted to assumed Lexi was his mother. I was thankful I’d been turned into a vampire at the age I had been.
I shook my head. “I’m not in love,” I said, wondering if I was saying it to convince myself. “But I’m settling into the routine at the freak show. I think I’m learning to like New Orleans.”
“That’s great news,” Buxton breathed sarcastically.
“Buxton.” Lexi glanced at him reproachfully before turning her attention back to me. “Did you forget our plans?”
I racked my brain, but finally shook my head. “I’m sorry.”
Lexi sighed. “Remember—I’m taking you shopping. I may be a vampire, but I still have a woman’s vanity, and it simply doesn’t suit me to be surrounded by men in ill-fitting clothing. What would the neighbors think?” She laughed, amused by her own joke.
“Oh, right.” I inched toward the stairway. “Maybe we could go tomorrow? I’m exhausted.”
“I’m serious, Stefan,” Lexi said, taking my arm. “You need clothes, and it’s a tradition of sorts. I took those two gentlemen in for fittings, and look at them now,” she said, nodding toward Buxton and Hugo as if exceptionally pleased with her work. It was true. From Buxton’s high-collared blue coat to Hugo’s well-tailored britches, they did look handsome. “Besides, you don’t have a choice,” she said mischievously.
“I don’t?”
“No.” Lexi opened the door with a flourish. “Boys, we’re off. When we come back, you won’t even recognize Stefan, he’ll look so handsome!”
“Bye, handsome !” Buxton yelled sarcastically as the door clicked closed. Lexi shook her head, but I didn’t mind. In an odd way, I’d gotten used to Buxton. He was like a brother of sorts. A brother with a potentially fatal short temper, but one I’d gotten used to managing.
Together, Lexi and I walked companionably into the cool night air. I saw Lexi looking at me out of the corner of her eye, and I wondered what she saw.
I felt I was living three distinct lives: In one, I was a loyal brother, in another I was a new member of a club I didn’t quite understand, and in the third I was a young man placing my trust in a human woman—a woman whom I had staked my own flesh and blood to save. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure how to seamlessly live all three lives.
“You’re quiet,” Lexi said in midstep. “And”—she sniffed the air—“you haven’t been drinking human blood. I’m proud of you, Stefan.”
“Thanks,” I murmured. I knew she wouldn’t be proud of me if I told her about the conversation Callie and I had shared. She’d say that I was too impulsive, too naive, that I’d made a huge mistake telling Callie my secret. Although I hadn’t told as much as confirmed her remarkably accurate suspicions.
“Here we are,” Lexi said, stopping at a nondescript wooden door on Dauphine Street. She took a slim metal hook from her pocket and jiggled it in the lock of the front door. After a moment, it clicked open.
“And now, the shop is open for business.” Lexi spread her hands wide, perching on a stiff leather ottoman. “Take your pick.”
A dozen mannequins with puffed-out chests held court in the store. One in a tweed jacket lifted its arm in a wave, while another in a sailor’s cap had a hand above its eyes, as though staring straight out to sea. Bolts of fine fabrics were propped up against the back wall, and a row of cuff-links glistened under glass. Stacks of ready-made shirts kept silent watch over the darkened shop, and a few cravats spilled out of a drawer.
Lexi crossed her ankles beneath her skirts and gazed at me, a look of pride on her face as I pulled a camel- hair coat off a mannequin and draped it around my shoulders.
I stood stiffly, waiting for approval, as I had done when my mother had taken me shopping.
“Well, I can’t tell when you stand there as wooden as a mannequin. Walk around a bit. See what you think,” Lexi said with an impatient wave of her hand.
I rolled my eyes but took a turn around the room, acting like the rich men Callie and I’d seen at the burlesque show. I held out my hand to Lexi with a flourish. “Care to dance?” I said in an exaggerated British accent.
Lexi shook her head, amusement evident in her eyes.
“Okay, I get it. It’s a little too dandy. How about that one?” She angled her chin at a mannequin in black trousers and a gray coat with red piping. I removed my jacket and pulled the coat around my shoulders.
Lexi nodded, her eyes taking on a faraway look.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“My brother,” she said.
I thought of the boy in the portrait, his eyes so much like Lexi’s. “What about him?”
Lexi picked up a silk cravat and laced it between her fingers. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “After our parents died, I started taking walks with a boy who was a vampire. He asked if I wanted to live forever. And of course I did, because I was young, and who wouldn’t want to always be young and beautiful? Also, if I turned, it meant I’d never have to leave Colin. He’d already lost so much, and I thought, well, at least he could know that he’d never lose me.”
“Was Colin a vampire?”
Lexi pulled the cravat through her fingers and cracked it like a whip. “I’d never do that to someone I loved.”
The image of me forcing Damon to drink from Alice, the barmaid in the tavern back home, flashed through my mind. I looked down, not wanting Lexi to sense what I’d done to someone I loved. “So what happened?”
“People got suspicious. I didn’t know then how careful we needed to be. My brother was growing up, and I was staying the same. People wondered. And there was a siege, and our house was torched. And the irony is, I escaped and Colin didn’t. And he was the innocent one. He was only sixteen.”
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. I tried to imagine Lexi as a human, leaning on the arm of the man who had promised the world to her, just as Katherine had promised the world to me. I pictured him spiriting her away to a dark alley, taking just a little blood at first, asking her to drink his, then stabbing her through the heart to complete the transformation.
Lexi waved her hand, wiping away the image of herself as a young girl. “Don’t be sorry. It was more than a century ago. He’d be dead anyway by now.” She appraised me. “That jacket looks good on you.”
“Thank you,” I said. Suddenly the weight of my discussion with Callie felt heavy in my stomach. “I have a plan to save Damon,” I blurted out.
Lexi’s head jerked up, her eyes flashing. “What?”
“Tomorrow night. Callie’s helping me.” I allowed my eyes to meet Lexi’s. “Damon’s back at Laurel Street. Her father will be out of the house at a card game, so we’ll free Damon then.”
“Did you tell Callie what you are?” she asked, her voice low and hard.
I chewed on my thumb. “No.”
“Stefan!”
“She guessed,” I said defensively. “And I trust her.”
“Trust!” Lexi spat. She stood up so abruptly the ottoman toppled over. “You don’t know the meaning of the word. Callie is the daughter of Patrick Gallagher, who just forced your brother to fight a mountain lion to the death. How do you know this isn’t some elaborate plan to imprison you, too?”
“How stupid do you think I am?” I challenged, stepping closer to Lexi. “I may be young, but I have good instincts.”
Lexi gave a derisive snort. “You mean the same instincts that landed you backed up in a butcher shop with three vampires surrounding you? The same instincts that led you to murder that woman on the train?”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“Because of me! And the boys back at the house. But I will not allow you to drag us into confronting Patrick Gallagher, of all people.”
“No one’s dragging you into anything!” I yelled in frustration. “Just because you let your brother die doesn’t mean I’m going to let mine! I owe him that much.”
“You ungrateful child!” she spat, pushing me with all her force against a gold-framed mirror. I fell as the
