Origin of the Vampyre

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Rachel slung her laptop bag over her shoulder and crossed 42nd Street at Fifth Avenue. The broad steps and terraces of the New York Public Library rose between the marble lions—Patience and Fortitude—that had guarded it for more than a century. Tourists gathered in the library’s palatial lobby, marveling at the polished architectural detail and reveling in the air conditioning away from the blaring traffic and the sticky Manhattan humidity that had wilted the trees of Bryant Park.

Rachel wished she could take off her suit jacket, but the seven-block walk from Rockefeller Center had reduced her blouse to sweat-soaked transparency.

“Ms. Walton.”

Rachel looked up and pulled her lapels together. The concierge held out a package about the size of a large boot box, wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, and covered in stamps—British.

“Thanks, Scotty.” Rachel tucked the package under an arm and awkwardly signed the form the concierge tilted her way.

“Hot outside, hey?” Scotty said with a smirk only a twenty-year-old Iowa farm boy could pull off without receiving a jaded New York backhand across the face.

Rachel smiled before heading down the south corridor away from the tourists. The package was weighty and cumbersome, its contents slipping back and forth inside—perhaps the dull thud of wood on wood. She steadied it with both hands. Two floors down, where the marble opulence gave way to linoleum and white-washed concrete blockwork, she stopped and leaned against the wall to reaffirm her grip. She nudged off her jacket to catch the imagined breeze creeping along the corridor from the dehumidified book-stacks beneath Bryant Park.

And then she saw him.

Straight up ahead, standing in her bright glass box of an office set amongst the miles of archive shelving. Massive in size, Adam leaned over her desktop contemplating something on the computer screen. His buzz cut was newly trimmed and sharp. A lemon-colored polo shirt clung to the powerful musculature of his torso, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. The hard bulge of his tattooed biceps glistened with a cool sweat. God, he’s big, was always her first thought whenever she saw him, instantaneously followed by, God, I love him.

“A present for me?” Adam asked when she walked in.

“No, it just arrived at concierge.” She placed it and her laptop bag onto the desk.

He smiled. “I wasn’t talking about the package.”

Rachel glanced down at her blouse. Before she’d a chance to chuckle, he stepped around the desk, pulled her up into his arms, and kissed her with a warmth and passion that had only escalated since they’d first met in Montreux, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva three years ago. She melted into the gentle strength of his embrace, the excruciating heat and moist pleasure of his mouth against hers. He brushed his lips across her cheek and whispered into her ear, “Ma chérie.” She’d never heard a more masculine voice. His tongue was Swiss, more German-Swiss than French, but he’d started to develop a slight Manhattan nasality—a tendency picked up from the tight group of friends he’d made since joining her in New York.

She pressed her hands against his chest. “My publisher approved the commission.”

“The Polidori biography? Oh, Rach, that’s great!”

Rachel’s smile faltered. “I don’t know about being away from Helen for so long. Plus, I already have reams of data on Polidori from my research for Mary’s bio.” She glanced at the oversized, framed bookstore poster on the wall for Fire on the Water: A Companion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “But I’ll need to be in London for at least a month to wrap up the last five or so years of his life, after the summer of 1816.”

Adam nodded thoughtfully. “Henny and I can video call you every morning and evening, and I will ensure she gets three times as many hugs and kisses throughout the day.” He touched his forehead to hers. “We’ll give it a week or two, so you can finish the first major slog of research, and then we’ll fly over and join you, yeah?”

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

He lowered Rachel to the floor and sat on the edge of her desk next to the package. “I didn’t realize Doctor Polidori died so soon after the Romantics tour of Europe. Was it, um, natural?”

Rachel pulled at her blouse to fan herself. “I don’t know. There’s conflicting data, and a lot of speculation. He seemed to spiral after the publication of his ghost story competition manuscript.”

“The Vampyre: A Tale,” Adam said.

Rachel nodded. “But whether it was the public reception to that work, or something more complex to do with his personal life, I don’t know. Yet.”

Rachel stared past Adam toward the package, and he turned to follow her gaze. Stamps covered a third of the front face, most with the silhouette of Queen Elizabeth, but a few with the smiling cherub face of the future King George. But that was not what attracted her attention. The addressing, care of the New York Public Library, was florid with letters over an inch high done by an impressive, masculine hand—a beautiful copperplate reminiscent of the ancient letters she’d studied for the Shelley biography. The sender’s address was written diagonally in the top left-hand corner:

Aubrey Polidori

38 Great Pulteney Street

Soho, London, W1F

England