Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

Down in the Tunnels

London, 1846

The fetid reek of human waste hit Gideon like a punch as he followed his fellow toshers through the outflow points of the city's sewers and into the tunnels themselves.

Three months he'd been doing this, and he didn't think he'd ever get used to that smell.

Three of the men with him didn't even seem to notice anymore, but they'd been doing this for years. At the head of the group was Walter, a veteran tosher with just a few wisps of white hair still clinging to his head. Ralph and Jim followed close behind, then Gideon, and behind him was Roy, the youngest of the group. Not even old enough to grow a proper beard yet, Roy had only recently joined their group after a previous tosher had disappeared in the sewers.

Disappearances happened more often than Gideon liked to think about. The sewer system was fast, and even people like Walter, who'd been toshing for most of his life, knew that hundreds of miles of tunnel remained unexplored, even by veterans like him. It was all too easy for toshers to wander too far from the main branches and get lost in the endless labyrinth of underground passages. If someone got lost down here, their options were limited. They could starve to death, or drown when the tide came in, filling the tunnel with foul water from the Thames.

"Rat," Roy cried, pointing, and Jim reacted quickly, stamping down on the furry body and snapping the rat's spine.

"Well done for spotting it," Jim said, clapping Roy's shoulder, and the boy smiled proudly.

Down in the sewers, rats were a serious threat and any tosher knew to avoid them if possible. Gideon had heard horror stories of lone toshers being overcome by huge hordes of rats and devoured down here in the dark, until there was nothing left by bones, submerged beneath the waters until the remains inevitably drifted towards the Thames where they'd be discovered by other toshers, or mudlarks working the flats of the river.

Even a lone rat was dangerous. Walter had told him of the times he'd been bitten by sewer rats, and the bites had festered until they'd formed ulcers with hard cores in the middle – hard as a stone. In those instances, Walter had had to cut the bite clean with a lancet and squeeze out the poison, and he had the scars to prove it.

At least Gideon didn't have to worry about that.

He hadn't meant to return to London.

This was where he'd been turned into a vampire, where he'd cast off his human life, and when Nicholas had said he wanted to leave, shortly after he'd turned Gideon, Gideon hadn't protested.

Now two years had passed since he ended things with Nicholas and struck out on his own, and the tide of life had carried him back to the city.

As a human, he'd never had to worry about money, but all that had changed when he became a vampire. At first he'd been able to rely on Nicholas's ample finances. Now he had to earn his own.

But life was horribly hard in London for so many people. The state offered almost no safety net for the poor, and the majority of Londoners struggled to eke out an existence in crowded, stinking slums. Gideon had found himself in the same boat when he arrived here, friendless, penniless, and with no idea what to do with himself.

Then he'd discovered the toshers, the men who made a living by sneaking into the foul depths of London's sewers at low tide, and combing through the raw sewage in search of any treasures that might have washed down from the streets above – bones or scraps of metal or bits of rope that could be sold to rag-and-bone men, silver-handled cutlery, and on good days, coins that had been dropped into the gutters.

It was dark, smelly, and unpleasant work, but it could be surprisingly lucrative. On average, Gideon was earning six shillings a day, enough to keep a roof over his head and protect him from the sun during the day.