Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

24 - Chapter XXIV: Rules and Regulations

The London Household. 6:10 pm

Rena followed the bustling housekeeper down the narrow hall. Reinette, she held close, taking pains to ensure the vampire would not be bruised upon waking. Like a bird in her palm, one whose neck could be snapped or shielded. She would watch over, feed, and protect her. If times changed and Lucian asked her to murder her in cold blood, she would do that as well. Like or dislike had nothing to do with it. Not when everything was a task.

Ahead of her, Mrs. Fulligan began to climb a set of narrow stairs, speaking to her in English. Mildly out of breath, the kind of voice that would take no nonsense from anyone but a superior. Like Rena with her charge, Mrs. Fulligan had a task, and she took to it with a level-headedness that belied her status as a mortal in a lycan household. She spoke of house-rules, den-rules, dinner-bells. It did not seem to matter whether they stood in the upper reaches of a British household or the lower levels of the den. At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Fulligan unlocked a wooden door and ushered their small party into a hallway, dark as the one downstairs, a door at either end. Left with a choice, Rena looked from one to the other, but said nothing, assuming the housekeeper would continue to lead as she had been doing. She made no mention of Reinette's condition, but the housekeeper seemed to take it in stride.

"If you will wait a moment, miss," Mrs. Fulligan said, holding a wrinkled hand up before walking down the hall and unlocking the right door. She passed through and shut it very quickly behind her, cutting off the last rays of sun. Even had she been slow, the door was too far back for it to do her charge any harm.

Left behind, Rena waited, listening through walls, hearing rustling rather than footsteps, fabric being drawn and a match being lit. Without the heavy footsteps of Mrs. Fulligan, she could pinpoint the lighter ones of Sabine crawling up the stairs, following them. She could smell dust. Damp. The muggy wool wrapped around Reinette's shoulders. Since leaving the ship, the vampire had not stirred, her limbs hanging loose from her frame. Lucian had said she would be awake by tomorrow afternoon. She would not speculate over why he had drugged her nor why she lay in his bed when they disembarked. She would do her task and ask no questions.

Through the wall, Mrs. Fulligan called for them to come. "It is alright, dear," she said. Dear. As if she were a maid in the governor's household. Rather than turn the handle herself, Rena persistently waited where she was, watching the handle turn, making certain it was the rays of a candle rather than the sun that fell on the floor. Only then, holding Reinette closer, did she proceed through the door, padding into what seemed a large drawing room, velvet-lined drapes covering a line of three windows from floor to ceiling. The fireplace was cold. Dust on everything. Books, tables, chairs, the abandoned piano-forte by the farthest window. Squinting, she could see an overturned brandy-glass lying on its cover, the blood from the vessel having been poured and long-since hardened over the instrument's keys; as if both keys and glass had been sitting there for a decade, alone in silence. Mrs. Fulligan was waiting ahead, holding a handkerchief to her mouth, the candle in her other hand. Coughing, she beckoned with the handkerchief, leading them through the silent room, their footsteps muffled by the remnants of a thick carpet burrowed by mice.

"This way..." The housekeeper pushed against a set of panelled doors at the room's end, the dust continuing through two more rooms of abandoned elegance. Their destination was a narrow door tucked at the end of a hallway, its plain lack of panelling unexpected after the French-inspired elegance of before. Removing a large iron key from the ring at her belt, Mrs. Fulligan turned the key in the lock and pushed. When the plain door did not open, she pushed again, using her hips this time. On the second attempt, the door swung open, its rusty hinges emitting a large creak that did little to alleviate any concerns about what Lucian had meant by the "east wing." He may as well have said "the forgotten hole in the back-end of nowhere." In spite of this, she had no concerns. She did not care why this place was deserted. She would not ask why a vampire prisoner was housed in the upper household rather than the exiles' quarter. She would not venture a guess over what separated Reinette from other prisoners. Everything was a task, and it was her mandate not to have opinions.