We shouldn’t be going in with blood on us at all. We should have gone home and changed so they wouldn’t sniff us out. But the sun’s almost down, and they can’t smell us if they’re still asleep. Or dead. And if they head out when they wake up...
The pack would be shit out of luck again. The city’s magical practitioners and Noah might be worse than that. He’d decided to roll the dice, and Cameron couldn’t blame him at all.
Cameron glanced toward the west. The horizon had eaten the bottom of the sun. Funny how much I’ve pinned on the sun today. The sun, and Sunny. Here we’re supposed to be creatures of the moon. Not today. Wish you were here, pretty lady. Wish I didn’t need you somewhere else.
Sonja wasn’t the only one he’d left behind with an important job tonight. He’d asked Peter to stay at Noah’s place to keep it secure, and to keep an eye on the shadow wolves besides. With luck, Peter could let the pair out of the cages when the rest of the pack took Kiplinger down. They wouldn’t want to cool their heels behind bars while they waited for a rescuer to arrive. It felt impossibly optimistic to hope for, but Cameron couldn’t think any other way.
No more room for doubts. To wonder if they ought to wait when they’d waited so long for this night already. Cameron couldn’t think that way when Kiplinger slept a few blocks away.
Footsteps behind them. Cameron scented the air and smelled Justin, one of the pack. They’d all agreed to arrive in staggered groups so as not to arouse more suspicion from the innocent locals than necessary. Darkness would have covered them better. Social engineering would have to do. Justin caught up to walk beside them and handed over a case of cheap beer. “For the party,” he said with a grim smile.
Justin carried a six pack of bottled brews in the other hand. Cameron grinned. “For the party. Nice of Paul to throw us a Halloween bash, isn’t it?”
“I’ve been looking forward to it for months. Got my costume on under my skin.”
Cameron laughed. “Yeah. Me, too.”
Just a group of folks headed to a Halloween celebration. With a host who’d be fatally surprised to discover himself the man of the night.
Sonja had never seen Vincenzo Pirelli just after he’d awakened. By the time she got to him, he’d always had time to dress himself, groom, and often, to eat. He never looked less than like a human with impeccable taste in style.
Even in pajamas and a robe, she couldn’t fault his fashion sense. But he did look less than human.
His smile had edges. It reminded her that the gentleman she’d shared meals with could hunt his dinner down without trouble. Even without her werewolf’s instincts, she would know him for a predator. Charlie didn’t miss it, either. He pressed against her leg as Pirelli spoke. “Miss Carter. This is unexpected. I cannot say it is entirely welcome.”
“Lord Pirelli. I’m sorry to disturb you. I hope you know I wouldn’t do so without a good reason.” She knew enough good manners to execute a little bow of deference to appease him.
“So Moira has told me. For anyone but her, and anyone but you, this visit would end in a far different conclusion.” He raised a hand to forestall any objections. “But it is her, and it is you, and I trust you both not to cry wolf.”
That was a pointed turn of phrase. “No. I’m crying ‘vampire’ instead. Kiplinger has stepped up his game.”
“Moira said whatever he did caused her episode last night. As if I did not already have ample reason to stake him out for the dawn.” He beckoned her to follow him out of the sitting room, down a hall that led deeper into the house.
“Did she tell you what I saw?”
“I asked her not to. I wanted to hear it from you.” Pirelli’s unruffled voice hid another layer of meaning. Sonja had dealt with him long enough to recognize the tone. A description from Moira would have biased him. From Sonja, it would stand on its own merits.
The library waited deeper in the house, but so did other places from which Sonja wouldn’t expect to emerge. A business relationship with Vincenzo Pirelli didn’t make you his friend. More than one person had not lived through that mistaken assumption.
“Then let me explain for you. Through magics I don’t understand, Kiplinger has managed to taint the local ley lines. That’s why the local magic practitioners have all gotten sick. Since he also used that ritual to control the shadow wolves, it’s probably why Moira felt it.” She had no qualms throwing potential control over Moira in there.
It had the desired effect. He glowered, though his lips never drooped past a light frown. “I see. Will killing him not clear the magics?”
“It might, but the more I consider it, I don’t think so. He’s made what I can only describe as a persistent source of pollution. The ritual he performed last night has not only lingered. It powers itself with the energy from the ley lines. Clean magic comes in, corrupted magic is pumped out.” She gestured with cupped hands, indicating the expansion and contraction in a regular rhythm. “When I got a peek at it, it looked like... Well, it looked like a big heart of darkness.”
Pirelli stopped walking. Sonja almost plowed into him. When he turned his head to look at her, it put their faces uncomfortably close. “What did you say?”
She staggered a step back. That nearness made her inner wolf snarl. “I said it looked like a big, black heart?”
“No. You said it looked like a heart of darkness.” His eyes had tinted a bloody shade of red.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. “Yes. Is that significant?”
“I wish it were not.” He continued down the hall, almost fast enough for her to jog after him.
“So you’ve heard of this kind of magic?”
“I have heard of the Heart of Darkness.” She didn’t have to see his face to know his expression had changed. No longer a glare, but an intense, determined scowl. “And now, I hope you are wasting my time. As should you. Better to wake me for no reason at all than for the Heart to have surfaced from the depths of history again.”
Luciana Gaeta met them at what Sonja took for the double doors to the library. Pirelli’s chief bodyguard had managed to get herself clothed in her usual, neat pantsuit, but Sonja could tell Gaeta hadn’t eaten, either. As far as Sonja knew, Gaeta had no facial expressions past the occasional narrowing of her eyes. She didn’t need them. It didn’t take a frown to leave a man without a spine, which she had done once when a human servant had tried to stake Pirelli in his sleep. But Sonja could see the hunger in Gaeta’s eyes, and a small curl of Gaeta’s lip showed fangs extended.
Guess she’s not a morning person. Evening person? “What is this Heart of Darkness?”
Gaeta blinked, and Sonja knew it had to be bad.
Pirelli answered. “A very old artifact. The Heart of Darkness was said to have been the literal heart of a demon, if you believe in such things.”
“Do you?”
“I believe in beings of surpassing evil. Evil that proves itself in its actions, not in its shape. Whether these beings are labeled with religiously significant names or not, I know they exist.” He pulled a key out of a pocket in his robe. It slipped into the lock. “I hope never to see one again.”
Dani’s words echoed in Sonja’s mind. That’s the word I keep thinking of. Unholy. Evil.
The lock clicked, and the doors swung open on silent hinges. Sonja felt her jaw drop to an undignified gape. She didn’t bother to close it. It would have distracted her from staring into the library the doors revealed.
Books. She had expected those, because the word library implied them. But she hadn’t expected to find the rows of shelves illuminated by the blue-white glow of computer monitors. An entire ring of them sat at the center of the room, displays filled with both images of book pages and search interfaces. A woman sat in front of one screen, digitizing the image of a book for ease of searching the contents. In a corner of the room, a man operated a hand scanner, dragging it with care over an ancient tome to input its contents into a computer.
Warm air gusted over S
onja as it rushed out through the doors, smelling of old pages and new electronics. Far warmer than the rest of the house, she noted. He must have whole racks of servers in there, to warm it up that much.
“More modern than you expected?” Pirelli asked with amused pride.
She couldn’t even temporize. “Yep. I had no idea.”
“You wound me, Miss Carter. Just because I was born in the Dark Ages does not mean I must continue to live in them.” He swept into the chamber.
From inside, she had a better view of the library’s scope. It must have taken up the entire back of the manor and spanned both floors of the home. She followed after the vampire lord with most of her attention on the rows of shelves. Leather-bound books, paperbacks, hard-backed textbooks, he had at least one of everything. The ones nearest the door were the most modern. The most easily replaceable, I bet. Toward the rear, she could see the older books, with tattered corners and signs of age. She got a glimpse of what looked like a true archive room, light and climate controlled to preserve delicate texts.
Pirelli didn’t let her get that far. Instead, he took them to the nearest keyboard so he could perform a search. Heart of Darkness. “It is said that the demon in question sought to carve out power within our living realm. He was stopped, of course, by those who would oppose evil. So he withdrew his essence into the heart of his mortal form to hide. His vanquishers left his remains to rot, not caring about the ruined flesh they thought he had left behind. Thus the demon lived on, diminished but not without sway.”
“Always burn the body,” Sonja said as she watched the screen. Entries started to pop up in answer to the query, each with a little blurb to accompany it.
“Yes. Leaving a corpse to rot invites an enemy’s unexpected return.” Pirelli scrolled down the entries, eyes tracking fast to scan the information for the piece he wanted. “From there, the tales branch out. A traveler who found the Heart and was tempted by its promises. For it had many promises to make. To the one who could free the demon to walk the Earth again, who could give it the power it desired, the demon would grant a share of that power. Immortality, influence, authority over its dominion...”
“The usual.”
“Except it could deliver on these promises. And likely, it would. Demons do best when they have minions to ground them. To better teach them the depths of human depravity. For we all know, there is nothing more depraved than humans.” He clicked on a link, frowned at it, and hit the Escape key. The window returned to the list of entries. “While the years have obscured the exact date or place of the Heart’s creation, legends trace its path through history. Egypt. Turkey. Romania. The last time I heard of it, it had surfaced in Italy.”
Sonja watched the cursor dart from one link to the next until Pirelli settled on one. “Your neck of the woods.”
“And in my youth, as well. My second youth.” He opened the link. A window bloomed on the screen, covered in text. He nodded toward it. “There were rumors of the Heart in Europe in the thirteenth century, but an occult scholar is said to have laid eyes on it in the early 1700s. His account of the event is interesting, I think.”
A frown tugged at her lips as she read it. An unknown researcher had kindly translated the archaic Italian into a more modern English. Though I count myself a man of great knowledge, I have never beheld such an object as the one my host has called the Heart of Darkness. A heart beats within my own breast. I should consider all hearts among the most natural of creations. Yet this Dark Heart has wandered so far from what is natural, I wonder how the great world around us can recognize it as part of what may be contained within our mortal frame. I have watched a man become a wolf. I have stared into the face of the unliving, beautiful though her face was to my eyes. No experience has filled me with greater dread than a mere glimpse of this artifact.
A bare glance, and I could hear a voice whisper in the vault of my mind. It knew my name. It knew my thirst for lost lore. The understanding it offered me tempted me, yet I could feel the hooks beneath the promises. May I never have this avowed knowledge, for that would mean I have weakened in the face of a dangerous seduction. I cannot countenance the destruction of any knowledge, but if I could, I would see this abomination destroyed before it can cause unthinkable harm to us all.
The page ended there. Sonja glanced at Pirelli. “What happened to it after that?”
“That, we do not know. It disappears from legends after that. The scholar himself was found floating in a canal some months later. It is thought he crossed one of the vampires of the city.”
“Why did you think that?”
Pirelli held up two fingers, then tapped them to the side of his neck. “Puncture wounds. The scholar had pestered many preternatural individuals in his quest for learning. None of us were surprised to see one had grown tired of him.”
Sonja stared at the words on the screen, running them through her mind again to look for unusual tidbits. As if the entire passage weren’t an unusual tidbit. “He sounds like he had an eye for the ladies.”
“He did. In fact, he often used his knowledge of the uncanny to try to impress women.” A tiny smirk and a roll of his eyes said Pirelli hadn’t been very impressed himself.
“He get a lot of them that way?”
“Not many. Those he did had few other suitors.”
She reached up to indicate a line on the monitor. “We know he got one looker. Might have been pity attention, but see that? He looked into the face of the unliving, but indicates that face belonged to a pretty girl.”
Pirelli canted his head. “So?”
“So, hundreds of years on, here’s how that looks to me. A scholar who couldn’t get a date convinced a beautiful lady vampire to show him what she was. Not too remarkable until that scholar goes on to see a notorious, evil artifact.” She drew her finger across her neck. “Then the only scholar to see it ends up in a canal with bite marks in his neck. The artifact disappears. Could be coincidence.”
“Could be the trouble he courted caught up to him at last.” He didn’t sound convinced, and she didn’t blame him.
Intuition inspired her to look deeper, however. If for no other reason than to rule the possibility out entirely, she wanted to know the rest. “There any more to that series of writings?”
“Nothing of note regarding the Heart.”
“Humor me.”
Pirelli clicked the button to go on to the next page. Sonja scanned the text. Cataloged dreams. Refusals of private collectors to grant the scholar closer access to potential artifacts. A feather that supposedly belonged to an angel, though the scholar thought it had probably come from a gull. A bad sonnet with flawed meter. Then she spotted the final entry.
I cannot leave the deed undone. Teresa says action will bring me peace. I could not go forward without her to bolster my resolve. We go tonight.
“Who was Teresa?”
Pirelli folded his arms across his chest. “It was a common name. He could have meant a quarter of the women in Italy.”
“What about vampires?”
A hunch. One she knew had paid off when Pirelli’s lips flattened to a thin line. “There was one. But I cannot see her bolstering anyone’s resolve.”
“Not a nice lady?”
“A killer of her own kind. She murdered her creator, and perhaps a dozen others before a convocation of vampires met to put a death mark on her head. She went into hiding after that.”
“When was that?”
Pirelli’s gaze grew distant as he looked back over the years. “I had gained enough power to be present at the convocation. It was hosted by one of my mentors at the time, as he had lost a dear friend to her...” His eyes sharpened again. “And we laughed about the scholar who had been found in the canal. My mentor mocked me for buying the man’s estate. I wanted to make certain he did not have dangerous writings that could escape our control.”
A frisson of dread shuddered through her. “So this was at the same time the Heart disappeared, and the only man
who had seen it was killed by a vampire. Who then also disappeared.”
“We did not know he had seen the Heart for some time after. Not until I got around to reading his journal. Nor that he knew Teresa Espina.” Pirelli’s jaw tensed with what some might have read as anger. Defensiveness.
Sonja saw fear, perhaps because she felt it, too. “The events seemed disconnected at the time. They look a whole lot more connected now. What do you know about her?”
“She came from Spain more than two centuries before she killed her creator. Teresa was a scholar herself, in search of esoteric knowledge. It took her to dangerous places.” Pirelli paced away from the computer, toward the doors.
Sonja followed. “Esoteric knowledge. That sounds like a euphemism.”
“It was. She had come to Italy in search of incantations. Old grimoires to add to her own library. Instead, she found a different sort of magic.”
“She was a witch?”
“Before she was turned.” He ushered her out of the library and closed the doors behind them. “You know what happens after the turning.”
Sonja’s gut turned to lead. “Remember when I said Kiplinger had performed a ritual? One that polluted the local ley lines with what looked like a dark heart?”
Pirelli paused with his key in the door lock. “I do.”
“Cameron Roswell found a message that indicated Kiplinger has an association with an unknown woman. Moira and I thought he must have found a magician to cut a deal with. But if this comes from the Heart of Darkness, and Teresa disappeared at the same time it did...” She let him put the rest together himself.
“Teresa understood magic. And she may have allied herself with Kiplinger.” He did no more than cast a glance at Luciana Gaeta, but the bodyguard took out her phone to place a call.
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