by Karen Chance
“You’re saying you can’t detect them?”
“Not in a city full of you, no! And whatever magic, if any, is being used to support them, it’s subtle. Too much for us to identify when half the mages in Christendom are also packed into that damned city, and working spells all the time. It’s impossible!”
“Then go to the Senate. They have resources—”
“Oh, yes, why don’t we do that?” Abramalin said sweetly. He’d been pacing back and forth, waving his arms and basically looking like a madman. But when he whirled around, the old eyes were shrewd. “Perhaps I’ll do it meself, walk in and inform her scalyness that, oh, by the way, there’s some rogue mages and a vampire or two committing mass murder in Venice, and interferin’ in the trade of your people’s bones. Can you help us get this sorted out so we can get things back to normal?”
“You’re afraid she’ll shut you down.”
“I’m afraid she’ll declare war! Mine and your kind are always teetering on the brink of it anyway, and this is the sort of spark that could set it off. And even if it doesn’t, she’ll doubtless view this as an intolerable slight, and yes, shut us down! Which rather puts us right back where we started, doesn’t it?”
“But if you explain,” Mircea continued stubbornly, “as you have to me, and if it’s just a few of your people—”
“But we don’t know that, do we?” Abramalin pointed out. “We have no idea who’s behind it, nor how many are involved. If it’s someone with the right sort of connections, this could spiral out of control very fast. We need one of your kind, someone who can keep his damned mouth shut, to go in and find out how they’re doing this, and who’s behind it! We’ll take it from there.”
“Oh. Is that all?”
It came out dryer than Mircea had intended, but the feeling in his gut wasn’t sarcasm. It was dread. This was even worse than he’d expected, and he hadn’t expected anything good. But the praetor was already on the search, and with pressure coming from the consul, that wasn’t going to change. She had only him on it now, not understanding the seriousness of the problem, but if he didn’t find out something soon . . .
Mircea didn’t want a war, either. He just wanted to save his daughter. And helping Abramalin could do that, and possibly stop a serious conflict, too.
It was repugnant, working for people who traded his people’s body parts like so many trinkets. But the trade predated him, and would continue whether there was a war to stop it or not. The last thing people give up is power.
Especially power like this.
“All we want from you is information, boy,” Abramalin had said, his voice taking on a wheedling tone. “There’s no need for you to be in any danger yourself.”
Yes, Mircea thought now, staring around at the cargo of vampires.
That was working out well.
And then it got worse, when a couple burly sailors stopped beside his stack of bodies, shoved the sleeping girl to the side, and picked him up. A moment later, Mircea was experiencing the pain of being dragged carelessly up the ladder and tossed onto a rain-slick deck, along with piles of other corpses. Corpses that were too insensate to see what hell lay ahead of them.
Unlike him.
He’d landed facing the port, giving him a perfect view of the activity on shore. Not that he needed it. The stench would have been enough, all on its own.
It was a smell he was intimately familiar with, from both halves of his life. The metallic thickness of spilled blood from the battlefield, cloying and strangely sticky in the nostrils. And the unmistakable smell of burning human flesh, half roast pork and half something that made your skin ruffle and crawl and shudder, because it was wrong, it was wrong, it was wrong.
He’d smelled that often enough since coming to Venice, when plague visited the town or was suspected, and the authorities ordered burnings instead of proper burials. The people had complained so much that the government had started restricting the burnings to the small island of Lazzaretto, where plague victims were quarantined if found still alive. And yet, when the wind was right, you could still smell them, roasting in their own fat.
People tried to pretend the stench was from the local taverns’ cook fires, but they knew. They always knew. Like Mircea did, even before the clouds of smoke parted, and showed him a glimpse of the carnage on shore.
For a moment, he froze, not only his body but his mind, too, refusing to understand what he was seeing: piles of living corpses, strewn about here and there; other piles of dismembered yet still-living body parts, because vampires didn’t die just because you hacked them up; stacks of bones, gleaming pale in the moonlight; and the massive kettles they were piled beside, where the steam was rising, rising, rising . . .
Along with the silent screams of the damned as they were boiled alive.
And then it did register, oh, yes, it did, and the overwhelming flood of panic that came with it was wild enough to wash him off the pile, to send him scuttling like a wounded crab across the deck, to leave him with his head pushed through a railing, so desperate to get away that he forgot his shoulders wouldn’t fit, too.
That was partly the fault of the spell, still dragging at him, and partly his own. Every time he tried to focus on a limb, it stopped working, as if remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be doing that. He wouldn’t get away like this; he could barely even think! And, at any moment, the ship was going to dock, and the sailors would be back, and after that—
Mircea was a soldier. He’d faced death many times. But not like this. Not butchered like an animal, and sold like a piece of flesh in the market. He wanted to tear at his throat, to let in air he couldn’t use but suddenly, desperately, needed. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think—
And then a voice was in his ear, familiar, but bizarre in this damnable place.
“Hush. Be still.”
Chapter Forty-three
I resurfaced from the latest memory-related time-out, but this time it didn’t go so well. Instead of popping back into my right mind, whatever that meant anymore, it felt like I’d fallen into a kaleidoscope of fractured images. As if my brain was a giant jigsaw puzzle, where most of the pieces were missing.
And the ones that were left weren’t anything good.
* * *
* * *
Radu was on the floor to my right, covered in blood. The female vampire with the strange-colored hair was lying on my other side, her limbs splayed out like a broken doll’s. Neither was moving; they looked almost like unconscious humans. But they weren’t human, and a vampire doesn’t go down without catastrophic damage.
Strange; they didn’t appear to be hurt that badly, unlike one of the dark-haired master’s servants, who was lying a few yards in front of me. Or part of him was. The whole top half of his body was missing.
My own body was in pain, everywhere at once, a throbbing mass of injury. But that was easily ignored. The problem with my mind was less so. My head felt heavy, confused, almost . . . spelled.
And I suddenly understood why the vampires weren’t moving.
Stun spells didn’t usually work on their kind, since they lacked most of the bodily functions such spells targeted, but this one seemed to be different. It had also had an effect on me: I was awake, but my vampire abilities were not. A psychic scream, my own stun weapon, was impossible right now, as was trying to get inside anyone’s head. But that wasn’t why I lay where I’d fallen, while a battle raged around me.
No, that was due to shock.
Because we were losing.
I watched the impossible through my lashes: dozens of high-level vampires, any one of whom constituted an army all on his own, being batted aside by half as many mages. The way the spells were being flung was casual, almost as an afterthought. Yet I saw a vampire ripped in half, and another immolated while he leapt through the air, in a fireball that filled hal
f the room.
What was left of him rained down as ashes.
* * *
* * *
“We have to stop meeting like this.”
I blinked my eyes open to see a woman bending over me. Well, sort of. She was actually bending over the massive chandelier I seemed to be lying under, which was all I could see except for dust clouds and rubble. But I could hear—
“Don’t even think about it,” she said, suddenly sounding like a drill sergeant on a bad day.
She didn’t look like one. She looked like a soccer mom out on the town, in a sparkly top that went well with her short gray-brown hair and big blue eyes. She even had a drink in her hand: Crown Royal with ginger ale, judging by the smell, garnished with two maraschino cherries.
I’d been about to turn around and see where all the talking, grunting, and subdued moaning was coming from, but stopped on command. Mainly because my body didn’t seem to be talking to me anyway. And if it had been, it would have been cursing.
She belted back her drink, made a face, and tossed the glass over her shoulder. “Okay,” she told me, looking determined. “I’m going to get this thing off you, and then we’ll see.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. She looked to be around fifty—the fluffy, comfortable sort of fifty, not the runs-marathons-in-her-spare-time fifty, and even if she’d been the latter she couldn’t possibly lift—
I hadn’t even finished the thought when the huge, heavy, multifaceted chandelier was chiming its way into the air, and I was noticing the wand in her other hand.
“There,” she said, sounding satisfied and proud and faintly relieved as the massive crystal monster floated away . . . through a mostly missing wall. And across a sidewalk. And into the street.
The sound of a car swerving and hitting brakes at the same time drifted to us through the gap, along with some inventive cussing, and—
What the fuck?
“Uh, can somebody get that?” she asked hopefully.
Somebody went to get that.
She turned back to me. “Okay. Now, isn’t that better?”
And then she noticed the blood spurting from a couple dozen holes in my body, which I guess the dug-in crystals had been keeping inside.
“Well, shit.”
* * *
* * *
The remains of the incinerated vampire blew on the wind coming through a destroyed window. I saw the powerful one notice, the one my twin liked. He jerked his head around in disbelief, while snapping the neck of the mage in his hands.
And then he disappeared.
For a moment, I didn’t believe my eyes. One second he was there, and the next he was not, and not because he moved. But as though he’d simply—
Veiled.
I took the word from my twin’s mind.
Not going invisible, then, so much as phasing to another plane of existence. It was . . . interesting . . . one of the more useful vampire gifts I’d seen. But the fact remained: he’d had to use a master’s power against a handful of mages, in order to save his life.
And it had. A trio of spells exploded where he’d just been standing, destroying a wall and setting several rooms beyond on fire. But they didn’t hit him, because he was no longer there.
But the mage he’d attacked was.
He was lying where he’d fallen, still twitching, but his eyes were already glazing over. So they could be killed, then. You just had to make sure they never touched you, never came close. For even a glancing blow from one of those overpowered spells could be deadly.
Understood, I thought, and surged to my feet.
* * *
* * *
Crown Royal was yelling at me.
“Get back here!”
I wasn’t getting back there.
I wasn’t sure where I was going, but there was something very, very important I had to—
Oh, yeah.
I spied Louis-Cesare under a couple tons of fallen concrete—and tasteful sandstone and parquet flooring and another goddamned chandelier—and scrambled toward him over mounds of rubble. It wasn’t easy; my legs didn’t work right, and the debris was studded with fallen draperies, half a piano, a dust-covered settee, and Radu, standing by a bar. And making himself a drink despite the fact that most of his hair was burnt off and a chunk of his torso seemed to be missing.
I did a double take while he belted back a stiff one, and I almost ran into Marlowe, who still hadn’t found any pants. But who had swathed himself in a curtain and was doing his best Caesar impression. Which seemed to mostly involve yelling at me.
I ignored him and finally reached Louis-Cesare, who was bleeding, bleeding everywhere, and my hands were shaking and someone was crying, but it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, because I was yelling now, too.
“Help him! Help him!”
Someone was pulling on me, which wasn’t going to work, only it did because I was weak as water.
“Will someone put her the hell out?” Marlowe demanded.
Nobody did.
“I said, does anybody have the power left to put her—”
Someone touched my arm, someone other than Crown Royal, who was still tugging from behind. I looked up to see Horatiu’s kindly old face. Unlike everybody else, he looked pretty much like always, in a dapper, if dust-covered, tuxedo, and peering at me myopically from under a fall of thick white hair.
“I’ve been looking for you,” I told him.
“Sleep, child,” he said, and put a heavily veined hand on my forehead.
“No, I can’t sleep. I have to—”
* * *
* * *
I felt the unmistakable scrape of steel on bone, the frisson up the spine it always caused echoing through me. But the bone wasn’t mine. A mage in front of me hadn’t been shielded, and the arrogance proved fatal when I slipped a knife between his ribs.
A second and third went down, their hamstrings cut, and then their throats as they fell. Another died when an upstroke, coming off the last two, gutted him like unzipping a coat, and a fifth—the last easy one—died trying to warn the others that they had another problem. And kept on trying, his mouth still moving even as his head bounced across the floor.
It had taken perhaps a few seconds, one stroke flowing into another, a familiar, deadly dance, the blood painting streamers in the air around me. But it was enough for the other mages to stop attacking and shield. My knife slid off one; stuttered against another; failed to puncture a third, even so much as dent it, despite the fact that all my strength was behind it.
That wasn’t normal.
But then, neither were these shields.
* * *
* * *
“Like I give a damn what you want!”
Crown Royal was yelling at somebody, I didn’t know why. And then I noticed that she was facing off with Marlowe and I understood. He just kind of brought that out in people.
I looked around. We were in Mircea’s apartment, sort of. I mean, there were still some walls left; and a window, somehow pristine despite standing almost on its own; and the ceiling—
Okay, forget the ceiling, I thought, staring up into what had been a very nice ballroom and was now a skylight.
“I was planning to renovate anyway,” Radu said.
It concerned me that I could see through his stomach.
“How do you keep the alcohol in?” I asked, and he patted me on the head.
I think I lost some time, because there were suddenly red and blue lights flashing in my face, lighting up the rubble. Even for me, getting the cops called twice in one night was . . . okay, not a record. But not exactly every day, either.
I wondered what I’d been up to.
Then I saw Louis-Cesare, lying on a stretcher between two of Marlowe’s men. And the next thing I knew, I was stumbling ov
er there, and nobody tried to stop me this time, probably because Marlowe was getting into a dustup with the cops. There was some yelling and the usual “gas leak” explanation, which it didn’t sound like anybody was buying, and then somebody spied Radu and started to freak out—
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!”
That was Crown Royal.
Who I guessed spelled the cops, because nobody got shot.
I didn’t know. I was too busy pawing at Louis-Cesare to turn around and find out. And then hitting him, because he wasn’t responding, he wasn’t doing anything.
Until strong hands grasped my wrists, and a blue eye cracked open. The other one was closed, caked with blood and swollen about three times its usual size. It matched the jaw, which was heading for Popeye territory; and the neck, which looked like somebody had tried to burn his head off; and the chest, which had great gashes in it.
I started to cry, great blubbery snot-filled sobs, and Louis-Cesare began to laugh. “You do love me, you do love me—”
“Shut up!” I told him hysterically, and would have hit him again, but couldn’t find anywhere that wasn’t already hurt, which made me cry harder and oh, my God, this was embarrassing.
I was almost relieved when Horatiu tottered over and put me out again.
* * *
* * *
All the strength and finesse in the world does you no good if you can’t reach your target. And I couldn’t. Neither could the powerful one, who had reappeared, eyes wild and chest panting, despite the fact that he didn’t need to breathe.
I understood: it was that kind of fight.
There were only three of us left: the dark-haired master, the powerful one, and me. The rest were dead or fled or were trying to, the injured grabbing the bodies of the unconscious and jumping through missing windows. The three of us were attempting to distract the mages while the rest got away, by sending massive pieces of debris crashing into those perfect shields. But there were too many of them and too few of us.