What can I say? “J-j-just w-w-wishing w-w-we c-c-could s-stay. Home.”
“What fun is that?” He grinned, and the crackle of the canines retreating and his jaw shifting was loud in the stillness. Outside, an adult dressed like an Armored Bear hunched his shoulders and “roared” for the delight of his childish audience, his broad paws spinning noisemakers, and charmsparks popping in a brief shower.
You’re trouble tonight. And I don’t know if I can stop you. So she said nothing, staring at the costumes outside the smoked charm-proof glass.
“Cami?” His fingers slid between hers. Warm and hard and familiar, the Family strength humming in his bones. Was he being careful of her mortal flesh, just as Papa always had been?
What would it be like to live with that strength, day in and day out? Sooner or later Nico was going to slip.
What would happen then?
“Th-thinking.”
“Are you wondering if I’m going to run off with the boys tonight? That’s finished.” It was the new tone, the one he’d used the night of Papa’s transition. Almost questioning, as if he wasn’t sure she would believe him.
If you get a few more whiskey and calf in you, will you still stay? But she nodded, touching her veil with her free hand. A twist of her fingers would loosen the silver clip, and she could spend the evening behind its blurring safety. Another group of children, all dressed as free fey, danced down the sidewalk, glittering with charm-sparkles carefully applied by their parents. A harried-looking mother in a wet mackintosh spread her arms, hurrying them along the sidewalk, and as her hood fell back her pale hair darkened under cold water.
Cami’s heart leapt into her throat, throbbed there for a moment. She blinked furiously, and the traffic constriction eased. Chauncey touched the accelerator, a featherlight brush, and they slid forward.
“I mean it,” Nico persisted. He squeezed her hand gently. The Vultusina’s ring would scrape his palm, but maybe he didn’t care. “Pierrot follows the Moon. All night, and always.”
Her smile took her by surprise, and when he leaned over to kiss her cheek, his breath freighted with copper and the tang of whiskey, everything in her jumped again. The unsteady feeling went away, the world regaining its solidity. “All r-r-right, P-pierrot.”
He looked pleased, and poured himself another drink.
Crush of lace and velvet of every hue, the newly finished dance floor whirling with color and motion—this was not a formal occasion, as her birthday had been. No, it was a revel, and the waiters and bartenders were the young ones among the Stregare, in their traditional blue and gold, instead of mere-human servants. The only mere-humans were security, like Trigger, and consigliere, some round and some stick-thin, all with the faraway look of those a Head could inhabit.
Cami kept her fingers lightly on Nico’s arm, ready for him to give her that half-apologetic glance and step away, especially when the crew of lean Family youngbloods called his name and surrounded them in a warm haze of liquor and feverish heat, their canines out and their pupils holding sparks of high excitement.
“Nico!” Donnie Cinghiale clapped Nico on the shoulder, then swept Cami a wide, mocking bow, the black robes of his Haxemeister costume already disarranged and a drabble of spilled vodka and lamb splashed on his white shirt-front. “And the Moon Herself! Hey, bound for Taxtix tonight. Hot fight. You coming?”
“Only if la mia signorina wants to,” Nico replied, hooking his arm over Cami’s shoulders and giving a wide, brilliant smile. His other hand held a single glass—more whiskey and calf, but he’d been nursing it since they arrived. Which was not usual. “Pierrot and the Moon, get it?”
Their laughter had teeth, and one of the Vipariane—Bernardo, the one who had cornered her once at a coming-of-age party and breathed how sweet, how sweet drunkenly into her hair—pressed close. “Ah, you’re not hanging it up and leaving the nightlife to us, are you, Niccolo? We’ll be lonely!”
Tresar Canisari, short and bandy-legged in his springhell-Jack costume, the oilskin over his dark curls knocked awry, let out a hiccupping laugh and slung his arm over his cousin Colt’s broad shoulders. “Pierrot and the Moooooon!” he crowed.
Cami’s breath came short and fast. She tried to step away, but Nico’s arm tensed. “My lady Moon, Tres.” Still with that bright, unsettling smile, both amusement and warning. The Vultusina’s ring spat a single bloody spark, but the sound was lost under the waves of crowd-noise.
“Lady Moon!” Baltus Destra elbowed his cousin, lean dark Albin, and they managed wide drunken bows as well.
I hate this. She pinched Nico on the ribs, but gently, her fingers slipping against white velvet—her private signal for I have to go. “P-powder r-r-r-room,” she managed, over the music. The beginning bars of a tarantelle had struck, and that was a man’s dance. The wives and daughters usually retreated during the tarantelle and the gipsicala, and the young men were allowed to shout and misbehave while the elder men gathered in the smoking room to transact Family business. When the moresca played, the women would re-enter, and the boys would have had enough time to blow off their steam and act reasonably again.
That was what was supposed to happen. Some of the Family girls—the Wild ones—danced the gipsicala, but not many, and those who did were taken home early, if their mothers could drag them away.
Nico hugged her closer for a moment, before pressing his lips to her veiled forehead. The youngbloods hooted and catcalled, but he didn’t seem to mind, and the veil hid Cami’s blush.
At least, she hoped it did. Nico let her go, and Cami stepped away, a current of retreating Family women bearing her along.
Halfway to the powder room, a hard shove from behind in the crowd and someone stumbled into her. A flood of whiskey and calf splashed from a full glass. Cami staggered, almost falling—and whoever bumped her was whirled away on a tide of young Family men, their pupils gleaming with colored sparks and their heels, no matter what costume they wore, drumming the wooden dance floor in time to the driving beat.
“Tarantelle!” one shouted; the answering cry rose from the others’ throats in a wave of copper-laced heat. A violin wailed, and the gitterns began to strum harder.
The veil stuck to her damp cheeks, and Cami struggled to breathe. The powder room had to be in this general direction; she felt along the wall for a doorknob, a latch, anything. Bumped and pressed, feathered masks and high tinkling laughter as the music spoke from the Family’s distant past, igniting the creeping fire in their veins. The musicians, behind carved screens, were older Family men, and those who showed musical promise almost never developed the Kiss, even if they served the Family well. You cannot serve the Kiss and the music, the Family said, and the proverb meant much more. It meant being caught between a rock and a hard place, or trying to serve two masters. Sometimes it meant betrayal, and other times it meant Fate.
The Family had some funny ideas about Fate, and try as she might she could never get Papa or even Nico to explain them. Maybe you had to be born in to understand.
Sweat slid down her back, soaking into velvet. The dress was too heavy, and it dragged the floor. If she danced, it would have to be a slow waltz, or she’d trip over the material.
Oh please, come on, the powder room. Please. Her tongue was a knot, and so were her lungs, struggling against the noise and the glare and the veil’s gauze, plastered to her face. Her questing fingers slid against a crystalline knob, she twisted savagely and shoved the door open. Stumbled into welcome cool, dark quiet, pushing the veil aside and gulping in dusty air full of neglect and stillness. The door swung shut behind her and she leaned against it, not caring where she was as long as she could breathe.
The darkness, after all the whirling color and motion, was a shock. Her ribs heaved; her wrists twinged sharply. It took a little while for her heart to stop pounding, and the dripping from her abused costume was loud in the stillness. Whiskey and calf, of course. It was never going to come out. Marya would scold and scold.
As soon as she could breathe again, she patted at her belt. The reticule was there, with all the supplies for the evening. She could dab at the dripping with the small charmcloth in her reticule, but it was all down her front. She probably looked like Bloody Scot Mary, for God’s sake.
She clipped her veil aside and took stock. Where am I?
A parquet floor. Shrouded shapes of furniture, antique gasjets jutting from the walls. Tall narrow windows choked with heavy rotting velvet drapes—what was this room? It looked like it hadn’t been open for ages. The furniture was low, and there were high lamp-shapes with ancient, cracked tubing dangling from them.
Oh. It’s a Borrowing room.
They didn’t have them in all the Family houses anymore, just the older ones. There was the fireplace with its carved screen, and above the dangling tubes were the glass canisters, filthy with dust. The vessel, Family or human, would lie on the higher couch, the Borrower on the lower and wider one with the flowerlike cup to their mouth, and the red light from the canisters would grow dimmer and dimmer as the vessel was drained. This wasn’t the private Borrowing between a Seven and one of their honored servants; this would be where the Festas Scarletas would be held and treaties would be cemented. It was also where an Elder would Borrow from a breathing Family member, with other Unbreathing in a circle around the two to make certain the Borrower didn’t take too much.
The furniture was likely as old as New Haven itself, and the drapes were probably so rotten they would fall at a touch.
I shouldn’t be here. She reached behind her for the doorknob, but it slipped against her sweating fingers. I really should not be in here. Powder room. It can’t be far away.
But it would be full of slim bright-eyed Family girls and their lacquered mothers, all of them knowing who Cami was but few deigning to speak to her, and never without a sneer. At least they didn’t actively do anything like some of the girls at school—it was beneath the pureblood girls to even notice the Vultusino foundling. It would be different if she’d been from a charming clan, married into the Family to cement an alliance or to strengthen the bloodline. Papa’s dead wife had been a Sigiled charmer, a shining mortal star among them, from what Cami could tell.
What did they think of Papa giving her that name? She’d sometimes wondered. There was nobody to ask, and the wondering always led her to a deeper, more uncomfortable question.
What’s my born name? Her wrists ached, sharply. She twisted at the knob again.
It refused to budge. Her sweating hand couldn’t grip properly, and the music throbbing outside was oddly muted. Cami’s dripping skirts brushed the deep dust griming the parquet. Nobody had walked in here for a long time.
Alcohol fumes rose from her ruined costume, she could almost see them; her Potential moved uneasily in the dimness around her, its heatripple haze almost visible as well.
What is that?
One of the curtains was slightly askew, and a cold white glow edged the folds of velvet. An outside window? Not in a Borrowing room. And it’s raining, there’s no …
A shudder slid through her entire body, crown to soles. The music had changed. It wasn’t the tarantelle or the moresca, not a waltz or a foxtrot, not even a tango or a capriccine. It was a queer atonal moaning, several voices piled atop one another and echoing, a soft drip-drip-dripping with no pattern stitching the chant together.
And yet … it was familiar, in some way. The cold touch of her nightmares down her back began, ice cubes against sweating skin.
I can’t … Cami stepped away from the door. The dust-thickened curtains moved slightly, as if touched by a hand or a vagrant breeze, and her footsteps—the Moon wore silver slippers with metal at heel and toes, so they chimed while she walked—were muffled and grit-crunched.
Skritch-scratch. Fingernails on glass, maybe? A small scrabbling sound.
The stone in her throat was dry. She smelled apples, wet salt, cold stone. Shadows moved at the window, brushing across the faint powdery silver light.
They’re calling me, she realized. Chanting voices, the rustles and drips from her costume blurring, and there was another sound underneath it. Faint and far in the distance, a train’s lonely whistle, perhaps.
No. Not a train. A howl, lifting cold and clear on a snowy night. Not a wolf’s uncivilized cry, though. A dog’s voice, a hunter’s song, one she had heard before.
Skritch. Skritch-scratch.
A thumping. Cami took another step. How had she gotten halfway across the room? The crouched couches on either side watched her with no interest. Her footsteps had become silent, even the scratchy gauze of her veil not whispering as it rubbed against the Moon’s dress, silver ribbons fluttering from her sleeves as if she was running. Her scalp crawled, her braided hair twitching as if every individual one wanted to stand up.
Apples. A breath of heavy, perfumed smoke.
The window was smeared with dust. Shadows and shapes moved behind it, whirling dancers and staggering drunks. A single bloody gleam—not the Vultusina’s ring, but something else—pierced its foxfire glow, and the curtains shivered uneasily.
Wait. The cold was all through her, and a trembling like a crystal wineglass stroked by a wet fingertip. It’s not a window. Not in a Borrowing room.
Glass. Flat glass full of light.
They were mirrors, behind the age-stiffened curtains. The crawling under her skin intensified, every inch of her alive with loathing but miserably compelled forward. The voices rose, a chorus with no music to it, echoing strangely as if the walls had pulled away. As if she stood in a vast cavernous space, the silvery foxfire gleam strengthening. Not moonlight, but a diseased glow.
The mirror. The calling was coming from the mirror. She couldn’t decipher the word. My name. The mirror’s saying my name.
Her born name. But she couldn’t hear clearly. Come closer …
Her right hand lifted, trembling. The ring on her left was a millstone-weight, its stone cold and dead, and her fingertips hovered an inch from the glass. Half an inch, and when she touched it, she would know—
The locked door barged itself open. Giggling, a Family girl staggered in, a burst of golden haze behind her. It was Mocia della Sinistra, and one of her clan-cousins, the Sinistra boy who always wore calfskin driving gloves. They stumbled, his mouth at her ear, her hair half-undone, and his gloved hands had worked themselves into her bodice—she had dressed as Esmerelda Gipsicana, and he was in a tuxedo and a shining mirrored half-mask, pushed aside as his face rubbed against her.
Their dance was a drunken whirl, and the music from outside was a blare that covered Cami’s footsteps as she darted aside, taking shelter behind a long row of canister-trees and higher-backed couches. They would be dazzled from the sudden darkness too, and it looked like they were in a world all their own.
Her cheeks scalded. The inebriated pair fell on a low shrouded couch, and dust rose thick around them. Cami’s breath jolted in her throat. Neither noticed her ghosting past; they were knotted together and murmuring with thick smacking sounds, and Mocia—she was Wild, there was no doubt about it—moaned as her cousin’s fangs scraped her throat. Was he going to Borrow from her?
Her mother is not going to be happy with that. It was a sane thought, a comforting thought, and Cami clung to it as she hurried along, her skirts pulled up and the Vultusina’s ring waking again with a ripple.
The door was closing, its slice of golden light and noise narrowing, but Cami ducked through just in time. The noise burst through her head, the clanging chimes of the capriccine—had she missed the other dances?
“There you are.” Nico appeared out of the crowd. “Mithrus, Cami, what happened to you?”
She couldn’t quite remember, her head full of buzzing noise and her bones cold. Ice under her skin and muscles, chilling her from the core out, and it was difficult to think. “H-home.” She could barely force the word out. “I. W-want. T-t-t-to g-g-g-g-go—”
“You’re covered in it.” He was a rock in
the middle of the crowd, and she clung to his arm. He’d had more, it was obvious from the burning red pinpricks in his pupils and the way he too-carefully tipped his head back, avoiding the smell from her dress. “Did someone throw something? What the hell?”
“H-home,” she kept repeating, but he wanted to stay with the Cinghiale boys and drink a bit more. In the end he handed her into the limousine and Chauncey drove her silently through Dead Harvest night, and when she woke Nonus Souls morning, Nico had already left for Hannibal.
Pierrot did not follow the Moon, after all.
THIRTEEN
THE MONTH OF NONUS WAS SERE AND COLD, DRY AND achingly bright. Icy flakes began falling a week after the Festival’s orgy of candy and parties; Cami almost shuddered every time she had to walk outside. Ruby drove her home with mind-numbing incaution every day. Stevens, dry and sticklike, was looking particularly gray. Marya wore layers of fine thin spidery black, her long fine hair scraped back and her usually apple-blooming cheeks pale. Trigger and his security teams were unseen, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there—a prowler was chased away the first night it snowed, a Twisted beast found just at the edge of the property another night.
It was a sign that it was going to be a hard winter, Trig remarked, if things were so desperate to try even a Family estate’s boundary.
The snow kept falling, and the plows and harnessed titons came out. Slump-shouldered, massive gray Twisted things, the titons were chained every winter, dragging plows along, their tiny yellow eyes alive with charmlight and their horny knuckles scraping the icy concrete. They ate bones and offal, as well as gravel and lumber with their broad flat black teeth, and were mostly docile if kept fed. They were trapped out in the Wastes between cities and provinces by teams of jack bounty hunters, and kept in pens on the edge of every city’s blighted core. Rumor had it they were sometimes pitted against minotaurs in the cages, and the betting was fierce.
Nico would probably know. But he would never tell her.
“Mithrus be careful!” Ellie shrieked, grabbing at the dash. The radio reeled off names—it was the three-thirty newscast, and two more charmer girls had vanished last night, one right from her own bedroom. No suspects, the announcer said, as Ellie let out a short jolting scream.
Nameless: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (TALES OF BEAUTY AND MADNESS) Page 10