"Go with the flow, go with the flow," I repeated to myself as I walked into a huge entry hall.
My voice echoed back at me, sending a skitter of goose bumps down my arms and back. I rubbed my arms as I slipped through the hall.
"Boy, if I get through this without being tossed in jail, I'm definitely coming back here," I whispered to myself, sadly forced to give short shrift to the wonders in armor, art, and museum pieces that I was passing. "Hmm. This looks libraryish."
I opened one of twin bound oak doors, reaching inside to turn on a light.
My jaw hit the floor as lights flickered on down the length of a long, narrow, high-ceilinged room. "I have got to meet Cousin Christian!"
Tall mahogany bookcases lined three sides of the room, long glass cases filling the fourth wall. I drifted over to one of the cases, flipping on a light to illuminate what was within. Drool formed as I gazed at the frail illuminated parchment. "My God, that's a tenth-century psalter!" I did a bit of translating Latin on the fly and reached for my purse to take a few quick notes on what I was seeing. The feel of the tiny notebook in my hand reminded me of a more important task.
"Rats. The kid." Reluctantly I turned off the case light and bit my lip as I looked around the rest of the library. "If I were a scholarly vampire, where would I keep my notes about the possible location of a demon lord? Ah. Desk. Good choice, Nell."
The big rosewood desk was remarkably orderly, or perhaps it was that my own was particularly disorderly. I flipped through stacks of what were obviously bills, found a red-inked manuscript of what looked to be a romance book in the making, and discovered a cache of letters in one of the drawers. Most of them were in a language I couldn't read, although parts were oddly familiar. None of them contained the word "London" so I set them aside. I searched all of the drawers, finding nothing else that was even remotely like what I was looking for.
"Well, crap. Now what do I do?" I looked around the room again, searching for anything that was out of place or different. "Let's go about this in an orderly fashion. I'm going to assume that whatever notes Christian has are valuable. Thus he would not keep them in a drawer. That means he's got them hidden somewhere."
The sound of my voice echoed starkly in the high-ceilinged room. I glanced with dismay at all the bookcases. There had to be thousands of books in the library, each one a potential hiding place.
"Or it could be in a wall safe, or floor safe, or—hell"—I looked up at the high arched wooden ceiling—"the owner's a vampire. He can probably fly, so I wouldn't doubt that he's got a handy-dandy ceiling safe! It's hopeless!"
The word safe triggered something in my mind. I stood up, looking around the room again. If I were your average safety-conscious vampire, and I had something of value, I wouldn't just entrust it to a safe. "Not when I was the sort of guy who uses magic to guard a door," I mused, walking around the room with my hands stretched out, feeling a bit stupid as I tried to feel a tingle that might mean that something was warded against discovery. I found it on my third pass around the north wall.
"Hmm. Book. Tingly. A bit dusty. Title is… Dark… someone needs to tell the maids to dust on the bottom shelves… Desire. Sounds fun. Let's just see why this particular book has been picked out to be warded or what… whoa! This is interesting!"
The book seemed to be made of some slippery substance, or I suddenly had a whole handful of butterfingers (and not the chocolate kind), because I couldn't for the life of me seem to get a grip on it. It seemed to slither from my hands, falling with a solid "thunk" to the floor. I squatted down to give it a good, long look, and noticed if I glanced just beyond it, I could make out what appeared to be an intricate pattern sketched into the spine of the book, one with lots of swoops and curves that doubled back on themselves, like a Celtic knot design. It was almost as if someone had drawn a path of green luminous paint on the spine, then left the book exposed to the sun. The pattern was faded, but as I traced it with one finger, it seemed to dissolve. Was I seeing a ward?
A faint memory emerged from the dark corners of my mind: the face of a tiny Asian woman sketching symbols in the air. I thought I had lost or destroyed all memories of the woman as she'd instructed Beth and me, but there she was, saying something about the importance of wards. I shook my head to clear the sad thoughts, leaning forward to examine the pattern more closely. It shimmered and faded as I traced it, definitely of a suitably intricate nature as to qualify for my still extremely fuzzy memory of a ward.
The tip of my finger came to the end of the ward, and suddenly the book was in my hot little hands. "What the… ooh!" Pushing aside the question of why the book had decided to cooperate, I flipped it open to find a couple of torn-out sheets of scribbled notes, and what looked like a hoop earring pressed between them. It was made of some sort of shell, something like an opaque mother-of-pearl, rimmed with a thin band of gold.
"Houston, the eagle has landed," I said as I took the book, pages, and earring to the desk so I could examine them under a brighter light. "And what have we heeeaaaaargh!"
"'Ello, you so very interesting lady," a spectral voice rolled out of the wall, quickly followed by a man with long brown curls, doublet, hose, and Elizabethan ruff. I backed toward the door, clutching the notes in one hand, the hoop earring with the other. The ghost—it was a ghost, my poor overworked mind admitted—swept a be-feathered hat from his head and made me a low, courtly bow. "I did not know we 'ad the company most fair. I am Antonio."
"Uh," I said, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that a handsome ghost was stalking me. I backed up a few more steps. I had to get out of there. "Right. I think this party is over. If these notes aren't good enough, then I'm just going to give up the breastplate, because honestly, I think at this point I'm going to need my sanity more than a career jump."
"You wish to talk about the breasts?" The ghostly Antonio shimmered forward as I backed up, his eyes locked on my chest. He twirled one end of a slight moustache as he ogled me. "I am most 'appy to do whatever will please my lady. Your breasts, they rise up off your chest like two plump pigeons just waiting to be plucked."
Oh, lucky me. I got a randy ghost.
"Um…" I felt behind me for the wall, not trusting the ghost enough to take my eyes off it to look for the door.
"What is your name, oh, beauteous lady of the pigeon breasts?"
"Er…" The fingertips on the hand waving behind me touched books. I took a couple of steps to the left, where the door I came in was located.
"You will permit me a slight squeeze? They are so attractive, your breasts. I 'ave seen many breasts in my time, but yours—ah, glorious one, yours are a banquet of breasts! I must feast at them."
"Eeek!" I squealed as Antonio's slightly translucent hand reached for my chest. I spun around intending to escape the library with my stolen items, but where the door used to be a brick wall had suddenly materialized.
A very warm brick wall.
One that had two piercing blue eyes, long reddish-black hair, and fangs bared in a soundless snarl.
Vampire!
Chapter Three
"I've heard of being caught between a rock and a hard place, but this is ridiculous." Behind me the ghostly Antonio was swearing at the vampire who blocked the door. "Hi!" I said to the vampire. "You must be Melissande's cousin. We weren't expecting you back. I'm… uh… she asked me to… um… you're probably wondering what I'm doing here, huh?"
"Beslubbered 'edgepig!" Antonio spat at the intruder, pulling a rapier from his side. "It is not enough that I must tolerate that other evil one putting 'is 'ands all over my beloved Allegra, now you come to claim my one true love! What is your name, my darling?" he asked in an aside to me.
"Uh…"
"It is enough! I will not tolerate you claiming the most beautiful Uh and 'er glorious breasts! She is mine, all of 'er!"
The vampire Christian, who had been watching the ghost with an amused cock to one of his glossy chocolate eyebrows, transferred his gaze from Anto
nio to my breasts. Impudent hussies that they were, they tried to thrust themselves forward toward him. I wrapped my arms over my chest and glared at both Antonio and the vampire, mentally telling my body that no matter how handsome the vampire might be, the last thing I wanted was to get involved with someone who was technically undead. "Look, I know this seems weird, you catching me here digging around your library, but I have an explanation."
"You will go now, un'oly dead one, else I shall cut off your man'ood and feed it to you." Antonio floated between us and whipped his sword around in a manner that probably would have left us both dead if it had been real.
Christian closed his eyes for a second. "Just what I need, an antagonistic ghost," he said. "Go away. My business is not with you." He waved a hand through the middle of the ghost. Amazingly, Antonio started to disintegrate.
"I am not antagonistic! Me, I went to Mass every morning!" Antonio's sword flashed in an intricate move no doubt intended to geld the vampire. Evidently he noticed he was fading, because he stopped gelding and shook his fist instead. "Basta! I shall call the others. They are watching Angel DVDs, but they will leave their precious Spike for you, you 'ideous spew-specked…"
"There's a lot to be said for exorcisms," Christian muttered under his breath as Antonio faded away into nothing.
"I thought only people who were possessed with a demon could be exorcised?"
Bright blue eyes snapped to mine, narrowing as they examined me from toes to head. Nervously I stepped back a few paces, my hands behind my back as I tried to stuff the stolen notes and earring into my back pocket, hoping that if Christian caught a glimpse of them, he'd believe they belonged to me. I wasn't sure he wouldn't mind Melissande having them, but I'd leave that to the two of them to work out.
"Who are you?" Christian asked, his voice low and rough, but with an edge of something that sent a little shiver down my back.
"I'm… uh… your cousin Melissande hired me."
He took two steps forward until he was a hairbreadth away from me. "Melissande isn't my cousin, and do not make me repeat myself again."
As he spoke, fangs flashed white in his mouth. Out of the blue a thought struck me, one so startling that my brain processed it without giving overdue thought to just how precarious a position I was in. "You know, I always assumed that vampires' fangs retracted or something when they weren't using them. Kind of like a cobra's fangs—present and accounted for when you want to use them, and out of the way when you don't."
They do, in most Dark Ones. Christian's voice had an almost ethereal quality, such a physical presence that I felt it in my head as well as heard it.
"But not you?" I looked at the pattern of red that wrapped around his torso. Like the one on the book, it was almost so faded I couldn't see it, seeming to shimmer in and out of my vision, like a half-glimpsed shadow seen out of the corner of my eye. I knew what it was the minute I saw it, though. Some things are just too horrible to ever forget, no matter how hard you try. "Does it have something to do with the curse that binds you?"
Christian stared at me for a moment, and I knew I'd gone too far. Just because Melissande had assured me that this vampire wouldn't hurt me didn't mean he couldn't if he was peeved enough. What did you say?
"Nothing," I said, moving to the side. "It's not important. You know, Melissande is just outside. Why don't we call her, and she can clear up this whole mess—"
"You heard me," he accused, grabbing my arm in a grip that was borderline painful.
"Ow," I said. His grip loosened a smidgen. "Yeah, I heard you. I'm standing right here."
You heard what I said about Dark Ones.
"Well, duh! I'm not deaf. I understand you're miffed about finding me here, but I promised Melissande—"
It is not possible. You are not Moravian. You are not a telepath. And yet you hear me. He pulled me up close to his body, the heat from his chest burning my arm. You can see the curse?
"Yeah, I can see it, but not clearly. If I look straight at it, it disappears. I have to kind of peek at it from the corner of my eye to see the patt… oh, my God. Your mouth didn't move just then. I was watching." The skin along my back and arms crawled as a horrible realization dawned upon me. "What's going on? Why can I hear you talk without your mouth moving? You're not like some sort of vampire ventriloquist, are you?"
He shook his head. "This is not happening."
"I know how you feel," I said on a sigh. "I've had that feeling all evening, ever since the imp episode, but I've given up trying to make sense of it and am now going with the flow. Look, Christian—"
He frowned, his warm, strong fingers flexing into the soft pudge of my arm. "Why do you call me that? I am not Christian Dante."
I went still, very still, bunny-rabbit-spotted-by-a-dangerous-predator still. I didn't even chance breathing. "You're not?"
"No."
"But you're a vamp."
An annoyed look passed across his face. "Dark One. I am a Dark One."
"Whatever. What are you doing here if you're not Christian, the guy who owns the place?"
"The same might be asked of you. More, since I would like to know why you have the ability to hear my thoughts, and how it is you can see the curse that binds me."
"Yeah, but I asked first. Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
He eyed me for another minute, then released my arm and spun around to look around the library. "Melissande hired you. You are here, obviously seeking the same as I. You can hear my thoughts. You can see my curse." He stopped and pointed to a sea-green vase on a bookshelf. "What do you see there?"
"A vase?" He stalked toward me until I scurried in the opposite direction, which just happened to be toward the vase. "It's a green vase. Pretty. Looks like it's valuable."
"Look closer," he commanded, his eyes turning to an indigo color. I looked away, curious as to how he did the eye thing, but figured now was probably not the best time to question him about vampiric skills and abilities. Glancing at the vase again, idly I wondered if it was possible to knock out a vampire by cracking him on the head with a vase.
"It would take much more than a vase to render me unconscious. Do not even think of trying. Now look at it again and tell me what you see."
I bit back the words of surprise that he knew what I was thinking and toyed with the thought of refusing him outright, but the few steps he took toward me, menace all but pouring off him, had me changing my mind. I hurried to do as he commanded. "It's just a vase. About twelve inches high, with a gold rim and faint pattern etched into the sides."
"Describe the pattern," he demanded, his gaze boring into mine.
"Fish," I said desperately, just wanting to get the hell out of there, away from the frightening—and bossy—fanged mystery vampire. "It has fish on it. Looks Greek or something."
He half turned away, disappointment flashing across his face. A brief stab of guilt flared within me, as if I had let him down somehow. What on earth was I thinking? He was a vampire! Bad news no matter how you looked at it. It didn't matter that somehow, what I had said had not been what he'd hoped to hear. Except… somehow, it did matter. Sympathy rose within me as I caught another glimpse of the red curse binding him. I supposed even a vampire has a right to be crotchety if he's bound by a demon lord's curse.
I glanced back at the vase, keeping one eye on the vamp in case he should try to grab me and make me a late-night dinner. I might feel sorry for him, but I wasn't completely stupid. "The fish are swimming in a couple of schools. The waves they are swimming on are curvy, turning back upon themselves. Kind of like the pattern I saw on the book—" I clamped my mouth shut, horrified with both what I said, and what it meant.
The vampire spun around, pinning me back against the wall with the force of his gaze. "You can see the ward?"
"Uh… maybe."
"Melissande," he murmured as he glanced down at himself to where the curse flickered red. "She found a Charmer. I didn't think she'd find one who has the power to hel
p."
"Well, she hasn't. That is," I said quickly when his blue-eyed gaze was back to goring me, "I would be more than happy to help, but I can't. Charm, that is. I never could. My Charming skills are stunted, you see. But I did promise to help her find her nephew by poking around Christian's library, and that's what I'm doing here. Now that I've spilled my info, it's your turn."
"Damian," he said, his eyes doing the indigo thing again. I was just about to throw caution to the wind and ask him how he did it, when he moved. I didn't even see it coming—one minute I was standing near a bookcase, the next I was slammed back against the wall, pinned by two arms of steel attached to one very large vampire. "You will relay everything to me, from the beginning. What did Melissande tell you?"
"I should warn you, I'm an expert on vampires. I've seen every episode made of Buffy, Angel, and Forever Knight, so don't think a little fang-flashing is going to scare me," I started to say, but an up-close look at those sharp white incisors sent my bravado flying out the window, leaving me babbling like a brook. Power and desperation rolled off him, swamping me with the knowledge that this man would kill to find out what he wanted to know. Had I any state secrets to hand over, I would have gladly given them. "She hired me to charm a curse, but I don't do that sort of thing, so she promised me a breastplate if I would break in here and find some notes her brother had found that told where Damian was, only I didn't know it was breaking in, because she said the castle belonged to a cousin vamp who evidently wouldn't mind, although he went and left the door warded so she couldn't enter the castle, and come to think of it, since you're a vamp too, shouldn't you be, you know, locked out? Ward-wise?"
"Only the doors and windows were warded. I entered through neither."
"Oh. So how did you get in?"
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