The only way Ava could have been more protected would be if they strapped a bulletproof vest to her chest and had a marine helicopter monitoring her from overhead. Somehow, she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear they had considered the idea. She was only surprised that they had abandoned it.
She could feel the tension radiating off of Dima in waves, and she wanted to think it was because he was worried for her and would have preferred that she not be putting herself in danger by entering Yelizaveta Chernigov’s lair all alone, but she wasn’t sure. Was he brooding because of last night? Had it not affected him as strongly as it had her? She had a hard time believing it was possible that he hadn’t felt something intense. He had certainly behaved as if he had. But then again, she’d fallen asleep immediately afterward, so what did she know? Maybe he’d only just discovered that she talked in her sleep and decided it drove him crazy.
The car began to slow, and Ava felt the first twinge of nerves rush through her. She had every confidence in the measures that had been taken to protect her, not to mention in her own confidence. These felt more like the nerves she felt just before her turn on the catwalk or before the cameras began to snap—not fear for her safety, but a form of stage fright that she had learned early on only fueled her performances.
“Come and change places with me,” Misha said, taking her arms and half-lifting her off the seat to shift her nearer to the door. In the background, Ava thought she heard Dima growl, but she couldn’t be sure. Maybe she was just imagining it. “And remember the first rule?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mr. Worrypants. I remember.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t take any stupid chances.”
“And rule number two?”
She grimaced. “If it would make Missy worry, it’s a violation of rule number one.”
“Good girl.”
“Get bent.”
She said it without heat and reached for the handle of the door. Before she could pull it, Dima snaked a hand out past his brother and grabbed her by the back of the neck. He leaned forward and pulled her to him until their noses practically bumped somewhere in the air over Misha’s lap.
“If you get hurt in there,” Dima growled, his gaze hard as ice and intensely blue, “I will kill you, understand?”
“That you’re out of your mind? Completely.” She blew out an exasperated breath. “Relax. You’ll be with me the whole time, right?”
He muttered something under his breath, in Russian, then gave one last tug until their mouths collided in a brief, hard, bruising kiss. Then he turned her loose and sat back in his seat.
“Just keep it in mind,” he grunted, and pointedly looked away from her.
Ava tried glaring at him but found it remarkably unsatisfying, given his refusal to turn his head and notice. Muttering something to herself, she opened the car door and slid out onto the cool pavement. Misha, though, both heard and understood her comment. He laughed out loud.
As Ava shut the door behind her, she heard Dima ask his brother what she had said.
“Oh,” Misha chuckled. “I really don’t think I could do it justice. You’ll have to ask her yourself, later.”
The sound of Dima’s frustrated cursing followed her all the way up the block to the front door of Wadsworth House and had her whistling a happy tune as she pressed the button for the doorbell. Maybe tonight wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ava wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but to have her doorbell answered by an elderly-looking man in a crisp butler’s livery, complete with bow tie and frock coat, hadn’t been it. She raised an eyebrow in surprise, before collecting herself and greeting him with a cool “Good evening.”
“I’ve come to see Ms. Chernigov. I believe she should be expecting me.”
The butler didn’t so much as twitch an eyelash, which looked to be the only hairs on his entire face. He was completely bald with the natural look of someone who had not shaved his head to make a fashion statement. He was also cleanly shaven and had no eyebrows she could detect. The lack gave him a blank, empty expression that she found disturbing.
When minutes had passed with no response from him, including one in which he would step away from the doorway and let her in, she lifted her chin arrogantly and tried again.
“My name is Ava Markham, and I’m here to see your employer at her invitation. If you have doubts, please feel free to check with her. But for how, I would like to not be kept standing on the doorstep like an orphaned beggar.”
The butler did finally step back, but he still looked about as cheerful as death’s door knocker. “Wait here,” he intoned in a surprisingly deep voice for a man who stood several inches shorter than Ava.
She had no trouble listening to the instruction. There was plenty to look at in the front hall of the mansion, from the intricately carved mahogany banister on the curving, marble stairway to the priceless collection of museum-quality art hanging on the walls. Ava had seen it before when she’d been inside the building for various charity functions over the years, but knowledge of the house had been limited to this hallway, the huge ballroom to the left, and the corridor behind where the ladies’ restroom was located.
Besides, she realized as she gazed up at a beautifully executed portrait of an eighteenth-century husband-and-wife couple, things looked different when you were here with five hundred other people from when you were standing alone listening to your breathing echo off the intricate plaster ceiling.
Testing. One, two, three. Testing, she thought under the cover of her art appreciation flashback.
She felt a distinctly Dima-ish presence flood her thoughts and was surprised at how much better it made her feel.
I am with you, kralya, but it is best to think of me as little as possible. None of us have had dealings with Yelizaveta in many years, and it is impossible to predict what talents she might have learned. Rest assured, I will not leave you while you are there.
Ava smiled to herself and turned her attention to a small landscape depicting an English country estate in the summer. The bucolic tranquility presented there contrasted nicely with her tightly wound nerves.
Relax, she heard just before a sharply cleared throat called her attention back to the reappeared butler.
“Princess Chernigov will see you,” he said, absolutely no inflection in his voice, something Ava hadn’t even known was possible.
“Princess” Chernigov? Ava thought as she followed him down the hall.
In Russia, Prince and Princess are common titles. Like Lord and Lady in England.
She has a title.
Her family, at one point, could claim a right to them, I suppose, but it has been a long time since the last noble in her family was hacked to death by his own mistreated serfs.
Charming family.
The butler stopped halfway down the hall before a wide set of ornately carved double doors. Ava saw him grip the knobs and blinked. The vampire lady was going to meet her for a nice chat in the formal ballroom? Interesting choice …
The butler pushed open the door, nodded her through, then pulled the heavy weights closed behind her. When Ava looked up, she found herself facing a movie set and wondered if this Chernigov woman had hired the same decorating firm that had worked on the Council of Others’ meeting chambers.
The room looked nothing like Ava remembered. Only the polished wooden floorboards appeared remotely familiar. Heavy black drapes now hung across the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran all along the two outer walls of the enormous room. Presumably they had been installed to block out the light, and the fabric looked to be expensive velvet, but the effect of it covering most of two walls was to make the place look like a funeral parlor or a sadly unfortunate disco.
No lights had been turned on in the room, but the antique chandeliers, once converted to electricity, had been lowered and candles mounted in their cups. Talk about a double whammy of a fire hazard. The tables Ava was used
to seeing around the perimeter of the room were absent. The only furniture she saw were a few delicate-looking armchairs at the far end of the room. They had been arranged around the base of a small platform about two feet off the ground, and on that platform stood a chair that …
Ava blinked, squinted, and blinked again. No, she hadn’t been mistaken. The chair on the platform could only be described as a throne, and a gaudy one at that. It looked to have been upholstered in rich burgundy velvet: the exposed wood framing the back and making up the arms and legs had been heavily, massively gilded so that the piece seemed to glitter in the candlelight.
It took a severe act of willpower for Ava not to laugh at the pretentions of it. Which was wise, because a laugh would likely have counted as a bad move.
In the chair, lounging like Cleopatra on her Nile barge, lay a woman—a girl, really—who Ava realized appeared to be no more than nineteen or twenty years old. She had fair hair in a rich shade of strawberry blonde—half-red, half-gold—and an even fairer complexion dusted with a tiny sprinkling of freckles across her snub nose. Her eyes were wide and, from what Ava could see in the dim light, dark and titled exotically at the corners. She had dressed in something out of a sci-fi fantasy movie, with long skirts, flowing sleeves, and a braided rope of leather and gold fabric wrapped and crisscrossed several times around her narrow torso.
This is Yelizaveta the Terrible? Ava thought, and wanted to laugh. She looks like a cheerleader trying out for the school play.
Do not let looks deceive you, Dima warned. Remember, you look like a cold, calculating bitch at first glance.
So? That’s not an inaccurate impression of me.
When she looked at Yelizaveta Chernigov, all Ava could think of was a famous Waterhouse painting of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott. Ava fought not to smile. If this girl proved to be as hopelessly dim as that immortal character, this would be even easier than they had hoped.
Ava approached the throne and dais and noticed that several of the chairs at its base were occupied by people with the inherent stillness and predatory gaze of vampires. Flanking the throne on either side, Ava also spotted two figures who appeared to be bodyguards.
So far, everything was pretty much as they’d expected. Except that Ava had expected Yelizaveta to look a bit different.
You were thinking horns and a tail?
No. Well, maybe little horns. I guess I just thought she’d look … bigger. More grown-up.
She is as old as I am, lyubushka. Do not let yourself be taken in.
When she came within eight feet of the end of the throne platform, Ava halted and looked up at the other vampire through innocent eyes.
“Are you Yelizaveta Chernigov?” Ava asked, her voice carefully neutral.
She hadn’t yet decided how to play this. Dima and his brother had warned her to be deferential, the way a new fledgling would be expected to behave, but she wasn’t sold on the idea. After all, if Yelizaveta knew who Ava was, she could easily have gathered information on her, and wouldn’t it be more suspicious to suddenly act like she’d gone from ass-kicker to ass-kisser in just a couple of days?
The woman on the throne waved her hand and a male vampire in the chair closest to the throne’s right-hand side spoke.
“You are in the presence of Princess Chernigov,” he said, his voice sounding as tight as his face looked. For a vampire, he appeared to be made entirely of lemon juice with pale skin stretched across the top. He was that sour. “You must make your bow.”
Bow?
She stared at the lackey for a moment and raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid I was never a Dallas debutante,” she laughed, taking care to strike the right balance in the sound between amusement and self-confidence. “The, ah, princess will have to settle for a polite nod and a ‘How do you do?’ ”
Yelizaveta leaned forward in her throne and glared at Ava. “I never settle for anything, Ms. Markham,” she hissed, and Ava saw not just antagonism but quite a bit of crazy in Yelizaveta’s eyes. “That’s why I have an empire at my disposal.”
Okay, guess we’re not going to pretend to be best friends.
“Um, you do?” Ava tried to look confused more than contemptuous. Really, she did. “Wow, that’s great. I’m just surprised to hear it. None of the people I asked about you seemed to know anything. In fact, none of them had ever heard of you. Isn’t that odd?”
“Odd indeed.” The little man at the base of the dais stood and took several steps toward Ava. As he stepped closer, she saw that not only were his sour lips pursed, they were a sickly-looking gray color, and his hands, which he held clasped together in front of him, were somehow deformed. The fingers were overly long, the knuckles too prominent, and his nails had been filed into what resembled sharp talons instead of fingernails.
After she saw that, she found it hard to look at his face.
“I’m afraid there are many things for you to learn about your new situation, Ms. Markham,” the lackey continued. His eyes glinted, but in the dim light, even with her improved night vision, the pupil blended so well with the dark, dark color of the iris that his entire eye looked black and flat, like a shark’s. “First, there are your manners, of course, but equally important is the fact that speaking to the wrong people about the wrong things can be very hazardous to your health.”
Ava looked at him and concentrated on keeping her breathing deep and regular. “Huh, that sounded almost like a threat to me.”
“And if it almost was?”
“Then I’d have to wonder why you would go to the trouble of inviting me here just to threaten me. You couldn’t have tied a note to a brick and thrown it through my front window? It would have saved each of us a lot of trouble.”
“But would it have been as effective?”
She paused as if to consider the question. “Probably,” she answered after a minute. “I’m not ever very good at obeying orders.”
Yelizaveta swept to her feet and twitched her skirts gracefully out of the way. “Perhaps it’s time you learned, then. And since I value Charles’ company too much to inflict the teaching on him, allow me to instruct you.”
With a smile as false as her heart, she stepped down off the platform and closed the distance between them until she stood no more than two feet away. The only reason she stopped there, Ava believed, was that if she went any farther, she’d have to crane her neck to look up at a woman she probably considered her inferior.
“First, though,” Yelizaveta said, her voice smooth and light and young for someone who had celebrated eight hundred birthdays, “it might do you well to understand your position here.”
“My position? Wow, and I wasn’t even sure I was going to get the job.”
Yelizaveta ignored her wisecrack. “My name, as you have obviously learned, is Yelizaveta Chernigov. I am just over eight hundred years old, and I have spent over seven hundred and eighty of those as a vampire. I have powers you could not hope, in your naïve, little, recently human mind, to comprehend. This is why I am the ruler of the House of Chernigov, and you are merely one of my many followers.”
“Followers?” Ava smiled and shook her head. “I’ve always found that if I get lost, a map and a good internal sense of direction are all I need to get me going in the right direction again. But thanks.”
Yelizaveta laughed, a light, tinkling bell of sound that provided a sickening contrast to the gesture she used to bring Ava to her knees.
The sensation came on suddenly, feeling as if a hand was tightening around her throat to shake her. Shock immobilized her for an instant before she reached up and instinctively began to claw at her neck. Her mind flashed back to the night in the alley, and she felt fear creeping over her again.
Relax, Dima said, his voice clear and comforting inside her head. Remember, you cannot die this way. If she truly meant to kill you, she would go for your head or your heart. Relax.
I thought you said she wasn’t supposed to be able to do weird mind control stuff.
Ap
parently, I was wrong.
Well, that’s comforting!
Still, Ava listened to his instructions and relaxed. When she stopped fighting, the tension around her throat eased, allowing her to breathe again. She glared at the vampiress.
“I suppose that’s one way to win friends and influence people,” Ava coughed.
The woman laughed again. “I have no desire to win friends, suka. The only thing I am interested in winning is the war. The fact that you can be useful to me in doing so is the only reason you have remained alive this long.”
What did she just call me? Ava demanded.
A bitch.
Oh, it is on!
She let her hands drop back to her sides and lifted her chin, meeting the megalomaniacal Yelizaveta glare for glare. Granted, Ava had to stare down her nose to meet the other woman’s gaze, but it wasn’t her fault the vampiress had been born a midget.
“Is that right?” Ava asked, her tone implying she didn’t care for an answer. “Interesting. But frankly, it makes a girl wonder what sort of state your army is in, if a week-old vampire with absolutely no special talents is the key to winning your war.”
That horrible laugh sounded again, making Ava want to slam her hands over her ears until it stopped. It was worse than nails on a chalkboard in her ears.
“So, so stupid,” Yelizaveta giggled while her eyes remained as cool and emotionless as colored glass. “You mean precisely nothing to me, suka, and in the grand scheme of things you are capable of serving only one purpose. Your significance has nothing to do with how you are or what you can do. It is simply who you know.”
“Who I know?”
The woman nodded eagerly, making Ava think she really must be a total lunatic. “Who you know! The head councilor and his wife, the Alpha of the local Lupines and his wife, everyone and his wife. But most important of all, my two oldest … friends. The brothers Rurikovich. They’re special. I think I might save them for last.”
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