by Karen Chance
“Make up your damn mind!” I told him, pulling it on. “One minute you strip me; the next you tell me to get dressed. One minute your tongue is down my throat, and the next you’re glowering at me. Do you even know what you want?”
“There are things we want, and things we may have,” he said tightly. “Sanity lies in knowing the difference.”
“Okay, you want to translate that for me?” I waited, but he didn’t say anything else, and his posture was as closed and uninviting as a statue.
Or like a guy who’s just remembered his mistress is waiting upstairs.
Screw this, I thought bitterly. It was exactly like last time, only then I hadn’t stepped back. I’d let him take my face in his hands, let myself lean into his touch, just enough to fall and keep on falling. Only to have him leave, without a word, to chase after his mistress.
It was the same woman he was going to redeem tonight. And then this would be over and he would be gone, and I couldn’t wait. I snagged my abandoned bottle and the duffel bag off the floor and headed for the bedroom without another word, frustration lingering like a sour taste in my mouth.
It’s the beer, I told myself firmly.
Mircea’s bedroom was the same gray expanse of boredom I remembered. Like the rest of the apartment, it was ultramodern, sleek and minimalist, like something transplanted from one of the glass- and-steel high-rises. It didn’t fit well in this old-world charmer any more than the blinding white bathroom did.
Some things just weren’t meant to go together, I thought viciously, and stepped into the shower. I turned it on high, refusing to think about anything except the pounding water and the enveloping steam. It didn’t work. That shouldn’t have surprised me. It hadn’t worked any better all month.
He was a vampire. I was a dhampir, born to detect the monster within the pretty package. And until now, I’d had a flawless record. But breeding, training, and experience all failed me in his case. When I looked at Louis-Cesare, I didn’t see a monster.
Part of the problem was his unique talent for appearing human. I’d never met another vampire who got all the little things right so effortlessly, who breathed as though he really needed to, whose heart rate went up when I came in the room, who flushed in passion. If it hadn’t been for the frisson that went up my spine whenever we met, he might have fooled even me.
But it wasn’t the appearance that had me so confused. A lot of vamps looked pretty damn human, but they didn’t act it. From the newly changed babies to the age-old consuls, every damn one of them evidenced the same focused self-interest, cold-blooded practicality and utter ruthlessness.
Everyone except for Louis-bloody-Cesare.
He didn’t live by the vamp code; he had his own. It was classist and had a heavy overtone of noblesse oblige, and it frequently made me want to smack him, but it was a code nonetheless. He didn’t always act in ways that would benefit himself, the mess with Alejandro being a prime example.
Every other vamp I knew would have either sacrificed Christine, if Tomas was considered too much of a threat, or have killed him and taken her back. Some of them would have made Alejandro pay for the insult later, but none would have so much as considered any other options. They probably wouldn’t have even seen any.
Vampires were emancipated when they reached the level of their master, and sometimes before, because the more powerful they became the harder it was to control them. Eventually, the problems in keeping them outweighed the benefits. I could just see Mircea’s face if someone suggested that he divert a huge amount of his personal power for more than a century to hold a vampire in thrall who could be of absolutely no use to him. Yet Louis-Cesare had done exactly that.
First-level masters varied in power, and obviously, Louis-Cesare had been stronger than Tomas. But even so, the cost must have been enormous, a constant, ongoing drain with no end in sight. And for what? The benefit of a vampire he didn’t even know? It was the sort of behavior that made my brain hurt because it challenged everything I knew about the self-serving breed.
Not that it mattered. Whatever he looked like, whatever he acted like, Louis-Cesare was a vampire. I needed to remember that.
I also needed to figure out what the hell I was going to wear. I didn’t intend to try to compete—vampire parties are all about outshining, outdazzling and outdoing everybody else, and my wardrobe wouldn’t have been up to the challenge even if I’d had access to it. But I also wasn’t wearing a smelly old T-shirt that wasn’t even mine.
Fortunately, Mircea is a shade over six feet tall, while I am barely five two. That makes his shirts on the order of dresses for me, easily hitting midthigh or lower, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t spare one. He was the biggest clotheshorse I’d ever met; if he hadn’t had a steady stream of mistresses through the years, I’d wonder about him.
I’d settled on a big shirt and maybe a cummerbund for a belt by the time I stepped out of the shower—and saw a piece of black silk hanging from the hook behind the door. It was a dress, sort of. It was mostly straps on top, cleverly designed to reveal more than they covered, yet managing to stay on the right side of slutty. The skirt was more problematic, long and black and slit high enough that my lack of underwear was going to be a problem.
“There’s some panties and things on the counter,” Ray said, from inside the duffel.
I’d parked it on the floor beside the door. I picked it up and peered into the hole in the side. “Are you spying on me?”
“Hell, yeah. Get me out of here.”
“Why? So you can get a better view?”
“So we can talk while you get dressed.”
“I’m not getting dressed,” I told him, threw a towel around myself and went out into the bedroom. It was dark and empty, except for the wash of light from the bath, so I passed through to the living room. Louis-Cesare was on the couch with the lights off, staring out over the view of Central Park.
I held up the dress. “What is this?”
He looked up, his eyes dark in the dim light. “I had it sent over.”
“It’s one o’clock in the morning!”
“Concierge,” he said simply, like he’d picked up the phone and ordered a pizza.
“There are shoes.” I’d tripped over a pair of black satin heels on the way out of the bathroom.
“You wished to dress for the occasion—”
“I said I wanted a bath.”
“—and I thought to oblige you. And myself. I have never seen you in a gown.”
I crossed my arms and glared at him. “How did you know my size?”
He just looked at me. And yeah, okay, I could probably guess his pretty accurately, too, if it came down to it. Not that it mattered.
“I’m not wearing this.”
He regarded me in silence for a moment. “Do you wish to fight with me, Dorina?”
“Yes!” At the moment, that was exactly what I wanted.
“If it will help.” I blinked. He’d spoken in the toneless kind of voice new vamps used when they hadn’t yet learned to operate dead vocal cords. Except Louis-Cesare never made slips like that.
A passing car lit up his face for an instant, and the strained blankness of his expression jolted me with an unpleasant shock. He looked like a vamp for the first time: the face beautiful, but pale and cold, like it was carved out of marble; the chest immobile, unbreathing; the eyes fixed and unblinking. I felt a chill run down my spine.
The man I knew was haughty, impatient, demanding, passionate. Not this blank. Not this thing.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded.
“Nothing.” Toneless, flat, dead.
Yeah, that was convincing.
CHAPTER 16
I walked over, the dress trailing on the floor behind me. I sat on the edge of the coffee table across from him because I was still dripping. “Try again,” I told him.
He didn’t say anything.
“I’d have thought you’d be pleased,” I pointed out. “You’re
getting Christine back.”
“I am relieved,” he said, after a moment. “Elyas is a sadist, delighting in the pain of others. I did not like to think of her there.”
“You think he hurt her?”
“No. He assures me that she has not been harmed.”
“And you believe him?”
“Yes. He enjoys the fear of his victims more than their pain, and Christine… As she once said to me, after one has lost their soul, what else is there to fear?”
“She hasn’t lost her soul,” I said impatiently. “Hell, Mircea is more devout than I am.” I didn’t mind going to mass so much, but confession was damned annoying. Even the supernatural confessors the Vatican kept on call always got a little… distraught… when I showed up. And, really, there weren’t enough Hail Marys in the world.
“But she believes she has,” Louis-Cesare said simply. “Her family was very devout. It was thought for a time that she would become a religieuse.”
I raised my eyebrows. “How does someone get from prospective nun to vampire mistress?”
“Christine was one of those rare individuals born with magical ability without coming from a magical family. She was never given any training, and therefore did not know about her gift until it began to manifest as she came of age.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“She mistook it for a miracle. She was a novitiate at the time, and people began to flock to the abbey to see her levitate the Host or to light candles with merely a touch. She believed she was the vessel of God’s grace, for she could find no other reason why she should be able to do such things. But magical power is like any other kind: it requires training to work safely—training she did not possess.”
“I have a feeling this isn’t going anywhere good.”
“No. One evening, she was startled while attempting to light the bank of candles before the altar, and the spell went awry. Within minutes, the chapel was in flames, the roof beams collapsed and many of the nuns died. The abbess survived, badly burned and newly convinced that they had taken a devil amongst themselves. Christine was whipped by the abbess and forced to run for her life with only the clothes on her back. Some of my vampires found her several days later, half dead from dehydration and un-healed burns, stumbling down the road near my estate.”
“And they recognized what she was.” It wouldn’t have been difficult. A vampire of any age could tell blindfolded the differences among human, were, mage and fey by smell alone.
“Yes. They brought her to me, and I nursed her back to health. During her recovery, we became… close. But I was not a mage. I could not give her the training she needed. Once she was well again, I thought to help her by putting her in touch with others of her kind. I contacted a mage on her behalf—a man I had known for years and had every reason to believe was scrupulous.” His fingers tightened on his glass, the first sign of emotion I’d seen.
“I’m going to guess he wasn’t,” I said, prodding him when he went silent.
“In the time since I had had dealings with him, he had amassed a great number of debts. He was desperate to find a way to clear them, and I gave him one. I brought her to his doorstep in my own carriage.”
“He sold her.” I knew this part of the story, at least. Radu had told me how Christine had become a target for the less salubrious part of the supernatural world. Dark mages lust after power. And a strong, untrained witch with no magical family to protect her? It just didn’t get any better than that.
“By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. I found her, but she was too close to death for any doctor to save her.”
“So you brought her over.” I was surprised it had worked. It often doesn’t when the subject is that far gone. But then, Horatiu had been on his deathbed when Mircea Changed him.
Of course, how successful that transformation had been was debatable.
“Again, I thought to help. And again, I made a bad matter infinitely worse.”
“You saved her life,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but Christine was not concerned for her life. She was concerned for her soul. Something she believes is now lost, wholly and irretrievably.”
“I don’t see why. She’d been a witch before. How is that any less ‘damned’ than a vampire?”
His lips twisted. “Magic, in her mind, was something that she did, requiring a conscious effort on her part, and was therefore something she could stop doing.”
“That’s stupid. Magical humans are not the same as—”
“But she did not see it like that. Her parents, her siblings—they were human. There must have been some magical blood in the family line, yes, but it does not seem to have manifested in anyone else. She therefore believed that her new abilities were the devil’s way of tempting her, and they could be overcome by prayer and good works. But vampirism?” He smiled grimly. “That was not something she did; it was something she was, and it could not be undone once the transformation was complete.”
It made a kind of sense, if you had a late-medieval mind-set. “And yet she chose to remain the mistress of the man who had damned her?”
His gaze shifted to the window, not that there was much to see. There also wasn’t a lot of traffic this late, and with no more passing headlights, I couldn’t see his expression that well. Assuming he had one. “The bond between a new Child and her master is very strong,” he finally said.
“But many of them aren’t lovers!”
“She wished it. My actions had deprived her of the love of her family, the solace of her religion and the comfort of a world she understood. I had destroyed her old life. It was my responsibility to provide her with a new one.”
“And now?”
He didn’t say anything, which was as good as an answer.
“She’s what?” I demanded. “A few hundred years old? I think she’s her own responsibility.”
“You know it does not work that way.”
“What I know is that vampires can be emancipated.”
“When they reach a certain power level, yes. But Christine has never advanced beyond what she was when she first awoke. I do not know what she might have been, but her loathing for our kind has made it impossible for her to mature. She has remained a child.”
“Children grow up.”
His eyes closed. “Human children do. But sometimes, with us… they simply remain.”
“Then maybe they need to be pushed a little more! Vampires aren’t human, but they’re part of the natural world. And that world thrives on change.”
“But that is how we differ, is it not?” he asked, opening his eyes. They glittered with some emotion I couldn’t even begin to define, contrasting sharply with the dead look of his face. “Vampires do not grow old. We do not die. We are as unchanging as the mountains.”
“The mountains change, Louis-Cesare,” I said harshly, getting up. “It just takes them longer. And vampires die all the time. Trust me on that.”
I went back to the bathroom.
Ray had hooked his long nose over the side of the duffel so he could stare at me as I stomped back in. I threw a towel over him and proceeded to dry my hair. “Get this thing off!” he bitched.
“It’s not like you’re going to suffocate!” I snapped.
“Yeah, but we gotta talk.”
I ignored him in favor of running my fingers over the soft material of the dress. It had gotten crushed in my hands, so I spread it out on the counter, careful to keep it out of any wet spots. The silk was so fine and lightweight, I bet it felt like wearing nothing. And why the hell shouldn’t I find out? I thought angrily. The bastard owed me an outfit.
“Are you listening to me?” Ray demanded.
“Talk about what?”
“About Elyas.”
“You’re going to be talking to him in a minute,” I said, examining a pair of ebony lace-topped thigh-highs. There was a matching thong, too, but no bra because there’d never been one invented to work with that dress.<
br />
“That’s just it,” Ray whispered, his eyes on the closed bathroom door. “No, I’m not. As soon as you turn me over, he’s going to kill me.”
“Why would he want to do that? He needs you to tell him where the rune is.”
“He already knows where it is. He stole it after he killed Jókell.”
“Who?”
“The fey!”
“What fey?”
“The fey who brought the rune. And don’t say, ‘What rune?’ ”
Now I was the one glancing at the door. It was closed, and I’d slammed the one to the living room coming back in, but two doors and the width of a substantial suite didn’t mean much with vampire hearing. Ray started to say something else, but I shushed him, wrapped another towel around myself and hauled him out the window.
An elaborate wrought-iron fire escape overlooked a small alley between buildings. The wind had picked up enough to ruffle the tops of a couple ornamental trees below, and some traffic still flowed along Fifth Avenue. It should be enough to mask a low-voiced conversation.
I hoped.
I shut the window behind me and unzipped the top of the duffel. Anxious blue eyes swiveled up to me. “You want to start making some sense here, Ray?”
“It’s like this. Jókell was Blarestri—that’s one of the three main houses of the Light Fey.”
“I know what it is.”
“Yeah, well, not a lot of people do. Anyway, he was in what I guess you’d call their military, and he regularly pulled a shift guarding one of the main portals into our world.”
“Let me guess. He sometimes let a little something slip through.”
“A lot of somethings. We had a good thing going. He found people on his end who had stuff they’d rather not pay the duty on, and I took care of selling it on this side. Anyway, about a week ago, he calls and tells me he’s got a lead on something special. He told me to arrange a private sale, even told me who to contact—and that was some list! It made me nervous, because I don’t usually handle the big stuff, and these were not people I wanted to piss off. But the boss said to go ahead with it.”