Franco Salerno had never liked or trusted him. Not that Sasha cared. Like most Italians, Franco was always unbearable company, and possessed of a narrow-minded intellect Sasha had never respected in the three hundred years of their unfortunate acquaintance. But Sasha had never given Franco enough thought to dislike the man in return.
Until now.
It had taken Sasha a good day by Thaddeus Fincastle’s dirigible to arrive in Genoa, and he’d received the tickertext the night before his journey, already some time after the body had been discovered. Thus over forty-eight hours had passed, yet here the body remained. It was as if Franco had taken extra pains to ensure Sasha’s discomfort – and wrath.
“I see you thought it necessary to leave this poor woman where she lay,” he said.
“Franco and I both agreed that, though distasteful, it was for the best,” the man next to Franco interjected. “We wanted to give you a chance to see the … er, tableau, as it was originally discovered. In case you see something the rest of us have missed.”
Sasha narrowed his eyes at the speaker, the dark-haired, aristocratic Rowan Harker, Lord Llewellyn. Of all the Elders, Sasha was closest with Rowan. But he could not miss the glimmer of suspicion lurking deep within his friend’s eyes. Sasha knew what Rowan left unspoken, that he and Franco wanted to witness Sasha’s reaction to the “tableau”, as Rowan called it, for any signs of his culpability.
Franco had already made up his mind centuries ago about Sasha’s guilt, while Rowan had always championed Sasha’s claims of innocence. But three hundred years of murders without any other suspects could make stronger men than Rowan doubt. Witnessing the doubt in Rowan’s eyes for himself, however …
Well, Sasha was not surprised, under the circumstances, but he was disappointed.
Sasha turned back to the body, though he didn’t want to. He’d already seen what he needed to, and knew exactly what had happened to the poor woman. The murderer had struck the woman on the head, but not hard enough to kill. Then he’d proceeded to surgically remove the woman’s heart while she was still alive.
In that, the villain had succeeded.
But if it had been the goal of the villain to keep his victim alive, that part of the plan had been unsuccessful. From the pattern of burns inside the chest cavity, it was apparent the villain had attempted regeneration, but without success.
Sasha rubbed the long scar that had never truly healed on his sternum. He’d been the last successful experiment in Vital Regeneration. But Da Vinci’s so-called Abominable Knowledge had been forgotten, the manuscripts destroyed by the High Council before the dawn of the 17th century.
Even Sasha’s transformation had been an illicit one, performed by one of the last of Da Vinci’s acolytes – and under great duress. But that scientist was long dead, and the technology was extinct. For those few remaining who remembered and lived with Da Vinci’s legacy, that was a good thing.
This murderer didn’t think so. He hadn’t thought so for three centuries, since that was how long bodies like this one had been turning up, taunting Sasha. He eyed the Cyrillic poem written in blood on the floor next to the victim’s head. He suspected it was another one of his father’s, just like the ones decorating every other crime scene.
Aside from mass rape and genocide, Ivan the Terrible had loved to write poetry.
It had been a hundred years since the last string of victims, just as there had been a hundred years between those and the first ones. Sasha had his theory about why the cycle had stopped, and why it was starting again. But his theory was one that no one on the Council wanted to hear. He was convinced it was a Bonded human who’d gone rogue.
But the implications of that theory were unacceptable, as that meant one of the Council was, in the end, culpable. Which was an outrageous notion to everyone save Sasha, who shared the Elders’ fate, but had never been one of them.
And that was the fundamental difference between Sasha and the Elders. All twelve of the Elders on the High Council had chosen Vital Regeneration. But Sasha had not chosen his fate, had never wanted it, something none of the Elders believed. How could they, when they couldn’t understand how anyone wouldn’t crave eternal life like they themselves did? Sasha had been looked upon with suspicion from the moment they’d learned of his existence.
And when they’d learned who his father was, their distrust in his worthiness had deepened. To them he’d always be an outsider. And he’d always be the Council’s easiest scapegoat when they found the truth too unpalatable to even consider.
He was about to turn away when the small beam of light shining down from the narrow basement window above hit something shiny tucked beneath the victim’s blonde hair. He stopped and stretched out his gloved hand to retrieve it.
He felt Franco start forward abruptly with a growl, as if he suspected Sasha of doing harm to the corpse. Sasha almost – almost – laughed out loud at the Italian’s absurdity.
“Relax, Franco. What do you think I’m going to do to her? She’s quite dead, you know,” he murmured, retrieving the object.
Spectacles.
For some reason, his heart, mechanical and flawless though it was, seemed to stop working for the blink of an eye. An unnamed dread began to rise up inside of him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on its source, or why the spectacles should unnerve him so.
He tried to shake it off and spun around to show the others what he had found. He gave Franco his most ironic smile.
“I can hardly harm her any more than she has been. And I’m not the one who has let this poor woman rot where she lay for the past two days. Perhaps had you done your job better, you would have found these earlier.”
Franco moved to take the spectacles, but Sasha snatched them away and strode out of the room, disgusted with his companions and the entire situation. He brushed rather abruptly past Rowan and stepped out into the hall. He swept down the corridor, towards an exit, needing fresh air.
Not that there was much of that to be found in Genoa these days. The blighted Fog that had swept Europe from the Pale, where the Crimean War had reached its catastrophic conclusion, lingered in this part of Europe. The unstable, quarrelsome Italian Federation had yet to implement any of the clean air measures Great Britain and France had introduced, and anyone without an Iron Necklace would not have survived long in such an environment.
Another reason aside from her tendency to cast up her accounts – not to mention the dead body – to leave the unenhanced Miss Finch behind. She’d had some allergy that had prevented her from being outfitted with the Necklace when she was an infant. He marveled she’d survived her childhood at all, considering how it had been in those dark days after the War.
Of course, with his monstrous heart, the toxic air posed no danger, the Necklace around his throat a mere prop to prevent attracting undo attention.
When he finally emerged into the blazing, soot-filled heat of a Genoa summer, he felt marginally better. It was certainly an improvement over the stench of death. He heard Franco and Rowan scrambling to catch up with him as they argued quietly with each other. It sounded like Rowan was trying to calm the Italian down.
But it was too little too late, as far as Sasha was concerned. If Rowan had been a true friend, he would have never let him walk unprepared into this untenable situation in the first place.
Fyodor was waiting for him at the edge of the courtyard, leaning against a pillar amid the gathering of the local gendarmerie under Franco’s command. The Weldling looked as out of place as a lion amid a flock of chattering, slightly hostile magpies. He raised his eyebrow in silent inquiry.
Sasha shook his head and turned his attention back to the spectacles, studying them in the full light. Something about them continued to bother him.
Rowan came up beside him. “So you think the spectacles are significant?”
“The murderer staged the room exactly as he wanted it. I doubt he would be so careless as to leave behind a pair of spectacles, unless he wanted them to be found. As wi
th the poem, the murderer is attempting to play a game with us. And in case you’re wondering, it is not I.”
Rowan stared at Sasha, not bothering to hide his doubts. “It’s hard for me to believe you did this, Sasha. You have never shown the slightest glimmer of the insanity it would take to commit such acts. And even if you did, I would never believe you stupid enough to leave behind such self-incriminating clues.”
“Damned with faint praise,” Sasha muttered.
“But, dear God, how could I not be suspicious? This rogue has done his best to implicate you, again and again, leading me to believe that, if nothing else, you are hiding something crucial.”
Sasha growled in frustration.
“Perhaps you don’t even know yourself what you are hiding. But whether you like it or not, you are at the center of this debacle, and you always have been,” Rowan finished adamantly.
This was one charge Sasha could not deny.
Rowan eyed the approaching Franco. “Our Italian friend, however, is convinced of your guilt. I would tread lightly. Don’t give him any more reason to hate you.”
“You mean, stop baiting him? What, and take away one of the few rare pleasures in my long and tedious life? I think not. And under the circumstances, I believe I will take your advice, my friend, with a grain of salt,” he murmured.
Rowan clenched his jaw and winced. Good, Sasha thought. Let him stew, the Judas.
Franco finally arrived at their side. He ripped the spectacles from Sasha’s hand and glared at him.
“You know,” Sasha began conversationally, “I’ve been in Paris this past week. At the Sorbonne. Dozens of people can testify to my presence there. I could have hardly jaunted down here, butchered that woman, then returned to Paris, without someone noticing my three day absence.”
“I won’t believe you were in Paris all this time without confirming it myself. Even if you were, you could have had an associate who carried out the crime for you. I am well aware of your connections to all sorts of men of science with dubious credentials.”
Sasha laughed. “Now I have minions, who go around slaughtering people on my bidding, all to – what, Franco? Throw you off my scent? And I suppose by scientists with dubious credentials, you mean Dr. Freud of Vienna, or Mr. Edison of America? Yes, I suppose anyone with even a spark of creative genius might seem dubious to you.”
Sasha didn’t think it was possible, but Franco’s face became redder, and the vessels in his temples began to bulge. Sasha almost felt sorry for the man. Almost. But Franco was so blind. And so, it seemed, were Rowan and the rest of the Elders. Most still held an infuriatingly medieval suspicion of modern science.
Despite its myriad drawbacks – drawbacks that were mostly a result of Elder interference, anyway – one of the few redeeming aspects of the present era was the emergence of the modern scientific method, in Sasha’s opinion.
The High Council was still grounded in a mysticism that had never appealed to Sasha. For many on the Council, God had ordained their immortality, but such hubris was downright dangerous. Sasha’s infamous father had also thought God had guided his hand.
And that hadn’t turned out well for anyone.
Since the debacle in the Crimea forty years ago and its aftermath, when Elder interference had nearly decimated entire nations, the Steam Age was fast leaving the Elders behind. Sasha couldn’t help but feel relieved.
He just wondered what would happen when the Elders finally realized they were fossils.
“As I’ve told you and the rest of the Council for centuries, I am innocent. Someone is using me to distract you, and as much as you don’t want to hear it, there are only two possibilities. Either it is one of the other Elders, or one of your Bonded companions.”
The incredulous looks they gave him were exactly what Sasha expected. He sighed. Most of the Elders saw nothing wrong with the practice of Bonding – sharing their special Heart’s Blood to prolong the life spans of a select few humans. But Sasha had always thought it a morally suspect practice, and above all a risk to their security.
No one had ever listened to his concerns, however. He wasn’t a true Elder, after all.
According to the Council, there were rules about Bonding, and those rules were strict enough to prevent any loose ends. But as Sasha had learned the hard way from the moment of his birth, rules were meant to be broken, and often were.
And unlike Rowan, Sasha didn’t have blind faith in the virtue of the other Elders. Just because they had Da Vinci hearts did not make them saints. In fact, Sasha’s experience with the Council inspired very little in the way of trust – not that he trusted anyone, after the upbringing he’d had.
The few he could have trusted, like Rowan, however, could not imagine the brothers who’d died and been reborn beside them capable of murder – or Bonding a human who was.
It was a failure of imagination that Sasha knew would be the Council’s eventual undoing. The outrageous actions of the Elder Stieg Ehrengard during the Crimean War proved Sasha’s point, but somehow Ehrengard’s sins had been conveniently brushed under the rug. The High Council had moved on as if nothing had happened and nearly a million human lives had not been lost in Ehrengard’s quest for power.
For the Elders, their brotherhood and their belief in their superiority over mankind trumped all.
“And as I’ve told you before, unlike the both of you, I have never Bonded anyone in my life. How you can consign someone to a fate such as ours is something I will never grasp.”
“Leave off with your righteous indignation,” Franco growled. “It hardly flatters someone of your lineage.”
“By lineage, do you mean the fabulously wealthy and powerful Russian Imperial family I was born to rule?” he asked archly. “Granted, my father was a unique sort of demon, but I am told some of my forebears were quite acceptable company. Saints, according to the Orthodox Church. I can hardly vouch for them, however, since three hundred years has taught me to be wary of history books, and the Church. But at least my ancestors could read.”
Franco’s face turned purple with rage. Everything was a sore spot with the Italian, but he was particularly sensitive about his humble origins. A low blow, perhaps, but Sasha couldn’t regret it at the moment. He shrugged. “You started it. And have you ever considered the possibility there is someone out there the Council has missed?”
“Impossible. There were only ever twelve of us,” Franco said.
“Yet I make a very unpleasant thirteen,” Sasha replied. “Perhaps I’m not the only mistake roaming around out there. But I wasn’t thinking of that. I would wager all I owned that this is a rogue Bonded, someone who has fallen through the cracks, despite all of your so-called precautions.”
Rowan looked thoughtful. “Why do you say that?”
He sighed. “First of all, an Elder would have no need for such experiments. He is already immortal, and he can Bond a human if he wants the company.”
“Unless he is not experimenting at all, merely desecrating human flesh because he is a madman,” Franco interjected. “A psychopath like his father.”
Sasha merely quirked his brow at the Italian, refusing to respond to such a thinly veiled accusation. “I never said we weren’t looking for a madman. That much is obvious. But this is a man who has been Bonded in the past. He is attempting to remove the Elder from the equation altogether by recreating Da Vinci’s heart for himself – quite unsuccessfully, I might add.”
“If this is true, then that would explain his longevity,” Rowan said reluctantly. “But it would also suggest…”
“It would also suggest that there is an Elder out there who is abetting this man,” Sasha finished. “And is still Bonding him. That is the reason there are hundreds of years between each string of victims. The Bonding wears off, and the murderer panics as he begins to age once more. He starts his cycle of violence, until the Elder intercedes.”
“That is not possible!” Franco insisted. “No Elder would facilitate such a fiend.”
“It is entirely possible. You and Rowan here are naïve to think otherwise. I seem to be the only one exempt from your belief in the inherent goodness of your fellow man. Turn some of that distrust upon your comrades and your precious Bonded companions, for God’s sake. Surely some likely suspects come to mind. Or did the Crimea teach you nothing?”
For once, he thought he’d gotten through to the Italian, whose face had lost all of its color. For a long time, Franco seemed adrift in some torturous thought, but it didn’t last long.
“This is all ridiculous!” the Italian finally burst out, with a shake of his head. “Surely you don’t believe him, Llewellyn. He’s lying. Spinning this crazy tale, just as he always does, to cover up his madness.”
Sasha sighed. “I’m not lying. I’m not hiding anything, and I’m certainly not mad – not yet anyway. I have given you my hypothesis, and that is all I can do. As I have never adhered to the Bonding practice I wouldn’t know who this villain is.”
“Well, he knows you,” Rowan said darkly.
“Just as he doubtless knows the distrust you have always felt for me. He is using it to distract you. But I have explained all of this before, to little avail. Nothing has changed.”
“But it has,” Rowan said, studying the spectacles in Franco’s hand, his brow furrowed. “You said so yourself. He’s never left spectacles before. And, come to think of it, this is the first time it’s been a woman.”
Sasha could feel the blood pumping faster through his veins with every word Rowan spoke, his resentment receding and that indefinable sense of dread growing stronger. He was missing something crucial. And the answer was in the spectacles, round and dainty, with thin, golden wire. So familiar.
And it was in the woman herself. Small, slight and unenhanced – unusual in this age of mass Welding – with dark blonde hair. She was entirely unremarkable, or at least she should be.
But not to him.
He knew someone who shared all of these characteristics, down to the golden-rimmed spectacles. His gut was telling him it was not a coincidence.
Prince of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles) Page 3