"What did you just do?" asked Samuel quietly.
Stefan let fall an exasperated sigh. "I made certain that the three of us are the only ones participating in this conversation, because there are things that hear very well in the night."
He turned his attention back to me. "When I called our accountant she put me right through to our Mistress-which is not standard procedure. Our Mistress was obviously more interested in your Dr. Cornick than she was with your question. She came to me and had me call you back-she didn't intend me to escort you. She didn't want you to have even that much protection, but once I offered, she could not contradict me. I am here, Mercy, because I want to know what is going on that stirs my Mistress from the lethargy that has been her usual state since she was exiled here. I need to know if it is a good thing, or something very bad for me and my kind."
I nodded. "All right."
"But I would have done it for friendship's sake," he added.
Unexpectedly, Samuel laughed a little bitterly. "Of course. We all do things for our Mercy for friendship's sake," he said.
Stefan didn't take us through the front gates, which were large enough to drive a semi through, but led the way around the side to a small, open door in the wall.
In contrast to the undeveloped scrub outside the gates, the interior grounds were elaborate. Even in November, the grass, under the moon's waxing light, was dark and luxurious. A few roses peeked out from protected areas near the house, and the last of the mums still had a few blooms. It was a formal French-style garden, with organized beds and meticulous grooming. Had the house been a Victorian- or Tudor-style home, it would have looked lovely. Next to a Spanish-style adobe house it just looked odd.
Grapevines, bare in their winter guise, lined the wall. In the moonlight they looked like a row of dead men, hanging arms spread wide and crucified on the frames that supported them.
I shivered and moved closer to Samuel's warmth. He gave me an odd look, doubtless scenting my unease, but set his hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer.
We followed a cobbled path past a swimming pool, covered for the winter, around the corner of the house to a broad swath of lawn. Across the lawn there was a two-story guesthouse almost a third the size of the main house. It was to this smaller building that Stefan led us.
He knocked twice at the door, then opened and waved us into an entry hall decorated aggressively in the colors and textures of the American Southwest, complete with clay pots and kachina dolls. But even the decor was overwhelmed by the smell of mostly unfamiliar flowers and herbs rather than the scents of the desert.
I sneezed, and Samuel wrinkled his nose. Perhaps all the potpourri was designed to confuse our noses-but it was only strong, not caustic. I didn't enjoy it, but it didn't stop me from smelling old leather and rotting fabrics. I took a quick, unobtrusive look around, but I couldn't see anything to account for the smell of rot; everything looked new.
"We'll wait for her in the sitting room," Stefan said, leading the way through the soaring ceilings of a living room and into a hall.
The room he took us to was half again the size of the biggest room in my trailer. From what I'd seen of the house, though, it was cozy. We'd left behind the Southwest theme for the most part, though the colors were still warm earth tones.
The seats were comfortable, if you like soft fluffy furniture. Stefan settled into a chair with every sign of relaxation as the furniture swallowed him. I scooted toward the front edge of the love seat, which was marginally firmer, but the cushions would still slow me down a little if I had to move quickly.
Samuel sat in a chair that matched Stefan's, but rose to his feet as soon as he started to sink. He stalked behind my love seat and looked out of the large window that dominated the room. It was the first window I'd seen in the house.
Moonlight streamed in, sending loving beams over his face. He closed his eyes and basked in it, and I could tell it was calling to him, even though the moon was not full. She didn't speak to me, but Samuel had once described her song to me in the words of a poet. The expression of bliss on his face while he listened to her music made him beautiful.
I wasn't the only one who thought so.
"Oh, aren't you lovely?" said a voice; a throaty, lightly European voice that preceded a woman dressed in a high-cut, semiformal dress of gold silk that looked rather odd combined with jogging shoes and calf-high athletic socks.
Her reddish blond curls were pulled up with elegant whimsy and lots of bobby pins, revealing dangling diamond earrings that matched the elaborate necklace at her throat. There were faint lines around her eyes and mouth.
She smelled a little like Stefan, so I had to assume she was a vampire, but the lines on her face surprised me. Stefan looked scarcely twenty, and I'd somehow assumed that the undead were like the werewolves, whose cells repaired themselves and removed damage of age, disease, and experience.
The woman padded into the room and made a beeline for Samuel, who turned to regard her gravely. When she leaned against him and stood on tiptoe to lightly lick his neck, he slid a hand up around to the base of her skull and looked at Stefan.
I shifted a little farther toward the edge of my seat and twisted so I could watch them over the back of the love seat. I wasn't too worried about Samuel-he was poised to break her neck. Maybe a human couldn't have managed it, but he wasn't human.
"Lilly, my Lilly fair." Stefan sighed, his voice puncturing the tension in the room. "Don't lick the guests, darling. Bad manners."
She paused, her nose resting against Samuel. I gripped the hilt of Zee's dagger and hoped I didn't have to use it. Samuel could protect himself, I hoped, but he didn't like hurting women-and Stefan's Lilly looked very feminine.
"She said we had guests for entertainment." Lilly sounded like a petulant child who knows the promised trip to the toy store is about to be delayed.
"I'm sure she meant we had guests for you to entertain, my sweet." Stefan hadn't moved from his chair, but his shoulders were tight, and his weight was forward.
"But he smells so good," she murmured. I thought she darted her head forward, but I must have been mistaken because Samuel didn't move. "He's so warm."
"He's a werewolf, darling Lilly. You'd find him a difficult meal." Stefan got up and walked slowly around my couch. Taking one of Lilly's hands in his, he kissed it. "Come entertain us, my lady."
He pulled her gently off Samuel and escorted her formally to an upright piano tucked into one corner of the room. He pulled out the bench and helped her settle.
"What should I play?" she asked. "I don't want to play Mozart. He was so rude."
Stefan touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. "By all means, play whatever you wish, and we will listen."
She sighed, an exaggerated sound with an accompanying shoulder droop, then, like a marionette she straightened from head to toe and placed her hands just so on the keys.
I don't like piano music. There was only one music teacher in Aspen Creek when I grew up, and she played piano. For four years I banged out tunes for a half hour a day and hated the piano more each year. It hated me back.
It took only a few measures for me to realize I'd been wrong about the piano-at least when Lilly played it. It didn't seem possible that all that sound came from the little upright piano and the fragile woman sitting before us.
"Liszt," whispered Samuel, stepping away from the window and sitting on the back of my seat. Then he closed his eyes and listened, just as he'd listened to the moon.
Stefan stepped away from the piano once Lilly was focused on her music. He drifted back to stand beside me, then he held out a hand.
I glanced at Samuel, but he was still lost in the music. I took Stefan's hand and let him pull me to my feet. He took me to the far side of the room before releasing me.
"It isn't being a vampire that made her this way," he said, not whispering, exactly, but in low tones that didn't carry over the music. "Her maker found her playing piano at an expensive broth
el. He decided he wanted her in his seethe, so he took her before he understood that she was touched. In the normal course she would have been mercifully killed: it is dangerous to have a vampire who cannot control herself. I know the werewolves do the same. But no one could bear to lose her music. So she is kept in the seethe and guarded like the treasure she is."
He paused. "But usually she is not allowed to wander about at will. There are always attendants who are assigned to keep her-and our guests-safe. Perhaps our Mistress amuses herself."
I watched Lilly's delicate hands flash across the keys and produce music of power and intellect that she didn't possess herself. I thought about what had happened when Lilly had come into the room.
"If Samuel had reacted badly?" I asked.
"She'd have no chance against him." Stefan rocked back on his heels unhappily. "She has no experience at taking unwilling prey, and Samuel is old. Lilly is precious to us. If he had hurt her, the whole seethe would have demanded retribution."
"Shh," said Samuel.
She played Liszt for a long time. Not the early lyrical pieces, but the ones he composed after hearing the radical violinist Paganini. But, right in the middle of one of his distinctively mad runs of notes, she switched into a blues piece I didn't recognize, something soft and relaxed that lazed in the room like a big cat. She played a little Beatles, some Chopin, and something vaguely oriental in style before falling into the familiar strains of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
"I thought you weren't going to play Mozart," said Stefan when she'd finished the song and begun picking out a melody with her right hand.
"I like his music," she explained to the keyboard. "But he was a pig." She crashed her hands on the keys twice. "But he is dead, and I am not. Not dead."
I wasn't going to argue with her. Not when one of those delicate fingers broke the key beneath it. No one else said anything either.
She got up from the piano abruptly and strode through the room. She hesitated in front of Samuel, but when Stefan cleared his throat, she trotted up to him and kissed him on the chin. "I'm going to eat now," she said. "I'm hungry."
"Fine." Stefan hugged her, then directed her out of the room with a gentle push.
She hadn't once so much as looked at me.
"So you think we're being set up?" asked Samuel, with lazy geniality that seemed somehow out of place.
Stefan shrugged. "You, I, or Lilly. Take your pick."
"It seems like a lot of trouble to go to," I ventured. "If Samuel died, Bran would tear this place apart. There wouldn't be a vampire left in the state." I looked at Stefan. "Your lady may be powerful, but numbers matter. The Tri-Cities isn't that big. If there were hundreds of you here, I'd have noticed it. Bran can call upon every Alpha in North America."
"It is nice to know how we are esteemed by the wolves. I'll make certain our Mistress knows to leave the wolf alone because she should fear them," said a woman from just behind me.
I jumped forward and turned, and Stefan was suddenly between me and the new vampire. This one was neither ethereal nor seductive. If she hadn't been a vampire, I'd have put her age somewhere around sixty, every year etched in the lines of grim disapproval that traversed her face.
"Estelle," said Stefan. I couldn't tell if it was a greeting, introduction, or admonition.
"She has changed her mind. She doesn't want to come up to visit with the wolf. They can come to her instead." Estelle didn't seem to react to Stefan at all.
"They are under my protection." Stefan's voice darkened in a way I'd never heard it before.
"She said you may come, too, if you wish." She looked at Samuel. "I'll need to take any crosses or holy objects you are wearing, please. We do not allow people to go armed in the presence of our Mistress."
She held out a gold-embossed leather bag, and Samuel unhooked his necklace. When he pulled it out of his shirt, the necklace didn't blaze or glow. It was just a bit of ordinary metal, but I saw her involuntary shudder when it brushed close to her skin.
She looked at me and I pulled out my necklace and showed her my sheep. "No crosses," I said in a bland voice. "I didn't expect to be out speaking to your Mistress tonight."
She didn't even glance at Zee's dagger, dismissing it as a weapon. After pulling the drawstring tight, she let the bag dangle from it. "Come with me."
"I'll bring them down in a minute," Stefan said. "Go tell her we are coming."
The other vampire raised her eyebrows but left without a word, carrying the bag with Samuel's cross in it.
"There's something more happening than I thought," Stefan said rapidly. "Against most of those here, I can protect you, but not the Mistress herself. If you'd like, I'll get you out of here and see if I can find the information without you."
"No," said Samuel. "We're here now. Let us finish this."
Samuel's words slurred a little, and I saw Stefan give him a sharp glance.
"Once more I offer you escort away from here." This time Stefan looked at me. "I would have no harm come to you and yours here."
"Can you find out where the other wolves are, if she doesn't want you to?" I asked him.
He hesitated, which was answer enough.
"We'll go talk to her, then," I said.
Stefan nodded, but not like he was happy about it. "Then I find myself echoing your gremlin. Keep your eyes away from hers. She'll probably have others with her, whether she allows you to see them or not. Don't look at anyone's eyes. There are four or five here who could entangle even your wolf."
He turned and led the way through the house to an alcove sheltering a wrought-iron spiral staircase. As we started down, I thought we were going to the basement, but the stairway went deeper. Small lights on the cement wall surrounding the stairs turned on as Stefan passed them. They allowed us to see the stairs-and that we were traveling down a cement tube, but they weren't bright enough to do much more. Fresh air wafted out of small vents that kept the air moving, but it also kept me from smelling anything from deeper down.
"How far down are we going?" I asked, trying to fight off the claustrophobic desire to run back the way we'd come.
"About twenty feet from the surface." Stefan's voice echoed a little-or else something below us made a noise.
Maybe I was just jumpy.
Eventually the stairway ended in a pad of cement. But even with my night vision, the darkness was so absolute I could see only a few yards in any direction. The smell of bleach danced around several scents I'd never encountered before.
Stefan moved and a series of fluorescent lights flickered to life. We stood in an empty room with cement floors, walls, and ceilings. The overall effect was sterile and empty.
Stefan didn't pause, just continued through the room and into a narrow tunnel that sloped gently upward as we walked. Steel doors without knobs or handles lined the tunnel at even intervals. I could hear things moving behind the doors and scooted up until I could touch Samuel's shoulder for reassurance. As I passed the last door, something slammed against it, ringing with a hollow boom that echoed away from us. Behind another door someone-or something-began a high-pitched hopeless cascade of laughter that ended in a series of screams.
By the end of it, I was all but crawling up on top of Samuel, but he was still relaxed, and his breathing and pulse hadn't even begun to speed up. Damn him. I didn't take a deep breath until we'd left the doors behind.
The tunnel took a narrow turn, and the floor became a steep upward set of twelve stairs that ended in a room with curved plastered walls, wooden floors, and soft lighting. Directly opposite the stairway was a sumptuous mocha leather couch whose curves echoed the walls.
A woman reclined on two overstuffed tapestry-covered pillows braced against one of the couch's arms. She wore silk. I could smell the residue of the silkworms, just as I could smell the faint scent I was learning to identify with vampire.
The dress itself was simple and expensive, revealing her figure in swirling colors ranging from purple to red. Her narrow f
eet were bare except for red and purple toenail polish. She had them braced so her knees came up and provided backing to support the paperback she was reading.
She finished the page, dog-eared one corner, and set it carelessly on the floor. She swung her legs off the couch and shifted so that her face was toward us before she raised her gaze to look at us. It was so gracefully done that I barely had time to drop my own eyes.
"Introduce us, Stefano," she said, her voice a deep contralto made the richer by a touch of an Italian accent.
Stefan bowed, a formal gesture that should have looked odd with his torn jeans, but somehow came out gracefully old-fashioned instead.
" Signora Marsilia," he said, "May I introduce you to Mercedes Thompson, auto mechanic extraordinaire and her friend Dr. Samuel Cornick, who is the Marrok's son. Mercy, Dr. Cornick, this is Signora Marsilia, Mistress of the Mid-Columbia Seethe."
"Welcome," she said.
It had been bothering me how human the two women upstairs had seemed with their wrinkles and imperfections. Stefan, himself, had a touch of otherness that I could see. I had known him for inhuman the first time I'd seen him, but, except for the distinctive scent of vampire, the other two women would have passed for human.
This one would not have.
I stared at her, trying to nail down what was making the hair on the back of my neck rise. She looked like a woman in her early twenties, evidently having died and become vampire before life had marked her. Her hair was blond, which was not a color I associated with Italy. Her eyes were dark, though, as dark as my own.
Hastily, I jerked my gaze from her face, my breath coming more rapidly as I realized how easy it was to forget. She hadn't been looking at me though. Like the other vampires, her attention was on Samuel, and understandably so. He was the son of the Marrok, Bran's son, a person of influence rather than a VW mechanic. Then, too, most women would look at him rather than me.
"I have said something to amuse you, Mercedes?" Marsilia asked. Her voice was pleasant, but there was power behind it, something akin to the power the Alphas could call upon.
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