Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  “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.

  “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.”

  “And something went wrong.”

  “Everything! For starters, he wouldn’t bring me the rune until we’d already made the sale. I told him it didn’t work like that, but he said it did this time or no deal. I don’t like selling something I don’t got on hand, but the boss said to do it. And it went okay. He got the reserve he’d wanted and then some, and after the auction, I sent him a message and he said he’d be here in a couple hours.”

  “But he didn’t show?”

  “No, he came through the portal on schedule, but that’s the last thing that went right!”

  “And this portal would be where?”

  “At the club. It’s upstairs, in the manager’s old office—”

  “At the—Are you crazy? You distribute from there! Everybody knows that!”

  “Which is why it was perfect.” The little shit grinned at me. “You idiots were running around, checking my apartment—oh, yeah, I knew about that—and my warehouse and that tea shop I own, but nobody ever thought to look in the most obvious spot.”

  “Because it’s stupid!”

  “Stupid like a fox,” he said, and then frowned. “No, wait—”

  “What. Happened?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, I’d called in a luduan to authenticate the piece before payment was made, and he was late. And I get nervous around those things.”

  “Luduans?”

  “Fey.” He made a face. “They don’t move enough or they move weird; I don’t know. Anyway, they give me the creeps. And so I tell Jókell to make himself comfortable, and I go down to get some refreshment, and I don’t hurry back, you know? I chat with some of the guys at the bar and remind Ken—that’s the DJ—that some of us like something besides techno occasionally—”

  “Ray!”

  “Right, right. So, after about fifteen minutes, I go back up with the tray. I push open the door, and I don’t see him, but I don’t panic because I figure even the fey have to use the john once in a while, right? And then something grabs my ankle, and I look down and it’s this bloody hand. And that’s when I found him, squashed between the desk and the wall. Or what was left of him.”

  “And Elyas was there?”

  “No, but I could smell him, so he must have just left.”

  “And how do you know what Elyas smells like?”

  “Maybe because he’d been down to the club that afternoon,” Ray said sarcastically. “He was trying to bribe me to give him the rune before the sale, and getting really pushy about it. I finally told him I didn’t have it, that it wouldn’t be delivered until after the sale, so he might as well go away.”

  “You told him?”

  “Well, I didn’t expect him to come down and murder the guy, did I?” Ray asked huffily. “Anyway, the fey are supposed to be hard to kill. And I guess maybe they are if you use magic. But this one had been gutted. He died a couple minutes later.”

  “And the rune was missing.” I didn’t bother to make it a question.

  “Damn straight. He had this gold thing around his neck when he arrived, fist-sized, with like a sunburst pattern. Kinda gaudy, but it looked expensive. But he said it was nothing, just a carrier for the rune. He showed it to me, and the rune fit inside in this little space. But when I went back up, it was gone.”

  “The rune or the necklace?”

  “Both.”

  “Then that thing you said you ‘misplaced’—”

  “Was the rune, yeah. I called Elyas as soon as I calmed down and told him that he either returned the damn thing or I’d finger him for killing a fey. And you know what they’re like about revenge.”

  On a personal level. “But he refused?”

  “No. I mean, he was pretty nasty about it, but he finally agreed. But it was almost morning by then, and I didn’t want him coming over when my boys were all asleep. So I told him to send it over tonight. But he didn’t show, and I couldn’t get him on the damn phone, and the boss was due in a couple hours! And I was freaking out, you know? The boss was flying in special to take the rune to Ming-de tonight, and I didn’t have it! I knew he’d kill me.”

  “That sounds about right,” I agreed. That was the way the vampire hierarchy worked, even in the more legitimate families. Cause your master to lose face, and you were likely to lose yours, along with a lot of other body parts.

  “Elyas never intended to show,” Ray said, getting worked up again. “He just wants me dead and conned that French guy into doing his dirty work!”

  “Louis-Cesare. And you could have mentioned some of this earlier!” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, I can’t imagine why I’d have trouble trusting the freak who decapitated me!”

  “So what changed?”

  “What changed is you told Louis-Cesare you want the rune. Well, you’re not going to get it from Elyas. He’s not going to give it up, and if it does its thing and makes him invincible, you can’t kill him. The only chance you got is to blackmail him. I can tell everyone what I saw if he don’t cough it up.”

  “But you’d have to be alive for me to do that,” I said, seeing where this was going.

  “Which I won’t be, once he gets his hands on me.”

  I stared blankly at the trees. The leaves shook, the tops swaying in the freshening wind. The sky above was a troubled gray, dark clouds mounting, heralding another thunderstorm. It perfectly matched my mood.

  On the one hand, if Ray was telling the truth and Elyas really had killed the fey, it opened up some interesting possibilities. He might be invulnerable, but his family and property weren’t. The fey could ruin him, making blackmail far from an empty threat. With a little luck, it might be possible to get the rune and Christine.

  On the other hand, I had to convince Louis-Cesare to ignore Elyas’s offer and that wasn’t going to be easy. Christine was within his grasp; all he had to do was turn Ray in, and it was a sure thing. Blackmail, on the other hand, included risk: Ray might be lying and Elyas might dig in his heels, counting on the word of a Senate member to beat out that of a nightclub owner.

  No. Louis-Cesare wasn’t going to take a chance like that. Not when he could walk upstairs and end this right now.

  Get away, keep Ray alive and willing to talk. That was the plan. I glanced down at the deserted alley. The fire escape made getting out of here easy, except for one small problem. The rest of Ray was in a guest room somewhere, and I didn’t even know which one.

  “If you’re lying to me to save your skin, I’ll find out,” I told him, dragging us back through the window. “And I’ll be ten times worse to you than Elyas.”

  “Yeah. Like I could make this shit—”

  Ray cut off midsentence because someone rapped on the bathroom door. I paused half in, half out of the window. “Dorina, it has been half an hour,” Louis-Cesare said. “Are you ready?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ray and I stared at each other. “Almost,” I said quickly. “Let me just . . . uh . . .”

  I slithered the rest of the way through, set the duffel on the counter and started pawing through it. I had things in there that could kill a person fifty different ways, but my less lethal alternatives were few and far between
. I’d been going into a vampire club, and not a lot works on them.

  And that’s especially true for first- level masters. I rejected magical cuffs—he’d be out of them in five seconds—a stun spray—he probably wouldn’t even feel it—and a disorienting sphere, which I already knew was a waste of resources. I finally had to admit that I had nothing that could trap Louis-Cesare long enough to do any good.

  “Dorina?”

  “Coming!”

  I started pulling on the dress, or trying to. But that top would have defeated a puzzle master. “Where are you?” I mouthed at Ray, who was watching me anxiously.

  “You mean my body?” he mouthed back.

  “Of course! Where is it?”

  “In the tub.”

  “What?”

  “That old guy left me and never came back.”

  Typical. Horatiu had probably forgotten he was there. “Get out the front door, fast.”

  Small eyes popped. “By myself?”

  “Yes! Go to the car.”

  “What?”

  “To. The. Car. I’ll stall him.”

  I ran a comb through my hair, which was still wet, forming a sleek cap around my head. I tried again to sort out the straps, but it was hopeless. They were a twisted mess that made no logical sense.

  “Dorina. Is there a problem?”

  I threw open the door. “I can’t get the straps right,” I said.

  Louis-Cesare stood there, his hand raised for another knock. His face was wearing that expression men get when a woman takes three times longer to get ready than she’d promised. It didn’t last long. Okay, I thought, watching blue eyes dilate black. Maybe the dress looked better than I thought.

  “A little help?” I prompted.

  He hesitated for a moment, but he finally stepped behind me. He made a few minor adjustments, the calluses on his fingertips catching slightly on the soft material. Miraculously, the dress fell into place, every shining strap lying perfectly flat against my skin.

  I twisted in front of the mirror. I decided that it wasn’t too bad. It was sleek and simple, and it let the cut do the work instead of requiring embellishments. And it fit perfectly, except for being maybe an inch or two too long. But the plain black satin heels should take care of that.