Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  The tube showed me a flight of steps leading down to a safety door. Light radiated through the ornate grille casting black traceries of shadow over the stairs. It also cast the silhouette of someone in the room beyond the door, tipped back against the wall, with what looked suspiciously like a rifle in the crook of one elbow. I couldn’t get a scent reading on him, but not because of the ward. The sweet pungency of high-quality weed drifted up the stairs, filling my nose to the exclusion of anything else.

  The fact that he had a rifle didn’t mean he wasn’t a vamp, but the weed probably did. Drugs had no effect on the vampire lack of a metabolism and so were uninteresting to them. They had plenty of other vices to compensate.

  I stood up, tucked the tube inside my jacket and jumped through the ward. Any lingering doubt I’d had as to the type of doorkeeper I was facing wore off when there was no immediate response to the small tone the ward sent out at my entry. By the time the shadow’s bootheels hit the cracked cement underfoot, I was already at the bottom of the stairs and reaching through the iron cage to grab him by the shirt. A quick slam of his head against the unyielding doors knocked him out and the keys were in his pocket.

  Simple.

  What wasn’t so simple was what was reverberating off the walls. It sounded like drums or too many hearts beating too fast. I couldn’t pin it down, but it was doing bad things to my blood pressure. I stepped through the door and over the inert guard, taking a second to attach him to the grille with the cuffs he’d thoughtfully had in his back pocket.

  A couple of small red dots had stuck to my jeans. I peeled one off with a thumb. It said “forty-two.” I flicked off a few more, and they had numbers, too. They were spilling out of a box with a lot of red, fewer orange and a couple of bright yellow circles. All had numbers, except for the yellow ones.

  I took one of each, appropriated the guard’s flashlight and headed down the corridor. It sloped away on a sharp incline, not quite as steep as the stairs but close, and the thrumming sound got worse the farther I went, echoing strangely in the enclosed space. There was something familiar about it, something I’d heard before, I just couldn’t place it.

  And then I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

  A door slammed open at the end of the corridor, and a guy staggered out, obviously inebriated. A wash of light, noise and strong smells spilled out along with him. I caught the door before it closed and found myself in the back of a large room lined with sloping stadium-style seats and packed with people. I couldn’t see much else, because a couple of hulking shapes blocked my view.

  The two vamps looked at me, one bored, the other just plain mean. The bored one said something, but I couldn’t tell what. My hearing is better than good, but the noise level was incredible. The commotion going on behind them had reached a fever pitch, and the crowd was chanting and stomping their feet.

  That was the weird sound I’d heard: the collective pounding of hundreds of feet on a dirt floor. The place looked like it had once been a cellar, one of the mass of old structures undergirding Chinatown. They and the tunnels that connect them were once used by the tongs as escape routes in their constant feuds, but these days, they’d mostly been converted to underground shopping malls and storage areas for smuggled Gucci knockoffs.

  This one appeared to have been appropriated for another purpose.

  Golden graffiti traced along one grimy wall, but unlike Fin’s, it wasn’t scrolling. Instead, a running outline of abstract shapes girdled a list of names, with numbers scrawled alongside them. They were odds, I realized, recognizing the formula.

  The bored guard pointed at the yellow dot on my clothes and hiked a thumb to the left. I didn’t know what that meant, but he moved out of the way, letting me pass, so I went in the specified direction.

  I stayed near the wall, and edged around the crowd, trying to search for a familiar figure in the crush. It wasn’t easy, as it was standing room only in the back, and my head only came up to the shoulders of a lot of the people. But here and there I caught glimpses of what looked like a live-action version of Olga’s chess set.

  A powerfully built male ogre in a leather loincloth was jabbing a long spear at an equally minimally attired troll. The troll had a club, but he wasn’t using it. It lay ignored on the ground, the heavy wood a poor substitute for his own stonelike hands.

  He appeared to be trying to crack the ogre’s head between them like a nut. The ogre didn’t seem in favor of this idea and kept jabbing the spear at the troll’s small eyes. Considering how useless troll eyes are anyway, this seemed a bad strategy to me, and it had the double effect of pissing the troll off.

  Luckily for the ogre, who was maybe half the troll’s size, mountains of troll flesh do not move quickly. He was just keeping ahead of the massive hands, one of which smashed down into the floor with a bone- shaking thud. The troll was becoming frustrated, and the ogre was growing tired. This wasn’t going to last much longer.

  I spied a kind of box seats overhead, in the form of a platform jutting out of the wall. It looked like it had been built over the entrance to another tunnel. A rickety-looking set of wooden stairs went up to it and the back disappeared into darkness.

  I headed for it, hoping that the stairs would give me a better vantage point from which to scan the room. There was a vamp at the bottom of the steps, which had a rope stretched across them, but he caught sight of the yellow tag on my shirt and let me through. I was halfway up when the stairs, which had been vibrating slightly to the enthusiastic stomping of the crowd, jittered more violently.

  A man staggered out of the darkness at the top, a spill of bright red blood cascading down the front of his white dress shirt. I had a few seconds to recognize Geminus as he teetered on the edge of the platform, along with the gaping wound in his throat, the knife in his back and the disbelief on his features. Then he was falling, hitting the ground in the middle of the two combatants, his blood leeching out to stain the arena sands.

  It looked like that ancient seer had been right, after all.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  For a moment, I could see the warm glow of Geminus’s power melting through his skin like sunlight through gauze. It turned everything white and gold, the entire room bathed in flickering fox fire. It was strangely beautiful, but unlike the rest of the room, I didn’t waste time staring. I’d seen enough dead vampires to know what was coming.

  The young aren’t too showy in death, having little power to expend. But Geminus had two thousand years of pent-up energy, and it had to go somewhere. And unlike with Elyas, his masters weren’t around to absorb any of it.

  My foot hit the top stair as a sudden burst of brightness flared at my back. I glanced behind me to see white-hot tendrils snaking around the body on the floor, and then a flash—and for a moment, Geminus became a human torch of impossible brilliance. I put on a burst of speed as something huge lashed through the room, an unseen current that trembled on the air, shaking a rain of dust from the rafters. And then the world fell away in a clash of thunder.

  I was halfway down a sloping corridor, but the backlash was enough to pick me up and throw me half a dozen yards. I landed on my side and rolled, wincing away from the sheer brightness of it, shielding my eyes with my hands. I don’t know if the stairs collapsed as Geminus’s death released his power, or if everybody panicked and headed for the main exit. But nothing followed me down into the depths of the tunnel except for a billowing wash of dust and a lot of screams.

  I lay on the floor, bruised and dust-covered for a second, breathing heavy. Until part of the roof collapsed, sending me scuttling down the tunnel on all fours, trying to stay ahead of the rain of dirt and moldy bricks. It felt like a dozen fists pummeling me, and I could see cracks in the round ceiling above, spreading rapidly.

  There was a side tunnel up ahead, and I dove for it, afraid I was about to become a permanent resident of Chinatown. But the expected destruction never came. These tunnels had been here since the nineteenth century; I guess
they’d withstood worse.

  I hugged the wall anyway, my breathing labored in my ears. I don’t like dark places. I really don’t like dark, enclosed, underground places. And the fact that this one just happened to have a murderer running around in it wasn’t helping my phobia.

  I pulled a flashlight out of my jacket. My eyesight is good enough that I don’t always need one, but I carried it just in case. The steel body did double duty as a club, and it felt reassuringly solid in my hand as I clicked it on.

  At first, all I saw was tumbled brick, dirt and dust in the main corridor, and dark stone laced with cobwebs on the side. But then the light glinted off a dark smear on the floor. Blood; fresh.

  I crouched, listening intently, and heard some faint cursing from somewhere deeper in the labyrinth. It could have been anything or anyone. I was sure plenty of people used these tunnels, and murderers wouldn’t be likely to call attention to themselves by swearing up a storm. But I didn’t have a trail at all in the other direction, and no knowledge whatsoever of the maze down here. I followed the blood.

  It wasn’t hard. Along with the spattered trail, there was a wide swath of slightly cleaner floor, near one wall, with some odd marks around it. They didn’t look like they’d been left by shoes or boots, more like something had been dragged through the grime. Something that might have been struggling, because some of those markings looked a lot like handprints.

  And then there was the blood. I could have probably followed it without the flashlight, the smell was so strong. Stronger than it should have been, for such a thin trail.

  I knelt and ran a finger through the century’s worth of muck on the floor, bringing a small sample to my nose. And flinched away, an electric charge shooting up my spine. Vampire blood. From an old one, based on the feel. It was rich and dark, closer to black than red, with a strange, almost velvety texture. Very old, I decided, looking up.

  The thought made me hesitate. I didn’t think of myself as particularly cowardly, and for once I had plenty of weapons and no compunction at all about using them. But a wounded master could drain me of the blood he desperately needed to heal before I even got close enough to spot him. And no weapon would help me then.

  But he had to know I was here; this close, he could smell every breath, hear every heartbeat. And he wasn’t feeding yet. He was, however, cursing a lot more. But not in English. I listened, frowning, as I inched forward, and figured out what language he was corrupting about the same time I rounded a bend and saw him.

  He was slouched on the filthy floor, inching along on his elbows, his back legs dragging through the grime. His once-white tunic was drenched in blood, much of it still wet. The dampness had picked up the furred gray cover of dust that had collected near the walls, like foam on the sea, as he dragged himself forward. The result was so startlingly like an enormous dust bunny that I just stared at him for a second, frozen in shock.

  “Anthony?”

  The esteemed consul of the powerful European Senate looked back over his grubby shoulder. And an expression of profound relief chased away the almost panic on his features. “Oh, thank the gods!”

  I blinked. That wasn’t the reception I usually received from vampires, much less master ones. I moved forward, and he grasped my hand, already babbling before I could so much as get a word out.

  “We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him, trying to struggle out of a grip that was about to crush my fingers. “The roof held. I don’t think we’re in danger of a—”

  “Oh, we’re in danger, all right.” He gave an almost giggle that had me doing a double take. Consuls did not giggle. I hadn’t even thought they knew how.

  “From what?” I asked cautiously. “Geminus is dead.”

  “Geminus.” He hissed the name through his teeth. “I’d like to kill him for getting me into this.”

  “Didn’t you?” There weren’t a lot of people who could have sent a first-level master reeling into that arena, but I was looking at one of them. It seemed like Louis-Cesare might have been right, after all.

  But Anthony merely shot me an exasperated glance. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “Then what did?”

  His eyes darted here and there, the whites showing all the way around the iris. I wasn’t sure if that was due to nervousness, or because of the way the skin seemed to have pulled back from his bones a little. Old Anthony wasn’t looking too good.

  “It was that thing,” he whispered.

  “What thing?” I asked, as he tried to struggle to his feet. He failed.

  “The thing that killed him! It’s still down here, and it’s going to get us, too. Oh, yes, and don’t think you’ll be spared.” He wagged a finger at me. “You’re half vampire, aren’t you?”

  I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, or if he even did; he looked a little crazed. But at the moment, I was less concerned over some possibly mythical monster than over why he couldn’t stand. It takes a lot to put a master vamp on his ass, and Anthony was clearly hurting.

  “What happened to you?” I asked, drawing back the folds of the toga he still had half draped around himself. And sucked in a breath.

  I knew where the blood came from, I thought dizzily. Anthony didn’t have one stake in him, or even one dozen. His body was riddled by them, like a human porcupine. They didn’t look like regulation stakes, now that I focused past the gore that covered them. More like shards of some kind of boards. But they’d done the trick. Some of the longer ones had passed completely through his body and were tenting the back of his toga.

  And one had nailed him straight through the heart.

  “Why haven’t you pulled these out?” I asked, bewildered and a little sickened.

  “Don’t touch them!” he said savagely. “It was bad enough putting them in the first time!”

  It took me a second, but I got it. Or I thought I did. “You stabbed yourself?”

  “I had no choice. The stake through my heart is coated in wax. I had to drain myself so my body temperature would lower. Otherwise, I’d have melted the damn thing already.”

  “And vamp bodies don’t bleed much from a single wound, so . . .”

  “I had to keep on stabbing myself! If I hadn’t been left near some old wooden crates, I’d be dead now.”

  “You bought yourself time for your neck to heal,” I said, impressed in spite of myself. I’d killed a lot of vamps, and never once had any of them thought of that. Of course, most of them were pretty much paralyzed with a stake through the heart. I wondered how much power Anthony had to have to still be somewhat mobile in spite of the stake and the massive blood loss.

  And then I wondered what would happen if he didn’t make it. Geminus had almost brought down the roof, and Anthony was at least as old and a good deal more powerful. “We need to get out of here,” I said, trying to get him up.

  “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” he asked, with vicious sarcasm.

  Considering the circumstances, I decided to let that go and concentrated on where to grab him. There wasn’t a lot of free space left, but I finally managed to get an arm around his waist. A heave got him to his somewhat shaky legs. It would have been nice to have been able to lean him against a wall, but that would only have done more damage. And it didn’t look like he could take much more.

  “Do you know these tunnels?” I asked him, wondering which way out was closest.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Why would I have asked if I did?” I demanded, trying not to snap. Anthony weighed a ton, and he was bearing almost none of his own weight. “I’ve never been down here before.”

  “You live here. Don’t you ever go exploring?”

  “Underground? No.”

  “Underground is where all the interesting things happen.”

  “Underground is where the monsters live.” Anthony’s surprisingly high-pitched laughter echoed off the walls. “You aren’t kidding, sist
er.”

  Anthony, I decided, might have lost a little too much blood. He was getting punchy. “Come on,” I told him, heading back for the main hall. Bad as it was, it beat wandering around lost for hours.

  I’d started to get up a head of steam when Anthony suddenly jerked to a stop and stumbled over to the nearest wall. He clutched it, muttering another rude phrase in Latin. Mine’s not too good, but I think it had something to do with someone’s grandmother and a one-legged donkey.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, feeling a little stupid even as I said it. Because obviously not. But his health didn’t seem to be uppermost in Anthony’s mind.

  “It’s back!” he hissed, staring around fearfully.

  “What’s back?”

  “That thing! Gods! I thought it had left!”

  I stared at him, wondering how I was supposed to get a seriously wounded consul out of this underground maze when the man was clearly not in his right mind. And then I heard it, too: a distant, far- off echo, just a sigh on the air. “Anthoneee.”

  My breath caught.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear that!” Anthony said, looking at me wildly.

  “I heard something.” I paused, trying to listen past the thud of my heart slamming into my rib cage—Anthony’s distress was contagious. But the sound didn’t come again.

  “Where is it? Which way did it come from?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, gods!”

  Master vamps hate to be seen losing their cool, and consuls are supposed to be above such human things. But Anthony was clearly terrified. I decided I didn’t want to know what could frighten a guy who could stab himself a couple dozen times without flinching.

  “Let’s go.”

  I pulled him down the corridor, a little faster than his feet wanted to work. He kept wobbling over to one side or another, almost forcing me headfirst into a wall more than once. I finally pulled him into a fireman’s carry, since most of the stakes along his torso had already been pushed through to the back, thanks to his dragging crawl along the floor.