Vampire's Dilemma

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  “I’m not that evil.”

  There was no way he couldn’t smile. He was doomed. “You vampire, me salesman. It’s a match made in heaven.”

  She smiled hopefully. “Not hell?”

  “Only if nine years of working with traders who could make blood sucking fiends look like Saints has been hell. And it’s been pretty damned fine.”

  She looked so hopefully at him. “This could be even better.”

  He took her hand in his good one. “The best.”

  She looked into his eyes. “You’re sure?”

  He smirked. “I’m open to new positions.”

  She caressed his hand. “You are?

  The soft glove, the firm strokes and the tickle of the ribbon laces begged him to reveal the flawless skin he knew lay underneath—he couldn’t resist. “No self-respecting salesman isn’t. Make me an offer, baby.”

  He’d worked with girls whose sales voices were liquid sex. None matched hers. “Can you fulfill it?”

  He couldn’t top it, but he could try. “Like a dream, sweetheart. Your boots—as the English guys I worked with back home say—will be well and truly filled.”

  She licked her lips. “Promises, promises.”

  And he focused on her lips, not her fangs. “I’m a market man, babe, my word is my bond.”

  She stroked his cheek. “I like that. I know I shouldn’t. You’re trouble.”

  He grinned. “You know it.”

  She matched it. “But I do like trouble.”

  He caressed her cheek with his injured hand. “And I bet that gets you into trouble.”

  Her smile shadowed. “Every time.”

  He gripped her hand tighter. “And you keep coming back for more.”

  “Every time.”

  It was the perfect moment to ask, “Like this thing with Fur Girl? What’s with that?”

  “I wish I was sure.”

  “Theories are good. Facts are better, but I’d take guesses at this point. Which of you is the fifth wife called Francesca.”

  * * * *

  She stopped and for a long time didn’t answer, just looked around the empty courtyard they’d walked into. She let go of his hand to wrench open a manhole, stepped onto a ladder and said. “We were never married.”

  He couldn’t leave it there and followed her into a long tunnel. “No?”

  She took a small flashlight from her pocket and flicked it on before answering, “Men like that never married a butcher’s daughter.”

  He took it from her and spot-lit her. “I’d have married you like a shot.”

  Fran ticked off the distance as she talked. “He wasn’t in a position to. He saw me, wanted me, and made an arrangement with my father. My sisters’ families were built on dowries made from selling me to him.”

  “That must have been harsh.”

  She shrugged, stopped, dug in her pockets for a small metal spike and started to dig a brick free. “I loved them. I understood. I was how things were done in 1597.”

  He held the light so she could see better, “You sure?”

  “Yes! I was happy for them. I had to do my duty, so I did. And they married good men who gave them children, a home, good lives.”

  “Not your life.”

  With a gap to work from, she started to pull brick after brick free. “No, there were no great painters, good silks—”

  “Or the whole super-strong blood-drinking creature of the night lifestyle thing.”

  She couldn’t help smiling as she rooted in the hole she’d made. “No, none of that for them. Wasn’t I the lucky one?”

  He knew he should ask more, but knew better than to distract someone that focused on their goal. “Lucky for me. I wouldn’t have met you otherwise.”

  “Flatterer. I bet you say that to all the women you follow down tunnels.”

  “Only the good looking ones.”

  And she was gorgeous, even with smudges of brick dust on her nose. The broad grin on her face made her look even prettier when she turned back to him with a rusty, old tobacco tin in her hands. He focused the flashlight on the tin as she forced it open. She saw the piece of paper inside and sighed with visible relief.

  Now he had to ask. “What is it?”

  “What I was last here in Milan to find, both officially and unofficially.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Vampires hear things. We know—none better—that the world does have more things in it than are dreamt of in the human world. Powerful things. In this case, something Mussolini found excavating the underground ruins of Nero’s Golden House.”

  “I thought the occult thing was the Nazis’.”

  “Mostly, but this was special. The knife Brutus used to stab Caesar was powerful. It had to be to break the protection Venus put on her descendent, and it was. It was ancient already, a relic taken out of Egypt and used by Seth himself to slay his brother. It can break anything, destroy any ruler or treaty.”

  “Treaties?”

  “The European Union—you think that was written without magic infusing each piece of paper, each pen wielded by the founders? To bind nations that warred on each other for years upon end, the magic had to be powerful.”

  “And the knife can break it?”

  She nodded. “Yes. And rip apart the work of the Risorgimento, tear the wealthy North and Rome from the drain that is the poor South.”

  He nodded. “I’ve seen in the last few weeks that some people want that. Typical!”

  “With the knife and enough money and power they can do it.”

  “But the knife’s not in the tin.”

  “The location is.”

  He boggled. “And the allies or the partisans knew about this?”

  “Not this. My mission was the other contents.” She shrugged. “The numbered Swiss bank accounts where much of the gold Mussolini stole from his victims ended up.”

  Matt calculated the numbers, and came up with hundreds of millions, possibly billions. “And you left them down here for sixty years.”

  “We were ambushed. My friends were killed, my partner wounded, dying. I hid it, tried to find help for him. Then it was chaos, years of chaos, the victims were dead, the new government, I could not trust it—or the ones that followed. They were all too closely linked to an industrialist I knew of old.”

  He put the pieces together. “One that’s just died?”

  She brushed her eye, getting brick dust across her cheek. “Yes. It’s how I knew it was safe to come back for the gold. That and I heard rumors of a conspiracy to break up Italy and knew I needed to retrieve the knife.”

  “Let’s do it then.”

  * * * *

  They retraced their steps and climbed into the fresh air and cold darkness of night. He brushed as much of the dirt as he could from her face while she read the contents of the tin by a streetlamp.

  She said, “The Duomo.”

  He grinned. “Hidden in plain sight in a floodlit cathedral. Smart choice! But one that makes it hard to do the ‘X marks the spot’ digging routine.”

  She grinned back at him. “Digging shouldn’t be required, but discretion is always good.”

  He offered his arm. “After dinner, or drinks maybe.” He couldn’t help doing the bad Romanian accent, “Do you drink—wine?”

  She laughed, nodded and they found a small trattoria to clean up in.

  Matt, fortified by pasta, asked as they left to walk to the cathedral, “So back to your twin with the bling habit. The one that looks so like you that I thought the picture of her was you. Your best guess?”

  “A certain industrialist’s latest toy. Maybe he was feeling nostalgic for me. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the mid-sixteen hundreds.

  “So you didn’t run off with his money?”

  She shrugged. “No chance of that. But in the end I didn’t need to. Money breeds money.”

  “I know that.”

  “You should, but it’s still true. My patron already had money
and power. Me, no, I was his ornament, his companion, his bedmate, but all I had was his. When he was betrayed by the friend he refused to share immortality with and the Inquisition came for us, I was on my own.”

  He reached out to her. “But you survived and prospered.”

  She looked at him. “It’s easy to make money in a city wracked with plague if you’re already dead.” Her vision was fixed centuries away. “And there were so many plagues. Smallpox, typhus, plague, they all taste different, you know?”

  It was lucky that he hadn’t wanted dessert. “Um, I didn’t.”

  “The finest courtesan in Rome wrapped in red damask tastes as hot as the sweetest sin.”

  “Vaccination, it’s a good thing.”

  “It does save a girl from having to drain the friend that would never survive the loss of her looks.” She looked at him, but she wasn’t with him. “Typhus is sour. Even in the sweetest soldier.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s even sourer when he loves you.”

  He grabbed her hand. “Fran.”

  She held his in a death grip. “He saved me when his men would have torn me to pieces. He was such a sweet boy. I wish I could remember his name or even the city in whose ruins I buried him. But it’s so many lifetimes ago and all that’s left is the sour note of loss on my tongue.”

  Matt’s heart broke for her. “Oh, Fran.”

  “But nothing tastes fouler than the plague.”

  “I can imagine.”

  She swallowed a sob. “No, you really can’t.”

  “I’ll try. If it’ll help.”

  “When I was on my own, after they came for us, and I escaped, I tried to find my sisters, find shelter, a home maybe—”

  “What happened?”

  “Plague, sweeping the city, consuming all it could and vomiting the excess.”

  He squeezed her hand in support. “Your sisters?”

  She squeezed back. “Stricken.”

  “I’d seen so many since I’d been changed. He…we enjoyed cutting a swath through the dying. The worst of sinners and totally immune to the sea of death around us—it’s heady.”

  “I can imagine.”

  The street was carpeted, electric lights illuminated the shops, but she didn’t walk those. “No, you can’t. Dogs fighting over a dying child. A mother smothering her own children, choosing damnation over hearing them scream for one moment longer. The liberties taken by the men who fill the death carts with the wine seller’s virgin daughter—tell me you could see that over and over again as you fill your belly with the delights of suffering and still keep your humanity.”

  “I can’t. I don’t know how you did it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But you now, okay, fangs, but you’re sounding pretty damned upset, which kinda screams humanity—if not human—to me.”

  “I glutted myself on death. For so long it sickened me.”

  “What changed?”

  “The swellings; they’re grotesque and they reek. And Matt, it’s so painful, they’re pleading for it to stop, for an end, for a mercy that never comes fast enough and all you can do is give them a quicker death.” She gripped his hands hard enough to bruise. “The rings were still warm from their skin. My nieces—they were so burned up with fever that they thought I was an angel.”

  “An angel of death?”

  “Angels don’t drink death from the veins of children they love. They’re shining creatures, or so the painters would have you believe. I don’t know. I’ve never seen an angel.”

  “Not even when you were dying?”

  “No white light, shimmering choirs or old bearded men with keys to Pearly Gates. Just his teeth in my throat and the blood leaving my body like I was floating on razor blades.”

  A lifetime of faith, however variable, should have made a sound when it broke. But all was silence wrapped up in the small woman in front of him. “There was nothing?”

  Her sadly simple, “No,” snapped an anchor going back to childhood.

  A lifeline he hadn’t really realized was there until it broke, leaving him floundering in a sea of uncertainty. It seemed strangely appropriate that it happened at the doors of the cathedral.

  Everything he’d been raised to believe in might be a lie, but Matt clung to learning new truths. “And when you tasted his blood? You did that, right? It is in the movies.”

  “The movies, the television, all those books, in that they’re right. It is always about the blood.” She sighed, the long suffering sigh of one who’s made a mistake and paid for it with the ultimate life sentence. “I never should have had drinks with that Irish hack back in the nineteenth century.”

  “You should at least have gotten a piece of the action.”

  “I know.”

  Spying a woman in fur at the edge of the square, they slipped into the cathedral, finding a deserted area in its vastness.

  He had to know. “So you haven’t killed since when?”

  She looked at him in absolute honesty. “Other than in self-defense and ending the suffering of those that asked—and I hated every drop of that blood in my throat—The Thirty Years War.”

  * * * *

  “Which is such a waste, Francesca. You were magnificent in the hunt!” The speaker was an older man, whose expensive suit didn’t conceal his bulk, but rather emphasized the sheer presence of the man.

  She shook her head, shamed. “I was a monster.”

  “Exactly!” He eyed Matt like a well-fed cat contemplating a particularly scrawny mouse. “Still consorting with peasants, child?”

  She stood up straight. “My choices are my own.” Then she looked embarrassed, but fell back on the manners of her adopted country. “Matt Neri, Il Cardinale—my patron of long ago.”

  Matt recognized the face from a portrait in the first gallery he’d visited. It was the same face as the dead industrialist in one of the links he found on the Internet.

  Two days ago he’d have freaked out, but now, even though the blood of his ancestors screamed out for justice against one of the aristocrats that took everything and left them with dust, he inclined his head, feigning respect. He hated it, but through years of playing nice with the foulest specimens of humanity to win a client or close a sale he had developed a special smile for those he hated.

  He was completely ignored.

  The close-set eyes only saw Fran. He wore a dark blue cashmere coat not the red robes and hat of the portrait, but the huge ring and fat fingers were identical, as was the attitude of the man. He seemed to be waiting for Fran to drop to her knees and kiss the ring.

  Her eyes were fixed on it. “But they found it in the fire. It’s how I knew you were dead, why I came now.”

  He patted her head. “My dear girl. You should have remembered how nothing escapes me. Nothing that is mine—not for long.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “It was a gambit, to fake your death.”

  “Naturally.”

  Fran tilted her head to ask, “Did your latest wife know?”

  “Of course, though she is hardly a wife, just a poor substitute whore. One that will have to be punished for using the inevitable chaos after my ‘death’ to fail to inform me of your return.” His pursed smile was that of a modern day Henry the Eighth. “Well, it has been some years since I stretched myself dealing with an unsatisfactory woman. It will be entertaining.”

  She stood bolt upright. “I won’t let you do that, Marco.”

  Matt stood right beside her. “And she won’t be alone in that.”

  Only to be silenced as ancient fingers gripped his throat.

  He could see the young and vulnerable girl she’d once been in the way her arm and right hand twisted outwards to reach out to the man that had bought her. “Please, Marco, let him go.”

  Nails dug into Matt’s skin as Marco asked, “Do you love him?”

  Matt could see honesty and strategy warring on her face and if he hadn’t been half-strangled would have sung with joy
when honesty won out and she said, “I think I might. It’s very new, but I think he is someone I could walk the shadows with.” She looked imploringly at Marco. “You know how rare that is. Don’t take that from me, please, I’m begging you.”

  Marco shook his head and a reluctant tear slashed onto Matt’s cheek. “You will beg, you will beg on your knees for deserting me.”

  She cried, “I thought you were dead, that the Inquisition took you! I saw them take you. You fought them so hard, I don’t think I ever loved you more than at that moment.”

  Marco’s tone was heartbroken. “Did you ever love me?”

  She said quietly, “You know I did.”

  He shook his head and a fingernail started to part Matt’s skin. “Not like you loved that scum of the streets.”

  She cupped Marco’s cheek. “Not then, no. But later, later I did. You were my moon and stars for forty years—longer than a lifetime back then.”

  He slapped her to the floor. “If you loved me you would have come back to me. Made my life complete again, not this…wound that has never healed.”

  She rolled to a halt. “You have to believe me! For centuries I didn’t know! I ran from the Inquisition to the plague and I bolted from that only to walk straight into the Thirty Years War. I took refuge in England for centuries after I survived that hell on earth. I was thousands of miles away across a religious schism. I couldn’t have known!”

  Marco’s eyes never left Fran. “When you found out I was alive, you should have come to me.”

  She got back to her feet. “How could I have believed it was you? No one escaped the Inquisition, no matter how well placed their nephews, brothers, cousins were—everyone they touched, bled.”

  Marco cried, “I escaped. It took months and a change of Pope, but my friends—they came for me. I was broken, torn, I had to leave Roma, but I came here to Milano. I looked for you; everywhere I looked for you. I made a new life, gathered my paintings became a man, a dynasty that could never be taken to those dungeons again. And all of it was empty because there was no you.”

  Fran said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. Until I came back to fight the Fascists I didn’t know you’d survived. And then, and then it was too late—I couldn’t just walk back into your life, not after all that time. I walked away from Italy.”