by Karen Chance
Gunther patted his shoulder. "It's okay. We'll get take out."
"Take out? Take out, in my kit—"
The door shut.
"Verrell might be right," I said, eyeing Bitey. "He looks a little . . . upset."
"No, he understands," Radu said, watching the furious thing still pawing the air.
Until the finger moved a little closer, and Bitey's mouth suddenly went slack.
"You feel it, don’t you?" Radu asked, his voice velvet. "Who we are, what you are now, in blood and flesh and bone. Not an animal to act so, to lash out as the humans do. And not a monster, as they so often call us. But more than you have ever been. A fusion of flesh and spirit, a masterpiece of nature; a man still, but one perfected, with the old weaknesses left behind, and an infinity of promise ahead. You feel it, don’t you?"
It looked like he felt something. I didn’t know if it was because of Radu's power or his words, but Bitey was no longer living up to his name. And he wasn't looking at the finger, despite the fact that it was slowly being offered now. His eyes were on 'Du, wide and shocked. Whose own eyes were glowing faintly as he pressed the blood to the man's lips, smearing it on his flesh like a pagan priest initiating an acolyte.
"You’re creeping me out, 'Du," I muttered, while servants came forward to lead the dazed-looking vamp away.
"Oh, that's rich, coming from you," Radu said, and rose from the filthy kitchen floor, gazing with disapproval at his ripped hose and stained clothing. "Tomato sauce. It never comes out of satin," he informed me, nonetheless patting at it with a cloth.
"Coming from me? What does that mean?"
A single eyebrow raised. He knew how much I hated that. "Did you or did you not round up all the babies in the place and corral them in your closet?"
"What?" I stared at him. "Why on earth would I do that?"
"Well, I don’t know." It was peevish. "That's what I planned to ask you. But every time they tried to leave, or anyone tried to go in and get them, you snarled at them—"
"I don’t snarl."
"You snarl quite convincingly. It's terrifying. And for such a pretty girl." Radu reached down to tilt my face up. "They are going to love you in Paris. If you don’t snarl at them, that is."
And, just like that, another wave of disorientation hit, and hit hard. I saw again a tiny pixie of a vampire, felt her gentle touch on my skin, heard the deceptively sweet voice echo in my head: "You'll be a beauty someday. I know about these things . . . ."
I put my head on my knees and just breathed for a moment.
I supposed it was only fair that I was getting flashbacks, even if they weren't mine, to old Venice, since that's where my problems had mostly started. Before then, I’d been a fairly normal half-human, half-bloodsucking fiend—okay, so normal had never really described me. But I’d been closer, like one whole mind closer, until Mircea had decided to split it. And had somehow created two brains out of one, isolating the human me from the vampire version, which he claimed was necessary to save my life.
And maybe it had been. Maybe the vampire me really had been threatening to swamp my far less powerful human half, resulting in the madness dhampirs were famous for. I didn’t know. Because the process had resulted in wiping human-me's mind, to the point that I didn't remember jack about the family's time in Venice.
Or about a lot of other things, since Dorina, my vamp version, had the memories from all the times she'd been in control.
That had always been a gut punch, since it often resulted in me waking up surrounded by the bodies she'd massacred after deciding that I was in over my head and taking charge. It had been my body who'd killed those people, but not my brain giving the okay—not all of it, anyway—resulting in some serious soul-searching. And a fair amount of PTSD from having a possibly evil doppelganger who could emerge whenever she chose, especially if I lost my temper and therefore my mental control.
And so it had gone, me hulking out for the last five centuries or so, because Mircea had decided that that was the best way to contain my mental problems. Only they weren't anymore. Contained, that is, because the barrier he'd built in my cranium had failed in a spectacular way recently, leaving me and Dorina in intermittent communication for the first time. Which she had mostly been using to send me crazy memories whenever I passed out.
Because my other half was apparently a psycho.
"We haven’t established that she's going anywhere yet," Marlowe's pissy voice said, cutting through the mental din.
"Of course she's going," 'Du said. "Who else could track my son half so well?"
"Track . . . what?" I raised my head, the pounding migraine suddenly less important than that careless, half-heard phrase.
"Who, dear."
"What?"
"Track who, not what. We're not talking about some kind of wild beast, after all."
"I—what?"
"You keep saying that. Stop saying that."
I felt my world tilting into the bizarre, which was not unusual when talking to my batty uncle. As the younger brother of Mircea Basarab, first-level master, senate member, and all around bad dude to cross, Radu had spent entirely too many years being able to say whatever he wanted to whoever he chose. It had gotten to the point that, some days, he didn’t bother to make any damned sense at all.
Like now, for instance.
"Radu—" I began grimly.
"He's talking about Louis-Cesare. He's disappeared," Marlowe cut in.
"What do you mean, disappeared?" I demanded.
"It's probably nothing," Radu said, fussing over the latest baby. "You know how Louis-Cesare is."
And, yes, yes I did. Proud to the point of arrogance, self-confident to the point of recklessness, a powerful prima donna who was almost as strong as he thought he was, yet also strangely vulnerable because of an outdated sense of noblesse oblige and a not very well hidden bleeding heart. If he hadn’t been so formidable of an opponent, he'd have been dead years ago. As it was, he frequently gave me aneurisms without even trying.
"Is it nothing?" I asked Marlowe, who had crouched in front of me again, looking grim.
"No."
"Tell me."
Dark brown eyes met mine, shrewd and assessing. "Are you up to this?"
"Yes! And I need to—"
A hand like a striking snake grabbed my arm. "Don’t lie to me," he growled. "I have to put someone on this, and for a variety of reasons, you were first on the list. But then I find you like this," he gestured at the blood and ice cream stained baby doll, "and learn that you've been out of your head for the best part of two days! I would prefer to keep this low key, but if I have to risk an international incident—"
"An international incident?" I frowned. "Over a missing master?"
"No." Marlowe's throat worked, and his eyes looked like they were trying to bore a hole into my head. But he finally came out with it. "Over a missing consul. Anthony hasn’t been heard from in a week, leading us to send Louis-Cesare to locate him. And now we've lost contact with him, too."
Chapter Five
1457, Mircea
Still at the wart, Venice, Italy
Mircea rolled over and fell out of bed. He lay there for a moment, because that hadn't been normal even when he was human, and it certainly wasn't now. One of the few advantages of his new state was a fine sense of balance, which ensured that he didn’t usually fall on his face.
Of course, he didn’t usually have a master vamp in his bed, either.
He regarded Jerome's sprawled form, which covered all but perhaps a fifth of the narrow bed, with annoyance. And then he got up to check on his friend. His color was still bad, but that was likely because he wasn't expending power to make it otherwise. And his incessant snoring, which had kept Mircea up half the day, seemed to indicate that some resting was going on. Mircea threw the bedcover, which had ended up on the floor along with him, back over Jerome, and headed downstairs.
He paused on the landing to check on Dorina. The tiny room across
from his had been Horatiu's, until he paid a couple of muscle-bound types to drag home a box bed he'd found in one of the city's numerous pawn shops. It was essentially a cabinet with a bed in it that he'd stuck in one end of the kitchen, near the fire, because "old bones don’t like the cold as well as young ones do." Or dead ones, Mircea had thought, and helped him put the pieces together.
As a result, when Dorina arrived, the only other bedroom in the little house had become hers. She'd since covered it with drawings of Venice and its people, along with memories of home. Leaving Mircea looking at fields and streams and tall, conical hay bales; at gnarled old women in gypsy garb, wrists spangled with bracelets; at ramshackle wagons covered with carvings; and at a crowd of dirty, dancing feet. Here he was, splattered with paint and frowning at a canvass; there was Horatiu, peering myopically at a pot over the fire, his long nose almost touching the soup; and a little above that, a couple of the neighbor's kids were playing dice in the street.
There was her mother, weaving in a corner of her small house, a ray of sunlight in her hair.
Mircea pulled the small scrap off the wall, and held it up. There was no window in the hall, but vampire eyesight didn’t need one, not with moonbeams streaming into the landing from a dozen cracks in the boards. It was enough to show him what he'd expected: this wasn't an image he knew.
It wasn't one of the sketches he'd made, ostensibly to show Dorina her mother's face, but in reality so he wouldn’t forget it himself. It had been more than a decade since he'd seen Elena; a decade since he'd left her, standing in the door of her house, tears of anger and anguish streaming down her face; a decade since he'd told himself that he was doing the right thing, and getting away before the madness of his new condition caused him to hurt or kill her.
A decade, and he was only realizing now that he'd probably hurt her far more by leaving than he ever would have by the reverse.
He'd gone back, after some of the madness lifted and he'd discovered that he was still a man, simply a changed one. The idea had been to give her the choice he'd previously denied her, whether to stay with him as he was, or for them to have a proper farewell. But what he'd found were rumors of her horrific death, a murderous bastard of a brother, and a daughter he'd never even known he had.
There had been no question about taking Dorina back with him, no question that she deserved whatever advantages he could give her, poor though they might be. It had never occurred to him that someone might object. She was his daughter; of course he would help her.
But she was dhampir, too, conceived in the narrow window between the laying of the curse that had upended his life, and the completion of it. It had only taken a few days, but it had been enough to engender a life that was neither one thing nor another. A life hated by his new tribe, and feared by his old. He had done this to her, had made sure she would never fit in with either group, and might well be hunted by both of them.
And he had no idea how to fix it.
He reached in the door to smooth her hair back from her forehead. Silky soft and abundant, so like her mother's. Her little nape, so vulnerable, like the slender arm that had fought its way free of the covers.
She barely stirred when he put it back underneath. Perhaps she knew it was him, or perhaps she was exactly as she appeared: a child, lost in dreams. Would she have roused at someone else's touch?
Would she have roused at Nicolò's?
Not that the vampire worried him so much anymore; Marsilia had him well in hand. But there would be others. A great many of them, in all likelihood, especially if the family stayed here. Or anywhere else in Venice.
The city had long been a refuge for people like him, for vampires cursed instead of made, with no master to protect them. Or for ones rejected by their masters, or made accidentally during a feeding that went wrong, or runaways that nobody cared enough about to pursue. There were a thousand stories behind the people who washed up here, in what had once been the only safe zone in the vampire world, a place where they wouldn’t be hunted by others of their kind.
And who still did, in droves, despite the recent upheaval.
For the first time in two thousand years, there were new consuls in charge of Europe's vampires. That was apparently not unusual for the other senates, which Mircea occasionally heard rumors about. It sounded like they were constantly changing consuls, in bloody coups that people only whispered about, even this far away.
But that had not been true here. Not for millennia, time out of mind. Because Europe's consul hadn’t just been a powerhouse, he'd been a monster, far older than all the rest. And one whom Mircea wasn't sure had been entirely vampire, and not something else altogether.
But he'd been taken down nonetheless, by two of his powerful, and possibly mad Children: Anthony, the boisterous, lecherous, brave and flamboyant, one time Master of Horse for Julius Caesar, and the woman who had been his lover for two millennia. The woman with whom he'd once dared to challenge the greatest empire the world had ever known.
She was called merely The Consul now, as if there weren't two of them. As if they weren't bound together in a duumvir-like situation such as had once been common in the human world, but was previously unknown in the vampire. Which had never before seen two people share power.
It was seeing it now.
And yet, when people spoke, it was always thus: Anthony and The Consul.
Mircea wondered if that rankled, wondered how long such an unusual situation could last. But that didn’t matter to him, who barely qualified as part of their world. What did matter was the new consuls' emphasis on the rule of law over caprice. And that masters no longer had complete control over their Children's lives, to make, kill, or cast them aside at will.
The new laws had drastically reduced the number of masterless vampires being made; well, that and the fact that the worst offenders were at war with the new consuls, and didn’t have time for such things these days. Several more free zones had also been set up, with safe passage between them, because many of the excluded had never managed to make it to Venice. And the hounding of those who did, and who had previously been shaken down for all they were worth by the local guards, had been stopped. By any possible measure, things were vastly better than they had been.
Yet no master was still no master.
Mircea pulled the curtain over Dorina's door closed, and started down the rickety stairs.
The problem was the patchwork of territories that powerful masters had spread out over the land, which was still in force. And which was likely to remain so, at least for the foreseeable future, since the consuls needed their vassals' help against the rebels opposing the change of power, and couldn’t risk alienating them further. Leaving his kind with few options, unless they had a skill such a master might want.
But even if he was willing to put himself under someone else's power, something he'd avoided so far, and even assuming he found anyone interested in acquiring his services, what were the odds of them also accepting Dorina?
Marsilia was the exception, not the rule, and her compassion came from a pain others did not know. He couldn’t expect to be so lucky again. Leaving him trapped in a city filled with creatures far stronger than he, every single one of whom thought his daughter was a monster who should be killed on sight.
"Now, now, none of that," Horatiu said, peering at him as he came into the kitchen. "We had enough trauma last night, I should think."
"Aren’t you going to ask how Jerome is?" Mircea asked, sliding into a place at the tiny table.
Horatiu had somehow managed to wedge it in between the box bed and the protrusion out over the sea that looked like the wart was growing a wart, but which served as a fireplace. It made the already small kitchen ridiculously cramped, but Horatiu had insisted. He might be serving one monster out of legend, might be tutoring another, might have left home and hearth behind to live in a city stuffed to the gills with even more of them. But he'd be damned if he'd eat on the floor like a peasant.
"He's a master and he's still breathing," the old man returned sardonically. "I know how he is."
He shoveled some leftover fish pie with figs into a bowl, and poured them both some ale. Mircea couldn’t taste it, of course; taste was yet another thing he'd lost to the Change, and which only returned for the lucky few who reached master status. And without a master of his own to draw power from, he was unlikely to ever be among their number. But he found the ritual soothing, nonetheless: sitting by a fire, drinking with a friend. Almost like the last ten years had never happened.
But they had. And with them had come responsibilities he'd never expected, and didn’t know how to fulfill. Foremost of which was keeping his daughter safe.
"You’re doing it again," Horatiu grumbled.
"How do you know what I'm doing?" Mircea asked. "You’re not even looking at me."
"Don’t have to look at you, do I?" Horatiu remained bent over his bowl, shoveling in food. "Known you since you were a boy. Always moody."
Mircea frowned some more, while his old tutor continued to inhale his meal. Horatiu had been around Dorina too long; he bolted his food these days, as if he was afraid that someone would take it away from him. And, knowing Venice, someone might, if Mircea wasn't around to protect him. Another welcome burden; another desperate fear. The old man might have been killed last night, and then what would Mircea have done?
Without his greatest friend.
"Keep that look on your face one more minute and I'll hit ye with a spoon," Horatiu said, mopping up the juices from the pie with a stale end of bread.
Mircea sighed. "What do you think about France?"
Horatiu leaned back on his stool, finding the comfortable spot he'd worn into the old boards, and let out a belch.
"Was that cholic or commentary?" Mircea asked dryly.
"Bit of both. Demmed figs."
Mircea sighed some more. "I know what we decided. But this latest incident —"
"Changes nothing."
"I have friends in France, and Paris is a free zone now —"
