“I’m sorry, sir,” the receptionist said, her voice developing a not-so-subtle edge, “but you’re going to have to leave.”
She seemed to become taller, the bones of her jaw sharper.
I glanced around, tightening my grip on my cane. The young men, who could have been interns with their shiny side-parted hair and Brooks Brothers suits, drew nearer still. I felt Arnaud’s cold eyes watching me from theirs, inducing a weakness in my core. I forced myself to straighten.
I had one more ace.
Splaying my right hand on the desk, I said, “My name is Everson Croft, grandson of Asmus Croft, Grand Mage of the Society of the Dragon. I demand the right to an audience with Arnaud Thorne.”
As the powerful words shook from me and resounded around the marble room, the men stopped. The receptionist’s eyes fell to my ring finger. The winged serpent embossed in thick silver appeared ready to lunge up at her. Inching back, she lifted a phone to her ear.
I’d thought that might get things rolling.
“Um, there’s an Everson Croft to see you, sir.” She listened, her large eyes never leaving my ring, but the phone call was for show. Arnaud had seen and heard all that she had.
After a moment, she hung up and shifted her gaze past me. “Show him up,” she said, no longer smiling.
Without touching me, the group of men enveloped me and fell into a silent lockstep. I moved with them, as though carried by a cold, hypnotic force. As blood slaves, the men weren’t vampires, but vessels for Arnaud. A brood mentality, along with superhuman speed and strength, were just a few of the perks that came with the position. Perhaps a modest stipend.
We boarded an elevator that lifted off with smooth, stomach-dipping speed. The slaves, who probably had been finance majors at one time, fixed their gazes straight ahead. In the brushed steel doors, I studied their faces, their dead eyes. I’d heard that vestiges of humanity remained inside them, clawing the walls of their bodily confinement, screaming for release or death. All very much to the head vampire’s delight, I imagined.
I looked away, not wanting my compassion toward them to soften my guard. At Arnaud’s word, the same poor souls would be clambering over one another to rip out my throat. I was a little surprised they hadn’t tried yet.
At the top floor, we exited and proceeded down a hall of what appeared executive-level offices. Ahead loomed a stately set of doors, the steep wood oiled and dark. Outside the doors, ice-cold hands plied my cane away and stripped off my coat. They lifted away my necklace holding my charmed coin. Though I knew better than to resist, my heart pumped into full panic. All of the defenses I’d been counting on left with the departing men.
The blood slave who remained behind suppressed a smile. His face was youthful but his almond-shaped eyes were beginning to jaundice at the edges, betraying advanced age. His hair spoke to another era, the short black bangs combed straight down, like a monk’s. You can take the boy out of the Middle Ages, I caught myself thinking.
He bowed and opened one of the two doors.
Every instinct in me was demanding I leave, and yet…
The dim room beyond the doorway released a smell of leather and musk. At the other end of what appeared either a large office or small library, a huge brown-tinted window cut a tall man’s silhouette. For a vertiginous moment, the regal figure seemed to take his measure of me.
“Everson Croft,” a silken voice said. “Please, do come in.”
I was dimly aware of stepping over the threshold and onto soft carpet.
“You are either the most audacious human to request an audience,” the voice said, with a hint of tragic humor, “or, my poor boy, you have simply given up on life.” I only realized the figure had been standing with his back to me when he wheeled and a pair of predatory eyes flashed into view.
Behind me, the door slammed closed.
19
I watched Arnaud watching me. He wasn’t as tall as he had first appeared. Neither was he wearing the long-tailed black suit I thought I’d glimpsed when he turned. His suit was light colored and contemporary, the pale oxford underneath open to a criss-crossing of thin chains. Mane-length waves of white hair fell from a center part, brushing a silky red scarf that draped his shoulders.
The newspapers called him fashionable and rakish. I found vampiric far more fitting. The black eyes that stared into mine held no humanity—and hadn’t for hundreds of years.
“So, which one is it?” he asked.
My voice stuck in my dry throat. “I-I’m sorry?”
“Audacity or lost hope?”
Though Arnaud remained preternaturally still, I could sense a coiling in his muscles, as though he were poising to strike. I felt, too, that he wanted me to sense this. I stiffened in apprehension.
“Boldness or gloom? Because, you see, my boy, I have the cure for either.”
I searched my peripheral vision for anything I might put between us, but the bookshelf-lined room seemed to have stretched out, the corporate desk and plush leather chairs suddenly far away. I felt naked without my confiscated items.
Arnaud gave a knowing laugh. “Rest assured, Mr. Croft, your accoutrements are quite safe.”
Vampires weren’t psychic, per se, but they could detect the chemicals humans emitted as a byproduct of fear. They also enjoyed inciting them, the hormonal aerosol being almost as nutritive for a vampire as blood. I could all but feel Arnaud’s smooth tongue lapping up mine.
Gross.
“Security precaution, you understand,” he was saying. “With so much nastiness and loathing out there, one can never be too prudent. But between us, a bag of rice could hardly be considered harmful, now could it?” When he laughed again it was with a hint of derision. “Or helpful, for that matter. As though spilled grains would drive one to such distraction he would fail to finish what he’d set out to do.”
Okay, so I’d gone with an untested myth on that one. Holy water, however—
“But back to the question at hand.” Arnaud took his first precise steps toward me, pupils gleaming. “Was it daring or despair that brought you? Or perhaps something of both? I am a granter of wishes, you know.”
His velvet voice took on a low flutter of hunger as he crossed the office cleanly, effortlessly. In the next moment, he was too close. An oppressive atmosphere enveloped me. It was the enticing smell I’d picked up outside, but grown more penetrating and foul, as though it were covering up a stink of decomposition. I struggled to breathe, to think clearly.
“Oh, yes, wonderful wishes,” he purred.
He was at my back now, circling. The atmosphere was the vampire’s making, emanating from his pores like a toxic opiate. An intense drowsiness pulled at my mind with the promise of the warmest, most luxurious sleep.
“You are a little older than the boys I like to take in, but I would make an exception.” Something walked over my scalp like spider’s legs—his fingers, I realized. “Yes, I smell power in your blood, Mr. Croft. Pledge it to me, and I will grant you wealth, eternal life. You’ll never want again.”
I staggered to remain standing.
“One has only to … submit,” he whispered, the final word like a down pillow under my head. “There, you see?”
His fingers massaged my scalp in small circles. When a chilling breath brushed my throat, I realized in horror that I was offering it to him. Through thick eyelids, I watched his lips retract from an impossibly large jaw, the emerging fangs bunched together like a great white’s. His fingers sank in, bracing my head, while his lower face disappeared beneath my chin.
The Pact, I tried to murmur.
I could feel the skin near my Adam’s apple dimpling beneath needle-sharp points.
“The Pact,” I managed.
Arnaud hesitated.
“You and the … the Society of the Dragon,” I forged on. “You made a pact with one another… to stop warring and join forces … against … the Inquisition.”
I had discovered the story during my time in Roma
nia, connecting it to the ring I’d found among Grandpa’s possessions. A ring that had been inert for as long as I’d possessed it, but now pulsed around my finger.
Arnaud chuckled softly. “I’m afraid the Brasov Pact does not apply to descendants. Only to those who had an immediate interest in keeping the Church from lopping our heads from our bodies. Besides, that was more than four centuries ago. I trust there’s a statute of limitation.”
I’d been struggling my right arm up until my fist was level with his heart.
A strange Word swelled in the back of my throat: “Balaur!”
It emerged like a cannon ball, as though the ring had spoken it. An angry force exploded from my right fist, and Arnaud went flying. His body cracked into the far wall of polarized glass, head whiplashing back. But when Arnaud landed, it was on fingertips and the toes of his loafers. He growled at me through shanks of white hair.
“How dare you,” he seethed, pain twisting the words.
Flaps of skin dangled from his face, as though it had been raked by a dragon’s talons. I had to remind myself that the gleaming blood wasn’t his. He hissed again as smoke rose from beneath the collar of his shirt.
“You burned me!”
“The ring burned you,” I corrected him. I was in full possession of my language and limbs again, the torpor gone from my thoughts. “Punishment for violating the Pact. So, in essence, you burned yourself.”
When Arnaud reared to spring, I brought my right fist up. His eyes shifted to the ring, and I watched the first shard of uncertainty take hold. The enchanted ring was no longer pulsing—I may have exhausted its charge with the blast—but Arnaud didn’t need to know that.
He sniffed the air for the least apprehension, but I gave him none. “Can we talk now?” I asked with an attitude of impatience.
Arnaud scowled but relaxed and slowly rose. The smoke dissipated into a haze around his head. He straightened his jacket with indignant tugs, then fixed the scarf over his shoulders. When the smoke cleared, his face was intact again, the skin restored to its waxy state.
He paced over to a small bar, his back to me. On the other side of him, glass clinked and liquid splashed. I expected him to order me out, but when he turned, he was holding two poured drinks—scotch on the rocks, from the looks of them. He set one drink down on an end table beside a chair of oxblood leather and took the chair across from it: an invitation to join him.
I did so, going over and lowering myself to the edge of the soft cushion.
Arnaud took a sip of his drink, then gave his hair a toss as he sat back, the rakish billionaire once more. He opened a hand of slender fingers toward me. “Now,” he said, as though we’d arrived at some understanding, “if you’ve come to talk, then get on with it. I’m a very busy man.”
Not knowing how long his respect for the ring would hold, I decided to shoot to the point. “There was a murder at St. Martin’s Cathedral,” I said, “sometime Wednesday night.”
“Ah, yes. Father Richard.” He made a soft tsking sound. “A tragedy.”
“Did you know him?”
“Indeed. We had an opportunity to talk last month.”
“Oh?”
“Mr. Croft,” he said with an edge of reproach, “if you insist on carrying on in this manner, with your surprised faces and little ‘oh’s, I am certain I can find a more productive use of my time. You know our history. You know my interest in the church property. Even now you’re searching for an eye tick, some tell, to determine whether I was involved in his murder. Why the artifice? Certainly a man of your bloodline can come straight to it and ask.”
“Did you have him killed?”
As he studied his drink, a smile touched the corners of his thin lips. I had played my hand clumsily, handing him back control, dammit. “There,” he said, “doesn’t that feel better?”
“Well?” I pressed.
“Why the sudden interest? The Church showed far less concern for your forebears, after all. Poisonings. Public burnings. Beheadings.” Arnaud made the tsking sound again. “Nasty, nasty business.”
“Is that why you want St. Martin’s out of the Financial District?”
The Church had come down just as hard, if not harder, on Arnaud and his contemporaries. Had magic users and vampires not aligned, both would have been cleansed from Europe. Instead, they fought back, defeating the regional enforcers of the Inquisition. Arnaud and Grandpa went their separate ways, only to eventually wash up on the same Manhattan shoreline.
I mentioned how Grandpa never joined us at Sunday Mass? He had his reasons.
“In part,” Arnaud replied at last. “But I have learned many things in my life, chief among them to not draw attention to my nature. Our kind inspires fear, yes, but also uncommon wrath.”
Arnaud stood and, his glass dangling from his long fingers, strolled to the floor-to-ceiling window that cast the room in tannic brown light. Beyond and far below, I could see the wall that separated his domain from the rest of Manhattan. The streets beyond were clogged with cars and pedestrians, great knots converging on the checkpoints. For a moment, I saw the people as Arnaud must have—bearers of pikes and torches, castle-stormers.
“I like to keep my activities quiet, you see.” He took another sip of scotch. “The brutal murder of one as exalted as Father Richard is anything but. Not that I regret what happened. If his death presents me with someone more amenable to financial pressure, well … let’s just say I won’t demur.”
“So you had nothing to do with the murder?”
“I believe I’ve answered your question, my boy.”
He spoke with the self-possession of someone with nothing to hide, and I caught myself nodding.
“What about Black Earth?” I asked.
He turned to face me. “What about them?”
Them? I straightened.
“Are they a group?” I blurted before I could stop myself.
Arnaud’s lips stretched into a wicked smile. Damn. He strolled back to his chair, this time sitting with his legs neatly crossed. He draped a wrist over his knee and jiggled his drained glass, making the ice clink.
“It seems I have something you want,” he said.
“Not necessarily. I mean, if you know something about Black Earth that I don’t, then—”
He silenced me with a raised hand. “The cat is already out of its foul little bag, Mr. Croft. Why, there it is now, scampering about, the rascal.” His eyes darted around as though tracking it, then returned to mine. He studied me for a long moment, his gaze dipping once to my hand.
“The ring,” he said.
I curled my fingers protectively. “Huh?”
“Yes. The ring for the information.”
Though he sounded like someone proposing a simple business transaction, I sensed an underlying urgency. He didn’t like the idea of an enchanted item out there that could hurt him. For my part, I didn’t like the idea of not having that item. But with less than twenty-four hours to point Detective Vega in the direction of the killer, I needed to know what Black Earth meant.
“A renewed truce?” I counter-offered.
“The ring or nothing.”
I studied the dragon embossed in the face of dark silver. I hadn’t thought the ring was anything more than symbolic. In fact, I’d only brought it to get inside and, once here, to remind Arnaud of the Pact. Fortunately for my immortal soul, the power of the Pact had been bound inside the ring through enchantment. It was a powerful artifact, and one I might need again.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t give this up,” I said.
“Then it appears we’re done.”
Before I could come up with another offer, Arnaud stood and clapped his hands sharply. The blood slave who had ushered me in opened the door.
“Zarko,” Arnaud said. “Please show Mr. Croft down and return his belongings.” He rotated back to the window as though I had already been escorted out. Knowing further appeals would fall on deaf ears, I stood from my chair, drink untouched,
and headed for the door.
I was nearly to the threshold when Arnaud spoke again. “I’ve become fond of you in our short time together this afternoon, Mr. Croft.” The way his voice warped the word fond told me he’d become anything but. I turned anyway, alert in anticipation. “As such, I will tell you this. While the Pact may forbid me from coming after you, I cannot be held liable for the actions of my employees. No offense to good Zarko here, but they are rather mindless, after all. There is no telling what they might do if provoked.”
“And what might provoke them?” I asked, edging from Zarko, whose pale lips had turned up at the corners.
“Remain on your side of the Wall, my boy, and I doubt you’ll ever need know.”
I clenched my jaw. In exchange for the vaguest acknowledgment that a group called Black Earth did exist, possibly even somewhere in the city, I’d relinquished my access to the bulk of downtown Manhattan—where St. Martin’s just happened to sit.
“I won’t make any promises,” I muttered as I crossed the threshold.
“Well, then neither will I,” Arnaud answered.
20
I left the Financial District on foot, dumping the bag of rice at the first garbage bin I encountered.
As I stepped from the Wall’s shadow, I squinted around. I was still recovering from Arnaud’s poisonous presence (the dull afternoon light outside his building had nearly blinded me), but part of my splintering headache arose from irritation at myself. That was what risking my life for nothing tended to do.
Well, not nothing, I thought as I tapped north. I felt I could safely cross Arnaud off the list of suspects. He was right. His survival had as much to do with amassing wealth and influence as keeping his vampiric activities on the down low. As badly as he wanted St. Martin’s out of his district, he was resigned to doing so through legal action and bribery.
That left Wang Gang and the White Hand. Perhaps Black Earth was the name of an inner circle Caroline hadn’t known about? I still thought it was a long shot, given the language of the message, but Chinatown was all I had. One small problem, however—I didn’t have an in with the White Hand like I did with Arnaud. No family connections or…
Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1) Page 8
