Blood on Silk

by Marie Treanor

  Why? Why? Why?

  Elizabeth sprang out of bed. Another endless night of circling her brain did not appeal. The hunters’ library was always open, and if she found Maximilian, she would inevitably see him again. . . .

  To dispel that unhelpful line of thought, she yanked on her jeans with unnecessary force, grabbed a T-shirt, and strode to the door, still pulling the top over her head.

  Descending the stairs into the library was almost like entering daylight and the real world, after too long in darkness and the hazy fog of her undisciplined thoughts. Here, the electric lights dazzled, computers hummed, and people worked.

  Well, up to a point. Elizabeth closed her mouth on the greeting she’d been about to aim at the assistant librarian, one of Miklós’s minions who manned the desk outside “office” hours. Her head rested on her folded arms sprawling the breadth of her desk. From her deep, even breathing, she was sound asleep.

  Elizabeth shrugged and went to her own table. She’d wake the woman if she needed her, but she might as well start with the books she already had. Some of those were bound to trace Maximilian’s movements after Zoltán’s “coup.”

  But only minutes later, she stood up, dissatisfied. They stopped too early, or were too vague. She needed the material filed under “Maximilian,” not “Saloman.”

  At her desk, the librarian still slumbered. Her arms only just missed her computer keyboard. As it was, some of her hair trailed over it.

  It was a pity, Elizabeth thought, not for the first time, that only the librarian’s computer contained the catalogue. She preferred to pursue her own research and trace all possible lines of it for herself rather than rely on what others thought. Inevitably, people—especially people who were not experts in the tiny area of knowledge that you were making your own—missed important bits and pieces.

  She supposed that here it was not so much a matter of convenience, but a matter of discipline and keeping some kind of control over the knowledge each individual operative could amass. There was a lot of dangerous stuff here, and operatives were only human, with all humanity’s failings and curiosities—like hers, except she wasn’t bound by an operative’s obedience.

  Elizabeth walked around the side of the desk, altered the angle of the monitor, and eased the keyboard across the desk, careful not to tug the librarian’s hair.

  She typed in “Vampire Maximilian” and scanned the long list of items that came up. Grabbing a pencil from the top of the desk, she made quick notes of some locations, including one book she hadn’t seen on Saloman’s killers.

  Next, she typed “Saloman’s killers” into the search box, partly because it wasn’t an angle she’d yet pursued in her study of him, and partly because it might provide clues as to Maximilian’s character and places he might have been before he hit the limelight with his killing of the last Ancient.

  Some more intriguing material came up, including something entitled Saloman’s Human Killers and something else called Tsigana. Tsigana, the lover who’d betrayed him.

  She hesitated over that one; she wanted to know too much, and it had nothing, if anything, to do with Maximilian. She scribbled it down anyway, then went to track down her new treasures. At the last minute, she grabbed the keys from the librarian’s desk and walked into the deepest recesses of the library.

  Elizabeth was used to libraries of all sorts. Although this one used a unique classification system, she’d already absorbed, almost unconsciously, how to follow it. It didn’t take her long to find the books on her list. To save more time, she took them to the nearest table rather than dragging the books to her own. As she moved, another volume on a top shelf caught her eye. Awakening the Ancients. Since it might shed more light on her own role in all of this, she hastily laid down the other books on the desk and went back for it.

  Because she couldn’t resist, she flicked first through the pages of Awakening the Ancients. Among a lot of general hearsay and mythology, she found the story of the medieval Awakener she’d heard of before. Having awakened an Ancient he’d originally helped to kill, this Awakener had promptly fled, aware the vampire would necessarily kill him when he recovered his strength. Which the Ancient eventually did, though not before the Awakener had discovered extraordinary powers of speed and strength in himself—a bit like Elizabeth was doing now. But—and this was new information to her—her predecessor had gone a step farther, even claiming before witnesses that he was now capable of killing an Ancient by himself, without the help that would normally be necessary.

  Elizabeth smiled wryly while she noted it down. The medieval Awakener had clearly believed himself invincible. It wasn’t a mistake she intended to repeat.

  Her stomach twisted. Would she even see him again? And as a lover or an enemy . . . ? Shit.

  Anxious to relieve rather than add to her confusion, she pushed Awakening the Ancients aside and reached for the first work on Saloman’s killers.

  After a while, she forgot to make notes. She was too appalled by the discovery that the blood of Saloman’s human killers was at least as important as that of the vampires. No matter that they were dead. Their descendants carried their blood, and Saloman would want it. They were in danger, and the hunters either didn’t know or hadn’t mentioned it to her.

  Feverishly now, she began to trace the descendants, all neatly mapped out through the generations. Previous hunters had watched and noted, because something else became clear too. Those descendants, the few who survived the original vampire attacks on them, carried some power of their own, a heightened awareness, a latent strength similar to that of Awakeners, that made them different, superior in many ways to their ordinary human brethren. Some of them became hunters, and were good at it.

  This was a whole new area to Elizabeth, as fascinating as it was bizarre. Two weeks ago, even less, she would have dismissed it as fanciful nonsense. Now she knew better, and she couldn’t stop digging.

  She followed Tsigana’s line of descendants, learning that they were regarded with particular respect by both vampires and hunters because they had possession of Saloman’s sword.

  Frowning, Elizabeth sat back in her chair. His scabbard had been empty when he awoke. She remembered it, and the proof was there in the photograph she’d taken of the sarcophogus. So Tsigana had taken the sword and passed it on to her descendants. Why? What use was it? It seemed to be regarded as more than a trophy. Was it some kind of enchanted object?

  Elizabeth groaned to herself. Did she have to believe in magic now as well? She knew a brief longing for the comfortable skepticism she’d brought with her to this country, but acknowledged it was unlikely ever to return to her.

  So who had this blasted sword now? Was it still extant?

  Among Tsigana’s descendants, only two diverging lines weren’t closed off as having died out. The first led to one living man, Joshua Alexander, born 1972, resident in the United States. His name seemed vaguely familiar, but she didn’t have time to rummage in her memory. She noted the name in a hasty scribble and turned to the other line, which had diverged from the Alexanders in the late nineteenth century.

  Voices sounded in the distance, at the front of the library where the librarian no longer slept. Elizabeth paid them no attention. She’d traced Tsigana’s last line to its end. And there she found a name she really did know well.

  John Silk.

  Her father. Not impossible that there were several John Silks born in the same year, even residing in Scotland. But not many at all would have one daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1979 and also residing in Scotland.

  The librarian was being told off, presumably for sleeping. It was Miklós, taking over. Elizabeth didn’t care. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe, because at last she had discovered why.

  Why Dmitriu had sent her of all the silly western researchers to Saloman. It wasn’t any old blood that awakened him. It was the blood of his killers; Tsigana’s blood that flowed in Elizabeth’s veins, however diluted.

  Why Zoltán h
ad risked breaking his new alliance with Saloman to kill her. The blood of the Ancient’s killers was as valuable to him as to Saloman. It would give him a greater strength that might even award him victory.

  Why Saloman needed her blood so much.

  And why he’d seduced her. He had been in total control, achieving her complete surrender. No wonder there had been triumph in fucking her desperately willing body. In seducing her, he’d seduced his beloved, treacherous Tsigana one last time, made her choose pleasure with Saloman over her own life. After that, he didn’t care whether she lived or died. He’d had his revenge.

  Revenge. She couldn’t think about that, couldn’t begin to analyze the awful, crumbling emotions rising up from her toes to consume her. So she did what she’d always done when life was unbearable. She studied.

  And she found that Tsigana was not the only human killer who had descendants with familiar names. That answered a few more whys.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning before they found her. They arrived in a panicked guddle, the affronted Miklós at the front, but Konrad, István, and Mihaela close on his heels.

  “Miss Silk.” Miklós’s unprecedented formality as much as his frosty voice revealed his displeasure. “If you wish to continue with the privilege of using this library, you must respect the organization’s rules!”

  For a moment, Elizabeth didn’t move. She remembered that she didn’t like confrontations and avoided them wherever possible. She’d found what she needed to know. No confrontation was necessary.

  But anger boiled very close to the surface, whipped up by a deeper betrayal she couldn’t afford to deal with. This was one she could handle, and she would.

  “Rules,” she repeated, throwing down the pencil she’d been unconsciously chewing as she read. Miklós watched it land on an open book and tutted. “The rules that allow you to use people as bait without allowing them the courtesy of the truth?”

  “Elizabeth,” Konrad said, shocked. “We’ve never lied to you!”

  “No? But you certainly didn’t tell me the whole truth, did you?”

  “That does not give you the right . . . ,” Miklós began, but Mihaela interrupted him without apology.

  “What are you talking about, Elizabeth? We never kept anything from you, even at the beginning when we probably should have!”

  Elizabeth couldn’t look at her, because her betrayal had hurt the most. Instead, she kept her gaze on Konrad and laughed. “First rule of research: Never let anyone else interpret material for you. Always go to the source yourself. Too many people have their own ax to grind. They leave things out, by accident or design, or merely slant it their own way. I forgot that for too long. The subject is too new to me, and I was bowled over by your greater expertise.”

  Konrad met her gaze, his piercing blue eyes intense and challenging. For the first time she saw them also as intimidating. “To what, exactly, are you referring?” he asked with more than a shade of haughty contempt. That would be his aristocratic ancestor making his appearance.

  “To your sending me into a lethal situation—namely into the Angel—without the full facts that might have made me more capable of dealing with it.”

  “Nothing was left out that could have helped you,” Konrad insisted.

  “You’re wrong. So wrong.” I would have known it was revenge. I would have understood. It might have made no physical difference to what happened, but I wouldn’t have fallen for it.

  “You’re being melodramatic,” Konrad said coldly. “And possibly transferring your own guilt. You’ve kept things from us. Such as what actually happened the night he took you from the Angel.”

  Elizabeth felt the blood drain to her toes. Was it really that obvious? “I have,” she admitted, shakily. “I couldn’t tell you because I couldn’t handle it.” She lifted her head. “And guess what? Now I don’t need to tell you anything at all, because our association is at an end.”

  She stood up, facing all four astonished expressions.

  “At an end?” Mihaela repeated. “But why? You can’t leave now! It’s not safe!”

  “Yes, I can, and it is safer than you know. I can take care of myself for the same reason I was in danger in the first place. I didn’t wake Saloman because I was the first person to stumble across his grave in three hundred years. I wakened him because I was one of the very few people who could. And he wanted my blood for the same reason. Tsigana was my ancestress.”

  István closed his mouth. Konrad and Miklós exchanged glances.

  “Shit,” Mihaela said. “That explains a lot.”

  “Doesn’t it, though? As her descendant, I have the physical strength to survive on my own. I just need to cultivate it.”

  “You’re an academic,” Konrad retorted, “a mere bookworm! You need us.”

  “It’s true I was never terribly athletic. I’m crap at sports. I had no interest in any of them. But guess what? I’m a natural fighter.” She looked into Konrad’s eyes. “Like you.”

  “If you’re not our friend, you’re our enemy. You have to go.” Konrad reached for her.

  He hadn’t watched any of her sessions with the combat coach. Despite what she’d just said, he didn’t realize how far she’d come. She knocked up his arm so hard, he almost hit himself.

  In shock, the others started between them, but somehow, through them all, Konrad still met her furious gaze. “I’m not a vampire, and I had no intention of hurting you.”

  “No, possibly not. Just keeping me quiet. But they have to know.”

  “Know what?” Mihaela demanded. “Elizabeth, what the hell is going on?”

  Elizabeth held everyone’s attention. She wondered if history students would listen to her lectures with the same rapt concentration, and doubted it. She felt very tired.

  She said, “I’ve read lots about the hunters now, right down to you guys. Did you never wonder why Konrad is so much faster than you in a fight, and yet never demonstrates to students? Why two of his previous teams died while he alone survived? Why he is so determined to be the one who takes out Saloman? He wants the power that comes with killing an Ancient. Twice.”

  “Twice?” Mihaela was staring at her, eyes dilated. Konrad himself was white-faced and rigid.

  “Twice. He’s descended from Ferenc, one of the human—” Her phone chose that moment to burst into Bach. “Killers,” she finished as Mihaela picked it off the desk and wordlessly handed it to her.

  Miklós declared, “Mobile phones should be switched off in the library, or at least set to ‘silent.’ ”

  Elizabeth rejected the call without even glancing at the number and pocketed the phone before reaching down to collect her papers.

  “Elizabeth, you’re not really leaving because of this?” Konrad said. His voice was more controlled now, reasonable, almost cajoling.

  “Yes. I really am. I can’t trust you, and I’ve had enough.” Perhaps she was being unfair. Mihaela and István had obviously been as much in the dark as she, but Konrad and even Miklós had known. And Mihaela, despite her obvious shock, was sticking by her colleagues. That seemed like a fresh betrayal.

  Elizabeth was prepared to shoulder her way through them all. She felt bullish enough, but interestingly, they parted for her like the Red Sea.

  “There’s nowhere to run from this, Elizabeth,” Konrad warned. “It’ll follow you. He’ll follow you.”

  No, he won’t. He’s taken all he needs from me.

  “I’m not running. I’m just facing it, whatever it is, on my terms, my ground. I can’t work on yours anymore.” She glanced at Mihaela as she passed, and paused to let her gaze embrace them all.

  They had warned her at the beginning, looked after her in their own way, and in spite of everything, there was a fondness, a closeness she’d seldom felt before. It wasn’t their fault she’d discovered a complete aversion to all forms of betrayal.

  “Though I won’t forget you,” she muttered, and walked through the stunned silence. It was a long way. Elizabe
th wanted it to go on forever, because her next farewell would be even harder.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part of her hoped there wouldn’t be time. And yet Konrad had been right. If she didn’t see him, she would be running away.

  So she cleared out of the hunters’ headquarters, packed all her luggage into the old car she’d bought here several months ago, and drove to the airport. She managed to get a seat on a night flight to Glasgow, which left her several hours of inactivity.

  After a strong cup of coffee, she left the airport and drove back into the city.

  Why am I doing this? For my own peace of mind? Or because I can’t stay away from him?

  Because even shouting was better than the loneliness.

  One night of false closeness had shown her what she wanted and had never found—that combination of exciting sexual ecstasy and companionship that had made her feel like a queen. And it wasn’t even real. Gullible Elizabeth Silk, duped again, by a monster whom even she should have recognized for what he was.

  It was easy to find the right area of Pest. On the first day of her recovery, the hunters had spent some time here, after Elizabeth had shown them the network of streets on a map, looking for him or his house without success. The day after, they’d tried to narrow it down by using the phone directory together with ownership and tenancy records. But it was a minefield of changing and multiple occupations, and despite frequent patrols, no one had seen him, or any other vampire, go in or out of any of the buildings.

  Elizabeth parked the car and walked. She had no clear idea of where she was going. She was just sure she would know the house when she saw it. She would smell him—or something.

  But it was a large area, and she walked for a long time. It had been dark that night, and she’d barely seen the outside of the house. They’d landed on a roof and jumped down to the side of the house before walking around to the front door. She couldn’t even remember what color the door was. There were many buildings of a similar size and shape.