by Karen Chance
“You didn’t know about the stone until a few days ago. What were you planning to do before?”
“Kit and I have been working to ensure a favorable outcome, hand-selecting candidates who are not only of a like mind politically, but who have no outside ties and have a good chance in their matches. It has been a difficult search, but we believe we have found our champions.”
“Yet no one can stand against an invincible opponent!” Marlowe reminded him. “I don’t care how good they are; if anyone at that damned auction has the rune, it’ll skew everything. Ming-de isn’t the only one who can play power games.”
“But if we find the rune, we find the killer,” I realized. “Setting Louis-Cesare free to challenge for one of your empty seats.”
“A fact that would make me feel a good deal better if the matches did not begin tomorrow night,” Marlowe said.
“It’s also a short suspect list,” I pointed out. “I think we can eliminate Ming-de. She won the auction; she would have had no reason to steal her own property.”
“Unless she knew the rune’s provenance,” Marlowe argued. “She may have doubted her abilities to keep it from being reclaimed by the fey, even should she pay for it. But if it was supposedly stolen before it reached her hands…” He shrugged.
“You’re a sneaky son of a bitch.”
He smiled. “Thank you.”
“Ming-de is not what anyone would call naive,” Mircea said sardonically. “It appears that we cannot rule anyone out at present. Other than Radu, who was there on my behalf.”
“But we have to add back in Cheung,” I said. “He wasn’t here for the auction, but he could have murdered Elyas. He was chasing Louis-Cesare and me half the night, trying to recover Ray. After he lost us, he could have returned to the club and questioned some of Ray’s servants. And if any of them mentioned Elyas, he had plenty of time to come here.”
“Five then,” Mircea said. “Ming-de, Geminus, Lord Cheung, the mage Lutkin andsubrand.”
“I need about six hours sleep; then I’ll start on the list,” I told him.
“No,” Mircea said flatly. “I told you all of this to avoid your involvement, not to solicit it. You needed to know how high the stakes were; now that you do, you must understand that—”
“I understand that you need all the help you can get!”
“You have a number of useful talents, none of which will work on anyone on that list!” he told me, suddenly angry. Or maybe he’d been so all along and just hadn’t shown it. Mircea was one person whose emotions I’d never been able to read with any accuracy. “You will not get in to see them, and if by some chance you did, they wouldn’t tell you anything.”
“The vampires, maybe. But I can talk to the mage—”
“I am not concerned about the mage. If he wants the stone for personal protection, all well and good. In that case, it will not interfere with the outcome of the competition. But you will stay away from the rest, the fey prince in particular.”
“Why does everyone assume I plan to go aftersubrand? I’m insane, not stupid.”
“I have never assumed you to be either. But you wish to help your friend.”
“I don’t recall mentioning any friends.” And if Louis-Cesare had, I was going to skin him.
Those dark eyes met mine. “I am not stupid, either, Dorina. When the stone is recovered, assuming it is, it will be returned to its owners. I have no wish to make an enemy of the fey. In the meantime, you are to stay out of this. Once you are no longer in competition with him for the rune,subrand will have no reason to trouble you.”
There was no safe reply to that, so I didn’t make one.
“I’ll get people on it,” Marlowe said. “But it isn’t going to be easy. Not with that group. Our best bet may be to wait and see whose candidates start cleaning up at the challenges. Although what we’re supposed to do about it then, I don’t know. Prying it loose from any one of them, with the possible exception of the mage, will not be easy.”
Funny thing, that’s exactly what I’d been thinking about Marlowe.
CHAPTER 22
Anthony made his rather flamboyant departure a moment later, surrounded by a passel of genuflecting flunkies. “Not coming?” he asked, peering in the door at Mircea.
“I will be along presently.”
“Oh, good. We’d hate to have to start without you.” He strode away, cheerfully chatting with Jérôme, and I suddenly realized that he was wearing a toga. His personality was so big that it had eclipsed everything else. I simply hadn’t noticed.
I did notice that Louis-Cesare didn’t even look in at me as he passed, however. It looked like some of Marlowe’s comments had gotten through, after all. Slumming with a dhampir was okay as long as nobody knew, but now it was clearly time for damage control.
I don’t know why it surprised me. No vampire had a dhampir lover. A few had tried to seduce me over the years, for the thrill or the bragging rights or just because they liked living dangerously. But anything more than a one-night stand? No.
And that wasn’t going to change. Best-case scenario, it would be social and political suicide. Worst-case, someone influential might start to wonder about said vampire’s sanity. And there was only one solution for insane vampires. I should know; I was the one called in to dish it out.
But it did surprise me. It also hurt, and that was unacceptable. I was tired and I was drunk off my ass and I was in danger of getting maudlin. It was clearly time to go.
I started to get up, when a cool hand slid onto my undamaged wrist. “Could you give us a moment, Kit?” Mircea asked.
Marlowe didn’t even bother to argue. I had the feeling he wasn’t exactly looking forward to facing the Senate. He went out the door, and Christine came back in. She was lugging two large suitcases and had a third under her arm.
“Christine. Dorina and I need to have a short conversation. Perhaps you could wait in the office?” Mircea asked politely.
Christine looked up, saw him and blinked. Then she smiled, the way women always smiled at Mircea. “Of course.”
“We’re not done?” I asked warily. This was already more than we’d talked in… well, ever. At least in one sitting.
Mircea selected a small cigarette—Turkish, by the smell—and proffered me the case. “Not quite.”
“Nasty habit,” I said, declining. I only smoke weed.
“There are worse ones.”
“Meaning?”
He put the case away and sat back in the chair, lighting up with an easy, unhurried motion.
For a long moment, he didn’t say anything, which wasn’t good. Mircea never has to gather his thoughts. Mircea has entirely too many thoughts. That’s his problem.
Well, one of them.
“I’ve never spoken to you much about your mother, have I?” he finally asked.
For a minute, I just sat there, frozen. Of all the things I’d expected him to come out with, that would have probably been dead last. I’d given up asking about her years ago, because the result was always the same: a few dead, dry facts that told me nothing more than I already knew, uttered with cold indifference. She’d been a peasant girl; they’d had a brief affair; he’d left when he discovered that he’d joined the life-challenged segment of the population, which, coincidentally, was about the same time she found out she was pregnant. The end.
Then, a month ago, he’d dropped the bombshell that she hadn’t died in a plague as I’d always assumed. His crazy brother Vlad had killed her by slow torture. And then Mircea had made Vlad a vampire so that he could torture him in return—for five hundred years.
Nobody ever said the family didn’t know how to hold a grudge.
It hadn’t been a fun conversation, and I wasn’t eager to repeat it. But I knew so damn little of her, thanks partly to him and the memory wipe. Not that I would have had direct recall anyway; we’d been separated when I was too young for that. But I’d gathered bits and pieces, from what little others recalled, later on.
Almost none of which remained now.
Trust Mircea to pinpoint a person’s weak spots with surgical precision. He knew that one sentence would hold me, knew I wouldn’t jump up and leave, no matter what he wanted to discuss. Not if there was any chance of learning more.
“What about her?” I asked harshly.
“She was a beautiful woman,” he told me calmly. “You look a great deal like her.”
“You’re keeping the Senate waiting to tell me that?”
“She came to us when she was seventeen,” he said, ignoring me. Mircea would get to the point when he damn well felt like it. “Her father had been a wood carver, but he died early, and her mother had a hard time of it thereafter. She eventually found employment in our kitchens, and when Helena was old enough, she joined her there.”
“And you saw her and took her.” It wasn’t hard to imagine. Servant women were pretty much easy prey back then, particularly one with no close male relatives to defend her. And most would have thought themselves lucky to attract the attention of the family’s handsome, generous elder son.
“It was not quite as simple as that. When I first noticed her, I admit I did try to steal a kiss.”
“And?”
He blew out a thin stream of smoke, which drifted slowly skyward. “And she slapped me. Hard.”
I blinked. “You could have had her beaten for that. Or worse.”
Romanian women of the time had had few rights over the males of the species. A woman could not join her husband at the dining table, but had to stay behind his chair, waiting to serve him. She ate what was left—which in peasant homes wasn’t much—when he was finished. She walked behind him when they went out, and if she went alone and a male walked in front of her in the street, she had to wait to continue on until he passed. Even if she was wealthy and he was a beggar.
Women’s lib hadn’t been big in old Romania.
Mircea had been tapping his ashes into a crystal tray, but at my comment he stopped and looked up, his face blanking. “Sometimes, Dorina, I wonder what it is you think of me.”
I didn’t answer that, since half the time I didn’t know myself.
And the other half would only get us in another argument.
After a moment, he continued. “She informed me that she was not there to be a gentleman’s amusement, but to save money toward a respectable marriage. And that she did not intend to lose her virginity price over me.”
I’d almost forgotten the old custom of rewarding virgins the Monday after the marriage for their chastity. They received jewels, clothes, and sometimes money, which they were allowed to keep even if the marriage ended in divorce. It had been a lot more effective than the modern virginity pacts for ensuring abstinence.
Well, that and fearsome Romanian fathers.
“And what did you say to that?”
He shrugged. “I was young and foolish, and had yet to realize that my vaunted success with women was due at least as much to my name and position as to my person. I informed her that I would gladly reimburse her for any losses she might incur.”
“I take it she agreed.”
He arched an expressive brow. “No. She slapped me again.”
“And you found that attractive?”
“Oddly, yes. Most of the women I had encountered were docile to the point of boredom. It was a chore to get them to so much as look at me when we were speaking. I had been intimate with women whom I do not believe could have described my face in any detail had their lives depended on it. That was especially true of noblewomen, who were taught from childhood that good breeding meant utter passivity.”
“So she was a challenge.”
“She was alive, Dorina, in a way none of the other women, and damn few of the men, I knew were. She fascinated me. She infuriated me…. Eventually, she enchanted me.”
“I guess she got over the slapping part.”
“Never entirely.” He smiled again. A soft, odd expression on a face that so seldom wore any at all.
I stared at him. I had never considered that he might have felt anything for her; I had always just assumed that she’d been one in a long line of conquests, easily made and easily forgotten. And maybe she had been. Maybe I just wanted to believe that his expression meant something else. Wanted to think that at least one of their kind was capable of something like real affection.
God, I must be drunker than I thought.
“After we finally began a relationship,” he said, “I bought her a house in her village and visited her there rather than keeping her in the castle.”
“Because you were ashamed to have a servant girl for a mistress.”
“No, Dorina!” He regarded me through a cloud of smoke, his countenance impatient. “I was never ashamed of your mother. I was fearful for her. And my fears were eventually realized.”
“You couldn’t have known Vlad was going to do what he did.” I blamed Mircea for a lot of things, but not that.
“No. But I knew she would be a target, should anyone realize that she was important to me. Some would have used her to attempt to influence me; others would have harmed her to hurt me. It was a cutthroat time, and one’s family was never safe. I would not let circumstances pro-scribe my life to the extent of choosing my lover for me, but I was careful. I was cautious. I was discreet.”
“Ah. Light dawns.”
“Louis-Cesare must occupy one of those empty Senate seats,” Mircea said, dropping the analogy. “I need someone I can trust, and I need his vote to help sway others during the war. Anything likely to prevent that is unacceptable.”
“I thought you’d already decided to scrap that plan.”
“The incident with Elyas is unfortunate, but I am owed a number of favors by members of the European Senate, and the consul is owed more.”
“You think you can convince them to let him compete?”
“It is possible. It helps that he has refused to join any faction, preferring to vote his conscience on matters as they arise. That has made him a dangerous loose cannon for years, and left many of the power brokers on his Senate tearing their hair out on a regular basis. I think some might prefer to see him gone. Unfortunately those same people would just as soon see him destroyed. And if he cannot have him, Anthony will do his best to ensure that no one does, lest his abilities be used against him one day.”
“And this has what to do with me?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.
“A liaison with a dhampir could destroy Louis-Cesare’s credibility at the worst possible time,” Mircea told me bluntly.
“In case you missed it, Louis-Cesare has a mistress,” I reminded him.
“No, I did not miss it. I also did not miss how he looked at you, or that outburst.”
“Or the fact that he left without a word?”
“As well he might, after that! This could ruin him, Dorina. It has already damaged our case considerably.”
“Anthony didn’t hear that much—”
“He heard enough to ensure that I cannot introduce your evidence about the way in which Elyas was killed!”
I frowned. “But Louis-Cesare wouldn’t have killed him that way! He couldn’t have, even if he wanted to. He didn’t know how until I—” I broke off, feeling a little queasy suddenly.
“Exactly,” Mircea said grimly. “If I introduce our strongest defense, Anthony will make the case that Louis-Cesare received instruction in creative vampire-killing from his dhampir lover. His political opponents would jump at the chance to smear the character of one who has been, until now, unimpeachable. And even his friends on the Senate might begin to waver. If he could do that, some will think, he is capable of anything.”
“Including murdering a fellow senator.”
“Exactly so.” Mircea sat back, the end of his cigarette drawing patterns in the air around him. “Louis-Cesare is powerful, which makes him a good weapon, but also a dangerous enemy. He and Elyas had a long-standing animosity that stretched back more than a century. But he had neve
r before moved against him. Now, some will believe, he has done so, and those with whom he has had other disputes may start to wonder if they are next.”
“Senators must have been killed before,” I protested.
“In coups, yes. In carefully planned political bloodfests for understandable objectives. But they are not assassinated for personal reasons while sitting in their own homes! This is something that has rarely been seen before, and it allows Anthony to paint a picture of a dangerous loose cannon run amok. And if the Senate vote goes against Louis-Cesare, as judge, Anthony can impose whatever sentence he wishes.”
“You said he won’t kill him.”
“He won’t—if Louis-Cesare is willing to knuckle under and bind himself to Anthony in perpetuity.”
“Giving him a powerful first- level master at his beck and call without any power expenditure on his part whatsoever,” I finished. It would be the Tomas situation all over again, only I didn’t see Louis-Cesare agreeing to what was essentially slavery. And if he didn’t…
“I hate politics,” I said fervently.
“At the moment, I am not in love with them, either,” Mircea said cynically. “But the situation is what it is, and we must deal with it.”
“How?” It sounded to me like Anthony had a lock on this.
“I can still bring up the rune, and show the Senate the empty carrier. That, at least, is a motive they can understand for someone else to have killed Elyas. Louis-Cesare, whatever he may lack in political acumen, needs no such crutch in a duel.”
“And if Anthony mentions me?”
Mircea regarded me soberly. “Louis-Cesare tricked you. He wanted the vampire Raymond, but did not wish to fight a family member. He therefore let you believe that he cared for you, in order to steal it away.”
“That will cover my outburst,” I agreed. And might even be the truth. “What about his?”
“That is why you need to stay away from him! Louis-Cesare is a warrior, first and foremost. And like most such men, he is blunt, straightforward and uncompromising. He has developed a tenderness for you; that much is clear. How far it extends, I do not know. But he will not succeed in hiding it; he will not so much as understand the reason he should do so!”
