by Karen Chance
“That doesn’t help our case,” Marlowe said irritably. “The only creature who could drain someone this quickly is a first- or possibly a strong second- level master. Like Louis-Cesare.”
“And like half the people in the house right now! The collective energy almost knocked me down when I came in the door. Are all the challengers staying here?”
“About a third, give or take. The rest are scattered around the city.”
“And most if not all of them are on the premises, right?”
That was a good bet, considering that it was broad daylight out. A first-level master could withstand that easily enough, but the power drain would be immense. And no one was going to risk that kind of loss right before facing combat—not when the stakes were this high.
Marlowe stared at the corpse, looking angry and frustrated. “On the premises, but with no motive! They weren’t at the auction and had no way to know that the mage might be important.”
“Who else could have gotten in here?”
Marlowe made a disgusted sound. “You mean other than Lutkin and the dozen other mages who insisted on giving their interviews out of the boiling sun? That would merely leave the challengers and their servants, all of whom were on the guest list. And the press and their support staff, who are doubtless about to descend on us like the vultures they—”
“What about Geminus and Ming-de?” I interrupted. Because none of the people he named were supposed to know about the rune, either. “They could do something like this without breaking a sweat.”
“Geminus has an apartment in the city, but Ming-de brought half her court. We couldn’t accommodate them all and she elected to take a house for the duration.”
“Either of them could have snuck in here,” I pointed out. “Geminus probably knows the place like the back of his hand and Ming-de is strong enough to fog the mind of even a first-level master.”
“As is Louis-Cesare.”
“And he killed Lutkin for what? The hell of it? He had no motive, Marlowe!”
“I am sure that will be Mircea’s argument. Lutkin was at the auction. He was at Elyas’s cocktail party. Now he’s dead. Either he killed Elyas for the rune and has now been killed for it himself, or someone assumed he had it and he died for nothing. Either way, Louis-Cesare is innocent.”
“Sounds logical to me.”
“Really?” Marlowe asked sourly. “Then how about this? Louis-Cesare murdered Elyas over Christine. He was caught in the act and is currently in fear for his life. He panicked and ran before he could stand trial, and has now killed a scapegoat to bolster his case.”
“That’s ridiculous! He’s on the run and yet he comes here, of all places? Why not attack the man in his own home if he wanted him dead?”
“Lutkin is a powerful, wealthy mage. His home is doubtless riddled with protection spells that Louis-Cesare would have no way of knowing. But he is quite familiar with the consul’s home and could easily evade security.”
“Without being seen?” I demanded. “Coming or going?”
Marlowe arched an eyebrow. “It seems you do not know Louis-Cesare as well as I had thought.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask what that meant, because a gaggle of reporters took that moment to storm the room. There was a metric ton on hand to cover the races, and it looked like every single one of them was trying to crowd into the limited space. I realized why a second later, when the consul’s spokesman entered the room, looking harassed.
He looked a lot more so when he saw the corpse. The elegant Mircea Basarab stopped in the middle of the room, ignoring the clicking cameras, the lights and the horde of hovering reporters. And said a very bad word.
“Lord Mircea, what can you tell us about the unusual state of the body? ”
“Is there a reason proper security measures weren’t in place to prevent—”
“How do you feel this will affect the current state of Senate/Circle relations?”
“Can you comment on the rumors circulating about you and the new—”
“Clear the room!” Mircea snapped, and a dozen vamps fell over themselves to obey. I was a little surprised. The vamp press would print what the consul told it to, but the mages were under no such restraints. Mircea was usually more careful around them. But then, putting a positive spin on this might just be beyond even his abilities.
“This is insufferable!” he said, glaring at the corpse, as if it was his own fault he was dead. “There is no way we can cover this up. Elyas was ours, but the Circle is already demanding an explanation for Lutkin’s death. I have just been informed that they have a delegation on the—” He stopped, finally catching sight of me. “What are you doing here?”
“You didn’t bring her?” Marlowe asked, his face reddening.
“I didn’t even know she was here!”
Marlowe rounded on me. “You told me—”
“That I came in through the front door. Which I did.”
“You came—how?”
“I walked.”
Marlowe’s face flushed, and okay, maybe that last little quip hadn’t been so smart. I started to explain when Mircea cut me off. “You promised to stay out of this, Dorina.”
Actually, I didn’t remember promising anything of the kind, but I didn’t think now was a good time to correct him. “You said you didn’t care if Lutkin had the stone or not. But Claire does. She wants the stone no matter who has it. I came here hoping to ask him some questions, and found him like this.”
“You did not ‘find him.’ Not in the middle of a vampire stronghold! You cannot be here! Do you not understand—”
“I understand that the list is shrinking. Lutkin is dead, andsubrand couldn’t have killed him. Not like that. And Cheung is also in the clear, at least for Elyas’s death. He was at my place last night—”
“Along with others. Why did you not tell me you were hosting royalty?”
“It slipped my mind?”
Mircea didn’t look like he thought that was funny, and the next moment, I felt a couple of large shapes move up behind me. “You’re throwing me out?”
“You promised to stay out of this,” Mircea said grimly, as someone grabbed my arm. “And so you shall.”
“I can help you, Mircea!”
“Yes, you can!” he said savagely. “You can help me by—” He cut off, and the color drained from both vamp’s faces. It was almost comical, it happened so fast. And then something hit me that wasn’t funny at all.
I had never really understood the old “ton of bricks” analogy, but I did now. It felt exactly like that, like some massive weight had just descended on me, crushing me. I didn’t even try to stay on my feet; I went to my knees, and prayed I wouldn’t be on my face next.
But the pressure wasn’t the worst of it. “A pretty little monster. I had forgotten about this one, Mircea,” a female voice said.
And with those words, a hundred voices slipped into the spaces between my thoughts, skittering like bugs into the dark corners. I could feel them, writhing inside my skull—spiders, snakes, every small, dark thing prying into every small, dark space inside me. If I hadn’t already been on my knees, that would have done it.
“She was just leaving,” Mircea said tightly.
“Oh, do let her stay,” the counsul said, bending down to me. “It appears she knows all our secrets, in any case.”
“She knows nothing that is not known to the meanest of our servants.”
Lustrous black hair slipped over a bare shoulder, and a few strands clung to the sweat on my face. Until a slim bronze hand wiped them away, gently. Her skin was papery, almost scaly, and finely abrasive. I could almost feel my own skin crawling up my face, trying to get away from that inhuman touch.
“She is not a servant, Mircea.” A single finger tipped my chin up, so that I was looking into a bronze face, beautiful and cold. “Yet she may prove helpful.”
I stared into dark, kohl-rimmed eyes, and felt a coiling tightness reeling out from my gut
to my spine. I tasted blood in my mouth, felt it sing in my ears, as my dhampir sense reached new heights. It was screaming—but not a warning. This time, it was a siren song, a pure driving need, breathtaking in its simplicity. For one brief moment, I had no other wish, no other purpose, no other reason for existing, than to sink my teeth into that slim throat.
And that didn’t make sense. I’d met her once before, and I hadn’t had this reaction, hadn’t even come close. I didn’t know why, but the consul was trying to bring on one of my fits. And she was doing a damn good job of it. I wanted to kill her so badly, I could taste it.
She laughed, a sound like the scrabbling of claws against glass. “Yes, I think she will do very well.”
“Do? For what purpose?” Mircea asked.
The consul’s lovely face turned up to his. “To help us locate our problem Frenchman, of course.”
CHAPTER 31
The pressure released so abruptly that I fell. But I was already rolling as soon as I hit the floor, my hand reaching into my coat for a stake, my feet coming under me—and then I was picked up around the waist and crushed back against an unyielding body.
I didn’t know whose arms held me, didn’t care. I wanted her, like I’d never wanted another kill in my life. I wanted to feel that smooth flesh ripping under my hands, wanted to taste her blood, wanted to—
“Dorina! Do not—”
“Silence.”
Mircea shut up, but the arms around my middle tightened. I could feel his power, soothing, calming, but it couldn’t reach me, wasn’t enough, not against the red tide pulling at me. The dhampir strength that comes only in my fits was rising. With that amount of strength, all poured into one hard, swift lunge, I could have her. I. Could. Have. Her.
And as soon as I did, I was dead. The thought cut through the writhing echoes, going straight to my core. I didn’t know if it was my thought or Mircea’s, but it was true, either way. She’d kill me, and if she didn’t, the guards would. I could feel them, hovering nearby. Ten, twelve—I couldn’t tell but enough. More than enough.
But it was so hard to care.
“I’m right here.” The words, low, sibilant, taunting, ripped through my brain, seething like fire ants, tearing like shrapnel. Squeezing one eye shut, I flattened a hand against my ear, but it did no good. The words were inside my head.
“She is stronger than I expected. Or perhaps you are helping her, Mircea.”
“No, Lady.”
“Release her, then. Let us see what manner of control she really has.” The arms around me didn’t budge. “You would defy me on this?”
“With… regret, Lady.”
And suddenly, the snakes were back, and this time, they’d brought friends. It felt like my body had been invaded by a sea of tiny spiders. I could feel them seething underneath my skin, in my head, every movement of their hair-fine legs displacing some of my flesh. The tiny erosions were multiplied by thousands, millions, until my skin was cracked and running and my flesh was flaking off the bone.
Someone squeezed my shoulder, and spiders scurried outward from the touch, crawling up through cracks in my flesh to scuttle across my skin. I considered screaming, but my lungs were teeming with them, too, sloughing away like the rest of me, and drawing the necessary breath would only split me open like a rotten fruit. So the spiders seethed and I didn’t scream.
“Enough!”
The single word sliced through the black haze in front of my vision, leaving me gasping on the floor, where I’d somehow ended up. The consul laughed again, but this time, it didn’t resonate. It was just a laugh. Like the carpet I was drooling onto was just carpet.
I clawed in a breath and coughed it out again, and didn’t even try to get up. I just lay there, blinking away moisture. Sweat, I told myself firmly, as my heart beat a staccato rhythm in my chest.
Someone knelt in front of me. “Are you all right?”
I made some small sound. It was supposed to be a laugh, but even I had to admit, it sounded more like a whimper. Pathetic, some part of my mind said.
I told that part to suck it.
“This is why you will never be a consul, Mircea,” he was told as he gathered me up. “No matter how strong you become, you are not ruthless enough.”
“I can be ruthless, Lady.”
“But not with everyone.”
The room swam a little about me, and my skin felt clammy and cold. But Mircea’s arms were a warm, steadying presence around me. “No. Not with everyone.”
“Unlike Anthony.” Her voice suddenly switched to a more businesslike tone. “Louis-Cesare must be found. Once Anthony learns he is lost, our case will be as well.”
“He will be found.”
“In time? We must produce him tonight, after the challenges.”
“We are doing what we can. You know the difficulty.”
“I also know the solution. He has shown an interest in this one. He went to her aid last night.”
“He went to collect his mistress—”
“Do not take me for a fool, Mircea.” The voice cracked like a whip. “I do not care that Louis-Cesare indulges his perversions, only that he fights for me while he does it. We cannot find him; therefore he must find us. If he has a bond with this creature, her pain will bring him faster than any other lure we have.”
“They do not have a bond. Therefore such a tactic would gain you nothing and be a waste of a resource,” Mircea said. His voice was calm, but the hand on my arm pressed hard enough to hurt. “Remember Tomas.”
There was no reply to that, but the room suddenly became noticeably chillier.
My eyes managed to focus on the consul, who was standing a few yards away. There were plenty of seats around, but she was probably afraid to crush her little pets. I watched the swarm of tiny snakes she wore in lieu of clothes writhe across her form from neck to feet, a glimmering, gleaming mass in constant motion. The first time I’d ever seen that trick, I’d thought it pretty cool.
I wasn’t feeling so much like that now.
“Top pocket,” I gasped, a little desperately. I really, really didn’t want to feel those things writhing inside me again. I thought once more and I might just go crazy permanently.
Three sets of eyes focused on me, but it was Mircea’s hand that slipped inside my jacket. Dark eyes ran swiftly over the short letter Claire had given me. His face did not change, but the body holding me relaxed slightly.
“I am afraid we shall have to find another method, Lady,” he said, handing the letter over.
Marlowe took it from him. “What is it?”
“A letter from a Blarestri royal princess, appointing Dorina her envoy to act for her in all matters concerning the stone. Any action taken against her representative will be considered to have been taken against the princess herself.”
The consul’s expression did not change, but her snakes writhed a little faster. “Find him!” she snapped, and strode from the room. She didn’t use the door; the fireplace was apparently an illusion, too, because she passed right through it. I was starting to wonder if anything in this house of horrors was real.
Except the bodies.
“What was the point of that?” Mircea demanded, as soon as she’d left.
“The consul is becoming… concerned… that the problem with Louis-Cesare may backfire on her,” Marlowe said carefully.
“Explain.”
“Should she lose him to Anthony, it will be a defeat on her own soil in front of her colleagues. Such a loss could damage the prestige she needs to lead in the war. And if she wins…” He took a deep breath he didn’t need. “She knows we need to be strong at this juncture, but she fears that some of us may be becoming too much so.”
Mircea had been wiping my face with his pocket handkerchief, but at that, he looked up. “She is suspicious of my loyalty?”
“Ambition has blinded better men.”
“And more foolish ones. I have no plans to challenge her authority.”
“P
erhaps not now. But with the Pythia under your control—”
“She is under the Senate’s control.” He paused. “More or less.”
“She is under your control, Mircea,” Marlowe insisted. “Her loyalty is to you. She is suspicious of the consul—”
“With reason. That stunt with Tomas was ill-conceived. I warned her as much at the time.”
“You suggested using him!”
“Using, not abusing, Kit. I never suggested butchering the man! That backfired, as anyone who knows Cassie’s temperament should have expected.”
“But we do not know it. You do. And you were strong enough before. Now, you have control of the Pythia as well as Louis-Cesare’s loyalty through his attachment to Dorina—”
“And how did she find out about that? What did you tell her, Kit?”
“Only what she asked. She’d already heard as much from Anthony. He thinks it’s the best joke this century.”
“Anthony is not you! You could have denied it.”
“I could have betrayed my duty, you mean, in order to save this—”
“Careful.”
“Mircea, what the hell is wrong with you? I’m beginning to think that damned geis addled your brain!”
“Or cleared it.”
I lay utterly still, content to let them believe I was more or less out of it. Which wasn’t far from the truth. Between the general oppressiveness of the house and the consul’s idea of a good time, I was a little under the weather. The room kept shimmying like a belly dancer every time I opened my eyes, so I mostly didn’t.
I didn’t understand a lot of the conversation, but the basic idea came across. Mircea was growing powerful enough that the consul was starting to worry about him. And given the way she handled problems, I didn’t think that was too healthy.
Apparently, Mircea didn’t, either. “She truly thinks I would move against her?”
“She wonders if one with so much power will be content to serve for the rest of his life,” Marlowe said.
“I am content to live, Kit. Perhaps it is something you have forgotten how to do.”
