Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 28

Marlowe glanced at me suspiciously as we passed through the front door, but I wasn’t interested in checking up on him. I assumed that he’d bug the place, and that I would remove them as soon as he left. I just wanted something dry to wear.

I headed for the stairs before I remembered—we no longer had any. So I swerved into the living room for a blanket instead. I found one that didn’t smell too much like troll, wrapped it sarong-style around me and started back for the hall. And stopped.

My eyes had focused on a tiny movement near the door. I bent down and found myself looking at a lone warrior, all of two inches high. It was one of Olga’s chess pieces.

That in itself wasn’t unusual; they ended up scattered about everywhere. But they didn’t usually carry small torches that they waved around wildly. And, once it had gotten my attention, the tiny thing started off across the forest of clothes and bedding.

It finally paused at the top of the stairs going down to the basement. It looked up at me, the minuscule faceplate gleaming in the torchlight. When I stayed where I was, it started waving again impatiently, and pointing down into the blackness.

For a minute, I just stood there, swaying a little on my feet and wondering how paranoid a person had to be before she decided the toys were out to get her. But in the end, I shrugged my shoulders and just went with it. I picked the little thing up and carried it down the stairs.

At the bottom, another small warrior was doing something near the rusted hulk of Pip’s still. There was no light in the basement, and the tiny torch cast wavering shadows on the walls that confused me further. But when I got closer, it became obvious that he was pushing around small sticks and bits of moss, arranging them in some sort of pattern.

The first small warrior started poking me in the side of the hand with his sword, so I put him down. He made his way across the peeling paint of the floor and touched his torch to the end of the nearest pile of kindling. Fire ran across the old concrete, forming jagged letters for a brief instant before the tiny fuel was exhausted: OPEN.

I stared at them and then at the wavering imprint they’d left on my retinas. The message was clear enough: it had been left in front of the wall where Pip’s conduit to Faerie manifested. But if Claire was on the other side, she could open it for herself. And if she wasn’t…

Butsubrand would never leave a message like that. And the only time he’d been in the cellar, he’d been too busy trying to kill me to rig something up. At least, I fervently hoped so.

I reached out, wondering if I was about to make a huge mistake, and pressed the small talisman that powered the link between the ley- line sink and the portal. I jumped back, but not fast enough. A swirl of light and color appeared on the wall, flooding the ugly old basement with a rich golden light. And something huge tumbled out of nowhere and smacked me to the ground.

My skull hit the floor hard enough to have me seeing stars. But it was difficult to concentrate on that while the life was getting squeezed out of me. The massive weight shifted slightly, and while I was still crushed, I could breathe.

And that was worse.

My lungs had room to fully inflate, but they were cowering in my chest in fear. I’d once been buried under a pile of decomposing corpses, with jellylike flesh and gangrenous limbs, and it hadn’t reeked like that. I retched, but my stomach had nothing left to bring up. Lucky I never got that sandwich, I thought, as someone started slapping troll flesh.

“Get off her! Move, Ysmi! Dorina, are you all right?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I could talk, and anyway, I was afraid to open my mouth and let in more of that hideous stench. But I looked up.

A thick, cracked, yellow toenail stared me in the face. It was attached to a foot with knobs and warts and skin as hard as a rock, all held together by some sort of greenish yellowish fungus and a lot of dirt. My last conscious thought was to decide that, all things considered, having a troll foot in my face was the worst thing that had happened to me all day.

I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later to find myself in my own bed with rain lashing the window and a note fluttering on the door. A glance down showed that someone, probably Claire, had stuffed me into a T-shirt and wrapped my wrist. But judging by my general filthiness, she’d stopped short of an actual bath.

I drew one in the tub for myself with a lot of bubbles, a rare luxury, and got in, taking the note in with me. It was a two-pager. Claire hadn’t been able to leave me one for so long, she was making up for lost time.

Who is this Marlowe guy anyway? He’s an ass. Threw him out. Threatened to have Ysmi sit on him if he returned.

I grinned. I’d really needed the sleep, but damn… I was sorry to have missed that.

How did no vampires turn into a houseful of them? You have weird friends. That Christine freaks me out. Put her in the large closet in the first-floor guest room because there are no windows. Okay?

I was sure Christine appreciated being bedded down in the closet. On the other hand, the only other rooms without a view were the pantry, which we no longer had, and part of the basement, which was full of trolls. On the whole, I thought she’d gotten the better deal.

Why are there two severed heads rolling around the house? Cats tried to eat one. Mostly prevented.

I wondered what “mostly” entailed. Decided I didn’t want to know.

Headless guy is in hallway broom closet with head that I think is his. Hosed body off in backyard; it was filthy. Head cussed a lot. But not as much as Radu when he found out you didn’t include a new car in your deal with this Cheung person. He said to call him.

Oops. I knew we’d forgotten something. I made a mental note to avoid ’Du for the near future. Maybe for the distant future, too. I wondered if there was any way to claim a Lamborghini on my expense account with Mircea. Probably not.

FYI, Olga cut a new portal. Well, not new. It’s a new destination on the old one. Two colors now: green goes to Faerie, blue goes to beauty shop. But she’d started it only today and we had no way back unless opened from this end. Sorry. Next time we’ll send somebody small through first.

Knock on my door when you get up.

That last line sounded ominous, but it wasn’t like I could avoid Claire, too. I sloshed my way out of the bath and checked out my bruise collection. I hadn’t added as many as I’d expected, all things considered. I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of soft gray sweatpants and padded down to Claire’s room, trying to dry my hair with one hand.

I couldn’t have been out long, because it was still dark outside. Claire was up, or at least there was a strip of light under her door. I knocked and she opened up, her long red hair done up in fabric rollers. It looked like she’d put her time at the beauty shop to good use.

“We didn’t know you were home, or we’d have waited for you,” she told me earnestly before I could say anything. “But when we heard the commotion from the wards—”

“You mean they actually did something?” I’d begun to wonder.

“For about a minute. Until the damn Svarestri deactivated them!”

She moved aside and I came in. She’d moved a twin bed in here, and Aiden and Stinky were bedded down in snoring heaps. Or, at least, Stinky was snoring, sprawled out at the head of the bed like a drunken sailor, hairy limbs akimbo. Aiden was curled up at his side like a cherub. A thumb-sucking one, I was glad to note. Stinky had never done that. If he couldn’t eat it, he wasn’t interested.

“The Svarestri had to have altered the wards from the inside,” I said, sitting on her bed. Wards could be overwhelmed from outside, but they could be taken down only when someone had access to their source of power. “How did they manage to reverse the portals?”

Claire sat on the vanity chair, propped her foot up on the quilt and continued what she’d been doing, which was to paint her toenails. “I’ve been thinking about that. Manlíkans are usually used for scouts into Dark Fey lands and as training dummies on the practice field. Not as warriors. I don’t think subrand intended to use them to fight us, but rather to find him a way into the house. I should have wondered what the rest of those things were up to while a handful kept us busy.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to have them take down the wards?”

She shook her head. “Wards ignore Manlíkans. As far as they’re concerned, they don’t exist. But a portal is a different kind of magic, and the Svarestri somehow knew there was one in the pantry—”

“subrand saw it the last time he was here,” I said, recalling how Louis-Cesare and I had once escaped him using that very portal.

“I had wondered; they aren’t that easy to detect unless you’re right on top of one. Anyway, they managed to reverse it, but by that time they were exhausted from the storm and the struggle with us—”

“So they waited to break in until tonight, when we were asleep,” I finished for her. It made sense.

“Yes. Attacking women and children in their beds—that’s whatsubrand calls honor!”

Personally, I thought it was whatsubrand called smart. I didn’t like his tactics, but from a purely military standpoint, it had been a flawless plan. And if Cheung hadn’t shown up, it might well have worked.

I said as much, only to have Claire frown savagely. “Caedmon should have killed him when he had the chance!”

I blinked. It was pretty much where my thoughts had been going, but it was a little disconcerting to hear it from her. The woman I knew had planted marigolds in the garden to keep the bugs off the plants because she didn’t like swatting them. She wouldn’t talk to me for a week once after seeing me beat a rat to death with a broom handle. She’d been a tofu-eating, fur-hating, plastic-shoe-wearing pacifist, but it looked like things had changed.

She flushed, but she didn’t drop her eyes. “It’s true. You know it is!”

“No arguments here. What I don’t get is whysubrand waited so long to attack. His odds would have been better had he struck sooner, before I got home with reinforcements… so to speak.”

Claire looked up from putting a piece of cotton between her final two toes. “Yes, about them…”

“I know you didn’t want vampires in the house,” I said, marshaling my arguments.

“I’m warming up to the idea,” she said, surprising me. “It looks like we need all the help we can get. I’m just not sure about these specific vampires. That Cheung guy was parked outside the house for hours, waiting for you to get home. And he didn’t look friendly. I tried calling you half a dozen times to warn you—”

“I didn’t have my phone on me most of the night.”

Claire raised an eyebrow, but didn’t ask. “I assumed you must have seen him and that’s why you hadn’t come back. I left you a message and we went to bed once it became obvious he couldn’t get through the wards. But now all of a sudden you trust him to guard us?”

“I don’t trust him,” I told her, stretching out on the bed. “I trust the system. It’s pretty harsh on masters who get out of line. And Cheung gave his word.”

“And that means something?”

“If given to you or me? No. But he gave it to a Senate member, and that’s a very different thing.”

“You mean he’d face some kind of punishment if he broke it?”

“And then some. Before the Senates, there was almost constant war between vamp houses, with constantly shifting alliances and backstabbing and betrayal. Think Italy in the Middle Ages, with every little city-state grasping at its neighbors, wanting to expand its lands at their expense. It was pretty much unrelieved bloodshed, and decimated whole houses. Once the Senates got organized, the rules they laid down were made harsh on purpose, to make even the richest prize not worth the price.”

“So Cheung can be relied on to help?”

“For the next several days, yes. And by that time, Heidar should be here.” I sat up, a giant yawn splitting my face. I needed to go to bed before I fell asleep right here. But I needed something else first. “Speaking of help, do you still want to do something to assist the investigation?”

She brightened. “Yes, although I have to say, things haven’t been as boring around here as I’d expected.”

“We’re a lively bunch.”

She snorted. “What do you need?”

“I need you to write me a note.”

Rain. It had started on the way, but he’d bowed his head and pressed on, his horse’s hooves churning up the mud. It had slowed him down; there wouldn’t be much time until morning. Until others arrived to wonder and stare, to lament and question, and to obliterate what little evidence might remain.

The rider dismounted, the sound of his spurs the only noise in the unnaturally still night. The moon was up, bulging half-full with watery light, turning the world into stark silvers and blacks. To the left, an old apple grove fractured the dark sky with darker traceries of branches. They were bare, the season now over, the few remaining leaves plucked by the cold wind and rattling against the bark. The ones that had drifted over crackled under his feet, dead like everything else here.

He tied his horse to one of the trees, keeping it well out of harm’s way, and moved forward. The coming dawn tugged at his consciousness, but it was impossible to move quickly. It would feel irreverent, like laughing in a graveyard.

To the right was the chapel, still partially protected by a slate roof. He paused at the door, or where it would have been. It had burned down to the hinges; his foot uncovered the old iron pieces in the sifting of leaves and sodden ash on the cold stone floor. The roof had gone, too, having been built of wood, as had the altar. But the crucifix remained, in a way. Its silver had dripped down the walls, painting the old stones with a smear of beauty.

He moved into a dark corridor. It had once been brightly lit by sconces that were now only glinting suggestions in the gloom of the passage, leaping into reality when the beams of his lantern swept over them. He found the first one there, a huddled, unrecognizable shape in the dark.

He knelt beside it. Dim, filtered light poured through a narrow window, bringing with it a wisp of cool air and the faint sound of rain. The body was charred, unrecognizable. But the cross around the neck had been trapped underneath, and suffered only scorching. It was small and plain, and made out of some metal sturdier than gold. Not the one, then.

The passage ended at what must have been the refectory. The missing roof ensured that a thin mist coated everything, but he could still just make out the rectangular shapes of the long tables where sparse meals had been served. There were bodies here, too. But the one he sought was not among them.

Down another dark passage and through two more rooms, he finally found the small room called Misericord. It was where punishments were doled out to those who had violated the strict rule. But no punishment devised by man had done this.

The body was stretched out on the floor, the dead eyes staring up at the ceiling. Unlike the others, it had not been burnt. There were no signs of scorching in the room at all, and even the roof here had survived. Perhaps that was why it was so well preserved—the rain had not touched it; the wind had not disturbed it.

It didn’t help. The face was unrecognizable, desiccated and withered. The eyes were white, the once-dark hair brittle and drained of color, the mouth opened in a silent scream. The hand was a half-closed claw, as if it had been clutched around something.

He tugged gently at the bones, barely held together by skin. The small movement caused the body to settle with a dry whisper, the broken wrist making a soft popping as it tore through the tissue-thin skin of the arm. The small sound seemed to echo in his head, and a bone-dead chill settled through him.

He pulled harder, forcing the hand to give up its secret. And then he merely squatted against the shelter of a burned-out wall, palm open, a glittering cross of solid gold held loosely in his fingers. He traced the cabochon stones that decorated the piece, polished and cool under his touch, and felt a coiling tightness reeling out from his gut to his spine. Blood sang in his ears, pain stabbed through him like a million keen blades, and the bitterness of guilt settled back into its usual place under his ribs, where he always carried it.

And now, where he always would.

I rolled over, kicking the covers with a low grumble of irritation. The old sheets were damp and inclined to stick to my skin. My bedroom was hot and, thanks to the weather, uncomfortably muggy. I peeled off the T-shirt, exchanged it for a fresh one and pushed up the window.

I’d been hoping for a breeze, but ended up getting slapped in the face by a gust of rain instead. Of course. I perched on the ledge anyway, not caring if I got wet as long as I cooled down.

The storm ruffled my damp hair and fanned my flushed cheeks. It felt wonderful. I could hear someone’s wind chimes, a faint, distant glissando riding the breeze. I leaned my head back against the smooth wood of the frame and watched lightning lick the sky.

A magical accident on our recent assignment had resulted in my sharing Louis-Cesare’s memories—all of them. And since he was almost four hundred years old, that was a lot to absorb. Most of it had been a blur at the time, a lifetime of impressions pouring into my head all at once. It had been too much, too fast, too overwhelming for anyone to take in. But ever since, I kept getting flashbacks to pieces of his past.

They might have eventually settled, slipping off to lurk in my subconscious somewhere with the rest of the monsters, if it hadn’t been for the wine. As it was, I was treated to an almost nightly parade of images, some so fragmented as to make no sense, but others as real as if I’d lived them myself. This had been one of the latter.

I could still smell the acrid stench of the fire, taste papery ash on my tongue, feel his bright flare of pain as if it had been my own. He hadn’t believed… something… hadn’t expected… Damn it! It was already fading.

A patter of rain hit my dangling leg, but I sat there for a long time staring at the dark yard. Tasting bitterness, fruit gone to rot, lost hopes, ruined dreams. And didn’t know what any of it meant. It was like seeing a movie and not knowing the ending. Or the beginning. Or who most of the damn characters were.

And knowing that I probably never would.

I know what I want, he’d said. And that was obviously Christine. Because despite what he maintained, there was no earthly reason why he had to stay with her if he didn’t choose to. Yes, he’d screwed some things up, but he’d also gone through hell to find her again, even to the point of letting himself be drained by those same mages in payment for her freedom. He didn’t owe her a damn thing.

So he wanted her. And he was right. Because despite what the stories say, love or infatuation or whatever the hell we’d had doesn’t really triumph over all. Not when two people came from backgrounds as different as ours. And not when they are genetically designed to kill each other.

It had been a bad idea from the beginning, and it was just as well that one of us had realized it before it went any further than it had. Game over, book closed, the end. Except for these damn memories that wouldn’t leave me alone.

The rain was getting worse and I was close to soaked. Not to mention my floor, my bedside table and my bag of nasty tricks. I pulled the duffel out from under the bed, took everything out and set it in a row on the dresser to dry. That sort of stuff was expensive, and it came out of my budget.

The second damp T-shirt went into the clothes hamper, and I tugged on another one before falling back into my hot, rumpled bed. I viciously plumped my pillow, looking for a cool spot. I had a job to do tomorrow; I didn’t have time for this. I concentrated on the intermittent sound of the rain and willed myself back to sleep.