Death's Mistress

EPILOGUE

“I told you she was evil,” someone said as I blinked open my eyes.

I was in my bedroom. A wash of afternoon sunshine cascaded over the old sheets, turning the off-white cotton faintly yellow. A vampire sat beside my bed, and he was in yellow, too. And before my eyes focused on the face, I knew who it was. There aren’t many people, even in the vampire world, who think that daffodil-colored satin is appropriate day wear.

Radu crossed his legs and flipped over another page in the magazine he was reading—Car and Driver, ominously enough—while I checked myself out. The parts I could see poking out of a faded blue T-shirt all appeared to be functional, although most were trying to decide between a livid red and a blue- black color scheme. But I’d looked worse, and I’d certainly felt worse. And, frankly, I was grateful to be feeling anything at all.

Even if I didn’t understand it.

I pushed the extra pillow behind me and sat up. “Maybe you can clear something up for me that I’ve always wondered about,” I said, meeting those famous turquoise eyes.

“Yes?”

“Why do you insist on dressing like freaking D’Artagnan when you were born two hundred years before that?”

Radu frowned. “Formal wear in my day was robes, Dory.”

“And?”

“Nasty, long, hot, smothering robes. Good in winter, of course, but the rest of the time…”

“Vampires don’t sweat.”

“Yes, but knee pants are so much more flattering. You can see my legs.”

“You want people to see your legs?”

“I have very nice legs!” We both paused to admire them for a moment.

“Are you here to shake me down for the car?” I asked, getting it over with. “Because I don’t have three hundred thousand dollars.”

’Du’s eyes flicked over the well-worn furnishings and faded quilts. “I never would have guessed.”

“I’m not likely to have it in the future, either.”

His frown grew. “I’m not here about the car, Dory! I bought it for Gunther, in any case. I don’t drive.”

“Gunther? Your bodyguard?”

“He’s a very good bodyguard.”

I looked at him severely. “ ’Du, you’re not falling for a human, are you? You know how tacky that is.”

“Certainly not.” He shook out a sleeve. “Anyway, I bought him another one.”

I grinned.

“Stop that.”

“If you’re not here over the car, why are you here?” I asked curiously. Radu was certainly strong enough to withstand daylight, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable.

He poured me a glass of water from a bedside carafe and settled back with a disgruntled look. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps I thought you might want to know how the trial went.”

I sat up a little more. “They still had it?”

“Well, of course they still had it. Elyas is still dead, isn’t he?”

“As far as I know. What happened?”

“Louis-Cesare was acquitted of murdering that sniveling creature.” I felt my spine relax slightly into the pillow. “And convicted of mass endangerment by knowingly concealing a revenant.”

I sat back up again. “What?”

“Well, what did you expect? She almost butchered Anthony.”

“What’s the sentence?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop.

“Death.”

“Death?”

“But since Christine was under Elyas’s care—and supposed supervision—while committing the murders, Mircea managed to successfully argue that the sentence should be carried out on him.”

“On Elyas?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“But he’s already dead.”

“Yes. Quite the time-saver, that.”

“So… they’re just going to let Louis- Cesare walk?” That didn’t sound like the Senate.

“Not entirely. He did sire her, after all, and failed to deal with the problem. He’s lucky they didn’t do worse.”

“Radu! What did they do?”

“Threw him off the Senate—both of them. And he is banned from taking Senatorial office again for at least a century.” He crossed his legs to get them out of a creeping patch of sunlight. “Of course, that’s a lot of tosh. It was really the only compromise anyone could think of to the problem of which Senate should get him. Neither was willing to back down, and we can’t very well afford a conflict when we’re already in one….”

“So Louis-Cesare had to fall on his sword?”

“In a manner of speaking. For my part, I think he should be pleased. It’s going to be hell in the senate until all the new members settle in.”

“So the challenges went off without a hitch?”

“Thus far. Of course, tonight was merely round one, and no one truly expected a problem yet.”

“I assume Ming-de’s candidates are cleaning up?”

“No. In fact, she had a rather poor showing. The only candidates to move on to the finals from the Chinese delegation were Zheng-ze and Lord Cheung, although it’s early days.”

“Zheng-ze?”

“Very odd sort. Believe it or not, he fought the whole night with a severed head tied to his belt!”

So Scarface was on his way to a Senate seat, after all. I grinned. “I believe it.”

There was a knock on the door and a hairy little head poked in. Big gray eyes regarded me silently for a moment before Stinky scrambled up the bedpost and plopped down beside me. He had something wet and dripping in his hand, and before I could stop him, he slapped it to my forehead.

“Thank you,” I told him as icy water dribbled down my neck.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said, coming in with Aiden on her hip and a blond at her back. Her hair was extra bouncy today. I guess because of the curlers. “But he insisted. He seems to believe it’s some sort of magic cure-all.”

I surreptitiously passed the dripping offering to Radu, who put it on the nightstand. “I seem to be doing okay without it, although I’m not sure why.”

“I am,” the gorgeous blond man behind her said. He had a chair in each hand, both of which he put down in order to give me a kiss. “Hello, Dory.”

“Caedmon. When did you get here?”

“Last night, as soon as our time streams caught up with one another,” the fey king said.

“Heidar’s here, too,” Claire told me, “along with about fifty guards. It’s a madhouse downstairs.”

“It could be worse. Heidar wanted to bring half the army,” Caedmon said drily.

“We could have used them,” I told him. “How the hell didsubrand get loose? Claire said he was secure.”

“It was clever,” Caedmon admitted. “My sister wrote to me, begging to be allowed to see her son. Foolishly, as it turns out, I agreed.”

“Why foolishly?”

“Efridís is adept at glamourie—good enough to fool even our own people. She paidsubrand a visit, they spoke for a time, and she left. At least that was what my guards believed.”

“You’re saying she took his place?” He nodded. “But how? If you knewsubrand had her ability—”

“On the contrary. Glamourie has always been difficult for him; he takes after his father in that regard. But my sister was veiled when she arrived, and through the gauze, the roughness in his assumed features was not obvious. And due to her rank, the guards did not check her too closely. Meanwhile, their prisoner’s appearance was flawless.”

“Then you have your sister in jail?”

“At present, yes. She resumed her old form once her son was safely away. It is an untenable situation, however. I cannot detain the Svarestri queen indefinitely, a fact she well knows.”

“So she’s sitting around your hunting lodge, playing cards or whatever, while that son of a bitch tries to kill Aiden?”

“But from what Claire tells me,subrand was not trying to kill Aiden during the attacks. In fact, he never so much as looked for him. Both times he went directly after you. He even waited to attack the second time until he knew you had returned home.”

“He wanted me to tell him where Aiden was.”

“Did he say so directly?”

I tried to think back. It wasn’t easy. My brain felt fuzzy and my tongue was as dry as sandpaper. I sipped some of the water Radu had poured. “Not in so many words, no. But that was the idea.”

“But do you not think it is significant that he did not focus his attention on Claire? She was a double threat. Her null abilities allowed her to destroy the wards that made the constructs possible, and her Dark Fey heritage made her a formidable opponent, particularly when protecting her child.”

“Maybe he knew she’d never give up her son’s location and believed I’d be an easier target.”

“Perhaps. But he had fought you before and had not managed to break you. In his situation, I would have concentrated on killing Claire, then you, and then searched at my leisure for the child.”

Claire stared at him, horrified. “You would what?”

“I am merely telling you proper military procedure,” he told her patiently. “Andsubrand was trained as I was, to be logical in the choice of adversaries. Yet his actions here were not—if Aiden was his target.”

“You don’t think the Svarestri want him dead?” I demanded.

“Oh, they wish that, certainly. But I do not think they feel a sense of urgency. It will be decades, probably centuries, before he is powerful enough to pose a real threat.”

“They tried to kill him before,” Claire said angrily.

“Yes, but as a postscript, if you will, to an attempt to kill me. He became a priority only once they believed I was dead. Then he was the only thing standing betweensubrand and the throne. As long as I live, that is not the case.”

“Then you think the attack at the castle had nothing to do withsubrand?” Claire asked skeptically.

“Yes and no. I do not think he ordered it, but the main conspirator was the father of Ölvir, one of the traitors I was forced to execute after his recent coup attempt. The man committed suicide before we could lay our hands on him, but he left a letter. He said that as I had deprived him of a son, he would deprive me of a grandson.”

Claire shivered.

“subrand has been preoccupied with the search for Naudiz, in any case. Having an invincible commander could sway many to his cause, and it is a powerful symbol. It is only given to the heir to the throne.”

“But you just said he was after me,” I pointed out.

“Yes.”

It took me a second, but it finally clicked. “I don’t have it, Caedmon!”

“Not anymore,” he agreed, holding something up. It was a crudely cut stone, off-white in color and about the size of my thumb. A few scratches on one side formed a crude glyph.

I pounced on it. “Where did you get this?”

“That vampire found it.”

“Louis-Cesare?”

“Yes. I knew it was some ridiculous hyphenated name.”

“It was discovered under your body when he pulled you out of the wreckage,” Radu said, shooting Caedmon a less than friendly look.

“What was it doing there?” I asked, bewildered.

Caedmon shrugged. “It fell off your skin after its energy was expended, deflecting the blast.”

“Off my skin?”

“Naudiz is meant to be worn into battle. When cast, it melts into the skin so that it cannot be dislodged.”

“Like a tattoo?”

“No. The magical tattoos your mages wear are visible on the body. One of the advantages of Naudiz is that it is not. An enemy can therefore never be certain when the wearer is protected, and must assume that any attack made upon him will be very risky.”

“That is why everyone wanted it for the challenges,” Radu said. “Most magical aids would be detected. But Naudiz was specifically designed not to be.”

I stared down at the small thing on my palm, my head reeling. “I had it? The whole time I was running all over the city, going crazy searching for it, it was on my damn skin?”

“And fortunately so. Had it not been, you would most certainly be dead.”

“But… how did it get there?”

“We got a theory about that,” a familiar voice said. It took me a second to recognize the guy who stood in the doorway. Because, for once, all his parts were where they were supposed to be.

“Ray. They put you back together already?”

“Good as new.” He walked over and bent down to show me his scar. “Better, really,” he said in a low voice. “The Senate’s got some good bokors on their payroll. When they finished with my neck, I had them look at… other stuff.”

“So no more Mr. Lumpy?”

“Naw. I’m a stallion, baby!”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I told him as he settled off to the side, well out of the sun.

I looked at Caedmon. “How did I end up with Naudiz? I wasn’t at the auction and I never met Jókell.”

“But I did,” Ray said.

“What difference does that make?”

Ray leaned back against the wall, getting comfortable. “We think it went down something like this. Jókell’s in the office, waiting on the luduan to authenticate the stone so he can get his money. The door opens, but he doesn’t sense anything dangerous, just some human looking for the john or something.”

“Because Christine’s power signature was deceptive,” I said. “She was one of those rare vampires able to hide her true strength.”

“Right. So he’s not worried. No human is gonna be a problem for him. So he gets caught flat- footed and she guts him.”

“That’s not speculation,” I said. “I talked to the luduan yesterday, and that’s what happened.”

“Yeah, we talked to him, too, this morning. He said Jókell had the rune in his hand and was about to hand it to him to verify when Christine showed up.”

I nodded. “He told me that, too.”

“Okay, so there’s Christine, who must have heard about the rune from eavesdropping on Elyas. She knows he’s coming to do his own snatch and grab any minute, so she doesn’t have much time. She checks Jókell’s clothes, turns out his pockets, but doesn’t find the rune. And then she senses Elyas approaching and has to leave or blow her cover too early.”

“Following you so far.”

“Then Elyas comes in. He sees Jókell lying there, all but dead, with the carrier he’d seen at the auction around his neck. He grabs the carrier, assuming it has the stone, and hurries off before anyone spots him. Leaving Jókell behind with the rune still in his hand.”

“But if he had it at that point, why didn’t he cast it?” I asked. “He had to know how it worked or he wouldn’t have been able to sell it. Any buyer was going to need that information.”

“He did cast it.”

“Then why is he dead?”

“Because he made a mistake. Naudiz takes a few seconds to activate once the incantation is said. He was half unconscious with blood loss and in a lot of pain. When I came back, all he could think about was getting my attention, to let me know he needed help.”

Light dawned. “H grabbed your ankle.” I remembered Ray mentioning that, but it hadn’t seemed important.

“With the hand holding Naudiz,” Ray agreed. “It transferred to me and the next second, Jókell was dead.”

“That still doesn’t explain how I got it.”

“Naudiz is designed to sustain life,” Caedmon said. “It cannot function properly on a creature that, by its definition of the term, is already dead. It lent him some additional energy while it searched for a living body to fulfill its function, but it could do no more.”

“The bokors said that’s why I came through the whole dismemberment thing so good,” Ray added. “According to them, I should have been pretty out of it.”

Come to think of it, Ray had seemed remarkably… resilient. “But why transfer to me?”

“No reason other than you were the first living body with which Raymond had extensive contact,” Caedmon explained.

“Yeah, your hands were all over me,” Ray said with a cheerful leer. “And at some point—boom! It transferred. Probably during that crazy pursuit. I mean, who would notice, right?”

“But I’ve been hurt since,” I protested. “subrand broke my wrist!”

“Naudiz isn’t a shield, Dorina,” Caedmon told me. “It does not protect you against all injuries. It does ensure that those injuries are not life-threatening.”

I nodded and started to ask something else when a huge yawn interrupted me. “She’s tired,” Claire said, getting up. “We should go.”

“I’m okay,” I protested, only to have her look at me severely.

“The healers said you’ll need lots of rest, probably for the next week. The rune may have kept you alive, but you took a beating down there.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad. I—”

“Louis-Cesare had to pry your body out of the brickwork!”

I was suddenly grateful not to be able to remember anything. “Okay, but one more thing,” I said as everyone else got up. “How didsubrand know I had the rune? I didn’t even know.”

“The most likely explanation is that he tracked the fey to the nightclub and saw Christine leaving the office,” Caedmon said. “By the luduan’s description, she was heavily muffled up, and from what I understand, she did bear a superficial resemblance to you.”

I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guess, from a distance, we would look something alike: dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin and roughly the same height. Of course, her hair had been long, but she’d usually worn it up. And the luduan had said she had a hood. I decided it was feasible. It also seemed irrelevant.

“There must be thousands of people in this city who look like me,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but there are not thousands who could take on a fey warrior and hope to survive.subrand saw a small, dark- haired woman with no discernable power signature leaving the office shortly before Jókell was found murdered. He does not know many humans, and therefore his thoughts must have immediately gone to you. He had his spies check your home and discovered that Claire was here. His logical conclusion was that she had asked you to retrieve the stone, and that you had done so.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“My people tell me that he has returned to Faerie for the present, no doubt realizing once we arrived that the rune was lost to him.” He looked at me soberly. “But you should be careful, Dory.subrand is not the type to forget a defeat, and you have bested him twice now in front of his men. I think you may see him again.”

I remembered the fey I had seen following LouisCesare. Hadsubrand hoped he would lead him to me? I decided I owed Marlowe’s boys a drink.

Claire bent over to retrieve Stinky. “Get well soon,” she told me. “I want to go see some movies, eat some greasy human food, go shopping….”

“So you’re not headed right back?”

She shook her head. “I know it doesn’t sound like it from the way I’ve been talking, but there are things I love about Faerie. But I’m half human, too. And I think I’ve been away too long.”

“Maybe you need to visit more often, then.”

She grinned. “Maybe I do.”

Radu was the last one remaining. He settled beside me on the bed, looking sober. “Louis-Cesare is downstairs. He’s been here since he brought you back.”

“Why didn’t he come up?”

“He doesn’t think you want to see him. I told him he was being ridiculous, but you know how he is.”

“I’m learning.”

“Should I tell him to come up?”

“Yeah.” I had a few questions for him.

Radu nodded, but he didn’t leave. “You know, even if she hadn’t been an evil mutant, she was always quite bad for him. Not that I meddle.”

“Of course not.”

“But she was. He needs a nice, levelheaded girl. You’re levelheaded, Dory.”

“I’m insane, ’Du.”

“Well, not all the time. And when you’re not, you’re quite lovely… in your own odd little way.”

“Uh, thank you?”

Radu patted my arm. “You’re welcome.”

I closed my eyes for what felt like a brief moment after he left, and when I opened them again it was dark. Moonlight poured through the window onto the bed, tracing Louis-Cesare’s face with a slender outline of silver. “I guess Claire was right,” I murmured. “I must have been tired.”

“With cause,” he said softly.

“You didn’t have to stay.”

He brushed sweaty hair out of my eyes. “I have left you twice, and each time, you were almost killed.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t leave, then.”

He let his fingers, soft and featherlight, trail over the skin of my face. “I’m not going anywhere. But you need to sleep.”

“Un-uh. You don’t get off that easy.” I didn’t feel like getting up, so I bunched a fist in his pretty blue shirt and pulled him down beside me. His chest made a good pillow, I decided; my eyes were already trying to slip closed.

I forced them back open, because there were a couple of things I wanted to know. I decided to get the big one out of the way first. “Was Christine really your mistress?”

“For a brief time, before the Change. But afterwards… even had I been inclined to continue our affair, she hated vampires. She would never have been involved with one of us.”

“Then why tell people that?”

“She required constant supervision and it was not a task I could trust to another. Had she managed to get away, any deaths she caused would have been my fault. I had to keep her constantly with me, and I had to have a believable reason for doing so.”

“So you let everyone think you were just too smitten to let her out of your sight?”

“Essentially. But it backfired when Alejandro decided that kidnapping my beloved mistress would be a perfect way to force me to deal with Tomas.”

“That’s why you were so crazy to get her back. You knew how dangerous she could be.”

“I had no idea how dangerous she could be,” he said drily. “She kept her abilities very well hidden. I was more concerned with the possibility that she would give herself away. Christine was quite lucid much of the time, but at others…”

“I saw.” That image of her playing in Anthony’s mutilated chest would stay with me a while. She’d seemed so… happy.

“But at Alejandro’s court, eccentricity is the order of the day. Apparently no one noticed. And Alejandro kept her closely confined; he knew that I would be looking for any way to steal her back.”

“But Elyas wasn’t so careful.”

“No. Alejandro transferred Christine to him once he discovered that Tomas was missing, fearing that his threat to kill her might lead me to desperate measures. Elyas agreed to take her, but it seems that his only concession to security was to tell the doorman not to allow her egress! She appeared timid and powerless to him—not someone to worry about. Not someone to fear.”

“Which is one reason she was able to kill so easily. Everyone else thought the same.”

“Fortunately she appears to have concluded that killing single vampires would do little good in her quest to eradicate the breed. And it might lead to her discovery and execution before she could put a larger plan in place. At least, Marlowe can find no reports of mysterious deaths, either here or near Elyas’s estate. We do not know what occurred at Alejandro’s, but I assume it was the same.”

“She was saving it up for one big blowout.”

“It would seem so.”

I rolled over so I could see his face. “Okay, end of the easy questions. What were you doing in my head?”

“Mind speak is part of your legacy, from your vampire half. I assume the wine you have been drinking allowed it to manifest.”

Fey wine—a curse and a blessing, I thought. And then my eyes narrowed. “But how did you know that? I haven’t been mind speaking to you, or to anyone.”

He looked away, and his tongue swept over his lips again. “There may have been a few instances when I picked up… thoughts.”

“Thoughts?”

“Feelings, mostly.”

“Good feelings?”

His eyes flicked back to mine, and a faint smile tugged at his lips. “Very good.”

Considering the kind of things I’d been picking up from him, I decided to let it drop. For the moment. “All right. But why tell me all that crap about you and Christine? You let me believe that you two were going to pick up where you left off.”

“How could I do otherwise? You have spent a lifetime killing revenants. How could I tell you that I was harboring one?”

“You were afraid I’d kill her?”

“That, yes. But there was also your reaction. I knew you would be shocked, disgusted, horrified—everything I saw on your face in the tunnels. I did not want you to think less of me and I knew…”

“Knew what?”

“That there was no chance for us!” His face was serious, passionate. It made me want to thump him.

“Why? Because Marlowe disapproves and the Senate won’t like it? Personally I think that’s kind of a bonus.”’

He looked at me in disbelief. “I stole from you. I lied to you about Christine. I left you with a madwoman—”

“Twice.”

“You have every right to wish to never see me again!”

“Yes. But then, you also helped me fight off a bunch of crazy fey, ran out on your murder trial because you thought I might need help and, from what I hear, pried me out of a wall.”

I yawned, and when I looked up again, Louis-Cesare had that same mix of hope, uncertainty and fear on his face that I’d seen once before. “What are you saying?” he asked carefully.

“I’m saying…” I paused. What was I saying? Was I actually thinking about this? Was I actually doing this? Because out of a lifetime of crazy things, this had to take the prize. Dhampirs didn’t have relationships—not long-term ones, at least. And certainly not with the creatures we were supposed to be hunting. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and this was probably going to end in disaster. Everyone knew, there was no such thing as happy endings, and princes didn’t end up with the family pariah.

But now it seems that I am a pariah, too, drifted through my head.

“Stop it,” I said, leaning back against him. His arms were tight around me, but his hands were gentle. I could hear a heartbeat in my ear, and it sounded natural, soothing. “What are you saying? That I can’t corrupt you?”

He brushed his lips over mine, the faintest of touches, his breath warm against my skin. “I intend to give you every opportunity to try.”

I smiled as I drifted back to sleep. Okay. That could work.