Touch the Dark

Page 9

Tony didn't seem too upset about my outburst, which was what I'd expected. People had been threatening him for centuries, but he was still here. He'd told me once that survival was a more eloquent answer to his detractors than any other, and I suppose it still was. "She has no proof that I had anything to do with that unfortunate business. Am I to sit here and be insulted?"
"I Saw it!"
I turned to the Senate leader, officially called the Consul, intending to plead my case, but she was petting a cobra large enough to wrap twice around her body, which I found pretty distracting. It looked tame, but I kept an eye on it anyway. The vamps tend to forget that what would be annoying for them, like a bite from a poisonous snake, would be a bit more serious for the mortals who worked with them. Those of us who survived long enough learned to be real observant.
"The woman is delusional," Tony was protesting, spreading his chubby white hands innocently. "She has always been dangerously unstable."
"Then I am surprised you relied on her predictions."
The Consul's voice slithered around the room, almost a tangible presence against my skin. I shivered just from the overflow of her power, and was thankful it wasn't directed at me. At least not yet. She didn't dress in flowing white linen and gold headdresses anymore, but I guess when you're that strong, you don't need to show off. I wasn't disappointed, though, considering that her outfit consisted mostly of multicolored snakes slithering and twining over her so thickly that only occasionally a patch of bare skin showed. Their scales caught the torchlight and shimmered like she was clothed in living jewels: onyx, jade and emerald, with the occasional flash of ruby eyes. It was more than the outfit that commanded attention, though; the authority in her voice and the intelligence in those dark eyes showed that, in some ways, she was still a queen. I hadn't recognized her and no one had bothered to introduce themselves, but Rafe, at my back for moral support, I guess, had whispered a name in my ear as we approached the table. At my startled look, teeth had flashed in his dark beard as he gave me his usual rakish smile. "It wasn't an asp that bit her, mia Stella."
"I did not rely on her," Tony was lying smoothly. "She was a convenience only."
Rafe's hand on my arm tightened, and I bit my lip. Repeated outbursts might annoy the Consul—not a smart move—but it was hard to stay silent. I had no idea how much money I'd made the little toad through the years, but it was a lot. I knew for a fact that he'd cleared at least ten million when he bought citrus futures right before a series of natural disasters wrecked the California orange crop and caused the price to skyrocket. That didn't happen every day, but it wasn't an isolated incident, either.
Tony's moneygrubbing had never been my main problem with him, though. The thing that caused me to snap, besides finding out about my parents, was his decision to let fire ravage a city block because he wanted to buy some real estate in the area cheap. I had told him about it a week in advance, plenty of time for him to have called in a warning, but of course he hadn't I'd stared in horror at newspaper photos of charred children's bodies and had one of those lightbulb moments. Some checking had confirmed what I already suspected: he'd used my talent to help him plan assassinations, mastermind political coups and successfully run drugs and illegal weapons past the authorities. And those were just the things I knew about. The day I finally put all the pieces together, I'd promised myself that, somehow, I would make him pay. He had, too, but in my opinion, not nearly enough.
"Then she should be no great loss. You will be remunerated for your claim."
"Consul, with all due respect, the only thing I want is for her to be returned to me. I am her rightful master, as I am sure my own will agree."
"No." The dark gaze slid to me momentarily, and I suddenly knew what a rabbit feels when it looks up and sees a hawk. "We have plans for her."
Tony blustered on, and I began to notice that Alphonse wasn't making any effort to help his beleaguered employer. My estimation of his intelligence took a hike. If Tony argued himself into a belated grave—permanently this time—Alphonse would get a chance to seize control of the operation, and that worked for me. Alphonse and I weren't exactly friends, but as far as I knew, he had no reason to want me dead besides the fact that Tony had ordered it. I grinned; keep talking, Tony. Unfortunately, one of the two huge vamps in leopard-skin loincloths that framed the Consul's chair came forward and removed the mirror after a minute. Too bad; I'd started to enjoy myself.
Pressure from Rafe's hand warned me to keep a blank expression. Just as it wasn't a good idea to show fear or weakness in a court situation—and this was pretty much the court of courts—it also wasn't bright to show too much amusement. Somebody might take it as a challenge, and that would be very bad. I quickly readjusted my expression to the poker face I'd used growing up. It wasn't hard: the little joy I'd been able to summon would have died anyway when I turned back to the Senate. With no more Tony around to distract them, everyone's attention was suddenly on me, and it was unnerving, even to someone who had regularly attended family meetings. Tony had insisted, after his resident telepath was turned and lost her powers, that I be there, especially if rival families were going to send reps. I don't know why. I can't read minds and the odds of my Seeing something about anyone present were slim. I'd told him a hundred times, I can't switch on the gift like turning on a TV, and when it does come, I don't get to choose the channel. He'd ignored me, maybe because he liked the prestige of having his personal clairvoyant at his side like a trained dog. Anyway, after the number of very frightening people I'd seen, I had thought nothing could impress me. I'd been wrong.
Besides the Consul's, there were twelve places at the table. More than half were empty, but the ones that were filled made up for it. A dark-haired woman sat nearest to me, dressed in a long velvet gown. A little cap decorated with pearls as big as my thumb framed her face, and heavy gold embroidery traced its way up her burgundy skirts. Her skin had the opalescent sheen of naturally pale skin that hasn't seen the sun in centuries, and was marred only by a ridge of scar tissue around her throat that a silk ribbon didn't quite conceal. Someone had gotten close enough to this beauty to take her head but hadn't heard that this alone won't kill a vamp. If the heart is intact, the body will mend, although I winced at the amount of effort it must have taken to heal a wound like that.
Next to her sat the only person at the table I recognized. I could hardly fail to do so since Tony boasted about his connection to the famous Dracula line at every opportunity, and had portraits of all three brothers on the wall of his throne room. He had been made not by Vlad III Tepes, the Dracula of legend, but by the great man's elder brother, Mircea. We'd entertained him in Philly when I was eleven. Like many children, I loved a good story, which was lucky since there was little Mircea liked better than to go on about the bad old days. He'd told me how, when his younger brothers Vlad and Radu were in Adrianople as hostages—the Ottoman sultan didn't trust their father to honor a treaty otherwise—Mircea encountered a vengeful gypsy. She hated his father for seducing and then throwing aside her sister, who'd been Dracula's mother, so she cursed Mircea with vampirism. I think the idea was to end the family line, since a vampire can't father children and everybody had assumed that the hostages weren't coming back. But, as Mircea pointed out, she actually did him a favor. Shortly thereafter, Hungarian assassins working with some local nobles captured, tortured and buried him alive, something that might have been a real downer if he hadn't already been dead. Under the circumstances, it was more an inconvenience than anything else.
I'd been too young when I met him to realize that the handsome young man who told me Romanian folk tales was actually older than Tony by about a century. He sent me an encouraging smile now out of a face that had looked thirty for five hundred years. I smiled back in spite of myself; I'd had my first crush on those brown velvet eyes, and I'd forgotten how attractive he was. Those same features had won his longer-lived brother Radu the title of "the Handsome" back in the sixteenth century. Mircea paused to brush a speck of lint off his snazzy black suit. Other than Rafe, who preferred more casual chic, Mircea was the only vamp I knew who cared much about modern fashion. Maybe that was why I'd never seen him wearing the court regalia of old Wallachia, or possibly the clothes then had just sucked. In any case, he looked completely up-to-date now, except for the long, black ponytail. I was glad to see him, but even assuming he remembered me fondly, I doubted one vote would do me much good.
Speaking of a need to update a wardrobe, the vamp next to Mircea—the same one who had been loitering around the waiting room—looked like a GQ ad, if the magazine had been printed in the seventeenth century. Considering that I'd spent a lot of time in a Goth club, I didn't object to the embroidered frock coat, frothy shirt and knee britches he was wearing. I'd seen weirder getups, and at least this one was flattering—silk hose shows off legs better than most modern styles, and his were worth playing up. The sticking point was that the whole deal was in buttercup yellow satin. I'm sorry, but a vamp in yellow is just wrong, especially when you throw in bright blue eyes and glossy auburn curls cascading halfway down his back. He was very handsome, with one of those open, honest faces you automatically trust. It really irritated me that it belonged to a vamp. I gave him a tentative smile anyway on the theory that it couldn't hurt, and thought maybe I'd get a brownie point for being the only other one in yellow in the room. Of course, my happy-face T wasn't looking its best at the moment, which maybe explains why he didn't smile back. He was watching me almost hungrily, the weight of his gaze so intense that I spared a thought to hope he'd already eaten. I needed to get this blood off me before I started looking to someone like a walking hors d'oeuvre.
The remaining vamps, two on the far side of the Consul, were so alike that I assumed they had to be related. I found out later that it was a coincidence. The man was almost as old as the Consul, having started life as one of Nero's bodyguards even though his mother had been a slave captured somewhere much farther north than Italy. He'd been one of the emperor's favorites for having even more sadistic tastes than his master: want to guess who really burned Rome? The woman, who looked so much like Portia that I did a double take, had been born in the antebellum South. She was said to have killed more Union soldiers in the twenty miles or so around her family home than the Confederate military did, and to have mourned the end of the war and the easy hunting that had gone with it. So, different eras, countries and backgrounds, but they looked like twins with their milky complexions and wavy dark hair. They even had similar eye color, a light brownish gold, like the light through autumn leaves, and were dressed in complementary outfits of white and silver. Admittedly, his was a toga while she looked like she was on her way to a Savannah ball, but they looked good together.