And fear.
Mircea was trying to sew up a newly meek Jerome, but it was slow going, with Nicolò hulking over them and staring at Dorina. She was by the kitchen wall now, dabbing on a piece of paper with some charcoal, seemingly unconcerned by the bevy of fanged creatures around her. The other vampires were on the other side of the room, supposedly spreading a sheet over the unexpected doorway, but in reality getting as far from the child as possible.
Except for Nicolò.
Mircea's hand was steady, pulling a thread through Jerome's dead white skin, to close the massive wound. But he was as tense as everyone else. Ready to move the instant that Nicolò did —if he did.
Mircea wanted to have Horatiu take Dorina back upstairs, but he was afraid. Of sending her off with a human as her only guard. Of having her out of his sight. Of giving his "friends" a head start towards her. It was why she was by the wall and Mircea was on the floor in front of her, with the implication clear: you will have to go through me.
So far, Nicolò hadn’t. But his large hands were clenched, and his face was as frightening as Mircea had ever seen it. "Dhampir," he breathed again, and there was enough hate in it to still Mircea's hand.
"Child," another voice countered, and Marsilia came forward.
Mircea had almost forgotten about her, so intent had he been on Nicolò. But he was swiftly reminded when she moved to Dorina's side in the time it took him to blink. And smiled when he flinched.
And then transferred the expression to Dorina, who was looking up at her calmly. "That's a pretty picture," Marsilia said, squatting on the boards beside her.
Dorina wasn't particularly tall for her age; if anything, the opposite was true. But Marsilia was a tiny thing. And with her hair half down and most of her makeup lost to the storm that had broken on the way here, they almost looked like sisters.
But they weren't, which was what had Mircea's back tensing and his leg muscles ready to spring.
Marsilia shot him a look that he couldn’t exactly read, and turned her attention back to the paper Dory held.
Mircea bought the rough sheets from one of the local candy sellers, who used them to wrap around the sugary treats that Dorina loved so much. It was thin and worthless for anything you’d like to keep, but it served Mircea as a way to sketch out paintings before he committed them to expensive canvass. It was also one of the ways Horatiu used to keep Dory at home, instead of running about the city on her own.
Eluding his half blind tutor wasn't much of a challenge for someone who had practically raised herself, since Mircea hadn’t known she existed until a little over a year ago. And no one else in Venice had known it at all, after he brought her back from his travels, for the very obvious reason now staring him in the face. Well, they know it now, he thought, looking from Nicolò to his mistress, and wondering what he was going to do, because he couldn’t take them both.
"Is that home?" Marsilia asked, kicking off the fashionable chopines she wore, and settling down into a more comfortable, cross-legged position.
"Mmm," Dorina looked at the paper thoughtfully. And then added a few swipes of charcoal that somehow managed to convey the idea of a thick forest beyond the thatch-roofed cottage she'd already finished.
"It's very pretty," Marsilia repeated. "You’re very talented."
Dorina shook her head. "Mircea," she said, nodding at the canvasses stacked against the walls.
Horatiu had puttered about, muttering things, and reassembled them behind the table and easel that took up a good third of the catch-all room they mostly lived in. The bedrooms upstairs were dark and cramped, and the tiny kitchen was most definitely Horatiu's domain. Leaving this as the one place available for family activities.
Mircea had never wished so much that he'd somehow managed to afford a larger house, one like where he'd grown up, with servants and high, stone walls between danger and the people he loved.
Not that it had ever helped.
"Yes, he's full of surprises," Marsilia said mildly, thumbing through the canvasses. "Ah." She pulled one free of the stack, and regarded it with apparent pleasure. Mircea felt his hand tighten.
"Is this your mother?" Marsilia asked Dory, as Jerome made a small sound.
Mircea looked down to see that he'd pulled the chord too tight, threatening the evenness of his stitch work. And the integrity of his friend's flesh. "Almost done now," he reassured Jerome, who looked up at him with dazed eyes.
"Mmm." Dory said again. She was usually a chatterbox, but there were times, like tonight, when she almost seemed to have a separate personality. One who rarely spoke, but always watched, her dark eyes missing nothing.
"She's lovely," Marsilia decided, regarding the features of his now deceased wife, who Mircea had painted lying in a field of flowers, laughing and out of breath from the chase that had finally ended with him catching her.
It wasn't at all like the formal portraits he occasionally did for whatever patrons he could scrape up, or the even more stylized Madonnas he sold to a shopkeeper who always needed more to satisfy the pilgrims crowding the city like clockwork, for the circuit of festivals Venice's calendar boasted every year. Even with those, he was accused of adding things nobody wanted—curls that escaped from under the Virgin's coif, or a mended tear in her gown, or a too-mischievous grin on the face of the saintly child.
Mircea didn’t know any saintly children, and he prized his daughter's rare smiles, so he'd painted the Christ child the same way. Like he'd painted his long lost wife as he remembered her —which had been anything but stiff and stylized. Like that day, when she'd led him a merry chase.
It hadn’t helped that she knew those woods far better than he, although he hadn’t worried. He was bigger and stronger, his muscles honed from combat training, which included fighting in full armor. He told himself that she'd tire long before him.
Only she hadn't. And she'd been fast, like quicksilver. He still suspected that she'd let him win, pausing on top of the flower-studded hill to allow him to locate her, and then fleeing down the other side.
But not quite fast enough.
"You look like her," Marsilia said, twisting the knife in Mircea's gut. She tilted Dorina's chin up. "You'll be a beauty someday. I know about these things."
"Marsilia—" Mircea began, his voice rough, only to be cut off by an explosion from Nicolò.
"She is dhampir. Why do you play games? You know what has to be done!"
"Do I?" Marsilia combed fingers through Dory's snarled hair, separating it into more manageable strands. "Why do I?"
"Children grow up!"
Marsilia began to braid Dory's hair. "Most do," she agreed.
"This isn’t about her," Nicolò said, low and forceful. "This isn’t about Sophia."
"No, it couldn’t be, could it?" Marsilia asked mildly.
Dorina looked up at her, and Marsilia smiled. "I had a little girl once. She looked much like you. She would have been a beauty, too."
"Lia," Nicolò's voice cracked, with some emotion Mircea couldn’t name.
"But I had her too young, you see? Far too young," Marsilia continued. "My body wasn't ready yet, and afterward, I found I couldn’t have any more children. But that was all right. I had her."
"But she died," Dorina said, calmly. She was watching Marsilia with an intensity that belied the non-expression on her face.
"Yes," Marsilia agreed. "A master vampire wanted to add me to his stable, but I didn't want to go. I had a daughter to care for, you see, and I worried about what would happen to her, if I wasn't there to protect her."
"Lia," Nicolò said, his voice harsh. "This isn’t the same thing."
"He killed her," Dorina guessed, sending a sharp pain through Mircea. Because of course he had. And, of course, Dorina knew it. Sometimes Mircea thought she understood this new world better than he ever would, having been born as part of it. It would always be a little alien to him, no matter how long he lived. But to her, it simply was.
To her, it was
home.
"Of course he did," Marsilia agreed. "I cried for months; years really. I still cry now, sometimes. For the girl she was, for the woman she might have been."
"Lia," Nicolò said, and she looked up, having finished a shining braid over Dorina's shoulder.
"I think we're done here," she said, rising with that same too-lithe movement. "Jerome needs time to rest and heal."
"You can’t just expect us to—"
"We're done here," Marsilia said, her sweet voice a sudden crack, like the lash of a whip. "Do you understand?"
Her eyes swept the room, and her other vampires quickly nodded acquiescence, one even taking a knee. All except for Nicolò. "She will grow up! One day she may rip your throat out!"
Marsilia looked down at Dorina. "Will you?"
Dorina looked up at her. For a long, agonizing moment, she said nothing, just held Marsilia's dark gaze. And then, slowly, she shook her head.
Mircea thought about passing out.
"You see?" Marsilia asked Nicolò, with a pretty smile. He did not smile back.
"Think it through! You can’t mean to—"
He broke off when she grabbed him, lightning fast, to the point that Mircea's eyes never even registered the movement. One moment, the huge vampire was looming over their small family, and the next, he was bent almost double, his shirt in the fist of a very unhappy master.
"I will not become the thing who made me," Marsilia hissed. "I will not kill an innocent. And neither will you. Or that girl won’t be the one ripping out your throat!"
There wasn't a lot of discussion, after that.
Chapter Four
Present day, Dory
A messy kitchen in upstate New York
Somebody threw a glass of water in my face.
I sat up, sputtering, to find a curly-haired bastard leaning over me. "Feel better?"
The features belonging to Kit Marlowe, the senate's chief spy and resident asshole, slowly swam into view. The earring he always wore in one ear, like a goddamned pirate, winked cheekily at me. But at least today it was paired with a relatively normal slacks and dress shirt combo, instead of something out of community theatre, and his dark hair and retro goatee looked like they might have been trimmed in the last week or three.
He looked almost respectable, not that it helped.
"Bite me," I slurred, the crashing sound of the ocean still in my ears.
"One day," Marlowe promised, and stood back up.
The kitchen was more crowded than before I took my second trip to lala land. There were a bunch of sheepish-looking servants, who had gotten to the party too late, some vamps I assumed to be Marlowe's, since they had that same I-smell-something-nasty expression when they looked at me, and Gunther, with his arm all bandaged up. And appearing his usual self, except for the concern in those blue eyes.
"You okay?" he asked me.
"Need a beer," I croaked, and had a longneck tossed my way.
I almost didn’t catch it, which with dhampir reflexes said everything about how out of it I still was. But I managed to snare it at the last second, and to get a thumb under the top, popping it open and chugging half before I looked up to see Gunther shaking his head. "What?"
"Just wishing I had thumbs of steel."
"It's a package deal," I told him dryly. Because I doubted he'd like the rest of the features.
I tried to get up, found it to be more of a challenge than usual, and decided fuck it. I stayed where I was and drank beer. And lowered the drained bottle to find Kit on his haunches in front of me, glaring.
"Are you all right?" he demanded, in a voice that made it clear that my well-being was not the point.
"And you care because?"
"I have a job for you, and you’re going to want it. Question is, can you handle it?"
"Ask me after another beer."
Nobody gave me another beer. Marlowe stood up with an angry cat sound, and Gunther was occupied trying to calm down the still freaked out chef. I’d have gone and gotten it myself, but someone was in the way.
Make that two someones.
"No, no. Gently," Radu admonished the pitiful thing sprawled on the floor of the kitchen.
She had tear-streaked makeup, a food-splashed body, and matted brown hair liberally dusted with frost. Because I guess we'd trapped the babies in the freezer, and it looked like it was a good one. Her eyes were red from crying, her mouth was open and panting, but her gaze never wavered from the single finger Radu was holding up.
It was bleeding slightly, a tiny dot of almost black, the color only centuries of power can produce. I’d seen it bring Mircea, Radu's brother and my father, back from the brink of death recently, and just the sight seemed to have absolutely mesmerized the baby vamp. She followed the digit with a little swaying motion of her head as Radu waggled it at her admonishingly. And then finally let her taste.
"Gently," he repeated, but there was no need. As soon as the bloody thing touched her tongue, her face relaxed into a cross between desperate-junkie-getting-a-fix and devotee-seeing-the-face-of-god. It was more than a little disturbing. I looked away, only to hear Radu say, "No, no. Not too much, dear. Else we'll pull you away from your Sire, and Misha wouldn’t like that, now would he?"
"Misha?" I repeated, remembering what the chef had said. "Radu, what is going on? Why are we taking care of other family's babies?"
"Ask him," Radu said darkly, glancing at Marlowe.
"They’re to be used as functionaries at court," Marlowe said curtly. "But there aren’t enough beds for them, so the overflow had to go somewhere."
I frowned. The court part made sense. Louis-Cesare, in what I regarded as a bad move, had decided to locate his new court all of twenty minutes from the one owned by the consul, the powerful leader of the North American Vampire Senate. That would have been bad enough, since it left him handy for whatever errand she'd thought up this time, but it was especially so at the moment. Because her creepy-looking house was acting as a sort of court of courts for the droves of masters pouring in to discuss the war.
We were currently fighting a coalition of fey, rogue vampires and dark mages, which would have sounded like a bad movie of the week if they hadn’t recently masterminded an attack that had resulted in a whole lot of deaths on our side. They'd suffered more, but I doubted that was much comfort to the families of the fallen. Especially since some of those families had been together for hundreds of years.
Masters were assembling from literally everywhere to decide on a response, and I guess they'd needed somewhere to rest up in between the policy making, back-biting and general intrigue. So it made sense that the consul's place was packed. And that the lowly babies would be kicked out to find lodgings elsewhere.
Or it would have, except that they shouldn’t have been there at all.
Baby vamps were useless for anywhere from two months to two years after the Change, and sometimes longer. Not only couldn’t they see properly, they couldn’t control anything else about their new bodies either. Like trying to move a little faster and accidentally plowing through a wall. Or attempting to open a jar and shattering it to pieces. Or going into a panic about a fire ten miles away.
Not surprisingly, nobody took them anywhere. Most people didn’t even let them out of the house. And now the consul was putting them to work?
"Functionaries?" I repeated, not bothering to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
"People to answer phones, type things, run errands." Marlowe waved it away.
"I know what the word means! But why not just hire some more humans? They’re better in daylight anyway, not to mention—"
"She doesn’t trust humans."
"Some mid-level vamps, then."
"They’re busy."
"Doing what?"
"None of your business!"
I stared at him, my vision pulsing in and out enough that it looked like he was constantly lunging at me. Lunge, retreat, lunge retreat. That was a problem, since I had been known to
invoke incandescent rage in Marlowe before.
So how was I supposed to know when he really lost it?
I leaned my head back against a cabinet and shut my eyes, since they weren't helping. "Fine, don’t tell me."
"I hadn’t planned to."
"Then why are you here?"
"I am beginning to wonder that myself."
He was glaring again. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear it in his voice. Could feel it in the dhampir part of me that wanted to go for his throat. But not as badly as usual.
Maybe it had a headache, too.
Someone snarled, and I opened my eyes to see that Bitey had been let out.
He was faintly blue, and beads of ice had formed in the sweat in his hair. They made little clacking sounds when he moved his head, looking wildly about. And then howling, a sound of mingled rage and hunger, as he dove for Radu's messy finger.
Only to be stopped mid-pounce by a flood of power that prickled over my skin and raised the hair on the back of my neck. It made several of Marlowe's guys tense up and stare around, as if wondering where it was coming from. Because, somehow, everybody always forgot that Radu was a second-level master.
The camouflage, I had to admit, was compelling.
I sighed and relaxed back against the cabinets instead of rescuing my uncle, who clearly didn’t need it. But the flood of power didn’t have the same effect on the baby. He fought and thrashed and howled, flailing his arms and gnashing his teeth, despite the fact that he wasn't going anywhere.
The frown on 'Du's handsome face became a bit more pronounced.
"If you aren’t good, you won’t get any at all," 'Du rebuked him. "And if you’re not calmed down by me, we can’t trust you with one of the donors, now can we?"
The baby roared.
"He ees too far gone; he doesn’t understand," the chef said, from across the kitchen. "And must zees be done 'ere? I 'ave le diner to consider."
Radu didn’t move, or so much as look up. But Gunther moved to steer the unhappy chef away. "I merely said zat I cannot cook under zese conditions!" the vamp told him.