Blood on Silk (28 page)

Don’t you always?
Unkind. Her previous lovers hadn’t been monsters. They’d just turned out to be somewhat—shallow. Besides, it had been her own loneliness, her own need and inexperience that had imagined those past relationships to be more than they were. She’d do the same with Richard, if he ever looked at her.

Was that the pattern? She needed to believe the men she slept with loved her?

For this moment, this night, Elizabeth, I love you.

He’d still meant to kill her at dawn. And he’d fed from her as he’d always intended. He needed her blood to be strong, her death to be stronger and to prevent his enemies from gaining that strength. But she was still alive. He’d brought her home. What did that mean?

That she was his milk cow, as the hunters believed?

Elizabeth sat up and switched on the light.

She avoided thinking about these things during the day. She trained hard, worked on getting her thesis evidence in order, and continued her research in the hunters’ library.

“Waiting,” she whispered into her fingers as she drew them across her dry lips. “I’ve just been waiting for his next move.” She had a vague, confused memory that was little more than an impression, of his promise to return. But she couldn’t pin it down to any reality. Somewhere, she
wanted
him to come to her, to show her that something had changed for him, that he hadn’t killed her because he cared for her.

Is that likely, Silk?

It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, wait any longer. She needed to know what he’d do next to help to counteract it. He’d killed Karl and Lajos now, two of the three vampires who’d staked him, to say nothing of any humans who got in his way. He’d be looking next for the strongest of the three, the mysterious and lost Maximilian.

While she recovered from her blood loss, the hunters had been wasting time, sharpening their sticks and watching the Angel, scouring the old city and the new for evidence of Saloman and Saloman’s house as she’d described it. She herself had gotten lost in reading scraps of his documents, obsessed with drinking in every description, every history that involved him. She should have been pursuing Maximilian and determining from evidence that had to be there, exactly where he had gone. And when they found him, they had the weapon as well as the bait they needed.

Weapon? You’d really kill him now?

He fed from me, betrayed me.

He made love to you, let you live.

Why? Why? Why?

Elizabeth sprang out of bed. Another endless night of circling her brain did not appeal. The hunters’ library was always open, and if she found Maximilian, she would inevitably see
him
again. . . .

To dispel that unhelpful line of thought, she yanked on her jeans with unnecessary force, grabbed a T-shirt, and strode to the door, still pulling the top over her head.

Descending the stairs into the library was almost like entering daylight and the real world, after too long in darkness and the hazy fog of her undisciplined thoughts. Here, the electric lights dazzled, computers hummed, and people worked.

Well, up to a point. Elizabeth closed her mouth on the greeting she’d been about to aim at the assistant librarian, one of Miklós’s minions who manned the desk outside “office” hours. Her head rested on her folded arms sprawling the breadth of her desk. From her deep, even breathing, she was sound asleep.

Elizabeth shrugged and went to her own table. She’d wake the woman if she needed her, but she might as well start with the books she already had. Some of those were bound to trace Maximilian’s movements after Zoltán’s “coup.”

But only minutes later, she stood up, dissatisfied. They stopped too early, or were too vague. She needed the material filed under “Maximilian,” not “Saloman.”

At her desk, the librarian still slumbered. Her arms only just missed her computer keyboard. As it was, some of her hair trailed over it.

It was a pity, Elizabeth thought, not for the first time, that only the librarian’s computer contained the catalogue. She preferred to pursue her own research and trace all possible lines of it for herself rather than rely on what others thought. Inevitably, people—especially people who were not experts in the tiny area of knowledge that you were making your own—missed important bits and pieces.

She supposed that here it was not so much a matter of convenience, but a matter of discipline and keeping some kind of control over the knowledge each individual operative could amass. There was a lot of dangerous stuff here, and operatives were only human, with all humanity’s failings and curiosities—like hers, except she wasn’t bound by an operative’s obedience.

Elizabeth walked around the side of the desk, altered the angle of the monitor, and eased the keyboard across the desk, careful not to tug the librarian’s hair.

She typed in “Vampire Maximilian” and scanned the long list of items that came up. Grabbing a pencil from the top of the desk, she made quick notes of some locations, including one book she hadn’t seen on Saloman’s killers.

Next, she typed “Saloman’s killers” into the search box, partly because it wasn’t an angle she’d yet pursued in her study of him, and partly because it might provide clues as to Maximilian’s character and places he might have been before he hit the limelight with his killing of the last Ancient.

Some more intriguing material came up, including something entitled
Saloman’s Human Killers
and something else called
Tsigana
. Tsigana, the lover who’d betrayed him.

She hesitated over that one; she wanted to know too much, and it had nothing, if anything, to do with Maximilian. She scribbled it down anyway, then went to track down her new treasures. At the last minute, she grabbed the keys from the librarian’s desk and walked into the deepest recesses of the library.

Elizabeth was used to libraries of all sorts. Although this one used a unique classification system, she’d already absorbed, almost unconsciously, how to follow it. It didn’t take her long to find the books on her list. To save more time, she took them to the nearest table rather than dragging the books to her own. As she moved, another volume on a top shelf caught her eye.
Awakening the Ancients
. Since it might shed more light on her own role in all of this, she hastily laid down the other books on the desk and went back for it.

Because she couldn’t resist, she flicked first through the pages of
Awakening the Ancients
. Among a lot of general hearsay and mythology, she found the story of the medieval Awakener she’d heard of before. Having awakened an Ancient he’d originally helped to kill, this Awakener had promptly fled, aware the vampire would necessarily kill him when he recovered his strength. Which the Ancient eventually did, though not before the Awakener had discovered extraordinary powers of speed and strength in himself—a bit like Elizabeth was doing now. But—and this was new information to her—her predecessor had gone a step farther, even claiming before witnesses that he was now capable of killing an Ancient by himself, without the help that would normally be necessary.

Elizabeth smiled wryly while she noted it down. The medieval Awakener had clearly believed himself invincible. It wasn’t a mistake she intended to repeat.

Her stomach twisted. Would she even see him again? And as a lover or an enemy . . . ?
Shit.

Anxious to relieve rather than add to her confusion, she pushed
Awakening the Ancients
aside and reached for the first work on Saloman’s killers.

After a while, she forgot to make notes. She was too appalled by the discovery that the blood of Saloman’s human killers was at least as important as that of the vampires. No matter that they were dead. Their descendants carried their blood, and Saloman would want it. They were in danger, and the hunters either didn’t know or hadn’t mentioned it to her.

Feverishly now, she began to trace the descendants, all neatly mapped out through the generations. Previous hunters had watched and noted, because something else became clear too. Those descendants, the few who survived the original vampire attacks on them, carried some power of their own, a heightened awareness, a latent strength similar to that of Awakeners, that made them different, superior in many ways to their ordinary human brethren. Some of them became hunters, and were good at it.

This was a whole new area to Elizabeth, as fascinating as it was bizarre. Two weeks ago, even less, she would have dismissed it as fanciful nonsense. Now she knew better, and she couldn’t stop digging.

She followed Tsigana’s line of descendants, learning that they were regarded with particular respect by both vampires and hunters because they had possession of Saloman’s sword.

Frowning, Elizabeth sat back in her chair. His scabbard had been empty when he awoke. She remembered it, and the proof was there in the photograph she’d taken of the sarcophogus. So Tsigana had taken the sword and passed it on to her descendants. Why? What use was it? It seemed to be regarded as more than a trophy. Was it some kind of enchanted object?

Elizabeth groaned to herself. Did she have to believe in magic now as well? She knew a brief longing for the comfortable skepticism she’d brought with her to this country, but acknowledged it was unlikely ever to return to her.

So who had this blasted sword now? Was it still extant?

Among Tsigana’s descendants, only two diverging lines weren’t closed off as having died out. The first led to one living man, Joshua Alexander, born 1972, resident in the United States. His name seemed vaguely familiar, but she didn’t have time to rummage in her memory. She noted the name in a hasty scribble and turned to the other line, which had diverged from the Alexanders in the late nineteenth century.

Voices sounded in the distance, at the front of the library where the librarian no longer slept. Elizabeth paid them no attention. She’d traced Tsigana’s last line to its end. And there she found a name she really did know well.

John Silk.

Her father. Not impossible that there were several John Silks born in the same year, even residing in Scotland. But not many at all would have one daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1979 and also residing in Scotland.

The librarian was being told off, presumably for sleeping. It was Miklós, taking over. Elizabeth didn’t care. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe, because at last she had discovered why.

Why Dmitriu had sent her of all the silly western researchers to Saloman. It wasn’t any old blood that awakened him. It was the blood of his killers; Tsigana’s blood that flowed in Elizabeth’s veins, however diluted.

Why Zoltán had risked breaking his new alliance with Saloman to kill her. The blood of the Ancient’s killers was as valuable to him as to Saloman. It would give him a greater strength that might even award him victory.

Why Saloman needed her blood so much.

And why he’d seduced her. He had been in total control, achieving her complete surrender. No wonder there had been triumph in fucking her desperately willing body. In seducing her, he’d seduced his beloved, treacherous Tsigana one last time, made her choose pleasure with Saloman over her own life. After that, he didn’t care whether she lived or died. He’d had his revenge.

Revenge. She couldn’t think about that, couldn’t begin to analyze the awful, crumbling emotions rising up from her toes to consume her. So she did what she’d always done when life was unbearable. She studied.

And she found that Tsigana was not the only human killer who had descendants with familiar names. That answered a few more whys.

It was ten o’clock in the morning before they found her. They arrived in a panicked guddle, the affronted Miklós at the front, but Konrad, István, and Mihaela close on his heels.

“Miss Silk.” Miklós’s unprecedented formality as much as his frosty voice revealed his displeasure. “If you wish to continue with the privilege of using this library, you must respect the organization’s rules!”

For a moment, Elizabeth didn’t move. She remembered that she didn’t like confrontations and avoided them wherever possible. She’d found what she needed to know. No confrontation was necessary.

But anger boiled very close to the surface, whipped up by a deeper betrayal she couldn’t afford to deal with. This was one she could handle, and she would.

“Rules,” she repeated, throwing down the pencil she’d been unconsciously chewing as she read. Miklós watched it land on an open book and tutted. “The rules that allow you to use people as bait without allowing them the courtesy of the truth?”

“Elizabeth,” Konrad said, shocked. “We’ve never lied to you!”

“No? But you certainly didn’t tell me the whole truth, did you?”

“That does not give you the right . . . ,” Miklós began, but Mihaela interrupted him without apology.

“What are you talking about, Elizabeth? We never kept anything from you, even at the beginning when we probably should have!”

Elizabeth couldn’t look at her, because her betrayal had hurt the most. Instead, she kept her gaze on Konrad and laughed. “First rule of research: Never let anyone else interpret material for you. Always go to the source yourself. Too many people have their own ax to grind. They leave things out, by accident or design, or merely slant it their own way. I forgot that for too long. The subject is too new to me, and I was bowled over by your greater expertise.”