Curse the Dawn (15 page)

The walls were covered in drywall painted in tasteful, muted colors of wine and deep gold. They complemented the Italian marble floors, the gilt moldings and the hand-painted ceilings. Mircea was the Senate’s chief diplomat, so his quarters took on the role of embassy. It was here, among the priceless antiques, Swarovski chandeliers and unknown paintings by the world’s great masters, that he welcomed dignitaries, soothed ruffled feathers and struck deals.

Away from the main entrance, signs of the disaster were more apparent. In places, the elegant Venetian plaster had erupted with raw red stone, the bones of the place peeking through the veneer. And everything was covered in a layer of fine red dust. I could taste the tang of it in the back of my mouth and feel it coating the inside of my nostrils. Even an overlooked spiderweb high in one corner was caked with it.

Pritkin found a couple of candelabras and some matches, giving us each a light source, and we split up to make the search go faster. The two mages concentrated on the common areas, while I went down the main hallway, opening bedrooms. Most were pristine except for the dust, their elegant furnishings untouched. But Mircea’s private rooms were in more disarray.

The bed linens hung half off the large pedestal bed, and one pillow clung to the mattress in a silent battle of wills with gravity. The ornate wardrobe was open, but most of the clothes, like the priceless paintings on the walls, had been left behind. Yet there were only blank niches in the walls where Romanian folk art had recently stood.

Mircea’s home away from home was beautiful, elegant and designed to impress. As a result, it said little about the man who lived here. Like the BBJ and the Armani wardrobe, it was what people expected to see. But I found it telling that his servants, when fleeing for their lives, had left the Sèvres and the Swarovski and had grabbed a collection of painted tin crucifixes and worthless wooden spoons.

It bothered me that, in their position, I wouldn’t have known what to take. I stared around at the things they’d left, like an intricately carved set of jade figurines on a shelf, and realized that I’d have probably made all the wrong choices. I didn’t know what were treasured memories and what were just decorations. Like I didn’t know his hopes, his dreams or his fears, if he had any . . .

My heel caught in a puddle of silk by the bed. As I freed it, I found one personal item that had been overlooked in the rush: an old, beat-up book. The black leather cover was worn at the edges and the gilt lettering on the front had mostly faded, with only a few small specks left to gleam in the candlelight. But it was undoubtedly a photo album.

I glanced around, but the guys were nowhere in sight. I knelt on the floor and opened the cover with slightly shaking hands. Mircea had the diplomat’s ability to talk for hours without actually saying much, and what he did say was often suspect. I’d heard two versions—so far—about how he became a vampire, and still had no idea if either was true.

But photos didn’t lie. At least, not as often as master vampires. And suddenly I was confronted with a whole album containing hundreds of photos of Mircea.

Only it didn’t.

The photos had a theme, all right, but it wasn’t him. On every page the same face stared out at me—that of a beautiful, dark-haired woman of approximately my age. She combined sloe-eyed sultriness with petite delicacy and would have stopped traffic in no makeup and wearing a muumuu. Only she preferred form-fitting clothes that showed off a trim, athletic figure.

One picture showed her eating at a café. She was wearing old-fashioned clothes—forties era, at a guess—consisting of a white short-sleeved suit and a striped scarf. She was waving a fork around and laughing at someone off camera. Her hair was glossy and sleek in a sassy bob that made a mockery of bad hair days. Her nose didn’t turn up at the end, her cheekbones were sculpted, and if she had any freckles they didn’t show. She could have been a model for an early issue of
Vogue
.

I stared at her, the album open on my knees, feeling strangely dizzy. I felt something else, too, something I couldn’t quite define, but it heated my cheeks and burned in my stomach like acid. There were no photos of me in this room. Not one. But there was an entire album devoted to this mystery woman. Whoever she was, obviously she was important to Mircea.

More so than me.

Something hit the clear plastic protecting the image, rolled to the edge of the book and was absorbed by the cracked leather binding. I blinked away more somethings, vaguely appalled. This is stupid and petty, I told myself. With everything I had to worry about, here I was, preoccupied with who Mircea might be—God, I couldn’t even think it. And that was even more stupid.

What had I believed, that he’d been some kind of monk for five hundred years? After seeing the way women regularly threw themselves at him? And I couldn’t very well be jealous of events that had happened long before I was born, even if they did involve beautiful, sophisticated brunettes.

I looked down at a crinkling sound to see that my fist had balled around the page with the photograph, crushing the plastic and threatening to put permanent creases in the paper. Okay, maybe I could. All right, I very definitely could.

Mircea’s sexual history was something I’d been able to put out of my mind, at least most of the time, because I hadn’t known any of the people involved. At least, I hadn’t thought so. Now I wondered.

He was closer than I’d like to the Chinese Consul, who had become fond of him while he was on a diplomatic mission to her court and who still sent him expensive presents every year. He’d also been pretty friendly with an icy blonde senator and a passionate raven-haired countess—and those were just the ones I knew about. The women had been pretty diverse in status, personality and background, but they had one thing in common: they were all heartstoppingly beautiful. Like this woman.

I flipped to the back of the book and got another shock. The brunette turned up again, but this time, she was jogging through a park. And the earbud to an iPod trailed down across her left shoulder. I went back through the album and realized that the photos were in chronological order—old sepia images from maybe the nineteenth century giving way to early black and white, then to bold sixties-era color and finally to the modern day. And, except for superficial details, she looked the same in every photo. She was a vampire, ageless and eternally beautiful.

Just like Mircea.

I put the album down with shaking hands and told myself to get a grip. I was just really emotional right now, that was all. That’s why I was feeling this way, like I wanted to gouge those pretty dark eyes out with my thumbs.

That was so very not me it was scary. I didn’t get possessive about people, any people. I never had. And Mircea and I didn’t have an exclusivity agreement, didn’t have any agreement at all, in fact. He could see anyone he wanted. Only for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that he might actually
be
seeing—might, in fact, be doing a hell of a lot more than just
seeing
—someone who made me look like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters.

With my thumbs
.

“Find anything?” I turned to see Pritkin coming in the door. He glanced around without interest. Maybe he didn’t realize whose room this was, or maybe he just didn’t care. Mircea was only another vampire to him, and Pritkin had never been fond of those.

“No. Nothing.” I didn’t make any attempt to hide the book, and his eyes passed over it uninterestedly.

“Same here.”

“Feels like a ghost town,” Caleb murmured, joining us. I disagreed. Ghosts were livelier than this.

“They must have gotten out,” Pritkin said. “Trust the vampires to have an escape route even in a supposedly impregnable fortress.”

“But I doubt they stuck around to help anyone else,” Caleb added, glancing at me. I didn’t deny it; I doubted they had, either. “There may be people farther up. Let’s go.”

We were in the foyer, heading for the main entrance, when the crystals in the chandelier overhead started to chime. A blue and white vase that I really hoped wasn’t Ming danced across the central table and crashed to the floor before I could grab it. The ground beneath my feet groaned and shuddered for a long moment, and I had to brace one hand against the wall to keep my balance.

“An
earthquake
?” I said in disbelief. “What’s next? A tsunami?”

“It’s probably the upper levels settling,” Pritkin said, but he didn’t look convinced. “We should hurry.”

We exited into the corridor and Caleb started for a door near a set of steps cut into the rock and going up. “I wouldn’t do that,” I advised.

He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “Why not?” He gave me a suspicious look from under lowered brows, like he suspected me of assisting the vamps to hide some nefarious secret.

As if they needed my help.

“Those are Marlowe’s rooms.” Kit Marlowe, onetime playwright, was now the Consul’s chief spy. And in the paranoid Olympics, he took the gold. I was betting that even in a magical fortress surrounded by guards, he’d warded his rooms. And, knowing him, probably with something lethal.

Caleb took his hand away under the pretense of straightening his lapels. And didn’t put it back. I guess he agreed with me.

The emergency lights were still working on the next level, casting a red stain over the old rocks. The passage at the top of the stairs turned a couple of times, passing shadowy rooms filled with strange equipment. Cables snaked underfoot, walls were lined with a lot of slimy things in jars, upended cages were everywhere and the overhead fluorescents flickered like horror movie lighting.

“Sigourney Weaver shows up and I’m out of here,” I muttered, surprising a laugh out of Caleb.

“We already killed the alien,” he reminded me.

“You sure about that?” Pritkin asked.

He was a little ahead of us, around a bend in the passage. We caught up with him to find that this level was also empty—of people. But there were plenty of other things prowling, flying and oozing around to make up for it. It looked like someone had been running a menagerie that the disaster had set loose. A very creepy menagerie, I decided after getting a close-up look at something pale pink and orange that was sliming its way out of a hole in a crate. A mass of jellylike similar creatures could be seen inside, waiting their turn. The pretty colors didn’t help obscure the fact that it was frighteningly like a huge slug.

Only it had small, angry, coal-black eyes. Intelligent ones.

I scrambled back, fighting an urge to lose my dinner, while Caleb swore and pulled a gun. I caught his arm. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” His brief good humor was completely gone.

“You can’t just kill it.”

“You didn’t have that problem in the chamber!”

“We were being attacked in the chamber!”

“And now we know by what. Some perverted experiments your vampires were running!”

He took aim again, but I guess his powder must have been wet, because the gun didn’t fire. He scowled, muttered a spell and tried again. This time, the gun worked fine, but I knocked his arm and the shot went wild.

The sound was enough to send a small stampede down the corridor, away from us. “I said, no killing!”

Caleb glared at me. “She’s Pythia,” Pritkin reminded him quickly.

“Not mine,” Caleb said grimly.

“Then who is? Or do you intend to fight this war without one?”

The two stared at each other for a moment, and then Caleb swore. “We can’t do this with those things jumping us at every turn!”

“They don’t look too interested in attacking to me,” I pointed out.

“And what about the ones that are?”

“We’ll take care of them if and when we find them.”

“And if these creatures find a way out of here? You want to let something as potentially lethal as the things we killed loose into the general population?”

“We’re nine levels down! And these don’t look too dangerous to me.”

“Looks can be deceiving. We know nothing about their abilities, about why the vampires were breeding them,” he argued stubbornly.

I watched as the slug thing started to ooze away from us. The underground streams would probably survive the pending implosion. What if the creature got into the water system? What if several did, and they started to multiply? There could be thousands within weeks.

“Most will die anyway,” Pritkin pointed out quietly, “of starvation or drowning or by being crushed under a mountain of rock.” He nodded to where a couple of sort-of birds were already feasting on something’s remains, tearing off strips of flesh with their long black beaks. “Or at the claws of the larger predators. It’s kinder this way.”

I stared at the impromptu feast and felt my stomach roil. “Do what you have to,” I finally said. “I’ll be at the top of the stairs.”

The sound of gunfire and the smell of smoke followed me up. It was dark and silent at the top except for a faint blush of light from below. I sat down, wrapped my arms around my knees, leaned my head against the wall and tried not to think at all. Which was when a hand reached out from the dark and covered my mouth.

I was dragged kicking and fighting into a blacked-out room. A light flared—only a single candle—but in the dense dark it shone like a searchlight. It highlighted a small table cluttered with papers and the man sitting behind it. His curls were in disarray and his cashmere sweater was dirty and torn. But the bright brown eyes and quick smile were the same as ever. “Rafe!”

He stood and moved around the desk and I all but threw myself in his arms. I’d known he was probably okay, but some part of me hadn’t believed it until now. My heart expanded in my chest at the sight of him, whole and unhurt, exhilaration flooding my veins like bright water.

“Look what I found prowling the corridors,” Marlowe’s voice said cheerfully from behind me. “She has two mages with her, Pritkin and one I don’t know.”