And then I saw something I didn’t recognize at all, but that drew me forward like a hand. It wasn’t the most dramatic scene. It was actually one of the more plebeian. Just a room with stucco walls and flaking paint, and a large window open to the night.
Dusty beams of moonlight cascaded onto a dustier wooden floor, which was obscured by little in the way of furniture. Just a few plain benches around an elaborately carved table, its shiny dark wood and corkscrew legs making it look like it belonged in another room. Or maybe another house.
An easel was set up beside the table and a candle, flickering in the breeze from the window, sat on top of it. The stuttering light looked impossibly bright and warm against the cool blue tones of the room, shedding a golden halo over the floor and part of the table. And lighting up the corner—
—of a canvas.
It was set up in the usual place, looking out onto the canal and the dark water shining below. I never knew why; it wasn’t much of a view. Just the shuttered windows of the house opposite and the still, silent boats drawn up outside, tied to listing poles for the night. Because who needed transport at this hour?
Maybe the fine ladies and gentlemen populating the palazzos and bars and brothels, but not around here. This was a working-class neighborhood, filled with men who would be up at dawn, lading and unlading ships or working on construction crews. The women would be going to the markets to haggle over fish or to buy the spices to brighten up a stew for their men’s dinner. And the children, the children would be everywhere.
Ragged and dirty and shoeless—and lice-ridden, according to Horatiu, my tutor. He was mostly wrong about that, although I didn’t tell him so. And anyway, they were happy, laughing and chatting and staging mock stick battles on the bridges, like their fathers would do more seriously on feast days.
They were amazing, those children, running right along the very edge of the canals, yet never falling in. I could do that, too. And leap from boat to boat, crossing the water without ever needing a bridge, following them on their crazy, circuitous route around the city, laughing at foreigners and giving them bad directions and picking their pockets when they weren’t looking.
And using the coins obtained to buy food from the vendors, who knew where we got the money and didn’t care. And, oh, the food. I had never known anything like it. Veal liver fried in grape-seed oil and served on little sticks. Stuffed baby squid swimming in fish broth. Huge dishes of steamy polenta with fried fish and eggplant.
And then there were the sweets—oh, the sweets!—unlike anything I’d ever known. The Roma who had raised me before I found my father had made sure I ate, but food to them was mostly tough black bread and vegetable stew, with the occasional scrap of salted pork. But sweets…those were rare in camp, and they did not go to me.
Father had bought me my first sweet shortly after we “landed,” setting foot on this strangest of cities but not really on land, for it floated. Or so it seemed to me at the time. An impossible, magical place, and even the overcast, rainy day didn’t dim my spirits, or the brilliant colors of the waterside market we waded through.
I’d never seen so many people, all in one place, all at once. Rough sailors smelling of fish oil and sweaty workmen covered in plaster dust rubbed shoulders with pretty young slave girls following their mistresses about with baskets, slick con men doing sleight-of-hand tricks for credulous farmers, orphan boys in bright tunics shaking poor boxes, and old grandmas bent double, palms outstretched for coins. Not to mention the painted women in the doorways, with their hair done up in ringlets and their arms jingling with bracelets, calling out offers to passing men. And making rude gestures at the ones who refused.
Father pulled me away from one of them, saying something sharp to her in a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t care; I hadn’t been interested in her anyway, but in the vendor beside her. He was selling platters piled high with sweetened rice cakes, honey fritters topped with gingered almonds, clusters of nuts boiled with honey, and what the Venetians called calisconi—wonderful marzipan-filled raviolis that melted on the tongue. I hadn’t known what any of it was then, but the smell—
Oh.
The smell.
I had stood, transfixed, the pack of clothes I was carrying hitting the ground unnoticed. Horatiu began to scold me for it, but Father shushed him. And bought me one of everything. And then thoroughly scandalized Horatiu by letting me eat them in the street.
“Like she was some common child!” the old man huffed, his gray hair wafting about in a sudden breeze.
“We’re all common now,” Mircea told him from inside his hood, a gloved hand smoothing down my short dark hair.
“Speak for yourself.” Horatiu sniffed, and went to find us lodgings, while I ate and ate and ate.
I think they thought I would get full, sooner or later. I never did. There had been too many nights after I left the Roma, filled with clawing hunger; too many days of stumbling weakness; too many beatings for theft.
I hadn’t minded the beatings so much, but they usually took the food back, too.
But nobody beat me now, and there was always food. Father came back from the bars with bright coins jangling in his purse. And Horatiu went to the markets in the morning and brought home sea bass and shellfish, ducks and chickens, wine and oil, fruit and bread. But not so much the meats, like beef and pork, that the Venetians imported on their ships from our homeland, which were too expensive.
And no sweets.
But that was all right.
These days I got my own.
“Do you like it?” Mircea asked, stepping back from the canvas.
He must have been working on it for a while, judging by the sheet he’d wrapped around his waist, like the aprons the old women wore. And for the same reason—his clothes had to stay nice. He couldn’t part the wealthy tourists from their coins if he looked like he needed the money.
And he always made a mess. He said it was the sign of a great artist. I thought he must be the greatest of all then, because his hands were spotted a rainbow of colors. Like the sheet and the hair flowing over his shoulders and the skin of his chest, because he’d gone shirtless.
He saw me looking at his multicolored freckles and raised an eyebrow, daring me to say anything. I was going to anyway—I always did—but then he stepped to the side. Showing me the canvas.
And I had to bite back one of the words the street kids had taught me.
Because it was a portrait, and the portrait was of me. That wasn’t the surprise—Mircea had painted me before. But that had been a normal painting and this…well, it just wasn’t.
Normal paintings had people stiff-backed and posed and all dressed up. He’d done one of those of me last year, sitting primly in a chair, my ankles crossed, my nicest dress spread out around me. That was what paintings were, or else they were fruit or flowers painted on the walls, like I’d seen in some of the unfinished palazzos I’d poked through.
But this wasn’t any of those things.
It was me and some of the neighbor children, crouched below street level, at the base of a bridge, our bare toes gripping the barnacled rocks like the ones I’d seen on a street performer’s monkey, somehow staying steady while we stuffed our faces with ill-gotten goods. My eyes were shining, my hair was in my face, and a smudge of dirt or mud was on my cheek. More mud soaked the edge of my tattered skirts, the ones of the too short dress I’d grown out of. But that I kept for when Horatiu napped in the sun after lunch and I slipped out for dessert.
“Well?” Mircea asked, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“I like the water,” I said defiantly.
It actually was nice. He’d somehow managed to catch the ripples of our reflections without painting them exactly, by just throwing little splashes of color in between the waves. For some reason, it looked more real that way.
“Thank you,” he said sardonically.
He started washing out his brushes. They were the regular kind and hadn’t cost very much.
Not like the minerals he crushed to make some of the paints. But he was always very careful with them.
“Nothing else to say?” He prompted finally.
“You’re not supposed to be awake in daytime.”
“Oh, I see. This is about what I am not supposed to do.”
For a moment there was nothing but the small ping, ping, ping of the brush against the side of a water-filled bowl. It was making it hard to concentrate, to come up with a good story.
And it already wasn’t easy. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be running around with street kids. Horatiu would…well, he might have that heart attack he was always threatening if he knew. Mircea didn’t talk about the family much, but it seemed important for Horatiu that I knew who I was. And that I acted like a lady.
I didn’t know why. Like Mircea said, we weren’t that anymore, and it was fine with me. I didn’t want to be a lady and wear too many layers and learn proper Italian. I wanted to wear comfortable clothes and run around barefoot and make boats out of sticks and bits of cloth and race them on the canals.
And eat sweet things.
Mircea put the brushes on the windowsill to dry. “There is a reason the rules exist.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Against gangs of cutpurses and thugs, I’ve no doubt.” Clink, clink, clink. “You know they are not what concern me.”
I sighed. Because we’d had this conversation before. We’d had it a lot.
Sometimes I thought Mircea worried about vampires more than I did.
It was both the best and the worst thing about Venice. Being a port—being THE port—meant that the city wasn’t under any one court. It couldn’t be; there was too much wealth, and therefore power, flowing through it for any one family to be allowed to dominate. It had been named a free territory, meaning that any vampire could come here, regardless of family connection.
Or lack thereof, in our case.
And because any vampire could come, many did. But I wasn’t a fool; I stayed away from the parts of town they patronized. Not that they were usually active when I ventured out anyway.
“How many Others go out at noon?” I demanded, using our code word for the rest of his kind.
Mircea didn’t say anything for a long moment. He put away the painting things and then settled beside me on the bench. The breeze blowing through the opening was cool, but he was warm. His hand was still polka-dotted when he put it around my shoulder, drawing me in. But it was warm, too.
It always threw me. They weren’t supposed to be warm. Someone had told me that.…I couldn’t remember who. Some of the Roma maybe. But they’d been wrong.
They’d been wrong about a lot of things.
I put my head on his shoulder and looked at the painting. I decided I liked it. It wasn’t a proper painting, but then, I wasn’t all that proper, either.
And I did like the water.
Mircea’s hand moved up to my head, smoothing down the curls there. They were everywhere, now that he’d made me grow it out. “I know it is lonely for you here,” he told me. “I can only promise that we will not be here forever.”
I put my chin on his chest and looked up at him. This was the first I’d heard of it. “Where will we go?”
“That is yet to be determined. But I will not always be weak. And every time I gain in power, my bargaining position improves.”
“To do what?”
“Many things. Someday, I will be able to make servants—”
I groaned in mock horror. “Not more Horatius!”
He smiled. “There is only one Horatiu. But there will be people who can help us. Give us the means to go away.”
“But I like it here.”
“You will like other places, as well. Beautiful places. Safe places.”
“Places with sweets?”
Mircea laughed. “Yes. Yes, many sweets, which you may eat until you don’t have a tooth left in your head!”
“I don’t think I would look very good with no teeth.”
Mircea kissed the side of my head. “You will always be beautiful. And you will always be safe. I swear it.”
I frowned, because his tone had been weird when he said that last. “Why wouldn’t we be? What can hurt—”
The scene suddenly froze, exactly like a movie somebody had paused. I blinked, coming back to myself but waiting for it to continue. Only it didn’t.
“Start!” I told it stupidly, wiping away even stupider tears.
I didn’t know why I was crying. I didn’t know this scene—not any of it. Not the room, not the painting, not the sights and sounds and smells of a city that, as far as I was concerned, I’d visited for the first time several hundred years later. And hadn’t been all that impressed by.
I hadn’t walked through that marketplace or run past those canals. I hadn’t looked for that house, to see if it still stood, or searched for that bridge. Or eaten the sweets that I’d seemed so obsessed with.
Because I hadn’t remembered any of it.
“Start!” I yelled, furious and desperate. But it didn’t. The little girl remained looking up at her father, loose-limbed and comfortable in his grasp, brown curls falling over a plain white shift, naked toes peeking out from under the hem, black eyes mischievous and adoring and—
And when the hell had I looked like that? I’d never fucking looked like that! Only I had.
I had and I’d lost it, I realized, as something sliced across the scene. Like talons through a movie screen, it shredded the delicate image, cutting it to pieces. Like the memories she’d stolen from me. Like everything she’d ever touched.
Bring it, bitch, I thought savagely, right before a crushing blow sent me flying.
Chapter Thirty-five
I hit the ground on my back outside the rift, skidded, flipped—and was hit again before I even got back to my feet. And again. And again. I snarled and grabbed for a dark shadow darting to the left, but clutched only air.
I wasn’t sure if I’d missed or if there hadn’t been anything there in the first place. I couldn’t tell because the fog was getting worse. It was head-high out here now, too, with only puzzle pieces of the harbor visible behind filmy veils. Everything else was billowing clouds lit up by the searchlight illumination of the rift, with the fog giving the beams a nearly solid appearance.
Like the heavy-booted foot slashing out at me.
It would have cracked my jaw, judging by the explosion of air that hit my face as it passed by, but I’d dodged back just in time. Only to have my feet swept out from under me a second later, dumping me on the ground again. And into the middle of a barrage that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
It was a relentless, impossible-to-meet pounding, that had me rolling around the path and still only half avoiding the blows. And reminding me of a small fact that I’d forgotten—I had never been the stronger. Saner, yes, maybe. Most of the time. But our strength…that had always come from her.
It was why the temporary block that the fey wine had created had cost me so much in battle. I’d still been better than average—I didn’t owe everything to her. But the split-second reactions, the knife-edge balance, the sheer power of berserker rage…those I had lost.
But obviously she hasn’t, I thought, as that boot came down by my right ear, hard enough to crack concrete.
Rolling to the left, I lashed out at the same time, and landed a punch that—finally—connected. But she melted into the mist before I could follow up, just a shadow among shadows, no more solid than any other. I jumped back to my feet and whirled around, trying to watch every direction at once. It would have helped if I’d been able to concentrate, but I couldn’t. Because a big, fat realization had just hit me, harder than her fists.
I wasn’t getting out of this.
I wasn’t even if she didn’t manage to kill me. I wasn’t even if I somehow managed to get back without a guide. I wasn’t because Marlowe had been in that room.
He’d heard every word that was sai
d before I went in—or under or whatever the hell Mircea had done to get me here. And he’d undoubtedly been given a play-by-play of everything that had happened since. His natural nosiness would have insisted on that much, even without the paranoia of current events to help it along.
But even if not, even if Mircea had realized the implication of that shattered wall and avoided questions, it didn’t matter. Marlowe wasn’t stupid. He was likely figuring it out right about now. And as soon as he did…
As soon as he did, I was dead.
Until now, I’d just been a dhampir. Longer-lived than most, maybe, and a little saner, but a dhampir nonetheless. And as much as the Senate hated my kind, I’d been tolerated because Mircea was who he was. And because I was who I was: strong enough to be useful at times, and weak enough to be controlled.
But Dorina…Dorina wasn’t weak. And Dorina wouldn’t be controlled, easily or otherwise. Dorina was a crazy first-level master with five centuries of experience under her belt and a hard-on for killing vampires.
And now she was out.
Just like Christine.
And we know what happened to her, don’t we? I thought grimly.
I didn’t get an answer, except for a flurry of blows that came out of nowhere. Including one I thought I’d dodged that clipped me across the mouth, sending a spray of droplets flying. And surprise—it was possible to bleed in here.
Too bad I seemed to be the only one doing it.
“Dorina!”
The voice came again, closer this time, and it must have startled her as much as me. Because there was a half-second lull in the pounding. And I said screw it and used the only advantage I had, and imagined a .44 Magnum into my hand.
It worked great—the hard, cold steel materializing in my palm with no trouble at all.