Blood Spirits

  “We’ve always been at each other’s throats,” Tony said tiredly, and to someone down a hall, “Boris! Fetch the Rose and Thorn. Meet us at the garden doors.”

  “Did you find the Esplumoir?” Phaedra asked.

  “Maybe. Those caves are closed, whatever they are. The bloodsuckers attacked us on the way back. We lost three people.” He named them.

  Phaedra flinched at every name, her grief swiftly turning to anger. She cursed as she followed us into the lower part of Tony’s castle. This had to be the service entrance with its stone walls and low ceilings cut from stone.

  We ran up two flights of worn stairs, and had just reached the massive floor made of yard-wide squares of black and white marble in a checkerboard pattern, when we were met by a tall, gloomy-faced, white-haired man carrying a heavy brass tray with two implements on it. The bowl was made out of solid gold, etched with the Dobreni symbols that had become familiar, twined together with rose vines. Same with the handle of the knife.

  The Rose and the Thorn.

  “Diamonds off,” Tony said, removing his earring. “Crystal, too.”

  I unfastened my necklace and laid it in a waiting bowl of some translucent material. It looked impossibly old. Tony tossed his diamond earring in without looking. Phaedra took off not only earrings but a necklace.

  Niklos turned up, shotgun on his hip and a heavy cavalry sabre in his other hand. A few of the huskier guys, armed with steel as well as shotguns, paced behind us as Tony and Phaedra led the way across the polished checkerboard floor to a pair of grand carved doors that opened onto the garden that I’d last seen in summer, when I ran for my life.

  Now the grounds were blanketed in snow, softly glowing from the many lit windows. The sky was covered by a thin haze of clouds. The nice weather was already eroding toward more snow.

  Crunch, crunch. We walked past the bare trees. The white statues were easily visible. No, not statues. My heart gave one of those bumps when I remembered that these were vampires—turned to stone.

  Yes, there was one I remembered, a mossy, weather-blurred figure in medieval tunic and hose, the shoes elongated, on a carved stand. Its hands were out to the sides—probably bound by ropes. His face lifted skyward.

  We paced in the opposite direction from where I’d run during summer, toward the highest end of the castle. There was a secluded garden behind the Sky Suite, which housed the ducal family. This garden was reachable by a long curve of stone steps. One side of the wall had a huge gate, which Niklos and a couple of the guys unbarred and pushed open. Beyond it was forest.

  In the center of the garden was a smooth, shallow fountain that reminded me of an ancient Greek kylix—a two-handled cup with a stem. Tony set the tray down in the middle of it, and stepped back.

  Then we waited.

  And waited.

  Nothing came through the gate.

  “Don’t you have to, like, send a message or something?” I said after what felt like a thousand years. My fingers and toes had begun to go numb again.

  “They’ve got to be around,” Phaedra said.

  Tony sniffed the air. “They’re around.”

  I sniffed as well. There was a trace of that musty deep freeze smell, charged with a sense of electricity—like the air when the desert winds blow in California, right before the wildfires start. It made the hairs on the back of my neck lift.

  There were no ghosts anywhere.

  “Damn it,” Tony said finally, lifting the tray. “Damn.”

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  Phaedra said, “Wouldn’t it mean that Uncle Robert completed the treaty, if they aren’t here?”

  Tony headed toward the path, after sending a grim look out into the darkness. “Not that simple. They’re out there. They could tell us if he did. I think what this silence means is that there’s unfinished business.”

  He started up the stairs to the castle.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  TONY LED THE WAY in angry silence back to a part of the castle I hadn’t seen during the summer. This was deep in the lower level, the service area. Past a jumble of baskets and brooms and garage kafuffle, a glance at a huge coat room full of boots and shoes neatly lined up, and coats on hooks, and oh, warmth and light—we walked into an enormous kitchen, with restaurant-sized prep tables and ovens, and glimpses of smaller prep annexes through open doors.

  A grizzled old man in a long apron bustled in. “In the boot room, in the boot room.” He waved his hands. “You know better, hertsa’vos,” the man scolded.

  “His dukeship” (the closest translation) withdrew to the big closet we’d just passed through, trailing Phaedra and me. We struggled out of our sodden boots and socks. As I hung up my coat, I fished the prism out and stuck it in my pants pocket—then remembered I’d left my backpack full of dirty clothes and toothbrush in the sleigh. Oh, well.

  “Leave those wet things there,” the man said from the doorway. “Boris will see to them. We will bring you something hot.”

  He made shooing motions at us as Phaedra led the way through the big kitchen to another smaller one that smelled like cinnamon and nutmeg. Big flour barrels were lined up, and on a vast bread board, pastry dough sat rising.

  Through there to a short hall where an odor of chicken paprika lingered, and through yet another door into a small, cozy room with carefully repaired but timeworn French streamline lounge chairs from the thirties. I sank into one with a sigh of relief that came up from my needle-stinging, defrosting toes.

  A fire burned in the fireplace. I worked my gloves off my tingling fingers and held out my hands toward the blaze.

  “Thanks, Boris,” Tony said shortly as the gloomy-faced, white-haired man came in with mugs on a tray. The delicious aroma of mulled wine filled the room, replacing the smell of wet socks that seemed to have followed us in. He served me first.

  I looked at the wine, my lips ready to taste it—then I said, “You two drink first.”

  Phaedra and Tony both gave me startled looks, then their eyes narrowed in exactly the same way.

  Tony set aside the mug and went to the door. “Boris?” he called.

  The white-haired old man shuffled back in. “Hertsa’vos?”

  “Do you remember who was here for Thorn night?”

  “Thorn,” the man repeated. “Jakov and I were alone in preparation. We were going to ride together after, down to . . .” The man rambled on about the servants’ Christmas plans, discovered Tony still waiting, then found his way back to the subject.” . . . and that was when Count Robert and Baron Parsifal arrived. They were alone.”

  “Thank you, Boris.” As the man shut the door behind him, Tony waved his hand impatiently. “Just as Robert said. We can guess why someone would try to kill Honoré. Who stands to benefit if Robert is dead?”

  Cerisette, I thought.

  “Cerisette,” Phaedra stated. “But if she wanted to organize a family coup, she’d be more efficient about it.”

  Tony laughed. “At least the planning of it. Though I can’t see her whacking Honoré with a poker, much less with Plato.”

  “If she can lift one of those busts, I’ll eat it for dinner,” Phaedra said. “Anyway, after her—assuming you’re dead—Percy would inherit. Then Danilov. I can’t think of two people less likely to do any of these things.”

  Tony slapped his hands on his knees. “We’re not high enough,” he said.

  “High?” Phaedra glanced at the plaster ceiling.

  “High?” I said. “We’re on the highest point in the—oh.”

  “Strategically. I keep coming back to the entire government neatly assembled at the Council Building for that hearing. Obviously I wasn’t the only one to think it a convenient way to round up the lot of them.”

  Ice ran through my bones and nerves. “I think your unfinished business is connected.”

  Phaedra scowled. “Who stands to gain if the government is all swept away? It’s not like vampires would be appointed. Everybody laughed when H
onoré dug up the old laws about them, a few years ago. Remember? But laws there are. A vampire is for all legal purposes considered dead.”

  The cook had kicked the castle staff into high gear. In spite of the fact that they have no microwaves, a hot dinner appeared. It was mainly steamed cabbage, with pickled vegetables and dried venison cooked up in a kind of instant wine sauce, with the remains of the morning’s bread.

  We hadn’t eaten all day. I was ravenous. Tony had to be, too, but he ate about half of his then jumped up and started out, pausing at the door. “No, go off to bed, Boris. I’ll put it away.” He stepped into the hall. “Ah, there you are, Niklos. Listen, I want you and Teo to go through everyone in the staff. Find out the last time they saw Ruli, and where. Get Anna and Horst to look through every room.”

  Their voices faded away down the hall.

  We’d retrieved our diamonds and crystals on the way back in, but I hadn’t put the necklace on yet. It sat there on the table in front of me, tiny lights in it winking.

  A few bites in, I said to Phaedra, “I’d be happy to believe she’s not as evil as she acts toward me, but why is it so easy to excuse Cerisette from plotting? Seems to me she likes organizing things, and she certainly seems to be ambitious.”

  “Not Cerisette. Beka Ridotski may be annoying, but she was right in saying once that Cerisette wants to reign at Alec’s side, not to rule.”

  “Is she really that into him?” It might explain the total hate she had going on me.

  “Tchah!” Phaedra shrugged. “I think she would be as happy marrying a piece of plaster made in Alec’s shape, if it made her queen. Happier.” Phaedra grinned and saluted me with her mulled wine. “Then she would never hear the words ‘tax’ or ‘mine,’ and would be spared him talking about poetry.”

  As she spoke, I watched the light shards in my necklace glimmer like light on water from another world. Those lights were clearly hooked in with Vrajhus, and maybe even the Nasdrafus. Would they be clearer if I tried the prism? I set aside my fork and took the prism out of my pocket.

  Phaedra leaned forward. “I was just thinking that,” she said. “Can you look at the twenty-first? I’ll wager anything Uncle Robert passed out and didn’t make the treaty. Maybe that’s why the vampires are swarming. Nothing else makes sense.”

  I rubbed the prism on my grubby jeans. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t pick a date then look into this thing like it’s a video recording. Maybe someone else can, but I’m a beginner at this. I need a person or an object to concentrate on.”

  “Then think about this room. Everyone uses it in winter. Though I must say, if you think about Uncle Robert, you’ll see him a thousand times,” Phaedra said dubiously. “Over his lifetime.”

  “I have to be more specific than that. Objects are better. At least, it was that way with Alec’s Daimler. Maybe I should get the Rose and Thorn back,” I said, reluctant to have anything to do with those implements.

  Boris entered, carrying another tray of mulled wine. As he set it out, I gazed at the mug, an association almost there . . . almost there . . . there! “The thermos,” I said, as soon as Boris shut the door again.

  “Thermos?” Phaedra sipped wine, eyes closed. “Oh, that tastes good.”

  “If Robert was roofied, he said it has to have been in that coffee thermos. Maybe if I get the thermos, and look at it in the prism. Even if it tells us nothing about whether or not the treaty was made, if someone puts something in there that isn’t coffee, we might have our poisoner, at least.”

  “If the poisoner is the same person who roofied Alec.” Phaedra huffed to her feet. “I will get the thermos. I know where those things are kept.”

  I was going to sip my mulled wine, then changed my mind and put it down. Not because I thought it was poisoned so much as I wanted to keep my mind clear. Or as clear as it was going to get, considering the wine already in me, and the very, very long day. On top of a series of long days.

  Phaedra was back in a moment, carrying three thermoses. “Sorry. No one could remember which one they used that night. These three are reserved for the family. The household staff keep theirs in the north pantry.”

  I bent over the first one, thinking coffee, ritual, and a lot of other stuff that was probably useless. The prism flickered between a lot of people I don’t know, some drinking from the thermos, others pouring from it, and it was washed a number of times, water splashing toward me in a kind of 3D perspective.

  I clenched the prism, trying to narrow the criteria, but the harder I tried, the more splintered the images were. My head began to thump in time to my heartbeat. So I did some breathing, then set aside the first one. If I learned to filter images better, I’d come back to it. I’d try the second one just for a change.

  I set the thermos on my tray, put the prism before it, bent over it, and this time I let the images flow. Hands holding the thermos . . . water running in it . . . steam coming up from it as someone poured soup, a wood pile in the distance. Coffee pouring out, held by a feminine hand, then it’s set on the dashboard of an old car, right-hand drive. Coffee . . . wash . . . tea. Wash. Another load of soup . . . wash . . . powder—

  “What?” Phaedra asked, her high voice going shrill. “You yelped.”

  “I did?” I sat back, fighting dizziness. “Powder. Someone put powder in it.”

  “Powder?” She leaned forward, glaring at the thermos and then the prism. “Who?”

  “It could be something perfectly innocent,” I began.

  Phaedra’s lip curled.

  “Right. Let me try again.” I bent over the prism, blinked, concentrated on the hand, the powder, the thermos.

  And there he was, facing me with the thermos between us, a tall, elegant man with curly red hair touched with silver at the temples and over the ears. He was still, as if listening, his chin raised. The perspective was strange, as if I held the thermos for him as he measured in a dose of powder from a rolled paper. He dusted the paper to make sure all the powder went into the thermos. Then his hand reached toward me, he picked up the thermos—and it went away.

  “It was Uncle Jerzy.”

  Phaedra burst out laughing. “Uncle Jerzy? Tchah! Some villain! What could he possibly gain? All he cares about is the Paris flat. And whatever Tante Sisi wants. It must be a different day.”

  “I thought he was forbidden to come to Dobrenica. Until this visit.”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “He was here all the time, forty years ago.”

  “His hair is silvery in the prism. Was his hair silvery in the old days? Also, his face was old.”

  “Then it must be powdered milk.” She scowled. “Except he despises powdered milk. He only drinks freshly roasted coffee and nothing to mar the taste.”

  The door opened, and Tony entered. “No sign of Ruli. I wonder if we should try again tomorrow with the treaty, as Jakov insists there’s snow coming through. Maybe scout the records. See if we’ve ever missed a Night of the Thorn, and what they did about it. If I can find any records. Damn! This is Honoré’s business to sort—what is it?”

  Phaedra had been waving her hand in a circle to get him to hurry up. “Tell him, Kim.” She turned to me.

  “I looked in the prism. I don’t know when, of course, but I saw your Uncle Jerzy putting powder in this thermos.”

  “It can’t possibly be Jerzy,” Tony said, sitting down heavily. “He hasn’t left Paris in forty years. Except when he was on the hunt for a chef. In fact, on the twentieth, wasn’t he in Chantilly? Or was he in Epernay?”

  Phaedra shrugged sharply. “Tante Sisi bored on about it constantly. I remember he was interviewing a man in Chantilly, and a woman in Compiegne. Anyway Uncle Jerzy left the day before I reached Paris, but I was there on the night of the twenty-first, when he returned emptyhanded to report that they all refused to leave France.”

  “But he was here,” I said. “In Dobrenica, I mean.” And when the others looked my way, I added, “That is, an inkri driver at the inn last we
ek said that Jerzy was the same guy he picked up at the train station the week before. He asked a lot of questions about me at the Waleskas’. Is there some way to check the records of arrivals?” I asked, without much hope, considering no one had ever asked for my papers on my arrivals. “Why don’t you have passports, or at least I.D. papers?”

  Tony leaned back, blinking tiredly. “Honoré says that papers were issued in the bad old days, but they were useless. He’s seen MVD records, neatly recording visitors such as Red Baron of Flying Ace, Austria, and N. Buono Parte of St. Helene, France.” He flashed a grin. “Honoré showed us an entry a year or so ago, where a man whose papers listed him as A.J. Raffles, of Albanos Village, was flagged with a note: This is Ysvorod—arrest on sight! The Soviet guards did not know enough Western history to see the jokes.”

  Phaedra dismissed jokes with an airy wave. “Anyway, there has to be some obvious explanation. Uncle Jerzy? He’s just a—”

  “Just a steward,” Tony said. “Loyal Uncle Jerzy! Everybody loves Uncle Jerzy, who knows how to make Maman happy, who always keeps the Paris house running. Who, we’ve heard our entire lives, won’t inherit anything.”

  “Who always . . .” Phaedra stared fixedly at the fire. “. . . answers the telephone.”

  The fire crackled. Tony’s chin came up. “Who spoke to Magda Stos last?”

  “Jerzy,” Phaedra stated, and with an ironic glance Tony’s way, added, “Danilov, Honoré, and I have been over it a thousand times, since you weren’t talking to anyone. It was the night of the twenty-first. He’d just arrived at the Paris house and was telling us the story about the cook in Chantilly and her ‘Where do you want me to go? What country? I’ve never heard of it! Is it in South America?’ We were all laughing.”

  Phaedra gazed into the fire. “When the phone rang, Jerzy got it, as always. He said ‘Magda, what’s wrong?’ And we all crowded around. He kept saying, ‘Calm down, calm down, it can’t be as bad as you think.’ Tante Sisi kept saying ‘What is it? What is it? Give me the phone,’ then Jerzy started jiggling it, and said either she’d rung off or been cut off. He said she was calling from the road, with Marzio, and the phone box was in the rain. We were in suspense for what seemed like hours, but probably was one or two at most. Then Robert called with the news of Ruli’s accident, and that’s when Tante Sisi began calling you.” She pointed at Tony.