Blood Spirits

  “Search,” I said to myself. “Be organized. Start in a small circle. Spiral out. Ask everyone you meet where Alec is, because he can give orders, and you can’t.”

  So that’s what I did. The first two people I talked to stared at me as if I’d just landed from Mars, so I pushed on. Madam Emilio hailed me gratefully, and started asking me something about dessert, but I ran on. A Vigilzhi (“I heard him in the garden not twenty minutes ago”) and Emilio’s grandson (“He’s in the street, and how many people did they shoot?”). Later, I found—“Dad?”

  “Rapunzel!” My father emerged from the archway in the hedgerow dividing the garden from the garage area. Every light in the downstairs floor seemed to be on, flooding the area with bleachy electrical glow. Dad’s grin contracted to concern. “Honey, are you okay?”

  “Cold.” I jumped up and down, shivering. “I have to find Alec.”

  “Nothing easier. I’ll take you myself. They’ve set up a command post right here in the garage.” He paced beside me. “I’ve been sitting with the chauffeurs, trading war stories about driving, trying to top each other with our worst—you know they actually use Santa-style sleighs here? In all weather, even when it’s snowing! I thought everything stopped when it snows. It sure would in L.A. Then the door blew open and all hell busted loose.”

  “Horror stories about traffic,” I said, trying to laugh, because otherwise I was going to scream and cry and shout. “Who won?”

  “L.A. rush hour, hands down. What happened, sweetie?”

  “Dad, I can’t talk right now—oh, Alec!” I cried thankfully, as we reached the garage, which was lit up, men crowded around a work table that had been forcibly cleared, from the looks of things.

  Alec looked up, blue eyes distracted, then instantly alert. “Kim?” He slid off his jacket and dropped it around my shoulders.

  His warmth, his scent, made me go weak at the knees. I clutched his jacket gratefully as I said, “Gran needs transport. Right now. Is there any way to get her some help?”

  Alec turned his head, and lifted his voice to the volume I heard the day of the ball, when Jerzy tried to stir up a riot. Because I was sure by now that he’d been behind that, too. “Princess Aurelia Dsaret requests transport,” Alec said. “Any volunteers?”

  “Princess Aurelia?” “Dsaret?” “She’s back?”

  The shocked words seemed to come from every direction, then a roar of voices as everyone, from the teenagers to grizzled Vigilzhi vets, crowded forward asking questions. I crunched my toes tight in my shoes, afraid for Gran.

  But most of those who thrust forward seemed surprised, even eager.

  Alec waved toward the house. “All of you go—give her an honor guard.” He waited for the stampede to die down and said, “There’s something more.”

  “Oh yes.” I looked around. Kilber, loaded shotgun in hand, stood on guard over Milo, who was in head-bent discussion with Baron Ridotski and a couple of the other oldsters. “I think I better go with Gran, but they’ll have to get the sleighs ready, right? Can we talk alone?” I whispered.

  Alec laid down the child’s chalk board on which he had been scribbling. “We can go up here.”

  Dad gave us the Mick Jagger point-and-shoot. “How about I scout out some comestibles? Drinkables? From the look of you, it’s been a while, eh, Rapunzel?”

  “Ate at dawn. Seems like three weeks ago.”

  Dad grinned, clearly glad to have something he could do. Alec led the way upstairs to a tiny parlor with a card table-sized dining set. Every surface was covered with mugs of half-drunk coffee and little plates. From the (few) crumbs, I figured that Mom’s tartlets hadn’t gone to waste after all.

  It was warm there, so I handed him back his jacket and sank down onto a three-legged stool. “Alec, Jerzy is dead. And I spoke to Ruli.” I told him what had happened.

  Alec listened, as always, without interruption. And as always, once I got it out—once I’d shared it with him, and we were matching rhythms again—a lot of my stress eased. “That second blackout of mine,” he said. “That has to have been Magda Stos, practicing.”

  “I think so, too. Jerzy had been planning this for a while. Maybe since summer.”

  Alec shook his head. “Magda. Was her motive loyalty? Or to please Jerzy? She had her reasons. What if I begin having reasons that seem convenient?”

  There he was, thinking out the ethical and moral consequences of power again. “You won’t,” I said, “as long as you keep questioning. Right? Anyway, about Jerzy. I guess you can call off the search, huh?”

  Alec looked out the window, then down at his hands, then at me. “I’ll fill Milo in while you go on your errand. My guess is, he’ll say to let them search, since the danger is effectively over. The von Mecklundburgs have enough to worry about right now.”

  FORTY-ONE

  THE LEAD ARTICLE in the newspaper the following week described how Princess Aurelia Dsaret and her granddaughter swooped in like Angels of Mercy in a train of sleighs whose torches and lanterns looked like a river of fire coming down the mountain at dawn.

  Other than us being angels, it’s all pretty much true.

  I ran inside to retrieve my coat, prism, and necklace. Dad and Madam Emilio met me, she bearing thermoses, and Dad handed off a sandwich packed with cheese and smoked meat, which I began wolfing down. We found Gran being tucked up in one of those open racing sleighs. Madam Emilio passed baskets of goodies to us and to the drivers as Dmitros Trasyemova himself fitted a wooly cap gently onto Gran’s head.

  I jumped in next to her, to find about ten blankets that had been raided from Alec’s house.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Gran said, taking the basket. “What is in here?”

  I unscrewed a thermos. Steam rose up, smelling of coffee laced with zhoumnyar.

  “Oh,” Gran exclaimed. “How that scent takes me back.”

  Little as I like coffee, I was glad of the warmth and took a good swig in celebration of trust. Then I replaced the cap to keep it hot. Gran took two or three sips before she capped hers. She had to be hurting, the way Jerzy had shoved her around.

  As the crowd stepped away and the sleighs jolted into motion, I said, “So where are we headed?”

  “Can you not guess?” Her profile was sad in the street light glow. “The Dominican monastery on Mt. Corbesc.”

  When Gran was sixteen, she ran away with Armandros only because she thought she was married. Armandros had hired an actor to pretend to be a priest. This man later joined the monastery on Mt. Corbesc and took a vow of silence.

  I finished my sandwich as we turned up St. Katarina Street, the sleighs picking up speed as we headed for the St. Mihal Bridge. I polished off the last bite as Gran looked around, her eyes so wide and the pupils so dark I could see the city lights reflecting in them. Her expression was closed as she looked around the city that had once been her home.

  “John Donne?” I asked Gran.

  She sent a pensive look at the Vigilzhi drivers on the box, then said in French, “All my life I have been struggling to understand the divine plan. At first, after I ran away, I ceased to believe there was one. But as the years went by, the faith I’d declaimed by rote so thoughtlessly as a child gained meaning, a word or phrase at a time. It has taken all my life, and I might say that I wish I had done many things differently now.”

  She paused, and I said, “Go on.”

  “It is clear that my sister has now been a vampire far longer than she was human. She could have killed us both but did not. When I was young, there were two things you heard together.” She held up her forefinger and second finger. “Vampires and evil. Evil, and vampires. I had never seen one, so vampires became synonymous with the devil. There was evil done in that room tonight, yet not as much evil as could have been done. And Jerzy? He did more evil as a living man than any of the undead.”

  The Vigilzhi swept up to the left toward the palace instead of turning right into the city. Gran turned as we glided by the front of the palac
e in the emerging starlight.

  “‘Blood spirits.’ The phrase is in the poem.” Gran studied her childhood home, then said, “Where are vampires in the divine plan? I wonder if John Donne knew about such things.”

  “Maybe. They definitely had a different view of the universe in those days. For many of them, magic was a part of rational science. How does the palace look to you, Gran? Has it changed?”

  “Oh, so much is different. Not the palace. But here.” She dipped her head toward Sobieski Square, where the gigantic hammer and sickle faintly reflected the ethereal light, and on its other side, the burned hulk of the Council Hall.

  We were quiet as the sleighs approached the northeast edge of the city, and began the climb toward the main road up to Mt. Corbesc. Darkness closed in around us. In the flickering torch and lantern light, the world was draped in white. I fished my prism from my pocket and checked, but it stayed cold and dark in my hand.

  Wherever those vampires lurked, it wasn’t around here.

  Gran took my hand. Hers was warm through her gloves. “Tell me everything that happened since you left London, Aurelia Kim.”

  “Didn’t Mom and Dad tell you?” I hesitated, then said, “Or Milo?”

  “I want to hear it the way you saw it.”

  So I did, as we climbed up and up. The journey had been about an hour the summer before, when Josip drove me in the ancient VW that their entire block shared. I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take by sleigh, but I knew I had plenty of time.

  When I got to Jerzy’s first attempt on Honoré, and the burning house, she pressed her free hand to her chest, but said, “Go on, dear. Go on.”

  So I gave her the rest, up until Tony and I closed off the vampire portal above the Esplumoir. And thought, how did Jerzy know about making that, if the rest of the von Mecklundburgs didn’t?

  Oh wow, more questions, I thought. Just what I wanted.

  After a protracted silence during which the only sound was the crunchy hiss of the rails, the muffled thud of hooves, and the quietvoiced conversations of some of our escorts, I said, “Is it hard to be back in Dobrenica?”

  Gran stretched out her hand and laid it over mine as she looked over her shoulder at the winking lights of Riev far below, and beyond it, the valley stretching away toward the eastern mountains, lost in darkness. “It is painful,” Gran said finally. “But the pain is . . . just.”

  “By whose standard?” I whispered.

  “Mine.”

  There was no answer to that.

  “Armandros was so very impatient with questions of Nasdrafus and of faith. The modern world in his view was hard as steel, grim as death, the divine gone as if it never was. And with the war . . . it seemed he was right. I was so young.” She sighed. “I’d heard all my life how smart I was, and I thought myself so wise.”

  “How are things with Milo? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want,” I added quickly. Gran and I had been good buddies all my life, but though we’d talked about music, history, literature, and the minutiae of the day, we’d never talked about relationship stuff. Ever. I was just beginning to understand why.

  She was quiet for so long I thought that that was going to be my answer, and I began searching for an easier subject, when she said, “Milo and I both want to reclaim our friendship, and we do have that. I am grateful for that gift.”

  Friendship. That pretty much fit what Alec had said.

  She sighed. “Milo understands that Armandros was not wicked, he was . . . he was who he was. He never lied to me, Aurelia Kim, you must understand. But he didn’t tell me everything, either. For example, this woman whose son caused so much grief. The last time I saw Armandros, he told me he’d been wounded, and was nursed back to health by a village stonemason’s daughter. He just did not tell me anything more. But I’d begun to piece together the silences.”

  “Oh, Gran.”

  “I think he knew this baby was to come when I saw him last, and when I think back over his words, I believe that Jerzy’s mother had threatened to make trouble. But at the time all I could think about was my own hurt. I confronted him about Rose, and he admitted that our marriage was a sham, and that he’d married her because she was so persistent—because of the settlement—but I think because he loved her in his way, too. It was then that I understood why he had been so resistant to my getting Marie baptized—he would have to admit the false marriage to me. He’d never meant to be unkind, he meant for me to go on believing I was a wife, since in his mind it hurt no one, and didn’t matter. But it did matter. With his brother dead, he was now the duke, and with the country overrun, he had woken to responsibility—in his own way.”

  “By joining the German air force.”

  “Yes. He could not bear the idea of Stalin finding the Nasdrafus. Nasdrafus! He had always said such things were mere stories, and so I called him a liar. . . . Well, the past is past. And now, to discover that he crashed his plane at the very gate of Esplumoir . . . it seems that even in death he did his best to protect Dobrenica, does it not? That was a heroic act.”

  He’d tried to take responsibility in his own way, just like Tony had, with his annoying secrets and his outrageous coup that was supposed to force the truth about his sister’s death. And, like his grandfather, there was a very good chance he was going to die as a result of his trying.

  I glared up at the stars, angry with the universe. Gran took her rosary out of her pocket. For a while we were quiet, and when she put it away again, the rest of our talk was about the inn, Dobreni food, and easy things until we rounded a last moonlit cliff, and there was the Augustinian monastery.

  One of the Vigilzhi banged on the wooden door, calling loudly, “Wake up! Open the door for Her Highness, Princess Aurelia Dsaret!”

  The door opened, and a monk carrying a lantern looked out.

  We were soon inside, and the guy in charge met us in the same quiet room I’d sat in to recover when I first discovered the truth about Gran’s fake marriage.

  Gran said, “I would like to speak with Brother Ildephonsas. I understand that he has made and kept his vows, but I have a boon to ask.”

  A few minutes later, there was the tall, grizzled old monk, who in his many decades here had become a Salfpatra.

  Gran said to him, “I was told that you possess the art of healing. A young relation of mine lies close to death, having thrown himself in the way of a bullet intended for another. Your thoughtless action harmed me once. Will you amend that wrong by coming to heal him?”

  The other monks betrayed surprise, misgivings, and a couple of them turned to their leader, who just waited.

  Brother Ildephonsas stared down at Gran, his eyes closed as he rocked gently back and forth on his feet. Then he worked his mouth, and in a rusty whisper, said, “I will.”

  We reached the hospital to discover all the von Mecklundburgs in the lobby, Alec with them. Nat and Beka were inside Tony’s room. Nat was in the Dobreni version of scrubs, which is kind of like doctors’ outfits of eighty years ago.

  When we got to the door, Nat made shooing motions at me. “You look like a walking germ pit,” she warned.

  “Nat, I won’t breathe on anyone. But I want to see this through.”

  “You and half the city,” she muttered, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to be able to stop the von M’s from crowding in behind Gran and Brother Ildephonsas, who walked up to Tony and looked him over carefully. He crossed himself, his lips moved in silent prayer, and then he stretched out his long gnarled hands, crisscrossed with old scars from animal claws and bites, and held them just above Tony’s chest where the bandages were wrapped.

  That skin-prickle of magic, like static electricity except without the painful snap, ran all over my body. The others reacted, some shaking themselves, or blinking. Only the duchess stood absolutely still, tears running down her face from under swollen lids.

  My chest hurt. I discovered I was unconsciously trying to breathe for Tony. The air stirred, bringin
g the scent of pine forest and running water, of forest and of spring. I sensed light, even if I didn’t see it. No, what I sensed was warmth.

  Tony gave a gasp, his eyes opening. Color flooded his face.

  Brother Ildephonsas stepped back. He signed a blessing over Tony and then withdrew, a step at a time, so quietly that no except me really noticed. Their attention was on Tony and on Nat who began doing doctorish things while elbowing Tony’s high and mighty relatives out of the way with decidedly un-doctorish mutterings in English like “Butt out, gang” and “Shift it.”

  Nat said to those of us crowded at the back, “I’m reasonably certain that the internal bleeding has stopped.” She wiped her eyes fiercely on her sleeve. “If he makes it through today and tomorrow, we can say he’s out of danger.”

  The duchess put her face in her hands and sank into a chair on the other side of the room from where Gran sat, pale and worn out.

  I sank down next to Alec. “Hold your nose. I haven’t had a shower in two, no, three days.”

  His smile was the rare, real one. He put an arm around my shoulder and pulled me up against him, then pressed a kiss on my grungy hair. Warmth flooded through me as I took a quick look around. The others were so busy yapping at each other, I used the cover of their conversations to whisper, “Do they know about Ruli?”

  “Milo told them late last night.”

  “What’s the etiquette when somebody in the family goes vamp?”

  “No etiquette that I know of. It hasn’t happened to anyone for a very long time. That we know of,” he added as an afterthought. “What will probably happen is that we’ll all finish out the half-year of mourning, as Ruli is legally deceased. If the von Mecklundburgs want to release the truth that’s their prerogative, but I doubt very much that they will.”

  “Grandma Rose.” I shook my head. “It was so weird—she looks like a high school kid. One dressed up in thirties styles. In fact . . .” I had a sudden thought. “I think I saw her before. At the gala, when I went chasing after Jerzy and his crossbow. I think she was backstage. I am very sure she was leading me to safety.”