Masks

  “It was very brave,” Mircea said, only to have her look at him heatedly.

  “It wasn’t brave! It was like with Sanuito, all over again. I heard what she said—enough anyway. I knew what she was! And I was so afraid—that I’d get you killed, that she’d turn on me, that I’d only make things worse and we’d both—” She broke off.

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “I couldn’t just stand there! The last time I did that . . . and there was no time to go get anyone else, and you . . . you weren’t even as powerful as me, but you were fighting her. You were fighting!”

  “I was trying,” Mircea corrected ruefully, but it didn’t seem to affect Auria’s euphoria.

  “It’s something I never thought I could do,” she told him. “To fight back. But . . . it’s not as hard as I thought it would be. It’s easier, in fact, than all those years I spent so afraid. So sure I couldn’t do anything about what happened to me. That because I didn’t have strength, I’d never be anything. But I helped!”

  “You did more than that,” Mircea said. “But I still don’t understand how you reached me. I barely made it down the hall on the other side, and that was through luck as much as anything. It couldn’t have been easier on yours.”

  She nodded. “The winds were appalling. I think that’s what helped me shake off Marte’s suggestion, as much as anything.”

  “Then how did you manage?”

  She blinked at him. “I didn’t.”

  “Then how—”

  She looked at him oddly. “I just went up a floor.”

  Mircea stared at her, and Antony burst out laughing.

  And then he got up.

  “Well, this has been fascinating, like so much these days,” he said, looking satisfied. “But I have to be going. I’ll let an . . . acquaintance . . . of yours know that you’re all right, shall I?”

  Mircea nodded. “Thank—”

  “And that you’ve regretfully declined her invitation to join us in Paris.”

  “In . . . Paris?”

  “She thinks you’d do well at court. I, on the other hand, see you prospering better here. I’ve had a word with the Watch. Don’t think they’ll be troubling you in the future.” He dropped a heavy purse on the side table. “Lovely place, Venice.”

  He clapped Mircea on the shoulder again.

  It was the same one.

  He left.

  Jerome stared after him, openmouthed. “I . . . think you were just warned off,” he said slowly.

  “That’s . . . and with his reputation . . . I just . . . oooh,” Auria said, scowling. “The consul—the other consul—is right. Mircea would do wonderfully at court!”

  “Yes, but he’ll live longer here,” Jerome said cynically.

  “But think of the possibilities! So many patrons—so much wealth!” Her face shone. “We should all go!”

  “I have an errand.”

  “An errand, he says,” Bezio muttered, from the floor.

  “You can get up now,” Jerome told him. “That government type that you don’t respect at all is gone.”

  Bezio looked up. “I didn’t respect the old government—which was run by a madman,” he pointed out. “Maybe this one will be different.”

  “Sure it will.” Jerome rolled his eyes.

  Bezio frowned at him. “Did anybody ever tell you, you’re awfully cynical?”

  “Me? I’m cyn—all right. Yes, sure. Then maybe I’ll just have to take you with me, so you can bring me out of myself.”

  “Well, someone needs to. You’re too young to be that jaded.”

  “For the last time, I have two centuries on you, ‘old man’!”

  “Two centuries?” Mircea asked.

  “Later,” Jerome told him. “Rest now.”

  They left, still arguing, and took the others with them. Leaving Mircea alone with Auria, who was smiling at him tearfully. “We got her, didn’t we?”

  He nodded.

  “I still can’t quite believe it. I always thought . . . I was always told that I couldn’t do anything alone. That without my master, I was nothing. But the bad things—they can be fought. They can be fought, and we can win!”

  “Sometimes,” Mircea agreed.

  “A lot of the time. But even if we don’t, it feels so good just to try. It makes me angry that I spent so much of my life fearing the bad that I couldn’t enjoy the good things that were there, too.” She leaned over, and kissed him softly. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  She left, and Mircea lay back against the sheets, exhausted from just that quick exchange. But strangely euphoric, too. Some of Auria’s seemed to have rubbed off.

  Or maybe it was something else.

  It feels so good to try, he thought. Yes, yes it would. Mircea felt sleep claiming him, but not before he saw himself again at that house in the woods. But this time, he didn’t wait in the trees. This time, he went in. To warmth and life and a woman who deserved the truth she’d asked for, and the chance he’d never given her.

  Even if it didn’t work, he was tired of living in fear, too.

  Maybe . . . it was time to try.

  Seven Years Later

  The small house was set in a row of narrow, ramshackle buildings spilling candlelight onto the dark water of a small canal. It had a sagging chimney, warped shutters, and peeling yellow paint above discolored, crumbling bricks. It had always reminded Mircea of a faded, but still fastidious, lady, holding her skirts up out of the wet.

  It was no better than the workmen’s homes that surrounded it, except that it was situated at the end of the little canal, where an old wooden bridge connected the island to another spar of land a few yards away. As such, it had a little more privacy than most, with the only neighbors on that side the seagulls who perched and cawed and shat on the pilings. The local urchins amused themselves by throwing the birds scraps, which was why the place typically smelled of fish guts—and rotting vegetables and raw sewage, since the canal served as the local trash heap until the tide came in and washed it all away.

  But the tide had been and gone, and the predominate smells even to a vampire’s nose were of a nicer variety: olive oil, spices, and roasting meat.

  He pushed open the warped wooden door and went inside.

  He felt a burden lift from his shoulders immediately, despite the fact that they’d just been saddled with a warm, talkative bundle. “Did you get it?” she demanded. And then, when he merely stood there, looking innocent, “Did you, did you, did you, did you?” while she crawled around him like a little monkey, riffling through his clothes with the same speed she used to pick other men’s purses in the marketplace.

  Not that he was supposed to know about that.

  Of course, he also wasn’t supposed to feed her insatiable sweet tooth, either, lest it and the rest of her teeth rot out of her head. But Mircea wasn’t very good at denying his daughter anything. Not after the life she’d led. And not that it would have mattered, since those nimble fingers found, identified, and liberated the small package of sweets inside his shirt before even vampire reflexes could react.

  And then she was gone, disappearing back into the heart of the house, the swinging curtain to the kitchen sending a blast of enticing smells blowing through the outer room. Mircea hung his cloak on a hook and left his muddy boots by the door. And then he followed.

  And promptly tripped over a cat.

  This was a bit of a surprise, since he did not own one.

  Yet, he thought, seeing Dorina’s face.

  “She’s pregnant,” Dorina told him quickly, around a mouthful of marzipan. And snatched the creature up only to look at him over its mangy head. The cat was white and tan, not brunette, and had big blue eyes, not black. But there was something very similar in the looks he was getting from the two of them, nonetheless. “She needs a
safe place to sleep.”

  “And to litter with fleas, no doubt,” the old man at the turn-spit said resentfully.

  Horatiu had reinvented himself as Mircea’s self-professed steward, if such an establishment as this could be said to need such a thing. And he did his best to keep the house tidy. But the usually derelict creatures his young charge often brought home made that even more of a challenge than the man’s fading eyesight.

  “She doesn’t have fleas! Well, not many, anyway,” Dorina protested, trying to pet the creature. But sugar-coated hands just came back matted with fluff. And, yes, there were fleas. Dorina saw Mircea notice the small, leaping creatures that her hands had disturbed and tried to cover them with her skirts. “And she’ll help with the rats—”

  “We don’t have rats!” Horatiu looked affronted at the very idea.

  Dorina rolled her eyes. “Everybody has rats. And she won’t need much else to eat, once she’s had the babies, and I’ll take care of her and you won’t even know she’s here!” Her eyes had returned to Mircea, to look up pleadingly. A thin little girl, because no amount of sweets ever seemed to put weight on those bones, dressed in the tattered rags she wore to play in, with dark eyes so much like her mother’s that they took his breath away.

  Mircea sighed. He knew when he was beaten. And, apparently, so did Horatiu.

  “Greedy bloodsuckers,” the man grumbled.

  “Then they should fit in well enough around here,” Mircea said. “But what about the kittens?”

  But Dorina’s mind, no less nimble than her fingers, had already scurried off on another subject. “You’re not greedy,” she said, her small dark head tilting. “But you are hungry. Why?”

  Due to a small detour on the way home, he thought, wondering how she knew. He wanted to ask, but he found it disconcerting, like so much about this strange existence. Did he look more human after he’d fed, or less? Was he better able to keep up the façade after stealing blood from some unsuspecting person, or did their energy only bring out more clearly what he was? He hesitated, but there was no fear in her dark eyes, no loathing. Just a child’s curiosity.

  “Dinner isn’t ready yet,” he said lightly, dancing around the issue.

  “But you don’t eat din—”

  “And don’t change the subject.”

  She gave a dramatic sigh. “Raniero said he’d take one for his boat, and Rigi’s dad could use one for the church, and Lucca’s grandma’s old girl just died and he wants to surprise her for her birthday, and, well, if there’s any more . . .” She broke off, obviously thinking hard.

  “We’ll come up with something,” Mircea said, ruffling his daughter’s hair.

  Dorina ran out, carrying the mushed bag of sweets and a smug-looking feline, and Horatiu shot him a glance. “We’re about to be overrun with cats,” the old man predicted darkly.

  “There are worse things,” Mircea said, getting down a bottle of wine and glasses for dinner.

  After the meal, when the rest of the house was in bed, he settled down with the letter that had come to his old residence. And had excited him enough that he’d forgotten to feed. It was written on fine paper, but in the rustic hand of a five-year-old, since Bezio had only taken up the art of penmanship recently. But the contents were clear enough.

  Thought you’d want to know: we finally caught up with her in Rome. She led us a merry chase, because apparently she’s good at that. And because we were looking for her in the vampire community, and she’d switched to living among humans. But you know how persistent Jerome can be.

  Mircea smiled. He still had trouble thinking of Jerome as a senior master, who had been in disguise like half the household. Only in his case, it had been with good intent—to investigate the woman he was convinced had killed his master and broken up his family.

  It seemed that what Jerome had told them had mostly been true—except that it had happened almost two centuries ago. When the then human Jerome had been working in his apothecary in Athens, only to have a dying master vampire come in desperately seeking help. He’d managed to clear the tainted blood from his system, as evidenced by the fact that he succeeded in Changing Jerome later that day. But the damage had already been done.

  But while his last child might not have been able to save him, he could avenge him. Because Jerome had grown up with a rare gift—the ability to hide his true age and power level. As such, he’d been the perfect candidate to infiltrate Martina’s establishment after the family finally traced her to Venice.

  And to find out if they were right, and the prey had somehow managed to kill the predator.

  He had spent weeks trying to figure out how to get a foot in the door without arousing suspicion, but hadn’t come up with anything. Until he was contacted by the condottiere he had bribed to get information on her. Martina had asked the man to keep a look out for likely slaves, and Jerome had quickly paid to make sure that he was among those shown to her. And then had spent every available moment, including the night of the fireworks when he’d stayed home, ransacking the place for evidence of how she’d done it.

  He hadn’t found it.

  But he had at last found her.

  Anyway, we’ll know more soon since it looks like we’re going to Paris in a few weeks, along with everybody else these days. It’s still a dog’s own mess, of course, and likely to remain so for a long while. But that’s where the patronage is, and Jerome’s got this crazy idea of becoming a senator one day!

  I don’t try to talk him out of it much; I figure court life ought to do that for me. I often wonder if our dear co-consuls would have wanted the job, if they’d known just how bad it was going to be. Cleaning up a court that’s been run on bribery, extortion, and corruption for hundreds of years, imposing a tough new law code, executing the worst of the worst offenders. . . . Sometimes, I think maybe they’d have had it easier if they’d lost!

  I keep telling Jerome we’d do better to join Auria in her new establishment. You should see it, Mircea. We passed through Paris a year or so ago, and damn. People fight over invitations to her dinner parties, her salon (as she’s calling it) has senators and dignitaries and the like reading poetry at each other and talking politics. They say the recent treaty with the African Senate was worked out in her drawing room! I’m telling you, it’s hard to tell that the damned thing’s a whore house.

  In fact, I’m not sure you can call it that anymore, since you need an invitation to get in the door. Apparently there’s a waiting list! I keep telling Jerome, we got out of the business too soon.

  Speaking of Auria, she asked about you, when we saw her. She always does. You know, I don’t think you’d need one of those invitations, if you happened to show up.

  Mircea remembered the last time he’d seen her, standing at the pier in the midst of bags and parcels of all types. Paulo had been buzzing around, prodding Cook to hurry, hurry, hurry. Their ship was about to depart and half the luggage wasn’t even on board.

  “And neither are half their passengers! They’ll wait,” Cook had said, and swatted his backside.

  “There’s room for one more,” Auria said, looking at Mircea. Although her expression said she already knew what his answer would be. And then she abruptly dropped decorum and grabbed him by the front of his doublet, burying her face in the fabric. “Oh, God, I’m an idiot!”

  “Why?”

  She looked up, laughing and tearful, all at once. “Because I’d stay if you asked me.”

  “Auria—”

  “But you’re not going to, are you?”

  Mircea looked down into some of the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. And said nothing. What was there to say?

  She shook her head. “She’s lucky, whoever she is. And there is someone, isn’t there?”

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  She suddenly hit him, in the chest, with both small hand
s. “What are you doing here, then? Go get her!”

  “I am. But with Constantinople now in Turkish hands, the Black Sea ports are closed to us. I plan to go overland, as soon as I’m allowed. The consul has promised safe passage, but only after the rebels are pacified. No one’s being permitted to travel through the disputed areas right now—”

  “Idiots! Do they really think they’re going to win?”

  “They haven’t done so badly so far,” he pointed out.

  “Because the consuls have had too much to deal with in more important areas. But they’ve crushed the rebellion in Russia, and Spain will follow within the year. Even Hassani has stopped helping the rebels for fear of causing open war. They should give up and beg for mercy while they still have the chance.”

  Mircea blinked in surprise. “You sound very current.”

  “I found I quite like politics. I think I’m going to enjoy Paris!”

  And it sounded as if she had.

  Mircea’s trip, on the other hand, had been somewhat different.

  I heard things didn’t go as you’d hoped back home, Bezio wrote. I know there’s nothing that can ease pain like that—there wasn’t for me when I heard that my Jacopa had passed. But I hope you know you always have a home with us. I also hope you find—how did you put it? Not just a reason not to die, but a reason to live.

  Or something like that. I don’t have your gift for words. But I’ve thought about what you said, and I think you were right. There is a diff—

  A cry broke through his thoughts before he could finish Bezio’s letter. Mircea got up, moving swiftly to his daughter’s small room. And found her on the floor, in front of the cat basket, looking with concern at three tiny, mewling pink things squirming around in front of their proud mother.

  Mircea thought it might be the blood worrying her, but apparently, it was something else.

  “Look!” Dorina said, turning to him fearfully. “There’s something wrong with them!”