I found myself out in the hall, after getting elbowed out of the room by hungry journalists. It looked like the Circle had brought some of their own, along with medics—too late—and a couple old guys in suits.
I looked down at the small book Mircea had pressed into my palm. It had a leather cover that looked new, but what it was protecting wasn’t. There were a few dozen pages inside of good, thick paper that had aged to a deep gold color. I stared at them, uncomprehending, for a long moment.
Images covered the pages on both sides. Some were hasty sketches, done with a firm hand in dark ink, a few quick strokes picking out delicate features. Others were fully realized miniature paintings, the paper beneath them mottled with age, but the colors still as vibrant as the jewels that had once been crushed into their pigments. The subject of each was the same: a young dark-haired woman.
At first, I thought the images were of me, but I’d never worn those clothes, never posed for those sketches. And then I found one of her in front of a window, with her sleeves rolled up and her arms coated in flour, and my mind reeled. My fingers brushed the surface of the soapy old paper, tracing the raised edges of the ink in disbelief. These hadn’t been hastily thrown together in a few hours, as a prop to some devious scheme. It must have taken months, years, to do them all….
Suddenly, I couldn’t make anything else out. Everything was a bright, smeared blur, like trying to see something when it was held right up against my face. Then I looked back at Mircea and everything came into focus again.
He was staring at me over the heads of the milling mages, silently. He should have been rearranging those handsome features into a concerned mask to placate the Circle. But there was still no expression on his face, no emotion in those dark eyes.
Maybe he didn’t know how to do this, either, I thought blankly.
And then a phalanx of scowling war mages arrived, jostling me farther down the hall.
The leather coat-clad crew got one look at Lutkin and started fingering their weapons. Eyes darted around suspiciously, as if they expected something to jump out at them from the wall. Mircea was going to have fun trying to keep the peace, and that was on top of having to come up with some kind of defense for Louis-Cesare.
The rules of the vamp world weren’t as arbitrary as some people thought. Masters had life-or-death power over their own families, but screw with somebody else’s and there was hell to pay. And for better or worse, Louis-Cesare was attached to the powerful, dysfunctional, vindictive-as-hell Basarab line.
Even Anthony couldn’t order him to be enslaved or killed if there was reasonable doubt of his guilt; Mircea would see to that. But eloquence would get him only so far. He needed something to work with, and it was my job to get him that something whether he wanted me to or not. I just wasn’t sure how.
I carefully tucked the small book away, dodging more new arrivals. Nobody was smiling, and everyone seemed to feel that I was in the way. I was trying to figure out the shortest route to the front entrance when Marlowe sidled up and shoved a slip of paper into my hand.
“Don’t make me regret this,” he hissed.
I glanced down. Two addresses were scribbled over it in a bold hand. One was nearby, and looked like a house number, and one was an address in Manhattan. There were no names, but I didn’t really need any.
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“Mircea’s Achilles’ heel is his family,” Marlowe told me quietly. “Louis-Cesare must be found by tonight, with or without proof of his innocence, or I fear your father may put his own position in jeopardy attempting to save him. And the consul will not back him. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you want me to drag Louis-Cesare back here to be butchered. He’s not going to take Anthony’s deal, Marlowe.”
“I know that! But if he is here we can stall while we work to find evidence to clear him. The trial could drag on for days. But if he is absent again, they’ll declare him an outlaw and issue a death warrant. Tonight.”
“Why trust me with this?”
“I have to operate within certain guidelines, at least where people at this level are concerned. You do not. And there is no time to finesse anything. We must shake something loose. Now.”
There was nothing I could safely say in the consul’s territory, so I didn’t say anything. I hit the door and got to shaking.
CHAPTER 32
Outside, heat shimmered off the drive and the sea of white plastic tents. I wished I’d brought a pair of sunglasses, but no such luck. So I bought one from a vendor who was happy to get the business now that half his customers had run off.
Or, at least, they were trying to. There was a backlog of cars still attempting to exit the grounds, clogging air and roadside alike. I decided to leave the Camaro where it was and head off to my first appointment on foot.
Slinking along behind me, carefully muffled up against the glaring sun, were two very unhappy vampires. I assumed they were Marlowe’s, since they made no attempt to attack me, but I didn’t know for sure. They wouldn’t introduce themselves or so much as deign to notice my existence. But when I moved, so did they.
Two miles and about a ton of sweat later, I found myself staring up at a rambling mansion that rivaled the consul’s in size, although not in elegance. But then, it was just a rental. I showed Claire’s note at the door, and was left to cool my heels for half an hour in the vast wood-paneled foyer.
Of course, there was no air-conditioning. I was certain the home came equipped, but vamps don’t need it. They usually only turn it on when they have humans around they want to impress, and apparently, I didn’t qualify.
Finally, I was shown into a sitting room. Or, at least, that was what I assume it had been before it had been draped with red silk and lined with braziers. The braziers were lit and it was hot as hell, but that wasn’t why I staggered and almost fell. The power in the room was like a punch to the gut. It felt something like walking through the consul’s front door, only most of it was radiating off the tiny, little woman on the big, ugly throne.
When I was born, the average height for a guy had been five foot four, so I’d been considered pretty tall for a woman. Then times had changed, diets had improved and I’d ended up shopping in the petite section. But one look at Ming-de, and I decided maybe to hold off on the complaints for a while. If she’d been shopping at the local mall, she’d have had to go to the kiddie store.
Not that she appeared to have that problem. Her bright yellow silk robes were embroidered within an inch of their lives with a glittering menagerie of fantastic beasts. She wore a headdress with pearls as big as cherries and a lot of gold tassels that shimmered whenever she moved. And her little feet, maybe all of three inches long, were encased in lotus shoes so crusted with embroidery that the fabric couldn’t even be seen.
The tiny useless feet were tenderly propped on a tufted stool, with a large guard kneeling on either side. Why, I don’t know. It wasn’t like she needed the help.
I finally scraped myself off the floor and staggered to the bottom of the set of stairs leading up to the dais on which the monster throne squatted. It had gilt mythical beasts writhing all over it or, hell, I don’t know. They might have been solid gold. It didn’t look like Ming-de was hard up. It was backed by a couple of tall, similarly decorated screens so that the whole end of the room was an explosion of gold.
I stood there in my sweaty T-shirt, feeling a little inadequate.
And then she poked a head on a stick out at me, and I cheered up. Mine was bigger.
The tiny shrunken head had been Ming-de’s English translator for a few hundred years, since she would be damned if she was going to learn the barbarian tongue herself. Rumor was that she’d cut it off some English sea captain back in the day, although after the shrinkage and subsequent wear, it was a little hard to tell. It looked dusty.