He wouldn’t have that advantage now. Horatiu had already done more for him than he’d had any right to expect. He couldn’t ask him to risk going to the other side of the world, and possibly get stranded there if Mircea’s reception was less than warm.
He couldn’t ask him to exile himself, on Mircea’s behalf.
“Then you were lucky,” Jerome told him. “Most of us travel overland for a reason.”
“Perhaps I could make it overland,” Mircea said, although with even less enthusiasm. Overland meant going through a succession of vampire territories, and experience had shown that they were never happy to see him. He was viewed as a pest at best and a rival at worst, and either way, the response was always the same.
It was why he and Horatiu had headed for the port city of Constanta, to catch a ship for Venice, after one of the vampires hunting him for sport had happened to mention it. It had been a gamble, yes. But the alternative had been unthinkable.
As it was now.
“If it makes you feel any better, it wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Bezio said, watching his face. “I don’t know about the court in Cathay, but it doesn’t matter because you’d never make it that far. But the ones in Cairo and Delhi are said to be worse than here.”
“Worse?” Mircea really didn’t see how that was possible.
“I hear they don’t even have a city like Venice.”
“Then what do they do with people like us?”
Bezio shrugged. “Don’t know. But if I was going to guess—” He sliced a finger over his throat.
Mircea stared up at the moon, rising over the buildings on the other side of the canal. “Then we really are stuck here.”
He wanted to go back, but he couldn’t go back. The world he had left didn’t exist anymore. Yet, it seemed, he couldn’t go forward, either.
So what else was there?
“Life?” Bezio said, when he asked. “Good wine, good friends, a reason to get up every day and not kill yourself?”
“A reason not to die.”
“Yes.”
“What about a reason to live?”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
Mircea stared up at the moon, pale and beautiful, reflecting silvery light into the grubby canal. And making even the old bridge and floating trash look beautiful. “No.”
“You want too much, that’s your problem,” Bezio told him, and drank wine.
“Well, I like to look at this as an opportunity,” Jerome said.
“Of course you do.”
“Why not? I’ve seen some pretty amazing things already. Like tonight.” He grinned. “You should have been there, Bezio.”
“I’m glad I wasn’t. It could have blown up in your face!”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Jerome said. “Some senators put a stop to it. Including a woman . . .”
“A woman senator,” Bezio shook his head. “What’s the world coming to?”
“She was beautiful,” Jerome said dreamily.
“They all are, son. It’s called glamourie.”
“And you’re an old cynic.”
“I didn’t say I blame them. If they have the power to spare—”
Jerome laughed. “Oh, she had it.” He caught Mircea’s eye. “Scary, huh?”
Mircea didn’t answer. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like, having power like that. He’d found it unsettling, just that brief exposure.
Not that he was ever likely to experience it again.
“Don’t worry,” Bezio said, echoing his thoughts. “That’s the closest to a senator any of us is ever going to get!”
Chapter Ten
One of these days, he was going to learn not to listen to Bezio, Mircea thought grimly, two days later. Of course, Jerome had been wrong, too. Because the woman on the chaise wasn’t strictly beautiful.
There were fine lines beside the otherwise lovely eyes, the beginnings of crow’s feet concealed beneath a line of kohl. The nose was also slightly overlarge, the forehead was too low for fashion, and the lips and chin were unremarkable. Likewise her hair, which was dark brown or black—hard to tell in the low light—and unbound, falling over the edge of the chaise almost to the floor.
It was the complete opposite of the elaborate hairstyles currently in fashion in Venice, where women often wore more jewels in their curled, teased, and dyed tresses than on their bodies. She didn’t wear jewels anywhere else, either. The smooth, olive skin was draped in some kind of shimmering silk, but it was so diaphanous it might have been merely a glittering cloud, caressing full breasts, dark nipples, a small waist, and long, shapely legs.
And a couple of glittering, jewel-like bands that slid over her body, under the robe, twining around a supple arm, or draping over a taut thigh.
In the low light of the ballroom, Mircea could almost convince himself they were merely oddly-made jewelry. Until bright eyes gleamed at him like dark diamonds, and a small ribbon of a tongue licked out, tasting the air. Scenting him.
His throat went strangely dry.
By Venetian standards, the woman seated on the daybed nearest to hers was far more attractive, with the high forehead, blond tresses, and milk white complexion so coveted by the local ladies. So, for that matter, were several of the other women—attendants, he assumed—who were scattered about the room on chairs and chaises, all of them lovely, all of them finely dressed. And none of them holding his attention for more than a few seconds.
It was impossible to look anywhere else when the senator was in the room.
Mircea didn’t know why, just as he didn’t know what he was doing here. This was an assignment for Paulo. Or for Danieli, Paulo’s swarthier counterpart. Someone else, in any case.
And yet he’d been sent instead.
It seemed like damned poor judgment on someone’s part.
And then her chin went up expectantly.
Mircea waited, but she didn’t get up. He assumed they would go somewhere, to the bedroom he’d yet to see or a private boudoir. Or at the very least that everyone else would be sent away.
But nobody moved.
The silence stretched for a long moment.
He glanced around. Servants came and went, refilling wineglasses, stoking up the fire in a huge marble fireplace, renewing the oil in lamps that swung here and there on thin golden chains, giving an exotic touch to the otherwise standard Venetian ballroom. Add in the cluster of female attendants or friends that were lounging on divans and nearby chaises and there had to be twenty people in here.
Some were ignoring him, talking among themselves or sewing or reading, but a number were not. In fact, a few of the women were openly staring. She couldn’t expect . . .
But clearly, she did.
His jaw tightened.
And then his hand went to the lacings on his doublet.
Coming from a culture in which even the men were expected to stay decently covered up, Mircea had never acclimatized to the casual Venetian attitude toward nudity. He reminded himself that the workmen here often stripped down in summer, completely if they could get away with it, in order to save their few clothes from wear. He’d seen some shortly after he arrived repairing the façade of a church, yet wearing so little he’d been surprised that the carved stone effigies beneath them hadn’t been gaping in shock.
But Mircea had.
And while he had somewhat accustomed himself to seeing workmen in such ways, even while women walked about underneath the scaffolding, or sold bread or baked apples to those same men on their breaks, he had never gotten used to it.
It was even worse now that it was him on display.
By the time he was down to those infernal hosen, he was sweating, his body reacting to stress the way Jerome’s had to the idea of no air. It was reacting in other ways, too. One of which sprang loose from the damned hosen already half hard, even before he finished stripping them down his legs.