“No, no, run!” one of the girls by Marte yelled. And then looked around, embarrassed, because of course they couldn’t hear.
“What the hell were they doing?” Bezio exploded. “Did they want to die?”
“They must have been the ones knocked clear before the catastrophe,” Paulo said, from near the headboard, his usually pink complexion pale.
“That doesn’t explain what the damned fools are doing there now!” Bezio said, as vampires waded or crawled out of the sea, onto wet sand. “They could stay under the waves, try to hide, at least!”
But they weren’t hiding. They were standing. Or kneeling in a few cases, looking about in confusion. As if wondering where their reception was. They’d just won, hadn’t they? They’d just defeated their rivals and won the acclaim of their peers, along with bragging rights for the next two years. Plus whatever gifts the consul had in store. Yet all they saw were fleeing people, expensive banners trodden in the grass, and an almost deserted pier.
Almost, but not quite.
“They couldn’t swim,” Mircea said, his lips numb, because he knew what was coming. “And with no air in their lungs, they wouldn’t float as easily as humans. They probably walked along the bottom.”
“They don’t know,” Zaneta said shrilly. “My God, they don’t know! Why doesn’t somebody get them out of there?”
That’s why, Mircea thought, as what looked like the breath of a dragon rippled through the air, from right above where the watcher was hidden. It flooded his view, giving the whole scene an ironic underwater quality for a moment. Ironic, because through the distortion, they saw the first survivor flare up like a Roman candle.
He burned with a brilliant fire, in a strangely beautiful column of incandescent light. But he didn’t burn for long. A moment later, what had been a living being guttered out in a flutter of ash, leaving nothing but an ugly mark on the sand.
Zaneta screamed, others gasped, a few cursed. But Mircea sat transfixed—horrified, but unable to look away. Even as columns of fire bloomed everywhere, catching the suddenly running vampires as they scattered across the sand. Like ants under a shard of glass, Mircea heard again, as one by one, they were picked off.
And so were the stragglers in the water. For a moment, the sky was filled with twinkling stars, and the air was filled with crisscrossing bands of deadly heat. And they didn’t seem to care what they caught in the search for their elusive goals.
Water boiled in spots, sending up vast geysers of steam into the sky. An olive tree, in between the consul and one of his victims, was bisected, the incinerated leaves falling around the burning trunk. The mast of one of the ships was likewise sliced clean in two, before falling over onto another ship, setting several of the passengers aflame in the process.
And then there was the palazzo.
Marte’s hand tightened on his shoulder, hard enough to hurt, as one of the enhanced sunrays suddenly sheared off from the rest and struck the building. Or no, Mircea realized a moment later, it struck something on the building. Specifically, on the terrace, where a dome of energy crackled and spit under the sudden attack.
Crackled and spit . . . but held.
And then the watcher, whoever he was, decided that dedication was one thing, but this was starting to look more like suicide. He looked around frantically, left and right, making his audience dizzy. And then he took off, scrambling like a crab underneath the dock as far as he could fit, and then crawling out the opposite side and sprinting for who knew where. Because the images blanked out briefly, before shifting back to the bird’s-eye view, likely the only one left.
But even the bird wasn’t sticking around. The group on the bed received one last skewed view of smoking ships, fleeing people, and crackling bursts of power. . . . And a lone senator standing at the terrace railing, dark hair flowing in the wind, staring expressionlessly down at her master.
And then the spell abruptly winked out.
Chapter Eighteen
A few minutes later, Mircea was lying on the slope of the roof, staring up at the vast array of stars overhead. Marte had broken out the wine as soon as the broadcast ended, and everyone else had seemed ready to hunker down for a good gossip. Or a good sketch in the case of some of the girls, who had wanted to get the dresses down while they were fresh in their minds.
“Life goes on,” Paulo had said cynically, watching them. Before he left with the cook, to inform the servants that they’d be dining alone tonight. It appeared that everyone else had lost their appetites.
And so had their clients, apparently. A few long-term patrons would be seen individually later on, but the majority of the clientele had found other things to do tonight. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day, business would resume as usual. In fact, Marte had said that she expected a rush of people eager to reaffirm their status among the living in the most primal way possible. But for tonight, the house was as quiet as it ever became.
Although not nearly enough for Mircea.
He had declined the wine party, to cries of disappointment from people eager to pick his brain for juicy details. He didn’t have any details—they’d just seen more than he had—and he’d needed to get away. From the stuffy, too full room, from the babble of conversation that had immediately broken out, and from the questions that swirled in his mind.
Although the latter hadn’t proven possible.
He had a thousand questions, but not about the orange team’s blunder, which seemed to be what everyone else wanted to discuss. Despotism was apparently one of those things that outlived the grave, and while the attack had been shocking, it had not been all that surprising. At least, not to him.
Perhaps the victors had been caught up in the moment. Perhaps they hadn’t thought about how it would look. But ripping down the banner of a five-thousand-year-old madman with delusions of godhood in favor of your own was not a healthy choice, any way you looked at it.
No, it was other questions that were bothering Mircea. One in particular that wouldn’t leave him alone, even though there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. But his brain didn’t seem to know that.
And his brain wanted to know: Why had the consul gone after his own child?
And he had gone after her—there was no doubt of that. Perhaps he had intended to pass it off afterwards as a mistake, something done in the heat of the moment, a single bolt gone wild. But it hadn’t been a mistake. Not unless Mircea was supposed to believe that it just happened to take place in the instant when she was most distracted, in the one moment when anyone would be least likely to be on guard?
Not to mention that he’d seen the accuracy of the creature’s other blows. He’d picked off single vampires under the water a third of a mile away. He could control his gift with frightening precision.
And he had deliberately sent it against her.
But why? There had been no provocation on her part that Mircea had noticed. Even if her master’s overweening pride demanded that she be on hand to witness the ceremony, it hadn’t begun yet. And in the end, there had been no ceremony, had there?
By the time he was finished, there had been no victors left to crown.
In any case, if her presence was expected, Mircea doubted she would have been lingering on the terrace with him. They’d had all day for a dalliance. There had been no reason for it to take place then unless she assumed she was free to do as she liked.