Thankfully, none of them had been among the group with Martina last night.
Those women had been friends of hers, on their way back from a ball, whom she’d carried along on her shopping trip as if picking up a new trinket. But she’d come home with four filthy, beat up, naked vampires instead, who Mircea had fully expected to be further abused. Instead, they’d been hustled through a back entrance, marched to the kitchen and scrubbed within an inch of their undead lives by a small cook with a vendetta against lice.
“I don’t have lice!” Mircea had told her, indignantly.
“Not anymore,” she’d replied, and dunked him under the caustic water.
He wasn’t sure what she’d had in there, but if he’d still had human skin, it probably would have sloughed off. Instead, he’d been wrapped in a blanket and shoved into a small, windowless room just as daybreak was sapping the last of his strength. And now it was night again, and he was being outfitted, if not like a prince, then at least like a gentleman.
He didn’t know what to make of any of it. He just knew he had to get out. And quickly, before Martina used a blood bond to insure that he never would.
He had been surprised that she hadn’t done it last night, but perhaps he’d been too weak. The beating, the blood loss from healing, and the lack of anything like a meal in well over a day had left him in poor shape. And he’d heard rumors that binding an ill vampire often didn’t go well.
But he’d fed this morning, on one of the human servants Martina kept to guard the house during the day. It hadn’t replaced all that he’d lost, but he was far better off than he’d been. Which meant that he was running out of time.
He needed to get out of here.
He also really needed the damned tailor to stop sticking him with pins.
The man drew one back, frowned at the bent head, and placed it on a pile with several others.
“How many is it now?” Auria asked Paulo, who had finally joined them.
“Six, as of this evening. If you mean how many new faces. This lot, one more who I don’t think even make up is going to help, and two girls Martina picked up a week ago but who just arrived. Although where she thinks we’re going to put them all, I have no idea.”
“We’ll stack ’em like cordwood in the kitchen,” Auria said cheerfully, and poked the tailor with her fan. “Tighter!”
“You aren’t helping,” Paulo told her, tugging on an auburn curl that had escaped from the elaborate bun on top of her head.
“Well you don’t want it too loose, or he’ll end up looking like those old men in the marketplace,” she told him, smiling innocently. “Or you in that green outfit.”
“There is nothing wrong with my green outfit—”
“Except saggy butt.”
“My hosen fit perfectly,” he said with dignity. And then ruined the effect by swatting at her with the notebook he was holding.
It didn’t appear to have much effect. “Saggy butt, saggy butt!” Auria sang, her youthful laughter belying her age, which Mircea had been told was closing in on a century. But she’d been changed at sixteen, and still often acted like it, to the tailor’s consternation and Mircea’s amazement.
He didn’t know what to make of these vampires. He’d met others of his kind before, of course. But none of them had acted so . . . human.
Of course, they weren’t human. He knew that. They were monsters like him. They were just well-fed, well-dressed monsters, unlike the ones he usually met. But exactly like the kind he’d run afoul of once or twice—and barely survived the experience.
Others hadn’t been so lucky.
One of his first weeks in the city he’d ventured into a gaming den run by one of the local lords of the undead. Unlike the crude market stalls and tavern back rooms where humans played their games of chance, this one occupied a graceful palazzo with an elegant atrium. Mircea had been pleasantly surprised.
Until he’d noticed what was nailed to the wall.
He had stood in the door, transfixed, and stared at the creature. Raw, red muscles and pale tendons were working, lidless eyes were staring, and a lipless mouth was open in mewling, unearthly cries as it writhed in agony. Mircea had finally realized what he was seeing when he noticed the limp skin, still in the vague shape of a man, which someone had managed to remove almost in one piece. And which had been fixed to the wall alongside the sufferer, where he could see it.
Because a vampire couldn’t die even from that much trauma.
A placard over the man’s head had explained that those who cheated in order to fleece others would have the same thing done to them, or words to that effect. Mircea hadn’t taken the time to focus on them. He’d been too busy turning on his heel and going off to find a human game, where he had concentrated his efforts thereafter.
He’d learned that day: an open port did not mean a protected one. The Watch was here to keep order and to benefit those who could pay them. Everyone else was on their own.
He had to get away.
Fortunately, he had a small stash of money at his lodgings that the Watch hadn’t found. It should suffice to get Horatiu back to Wallachia, should he choose to go, or at least safely out of the city. And Mircea—
Would manage. He was, he had discovered to his surprise, rather good at that. After a lifetime of study designed to make him fit for a palace, he had taken to the gutter remarkably quickly. He would find somewhere to go, like he had almost found a way out of here shortly after getting up, before running into the damned tailor in the doorway. And then Auria had arrived and that had been that. But maybe—
Auria interrupted him again by bolting off the chaise with a laugh and a swirl of skirts, and attacking the startled tradesman’s assistant, who had just come in with another armful of silks. She grabbed a bolt of bright crimson off the top with a crow of triumph. “This one!”
To Mircea’s consternation, Paulo was nodding thoughtfully, sizing him up with a practiced eye. “It could work.”
“I like the black,” Mircea said swiftly, nodding at a plain piece of serviceable wool propped against the wall.
“The black, too,” Paulo said. “But in velvet.”
For the first time, the tailor started to look less exasperated. Unlike Auria, who pouted prettily. “What about the blue? He needs color.”
“Blue is for girls who want to look like the Virgin,” Paulo said repressively. “Neither of which is appropriate here.”
Auria snorted, obviously completely unrepressed, and tossed bolts here and there until—
Mircea stared in horror as the girl beamed at an eye-searing piece of shiny yellow brocade. “If you want appropriate, how about the yellow? I heard Florence even makes its whores wear—”
“Why do you need so many?” Mircea blurted, as the tailor’s scandalized glance went from him to Auria and back again.
Auria blinked at him. “Well, you can’t wear the same thing every day—”
“I meant us,” Mircea said, more roughly than he’d intended. It prompted startled looks from the duo on the table, neither of whom had so far uttered a peep. But he was damned if he was going to stand there like a statue without at least asking about their situation. “Why do you need us?”
But Auria didn’t look annoyed. If anything, she seemed almost giddy. “Convocation,” she said, rolling the word over her tongue as if relishing it.
“Oh, God,” Paulo said. “Don’t get her started.”
But Auria had started, on what was obviously a favorite topic. “It’s in Venice this year—finally! It’s in a different city every two years, but it’s never us! They’ve been to every pig wallow and mud pit this side of the Arno, and every time we thought, this time, it has to be our turn—it wasn’t. But, at last, it is! The senate announced it just last week—”