“Oh, thank God!” Paulo said, and then shut up abruptly, looking behind him. But the hall had branched in two ways, and it looked like most of the people had gone the other, because nobody was following them this time.
“What are we doing?” Mircea asked.
“Trying to find a way out, what does it look like?” Paulo demanded, striding across the room.
“Then why were we upstairs?”
Paulo said a very bad word, but Mircea didn’t think it was directed at him. He was staring at something outside, and in a moment, the rest of them were, too.
“Because of them,” Jerome said, looking at the ring of red caped guards that had now surrounded the huge palazzo, as far as they could see in both directions.
A group of partygoers, who had managed to make it as far as the street, were being corralled like cattle. And forced back against the house, despite the fact that part of it was still on fire. More red capes lined the canal, including the area in front of the small flight of stairs that was their only exit.
Paulo said that word again.
“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” the pink lady asked, quivering.
“Nothing,” Jerome breathed. “They’re senatorial guards. Crossing a line they’ve formed is a death sentence.”
“But . . . but we didn’t do anything wrong,” she cried. “Why are they doing this?”
“This isn’t about us,” Mircea said, and Jerome nodded.
“It was a setup. They were here too fast.”
“A setup for what?” Paulo demanded, looking back and forth between the two of them.
“Not what,” Mircea said, as his world started to gray out again. “Who.”
There were bodies everywhere, some motionless, others writhing in agony. Mircea’s vampire landed hard on the graveled path right in front of one, and saw death, limned by fire, reflected in the corpse’s open eyes. Not yet, he thought savagely, and rolled, just as the great head struck down, the huge fangs piercing dirt, gravel, and the body of his fallen comrade, all at once.
The monster reared back, whipping its head around, trying to dislodge the body, and Mircea’s vampire saw his chance. He jumped, not away, for there was nowhere to go, but straight at the muscled coil, landing and sinking his sword deep. Several of his men joined him, and for a moment, he thought perhaps they had a chance.
Until his hand started burning, flesh and then bone dissolving away as bloodlike acid ate through sword, glove, and body with equal ease.
He jerked back, stifling a scream, and pulled a crossbow with his good arm. But he didn’t fire. Because the great wound he’d just made, which had sunk half his arm in the thing’s red guts, closed as he watched, the skin rippling and churning as it had when the body was formed.
And then stilling again, without even a scar.
He looked up to see his men staring at him, both close and far, waiting for orders. For answers. For the way out he’d always found in the most impossible situations.
But he didn’t have them; he didn’t have them.
He saw when it registered, when they gripped their weapons tighter, because there was only one thing left to do, and it wasn’t to die like puling cowards, running away.
“For the Lady,” he said silently, and heard it echoed around the garden.
And then shouted when they charged as one man, almost drowning out the slithering, scraping hiss of the great body, turning lightning fast to meet them, still hampered by its gory prize.
But the great tail wasn’t.
Mircea’s vampire managed to loose his arrow into one of the thing’s eyes, just before what felt like a giant’s fist threw him back against the side of the house, along with the half dozen men who had been in its path. He tried to get up, but nothing worked; even armor couldn’t absorb that much force. And the blow had torn his last weapon away, sending it hurtling into the darkness, where he didn’t know.
Not that it mattered now.
He lay against the house like a broken doll, feeling his system trying to repair the damage, even as the cause loomed up over him. It had identified him as the leader, and so he would die first. He was vaguely grateful for that, for not having to see the rest of his men . . .
The man’s thoughts trailed off as that dark hood swallowed the sky. Swallowed speech. Swallowed everything.
Except the slight, spectral figure that stepped in between them, shedding a puddle of light over the ruined ground, and raising a hand.
“No.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Bezio said, the next night. “The senator’s challenged the consul, the city is in an uproar, the fate of vampire kind lies in the balance, and what are we doing?”
“Going to visit the mages,” Mircea said.
Hopefully, he didn’t add.
Luckily, he’d committed the directions the cook had given him to memory, because there was insufficient light to read by, even for a vampire’s eyes. There was insufficient everything else, too: air, garbage disposal, and a pen for the pigs that were running around freely in the crowded neighborhood, rooting in the residents’ leftovers. But the main thing they were short of was room.
Since coming to Venice, Mircea had become used to narrow lanes, multistoried buildings, and streets that dead ended in odd places, requiring him to backtrack. Unable to expand unless they went through a lengthy and expensive process of reclaiming land from the sea, the Venetians had learned to use what they had to full advantage. Pedestrians were just expected to make do.
But even by Venetian standards, this was ridiculous.
The current lane was so narrow that he scraped his elbows against the walls unless he kept them tucked against his body. To make matters worse, local homeowners in search of more room had built their second and third floors out over the street, to the point that the roofline of the surrounding buildings almost met overhead. The result was something akin to a tiny, dark, enclosed tunnel.
So much for a quick exit, if anything went wrong.
“I don’t like this,” Jerome said, echoing Mircea’s thoughts. “I thought I was doomed last night, until those guards just up and left. I don’t want to push my luck.”
“They didn’t just ‘up and leave’,” Mircea said, scowling in memory. “They were there to force the senator’s hand. With both her men and her guests in danger, she almost had to challenge.”
“No, she didn’t,” Jerome argued. “And they weren’t her men. They belonged to one of her servants. She could have blamed everything on him and cut her losses—”
“That’s cold,” Bezio said.
“It’s practical. So, hurray, she saved some lives last night. But without her to curb the consul’s insanity, how many more are going to die?”
“How do you know she can’t defeat him?” Bezio asked.
Jerome made a disgusted sound. “If she could do that, why not challenge before this?”
“Perhaps she didn’t want to risk it.”
“And perhaps she knows it won’t work!”
“Then why challenge at all? As you pointed out, she could have just walked away. It doesn’t make sense—”
“It does when you recall that this is the second time they’ve come after her in two weeks,” Mircea said, as they paused to scramble over a pig. “Why wouldn’t they keep coming? Clearly, the consul views her as a threat—”