I shivered and moved closer to Samuel’s warmth. He gave me an odd look, doubtless scenting my unease, but set his hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer.
We followed a cobbled path past a swimming pool, covered for the winter, around the corner of the house to a broad swath of lawn. Across the lawn there was a two-story guesthouse almost a third the size of the main house. It was to this smaller building that Stefan led us.
He knocked twice at the door, then opened and waved us into an entry hall decorated aggressively in the colors and textures of the American Southwest, complete with clay pots and kachina dolls. But even the decor was overwhelmed by the smell of mostly unfamiliar flowers and herbs rather than the scents of the desert.
I sneezed, and Samuel wrinkled his nose. Perhaps all the potpourri was designed to confuse our noses—but it was only strong, not caustic. I didn’t enjoy it, but it didn’t stop me from smelling old leather and rotting fabrics. I took a quick, unobtrusive look around, but I couldn’t see anything to account for the smell of rot; everything looked new.
“We’ll wait for her in the sitting room,” Stefan said, leading the way through the soaring ceilings of a living room and into a hall.
The room he took us to was half again the size of the biggest room in my trailer. From what I’d seen of the house, though, it was cozy. We’d left behind the Southwest theme for the most part, though the colors were still warm earth tones.
The seats were comfortable, if you like soft fluffy furniture. Stefan settled into a chair with every sign of relaxation as the furniture swallowed him. I scooted toward the front edge of the love seat, which was marginally firmer, but the cushions would still slow me down a little if I had to move quickly.
Samuel sat in a chair that matched Stefan’s, but rose to his feet as soon as he started to sink. He stalked behind my love seat and looked out of the large window that dominated the room. It was the first window I’d seen in the house.
Moonlight streamed in, sending loving beams over his face. He closed his eyes and basked in it, and I could tell it was calling to him, even though the moon was not full. She didn’t speak to me, but Samuel had once described her song to me in the words of a poet. The expression of bliss on his face while he listened to her music made him beautiful.
I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“Oh, aren’t you lovely?” said a voice; a throaty, lightly European voice that preceded a woman dressed in a high-cut, semiformal dress of gold silk that looked rather odd combined with jogging shoes and calf-high athletic socks.
Her reddish blond curls were pulled up with elegant whimsy and lots of bobby pins, revealing dangling diamond earrings that matched the elaborate necklace at her throat. There were faint lines around her eyes and mouth.
She smelled a little like Stefan, so I had to assume she was a vampire, but the lines on her face surprised me. Stefan looked scarcely twenty, and I’d somehow assumed that the undead were like the werewolves, whose cells repaired themselves and removed damage of age, disease, and experience.
The woman padded into the room and made a beeline for Samuel, who turned to regard her gravely. When she leaned against him and stood on tiptoe to lightly lick his neck, he slid a hand up around to the base of her skull and looked at Stefan.
I shifted a little farther toward the edge of my seat and twisted so I could watch them over the back of the love seat. I wasn’t too worried about Samuel—he was poised to break her neck. Maybe a human couldn’t have managed it, but he wasn’t human.
“Lilly, my Lilly fair.” Stefan sighed, his voice puncturing the tension in the room. “Don’t lick the guests, darling. Bad manners.”
She paused, her nose resting against Samuel. I gripped the hilt of Zee’s dagger and hoped I didn’t have to use it. Samuel could protect himself, I hoped, but he didn’t like hurting women—and Stefan’s Lilly looked very feminine.
“She said we had guests for entertainment.” Lilly sounded like a petulant child who knows the promised trip to the toy store is about to be delayed.
“I’m sure she meant we had guests for you to entertain, my sweet.” Stefan hadn’t moved from his chair, but his shoulders were tight, and his weight was forward.
“But he smells so good,” she murmured. I thought she darted her head forward, but I must have been mistaken because Samuel didn’t move. “He’s so warm.”
“He’s a werewolf, darling Lilly. You’d find him a difficult meal.” Stefan got up and walked slowly around my couch. Taking one of Lilly’s hands in his, he kissed it. “Come entertain us, my lady.”
He pulled her gently off Samuel and escorted her formally to an upright piano tucked into one corner of the room. He pulled out the bench and helped her settle.
“What should I play?” she asked. “I don’t want to play Mozart. He was so rude.”
Stefan touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “By all means, play whatever you wish, and we will listen.”
She sighed, an exaggerated sound with an accompanying shoulder droop, then, like a marionette she straightened from head to toe and placed her hands just so on the keys.
I don’t like piano music. There was only one music teacher in Aspen Creek when I grew up, and she played piano. For four years I banged out tunes for a half hour a day and hated the piano more each year. It hated me back.
It took only a few measures for me to realize I’d been wrong about the piano—at least when Lilly played it. It didn’t seem possible that all that sound came from the little upright piano and the fragile woman sitting before us.
“Liszt,” whispered Samuel, stepping away from the window and sitting on the back of my seat. Then he closed his eyes and listened, just as he’d listened to the moon.
Stefan stepped away from the piano once Lilly was focused on her music. He drifted back to stand beside me, then he held out a hand.
I glanced at Samuel, but he was still lost in the music. I took Stefan’s hand and let him pull me to my feet. He took me to the far side of the room before releasing me.
“It isn’t being a vampire that made her this way,” he said, not whispering, exactly, but in low tones that didn’t carry over the music. “Her maker found her playing piano at an expensive brothel. He decided he wanted her in his seethe, so he took her before he understood that she was touched. In the normal course she would have been mercifully killed: it is dangerous to have a vampire who cannot control herself. I know the werewolves do the same. But no one could bear to lose her music. So she is kept in the seethe and guarded like the treasure she is.”
He paused. “But usually she is not allowed to wander about at will. There are always attendants who are assigned to keep her—and our guests—safe. Perhaps our Mistress amuses herself.”
I watched Lilly’s delicate hands flash across the keys and produce music of power and intellect that she didn’t possess herself. I thought about what had happened when Lilly had come into the room.
“If Samuel had reacted badly?” I asked.
“She’d have no chance against him.” Stefan rocked back on his heels unhappily. “She has no experience at taking unwilling prey, and Samuel is old. Lilly is precious to us. If he had hurt her, the whole seethe would have demanded retribution.”
“Shh,” said Samuel.
She played Liszt for a long time. Not the early lyrical pieces, but the ones he composed after hearing the radical violinist Paganini. But, right in the middle of one of his distinctively mad runs of notes, she switched into a blues piece I didn’t recognize, something soft and relaxed that lazed in the room like a big cat. She played a little Beatles, some Chopin, and something vaguely oriental in style before falling into the familiar strains of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.