“I thought you weren’t going to play Mozart,” said Stefan when she’d finished the song and begun picking out a melody with her right hand.
“I like his music,” she explained to the keyboard. “But he was a pig.” She crashed her hands on the keys twice. “But he is dead, and I am not. Not dead.”
I wasn’t going to argue with her. Not when one of those delicate fingers broke the key beneath it. No one else said anything either.
She got up from the piano abruptly and strode through the room. She hesitated in front of Samuel, but when Stefan cleared his throat, she trotted up to him and kissed him on the chin. “I’m going to eat now,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
“Fine.” Stefan hugged her, then directed her out of the room with a gentle push.
She hadn’t once so much as looked at me.
“So you think we’re being set up?” asked Samuel, with lazy geniality that seemed somehow out of place.
Stefan shrugged. “You, I, or Lilly. Take your pick.”
“It seems like a lot of trouble to go to,” I ventured. “If Samuel died, Bran would tear this place apart. There wouldn’t be a vampire left in the state.” I looked at Stefan. “Your lady may be powerful, but numbers matter. The Tri-Cities isn’t that big. If there were hundreds of you here, I’d have noticed it. Bran can call upon every Alpha in North America.”
“It is nice to know how we are esteemed by the wolves. I’ll make certain our Mistress knows to leave the wolf alone because she should fear them,” said a woman from just behind me.
I jumped forward and turned, and Stefan was suddenly between me and the new vampire. This one was neither ethereal nor seductive. If she hadn’t been a vampire, I’d have put her age somewhere around sixty, every year etched in the lines of grim disapproval that traversed her face.
“Estelle,” said Stefan. I couldn’t tell if it was a greeting, introduction, or admonition.
“She has changed her mind. She doesn’t want to come up to visit with the wolf. They can come to her instead.” Estelle didn’t seem to react to Stefan at all.
“They are under my protection.” Stefan’s voice darkened in a way I’d never heard it before.
“She said you may come, too, if you wish.” She looked at Samuel. “I’ll need to take any crosses or holy objects you are wearing, please. We do not allow people to go armed in the presence of our Mistress.”
She held out a gold-embossed leather bag, and Samuel unhooked his necklace. When he pulled it out of his shirt, the necklace didn’t blaze or glow. It was just a bit of ordinary metal, but I saw her involuntary shudder when it brushed close to her skin.
She looked at me and I pulled out my necklace and showed her my sheep. “No crosses,” I said in a bland voice. “I didn’t expect to be out speaking to your Mistress tonight.”
She didn’t even glance at Zee’s dagger, dismissing it as a weapon. After pulling the drawstring tight, she let the bag dangle from it. “Come with me.”
“I’ll bring them down in a minute,” Stefan said. “Go tell her we are coming.”
The other vampire raised her eyebrows but left without a word, carrying the bag with Samuel’s cross in it.
“There’s something more happening than I thought,” Stefan said rapidly. “Against most of those here, I can protect you, but not the Mistress herself. If you’d like, I’ll get you out of here and see if I can find the information without you.”
“No,” said Samuel. “We’re here now. Let us finish this.”
Samuel’s words slurred a little, and I saw Stefan give him a sharp glance.
“Once more I offer you escort away from here.” This time Stefan looked at me. “I would have no harm come to you and yours here.”
“Can you find out where the other wolves are, if she doesn’t want you to?” I asked him.
He hesitated, which was answer enough.
“We’ll go talk to her, then,” I said.
Stefan nodded, but not like he was happy about it. “Then I find myself echoing your gremlin. Keep your eyes away from hers. She’ll probably have others with her, whether she allows you to see them or not. Don’t look at anyone’s eyes. There are four or five here who could entangle even your wolf.”
He turned and led the way through the house to an alcove sheltering a wrought-iron spiral staircase. As we started down, I thought we were going to the basement, but the stairway went deeper. Small lights on the cement wall surrounding the stairs turned on as Stefan passed them. They allowed us to see the stairs—and that we were traveling down a cement tube, but they weren’t bright enough to do much more. Fresh air wafted out of small vents that kept the air moving, but it also kept me from smelling anything from deeper down.
“How far down are we going?” I asked, trying to fight off the claustrophobic desire to run back the way we’d come.
“About twenty feet from the surface.” Stefan’s voice echoed a little—or else something below us made a noise.
Maybe I was just jumpy.
Eventually the stairway ended in a pad of cement. But even with my night vision, the darkness was so absolute I could see only a few yards in any direction. The smell of bleach danced around several scents I’d never encountered before.
Stefan moved and a series of fluorescent lights flickered to life. We stood in an empty room with cement floors, walls, and ceilings. The overall effect was sterile and empty.
Stefan didn’t pause, just continued through the room and into a narrow tunnel that sloped gently upward as we walked. Steel doors without knobs or handles lined the tunnel at even intervals. I could hear things moving behind the doors and scooted up until I could touch Samuel’s shoulder for reassurance. As I passed the last door, something slammed against it, ringing with a hollow boom that echoed away from us. Behind another door someone—or something—began a high-pitched hopeless cascade of laughter that ended in a series of screams.
By the end of it, I was all but crawling up on top of Samuel, but he was still relaxed, and his breathing and pulse hadn’t even begun to speed up. Damn him. I didn’t take a deep breath until we’d left the doors behind.
The tunnel took a narrow turn, and the floor became a steep upward set of twelve stairs that ended in a room with curved plastered walls, wooden floors, and soft lighting. Directly opposite the stairway was a sumptuous mocha leather couch whose curves echoed the walls.
A woman reclined on two overstuffed tapestry-covered pillows braced against one of the couch’s arms. She wore silk. I could smell the residue of the silkworms, just as I could smell the faint scent I was learning to identify with vampire.
The dress itself was simple and expensive, revealing her figure in swirling colors ranging from purple to red. Her narrow feet were bare except for red and purple toenail polish. She had them braced so her knees came up and provided backing to support the paperback she was reading.
She finished the page, dog-eared one corner, and set it carelessly on the floor. She swung her legs off the couch and shifted so that her face was toward us before she raised her gaze to look at us. It was so gracefully done that I barely had time to drop my own eyes.
“Introduce us, Stefano,” she said, her voice a deep contralto made the richer by a touch of an Italian accent.
Stefan bowed, a formal gesture that should have looked odd with his torn jeans, but somehow came out gracefully old-fashioned instead.
“Signora Marsilia,” he said, “May I introduce you to Mercedes Thompson, auto mechanic extraordinaire and her friend Dr. Samuel Cornick, who is the Marrok’s son. Mercy, Dr. Cornick, this is Signora Marsilia, Mistress of the Mid-Columbia Seethe.”
“Welcome,” she said.