The boy’s feet, one braced against the trunk half he was not leaning against and the other dangling carelessly, were bare but clean—as if the mud of the fields did not dare cling to his skin.
A glowing waterfall of pale gold hair, backlit by the moon, spilled over his shoulders. It was caught back from his face in dozens of thin braids laced together. His skin was a shade lighter, even, than his hair, unblemished as if he’d never seen the sun nor aged a day past childhood.
Before I could speak and without opening his eyes, he pulled the vielle into position and drew the bow across a pair of strings, producing a strong, dual note. It was a harsh thing, that first note, breaking into the muted sounds of the night. But as he played, the music softened.
I closed my mouth, unwilling to interfere.
Though his face was still, his body rocked with the movement of the bow. The fingers of his left hand danced over the fingerboard of the boxy, ornate instrument, drawing out of it such music as I had never heard, not even in the courts of the princes.
I had come here to thank the healer who had saved me after I put my body between a knife and she whom I served. I had no memory of it, but my friend Andre had described my festering wounds with more detail than I needed. They believed I was dying.
Then my lady brought a healer who had stayed alone with me in my room for two days and nights. When he left, my friends had discovered me sleeping and my wounds clean of infection.
My lady had laughed when I told her I needed to thank my benefactor. But she’d told me where to find him anyway—a strange place to find a strange man, she’d said. She seldom used his name, calling him “my traveling scholar” or “my poetic friend.” He was a mysterious man who brought her books, told her stories, and taught her mathematics and geography and foreign languages—a man who appeared to no one but her. I had had no idea he was a healer as well.
My friends had seen nothing but a heavily cloaked figure when he’d come. But learned men, in my experience, were old and hoary, possessed of beards and creaky bodies. They were not youthful beauties who played music to the stars with eyes closed and the expression of a man who beheld, behind his closed eyes, the face of God.
“Are you an angel?” I whispered.
A wicked, carnal smile lit his face. He opened his eyes, which were as blue and dark as the ocean deep, and beheld me. His music did not falter as he sat up. Only then did I recognize the belt as a girdle my lady had favored, a gift from one of her wealthy lovers, now wrapped three times around the youth’s narrow waist.
“Nor anything like, darling Stefan,” my lady’s scholar answered in lightly accented but serviceable Italian. “How kind of Marsilia to send me a present.”
I woke up, my Mercy self once more. The scents of my home centered me, as did Adam’s leg entwined with mine. I told myself that I should have expected to dream of Wulfe under the circumstances.
But I’d dreamed of him through Stefan’s eyes, and that wasn’t how my dreams usually worked. It hadn’t had the sharpness, the feeling that I was present, that a real vision had. But even though tonight’s adventure hadn’t felt real, it felt true.
Beside me, Adam rolled over. He was a light sleeper.
“Okay?” he murmured. If I’d been asleep, I could have ignored him.
“Dreaming of Wulfe,” I told him, still uneasy in my own skin.
“Oh?” His voice was a low growl that seeped into my bones. “Think I should do something about that?”
I didn’t get back to sleep for a while. When I did, sated and limp with pleasure, I dreamed—
—of Wulfe.
“Stefan, Stefan!”
The locks on my door rattled with her urgency.
“Marsilia?” I had feared her dead, hoped that she had fled. I stood up, ready to do whatever she needed of me.
She got the door open, and I saw she stood with a guard to either side of her. I wobbled a little as if weakened by my long confinement—which was true enough, so far as it went. I saw them relax as if that weakness meant I was not a threat, which was not true. I was always a threat. I had been a threat when I had been merely human. I had been a threat in the centuries I had served as my lady’s daytime servant, caught in the twilight world of fledgling so long as I had been useful there. It would take more than a little starvation to make me less dangerous.
“Get to your rooms,” she ordered me urgently. “Get a bag and pack. Do not take time. He has said I may go. I may take you and Andre. We are to be exiled.”
It was almost enough to make me thank the God I had long ago abandoned. Then the torchlight fell upon her and I understood the price our lord and master had extracted, and I took my thankfulness back. If we made it out of here, I would be thankful, properly, to my lady, who had made it possible. If we did not, I would spend the rest of my life—likely not that long—exacting what vengeance I could.
In the weeks since I had seen her, my lady had gone from rounded health to cadaver thinness. Her hair was limp and dirty, and a red mark ran along the edge of her hairline as if he’d threatened to scalp her. Her face—I did not flinch. I would not flinch.
He liked to damage his playthings, did our lord and master. Her nose was destroyed. In the uncertain light, and beneath the dried gore, I could not tell if he’d just beaten her or actually cut it off. He had written sonnets about her loveliness, this woman he loved. The nose was recent damage, perhaps even a few hours ago. Her eye looked as though the damage was weeks old.
“It is no matter,” Marsilia said impatiently, glaring at me through her one good eye. “Stefan, go. Meet me—” She stopped, glancing at her escorts. “You know where he keeps my treasure. Meet me there as quickly as you can. I think I can take that treasure with us.”
She didn’t say, because there were witnesses, as long as we leave before he changes his mind, but I knew our master as well as she did.
My instincts were to abandon my things and accompany her. Where she was going, where her treasure was, was not safe. But she was as dangerous as I, even wounded, and better—those escorting her would never think her so. And I had money and jewels in my rooms, useful for life in exile.
I heard the screams before I got to the level where the secret dungeons were. There was only one prisoner here, in the secret depths of the palazzo, and he did not scream anymore. Something was wrong.
I dropped my bags and drew the sword that had still been hanging in its proper place in my rooms, as had all my belongings. I hadn’t been able to decide if the Lord of Night thought I would just resume my place at his side, or if I was too negligible to draw his attention. Knowing him, it could be both.
I was weakened, but not so weak as a mortal would be, and more skilled than any of the vampires who would have worked down here. As long as the fight was short, I did not doubt that I could prevail once I got there.
The door at the top of the stairs had been ripped off its hinges, but there was a turn at the bottom so I could not see what was going on. It had grown, suddenly, very, very quiet.
“Stefan,” said Marsilia, her voice quite calm.
“Yes?”
“Move with care,” she said.
I took the stairs in two leaps, but obedient to her wishes, I slowed as I turned the corner. The area was dimly lit by a single flickering torch. Even with my ability to see in the dark, it was hard at first to understand what had happened. There was blood everywhere—both fresh and rotting—but that was to be expected in a torture chamber.
The bodies were less expected—my lord liked to keep his workspaces clear of corpses. Marsilia stood very still next to one of the cages, whose crude wooden door was open.