Death's Mistress dbd-2 Read online

  I couldn’t really argue that one, so I changed tactics. “So you run. Then what?”

  “I have a lot of contacts in the auction business,” she told me, her color high. “If the rune is up for sale, someone has to know about it. I have to find out who has it before it ends up in a private collection somewhere and disappears.”

  “Fair enough. But you can’t do that with the heir to the throne of Faerie on your hip.”

  “The fey don’t know this world—”

  “But plenty of other people do! And nothing is easier than hiring a bunch of mercenaries.” I should know; I was one.

  She blinked, as if that had never even occurred to her. “I don’t think… I don’t think they’d do that. The fey handle their own problems.” But she didn’t look sure.

  I pressed my advantage. “Okay, setting that aside, do you know what Aiden would be worth in ransom?”

  “As soon as the shops open tomorrow, I’ll dress him like a human child. No one needs to know—”

  I stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Look.”

  Aiden had freed himself from the grip of the poncho and curled into a sleeping ball on the rug. Stinky was resting his head on the princely bottom, staring at him with liquid eyes that reflected a soft golden glow. It spilled over the muted colors of the old Persian and highlighted the scuffed floorboards like lantern light. It wasn’t.

  “Human children don’t shed light shadows,” I said softly, and watched her face crumple.

  She put a trembling hand to her forehead. For the first time, what must have been months of constant strain showed. She looked almost haggard. “What am I going to do? They’re going to kill him, Dory. They’re going to kill my little boy, and I can’t stop it!”

  “No, they’re not.” I put an arm around her, feeling awkward because I’m not a hugger. But she looked like she could really use one. “The wards held, despite everything. And that was a pretty good test. I’ll talk to Olga tomorrow, see what else can be done. We’ll keep him safe, Claire. Long enough for us to find this rune of yours.”

  “Us?”

  “Well, now I’m all interested.”

  She stared at me for a moment, before breaking down into half-hysterical laughter.

  “You’re insane,” she finally told me, wiping her eyes.

  I cocked an eyebrow. “You’re only figuring this out now?”

  I don’t think I’d have won the argument, but Claire looked like she was ready to drop. We hunted around and found some blankets in the hall closet that were miraculously still dry, and used them to bed the kids down on the sofa. Stinky was snoring almost immediately, and Aiden never even woke up in the transfer. Then we went up to check out Claire’s room.

  It was about the same as mine, except the holes in the roof weren’t directly over the bed, and the mattress pad had kept the mattress largely dry. I helped her get the mattress downstairs, which mostly consisted of shoving it through a massive hole in the ceiling. It got a little waterlogged when it hit the river the melting snow was making out of the hall, but I didn’t think Claire cared.

  We dragged it into the living room and threw a few blankets on it, and then she dove in. “There’s plenty of room,” she mumbled, as I snuffed the lamp someone had left burning.

  “Thanks. I’ll be right back,” I told her, and shut the door behind me.

  I went back up to my room to rescue my cache of weapons. I was standing in front of the closet, wondering if I should take the swords or if they’d be okay in their scabbards, when my legs started feeling a little funny. I sat down on the waterlogged mattress for a moment, suddenly gasping.

  At first I thought it was blood loss. The wound in my thigh had bled heavily, staining my skin below in a red sheen that was starting to turn dark. I went to the bathroom for my first-aid kit and caught sight of myself in the mirror. My skin was waxy pale, my eyes and lips darkened as if bruised, the skin around my mouth crusted with something white and scaly.

  I wiped it off and sat on the edge of the tub to bandage my leg. The bleeding had stopped in my thigh, although the knee still dribbled a little whenever I moved. And being a joint wound, it hurt like a bitch. But I’d had worse, and with my metabolism, I’d probably be well on the way to healed by tomorrow. Yet for some reason, my hands shook as I taped my knee off, and my lungs kept dragging in more oxygen than I needed.

  They’d been doing it downstairs, too, like they thought there might be another shortage soon and needed to stock up. But it was worse now, to the point of making me dizzy. It took me a moment to realize that I was close to hyperventilating. I sat there, struggling to calm down, and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

  I’d come that close or closer to death more times than I could count, with many of them more painful and a lot more messy. I’d woken up from fits covered in my own and others’ blood, with broken bones still reknitting, or burned flesh still sloughing off. Then there had been the memorable incident of coming back to consciousness only to interrupt the feeding of the vultures who had mistaken me for a corpse.

  Sometimes I still had flashbacks to that one, the feathers dragging over my skin, the claws digging into my flesh, the beaks tearing. Yet I’d beaten them off, retrieved my weapons and stolen one of the horses of the men who had tried to gut me to get to my next job. I was used to dealing with the aftershocks of near disaster: the taste of blood, the scent of death in the air and the quiet that followed.

  But, I realized slowly, I wasn’t nearly as accustomed to the disaster itself. Most of the time, I was out of my head when the mayhem happened—a fact I’d always dreaded. I had never realized before how much I’d also relied on it.

  It had been terrifying but also strangely comforting to know that death for me would simply mean failing to wake up from one of my fits someday. It meant knowing every time I heard the familiar rushing in my ears that this might be the last time, but it also meant being pretty sure that I wouldn’t see the end coming. Yet I’d almost seen it tonight.

  And this is how you deal with it? I thought angrily. Five hundred years and this is the best you can do? Freaking out because your damn weapons failed? Because you finally met an opponent you don’t know how to kill?

  I got up, furious with my body for its weakness, with myself because I hadn’t anticipated this, hadn’t realized after getting my ass kicked by the fey once before that it damn well might happen again. I didn’t know their magic, didn’t understand their weapons. A weapon to me was the reassuring weight in my hand, a sword, a club, a gun; how the hell could I fight people who had the very Earth and sky on their side?

  I didn’t know, but I knew one thing. Ifsubrand was alive, he could die. And I really, really wanted him to die.

  CHAPTER 8

  I awoke to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and frying bacon, which was impossible. But since I needed to get up anyway, I rolled out of bed—and fell three feet to the floor. I hit with a thump that didn’t do the crick in my neck or the knots in my back any good.

  My eyes crossed, focusing on a huge pair of smelly socks. They reeked badly enough to act as a kind of smelling salts. I sat up, fully conscious, and bumped my head on the underside of a table.

  In front of me was a wreck that I vaguely identified as the living room. Blankets and old quilts had been thrown everywhere, clothes and bags of personal items had been piled in a heap by the cellar door, and a trail of huge, muddy footprints led from it to the hall. They obliterated most of the rug but skirted a waterlogged mattress.

  The footprints had three toes each, pretty standard for mountain trolls, so I relaxed. I assumed they belonged to the large lumps curled up in a couple of wingback chairs in front of the fireplace, snoring loud enough to bring down what remained of the rafters. I ignored them for the moment, and stood up, my back cracking like old knuckles.

  The edge of a quilt trailed off the tabletop, and I recalled what I’d been doing up there. Claire had been sprawled in the middle of the mattress when I return
ed last night, and I hadn’t had the heart to move her. I’d failed to find a dry patch of floor, so I’d piled some bedding onto the felted surface we used to play poker. It was only about four feet around, which explained the knots, and had a two- inch lip, which explained the crick.

  After some much-needed stretching, I checked myself out. The wounds in my thigh and knee had ripened to purple with green and yellow around the edges. The knee was also puffy and tender to the touch, swelling up like bread dough when I peeled off the bandage. But both wounds had closed over, and my throat no longer felt like I was being choked from the inside. My wrist still hurt like a bitch, but overall, I’d woken up in worse states.

  I wandered over and took a quick peek under the first lump’s blanket. A small green eye opened and regarded me unhappily. “Sorry, Sven.”

  He grunted and went back to sleep. I didn’t check the other one, but it was probably Ymsi, his twin brother. They were a couple of Olga’s boys, second cousins or something, who acted as muscle in the business. It looked like word had gotten around that we might need a little added protection.

  I walked out into the hall, yawning. The stairs were basically kindling, with more missing than still in place, and the wallpaper hung in dispirited strips, a victim of the damp that had mostly receded. But the ceiling looked better than I remembered.

  It was still possible to see all the way up to the attic, but I was having a hard time figuring out which opening Claire and I had used to get the mattress down. None of them looked large enough for a twin, much less her queen. Even better, no more rain appeared to be getting in.

  I found Claire in the kitchen, wrestling with the ancient stove. Her hair was a limp mess around her flushed face, and her glasses were about to slide off her sweaty nose. The house has air-conditioning, but with the wards on full, it didn’t work any better than the lights. It had to be ninety degrees in there.

  The kids were at the table. Aiden had spread the chess set out on his half and appeared to be attempting to dry it out. He had stripped the soldiers of their armor and laid it out in a line on a paper towel, and was now struggling to get a small ogre out of its damp clothes. The ogre wasn’t too happy, but without its weapons, it could do no more than shake tiny fists.

  Stinky was at the other end of the table, sleeping. Or at least I thought so, until a pitiful groan erupted from the fuzzy lump. I walked over, trying to get a look at him, but he kept shielding his eyes.

  “He’s been sick twice since he woke up,” Claire told me, looking worried. “And he won’t eat anything. I gave him some aspirin, but it didn’t seem to help. I was about to wake you and ask if you want me to call a healer.”

  I pulled his head up and peeled the woven place mat off it. It left a checkerboard pattern on his cheek, which did nothing to hide the pallor and the under- eye bruising. I watched him for a moment, then went and got a dishrag and filled it with ice.

  “Sit up,” I told him. I was rewarded by a slitted eye glaring at me from under a snarled mass of hair, but no horizontal movement.

  “What are you doing?” Claire asked.

  “He’s not sick.” I pulled him up again and slapped the compress over his eyes. He mewled with protest until the cold started to work. Then he groaned in appreciation and flopped his head back down.

  “He’s hungover?” Claire asked, looking faintly appalled.

  “Considering that he drained most of a bottle of your uncle’s home brew last night? I’d say it’s a safe bet.”

  I squatted down beside his chair. “Hurts, doesn’t it?” I got a faint nod. “Are you going to stay out of my stash from now on?” A more vigorous nod. And then another groan. I decided he’d been punished enough.

  “Have you seen my cell phone?” I asked Claire, staring at the empty recharger in my usual morning haze. I always envied the types who could roll out of bed and be bright-eyed and sharp within seconds. It took me a good hour, and that was with the help of large amounts of caffeine.

  “No. Why?”

  “Since it’ll be a few days before any backup can arrive from Faerie, I thought I’d call Mircea. Get some protection down here.”

  Claire glanced up from the stove, brow furrowing. “What kind of protection?”

  “The Senate’s running short-staffed these days, but they should be able to spare a few masters—”

  “You mean vampires.” Her voice was flat.

  “It’s the Senate. What else?”

  Her expression tipped over into a full- fledged frown. “I thought about what you said last night, about what Aiden would bring in ransom. I think the fewer people who know he’s here, the better.”

  “I’m a little more concerned about the people who already know he’s here,” I said sardonically. “The house wards should stop the riffraff.”

  “They won’t have to if nobody knows he’s here in the first place.”

  “I’ll tell Mircea to be discreet.”

  “I’d prefer to let fey deal with fey.”

  “Olga’s boys are resistant to most magic, including the fey variety,” I told her, while rifling through the bread box. “And God knows they’re strong enough. But there’re only two of them, and they aren’t exactly deep thinkers. And whatever else I can say aboutsubrand, he’s not stupid.”

  “Neither am I. And I know better than to trust a vampire!” I couldn’t blame her for being wary. Claire had been kidnapped by Vlad on his recent rampage. She had every reason to mistrust the breed.

  “They’re not all the same,” I admitted uncomfortably. Louis-Cesare, for example, seemed determined to mess with my head, constantly challenging my preconceptions about what a vampire was and how one behaved. It was only one of many ways the guy was a pain in the ass.

  “You can say that when your job is killing them?” Claire demanded.

  “My job is hunting revenants—” She looked confused. “Vampires who had something go wrong with the Change.”

  “Wouldn’t they just”—she waved a spatula—“stay dead, then?”

  “Most do. But once in a while one will survive physically, but mentally… Let’s just say he’s not all there. And a revenant will attack anything—human or vampire—that gets in his way. And since he’s insane, there’s no reasoning with him. He has to be put down.”

  “And you’ve never killed any vampires other than these revenants?” she asked, skeptically.

  “I take commissions occasionally to hunt down vamps who have violated Senate law in some way. But I don’t go around killing random vampires.” I wouldn’t have lasted long if I had, no matter who daddy was.

  “I don’t see much difference,” Claire said, scowling.

  I thought about Mircea’s expression if he knew he’d just been lumped together with Vleck and a bunch of slavering beasts with little more brains than an animal. “You probably shouldn’t mention that view around any vamps you meet,” I said drily.

  “I’m not going to be meeting any.” It sounded final.

  “You ought to reconsider,” I told her seriously. “It’s easy to distrust something that views you as food, but right now—”

  “I don’t want those things near my son, okay? I’m sick of guards I can’t trust!”

  “They’ll be master-level vampires on loan from the Senate. They’re not going to do any snacking.”

  “I know they’re not, because they’re not going to be here.” She saw my expression and sighed. “Think about it, Dory. What could they have done last night, other than get carved to pieces?”

  “I think you might be surprised.”

  “Well, I don’t. I’ve seen what a fey warrior can do.”

  “And I’ve seen a master vampire in action.”

  She shot me an exasperated look. “Ifsubrand could get through the wards, he’d have done it, rather than resort to creating those things.”

  “Which he could do again.”

  “He knows that I can defeat them now. It would be a waste of time.”

  “And t
he next thing he comes up with?”

  “He’s not going to be coming up with anything today,” she said firmly.

  You hope, I didn’t say. Because it would have been a waste of time. Claire was as stubborn as they came when she was convinced she was right, which was frequently. It didn’t help that she usually was. I just hoped this wasn’t going to be the exception that proved the rule.

  I gave up on the phone and started looking for a mug instead. There weren’t any in the usual spots—scattered around the table, littering the counters or piled in the dishwasher someone had installed back when olive green appliances were all the rage. It didn’t actually work, but sometimes people stuck things in there anyway. But not this time.

  “What are you doing?” Claire asked, watching me.

  “Trying to find the mugs. They’ve all disappeared.”

  She rolled her eyes and opened a cabinet, and there they were—several rows of gleaming white cups, all perfectly aligned. She’d even gotten the stains out. Must be fey magic, I decided, pouring my morning brew.

  I took the coffee and picked my way up the stairs to my room. I found it suspiciously clear of ice, snow or even water. I kicked a heel against the old floorboards, and they seemed solid enough. There was some staining, but they were dry.

  Huh.

  The lights didn’t work, of course, but the holes in the ceiling let in plenty of daylight, plus a couple of birds who were poking around, checking out nesting opportunities. I ignored them and went to find my toothbrush. I’d located it before I remembered: the pipes had burst. I turned the faucet anyway, just for the hell of it, and a stream of water gurgled out into the rust-stained sink. I stared at it for a moment, perplexed, then shrugged and brushed my teeth.

  The shower also seemed to work, so I took full advantage, washing away the blood from the previous night and the sweat from this morning. The house was hot and, thanks to the rain, uncomfortably muggy. I was toweling off when I got sidetracked by a small square of blue.