The White City (6 page)

Jack thought about Sebastien, and from his sheltered position, observed. He was not so accomplished at vanishing into the furniture as a wampyr, though, and when one of Irina’s peregrinations left him unaccompanied looked up from his tea glass to find Nadia drawing up beside him, glass beads sparkling amid her tassels and fringe.

“All the boys want Irina,” she said, without prologue. “But Irina doesn’t want any of the boys. Not for long, anyway. She’ll break your heart, English boy.”

“Your English is very good,” Jack answered. Another thing about growing up in a crèche: one learned which bait to refuse. “Do you think I have a heart to be broken?”

Nadia smiled, turning her back to the wall to stand beside him. They were of a height, and if she was twice his age, she laughed like a young woman. “It turns out, we all do. You just have to find the place where we keep it. Like sorcerers, some of us pull the heart from our chest and invest it elsewhere. You have to find where we hid it.”

Jack watched Irina whirl around the room, and was struck by how different she looked from the others present. Laughing, vivacious, mocking. It drew frowns from some of the others—Dmitri, who spoke to her in hushed tones, sternly. Jack said, “She doesn’t look as if she’s here out of concern for the plight of the laboring class.”

“Are you?” He turned to her in surprise. The challenge in her pale eyes was unmistakable.

Jack wondered if he could shock her. “I followed Irina. I thought she was taking me home.”

Apparently, blunt honesty was good enough to provoke a laugh out of her. While she was gasping, tears at the corners of her eyes, Jack finished, “But my parents were poor. So poor they had to indenture me because they could not afford to feed me. So yes, I have some sympathy.”

That ended Nadia’s laughter. She licked her lips, quickly, guiltily, and sipped tea as if to disguise the gesture as thirst. “She probably started coming to these things because Starkad likes revolutionaries.”

She was watching to see if he recognized the name. He did not, and likewise did not see any need to dissemble. “Is Starkad the gallery owner?”

Nadia shook her head. “A patron of the arts. We were all in love with him, a little.”

Were
. But before Jack could pursue that line of inquiry, the door opened again.

Nadia lifted her chin and turned, up on tiptoe to peer through the crowd. Following her gaze, Jack saw narrow shoulders and a dark head poking above the general mass. “Oh, it’s Ilya. We can start now.”

Apparently, the showing at the gallery had broken up for good. Beside Ilya, Jack saw the gray complexion and thick shoulders of Sergei; Svetlana and Tania were off to his left.

Ilya didn’t seem to be making any gestures for attention, but as he moved slowly around the room, Jack could feel the focus of the group settling on him. He had that kind of charisma, the ability to dominate a conversation without saying a word. Even across the meeting hall, Jack could feel it working on him, making him desire Ilya’s attention and approval.

When the crowd had silenced enough, it was he who called the meeting to order, speaking too rapidly in Russian for Jack to follow. Jack didn’t really need to know what was being said, in its specifics—the hypnotic tones of Ilya’s voice, the susurrus of approval that rose to fill each pause, were enough. Jack could feel the excitement sweep over him, as well.

Irina appeared at Jack’s elbow, on the other side from Nadia. She’d left her tea glass somewhere, and stood with her arms crossed, fingering the red and black armband that still twisted around her biceps. Her closeness warmed Jack’s shoulder. But even when she leaned on him, she never took her eyes off Ilya, whose art she had scorned.

Ilya might not be much of a painter in her estimation, but at this, he was an artist who could hold anyone.

Moscow

Kitai Gorod

May 1903

The women waited just outside. The lady novelist Mrs. Phoebe Smith was prim and pale in a peach summer dress that complemented her blonde hair and skimmed-milk complexion, Abby Irene still regal in her blue evening gown. She hadn’t even been back to the hotel, then. It was, Sebastien admitted, good to see them out and together, no matter what the circumstances. Since Jack’s death, Phoebe had been too much alone.

As he approached, Sebastien’s momentary pang of guilt gave way to admiration. They probably hadn’t chosen the colors to complement one another, but then he couldn’t be too sure. Especially as since Paris, Abby Irene had taken to dressing Phoebe fashionably, which Phoebe endured with a sort of good-humored tolerance.

It was Phoebe who crossed her arms and frowned most sternly at him. “You lied to us.”

Sebastien fell in between them, taking each woman’s elbow in one hand and turning them so they walked alongside. The weight of their disapproval warmed him: it was indifference he could not have borne.

“I omitted,” he offered, as a sort of compromise. “And only with the best of intentions. And you know I murdered no one. So who was the dead woman, anyway?”

Abby Irene shook her head, which Sebastien understood to mean
outside
. “You don’t know?”

“Nor did the good Imperial Inspector tell me. But in any case, he wishes our assistance in solving the crime.” Tactfully, Sebastien neglected to specify exactly who he meant, though the detective had not. But then, Phoebe’s professional qualifications—while better-known to the general public than those of either Abby Irene or Sebastien—were not so obviously applicable to providing satisfactory resolution to a sudden and bloody homicide.

“I knew the woman whose studio it was,” Sebastien admitted. “It was she I meant to visit.”

“A courtesan?” Phoebe asked, her voice level and interested. It surprised him that it was Abby Irene who continued to prickle when Sebastien relied on other sources to meet his needs, while Phoebe had adapted to the realities of paying court on a wampyr most easily. Or maybe, he admitted, she was merely still in shock over Jack’s death, and her jealousy would flare when she had healed a little.

If she chose to stay with him at all.

“A courtier, yes, but not mine. And when last I knew her, Irina Stephanova had been abandoned by her patron.”

He felt the women’s reactions in the different ways the muscles of their arms tightened, detected them on changing scents. He bulled on. Some things, if they must be done, were best done at speed. “She and Jack were lovers, though. Six and a half years ago, now.”

Abby Irene snapped a glance across Sebastien at Phoebe. Sebastien flattered himself that he was a little more subtle, but he didn’t miss the moment of agony that twisted her mouth. No jealousy, that.
Loss
.

None of the pain Sebastien knew she felt as well colored Abby Irene’s voice. “So you went to break the news to this namesake of mine?”

“I thought also to throw myself upon her mercy,” Sebastien admitted. “But had she not offered, I would have found something at the club.”

When Phoebe winced this time, it was for him. In sympathy—which made him in his own turn burn with sympathy for her. For one of the blood, feeding was an intimate experience. A joining, a kind of communion. And it did, Sebastien thought, give the courtesan involved a certain diaphanous link to or control over the wampyr in question. So most of Sebastien’s kin chose their courts with care, either out of the pretense or reality of a calculated tolerance for those they dined upon—most of the blood would not admit or demonstrate a fondness for living men—or professionally and with a coldly maintained distance.

If he were rogue, a wampyr might kill, erasing the intimacy with the life. Sebastien knew many who might prefer it that way, but few were willing to risk the retaliatory wrath of humans and of their own kind. Those who did not restrain themselves did not last long, once the evidence began to accrue—and they left a poisoned well for others who chose to coexist more harmoniously with the living.

“So how long since you last dined?” Abby Irene asked in a voice that would have had Sebastien blanching, if he were not blanched already. He had to pause and think, which was never a good sign. If she’d asked, he’d lay odds that Abby Irene knew better than he did.

A cab awaited them in the cracking mud of the street. After helping Abby Irene and Phoebe across, Sebastien handed them up into its chamber.

“Nine days,” he admitted.

Phoebe hissed between her teeth. “Take me,” she said. “It’s been a month. I’ll be well.”

“You should rely on me to adjudge your wellness—”

Phoebe shrugged. “Oh, yes. You’d starve between us like a donkey between two bales of hay, and then what’s a girl to do?”

“Touché,” the wampyr said. “It’s very hard to argue with such reasoning.”

Phoebe smiled and rapped on the carriage roof to start the cab forward. A rattle of reins and the snort of horses came from outside as she began to unbutton the high collar of her dress.

Hiding her scowl, Abby Irene leaned across to draw the curtains. Dawn was indeed coming. Sebastien could smell it.

“Curious,” he said, as Phoebe tilted her head back. “The last time I got involved with Irina Stephanova, a murder occurred then also.”

Moscow

Kitai Gorod

January 1897

Outside, the shadows of winter evening grew long quickly. But in her bed below the tall spotless windows of a top-floor loft converted into an artist’s studio, Irina stretched against Jack’s side and pressed her face into the hollow between his shoulder and his throat. She was warm, brown against her dingy sheets, her back and flank scattered with liver-black moles.

She turned to brush her lips against Jack’s ear. —You’re not wearing his ring.

Jack’s drowsing eyes flew open. He must have jumped away from her, because abruptly he found himself clinging to the edge of the cot.

—Excuse me?

—Your wampyr. You’re not wearing his ring.

She touched his hand as if by way of illustration, her breasts swaying gently when she pushed herself up on her elbows. Her long nipples were liver-black, too, like pieces of licorice. Jack suddenly had no urge to reach out and cup one, though his fingers still burned with the memory. He pulled his hand away.

—How do you know about that?

—I know all sorts of things,— she teased. —Come back into bed, Jack, before you tip it over.

He edged closer, but stayed wary. It must not have been the response she wanted, because her expression sobered.

—I know because my patron told me— she said. “Here. Look.”

She pushed the sheets aside and drew her leg up, turning it aside so he could see the fine-textured scarring along her inner thigh. Just a row of pale dots, shiny against the soft matte texture of her skin. Easy enough to miss, if you weren’t looking closely.

Jack bit his lip, choking down envy. Unwarranted envy, in all probability: most wampyrs were not Sebastien.

There was no paler or irritated band on her finger, as there had been on Grigor’s. Either she hadn’t worn the ring habitually, or she’d had it off her hand long enough for the telltale marks to fade. “You’re not wearing a ring either. Who is your patron?” he asked, because that was an appropriate question and he could speak it sanely.

“He goes by Starkad,” she said. “Don’t worry. He’s away from Moscow now. There won’t be any trouble.”

“There wouldn’t have been any chance of trouble if you had let me know you were a courtesan in advance,” Jack shot back, but he could see by her expression that what he’d said was too complicated and he’d lost her. He tried again, stretching the limits of his vocabulary. —There would be no trouble if you had told me.

She shrugged, impishly. —But then you wouldn’t have come home with me. And I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet
your
patron.

Jack stood, leaving the sheets behind, and crouched to find his trousers.

—He’s not my patron. He’s just a friend.

—h—

Patron or not, he was unsurprised to find Sebastien waiting in the icy street below, leaning on a silver-shod ebony cane, looking gloriously out of place in his beaver hat and overcoat. A casual inspection would have shown a man of just above average height—five foot eight inches, perhaps: taller than Jack, anyway—with thick black hair that wanted to curl and a swarthy complexion that often concealed his wampyr pallor. An unnecessary muffler wrapped across his face hid the fact that he had no warm breath to mist, but Jack made billows enough for the both of them.

It was only a half-hour after sunset. Sebastien must have come looking for Jack directly upon leaving their apartment.

“What’s her name?” Sebastien asked as Jack came up. He presented the perfect picture of nonchalance.

Jack would have chosen to emulate him, but there was no point with somebody who could read your upset on the wind. He closed his eyes briefly, but had to open them again to keep walking due to the hazards of lamp posts and other streetside obstacles. Of course Sebastien knew. If he could follow Jack halfway across the city by scent, he could certainly smell Irina all over Jack’s clothes and body.

“Irina Stephanova,” Jack said. And then—bitterly, because he trusted Sebastien enough to let him see when he was wounded—added, “She wants to meet you.”

“You told her…?”

Jack shook his head. “She knew. It’s the only reason she wanted me.”

“Somehow,” Sebastien said, softly and with a sidelong glance, “I find that very challenging to believe.”

Jack stalked ahead.

Sebastien hurried a step or two to catch up. “So,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you feel the difference?”

Jack wheeled and stared, the icy winter night searing his cheeks. If Sebastien were human, he would have shot past him a half-step and had to turn, but as it was, he just stopped lightly, his motion—for that moment—preternatural.

“You mean, did she make a man out of me? Oh,
Sebastien
.”

Sebastien shrugged and said delicately, “One is curious about experiences one has never had. Evie was my first lover, and she was—no more capable of the human act than I am now. I died a virgin, Jack.”