Blood on Silk (6 page)

Thanks to the delay caused by the “vampire hunters,” whom she’d shaken off with extreme difficulty in the end, it was almost midday before she parked outside Maria’s house once more. The village was quiet, most people having sought shelter from the worst of the sun’s heat. But as she approached the familiar rickety gate, where only yesterday she’d paused to talk too long to Dmitriu, she saw Maria’s daughter sweeping the garden path beneath the shade of the thick, tangled vines.

Catching sight of Elizabeth, she straightened and leaned on her brush. “
Domnişoară
,” she called in greeting. It wasn’t clear from her closed face if she was pleased, annoyed, or even embarrassed to see her.

Elizabeth returned the greeting, adding, “I’m looking for Dmitriu.”

There was a pause, but the woman came no closer. “He isn’t here,” she said at last.

“Do you know where I can find him?”

She shook her head.

“Does he live in the village?”

The woman shrugged and returned to her sweeping. “He moves around a lot. I’d find someone else to talk to.”

Yes, I’ll bet you would
, Elizabeth thought with a hint of bitterness. They’d all been in on it. Fool the crazy foreigner. Butter her up with Maria’s nonsense, and then set Dmitriu on her as the more acceptable face of legend. Only, what was the point? Didn’t it get boring after a while? She never paid anyone for talking to her—on the grounds that for one thing she couldn’t afford to, and for another it would just encourage people to say what they imagined she wanted to hear.

She got back in the car and drove the now-familiar road through the hills to Sighesciu—not forgetting to check her rearview mirror for any vehicles following hers. She didn’t put it past the “vampire hunters” to dog her footsteps until she left the country.

The village looked different in the brightness of the afternoon sunshine; though still down-at-the-heels, it was less depressing. Parking her car in the shade of a parched tree in the empty market square, she found she could actually laugh at herself, and at the sight she must have presented last night, fleeing in panic from a “vampire” come to life from a stone sarcophagus. Her colleagues would laugh themselves silly if they ever found out—though she’d take damned good care they didn’t.

And yet, despite everything, as she walked up the hill toward the castle ruins, she found her heart beating too hard and too fast. She knew she should feel as angry with Dmitriu as with his accomplice “Saloman,” but the truth was, she needed to talk to Dmitriu again, to find out if any of what he’d said was true. The heat of her fury was reserved for “Saloman,” who’d scared her, tormented her, and, worse than anything else, excited her out of her normal, reserved skin. For that, for him, she felt something approaching hatred.

She had no idea how she’d cope if she met him again. Would she yell at him, gibber like a fool, turn all tongue-tied like the shy schoolgirl she often still felt she was? Or would she still melt like butter under the heat of his hungry, mesmerizing eyes?

She curled her lip, knowing that in daylight, in the brightness of her returned common sense, he’d look no more than ordinary. No charisma, no magic would touch her or arouse her, which was a pity in some ways because she hadn’t even known she
could
feel like that. It had been edgy, breathless, exciting. . . .

Hastily, she shut down that line of thought. It was the adrenaline, the fear, that had intensified and confused everything. That was all.

Diggers and workmen swarmed all over the hilltop. Keeping a low profile, she got quite close to the crypt corner before the foreman she’d spoken to last night spotted her. He yelled something to the driver of a large mechanical beast, who inched his charge forward out of her line of vision while the boss walked toward her.

Elizabeth gazed beyond him, at a completely flat piece of ground. The hole crumbling onto the crypt had been filled in. This entire part of the hilltop was smooth and even.

“You filled in the hole,” she blurted before the foreman had even greeted her.

“What hole?”

“I found a hole in the ground last night—just there. There was a room underneath, like a crypt, with angels carved on the walls. Shouldn’t you notify the authorities before building starts?”

The man smiled at her, a pitying smile, though why he pitied her wasn’t clear. “There was no hole over there; nothing to fill in. We’d have seen such a thing, and if we hadn’t, the surveyors who swarmed over the site last week would have. So, will you be buying a house?”

It was pointless. Either Dmitriu and “Saloman” had covered it up themselves, or the builders didn’t want to wait for archeologists to grub about in the foundations before they started work, and so they would deny everything.

“No,” Elizabeth said ruefully. “I couldn’t live here now.”

Over a cup of coffee in the village square, she asked about Dmitriu, but no one seemed to have heard of him. She wasn’t surprised. She’d been expecting to work without him. Her next stop was the churchyard.

However, there were three churches in Sighesciu: the Roman Catholic at one end of the main street, a Lutheran church at the other, and about halfway between, the Eastern Orthodox church. Each had its own graveyard. The “vampire hunters” had looked at her as if she’d grown horns when she asked them which religion Saloman had followed, although they’d all known he’d been staked in 1697.

“Did Dmitriu tell you that?” she’d asked suspiciously.

“I’ve never met Dmitriu,” Konrad had answered with what seemed complete honesty. “The date is in our records.”

Elizabeth began to think, having scoured all three graveyards in search of likely monuments, that she might have to ask to see these records, whatever they were. However batty, they might just contain the odd kernel of truth that would help her. After all, that’s what she’d been doing in all her research so far, rummaging for pearls among the dross. Her reluctance to engage with the “vampire hunters” again was down to the simple fact that their very solemnity freaked her out.

Dropping onto a table stone facing the church building, she pulled out her water bottle and took a sizable swig as she cast her gaze around the cemetery in an accusatory way. Well, what had she expected? A nice, clear stone that read,
Here lies Saloman, a very ancient vampire, staked in 1697 by the following people
?

Perhaps he really had been buried under the castle chapel. If that was the case, his body and any inscriptions were lost for good—unless her photographs showed something?

Brightening, she shoved the bottle into her bag and held up her face to the sun, eyes closed. She’d head back to Bistriƫa, get the photographs onto her computer, and see what she could see. And that would be the last time and effort she’d waste on Saloman. Tomorrow, she’d head south and pick up a few more legends.

A shadow fell across her face. Her eyes flew open and she sat up, shivering. No one stood over her; no vampire threatened to drink her blood; no one dressed up as a vampire threatened to drink her blood. It was just a tiny cloud passing across the sun; yet there’d been an instant, a tiny instant, when she could have sworn she smelled the cool earth and spice scent of the man who’d pretended to be Saloman.

She had some good pictures of the angels in the crypt. She even had one of the stone sarcophagus.

Sprawled on her hotel bed with the laptop on the pillow, she blew the sarcophagus picture up as far as she could and stared at it. It was as exquisite as she remembered, a beautiful piece of art with the handsome, expressive face, the lean yet muscular body very similar to that of the man who’d accosted her moments later. Her gaze lingered, taking in the empty scabbard on the carving.

She had a brief unbidden vision of “Saloman” rising from the stone table, then walking toward her in a cloud of dust while yanking the sword from his chest and throwing it on the ground. But it hadn’t been a sword. There had been no metallic clank on the stone floor. The sound of it falling had been softer, blunter, like wood.

They’d fooled her with a clip-on wooden sword, and now that she thought through the stunned fear of that scene, she realized it had been too short for a real sword.

“Well, that’s one trick explained,” she murmured.

She refocused on the photograph, looking for more clues. The sarcophagus was undoubtedly stone, far too inert and dust covered to be the human male at this stage. And yet she’d been right—there was a gleam of black paint beneath the dust of his eyes and his hair and his cloak. It must have been old. No one could have rustled up something so wonderful just for a prank.

“So how did they do it?” she murmured. “Did they destroy it, hide it? And why is the dead man carved with a sword through his chest and an empty scabbard?” She sighed. “I wish I knew if you were really Saloman. . . .” She touched the computer screen with her fingertip, brushing the sarcophagus’s face. “If I can’t find Dmitriu, I’m going to have to speak to the vampire hunters, aren’t I? And why am I talking to you anyway, computer image?”

Closing the lid, she pushed the computer aside and stood up. Her stomach rumbled, and she realized she’d forgotten dinner again. Well, she’d go out and get something from one of the stalls. She needed some fresh air before bedtime anyhow. And while she walked, she could decide whether to leave Bistriƫa tomorrow as planned, or hang around to talk to the vampire hunters about bloody Saloman.

She grabbed a sweater for defense against the cool of the evening and went in search of food.

It was a clear, starry night, too late for there to be many people still around in the quiet streets near her hotel. But there was nothing threatening about this town. It was merely peaceful in the darkness, and by the time she approached home, munching her way through the warm pie from the corner stall, she’d made up her mind to spend one more day on the elusive Saloman. Though she was in danger of wasting too much time on one anomaly, another day couldn’t hurt. And it would be worth it if she solved the mystery of his existence once and for all.

Emerging from the picturesque vaulted arches that covered the pavement in this part of the old town, she glanced up at the jeweled sky—and something hurtled down on top of her, rolling her to the ground.