Blood Spirits (46 page)

“No doubt because that's what he would have done?”

“—that we went along with his plan to get you alone and find out where it was.”

“I can assure you, my grandmother didn't have any treasure. Or she wouldn't have had to teach piano for years and years. Ow!” A sharp elbow hit me right in the ribs.

A flushed older man wearing a baldric with genuine medals apologized before he and his partner were swallowed in the crowd.

I jerked back—and a broad back thumped mine, nearly knocking me into Danilov, who winced and hopped as a teenage girl exclaimed, “I beg pardon, I beg pardon,” and was whisked away by her partner.

I looked around. The floor was so crowded there was scarcely an inch between one couple and the next. “We're not dancing,” I said, “we're bobbing and weaving. Let's get something to drink, and you can tell me more about vampires.”

He gave me a startled, wary glance. “You want to find them?”

“There are two things I want to know: how to avoid them, and if I do meet one, how to defend myself. ‘Shadow ones' or ‘wild folk' may be poetic, but it doesn't tell me anything, unless they really look like walking shadows.”

The crowd of dancers was scarcely moving, and I was glad of my lightweight gown, for the air was nearly stifling. Danilov's forehead was damp. It was a relief to get out of the press and reach the tables.

The ice sculptures were beginning to soften slightly at the edges. A young girl dressed in white and black carefully poured us some punch. We each took a cup, then Danilov said under his breath, “Ah, Gilles! That stupid film! Smile and look at the dancers, unless you want him pestering you for an interview later, on what it was we found so engrossing in our conversation.”

My face tightened into the bland smile I always wore on stage. I scanned the crowd then lifted my head to take in the iron chandeliers, the more martial gods of Olympus looking down from the clouds in the main dome, and, below that, the gallery running all the way around, that I'd missed before. It was filled with observers, except for one of the round royal boxes at either side, which furnished a splendid view of the stage. One of them was cordoned off, and Gilles and his film crew were there, looking vastly out of place in their punk rock attire as they operated their film equipment.

Danilov lifted his cup to someone in the crowd as he said under his breath, “Vampires. You will not see the older ones. The longer they survive, the more powerful they get. They can bend the weak light of night around them—moonlight, starlight, artificial light. At most you might perceive a deeper shadow. Or a sharp chill.”

“Cold? I thought the cold was the presence of a ghost.”

Danilov moved along the table, sipping at the punch, which was a fruit and citrus concoction with the bite of zhoumnyar mixed in. I resolved to make this cup last all night; zhoumnyar was potent stuff.

“Both.” Danilov brushed something from an elegant shoulder. “My experience with ghosts is confined to the Bloody Duke up at the Eyrie. We used to stand on the landing outside the Weapons Room, which is where he always walks out. Usually after midnight. When he walked through me I felt a chill. But the cold of a vampire in proximity reaches your bones, and sends out a current that stirs the hairs on your arms. If they pass you while you are asleep, they give you nightmares.”

“I thought it was ghosts who handed off the nightmares,” I said.

“Ghosts don't have any influence on the living, waking or sleeping, not that I've ever heard.” He shot me a fast, narrow look. “If you've been getting vampire nightmares at that inn of yours, then they are on the watch. I'd get out.”

“It's got protections all over it. Those work, don't they?”

“Yes, but you have to leave sometimes, right?”

“Why would they be staking
me
out? Whoa, is that a pun or what?”

“Good question.” He drank off the punch, then grimaced slightly as he put it down. “Another question is, why are they in the city at all? But there are others who can answer that. Not I. To your question about the efficacy of protections, my understanding is that, as long as they have not recently fed, the younger they are, the easier to defeat. They must be caused to bleed faster than they can repair themselves. Pistols only work at high caliber—you blow them apart—but these weapons can be untrustworthy. Vampires use Vrajhus to interfere with the firing mechanism, if they have the time and the strength to do whatever it is they do. But they cannot interfere with steel.”

I'd heard about a mysterious force that could keep guns from firing, but this was the first time anyone had related it to vampiric powers. Though he wasn't saying that this ability was exclusive to vampires. “How about the wooden stake thing?”

“If you stab a vampire in the heart with rowan, hawthorn, or especially yew, it poisons them into immobility. At which time whatever it is in them that keeps them alive, and enables them to heal from small wounds, causes the stake to send out roots. It's not an easy sight—”

“Okay. Stop right there. I've got the picture.”

“What picture would that be?”

I whipped around as we were joined by Niklos, Tony's handsome second in command. He had on a kind of Zorro mask but I recognized him instantly.

His gaze shifted past me to Danilov and lingered long enough for me to register it as a Look. I didn't have to turn around to see that the Look was two way. I blushed when the cluebat hit me that Niklos was running a rescue from the grabby foreigner—me.

I wanted to yell, “It's not like that!” but a woman about my age, wearing an ice-white damask ball gown complete with bustle, slipped her hand (in armpit-length gloves) through Danilov's and cooed, “You promised me a waltz.” And off they went, leaving me alone with a bunch of beautifully dressed people I didn't know. I was not about to dance with the guy who'd shot me, and the way he watched Danilov and Bustle Princess whirl their way into the crowd, he wasn't in any tearing hurry to dance with me, either.

So I looked into that expectant, slightly wary face and said, “Ever seen a vampire?”

Niklos's brows shot up. Then his face smoothed into bland wariness. “Yes.”

I could tell he was going to be as easy to question as a rock, so I gave him the Mick Jagger point-and-shoot with my forefingers, and walked away.

I think I heard him laugh.

On the other side of the room, Alec was dancing with Beka. Her gown was white on top, with a black floaty skirt. It moved like a dream, or rather, she moved well in it.

“Care to waltz?” asked a guy.

He was around thirty, maybe older, a thickset fellow whose broad chest looked splendid in his wide-lapel box tux and black bow tie. He and three of the others in their group wore extravagant Punchinello masks—jaguar, lion, bird. My partner was the jaguar.

I thanked him, and he swung me so energetically out onto the floor that my skirt flagged behind me. “I'm Carol Madaksos. You are Mademoiselle . . . Dsaret?”

“For tonight that will do,” I said. “It's actually my grandmother's name.”

“Your grandmother really lives?”

“Yes, she does.”

“Is she coming home?”

“That I don't know.” And when his eyes widened behind the jaguar mask, I said, “I've been traveling for several months, so I haven't spoken with her.”

“Ah,” he said. “You have such a look of her. A Dsaret, alive! We thought they were all gone.”

I wanted to point out that there were plenty of descendants of Princess Rose around, who would technically be as much “Dsaret” as I was, but decided it was better not to get into it. What was it Danilov had said? “Too fatiguing to explain”? I just wanted to have a good time.

So did he. When I asked what he did, I got a stream of information, not only about his family's business in floor restoration, but about how his tux had been his father's, remade by his cousin the tailor, about how the food for the party was divided between the Vigilzhi kitchen and the pastry shop across the alley from Cuzco's Pies (“Everyone knows their pies, the best in the city”) and how those who had donated skills and or materials to the opera house got bumped up the list of businesses used by the palace, arranged by Mam'zelle Cerisette herself.

He was a nice guy, and apparently he was popular, because as soon as our dance finished, a swarm of his friends descended.

And so I spent the next several hours dancing. I noticed that the crowd had, in typical fashion, separated into two groups. The VIPs migrated to the area near the orchestra and the refreshments around the high table, at the center of which, the duchess sat in a fancy, thronelike chair (the only one in the room, as far as I could tell). She didn't even seem to talk to anyone. A couple of times I danced near her, and I couldn't tell if she was watching me or staring through me in an old-fashioned cut direct. The other group was everywhere else.

Twice I spotted Robert heading in my direction, but there was always another partner for me to turn to and make my escape. Once, when I was between partners and I saw him trying to zero in, I tried my summer move—a beeline for the rest room. I was saved by teenaged Sergei Trasyemova, who had scraped up the courage to ask me to dance. We fumbled stiffly through a cha-cha.

Then there was a new partner, one whose red hair and huge chin I recognized. In slacks and pullovers, or in that stupid pirate costume last summer, Percy von Mecklundburg had looked dorky, but in a Brioni tuxedo, he came on with an old-style movie hero vibe.

“Will you dance with me?” he asked shyly.

Thirsty, my feet protesting after avoiding being smashed by nervous young Sergei, I even so, said yes. He was so shy, and his eyes were so unhappy I felt like turning him down would be puppy-kicking, even though he was at least my age.

Percy's dancing was more absentminded than enthusiastic. It was clear within a few steps he mainly wanted to talk. “I don't care what they say,” he began. “I believe it, that you came to see Ruli.”

Unlike the rest of your family?
I thought, wincing inside.

“She liked you,” he went on.

Help me
, I remembered. “She didn't know me,” I protested, feeling the weight of guilt.

Percy's lips shaped words, and one hand twitched in my grip, a gesture subdued, as if he struggled to give voice to images. “Beka says you were for Ruli a symbol of freedom. I think that is right. Like my pirates were for me.” He smiled, and I remembered his pirate costume at the masquerade.

Tony'd had the exact same costume, which he'd worn with a piratical air, so he could kidnap me right off the ballroom floor. But that was never Percy's fault.

He went on, “Only my pirate drawings were more, oh, more freedom of—of choice, of imagination. Pirates were free of family, of obligation. I love Dobrenica,” he said quickly, earnestly. “I could never be happy anywhere else.”

“Not even Paris?”

“I could have loved the old Paris of candles and artists. The Paris of today, with neon and diesel fumes, no.” He lifted his gaze up at the martial figures of the baroque era. “Ruli, she wanted Paris, she wanted freedom. You were free. She had Magda always watching and reporting to Tante Sisi.”

“Why didn't she just leave?”

“Her mother would cut her off.” He lifted his shoulders. “Unless she went to the north of England to be mired up with her father, and that would make her just as unhappy. How should she survive?”

I was going to retort, “She gets a job, like anyone else,” but I clamped down on that. What seems so easy to one person can be impossible to another. While I don't have much (well, any) sympathy for the rich who suddenly find themselves having to struggle like everyone else in the world, I could understand how Ruli, raised all her life to the job of princess, would feel lost if she ran from that to the unknown. And face it, who would hire her? She wasn't trained to do anything except wear expensive clothes and act like a princess.

Percy went on. “Ruli helped me here, did you know that?”

He flashed a glance up at Jupiter gazing sternly down at us from beyond the wheel chandeliers. “See over there? Ruli got Honoré to help her find the portrait of Alexander II for me. All that was left was the outline of his battle tunic and his feet. He built the first riding school here, on the site of the old medieval castle. Took six of us to shore up the fresco, which was crumbling at the touch. Moss had grown where the walls weren't filled with bullet holes from the Soviets. Or maybe it was the Germans. Did you know that the Soviets used this hall as a car park for their trucks and transports?”

Image flash: the mossy, bullet-pocked walls, a smell of mildew and gasoline, the hulking shapes of mud-splattered old vehicles. I blinked it away, amazed. In all the times I'd seen Percy the summer before, I had never heard so much talk from him. He was like a dam released at last as he told me the history of the riding school and what he and his team of painters had to do to restore the old frescos—with mostly volunteer labor, from the sound of it. Huh, I thought as the dance came to a close. Robert might be short on cash, but he'd sure scored by getting Percy to do the restoration as a freebie.

When the dance music wound down, Percy smiled. “Thank you. Oh, there's Phaedra. She seems to want me, or maybe it's you?”

We slipped through the crowd forming up for the next number, and made our way toward Phaedra, who leaned against a chair midway along the wall, well away from her family, cool and elegant as a knife.

When we joined her, she greeted Percy, asked him if he was having a good time, and listened to him go on about the last-minute rush to get the south wall done—“Nobody knows it but the paint under the gallery is still wet,” he said, pointing to the martial scene directly below Gilles and his film crew.