Blood Spirits (58 page)

In the summer, my first glimpse through this doorway had given me faces, inhuman except for two strange eyes—not human, or not completely human.

This time, what did I see? Nothing. Only the snowy slope beyond. Why was this time different? Last time there had been music, played by that talented boy, Misha. Wondering if he'd been making magic—and if it was deliberate or accidental—I cradled the prism in my hands, holding it before the archway.

As I tipped it slowly, I concentrated fiercely on
Esplumoir, Esplumoir, Esplumoir
.

That sense of falling pulled at my mind. I shut my eyes—and toppled headfirst into the snow.

One, two steps, and Tony hauled me to my feet.

“I'm fine. I'm fine. Let me try that again.”

“What happened? From here it looked like someone gave you a push.”

“It . . .” I gave up trying to find the words, braced myself, and glared down into the prism. My snowy mitten trembled, and my eyes blurred. I did relaxation breathing and began again. This time I got a sense of tunnel, or distance, or corridor, but not right in front of me. It pulled me to one side.

When I tried to force my concentration into the tunnel, that creepy inward freefall made my head spin. I shut my eyes, and my hands dropped in defeat. “This archway is not the portal to Esplumoir, or at least, we're not going to be able to use it. The prism keeps pulling me somewhere that way,” I said, flapping a hand. “The Esplumoir has to be there.”

“South,” Tony said. “At the heart of Dsaret Mountain. I thought this was too easy. We'll get an early start in the morning and find it tomorrow.” He looked around. “The sun is just vanishing. We'd better get inside. No telling how many of those damn things are coming through each night.”

My neck tightened. “Let's go.”

We started toward the house, me blinking to get rid of the blur and slight dizziness as I struggled to keep up with his long strides. He flicked a glance my way. “How much do you trust that prism?”

I fought a sudden yawn, so huge it felt like my jaw would unhinge. “I don't know. If I see something distinct I think I can trust it's real. For certain definitions of ‘real.'”

“So what have you seen that you trust?”

I blew out a cloud of vapor as I considered my answer. Tired as I was, I knew the question was not idle. “We went to the crash site. I saw the Daimler just before it went over the cliff. Before you waste your breath saying I saw what I wanted to, Beka and Phaedra tested me as much as they could.”

“Beka,” he breathed. “She never said anything at all about this.”

“Yes, well. I saw Alec asleep in the back, and a woman whose description Phaedra and Beka said fit Magda Stos. They recognized the way I described her chin. They called her
Barbe
.” Another yawn hit me on the last word.

“You met Magda last summer.”

“No, I didn't. But if you're expecting me to prove a negative, we can drop this subject right now.” He lifted a hand in a gesture that I interpreted as
go on, I won't argue
. “In the front seat was that Marzio guy, asleep. Like Alec. I mean, out cold, mouth hanging open.”

“Magda was driving, with Alec in the back seat?” Tony's expression had gone grim in the gathering shadows. “How do you know when it was? Oh. Marzio in the car—in Riev only a day, according what Gilles found out from the Vigilzhi.”

The last light was fading, and already the stars were popping out, twinkling like diamonds. Several of Tony's guys appeared, each carrying a lantern, and my worry eased. To hide how scared I'd been, I tipped my head back and looked at the sky. “'The types and symbols of eternity,'” I quoted, but got no flash of recognition, only a glance of inquiry. “From Wordsworth's ‘Simplon Pass.'” I pointed upward. “These mountains remind me of it.”

“I've probably heard it,” Tony admitted. “Alec and Honoré used to spout poetry by the yard until the rest of us threatened to chuck them down one of their poetic passes.”

“What have you got against poetry?”

“Nothing, as long as I don't have to listen to it when I'm on the watch for Russians, or wild animals. Or it's being declaimed in that bloody moo that schoolboys seem to think appropriate for verse.”

An unexpected spurt of sympathy made me laugh. It seemed disloyal to imagine Alec reciting poetry badly, but who is any good at fifteen? He certainly wasn't bad at it now—hoo-ee,
far
from it—but I was not going to discuss Alec with Tony.

We'd reached the door, walking past two guys with shotguns aimed out into the dark as someone hung up lanterns, each with a crystal inside. Tiny glints of rainbow lights twinkled.

Then the door was shut and barred, and I let out a sigh of relief.

We left our wraps in the coat room off the small hall. It smelled like wet wool in there. I leaned against the wall to steady myself. That session with the prism, on top of the long and incredible day, had tired me so much I felt as if I was floating gently at sea as I blinked around in the brightness of electrical light.

People came and went in the fine eighteenth century rooms with a purpose and familiarity that suggested—along with the stacks of ammunition, weapons, horse and reindeer gear, and other stuff—that this place had a whole lot more inhabitants than I'd been led to believe during summer.

“Through that door is the ladies.” Tony pointed. “Meet you out here.” He pushed a door open through which came men's voices.

There was hot water, I was glad to find. I felt somewhat less sticky and a little more awake after I'd washed my hands and face. The wakefulness came with a measure of uneasiness. Outside, who knew how many vampires there were. And inside? What kind of danger might I be in?

Tony was waiting in the hall, head bent as a familiar figure in a black dress grinned up at him, her prosthetic eye staring beyond him into space. “I shall see to supper myself. Good boy, you brought us one of your Paris surprises!”

“I know how you like your Paris desserts, Nonni.”

Madam Coriesçu cackled, rubbed her hands, and wandered off, ducking around guys standing in groups, some armed.

“This is a headquarters,” I said.

Tony grinned.

“A military headquarters.”

“Think of it as a field camp, if that helps.”

“It doesn't matter what I think. What matters are what kind of games you're playing.”

“Games?”

I was feeling that stomach-sinking sense of
uh-oh
.

Tony gave me a pained glance. “Our problems with the mining consortium have not conveniently gone away because we're having a spot of trouble with vampires and mystery conspiracies. In fact, the consortiums' continued interest in Dobrenica's mines and minerals in the face of Alec's truly heroic negotiations, as well as our gently diminished quotas, is disturbing. Do they see through Alec's policy of starving their profits? Or do they see something else they want here? But we are not going to solve that now.”

The mines—I'd forgotten the mines. Yet these were a huge part of Dobrenica's economy. But as he said, that problem was for later. “I can't help it,” I began, “if every new surprise brings my mind right back to the conspiracy. By which I mean
your
conspiracy.”

Tony's pained glance this time was far less humorous. “You really think I'd whack my own cousin?”

I was ready to retort
I think you'd whack your grandmother to gain power
, except I knew it wasn't true. Not quite.

Then he said with the old derision, “Perhaps I should rephrase. You really think if I were to whack Cousin Honoré, I'd be that incompetent?”

“I thought that fire at his home was pretty efficient.”

“It was efficient at destroying the house. Unless someone wanted Honoré only to suffer, then it was terribly
in
efficient. I think he was supposed to die, and the fire was to destroy the evidence. Only he wasn't hit hard enough.”

“So you thought it was me,” I said indignantly. “Well, since I thought it was you, I guess we're even on that one.”

He laughed as a bell clanged somewhere, echoing slightly. A genial roar of men's voices preceded a stampede.

“This way.” Tony opened a tall door carved with wheat sheaves around its edges, and turned an old-fashioned electrical knob on a nearby wall.

Light revealed a small room that I recognized immediately. As my gaze traveled over the darkened windows, the conservatory-grown flowers in pretty vases against walls of pale eggshell blue, and the painted pattern of rowan, holly, and hawthorn a foot or two under the ceiling, I was thrown back to the emotions of summer. How isolated I had felt—an emotion that has its comforts, for there is no responsibility with isolation. Now, as I approached one of the pretty little cabriole-legged chairs and sat down to place my hands on the cozy round table set for two, I felt the weight of my chosen obligations. And loyalties.

And dangers.

“This is the royal breakfast room,” I said inanely.

Tony sat across from me. “You and I will get a better dinner than the others. We're to have New Year's leftovers, more than half of our guests having not been able to get to us on New Year's Day.”

Nonni herself appeared, wearing an apron of white linen aged to a shade of ivory, the edging a pattern of lace not seen in over a century. With a twitch of shoulder and extra tweaks and pats, she set out dishes of gilt porcelain, edged with deep blues and greens and crimson, the central figures mythological in the neoclassic mode.

She was obviously very proud of these dishes; she'd even decanted the wine into a beautiful porcelain pot and poured it as a last gesture.

In my exhausted, bemused state her hand blurred, and I gazed at another hand, belonging to a much younger arm, charming in its shape. The shade of skin the warm brown associated with the equatorial regions of most of the world. I caught a brief glimpse of a young woman, then I blinked, and there was Nonni putting the decanter on the tray.

“
Bon appetit
,” she said, and left.

Tony lifted his goblet in toast, to which I responded. I took the tiniest sip, but even that much alcohol on top of an empty stomach was a mistake, or maybe I was going to see the ghosts anyway, because this time the vision was longer.

They were about my age: the woman with long-lashed, slanting black eyes and a rakish smile dimpled on one side; the man blond and handsome, his eyes honey-brown. They wore robes of silk and lace, their manner intimate, as morning sunlight streamed from the windows onto the very same set of dishes.

The golden light rippled . . .

A hand gripped my shoulder.

I jumped, and discovered I'd nearly fallen off my chair. I closed my eyes against the sickening swim-jolt of dizziness until it faded, then I cautiously opened my eyes.

Tony moved back to his chair. “I thought you were going to pass out.” He frowned into his wine glass. “If it's been doctored, the poison or drug is odorless.”

“I think it's just me. Maybe I'd better eat,” I said, and to forestall questions, added, “Tell me about these dishes. I know it's an old set.”

“It's actually a breakfast service. That decanter is the coffee urn. It was sent by some queen or other, when a mutual ancestor of ours married the crown prince, right after the Dobreni brush with Napoleon. I wonder why Nonni dug it out? I've only seen this particular set once, when I was scouting out something else.”

Nonni reappeared, wheeling an elegant cart. With a flourish she uncovered dishes and set them out, then she left.

The dizziness had abated enough to let me help myself to langoustines wrapped in phyllo with mousseline and caviar—a fancy dish I recognized because I'd had it once. “This is delicious,” I said grateful both for the food and for an easy subject. “But where did your cook possibly get lobster?”

“My chef?” Tony's lips parted, then he gave a slight shrug. “She brought baskets and boxes of fresh ingredients from Paris. Oversaw the unloading herself, and then put her own locks on the pantry doors.” He took another bite. “Though I've had this dish three times since New Year's, it's still good, which is why I brought the last of it up here in the hamper. Anyway, my mother hid all the good porcelain after she asked for this house as a wedding gift. Jakov told me once that Mother was afraid that Milo would remember these old plates and demand their return, as they were a Dsaret heirloom.”

“You told me once that this is her lair. When was she here last?”

He grinned conspiratorially. “Maybe five years ago. But she does think of it as hers.”

So yeah, he hadn't quite lied. He'd just left crucial information out—as usual. I made a private bet that Alec still thought the duchess came up here to visit “her” vacation house, and that he had no idea that Tony used it as a military outpost.

Or maybe he knew.

I considered that, as we worked through the amazing food.
Reblochon
cheese,
risotto
with
épeautre
accompanied by
girolles
mushrooms, and to remind us that we were not in a five star restaurant, it was all sopped up with plain bread rolls, but they were hot and fresh.

There was little conversation. I was too tired, and too wary of vampires and ghosts and Tony. Too worried about what was happening with Alec, and with Riev, once the sun had set.

“What are you thinking about so solemnly?” Tony asked, raising his wine goblet.

It caught the light, a ruby gleam, and there was the couple again. Ghosts or a glimpse of the past? This time they were silvery, hand in hand. It was the first time I'd ever seen two ghosts together like that. They were not looking at me, but gazing through the south window.