Blood Spirits (66 page)

Except for the glittering chandelier hanging over the front stairwell, the upstairs wasn't lit. Rainbow sparkles splashed the stairs, and the walls, as I ran up, my head throbbing in time to my steps.

I reached the darkened hallway, and slowed, knife at the ready.

I remembered the layout: the big rooms at the front belonged to Milo and Alec. As I started down the main hallway toward the guest rooms, I caught the murmur of voices almost smothered by the louder noises echoing up from below.

The door to my old room was open—empty, except for a trace of Gran's familiar scent, Shalimar. She'd been here and recently, too.

She wasn't downstairs, and she wasn't in the room . . . that meant she'd been grabbed by Jerzy. To use as a hostage?

Oh no you don't
, I muttered as I tiptoed down the hall, then paused at the corner to listen. The adjacent hallway led to the wing called the Children's Suite, unused by any actual kids since the early thirties, when Milo was a boy. It had been closed off, unheated, so it was deep-freeze cold.

From the far end came noises. Voices. I ran soundlessly, closing the gap.

“. . . but your father was not a villain,” Gran was saying to someone. “One might say his heart was perhaps too generous.”

Jerzy laughed softly. When you didn't see his handsome, friendly face, the sound was creepy.

“Might one?” Jerzy asked, mocking her elegant diction. “Or might one say he could not keep his trousers buttoned? He was certainly unable to resist my mother, who was an evil witch, I was often told as I was growing up. Who knows? It might even be true.”

I slowed, staying back about fifteen yards. I had two weapons: the knife, and surprise. I had only one chance, and I had to get between him and Gran.

“Do you believe she was evil?” Gran asked, calm and conversational, as they turned the far corner.

I tiptoed behind, wildly making and discarding plans.

“Do you really want to know, Princess Lily?” Jerzy asked. “Or are you just speaking to postpone what awaits you here?”

“I wish to know,” she said, still calm, still conversational.
Everyone is king or queen of their own demesne
. “And if what you say is true, that you will live forever, and that my life is ending, well, I would like to enjoy what remains by gaining understanding.”

“They all said she was the devil. I never met her. She sold me to Sisi's family when I was a baby—of which they never failed to remind me. How poetic, this justice! And how fitting, that my first meal will be the purity of Dsaret blood.”

Now.
I hefted my knife, poised to close the distance—

And froze when a third voice spoke, a female voice, low with laughter, said, “Are you not a little ahead of yourself, dear boy?”

Jerzy said, “I have someone much better than Alec Ysvorod. Who can wait his turn. Discovered her quite by accident. Or is this what you call synchronicity? Why are you here? Where is Elena?”

“Elena is not here,” the female cooed. “She and her followers seem to be caught outside the city. But Augustus is present. You may complete your covenant with him.”

“Augustus,” Jerzy stated with satisfaction. “Better than Elena.” Then, with a kind of ritual cadence, “I offer my blood in covenant.”

I popped around the corner just in time to see Jerzy and Gran, outlined by silvery moonlight, passing inside a room.

“We will accept of your blood in covenant,” repeated the female. She sounded young. “Chérie, will you do the honors?”

How many people were
in
that room?

“—
you?
” Jerzy exclaimed. “But I thought—”

“Your covenant is about to be kept. Or shall you wait another year?”

“No, no,” Jerzy said in haste. “It does not matter. Merely surprise. By all means—it should be a pleasure of an agreeably twisted sort.”

We will accept
? It was time to run for help. But first I had to spot Gran, make sure she wasn't in imminent danger.

“Chérie?” the female said.

I pressed myself flat against the wall and sidled to the door, then carefully peered in. The moonlight streamed in through two tall windows. It was enough to reveal a confusion of figures. Which was Gran?

Jerzy's ruddy hair glinted like dying embers. He seemed to be sitting in a chair, with a female in a long pale blue gown half-leaning, half sitting on him in a parody of passion. That's when the noises started. He gave a groan and a hissing indrawn breath as the female made kissing, sucking sounds—again, a horrible parody of passion.

“Not all. Not all,” whispered the female from the shadowy corner of the room. “We must keep our covenant.”

Reality hit me then, knocking my wits askew as I realized,
These people are vampires
. For the first time I could actually see them.
No crystal
.

Gran's pale face was outlined by moonlight. She'd been shoved into a carved wooden chair, from which she gazed into the face of a young woman who was also silhouetted against the window.

For a heartbeat I stared in astonishment at the two profiles, one young and one old. It was as if the same woman faced herself at her coming of age and at the other end of life: They were the same size, the same build. The only difference, besides the aging in Gran's face, was the silver of Gran's hair in its coronet, unsteady after a long journey and being shoved around by Jerzy. The other's pale hair was perfectly coifed, marcelled around her face, and twisted up into an elegant chignon in back.

Gran seemed utterly dazed.
“Rose?”
she whispered. “Rose, is that you?”

“It is, Lily.
Quelle surprise
, eh?” Rose turned her head. “Neatly done, chérie,” she cooed in that distinctive old-fashioned French that Gran had been taught, and that Gran in turn had taught to my mother and me. “Not a drop spilled.
Chic alors!
”

At that moment, one of the shadows in the corner
moved
. Like ink, or lightless fog, it flowed across the room between me and Jerzy, and as every hair on my body stood up, Jerzy let out a long sigh, almost a groan, as a phosphorescent glow glimmered around him and the slim woman in ice blue, like moonlight on water.

She backed away, her head bowed as Stygian dark covered Jerzy, utterly blocking the light. Terror froze me—I could not have moved as I stared into that blackness.

Then it swept away from Jerzy's chair. I caught a brief ruby gleam of red along the inside of a pale, moonlit wrist, then the shadow blended into the darkness of the corner once again.
What was that?

In the chair Jerzy lay, eyes open and reflecting moonlight, breath laboring. His mouth was a rictus, black-smeared in the faint light. “Oh, it's good! It's good! I feel . . .” He struggled up. “Oh yes, I feel
young
.” He flexed his hands. “If I'd had this strength a week ago, that
abruti
Honoré wouldn't be running around the city now. Maybe it's better he's alive. He'll taste good.” He laughed. “You first, though, Aurelia Dsaret, you first.”

He lunged up out of the chair, and reached for Gran. Instinct unlocked my muscles. I hefted my knife, poised on my toes to spring—

But the slim woman in blue was faster. She stepped between Jerzy and Gran. She brought up her hands. The faint light from the window gleamed along something long and sharp in each fist as, with superhuman strength, she buried one in Jerzy's chest, and when his body jolted in shock, his hands going to the stake, she drove the other one up under his chin into his head.

He fell with a crash on the floor as I stuttered to a stop in the middle of the room, knife poised.

Jerzy wheezed, “What are you doing?” The thing in his throat bobbled obscenely.

“Keeping
my
covenant,” the female in blue whispered.

Jerzy twitched and jerked and writhed, his body bucking like a beached fish as
things
curled out of his body, like ivy tendrils, only they glistened slick and red-streaked in the moonlight. From his chest, the stake sprouted twig buds. A lump forced up between his ribs, tore through his vest, and curled wetly over his stomach. He began to scream voicelessly, a high, thin, barely audible squeal as another tendril burst out of one eye, waving around slickly. From other parts of his body, tendrils emerged, budding tiny leaves, and seeking light.

Jerzy gave a long, agonized gasp, and then collapsed, lifeless.

Gran's whisper broke the terrible silence as she began saying her rosary.

I stood there, frozen again, as I tried to gather my wits.

Good thing? Jerzy was dead. Bad things? I'd blown my surprise, and here we were, Gran and I, surrounded by vampires.

I turned to the one in blue, still brandishing the chopping knife, and it was my turn to freeze, for I knew that face. It was my own.

It was
Ruli.

She had become a vampire.

FORTY

“W
ELL DONE, CHÉRIE.” A rustle of silk, and Rose stepped into the soft light. She couldn't have been over nineteen at most, the soft contours of her face chillingly familiar. Her white satin gown draped in a thirties line.

She turned back to Gran, and patted her lined cheek. “Oh, how I hated you before you left,” she said. “Why did Mandros choose you over me? Even after you ran away, when he came back, all he talked about was you. The night I
married
him, he talked about you.”

“Rose,” Gran murmured. “I am so sorry.”

Rose laughed softly. “For years I thought about this moment, and how fun it would be to exclaim about how you had aged. So old! But it is not fun, now that I see you.”

“I am old,” Gran said, hands clasped together. “You are not. Rose, what happened?”

Rose pointed with a satin-slipper covered toe at Jerzy, whose tendrils' growth had begun slowing, now that his life force was gone. “His mother. She knew some of the mountain
inimasang
, cornered me at a Christmas party, and offered my life in trade for certain secrets of Vrajhus.”

Rose gestured toward the corner where the fulgent shadow—really, the only word for that guy—
loomed
. “Antonius Augustus said I was too beautiful to be dead, and so I woke up and found myself in this form.” She ran a slim hand from her youthful neck down to her hip. “In my turn, I had no wish to see Ruli dead. Jerzy's covenant was not made with me, but with Elena, a vampire who had been cut off from her followers when Mandro's plane closed the portal. Jerzy's mistake was accepting my offer to complete it, in his hurry to make the Ysvorods his first kills.”

Gran whispered, “I do not understand.”

Rose swooped on her. I have to hand it to Gran—she didn't jump or shriek or recoil as I firmly believe I would have done. She stilled, and I could see her gnarled hands tighten, but Rose just brushed her lips over Gran's forehead, laughing softly in her throat, then drifted my way. “Neither of us had Mandros very long, did we, Lily? My one comfort is that the
salope
had him even less. Though it was long enough to produce
this
.” She nudged Jerzy with the toe of her silken shoe.

Rose lifted her hand toward the doorway. “We must depart at once. There must be no evidence in this house. As well he insisted that the covenant be completed here,
hein
? He was so dramatic, wishing the last desecration to be completed in Milo's home. We shall see that Jerzy takes root in an appropriate garden.
Mon ange?
”

The silhouette Rose called Antonius Augustus emerged, light shifting around him in a disturbing way so that all I could see, even though he passed within a yard of me, was a starlit masculine line of shoulder, bending inward to lean hip.

“You may regard Jerzy as your first kill,” Rose said to Ruli. Then she and Antonius Augustus stooped, and without apparent effort picked up Jerzy's body, from which the horrible tendrils dangled around his lifeless limbs. “My sister and her granddaughter seem uncomprehending still. Please explain, Granddaughter,” Rose murmured sweetly over her smooth bare shoulder. The moonlight was full on her face as she smiled. “Then join us. Lily, darling, I promise that you and I will have a chat later. Watch for me.”

They bore their burden out of the room with no more noise than the whisper of silk, and the soft sough as the tall vampire's tenebrous cloak brushed the doorway.

The air stirred, bringing a coldness and a musty scent, as of ancient tombs, and the faintest tang of blood, not quite covered by the drift of expensive perfume.

Then they were gone.

Leaving Gran and me with Ruli, who sat in the chair that Gran had vacated, her long fingers spread on her thighs. The skirt of her gorgeous dress surrounded her like a rilling stream, glacier pale.

Gran sank onto the bed, her hands pressed to her heart.

“Oh, that was . . . wonderful,” Ruli breathed.

“You're, um, breathing,” I pointed out brilliantly.

“Oh yes. The blood does need oxygen. That much is still the same.” She got to her feet and ran her hands down her gown again. The bodice was marred by droplets of black. “Ugh. I did spill. But at least not on the floor. I'll have to change.”

“Ruli, what happened to you?”

She lifted her face. It was my face, heartbreakingly, eerily, my face, but thinner. “Jerzy opened a new portal to the Nasdrafus by offering me as a sacrifice on the twenty-first, on which coincided the solstice and the eclipse. Only
inimasang
know of this portal as yet. Many will not use it, Rose says, because of the way it was made.”

“On your death?” I asked, and on her nod, “Rose mentioned a covenant.”