Blood on Silk (27 page)

Stricken, Elizabeth looked at her and couldn’t speak. What the hell could she say?

“Shit,” Mihaela muttered. “What did he do to you?”

Hysteria arrived like an old friend, but at least she knew how to deal with that, swallowing it down before the laughter became more than a hiccup.

He took me to his palace and made love to me all night until I felt safe and warm and happy. And then he drank my blood. . . . He used words like “love,” the meaning of which varies so much even among the truthful that it’s hardly worth regarding. Except to note that a polite synonym of the verb “to fuck” is “to love.” And trust me, in every sense, I’ve been fucked.

When she raised the glass to her lips once more, her hands shook. But at least her internal rant had remained internal.

She lowered the glass and held it in her lap with both hands under three pairs of anxious eyes.

“He drank my blood until I lost consciousness.”

Mihaela turned her head up, searching for the wound. There might have been still a mark of some kind, for her breath hitched.

“How did you manage to get back here?” István demanded.

“I don’t know.” Elizabeth fingered the sleeve of her shirt. “But judging by my dress, he brought me.”

“Why?” Konrad stepped closer. “Why would he bother? Why did he leave you alive when he needs your blood so much? Elizabeth, did he do anything else?”

For a moment, she wondered if he was referring to the sex. Not in her wildest, angriest dreams could she call it rape. Even stranger was her not wanting to pretend to herself. She wanted to remember her own desires, her own responses, her own pleasure. She just didn’t want to feel so . . . betrayed.

“Did he make you drink his blood?” Konrad demanded.

“No,” Elizabeth said, revolted, and watched the quick, relieved exchange of glances among the hunters. “Is that how it’s done? Creating a new vampire? Like in
Dracula
?”

“Part of it,” Mihaela admitted. “But it has to be done at the moment of death.”

Elizabeth’s stomach twisted. “Then I wouldn’t know, would I? Perhaps he did kill me; perhaps he made me drink when I thought I was unconscious and I was actually dead—I wouldn’t know.”

Mihaela glanced up at the others. Konrad took his hand out of his pocket and threw something to Elizabeth. She caught it one handed, from instinct, and saw that it was a small detector. It was switched on and lay still on her palm, silent and dull.

“Is that conclusive?” she managed.

“On any but an Ancient, and we’re working on that—” He broke off as a ringtone sounded, and fished his phone out of the other pocket.

“I think he’ll be back,” Mihaela said grimly. “He’s still playing.”

“He meant to kill me,” Elizabeth blurted. “He told me so at the beginning, when we arrived in his house.”

“You were in his house?” István jumped on it at once. “Where is it? Could you take us there?”

Could she? Even if her memory and her poor sense of direction came up to the mark, could she? The idea should
not
feel like betrayal. He’d fed from her, after everything that had gone before. . . .

She opened her mouth, but Konrad spoke first, snapping his phone shut and shoving it in his pocket. “The vampire Lajos is dead. Saloman killed him at dawn, along with a human who got in the way.”

Water slopped from her glass, darkening a growing patch on the sheet. Blood sang in her ears. “Which human?” she whispered.

“Lajos’s human protector—or slave, if you prefer. Nasty piece of work who’s committed all sorts of foul crimes to please his master. We never had enough evidence to pin them on him. He was probably hoping to be ‘turned.’ The important point is, the Budapest vampires are falling over themselves to ally with Saloman now. As if they were just waiting to see how he handled his enemies. Zoltán has left Transylvania, presumably heading for a show-down with Saloman.”

“He’ll lose,” István said with certainty.

“Will he?” Konrad sounded excited. “Think about it. Why did Saloman leave it so long to kill Lajos?”

“Games,” Elizabeth muttered. “He likes to play cruel games.”

Mihaela nodded. “Increases the fear.”

“Perhaps,” Konrad allowed. “Or perhaps he isn’t as strong as everyone thinks he is. Whom has he taken out so far? Karl, the weakest of his vampire killers. He hasn’t touched Zoltán, whom he might reasonably accuse of usurping his power. Perhaps he needed Elizabeth’s blood even to be strong enough to take out Lajos.”

“Then why didn’t he finish her and get twice the power he did?” István demanded.

“God knows. He’s an Ancient. He knows things that wouldn’t even enter anyone else’s head—vampire or hunter—as possibility. Perhaps he gets more by milking her, letting her recover, and going back. He’s drunk from her twice now, after all, and she’s still here.”

Then why go to the trouble of seducing her? Just to pass the time? Just to amuse himself or scratch a sexual itch? A 312-year-old sexual itch. Excluding the nine days. No, there was more here. There was feeling for her; she could swear it. . . .

Who am I trying to fool? He’s thousands of years old, fascinating, magnetic, dangerous, with all the added attraction that somehow implies. I’m a sexually inexperienced, socially inept nobody. What the hell could he feel for me except passing amusement?

Shite. Am I grateful even for that? What is
wrong
with me?

“You might be right,” Mihaela said, “though I wouldn’t like to bet my life on the weakness of the vampire I saw last night, flying through the Angel’s roof with Elizabeth in one arm. The other point is, he’s now a lot stronger. He has killed Lajos and drunk again from Elizabeth. Our time is running out, and we can’t protect her. He knows she’s here.”

Konrad’s face changed. For once, he said what Elizabeth was thinking. “He knows you’re here too. Neither of you is safe. You need to move to headquarters until we get this sorted out.”

Dmitriu liked train travel. He liked the hypnotic sound it made, passing over rails, the pleasant sense of limbo, having departed one place, but not yet arrived in another. He didn’t get that from walking or riding. And of course, there was often opportunity for a quick snack in a quiet, dark corridor. A little hypnosis as taught him by Saloman, and his victim didn’t remember anything. The same hypnosis was useful when presenting the conductor with a piece of paper that was not a ticket, or the border police with an obviously fake passport.

This particular journey wasn’t quite so pleasant. For one thing, he couldn’t wander up and down the train in case he encountered Zoltán or one of his bodyguards. There was no point in total masking on a psychic level if one then walked physically into the person one was trying to avoid.

And so he sat alone and still, several carriages away from the other vampires, watching the darkness rush him rhythmically toward Budapest. At least there he’d get a decent meal—and the pleasure of Saloman’s company.

On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he was doing Saloman a real favor. The Ancient would know as soon as Zoltán set foot in the city. He didn’t need Dmitriu to come and tell him. Dmitriu just couldn’t shake the notion that Zoltán was up to something. Last night he’d visited a Romanian politician in her house and hadn’t killed her. And then tonight he’d left in too much secrecy for a vampire who either had to confront or submit to his erstwhile ally.

In the meantime, the
puszta
—the great plain that spread eastward from Budapest—was dull. Even in darkness, Dmitriu preferred the hills and mountains of Transylvania. Still, it had been a long time since he’d experienced the crowds and the excitement of the city. And he admitted to profound curiosity as to what Saloman was up to.

As the train pulled at last into Budapest’s Keleti station, he couldn’t help the excitement that surged through him. It was almost light. He needed to find shelter fast, preferably with Saloman. He just hoped the bastard wasn’t playing masking games. The word was that he was increasingly visible in Budapest, and that with Lajos dead—they’d all felt that loss, or at least all the vampires old enough to sense anything more than their own animal hunger—everyone was desperate to submit to the awakened Ancient. Dmitriu assumed this was what had dragged Zoltán away from his futile courtship of the scattered Transylvanian vampires and sent him rushing hotfoot to the city.

Watching from the window, Dmitriu waited for the other vampires to pass before he left the train. And there they were, Zoltán’s two new bodyguards, looking like skinhead thugs as they swaggered through the crowd, which wisely gave them a wide berth.

However, where was Zoltán? Frowning, Dmitriu scanned the crowd both ahead and behind the bodyguards. There was no sign of him.

Alarm bells rang in Dmitriu’s head. Time was passing. The bodyguards had gone, and still Zoltán remained on the train. He was masking, but with severe concentration, Dmitriu could see through it. Who the hell was he hiding from? Saloman? Saloman would find him in the blink of an eye, if he was looking. . . .

Get off the train, moron, before we end up in bloody Vienna. . . .

Vienna. That was the plan. Zoltán had never been going to Budapest. His bodyguards were a decoy. He was traveling on in secret, with no companions, and that scared the hell out of Dmitriu. Not for one moment did he imagine that Zoltán was running away, giving up the struggle with Saloman before it had properly begun.

What was there in Vienna?

Everything. It was the gateway to the rest of Europe.

Dmitriu groaned. More passengers were getting on the train, loud in farewells and requests for help in finding their booked seats.

He could leap off and run to Saloman with this news that meant nothing, or he could stay aboard, arrive in Vienna in broad daylight, and find out where Zoltán was really going and why. While sheltering from the sun.

Why did he even send that girl to Saloman? Life was so much simpler when he slept.

And a hell of a lot duller.

The train roared back to life, and lumbered forward.

Elizabeth didn’t sleep well at the hunters’ headquarters. Not because her room wasn’t pleasant; on the contrary, when she thought about it, she rather liked it, all faded splendor and solid comfort. Nor was she troubled by nightmares, although she woke often in the night with an odd impression of candles and blood and silk sheets, and the warm tingle of sexual arousal—or satisfied pleasure. It felt like both.

It wasn’t so much her body as her brain that prevented her from sleeping. In particular, it was the simple question—
why?

Why did he not kill her? He’d meant to, she could swear. The bizarre mixture of seduction and promise of death had been genuine. She could even pretend the death part had been what persuaded her not to fight the seduction—and there was some truth in that. There had been a time when she’d believed she was playing for her life. It had gotten lost with humiliating speed in the whirlwind of lust and sensual pleasure, and finally vanished when the first lovemaking had ended without biting.

I’ve won
, she’d thought.

What in God’s name had made her believe that? When had he said,
One fuck, one bite, and you’re dead
? Quite the opposite; he’d promised her a whole night of sex before killing her, and that was exactly what he’d given her. She had no reason to believe that he’d changed his mind, no evidence for her belief that she’d won.

And, of course, she hadn’t. He’d bitten her, fed from her, just before dawn, adding that cold, insidious pleasure to all the rest that she’d absorbed and reached for so greedily. It was only when she’d begun to come down that the reality had penetrated her fog of stupid, sexual ecstasy with the awful realization that she hadn’t won after all; that it had meant nothing to him.

And yet now, on her second night of tossing and turning in the large, soft old bed in the hunters’ headquarters, her brain hung on to his words with tenacity.

For this moment, this night, Elizabeth, I love you.

She wanted to believe it. She needed to believe it. She couldn’t bear the idea that she’d given herself to a monster without feelings.