Darkness Embraced (13 page)

Aye!
Cuinn’s voice was a deadly hiss in the confines of my skull.

“Perhaps,” I said, “or perhaps it occurs to me that you would dare loathe the rabbit when you yourself are a terrible huntsman, Gaspare.”

I heard the sound of his chair clatter to the floor a moment before his fist balled in my hair. He jerked my head back and drew his other hand back as if to strike me.

Renata’s voice cracked like a whip, full of heat and command. “Gaspare!”

I narrowed my eyes in defiance.

He used the grip he had to pull me up high on my knees. “Wretched little bitch!”

I heard the hiss of steel sliding from a sheath.

“Let her go.” Vasco’s voice dripped with cold fire as he pointed the fox blade at Gaspare.

Gaspare snarled and spat, “You would protect her?”

Vasco’s eyes brightened with power, rocking waves of an azure ocean. His voice dripped with unrelenting challenge. “Sì.”

I took the opportunity the distraction presented, catching Gaspare’s hand between my fingers. I am a vampire and we are all supernaturally strong. Though I have been an Underling for two-hundred years, I used my strength against him, digging my fingers into his skin between his thumb and index finger like a vice. Gaspare reacted by loosening his hold. I caught his hand, pushing it back toward his wrist until I felt the bones grinding. Something in his wrist popped and he screamed.

Such a small noise for such a loud scream.

I moved as I had seen Vasco move, too quick for the eyes to follow. A strike of lightning that never strikes twice. The throne room was a blur around me. I was motion. I was liquid. I caught Gaspare’s shoulders and he tried to move, tried to see it coming, but he was too slow. I threw my body into it, ramming my knee high up between his legs as hard as I could. I used the grip on his shoulders to pull his body into the collision, and then I turned, as if dancing the steps of a dance that my body knew and had performed a thousand times before. I used his weight against him, used the momentum of the impact to push him facedown on the stone floor.

I shoved my knee hard into the back of his spine. He tried to reach for me, and I caught his wrists, jerking his arm up high behind his back until I heard the ball and socket joints of his shoulders dislocate in a sickeningly thick sound.

Gaspare screamed for me again. On the edges of his scream I heard Baldavino’s laughter, heard him say, “Looks like someone’s been teaching the little Underling how to wrestle.”

Baldavino didn’t speak often. On the rare occasion that he opened his mouth, I could not remember a time when anything good came of it. He was a prick, in much the same way that Gaspare had always been, and yet not. I had always been fairly certain that Baldavino simply hated everyone with an equal passion. Gaspare, on the other hand, relished belittling and demeaning those he deemed beneath him. It was two different types of arrogance, but still, it was arrogance nonetheless.

Gaspare tried to get up and Vasco was there, placing a booted foot hard against the back of his head.

“Signore, I would not advise struggling any further,” he said.

Gaspare went incredibly still beneath me.

“Epiphany?” Vasco made my name a question.

“Yes, Vasco?” I asked sounding polite and calm and not like I was holding a man captive.

“Are you well?”

I looked up at him and felt a dark smile tug at my lips. “Yes.”

The corner of Vasco’s mouth rose in a half-smile.

An eruption of noise battered my ears as someone clapped, hard and rapid.

Lucrezia’s voice slithered like a whispering snake throughout the throne room. “Brava, Epiphany,” she said. “Molto bene.”

I didn’t turn to look at her. The space between my shoulder blades tensed as I heard the sounds of her skirt slithering across the stones. She knelt beside me, leaving only a few feet between us. Her eyes sparkled with delight and she tilted her head to the side to look down at Gaspare.

“That was nicely done, wouldn’t you say?”

Since it seemed she was speaking to Gaspare, I didn’t say anything.

Gaspare didn’t either.

Lucrezia reached out, as if to touch me. I moved from the waist up, keeping my face out of her reach. Her eyes closed, and as if slipping on a mask, when she opened them again she smiled oh-so-sweetly at me.

I forced myself not to recoil.

“Do you still fear me?” she whispered in a small voice, like a monster pretending to be cute and cuddly, when you know full well it will slit your throat the minute you turn your back.

I met her gaze and said, “I do not like you.”

“Buono,” she said in a darkly pleased voice, “molto buono.”

I felt a touch at the back of my neck that nearly made me jump out of my flesh. “Lucrezia.” Renata’s voice dripped behind me like something even more deadly than Vasco’s and Lucrezia’s combined. The tips of her fingers rested at the base of my neck like an anchor.

Lucrezia looked up at Renata’s face.

I felt the movement travel through Renata’s body and knew when Lucrezia flicked her eyes to her empty seat on the dais that Renata was pointing at it.

Lucrezia stood and gave an elegant curtsey. “Sì, mia padrona.” The serious tone to her voice didn’t match the sparkling amusement in her expression.

Renata knelt much as Lucrezia had.

“Dante,” she said. “Dominique.” She called their names like a cool command.

Gaspare spoke then, his voice thin and frantic. “Mia padrona! No! Per favore!” he pleaded.

I tried to follow and only managed to catch,
my mistress, no, please.
You’d think that after two hundred years I’d have learned more Italian. Well, guess again. Considering the only time Vasco spoke it was when he was cursing at something, and the only time the others spoke it was when they were trying to be sneaky, my knowledge only went so far. Very quickly spoken Italian was too far. I’d never been adept at translating that.

Dante and Dominique came to us. Dante was naked from the waist up, wearing only a pair of red leather pants and dark boots. Dominique wore black leather, with a plain white T-shirt stretched over the bulk of his chest. For the sake of my own survival and health, I wouldn’t in a million years have started a fight with either one of them. Supernatural strength or no, they were both built like their bodies were made for throwing people around. As guards, that was pretty much what they did. They protected the Queen. If that meant throwing people around, I’d no doubt that either of them would not hesitate to do it.

Dante reached out to touch my shoulder and Dominique stopped him, shaking his head and sending his dark braid swaying down his back.

Gaspare pleaded relentlessly. Renata ignored him. Vasco still had his foot on the back of his head. I wondered if he was getting a leg cramp, but highly doubted it.

Gaspare tried to wriggle out from under me and I pulled his arms up even higher, slamming my knees down into his back. Vasco shifted his foot to the back of Gaspare’s neck, leaning his weight into it.

I dropped my gaze to the black velvet of Gaspare’s back and said through gritted teeth, “He’s going to fight you.”

Dominique responded loud enough that I could hear him over Gaspare’s slew of frantic Italian. “Let us worry about that, piccolo.”

I ignored the fact that he’d called me a nickname that meant “little.” Dominique had never been rude to me or treated me badly.

I slowly started to get up and then realized slow wasn’t going to work with the way Gaspare was struggling.

I got up in one fluid stretch and moved out of the way.

Dominique and Dante moved in unison, as if they instinctively knew what Gaspare would try to do and they’d rehearsed beforehand just how they would react. Dante grabbed Gaspare’s kicking feet while Dominique caught him by the arms.

They carried Gaspare out of the room like that, with Gaspare stretched out like a wiggling eel between them.

Only then did Vasco sheath the fox blade.

Relief and tiredness left my body in the form of a sigh. It occurred to me why I had never stood up and defended myself against the Elders. I looked out over their faces and saw that half of them held contempt while the other half held either disinterest or curiosity. Sognare’s wizened eyes met mine and I guessed that he had taken his seat for lack of anything better to do, for I had not heard Renata order him to do so. There was a certain amount of curiosity in his gaze that I did not understand.

I never stood up and defended myself against them, because some of them I would always have to defend myself against. I had thought it better to be as quiet as a mouse hiding in the long grass and hoping the predator would pass me by than a tiger whose very bold colors and stripes invoked challenge.

I turned to Vasco, who gave a slow nod, as if to let me know that he understood my thoughts and had seen the looks too.

I had just declared my very bold colors by standing up to Gaspare.

Aye
, Cuinn said softly,
but this is the way things are meant to be.

I hope you’re right.

I am right in that I know ye are more than ye seem, Epiphany, and these vampires have not reckoned the half of it.

Renata waited until Dominique and Dante had returned to proceed. Vasco was sent to admit two lesser attendant vampires into the room. The girl was only a few inches taller than the boy and they both appeared to be about some twenty years of age, though I knew they were much older, not yet two hundred, but older still.

They kept their heads at an angle so that their long hair hid their youthful features. The girl’s hair was a blond so light that it was almost white. The boy’s hair was a honey blond so dark it bordered on brown. They set about preparing the dream trial area. I watched, curious, as they arranged large fur rugs on the floor.

I turned in time to catch Sognare hobbling over on his cane. His silver beard trailed the floor as he made his way to me. Thick brown robes covered him from neck to foot. Sognare’s eyes were almost as gray as the hair on his head, but not quite, for there was a dusting of blue in them.

“Come,” he said, “sit.”

I sat crossed-legged on a thick gray rug. What animal the rugs had once been, I did not know, nor did I particularly care to find out.

“You have fed, yes?”

I could still taste Renata’s blood in my mouth, something faint, but sweet and metallic. I closed my eyes trying to hide the remembrance. I inclined my head and said, “I have.”

“Good,” he said, using his crooked wooden stave of a cane to help lower his elderly body to the ground.

It took long enough that I couldn’t help but smile and say softly, “That body of yours doesn’t seem very convenient.”

Behind his long beard, I thought I saw the flash of a smile. “Ahh, the folly of the old,” he said, “I feared death, and now I find myself stuck in a perpetual state of it, bag of brittle bones.” He chuckled, crossing his legs to mirror mine.

I seriously doubted the old wizard of a vampire was that brittle of bone. One of the benefits of being a vampire, the body heals at a supernatural pace. It’d taken a great deal of strength for me to break Gaspare’s wrist, and had I been human, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it. It’d probably take as much strength to break Sognare’s wrist, despite appearances to the contrary.

Vasco began walking a circle around us; only this time he did not use his sword.

“We shall begin while Signore Vasco sees to the anello di protezione,” he said. “Close your eyes, Epiphany.”

I did as told, hoping that the area of protection would protect me as well.

Sognare, the Lord of Dreams, began humming a solemn tune that was at once haunting and melancholic. I let go of my thoughts and listened to him.

When all was quiet, I waited, flinching when I felt his gnarled fingers brush across my eyelids.

“Exoculo,”
he murmured.

“Consopio.”
His fingers touched my brow.

“Alucinor.”
His touch stopped at my temples.

Sognare’s power reached out toward the center of my being like some great clawed hand. I found myself dizzy and sick.

*

There was nothing, nothing but complete and utter darkness. As soon as I thought it, there was cold, a cold that cut to the very bones of my body, fierce and sharp like needles. I reached out with my hands and felt nothing, nothing but air and darkness, nothing but that stabbing cold. I shivered with it, my teeth chattering and rattling my skull.

That was wrong.

As a vampire, I should not have felt the cold like a killing thing. I forced myself to focus and reached down, feeling the ground beneath me. Frozen blades of grass cut my hands and I raised them, feeling the blood trickling, but unable to see into such impenetrable darkness. I should have been able to see, at least enough to make out certain shapes.

I held my hands to my chest and got my feet under me. The darkness in my head spun like an invisible vortex. A light kissed the edge of that darkness, a light that spread its pink and orange fingers across the sky.