One With the Shadows (12 page)

“I think we are coming into the city.”

He sat up, pulled the shade open a crack and squinted into the brightness. “Would you care to tell me your real name?” He let the shade slip back into place. “I hate to lie to my mother.”

Kate sat up straighter, incensed. But after she had asked him all those impertinent questions about his disease, it might not seem unreasonable to him to ask her name.

She grimaced. “Kate. I always keep some version of Kate.”

He raised his brows. “And the last name? Not Mulroney, surely. It hardly suits you.”

“Why not?”

“Inelegant.”

“One doesn’t choose one’s name.”

“One always chooses who one is to some extent, in spite of one’s background.”

He was right about that too. The thought made her uncomfortable. She spent a fair amount of time around this man feeling uncomfortable.

“Names included,” he continued. “I chose mine because I liked the Eternal City, and wanted to be called after it. Urbano means ‘from the city.’”

“I know what it means,” she snapped. “Were you rebelling against your family?”

He gave a small, rueful smile. “Hardly. My mother encouraged me to change it. What woman wants to acknowledge a grown son?”

Kate was appalled. What kind of a mother was that? “Your other names as well?”

“No. I always keep my given name. I think of myself as Gian. Currently Gian Vincenzo.”

“I’m not sure of my real surname,” she admitted, “since Matthew was not my father.”

He nodded, silent, not pressing. So she went on. “Come to think on it, I’m not sure
his
real name was Sheridan, though that was what he claimed.”

“Sheridan.” He considered. “That fits. Shall you be called Miss Kate Sheridan?”

“I suppose so.” It was a commitment, after all, only for a few days.

“Then that is how I shall introduce you.”

Eight

Gian made certain to arrive when his mother was out. She might not be overjoyed to have the protection of a girl thrust upon her. Gian suspected she liked to think of herself as a girl in spite of her age. She had taken up residence in the Palazzo Vecchio on the central Piazza della Signoria of Firenze. Inconvenient. He had to bring Kate in the back entrance to avoid one particular piece of statuary in the piazza. He bribed his mother’s majordomo liberally and installed Kate in a comfortable bedroom behind the map room until he could prepare the way.

He waited in his mother’s apartments overlooking the piazza. The salon was lighted only by flickering sconces. The walls were covered with frescos now dark with age. It smelled of the oil and lemon used to polish the heavy furniture. The palazzo had not been modernized. His mother liked it for its location next to the former government offices, called, directly enough, Uffizi, now turned into an art museum. She also relished the fact that it had once been the town residence of Cosimo de’ Medici before he moved to the Palazzo Pitti across the river. His mother always liked taking something from the Medicis, though they had now vanished and it was only from their ghosts that she took it.

A carriage clattered into the courtyard and servants began bustling about in preparation. His mother always seemed to move about like a brisk breeze whirling up leaves before it.

“Gian? Gian is here?” Her footsteps quickened up the grand staircase from the audience hall. “At last.” The door burst open in a wash of cinnamon and ambergris.

“Gian!” She hurried to take his hands, laughing. “I thought you might be in the vicinity.”

He smiled. How could one not? She was so alive! She, for all her years, had not grown bored with living. “You look well,” he said. Her red and old gold brocade dress had full slashed sleeves and much Brussels lace, its waist lower than was the fashion at the moment. On her it looked timeless. She was a beautiful woman: dark hair, porcelain skin, and great, dark brown snapping eyes fringed with long lashes. No one would guess she was Gian’s mother, not only because of his light eyes, but because she looked younger than he did. She would have to be moving on soon, or her claim that excellent skin creams and cosmetics kept her looking young would no longer fool her jealous rivals. How she would hate to leave Firenze, even for a time.

“Of course I look well,” she said, laughing, “I always look well.” A frown appeared as she examined him. “But you, my son, look … worn. Were the wars so terrible?”

He shrugged. “War is war.” But he saw she would not be satisfied with that. “There were a lot of them. The killing was ugly.”

“Khalenberg says you were quite the hero.” She took off the tiny hat of old lace that nested in her upswept hair. “Algiers would have fallen without your leadership.”

“Hardly.”

“Why did you not have Bucarro send for me? I was dallying at some state function most intolerable when I could have been here with you, hearing all about it.”

“I … I’d rather not discuss it, if you don’t mind.” He paced to the balcony.

“As you wish.” Her voice held concern.

In the piazza below, women clustered about one of the statues just in front of the Uffizi’s main entrance in the May Tuscan evening. He sighed. Did they never tire of looking at it?

“When did Buonarroti finish that damn thing?” he growled.

“Oh, 1504 or 1505 I should think.” His mother’s voice drifted out from the darkness behind him, sounding fragile and feminine. That fragility was a lie.

He took a breath and leaned on the balustrade of the balcony. The air was scented with jasmine, warm with the promise of summer heat. Not so different from the heat and the jasmine in North Africa. He shook his head, lest the memories come and overwhelm him again. All this talk of the wars unnerved him. He tried to focus on the statue. “I don’t see the attraction.”

“Don’t you?” He could hear the smile in her voice.

“The hands and feet are too big,” he grumbled.

“They forgive Michelangelo that, my dear. It was meant to stand on the top of the Duomo. He wanted people to be able to see everything from the ground.”

“Well, now it stands in the piazza.” It was sixteen feet high. The pale marble gleamed in the moonlight through the patina of age. He couldn’t deny the sculptor’s genius. The contrapuntal stance of the body, the articulation of ligament and muscle—the damn thing looked like it would step off the pedestal at any moment. But the real artistry was in the expression. Buonarroti had captured young David in the moment after he had slain Goliath. Any other sculptor would have made the victor jubilant. But in Buonarroti’s
David
there was no triumph. The figure’s puckered brow showed only the realization that killing was not satisfying and the knowledge that, from this moment, everything had changed. It was a pensive look, disturbed and disturbing. Buonarroti had captured the instant in which the simple shepherd was transformed into an uneasy king. Where had Buonarroti seen that expression?

He didn’t think the expression was why the women clustered, though.

“Why ever did you pose for it, if it upsets you so to have it on display?”

The point exactly. Buonarroti had seen him at the baths. The brute could be very persuasive. Everything for art and all. Gian never thought anyone would recognize him with the statue perched so high up on the Duomo. Who knew they would set it in the Piazza della Signoria where every woman in Tuscany could ogle his nude body at their whim? White marble couldn’t render his coloring. But if women who met him didn’t jump to the pertinent conclusion at once, he was soon treated to a gasp of recognition. Even when he was fully clothed.

He appeared in the piazza these days only when he wanted women in his bed, for love or for blood. He made up stories of an ancestor who had posed for the statue. They wanted to test how far the likeness went. He clenched his jaw. Buonarroti had not exaggerated. Gian had put on a little bulk of muscle since then, but the essentials from a female point of view were the same. These days they would be disappointed in the actual operation of those essentials, but he made sure they had their pleasure of him, took his blood from them, and left them with ecstatic memories.

He turned into the salon, trying to assume nonchalance. “I wonder you can stand to have your son’s circumcision displayed beneath your window.”

“The statue reminded me of you. Two years is a long time to be without a son.”

Two years of killing. He blinked against the memories. An army of men who had been made vampires by an evil vampire woman called Asharti. She had thought to use that army to rule the world.

A pack of them descended on him, snarling like animals. His sword flashed but they came and came. Only a clean decapitation could kill them. Canvas flapped from the abandoned tents of the Kasbah. The night sky was black and moonless. He ducked under the blade of a scimitar. The aroma of unwashed bodies mixed with the scent of cinnamon and ambergris that marked their kind. His kind. And over all, the smell of blood. A blade found his side. One reached for his head … Rage washed through him. A tent erupted in flames …

He swallowed convulsively, blinking, and pushed down the memories. Strange, he had not had a single uncontrolled memory during the journey here. They had used to take him frequently at night, and haunt his dreams during the day ever since he’d returned. Perhaps his preoccupation with the stone was a good thing. Or was his real preoccupation with the girl? “I … I’m glad the statue was a comfort.”

His mother drew her brows together. Had she seen his lapse? “Come, sit.” She motioned to a carved mahogany chair with a cushion. “The war is over. It is time to think of your future.”

“Not yet. I have a final task to perform. A stone from the Temple of Waiting has surfaced. I must return it to Mirso.” And then there would be nothing left to do.

She drew a breath and let it out.

“I stay only to … make certain arrangements and I will go.”

Again she pointed to the carved wooden chair. “Then what?”

Ahhhh. That was the question now, wasn’t it? “I have no plans.” He didn’t want to reveal the turmoil inside him. But out of deference to her, he sat.

She simply waited, her snapping eyes filled with questions.

He shook his head. What could he tell her?

“Perhaps you could interest yourself in politics,” she suggested. “All these warring city-states allow foreign powers to pick us off one by one. The Spanish are bad masters, the Hapsburgs no better. They bleed us dry. The best thing that happened to us was Napoleon. He set things to rights. But he is exiled to Elba. What we require is a united Italy. The Carbonari have started an underground movement to achieve that. But they need a leader.”

He shrugged. “Some greedy new demagogues would just tear it all apart again.”

“Then speak out against the Inquisition. The Church has suppressed all original thinking. You write persuasively, and you certainly have no fear. You could make a difference.”

“The Renaissance is officially over, Mother, in case you haven’t noticed. All society talks about is opera and the latest castrati. No one cares about original thinking.”

His mother shook her head, exasperated. She picked up a parchment from her desk, but she only pretended to read it. She chewed her lip. Finally she looked up at him. “You know what you need?” Her tone was too casual for his liking.

“I have no idea.” That at least was true.

“A woman.”

He chuffed a bitter laugh. “I have plenty of women.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

He looked away. “I won’t get entangled with a human woman just to watch her age and die, Mother. Your own experience is a lesson to me.”

Her eyes registered her hurt. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. But he wouldn’t let her push him either. She took a breath and answered. She had always been courageous. “I loved your father well. The pain was worth it.”

“You didn’t take another lover for two hundred years after he died.”

“I have had many lovers since.”

He simply raised his brows.

She colored. “Very well. Not the same. But I keep looking. You never look at all.”

He shrugged. “I decide quickly.”

She frowned at him. “In one day?”

He rose, restless. “How am I to impose what I am on any human woman? Aside from the pain of watching her age, how do you tell her you are something she considers a monster?”

“Then one of our own kind.”

“With only one to a city allowed? Short visits with permission. I’ve done that, Lord knows.” He’d done it with Elyta, to disastrous effect. She was still angry that he’d left her. Not that her heart had been engaged. Elyta didn’t have a heart. She was just used to being the one to leave. He wouldn’t repeat that particular mistake. “It smacks of shopping at the Kasbah. ‘May I stay in your city for a week to sample the goods?’ And if by chance I did meet a female, and if by greater chance we suited, we could not live together. What life is that?”

“You always were one to obey the Elders’ Rules.” She sighed.

“I come by it honestly. You did not make Father vampire because it is against the Rules.” He saw the pain in her eyes. Did she regret her choice? “I would call that honor, by the way.” He tried to tell her she had done the right thing. He saw she didn’t believe that anymore. “The Rules are the only thing between us and chaos. Look what happened when Asharti made a vampire army. It was almost the end of everything.” She looked away. She wouldn’t be comforted even after a thousand years. “And anyway, I’m dry inside, just dust. I’ve nothing to give.”

Her eyes softened. She smiled. That smile had always warmed him, inspired him. He wished it would do so now. He wanted to feel enthusiasm again, as she did. “You’re wrong,
cara mia,
” she whispered. “You have
so
much to give.”

He couldn’t smile in return. “You’re my mother. Of course you think that.”

She toyed with a quill on the desk. “Elyta Zaroff was here yesterday. She said she came to see you. I was glad of that at first.” His mother tapped the quill’s feather to her chin.

“Elyta was here? Why didn’t you tell me immediately?” Elyta
had
guessed he would come to his mother. How glad he was he had taken a devious route.