The House (20 page)

“Wow, they
offered to dress me but not like that,” she laughed. “I think the
mistress person thought she could dress me up like a doll, and she
doesn’t have a particularly modern fashion sense.”

I remembered
how I knew the woman who’d shown us to our accommodation. She was
vampyre; she belonged to one of the older witches who’d gone
vampyre themselves and managed to keep most of the people they’d
bound to them. Vampyre can’t make new vampyre even if they used to
be witches. A lot of them lose the ones they had created and bound
to them when they change. By lose, I mean the vampyre they created
during their witch years die. It’s not a pretty sight.

“She may have
thought it was modern. She comes from a vampyre family - what we
call a group that’s bound together - from the Middle Ages. She was
probably born around eleven hundred AD or so,” I calculated
quickly.

“Ten
ninety-one actually,” came a voice from just around the corner.

“Alright!” I
half shouted back. When they were alive they probably thought it
was rude to ask a lady how old they were, but it seemed that the
older vampyre especially prided themselves on every year. And she
had enough years to make her pride swell to astronomical levels.
They also have a habit of thinking that they know better than
everyone else. She must have been one of the oldest people at the
Covenant.

“Come on, we
better go get the guys before they wonder off on their own.”
Stripes laughed with me and we raced down the corridor.

I won by a
mile but I stopped short of knocking on anyone’s door before
Stripes caught up, all out of breath. The first door we knocked on
was Marlow’s, although Eddie’s door was closer. We didn’t greet
Eddie first because he knew the least about all of this and to be
honest I didn’t want to see his face when he saw me.

Marlow
answered fully clothed and slipping on his shoes. I left Stripes to
hurry him and knocked on Hercules’ door, which James answered;
evidently everyone was already awake and ready to go. Guys always
seem to get ready faster than girls. They were wearing their suits
from the previous day and both of them gave me a once-over - James
in a surprised way and Hercules in a way that suggested he wondered
if I’d gotten new underwear to match. I just smiled innocently up
at him. Always the player, even if I knew he didn’t really mean
it.

“Come on you
two, ignore the outfit.” I looked at Hercules. “It’s not for your
benefit.” I stuck my tongue out and moved fast enough that a normal
human wouldn’t have seen me. Just to smack straight into Eddie
who’d stepped out of his room at the wrong time. I hate to think
how much force it would have been if I’d hit a brick wall at that
speed. We were lucky I was stopping as we collided so we didn’t go
all the way across the room and through the window. We ended up
heaped on the bed instead.

We were also
lucky to have hit the bed and not the wall, though I suspected the
back of Eddie’s legs would be bruised from the impact.

“Can you move
your ... um ... left leg I think. It’s trapping me,” I said through
the haze of shock from bouncing my head off Eddie’s shoulder. He
moved the leg that was trapping me and I pushed myself onto my
hands and knees very slowly. Eddie moved around so that I could
flop to one side and half slide, half fall off the bed. I’d tried
to stand, failed and had to pull myself up using the bed.

“You need a
hand?” Stripes asked. I took her offered hand and pulled myself the
rest of the way to my feet, before offering my own hand to Eddie to
help him up but he refused. Then again, he didn’t land himself on
the floor.

“Hey, not my
fault.” I held my hands up. I don’t know why people do that; I
think it’s supposed to show you aren’t armed. I’d never been armed
in my life, unless you count the time I accidentally stabbed Marie
with a kitchen knife. I wasn’t even running with it, so the point
of showing I wasn’t armed was, well, pointless.

“You knocked
me over!”

“Not on
purpose…”

“Hey, both of
you. It was neither of your faults. Eddie, you just have to accept
that when people move that fast accidents happen. At least the door
was open. Maybe if you ever learn to do it you’ll change your
mind.” Stripes sounded like a mother scolding her children. It
normally annoys me but since her tone was mostly directed at Eddie
I didn’t get angry. I just hoped that he wouldn’t either. We had
enough to deal with without arguing amongst ourselves as well.

“What are you
doing?” Great. Jalas was standing in the doorway with a small smile
on his face. “Nice outfit,” he added.

“Thanks.”
Short and snappy. A little heavy on the snappy. I walked out past
them all and started off down the corridor. “Coming?” I asked over
my shoulder. When everything is going wrong, just act normal. Maybe
nobody will notice.

Everyone had
caught up with me by the time I reached the end of the corridor and
opened the doors. Jalas was busy teasing me about various things
that I prayed nobody else understood and I felt my pulse go into
overdrive. It did no good to try to remind myself of why we were
there. Or that I did not want Jalas in my bed again. He could still
get to me. I just hoped everyone else was too distracted to be
listening for my racing heart.

The Covenant
was a big part of my past. The part that I did my best not to tell
anyone about, and it looked like every secret I’d ever kept was
about to be blown wide open. If I hadn’t been worried about Shayana
I would have been terrified for myself. I hated that responsibility
fell on my shoulders when Marie went away; I was only twenty-two
and with my own problems. I just couldn’t deal with everyone
else’s. I had no idea how Marie did it all the time.

We made our
way through the maze of long corridors and a few hidden doors. The
Covenant doesn’t just use hidden doors for secret rooms. If you’d
not been there before you’d wonder where half the place was, or at
least how to get to it. Then again, the place was probably close to
a thousand years old and cloaked in more spells and magic than I’d
seen in my lifetime. We were going to the dining hall; it seemed
too normal but we were shifters and as such we had to spend a lot
of time eating.

The dining
hall is a bit like one you’d find at school, except more luxurious.
The walls have wooden panels with intricate carved patterns in them
and the tables are solid oak. The food was excellent, as always. At
any time there could be several hundred or more people living and
working in the Covenant and they all had to eat. Well, almost all.
So there were ten full-time chefs employed that I knew of, although
some of the witches seemed to have their own, and at least four
were on duty during daylight hours at all times with one or two at
night.

Breakfast
consisted of basically anything you want; if you wanted roast
chicken, by God, they’d make you roast chicken. When I was younger
I tried to get chocolate cake for breakfast everyday. It worked up
until my grandfather told the chefs that the next person to
facilitate any kind of chocolate breakfast for me would be spending
time in the dungeons. Not that they’d be fired, but that they would
be put in the dungeons and he’d personally deal with them. I didn’t
get any cake or chocolate for a month after that and I never asked
for it at breakfast again.

I was half
tempted to see if I could get chocolate cake for breakfast since I
wasn’t living there anymore, or if the chefs still feared my
grandfather’s threat. I chose cereal and several pieces of toast
and jam instead. I was starting to think too much about Shayana.
Was she getting enough food? Shifters can starve to death quite
quickly and not everyone realised it. Was she comfortable? Did she
have clean clothes? A warm place to sleep? Was she alone? I hated
the thought of her being alone as I ate and laughed with friends
over so much food.

Marlow looked
like I felt. He poked his bacon and eggs, moving his food around
his plate more than he put it in his mouth. Shayana was his sister,
more than that, he had always felt that it was his job to protect
her. Protect her from people like him who could hurt her. It was a
heavy burden to carry.

“Marlow.” I
spoke barely above a whisper. I had to repeat myself before he
heard me and he was sitting right next to me, away in his own
little world. “Marlow, you could have taken Shayana couldn’t you. I
mean if you didn’t know her?”

“Yes I could,
but I wouldn’t.”

“But what
about other people like you? If they had similar training and
skills, they could have got her,” I whispered. I needn’t have
bothered though because nobody was paying us any attention. Jalas
was regaling everyone with stories about meeting Henry the
something or other - I think it was the eighth but I couldn’t be
sure. He’d probably met more than one king Henry.

“What are you
saying? You think someone took her to get to me?” Marlow was
whispering too but he was angry, it was threaded through his voice.
“Why would they do that?”

“Maybe to use
as leverage over you if you had a contract on someone they knew.” I
heard a faint hissing from Marlow and hurriedly told him my second
theory. “Or someone hired them to do it.”

“Why does this
have relevance?”

“Because it
means that just because someone isn’t good enough to take her
themselves doesn’t mean they didn’t have her taken.”

“That would
make this very personal,” Marlow said, his voice a little louder,
the anger seeping away in his thought.

“Do you know
anyone who would want to take Shayana? Who could have afforded to
hire help of your calibre?”

“No.”

“What about
another dancer?” Stripes suggested. She was sitting the other side
of me and must have heard us talking. I noticed that Jalas had
finished his story. “If she was up for a big part and someone else
wanted it?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, just a suggestion.”

“That would be
crazy,” was Marlow’s response.

Jalas cleared
his throat. “I have lived long enough to see some crazy people in
my time. Nowadays it sounds insane but when I was younger
kidnapping a rival would have just been strategy. And good strategy
at that, unless you were caught. Or taking someone close, a
daughter or lover of their rival, to put them off their game or
blackmail them. Of course, most people would have just killed the
competition and been done with it.” I glared at Jalas and wished he
hadn’t said that last sentence. “Of course, that was a long time
ago when it was hard to prove who did the killing. It was less
crazy then.”

“I don’t know
anyone who’d be fool enough to try it and they’d have to know who
she was to pull it off.” Marlow looked forlorn and sounded like he
was trying to convince himself more than anyone else.

“Crazy people
do not always seem crazy at first.” Eddie said.

“You know
someone like that?” I asked.

“Yes.” I
wanted to know who it was, just natural curiosity, but we had to
tread carefully. If we tried to get Eddie to open up more than he
was ready to, he’d shut down completely and we couldn’t really
torture him for the information. It would defeat the object of
getting it. I saw Jalas was nodding in agreement as well. He
probably knew more than one person that crazy; I wondered how many
of them he’d made that way.

“Especially in
such a fast-paced world where people do not know each other, hiding
that you are insane is relatively easy. Just like hiding what we
are has become easier. People notice less and care less about the
people around them, especially ones they don’t really know.”

I sighed. It
was getting more and more complicated trying to figure out what had
happened. I was also annoyed that I’d gone back to my grandfather
and the Covenant when it looked like it had nothing to do with
them. Yet there was also the case of the vampyre attack on Stripes
and myself. I hoped that there would be a way to figure out what
had happened and I was longing to talk to the witches who’d let
their vampyre attack me. That was probably my main reason to still
be there. We could have gone home the night before and I’d chosen
not to on the off chance we got a crack at something today.

We finished
our breakfast with light talk about nothing, the kind that you
don’t remember ten minutes after the conversation. We all trooped
out of the dining hall together and I wondered how many of the
others were having the same schooldays flash backs that I was. Part
of me wished I could go back to those days for the simplicity of
it, the surety that comes from knowing what will happen the next
day. Most of me was glad that they were over.

Jalas was
leading now since I didn’t know where we were going. I wasn’t
entirely sure why I was following him, years of conditioning I
guess.

By the time
we’d gone down the first four sets of stairs however, I’d figured
out where we were going. The only thing underground was the
dungeons, unless they’d built something new in the four years I’d
been away. Which was highly unlikely since, as far as I knew, even
the newest part of the building was three hundred years old. But I
could hope - maybe they had installed a new cinema or
something.

The
temperature started to fall as we got deeper and deeper
underground. They had ways to heat every inch of the place. The
cold was a way to unnerve the prisoners they brought down. It sure
as hell unnerved me; if we were speaking to people they’d put down
here then we were speaking to some very dangerous people. I thought
I’d seen the last of their ilk when I left the Covenant. I just
hoped that there was a point to all of this beyond pissing me
off.

Two more
staircases - one of which was very steep and had taken more than
one unwitting life over the years. If you looked very carefully
there would be bloodstains permeating the wood but in the
semi-darkness of the lit torches not even my eyes would see it. Yet
there was a faint coppery smell to the air, the smell that promised
blood somewhere close. There was always plenty of blood.