The White City (12 page)

Starkad smiled at him, showing the tips of skinned fangs—Sebastien wondered, in that moment, if the display were threat, arousal, or both—and murmured, “I have oft heard you mentioned as well.”

His own teeth sharping in his mouth, Sebastien gulped saliva. The meal he’d taken from Phoebe was still fresh and hot in his veins, his flesh juicy with it. He wondered if Starkad could smell it in him. From the way the elder’s nostrils flared, Sebastien thought perhaps. If he could scent the blood in Sebastien, he was sharp-set indeed.

Behind Irina, the kettle began to sing. She spun around, every gesture crisp with nervous self-awareness, and pulled it from the burner. With her other hand she killed the flame. As if turning her back on the wampyrs would somehow keep her safe from them, she busied herself with tea and pot.

Phoebe, by contrast, sat very still, her hands folded in the skirts of her dress.

Sebastien refused to be distracted. He squared his shoulders and drew himself up to all his height and what little authority he commanded in this situation, under the customs of his tribe. This lack of status was a sensation that had grown unfamiliar with disuse, and he found he savored it in its novelty. “It seems someone desires your attention, Starkad. Is it only these two of your courtesans who have been murdered, or are there more?”

The elder vampire shrugged, stepping back, and only then did Sebastien realize he had lifted his own chin in order to meet Starkad’s water-sapphire eyes. He broke the connection and made himself relax, shoulders down, arms casual. “I have not yet ascertained,” he said, softly. He looked over Sebastien’s shoulder, to Irina. “I have heard he slashed a painting.”

She nodded and did not look up. “It is true. A nude.”

The wampyr did not show emotion. He did not frown, or offer any clue at all to what he might be feeling. Sebastien could not even pick it from his scent.

But he nodded, and said reassuringly, “While that cannot be set right, I shall see that, for it, someone pays. They wish you to meet with a police officer?”

She nodded, hands twisting. From the bob of her throat, Sebastien knew she already realized what Starkad’s will would be and wished to argue—and that she would no more argue with Starkad than—well, than Sebastien would. The presence of the elder predator was such that it was an act of will for even Sebastien to stand against him.

Evie had been like that sometimes, when the spirit was on her, but even she had not been so old. Sebastien was not at all surprised when Starkad said, “Then speak to the policeman you shall.” Starkad ducked his head to smile at Sebastien through his lashes, a coquettish expression for such an ancient face. “Such desecration deserves a response, and if there is an honest policeman in all Moscow, I trust my brother Sebastien would have found him.”

Moscow

Bely Gorod

January 1897

“I remember first time I met patron,” Irina said without lifting her head from Jack’s shoulder. She’d changed the sheets. Her skin lay against his, moist and a little adhesive, uncomfortable and alluring. His hand rose to stroke her hair, tucking it behind one leaf-tender ear-edge. He wondered if he should mention to her that it seemed a little…uncultured…to conduct a postmortem of one love affair while lying in the arms of the replacement.

She seemed immune to his discomfort, or perhaps her reaction was lost in translation. She told him—he thought, picking out the sense of what she said from the jumbled words—that Starkad had found her painting the Moskva by night in autumn, the lights on the far bank reflecting streaks across the water. Jack thought he remembered the painting dimly, having seen it hanging in the gallery before being distracted by the magnificent flame-colored panels that dominated her display.

He had come up to her and leaned over her shoulder, but somehow his presence had not made her jump. There was no threat in him, she said, but only a kind of hypnotic calm. He’d complemented the movement of her painting, and suggested that the water, in the dark, reflected a little more crimson.

Upon examination, she had discovered that he was correct. When she turned to thank him, she found him regarding her, she thought then, like a ghost in a mirror. —It is a good thing that you make art,—he’d said. —Art will be around a long time.

She turned to brush her lips across Jack’s collarbones and he tried to make himself relax into her embrace. It half-worked, at least until she said, “Do you remember how you met Sebastien?”

Jack made a wheezing noise. It might have been a sigh except where it squeezed past the tightness of his throat.

She was looking for a story like her own, one of high romance, and Jack did not have that to give her. He stretched out beside her and tried not to sound too cruel when he said, “He bought me.”

It seemed a long time before she stirred, and longer before she spoke. She laid her head against his shoulder and said, “But he had only the best of intentions.”

That she was correct did not make Jack any less irritated with her. It was possible, in fact, that her correctness only served to increase his annoyance. He sat up abruptly, shedding sheets and girl. “Come on,” he said, reaching for his trousers. “Let’s go find something to eat.”

It had been an excuse: he wasn’t particularly hungry. So it was a relief when, fifteen minutes later, Sebastien let himself into Irina’s studio and announced that he and Irina must present themselves to Inspector Kostov within the hour.

Moscow

Police Palace, Kremlin

May 1903

It was a strange thing, walking through Moscow in the company of two mortal women and a prince of the blood as vanishing old as Starkad.

Vanishing
was the proper word, too—he was hard to hold in one’s attention, except when he chose to dominate it. It was as if he existed in some way sideways to the rest of the world, so that he faded into the backdrop until he asserted his presence. When he spoke, though, a spotlight might have picked him out on the proscenium of some invisible stage, and all around him faded into darkness.

In another thousand years
, Sebastien wondered,
will I be like that?

“You don’t associate with the blood,” Sebastien said, dropping back to walk beside Starkad.

Starkad paused for a moment as if remembering how before he shrugged, his ash-pale locks breaking over his shoulders. “I did,” he said. “Before there were clubs and associations and rules and traditions. Before there were so many expectations.”

“All those people are gone.”

“Yours too.” It wasn’t a question.

The acknowledgement, Sebastien could see, cost Starkad an effort. So much work, relating to others, when the silence inside one’s own head had become so immense.

Sebastien, half in compassion and half in fellow-
feeling, let the conversation lapse, and instead nodded silently and went ahead to flag down a cab.

Less than forty minutes later, he led his little crew into the front doors of the Police Palace and paused before the reception desk. When he identified himself, the desk matron nodded. —Inspector Dyachenko is expecting you. One moment, and a page will guide you in.—

Sebastien knew the way, of course, but he also understood the exigencies of traffic control in a public building. And it was not as if he were short of time. Starkad seemed more a statue than a creature, standing cold and immobile behind the women, who—as if by contrast—moved and breathed and glowed with life. He could have been replaced by white marble with perhaps only a lessening of effect.

The page, when he arrived, was a curly-haired young man in a red-piped navy uniform who said only —Come with me, please,— and —Inspector Dyachenko is in this office here.— before rapping on the doorframe and leaving Sebastien and his companions to their fate. And though in this good light no one could have mistaken Starkad for other than he was, the page made no remark and gave him no more than a second glance. The added stiffness in his spine could even be mistaken for an adolescent’s attempt at official dignity.

Before he came up to the door, Sebastien knew that Dyachenko was not alone in his office. He made sure he entered at the vanguard of his little coterie, so he could come around to the chair where she waited and bow over Abby Irene’s hand before making the series of introductions necessary. And, if he were truthful with himself, assess the situation for an extra fraction of a second.

Dyachenko’s desk was covered in a silk drape Sebastien recognized from the depths of Abby Irene’s carpet bag, and on it lay several objects of interest. Starkad’s ring, the canvas knife that had protruded from Olesia Valentinova’s throat, the note summoning Sebastien to the scene of the crime. Some glass slides sealed with cover slips, which Sebastien presumed held lifted fingerprints. Tiny glassine envelopes that must enfold hair or fibers, or fingernail scrapings. A bloody cotton swab.

Irina’s face did interesting things as she entered the office and took in the display of evidence. Phoebe looked like herself, reserved and compassionate. Starkad remained stone, when Sebastien might have expected his hand to flick out at least toward the ring.

By the time Sebastien completed the introductions, though, the elder had marshaled a response. He spoke in English, which was either an unexpected consideration for Abby Irene and Phoebe, or a failure to notice that it might behoove him now to switch. “That is not all Lesya’s blood.”

Dyachenko had been seeing that Irina and Phoebe were seated, but other than nodding to available chairs, had left Sebastien and Starkad to fend for themselves. He seemed disinterested in the common human habit of enforcing social niceties on wampyrs, which made Sebastien wonder again were he had gained his comfort with Sebastien’s tribe. He lifted Starkad’s ring with a scrap of ivory silk and handed it to the wampyr.

“We know,” he said. “Some of it is from her assailant. Do you recognize it?”

“The ring or the blood, policeman?”

“I know you recognize the ring.”

“It is the one I provided to Ilya Ilyich Ulyanov, a painter who was a member of my court. When I closed my court in Moscow, in eighteen hundred and eighty-six, he did not return his ring to me. He told me then it had been stolen. I had no evidence then that he was lying.”

“The ring was recovered from the pocket of a more recent murder victim. Please answer my question about the blood.”

Starkad closed his eyes and sniffed, delicately, like a parfumier analyzing the notes of an unfamiliar fragrance. Sebastien heard Phoebe holding her breath as he did it, and thought her response unconscious.

Sebastien could identify the presence of the dried blood of two distinct persons in the room. One, he knew by experience to be Olesia Valentinova. The other—

“I am not familiar with the blood of that person,” Starkad said, after a pause to consider. “I should like very much to tell you that it has familiar elements, but—”

Dyachenko nodded. “Too bad. And too much to hope for such an easy solution, I suppose. You will provide us with a list of your court in Moscow?”

“I have no court in Moscow,” Starkad said. Sebastien watched Irina’s face for a reaction, but it might have been carved of the same stone as the wampyr’s, albeit in a browner shade.

“But you did,” said Phoebe, lacing her fingers together in her lap. “And two of them are dead. A most poetic justice.”

Starkad nodded. “Three of them, counting Ilya. My former courtiers, I will gladly provide a list of.”

Silently, Dyachenko offered him paper, a clipboard, and a pen, then turned to Irina. “Thank you for coming in, Irina Stephanova. I know this is hard for you. The victim was a friend?”

She nodded.

“And this is not the first time you have been connected with a murder.”

“It is not,” she said, over the intermittent scratch of Starkad’s pen. “I am beginning to take it personally.”

Dyachenko reseated himself behind his desk. “That may be a reasonable response,” he said. He glanced at Abby Irene. “Doctor Garrett, your forensic findings, if you please?”

She straightened her skirts with a quick, precise gesture, as if preparing to stand, but did not actually rise. Her long-fingered hands grew thinner with every passing year: incrementally, but enough to hurt Sebastien, even so. He thought of Starkad’s anger, all directed at the defacement of a painting when a woman lay slashed to death beside it. The loss of something that might endure more than the bare century of a long human life might weigh heavily on an immortal—and aiming one’s emotions there did relieve one of the burden of outliving mortal companions. If Starkad chose to surround himself with a court of artists, perhaps that was why: he could fix his affections on their material results and keep his heart intact in ways Sebastien could only imagine. Imagine, and perhaps envy.

“Since you have identified the ring, sir,” —she nodded to Starkad— “that answers one question—but raises more. Such as why did the victim have a dead man’s missing or stolen ring in her pocket? And why is there no trace of her upon it?”

“No trace?” Phoebe leaned forward, hands braced on her knees.

Abby Irene smiled. “Olesia Valentinova never touched the ring—not with her living hand, nor with her dead one. She left no fingerprints on its surface, and there is no
thaumaturgical contagion.”

“So the ring was planted,” Sebastien said.

“More than that, the ring was planted by the killer,” Abby Irene said. “The same hand left traces—thaumaturgical and physical—on both it and on the canvas knife that was used to slash the painting and Olesia Valentinova’s throat.”

“I see the letter Irina sent me there—” Sebastien said.

Irina glanced at him. “I sent no letter.”

Around the room, shoulders squared and chins and eyebrows rose. Only Starkad remained unmoved, which was probably as it should have been.

“I see,” said Dyachenko. “So you were lured there in order to discover the body? How intriguing.”

“I believe Ilya was framed,” Irina volunteered. She glanced at Sebastien. “So why not frame another friend?”