Silver in the Blood (33 page)

Exhausted, she let herself thin out. Mixing with the whole air of the castle, she hovered in every room, a faint haze near the ceiling if you looked up. But no one was looking up. They were looking down, and out of the corners of their eyes as well: jumping at every sound, inspecting each other for signs of betrayal. Several of the maids were huddled in the butler's pantry, weeping, while the butler had drunk most of the sherry and crawled into a closet.

Lou knew all this.

She knew that the queen had written three letters and hidden them inside her Bible. Now the venerable lady was kneeling beside her bed, praying.

She knew that the king was sitting in his study, fists clenched
on a plan of the palace and grounds, staring into space with his jaw jutting forward.

She knew that Dacia was dozing with her head on Lord Johnny's shoulder.

And she knew that Theo was sitting on the opposite sofa, staring up and talking softly in a language she thought was Turkish.

She strained to hear him, trying to understand, but instead she heard Mihai.

He was coming in through one of the long windows in the music room. She didn't know how he had gotten past the guards and into the garden, but there was no one in the music room to stop him. With a massive effort Lou pulled inward, thinking to write on the window behind the king's desk, but found instead that she could only scatter wider and thinner. She was losing herself at last.

“He's coming!”

Screaming the words as loudly as she could, though she had no lungs, no tongue, no mouth, Lou tried to tell them before she was gone completely. As nothingness overwhelmed her, she saw Theo leap to his feet and shout.

“It's Lou! They must be here!”

Gratified, Lou faded away.

 

FROM THE DESK OF MISS DACIA VREEHOLT

17 June 1897

To Mrs. Ileana Vreeholt,

I will most likely not be alive to send this letter in the morning, and even if I am, I doubt very much that I would have the courage. And so let me say here and now that I hate you. I hate you and blame you for everything that has befallen me, and I wish somehow for you to know that I reject you and the legacy you have given me: the dissatisfaction with life, the sense of superiority to everyone I meet, but most especially, the Claw. I reject you. I reject everything you have ever taught me. I reject this grotesque inheritance.

Nevermore your daughter,
Dacia

Quite suddenly, the palace was swarming with Mihai's army.

There were shouting men and stamping feet, and howling that filled Dacia with a strange longing. She was on her feet, leaning toward the door of the king's study, before she came fully awake.

Something kept her from lunging forward, however. Someone was gripping her hand, pulling her back. She looked down, her gaze vague, and all at once the world came into sharper focus. Lord Johnny was holding her hand with both of his. She could feel the calluses on his hands, and see a small scar on the back of one, a little white parenthesis on the tanned skin. It was not the hand of a pampered society buck like Will Carver, she thought.

It made her wonder, abruptly, what had become of Will Carver. Was he still in Romania? Or had he fled, afraid of bloodsucking monsters stalking him in the night? A month ago she
had hardly passed an hour without thinking of him; now she could hardly summon the interest to question whether he was safe.

“Dacia?”

She realized that she had lost focus again, and looked down at Johnny. His face was white and tense, his blue eyes fixed on her.

“I'm all right,” she said.

“You looked like you might . . . like you might go to them . . .” Lord Johnny jerked his head toward the door, and the sound of the howling.

“No,” Dacia said, her voice low. “No, I won't. I swear to you.”

“John,” said Mr. Arkady. “Here.”

He was holding a freshly loaded pistol, and another was tucked into his belt. Johnny took the proffered gun and checked it before putting it into his own belt. He took up a rifle that one of the guards had brought and loaded it while Mr. Arkady loaded his own. Feeling useless, Dacia looked around and saw that the king was sitting at his desk still, only he had a brace of pistols on the blotter, and a rifle leaned against the bookcase just beside him. After making such a fuss about having a gun of her own, Dacia had left it in her room.

There was a knock at the door, and a guard announced himself.

“Enter,” King Carol barked, and a young guard with a sheen of sweat on his forehead slipped into the room.

“Your Majesty, we're going to take you to the cellars. The queen is there already.”

“We're to cower down there like rats? Ha!”

“It's for your own safety, Your Majesty,” the guard said with a hint of pleading. There had been a great deal of discussion over this matter earlier in the day. “Since you won't leave altogether, you must go to the cellars!” He drew in a shaky breath, seemingly on the verge of babbling. “They came right in. The guards ran away. They ran away because . . . some of the intruders are . . .” His eyes darted to Dacia.

“Wolves?” She supplied the word with polite interest, even though what she really wanted to do was cry.

No. Not cry. Howl. What she really wanted to do was howl.

She could hear them coming closer and closer, the wolves. Her wolves. She was their leader, they needed her . . .

“Dacia?” Lord Johnny shook her shoulder.

With an effort, she looked at his face, concentrating on him and not the wolves.

“We have to get out of here,” she said.

“If you'll come this way,” the guard said, giving her a grateful look. He put one hand on the door.

“No!” Dacia startled them with her vehemence. “They're in the corridor already. We'll have to go out the window, into the gardens.”

The guard leaned against the door, listening. A moment later he leaped back.

“They
are
in the corridor,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

“We have to go,” Dacia said, but she felt like her voice didn't have as much conviction as it had before. She was swaying toward the door to the corridor, and once again it was Johnny's hand on her arm that kept her from joining her family.

“There's a passage here,” the king said. He got to his feet, weapons in hand, and crossed to one of the bookcases that lined the walls of the study.

“I thought those books looked fake,” Dacia said to no one in particular.

She let Lord Johnny take her arm in a firmer grip. He was standing very close to her now, and she could smell his shaving lotion. It smelled like leather and spices. He was not exceptionally tall, and so they were much of a height, with the low heels that she wore. She had a sudden urge to press her cheek to his, and fought it back.

What was wrong with her? She wanted to join the wolves, she wanted to kiss Johnny, she wanted to run through the forest barefoot. It was as though a fog had completely covered her brain, and all she could do was feel these urges. She gripped Johnny's arm and clenched her teeth to keep from saying something inappropriate as the king lifted a hidden latch. A section of the bookcase swung inward to reveal a narrow passageway.

“We can go to my bedchamber, and from there to safety,” the king said, leading the way down the way between the walls.

Dacia could still hear them, the Claw. She sensed other, higher voices, that she thought might be the Wing. And, too, the sound of heavy footsteps, of loud voices, carried through the wall. It seemed that Mihai had supporters of a more mundane nature as well.

“Vlad Tepes had thousands,” she murmured to herself.

“What's that?” Lord Johnny leaned closer, and his breath brushed her cheek.

“If he means to follow Vlad Tepes,” Dacia said as the king
stopped and fiddled with the latch of a door leading off the passage. “He will have
thousands
of soldiers—” Then something else occurred to her, and she put out a hand to stop the king. “Tepes wanted to kill the sultan himself. Mihai will come after the king himself—”

But it was too late. They stumbled into the king's bedchamber to see Mihai lounging at the foot of the bed, a pistol in his hand and a smile on his face.

“He came himself,” Dacia said flatly.

Her stomach churned at the sight of Mihai there, on the king's bed. She thought of the bed in the hotel and sweat broke out on her forehead and down her back. No. She forced her mind away.

“Indeed I did come,” Prince Mihai said, giving Dacia a look that made her aware that he was also thinking of the hotel and what had almost happened there. He turned his attention to the others. “Now, why don't you all make yourselves comfortable? Shut the door, please,” he told the guard, looking over Dacia's shoulder.

Dacia turned to look at the man as well, and Theo . . . but he wasn't there. She clenched her teeth again to keep from making a noise. Theo had been last through the door. He must have seen Mihai and slipped back down the passage before he was spotted. Dacia gave a silent cheer and hoped that the resourceful young man would bring reinforcements.

She gave her attention back to Mihai, which was just what the prince wanted. He was still smiling at her. She clung all the tighter to Johnny's arm. She wondered how she could have ever been stupid enough to think Mihai so handsome and exciting.
Hadn't she seen the cruelty lurking in his eyes? Had he hidden it from her so well, or had she just made herself blind to it because she was so enthralled with being courted by a prince?

“You've come to me at last, whether you meant to or not,” Mihai said to her. He held out his hand, the one that wasn't aiming a pistol at the king.

“I haven't come to you at all,” Dacia said.

“But you have, and without your beloved aunt Kate lifting a finger.” He clucked his tongue. “We shall have to punish her.”

“She isn't yours to punish,” Dacia said, doing her best to keep her voice low and commanding. She had a distressing tendency toward shrillness, if she lost control.

“Ah, but she is,” Mihai said lightly. “And so are you. Now come here, like a good dog.” He snapped his fingers and gave an ugly laugh at his own joke, while Lord Johnny made a sound that was rather like a growl.

“Here now,” said the guard, indignant.

“Oh, so there's more than one dog in the room?” Mihai smirked. “Or should I say, more than two?” He looked past Dacia to the guard. “Far too many for my taste.”

He shot the guard.

The bullet tore past Dacia, a streak of heat that made her shriek a little, and then the poor guard groaned and fell to the floor, a bullet through his chest. Blood began to gush out, and Lord Johnny pulled her away, putting an arm protectively around her, and moving her closer to King Carol, who hadn't said a word, or taken his eyes off Prince Mihai.

“Have done, Mihai,” said King Carol. “Have done, before
more people must die. Your claim to my throne is the thinnest of excuses for your cruelty.”

“Your claim to
my
throne is nonexistent, you Hungarian bastard!” Mihai leaped to his feet, baring his teeth at the king with his snarled words.

The curtains stirred, though there was no draft that Dacia could feel.

“You are a Hungarian bastard yourself,” Dacia said coolly, causing both the king and Mihai to turn to her with expressions of equal parts astonishment and irritation. “His Majesty is not, in fact, a bastard, while your ancestors rather eschewed formal marriage, so you can hardly bandy that word about, Mihai.” She released Lord Johnny's arm, and smoothed the front of her gown, doing her best not to look down at the guard's body as it bled onto the dark-colored rug. “Nor, as I've said, can you throw insults on the Hungarians. My understanding is that you are more Hungarian than Romanian yourself. Your family shouldn't have put mine in quite such a lowly role. Had we intermarried a bit more, you'd have real Romanian blood, and perhaps acquired some powers of your own.”

“I don't need to have your monstrous powers,” Mihai snapped. “I need only to command them. And even without your family, I have an army behind me, waiting for me to kill the usurper and take my rightful place as ruler.”

“I am not a monster,” Dacia said.

She knew then that she believed it: whatever she was, she was not a monster. Mihai was the monster. Something warm and soft, like the breath of a loved one, moved against her cheek. She smiled.

“I am a young lady of good family,” she went on, “and I have suffered enough humiliation at your hands, Mihai. Put your weapon down at once, and stop all this foolishness.”

“I think once we are wed, I will find a Gypsy sorcerer to take away your voice,” Mihai said.

“I think if we were to wed, I would promptly tear your throat out,” Dacia said in the same social tone he had used.

“You won't wed,” Lord Johnny said tightly. “You won't ever see her again.”