“Couldn’t agree more,” I said, got a leg over her spear, and snapped the heavy shaft in two.
She looked from it to me, and the scowl grew more pronounced. “Bitch, that was my favorite spear.”
“Not anymore,” I said, and went for her with the jagged end, which made a quite serviceable stake.
Because vamps and wooden weapons don’t mix, no matter how good they think they are, but I didn’t have a chance to demonstrate the point.
But not because of her.
Because I was suddenly hit with a jumble of slurring, cloud-filled skies, clawing talons and sharp, tearing beaks.
Pain ripped through me, and I looked down at my side, expecting to see a jagged wound, but there was nothing there. Just like there was no sky full of feathers, and strong flapping wings, and blood spurting as two predators fought it out, somewhere above me. Which was going to get me killed down here, because my brain wasn’t used to doing a freaking split screen!
And because my opponent didn’t have that problem.
Fortunately, she did have another.
One that reached down with a huge, hoary hand and grabbed her, right before she could shove the shiny end of the spear through my eyeball. And snatched her off the ground and into the air, maybe thirty feet, maybe more. Whatever the height of the copse of tall trees just behind us.
Of course, her buddy was no help. He crawled out from under the car he’d just jerked on top of himself, in time to see another tree branch curving like a giant’s hand and reaching down for him. Then the two vamps were getting introduced to the ground by the treetops swaying violently this way and that, as if in hurricane-force winds, grabbing them up and smacking them back down, over and over and over and over.
I could watch this all day, I thought dizzily.
And then a couple of birds splatted onto Claire’s windshield, and the split screen became one seriously messed-up brain again.
One that was no longer even trying to keep up.
Well, shit, I thought.
And passed out.
Chapter Nineteen
Mircea, Venice, 1458
“Damn it, Mircea!” The praetor’s color was high, but not from embarrassment. She stepped out of her lovely gown, giving Mircea a glimpse of a beautiful bronzed figure, lean of thigh and high of breast, the opposite of the Venetian preference for rounder, paler forms.
The Venetians were idiots, Mircea thought, as the praetor’s ladies hurried to help her into her bath.
It was unusual, too. The Venetian norm was the same as everywhere else: a high, wooden tub lined with cloths to reduce splinters, and, for the wealthy, soft, scented soaps and thick towels. He hadn’t had a bath like that in a while, being relegated to the local public bathhouse when he had the fee, and to an overlarge bucket Horatiu had found that left his knees up around his ears whenever he didn’t.
This was like an indoor fountain, a depression in the floor decorated with mosaic tiles and featuring streams of fresh water coming from decorative fittings in the walls. It was ridiculously pretentious in a town that received its water exclusively from rainfall caught in sand-filtered wells. Behind the luxurious facade, some poor servants were laboring to carry buckets up four stories so they could fill some reservoir that allowed her to pretend she was still in Rome.
Mircea remained stoic, but the sheer waste colored his appreciation for her beauty.
That, and her cruelty.
“I had one in sight tonight,” he told her. “I saw one boy taken and the trap set again. If the skies had stayed clear—”
“But they didn’t, and you lost him. Leaving me precisely where I was before.”
She paused to summon a maid mentally. Goat cheese, and pears stewed in red wine. The girl hurried to bring her mistress a late-night snack that Mircea couldn’t taste, thanks to his age, not that he was likely to be offered any. He hadn’t even been offered a chair.
This was not going to be a long audience.
“I know where they hunt now,” he said urgently. “I will find them—”
“Not soon enough. Jacomelo is kicking up a fuss, and the Lady wants answers.”
“I understand—”
“Do you?” The other maid began washing her mistress’ arm with soap smelling of musk and cloves. It was a heady, rich scent, and wreathed Mircea’s head in fragrance. It did not seem to improve his patron’s temper, however. “She’s at war,” she said flatly. “She needs her allies kept happy, and losing his son has not made Jacomelo happy. It didn’t help that the damned boy was the only one in his family who could count!”
No, Mircea supposed not. Jacomelo was the head of a powerful vampire family with extensive business interests in Venice and abroad. He was also a longtime, vocal supporter of the consul. Had she failed in her attempt to overthrow her Sire and take control of the Senate, his blood would have run in the streets alongside hers. As it was, he was a senior member of her government, with a great deal of power.
Power he was using to find out who had kidnapped, and presumably killed, his son.
There had been rumors about vampires disappearing for a while, but the usual targets were the masterless hordes that no one cared about. Whoever had taken Jacomelo’s son had probably assumed he was one of them. When he wasn’t running his father’s vast empire, the boy had been fond of slumming in Venice’s stews, dressed as a commoner.
Until one morning, when he didn’t come home.
“I will solve this,” Mircea promised again. “Soon.”
“And when you do, you will have your reward.”
“But I need—” Mircea stopped the blurted words, because she didn’t care. It was one thing the nobles of his new world had in common with those of his old. Telling them what you needed—even desperately—was beside the point. They saw only their own, selfish points of view.
“My daughter’s illness takes up a good deal of my time,” he said, more diffidently. “I fear her condition grows worse. I spend as many hours as I can on the streets, on this project of yours, but—”
“Project of mine?” the praetor interrupted. “Say, rather, the consul’s; she’s the one who ordered it, but gave me no men to aid with it. They’re needed for her war, it seems.”
“I understand—”
“You keep saying that.” She crossed her arms on the edge of the pool, laying her cheek on them as the maid moved on to her back. “Of course, you’ve met her, so perhaps you do. Others see her beauty, her charm, her power—so much power! It blinds us poor mortals.”
“But . . . you’re not mortal,” Mircea said, confused. The praetor was said to be almost as old as the consul herself. Old enough to remember when Venice was founded, not that she was here then.
Like so many of her kind, when old Rome fell to the barbarians, she merely moved to one of her estates—in Spain, Mircea had heard, somewhere near the sea—drank her wine, watched generations of her servants cultivate her olive trees and . . . waited. Vampires as old as she had watched empires come and go more than once. They had time to wait for the next one.
“Yes, that’s the story they tell the young, to sway them into the fold,” she agreed. “For what does youth fear but age? Yet, how many do you see, from all those centuries past, who still remain? One day, death finds us all.”
“Then she is mortal, too.” He dared to sit on the edge of the bath, although he had not been asked, but she only looked at him in mild amusement.
“Says a boy, barely grown. She’s managed to avoid death for a millennium and a half. And her Sire was said to be ancient, perhaps five thousand years old. They are difficult to kill, that family.”
“Yet he died, too,” Mircea pointed out.