I changed into a white T-shirt, a black leather jacket—since the demon goo had reduced my denim coat to so much lace—jeans and black boots. Then I packed a few essentials and emptied the contents of a hidden cupboard into the remaining space in the pack. If I was going after Drac, I was taking my whole damn arsenal with me.
I hefted a short sword, but regretfully decided I’d have to do without it. Nothing else was fitting in that pack. I propped the sword against the wall, where its surface reflected the vivid colors of the mural I’d recently completed. It had surprised the hell out of Claire, not so much for its postmodernist edge, but because the house had permitted it.
Claire was in a constant struggle for dominance with her legacy, which her uncle had given the personality of a crotchety old woman. Yellowing antimacassars remained on the furniture despite the fact that she hated them, because they reappeared whenever she moved them and shortly thereafter something of hers would go missing. Yet I’d slapped paint all over the place and suffered no ill effects. Maybe the house hadn’t liked the faded cabbage rose wallpaper, either.
I had just finished packing when I heard a yelp followed by a series of thumps. From the landing, I saw Miss Priss sitting in front of the cellar door, looking smug. I went to the kitchen and got the key and a lantern, since Claire’s uncle had never run electricity down there. Then I went to rescue the Senate’s great warrior.
He was at the bottom of the cellar steps, lying in a heap. The last person to piss off the house had been one of my clients, who had tried to go upstairs without an escort. He’d not only been transported to the basement but ended up stuffed into a small trunk in the corner. The trunk had since been moved—I was using it for a nightstand—so the vamp had fared better. The only obvious harm was to his hair, which had come loose from its clip and fallen all over his face.
“The house is a little… temperamental,” I explained as he got his long legs back under him.
“What is this place?” He looked around, eyes bright with interest.
I glanced at the dark cave, trying to see the attraction, but it looked as bad as always. The only saving grace was that the dim light hid the peeling, bilious green paint that had been applied around the time Eisenhower was president, and shadowed the rusting metal hulk in the corner. It didn’t help to conceal the heaps of crates, however, since they were scattered all over the place. Claire had been planning to clean them out, assuming that the house was amenable, for fear that they constituted a fire hazard. “The basement. The stairs automatically send trespassers here.”
“It is far more than that,” he said, picking his way through the crates to where an old set of shelves held bottles of various colors. Claire’s uncle had fancied himself an alchemist, but had never found the secret to turning lead into gold. Or much of anything else, according to her. “Your friend made this?” Louis-Cesare had picked up one of the delicate blue glass vials that had always reminded me of oversized perfume bottles.
“She’s a null. She can’t do magic.”
Louis-Cesare inhaled. “Magic was not required here. This is art.”
“I don’t know that I’d get too close to that, if I were you,” I advised. Moisture had beaded the outside of the glass, and his fingers left prints in the damp dust. I didn’t know what it was sweating, but it was better to be safe than in a hundred pieces. I’d probably have a hard time explaining to Mircea why his red-haired boy hadn’t even made it through the first day. “Pip’s experiments could be a little… volatile.” As demonstrated by the multicolored stains on the basement walls, courtesy of years of explosions.
“I sincerely hope so,” he said obscurely. To my consternation, he opened the vial and ran a fingertip over the wet end of the plug. Before I could stop him, he brought it to his lips.
“Pip was an alchemist,” I informed him, resisting the urge to step back. “Anything could be in there.”
He raised a dark brow. “Alchemist? Is that what they call them now? The last time I visited this country, there was a more colorful term in use. Moonshiner.” He went back to browsing the shelves, exactly like a connoisseur in a wine shop. I narrowed my eyes at the pile of metal in the corner—the still, I presumed—and suddenly a lot of things made sense.
“You’re telling me these crates contain booze?”
“Booze.” He rolled the word over his tongue as if he liked the sound. “Yes, I remember that one. And ‘giggle water,’ and ‘hair of the dog’ and, my personal favorite, ‘hooch.’ ” I stared, both at the oddity of hearing those words in his accent and for the realization that some of the slang wasn’t exactly current. I scowled. Thank you, Mircea. If Louis-Cesare’s knowledge of the rest of the country was as archaic, he was going to be just a huge help.