“Not him. The other. Louis-Cesare.”
I eyed the Fey. I didn’t see any seeping wounds or missing limbs, so it looked like he had been able to handle Louis-Cesare well enough. “He isn’t likely to be hanging around the foyer, either.”
“No, but he may be, as you say, ‘hanging around’ other places, such as the source of the power for your uncle’s wards.”
“Which would be?”
“The first thing you will discover for me. The wards should let me in when I return as they already know me as a friend of the house. I will shut them down after I arrive, but I will not have time to search the house. Second, you will need to ensure that Geoffrey is out of the way and that someone with less knowledge of Mircea answers the door. One of the humans would be best. And third, you must distract Louis-Cesare long enough for me to lower the wards.”
“Is that all?” I asked sarcastically.
“It should suffice.” He smiled with amused tolerance. “I will arrive at nine p.m. tomorrow. That gives you more than twenty hours. I am confident you can manage in that time.”
The only reason I didn’t bite him was the certain knowledge that he’d enjoy it. “And why should I trust you? A strange Fey I only met yesterday?”
Caedmon smiled gently. “I think you know why.”
I thought I did, too. I covered his hand with mine. “As long as we have an understanding about Claire. No forcing her into Faerie against her will.” Caedmon gave me innocent eyes. I pushed his thumb onto one of the rose’s longer thorns, deep enough to hit bone. “If you betray me, I’ll gut you and feed the remains to Radu’s menagerie.”
Caedmon pulled his hand off the rose and brought the bleeding digit to my mouth, smearing blood along my lips. “You say the sweetest things.”
“I mean it, Caedmon.”
He bent his head and gently kissed away the blood. The taste of his lips was an explosion of sweetness, like summer condensed. “I know.”
Chapter Eighteen
Fresh blood at midnight isn’t red. It’s a purplish black that easily blends into the shadows. I plunged my foot ankle-deep into a frost-covered puddle of it and swore softly. The upper crust was only half-frozen, and the sticky sludge beneath oozed around my rag-covered foot sickeningly. I jumped to the side, scrambling for purchase on the icy rocks and slippery dead leaves, leaving a trail of dark gashes in the snow.
When I finally forced my eyes upward, I saw what I’d expected. The naked man impaled on a thick wooden stake above me had skin the color of the snow piled all around, and never moved except when the vicious wind tossed his limbs about. The eyes were frozen over with a thin layer of ice, making them glitter with a parody of life in the moonlight. I looked away, but all I saw was a line of similar corpses bordering the path down the mountain, disappearing into the dark. It looked like my quarry was home.
A flight of crows, startled by my presence, left their perch in the skeleton of a tree and wheeled out over the valley, a score of dark shapes dipping erratically in the wind. The full moon illuminated thick woods glittering with frost, cut through by a silver ribbon of river. It would have been breathtaking, if I’d had any to spare. I didn’t. I hadn’t dared take the main path up the mountain; even on a night like this, it was guarded. I’d had to crawl up a crumbling dirt path engineered by goats and practically impassable by anything not on four feet. The only sight that interested me now was the two cloaked guards standing in the shadow of a nearby stone overhang, the fog of their breath thick as smoke as they stomped their feet, trying to get some circulation going.
The massive slab over their heads had a beard of long icicles, like a mouth with sharp, jagged teeth. It almost looked as if the entryway were trying to eat them. The gray hulk of Castle Poenari rose menacingly behind them, sparkling with the same ice that crunched under their boots every time they moved. A bitter wind howled around the mountain, and I could hear one of them struggle to breathe, the air rattling wetly in his chest. But they hadn’t dared to light a fire. Their master frowned on any sign of weakness, and I guess they preferred pneumonia to ending their lives writhing on the end of a stake.