Libor’s pack thought her a lesser vampire, but a vampire who could pull on the power of witchcraft was a contender for the scariest monster in town by any definition.
I clung to the contact I had with Adam, drawing courage and resolution in equal measure. I would not let this be the last place I saw on this earth. I would not let the last time I saw Adam be the laughing face he’d given me as I died a dramatic death at the hands of his daughter. I would not let the last air I breathed be the fetid stench rising from the dirt of this abattoir.
I would survive this. Somehow.
“Mercedes Thompson Hauptman,” Mary the vampire said. Her accent was heavy, definitely Eastern European, but I couldn’t decide if it was actually Czech, Serbian, or even Russian. That put paid to my Hitler M?dchen guess. Hers was not the usual Czech accent, though.
I stared at her without meeting her eyes. Probably she couldn’t have caught me with her gaze, but I’d met at least one who could. Being immune to most vampires sometimes seemed as useful as being immune to none.
She said something. I stared some more, and she made an impatient sound. One of the vampires came over, a male, and knelt beside her, facing me. She put her hand on his head and said something again.
The kneeling vampire said, his voice accented with the same upper-crust accent that Ben used, “How thou art fallen, daughter of the Werewolf King.”
I continued staring at Mary. She knew who I was. Possibly she’d gotten word from Bonarata. Less likely was that she knew more about the werewolves in the States and our families than the rest of the supernatural community I’d run into here.
What did she intend with the misquote of the Bible? I couldn’t see why she’d compare me to Lucifer, at whom the original quote had been aimed. I wondered if stealing and mutilating phrases from Isaiah was a kind of assumption of power—a dare of sorts. Though I knew that biblical readings did not affect vampires, not everyone (including some vampires I’d met) knew that.
Or maybe the translating vampire was taking a few liberties with what she said. I kept myself from looking away from Mary to look at her translator by force of will. Mary was the threat.
“I have seen nature films of coyotes,” Mary continued through her translator. “I expected that you would be bigger. More impressive. He told me that you had escaped the Lord of Night, so I should make sure of your captivity.”
It must be hard, I thought, to give a proper villain speech when your victim couldn’t say anything, and you could only speak through another person. It didn’t seem to bother Mary much. Nor did she appear to be rattled by the clank, clank, clank of the vampire chained to the wall. He’d quit screaming but now jerked on his chains in a heavy-metal precise rhythm that pounded my ears.
Mary paid him no obvious attention, though the structure of her sentences started to follow the beat of that chain. As bad as the clank, clank, clank was, I still preferred it to the screams.
“I think, Mercy . . . that is what they call you, yes?” Mary smiled a little at me, as if she found me charming or something. I was betting on the or something. She waited a moment or two after the other vampire had translated for her. Presumably, she thought I might respond, but I made no move.
“A shortened version of your real name,” she said. “Mercy, the weakest of all the virtues. I find your name ironically appropriate.”
She reached out and ran her long fingernails musically over the welded metal mesh. I noted that she had a French manicure, though the nail on her little finger was broken raggedly.
She whispered, “Mercy has no place here, except that she is locked behind bars of steel and silver and magic.”
As if no one had ever had clever things to say about my name before.
“I think,” Mary told me, “that you should not anticipate escaping from here. We have kept your greater cousins here for months at a time, and none have escaped us that we have not let go. We will keep you alive, because that is what he wants. You should remember that—that you owe him your life.”
Him who? Bonarata? Oddly, I thought not. The other Master Vampire, Kocourek, had Bonarata’s support. Bonarata, evil and rotten to the core though he might be, had a code of honor he followed. I knew the stories—and some of them were gruesome. It was the belief that Bonarata would keep his word that had allowed him to amass power for as long as he had. If he supported one seethe, he would not undermine that with another in the same hunting ground.
So whom did she mean?
I cocked an ear at her. And she got it.
Her eyes half-lidded, and she smiled secretly. “Guccio,” she said.
It took me a moment to process his name. Pretty Vampire. Hadn’t his name been Guccio? I’d been meeting a lot of people in the past day or two. But I was pretty sure that Pretty Vampire had been Guccio.
“I see you know of whom I speak. Though you met him only briefly, he leaves an impression most rare.” She took a step forward and dropped to her heels, so her face and mine were even. “He said you were ugly and fat. He said he prefers me.”
Yippee. She was welcome to him. Even if I wasn’t married, I don’t date the dead.
Mary’s mouth was pursed unhappily as she examined me. “You do not look as though you are fat. You look puny and stupid, but not fat. I think he lied to me. And why would he lie unless he wanted you and he didn’t want me to know it? Are you ugly?”
Heaven save me from jealous vampires. I’d always thought that vampires were cold-blooded, and, if they thought about another creature at all, it came with thoughts of food.
I didn’t make the mistake of trying to answer her question. There was no right answer to a question like that. In my coyote shape, I had the perfect excuse to maintain my silence.
“You brought another witch with you,” she said after a moment.
I had no idea what she was talking about. Had Bonarata had a witch travel with me from the US?
“He said”—she frowned unhappily—“he said he wasn’t looking for another witch because he had me.” Shrewd eyes examined me. “But I’m not stupid—I’m not as stupid as he thinks I am, anyway. He lied about you. If he weren’t interested in the witch, he wouldn’t have brought her up.”
He wanted to keep her on edge, I judged. Keep her trying to please him. It was easier to control someone who understood that they were replaceable.
“He told me he thought about taking her, too, since I worked out so well for him. But she was old—and while vampires don’t age, they don’t get younger-looking, either.” She leaned close to the cage and murmured sweetly, “And it looked as though she had her claws into your mate anyway. They are sleeping together.”
My mate. Adam had made it to Milan, then, to speak with Bonarata. Had he brought Elizaveta? Why had he brought Elizaveta? That was a stupid question. Elizaveta was a very strong arrow in our quiver as long as she chose to aim herself in a useful direction. She liked Adam. I realized that I should have known he’d brought her—it must have been her magic that had allowed him to contact me while I was in the bus’s luggage compartment.
Mary made a disappointed sound. I guess I was supposed to be jealous over the comment about Elizaveta and Adam sleeping together. If there was one constant in my life, it was my mate. Pyramids would roll down the desert before Adam would break his word or betray anyone, let alone me.
Finally, with a little unattractive pout, she said, “It is good for you that Guccio didn’t like that witch. He said he didn’t think she’d be cooperative, not useful to him as I have been. If he chose another to do for him what I do—I would not have liked that. You might have had an accident.”
Elizaveta was well able to defend herself. I expected that if Guccio had tried to suborn Elizaveta, the vampire would have found himself overmatched. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew quite a bit about Elizaveta.
“He’ll be so pleased with me,” she said, apparently to herself, because she got to her feet and turned her back to me, though the translating vampire kept translating.