And one only had to look to see the madness that glittered behind Elisabet’s eyes. Lucien had discovered her in Portugal, on trial for the murder of her husband. He’d been impressed with the way she spat on the ground and declared that not only she’d done it, but if the Lord raised him back up in that very courtroom, she’d do it again. He and Gavriel broke her out of the prison that night; she’d gone with them without a single look back. When she hunted, she used a razor instead of her teeth and attacked her victims with a ferocity that would have been unnerving in a man twice her size.
And now he would have to mourn them. He tried to say amusing things as they walked through the streets, tried to pretend that it was possible for the Spider, ancient and terrible as he was, to let them live, but Lucien knew his progeny would, in all likelihood, be destroyed. Ancient vampires ruled over their portion of the world like feudal lords, favoring the same sorts of punishments. Perhaps Lucien should have told them to run, but he knew that neither Istanbul nor Shanghai nor any other place was far enough to hide from a creature like the Spider, who could pull at his baroque web of connections to cause the fall of the banks in Luxembourg or a revolution in Spain. If they ran, he would track them across the world.
Besides, if they ran, it would get Lucien in a lot of trouble.
Elisabet flashed him a fierce look. “We should kill the Spider,” she said. “Kill him and drain him. His blood would grant us all his centuries of power. Even shared, we’d be able to make the rules instead of listening to them.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Lucien snapped, although in truth, he had heard that there was a Spider before this one, killed in the way Elisabet proposed. “If you make a single move against him, we’ll all be dead. It’s important that you show him that I’ve taught you the proper respect for your elders.”
“Then perhaps you should have,” said Gavriel in his soft, self-possessed voice.
Lucien shot him a sharp look. One of the things that had drawn him to Gavriel was that as lost as Gavriel was in his morass of grief, there were times when he was unnervingly clear-sighted. But he didn’t like to have that sharp sight turned on him.
He knew what he was, what depths of depravity and cruelty he had plumbed, what ambitions drove him. He prided himself on knowing those things—but that didn’t mean he needed anyone else to see them as well.
They made their way to a walled manor in the old city, the facade all carved marble and stone. The gates stood slightly ajar, and Lucien slipped inside, past carefully shaped hedges, toward a large, red double door with a brass knocker in the shape of an agonized woman’s face. As Lucien lifted it, he realized that the hinge of the knocking mechanism was between her teeth, making it appear like a riding bit.
Gavriel raised both his brows at Elisabet. She rolled her eyes.
It should have pleased him, the way they truly behaved like siblings, but he resented it. It made him feel that, though he ruled over them, they still had secrets. “He’d like to see you like that, I’ll wager,” Lucien said just to watch Gavriel look embarrassed, to watch Elisabet snort, just to show them that everything, even their jokes, belonged to him. Death might steal them soon, but until then, they were his.
A few moments later, a stoop-shouldered woman came to the door. She was wearing a dark-colored dress, her graying hair pulled back into a braided bun.
“Guten tag,” the woman said, and ushered them inside. Following her, they passed through many rooms with painted fresco ceilings depicting battles, the dead and dying looking down at them from gilt-lined recesses. Electric globes hung like fruit from chandeliers, reflected in mirrored panels. They passed red brocade couches and tables with carvings as elaborate as the plaster moldings on the walls.
She led them to another courtyard, this one with a single hawthorn at its center. A few of the Spider’s personal guards, rather pretentiously known as the Corps des Ténèbres, stood around conspicuously in their long robes. Standing beside the tree was a very tall and thin vampire in a charcoal sack coat with a waistcoat and trousers. A watch fob ran from his pocket to underneath his vest, and a red-gold intaglio signet ring, still choked with wax, shone in the glow from the gas lamps. His hooded red eyes regarded them from a saturnine face with a high forehead and a poisoner’s mouth. There was no mistaking who he was, despite his ordinary dress and demeanor. He exuded a kind of power that had almost a gravitational pull.
Elisabet was staring at him with a terrible kind of fascination. And Gavriel seemed to be trying not to look anywhere at all.
“Ah, Lucien,” said the Spider, walking toward them, taking his hands out of the pockets of his trousers to scorch the end of a cigarette with a bright gold lighter. His fingers ended in long, yellowed, hooked nails like the talons of some great bird, and Lucien wondered how many more centuries it would be before he woke up with hands like that. “So good of you to come.”