Curse the Dawn

My grasping fingers finally found something that felt like a doorway and my foot scraped against a jagged surface that might have been stairs. I kicked against it instinctively but didn't go very far. The remains of my waterlogged outfit dragged me down as I tried to fight my way toward the dim undulation that I really hoped was the surface.

Then a hand wrapped in the front of my dress, threatening to strangle me, and with a kick and a heave, I broke into air. I grabbed the sleeves of a wet white shirt and stared at the man wearing it. For a second, everything went gray except his face. His eyes looked too green, too clear, with a diamond-sharp, surreal edge. It took me a moment to notice that his face was flushed and his eyes were bright as lightning. The lunatic had enjoyed himself.

"How the hell did you get here before me?" I demanded, gasping as much from relief as lack of air.

Pritkin shrugged. "I took the back door and came around."

"Pritkin. There is no back door."

"There is now. The projector punched a hole in the south corridor."

"Bit of a design flaw," Caleb rumbled.

"I don't think the wards were ever tested over a sustained period," Pritkin told him. "Something to keep in mind when we rebuild." He finally noticed my expression and frowned. "Are you all right?"

"Fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm trying to remember all the reasons you are indispensable and can't be killed slowly and painfully."

He ignored that and hauled me to my feet. I gathered up my tattered skirts, along with whatever dignity I'd managed to salvage. Then the three of us squelched up the stairs.

Chapter Eight

Caleb's sphere made little headway against the gloom and was soon covered in a thick layer of dust. It was like the one I felt clinging to my skin, gritty and all-encompassing, as if the place resented not being able to drown us and was trying to slowly bury us alive. It didn't have far to go.

The swath of destruction carved by the ley line hadn't reached down this far, but it looked like some of the tremors it caused had. There were cracks in the walls as big as my thumb and chunks missing from most of the steps. We picked a zigzag path up the solid parts to the top, only to find yet another dark-as-night corridor.

Pritkin took point while Caleb brought up the rear. The rooms in this section were mostly residential, including the palatial suite used by Mircea when he was in residence. We stepped through the doorway into his rooms, and it was suddenly difficult to tell that we were in an underground fortress in the middle of a crisis.

The walls were covered in drywall painted in tasteful, muted colors of wine and deep gold. They complemented the Italian marble floors, the gilt moldings and the hand-painted ceilings. Mircea was the Senate's chief diplomat, so his quarters took on the role of embassy. It was here, among the priceless antiques, Swarovski chandeliers and unknown paintings by the world's great masters, that he welcomed dignitaries, soothed ruffled feathers and struck deals.

Away from the main entrance, signs of the disaster were more apparent. In places, the elegant Venetian plaster had erupted with raw red stone, the bones of the place peeking through the veneer. And everything was covered in a layer of fine red dust. I could taste the tang of it in the back of my mouth and feel it coating the inside of my nostrils. Even an overlooked spiderweb high in one corner was caked with it.

Pritkin found a couple of candelabras and some matches, giving us each a light source, and we split up to make the search go faster. The two mages concentrated on the common areas, while I went down the main hallway, opening bedrooms. Most were pristine except for the dust, their elegant furnishings untouched. But Mircea's private rooms were in more disarray.

The bed linens hung half off the large pedestal bed, and one pillow clung to the mattress in a silent battle of wills with gravity. The ornate wardrobe was open, but most of the clothes, like the priceless paintings on the walls, had been left behind. Yet there were only blank niches in the walls where Romanian folk art had recently stood.

Mircea's home away from home was beautiful, elegant and designed to impress. As a result, it said little about the man who lived here. Like the BBJ and the Armani wardrobe, it was what people expected to see. But I found it telling that his servants, when fleeing for their lives, had left the Sèvres and the Swarovski and had grabbed a collection of painted tin crucifixes and worthless wooden spoons.

It bothered me that, in their position, I wouldn't have known what to take. I stared around at the things they'd left, like an intricately carved set of jade figurines on a shelf, and realized that I'd have probably made all the wrong choices. I didn't know what were treasured memories and what were just decorations. Like I didn't know his hopes, his dreams or his fears, if he had any. .

My heel caught in a puddle of silk by the bed. As I freed it, I found one personal item that had been overlooked in the rush: an old, beat-up book. The black leather cover was worn at the edges and the gilt lettering on the front had mostly faded, with only a few small specks left to gleam in the candlelight. But it was undoubtedly a photo album.

I glanced around, but the guys were nowhere in sight. I knelt on the floor and opened the cover with slightly shaking hands. Mircea had the diplomat's ability to talk for hours without actually saying much, and what he did say was often suspect. I'd heard two versions—so far—about how he became a vampire, and still had no idea if either was true.

But photos didn't lie. At least, not as often as master vampires. And suddenly I was confronted with a whole album containing hundreds of photos of Mircea.

Only it didn't.

The photos had a theme, all right, but it wasn't him. On every page the same face stared out at me—that of a beautiful, dark-haired woman of approximately my age. She combined sloe-eyed sultriness with petite delicacy and would have stopped traffic in no makeup and wearing a muumuu. Only she preferred form-fitting clothes that showed off a trim, athletic figure.

One picture showed her eating at a café. She was wearing old-fashioned clothes—forties era, at a guess—consisting of a white short-sleeved suit and a striped scarf. She was waving a fork around and laughing at someone off camera. Her hair was glossy and sleek in a sassy bob that made a mockery of bad hair days. Her nose didn't turn up at the end, her cheekbones were sculpted, and if she had any freckles they didn't show. She could have been a model for an early issue of Vogue.

I stared at her, the album open on my knees, feeling strangely dizzy. I felt something else, too, something I couldn't quite define, but it heated my cheeks and burned in my stomach like acid. There were no photos of me in this room. Not one. But there was an entire album devoted to this mystery woman. Whoever she was, obviously she was important to Mircea.

More so than me.

Something hit the clear plastic protecting the image, rolled to the edge of the book and was absorbed by the cracked leather binding. I blinked away more somethings, vaguely appalled. This is stupid and petty, I told myself. With everything I had to worry about, here I was, preoccupied with who Mircea might be—God, I couldn't even think it. And that was even more stupid.

What had I believed, that he'd been some kind of monk for five hundred years? After seeing the way women regularly threw themselves at him? And I couldn't very well be jealous of events that had happened long before I was born, even if they did involve beautiful, sophisticated brunettes.

I looked down at a crinkling sound to see that my fist had balled around the page with the photograph, crushing the plastic and threatening to put permanent creases in the paper. Okay, maybe I could. All right, I very definitely could.