Embrace the Night
Page 57

I stared at the house, which looked completely deserted, and wondered if he was sure about that. With the master away, maybe the caretaker had left for parts where there weren’t daily decapitations. “I don’t think anyone’s home,” I ventured, peering in the window. I couldn’t tell much about the inside since there were sheets thrown over all the furniture, but it felt as empty as the cathedral.
Mircea only smiled. “He’s a little slow.”
“So when you said you lived in Paris—”
“I meant here.” Mircea paused to pound on the door, actually shaking the heavy wood. “Before I joined the North American Senate, I belonged to the European one. And it has been based in Paris since the early Middle Ages.”
He started to knock again, but the door was wrenched open by a tiny old man with a large nose and watery blue eyes. He peered at us myopically from under an oversized wig, while spewing a string of angry French. He punctuated whatever he was saying with wild waves of his cane, but without its support he lost his balance and would have toppled down the stairs if Mircea hadn’t caught him.
“Demmed young ruffians!” he raged, in between attempts to bite Mircea’s wrist. But despite being a vampire, he seemed to have only one fang, and it never managed to connect with anything.
“Horatiu! It’s me!” Mircea’s voice echoed up and down the street as he practically screamed in the old man’s ear.
“Eh?” the vamp squinted, but apparently it didn’t help his eyesight.
Mircea sighed. “I gave you a cord for your spectacles,” he said, rummaging around in the old man’s coat. “Why aren’t you wearing them?”
“’m a vampire. Don’t need spectacles!” Mircea was informed, as the man slapped at his hands. Mircea ignored him and finally came up with a pair of pince-nez. He settled them on the vamp’s long nose and smiled at him encouragingly. “It’s me,” he repeated.
“I know that!” the old man said tetchily. “Might have sent word you was coming. Got nothing prepared,” he bitched, but he did let us in the door.
We walked at a snail’s pace through a hall and up a large staircase. Horatiu was carrying a candle that wavered and flickered, casting leaping shadows on the walls, and it gave me my first clear look at Mircea. Despite the earlier libations, he was still missing half his outfit, had dirt and dust all over the part remaining, and a strand of something suspiciously like seaweed was clinging tenaciously to his hair. Seeing him like that was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’d treasure it.
“You’re going to need to change before you see the other me again,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Something that looks as much like your old outfit as possible.”
Mircea shot me a look that said he’d noticed my amusement. “I have several black suits.”
“But the shirt—”
“I also have quite a few of those.”
“Really. It didn’t look off-the-rack to me.”
“It wasn’t. Ming-de sends me one every year, on my birthday.”
“How kind of her. Any particular reason?”
Mircea blinked lazily. “I don’t suppose you would like to tell me what the mage meant by ‘outraged modesty’?”
I licked my lips, feeling a residual tingle on my tongue that tasted suspiciously like a certain psycho war mage. “Not really.”
“Then I think I, too, will keep my secrets, dulceata?.”
“Yeah, but you have more than me,” I muttered.
He quirked an eyebrow. “I am beginning to wonder.”
We ended up in Mircea’s rooms, which were composed of a small dressing room and a larger bedroom. The painted wardrobe I’d seen at MAGIC had pride of place, beside a silk tapestry showing a green dragon eating its own tail. I stared at it in exhaustion. It was starting to get creepy. “The ouroboros.”
“The symbol of the Sárkány Lovagrend,” Mircea corrected me, his eyes on Horatiu.
“What?”
“The Order of the Dragon,” he translated, moving closer to his servant. The old man was doing something near the fireplace that faced the large bed. It took me a moment to figure out what, because the paper spill he was holding was pressed to a soot-covered brick several feet to the left of the grate instead of to one of the dusty logs. “It was a society set up in Hungary by King Sigismund. My father became a member and…Let me do that,” Mircea offered, his eyes on the rapidly burning paper.
Horatiu smacked him on the shoulder. “Didn’t I teach you anything about respecting your station?” he demanded. “Always running about, playing with the servants’ children, thinking that cheeky grin of yours was going to let you get away with all sorts of irresponsible behavior.”
“So nothing’s changed,” I murmured.
Mircea sent me a wounded look while wrestling the old man for the spill. “What a nice blaze,” he said loudly, managing to get the paper away from Horatiu just before it set his hand on fire.
Horatiu regarded the cold interior of the fireplace proudly. “Yes it is, isn’t it?”
After a few moments, Mircea managed to coax the logs to life. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat?” he asked. He didn’t look hopeful, but my stomach grumbled expectantly anyway.
“Eat?” Horatiu peered at me blankly. Apparently he’d assumed that Mircea had brought takeout.
“She is my guest!” Mircea said emphatically.
Horatiu muttered something that sounded disappointed. “Well, I suppose I could go out and try to find someone,” he said doubtfully. “But with all the troubles nowadays, the streets are often deserted after dark.”
“I meant for her.”
“Eh?”
“Is there any food suitable for a human?” Mircea asked patiently.
“Well, if you’d sent word,” Horatiu said huffily. “I can’t be expected to know you’ll be bringing home one of them, can I? Not to mention that the shops are mostly empty in any case, what with everything going to the army!”
“A ‘no’ would have sufficed,” Mircea said. His glance at me was rueful. “My apologies. My hospitality is usually somewhat more…hospitable.”
“Not a problem.” I sat on the plush rug in front of the hearth and stretched my hands out to the fire. For the first time that night, I was almost warm and I didn’t have to worry about someone sneaking up on me.
“The cellars are intact, I believe?” Mircea inquired.
“Yes, yes. Plenty of wine.” Horatiu just stood there. So did Mircea. “Do you want me to go get some?” the old man finally asked.
“That would be nice,” Mircea said politely. Horatiu tottered off, still muttering to himself, just loudly enough to be understood. Mircea sighed and started searching a squat cabinet in a corner.
“It is an ouroboros, though, right? The order’s symbol?” My eyes had wandered back to the tapestry. The dragon’s scales were green, and its eyes, picked out in gold thread, seemed to move in the low light of the fire.
“Yes, I suppose,” Mircea said absently. “It is an ancient protection symbol, of a girdle of power encasing something precious. And that’s what they were trying to do—guard Europe from Turkish invasion. Why?”
“I keep seeing it lately, everywhere I go. It’s starting to weird me out.”
Mircea laughed. “The ouroboros is the mages’ emblem. It is ubiquitous in our world.”
“But they just use a plain silver circle,” I protested. I’d always thought it showed a real lack of imagination. The oldest magical organization on earth, and that was the best they could do?
“The older version of their symbol was an ouroboros. It was stylized over time into something easier to reproduce. They say they chose it because it is the alchemical symbol for purity, and silver stands for wisdom.” Mircea’s tone left no doubt as to what he thought of that claim.
“Protection, purity and wisdom.” A lot of things came to mind when I thought of the Circle. Those three weren’t on the list.
Mircea held out a dusty bottle. “Burgundy,” he said triumphantly.
“But you just sent Horatiu for wine.”
“Yes, a fact he’ll remember for perhaps five minutes.” He filled a couple of glasses that looked reasonably clean and passed me one.
“Thanks.” I took a sip. It was good. “What happened to him?”
“Horatiu?” I nodded. “I am afraid I did.”
“What? But isn’t changing someone that old considered kind of…inadvisable?”
“Very much.” Mircea ignored his wine in favor of rummaging around in the wardrobe. He soon produced a paper-wrapped package that smelled like sandalwood. “Yes, I thought I would have another.” He lifted up a corner of the paper. “And it’s in white.”
I narrowed my eyes at it. Ming-de’s little gift, I assumed. “You look better in color,” I snapped.
He sent me a sultry look over his shoulder. “Really? Most women think I look better in nothing at all.”
I backpedaled fast. “So why did you change him, then?”
Mircea shrugged. “He was my childhood tutor. I visited him on his deathbed, to find his skin as pallid as the sheets but his mind as sharp as ever. He knew he was dying, and he was highly incensed about it. He lay there, his body failing, and demanded that I do something, in the same voice he’d used to terrorize me as a child—”
“And you caved?”
“I agreed to his proposition,” Mircea said with dignity.
“You caved.”
He sighed and pulled on the shirt. “I’m afraid so.”
“But why is he like that? If you turned him, shouldn’t he have vampiric sight?” Not to mention hearing, sense of balance and the ability to cross a room faster than a meandering caterpillar.