“I know where they hunt now,” he said urgently. “I will find them—”
“Not soon enough. Jacomelo is kicking up a fuss, and the Lady wants answers.”
“I understand—”
>
“Do you?” The other maid began washing her mistress’ arm with soap smelling of musk and cloves. It was a heady, rich scent, and wreathed Mircea’s head in fragrance. It did not seem to improve his patron’s temper, however. “She’s at war,” she said flatly. “She needs her allies kept happy, and losing his son has not made Jacomelo happy. It didn’t help that the damned boy was the only one in his family who could count!”
No, Mircea supposed not. Jacomelo was the head of a powerful vampire family with extensive business interests in Venice and abroad. He was also a longtime, vocal supporter of the consul. Had she failed in her attempt to overthrow her Sire and take control of the Senate, his blood would have run in the streets alongside hers. As it was, he was a senior member of her government, with a great deal of power.
Power he was using to find out who had kidnapped, and presumably killed, his son.
There had been rumors about vampires disappearing for a while, but the usual targets were the masterless hordes that no one cared about. Whoever had taken Jacomelo’s son had probably assumed he was one of them. When he wasn’t running his father’s vast empire, the boy had been fond of slumming in Venice’s stews, dressed as a commoner.
Until one morning, when he didn’t come home.
“I will solve this,” Mircea promised again. “Soon.”
“And when you do, you will have your reward.”
“But I need—” Mircea stopped the blurted words, because she didn’t care. It was one thing the nobles of his new world had in common with those of his old. Telling them what you needed—even desperately—was beside the point. They saw only their own, selfish points of view.
“My daughter’s illness takes up a good deal of my time,” he said, more diffidently. “I fear her condition grows worse. I spend as many hours as I can on the streets, on this project of yours, but—”
“Project of mine?” the praetor interrupted. “Say, rather, the consul’s; she’s the one who ordered it, but gave me no men to aid with it. They’re needed for her war, it seems.”
“I understand—”
“You keep saying that.” She crossed her arms on the edge of the pool, laying her cheek on them as the maid moved on to her back. “Of course, you’ve met her, so perhaps you do. Others see her beauty, her charm, her power—so much power! It blinds us poor mortals.”
“But . . . you’re not mortal,” Mircea said, confused. The praetor was said to be almost as old as the consul herself. Old enough to remember when Venice was founded, not that she was here then.
Like so many of her kind, when old Rome fell to the barbarians, she merely moved to one of her estates—in Spain, Mircea had heard, somewhere near the sea—drank her wine, watched generations of her servants cultivate her olive trees and . . . waited. Vampires as old as she had watched empires come and go more than once. They had time to wait for the next one.
“Yes, that’s the story they tell the young, to sway them into the fold,” she agreed. “For what does youth fear but age? Yet, how many do you see, from all those centuries past, who still remain? One day, death finds us all.”
“Then she is mortal, too.” He dared to sit on the edge of the bath, although he had not been asked, but she only looked at him in mild amusement.
“Says a boy, barely grown. She’s managed to avoid death for a millennium and a half. And her Sire was said to be ancient, perhaps five thousand years old. They are difficult to kill, that family.”
“Yet he died, too,” Mircea pointed out.
She laughed, and it sounded genuine. “You always know the right thing to say,” she told him cryptically, and waved the girl away. Go find out what’s taking Colleta so long.
The praetor rinsed herself under the streams of water, taking her time, while Mircea fought not to vibrate with impatience. But he said nothing, and kept his expression blank and dutiful. His old habits did him little good in this new society, where bluster and bravado were the habits of children, and where time, always the bane of mortal existence, stretched long.
Like the silences.
He watched the candlelight flicker in the dark water. The rain had stopped and someone had opened a window, letting in the scent of clean air, roses, and wine, because several servants were indulging themselves after a hard night’s work, somewhere below. Mircea wanted to elaborate on his previous theme, of how his daughter’s illness was keeping him from giving his full attention to the praetor’s matter, and how helping him to cure her would therefore benefit them both. But there was an odd stillness in the air. Something weighty that made him pause, and wait for her to resume the conversation.
And she knew he would wait, as long as required. She was the only one who could give him what he sought. Where else was he to go?
“Hand me my robe,” she finally said, and Mircea made himself move slowly and deliberately to retrieve it, as if it were a matter of complete indifference to him how long it took.
He turned to find her drying off—alone, because her servants weren’t back yet. And smiling at him, a brief twist of her lips, amused and a bit wistful, all at once. “I remember when things were so important,” she told him. “When I, too, vibrated with need.”
“Praetor—”