Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly Read online

  “I’m sure she meant we had guests for you to entertain, my sweet.” Stefan hadn’t moved from his chair, but his shoulders were tight, and his weight was forward.

  “But he smells so good,” she murmured. I thought she darted her head forward, but I must have been mistaken because Samuel didn’t move. “He’s so warm.”

  “He’s a werewolf, darling Lilly. You’d find him a difficult meal.” Stefan got up and walked slowly around my couch. Taking one of Lilly’s hands in his, he kissed it. “Come entertain us, my lady.”

  He pulled her gently off Samuel and escorted her formally to an upright piano tucked into one corner of the room. He pulled out the bench and helped her settle.

  “What should I play?” she asked. “I don’t want to play Mozart. He was so rude.”

  Stefan touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “By all means, play whatever you wish, and we will listen.”

  She sighed, an exaggerated sound with an accompanying shoulder droop, then, like a marionette she straightened from head to toe and placed her hands just so on the keys.

  I don’t like piano music. There was only one music teacher in Aspen Creek when I grew up, and she played piano. For four years I banged out tunes for a half hour a day and hated the piano more each year. It hated me back.

  It took only a few measures for me to realize I’d been wrong about the piano—at least when Lilly played it. It didn’t seem possible that all that sound came from the little upright piano and the fragile woman sitting before us.

  “Liszt,” whispered Samuel, stepping away from the window and sitting on the back of my seat. Then he closed his eyes and listened, just as he’d listened to the moon.

  Stefan stepped away from the piano once Lilly was focused on her music. He drifted back to stand beside me, then he held out a hand.

  I glanced at Samuel, but he was still lost in the music. I took Stefan’s hand and let him pull me to my feet. He took me to the far side of the room before releasing me.

  “It isn’t being a vampire that made her this way,” he said, not whispering, exactly, but in low tones that didn’t carry over the music. “Her maker found her playing piano at an expensive brothel. He decided he wanted her in his seethe, so he took her before he understood that she was touched. In the normal course she would have been mercifully killed: it is dangerous to have a vampire who cannot control herself. I know the werewolves do the same. But no one could bear to lose her music. So she is kept in the seethe and guarded like the treasure she is.”

  He paused. “But usually she is not allowed to wander about at will. There are always attendants who are assigned to keep her—and our guests—safe. Perhaps our Mistress amuses herself.”

  I watched Lilly’s delicate hands flash across the keys and produce music of power and intellect that she didn’t possess herself. I thought about what had happened when Lilly had come into the room.

  “If Samuel had reacted badly?” I asked.

  “She’d have no chance against him.” Stefan rocked back on his heels unhappily. “She has no experience at taking unwilling prey, and Samuel is old. Lilly is precious to us. If he had hurt her, the whole seethe would have demanded retribution.”

  “Shh,” said Samuel.

  She played Liszt for a long time. Not the early lyrical pieces, but the ones he composed after hearing the radical violinist Paganini. But, right in the middle of one of his distinctively mad runs of notes, she switched into a blues piece I didn’t recognize, something soft and relaxed that lazed in the room like a big cat. She played a little Beatles, some Chopin, and something vaguely oriental in style before falling into the familiar strains of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

  “I thought you weren’t going to play Mozart,” said Stefan when she’d finished the song and begun picking out a melody with her right hand.

  “I like his music,” she explained to the keyboard. “But he was a pig.” She crashed her hands on the keys twice. “But he is dead, and I am not. Not dead.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with her. Not when one of those delicate fingers broke the key beneath it. No one else said anything either.

  She got up from the piano abruptly and strode through the room. She hesitated in front of Samuel, but when Stefan cleared his throat, she trotted up to him and kissed him on the chin. “I’m going to eat now,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Fine.” Stefan hugged her, then directed her out of the room with a gentle push.

  She hadn’t once so much as looked at me.

  “So you think we’re being set up?” asked Samuel, with lazy geniality that seemed somehow out of place.

  Stefan shrugged. “You, I, or Lilly. Take your pick.”

  “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to,” I ventured. “If Samuel died, Bran would tear this place apart. There wouldn’t be a vampire left in the state.” I looked at Stefan. “Your lady may be powerful, but numbers matter. The Tri-Cities isn’t that big. If there were hundreds of you here, I’d have noticed it. Bran can call upon every Alpha in North America.”

  “It is nice to know how we are esteemed by the wolves. I’ll make certain our Mistress knows to leave the wolf alone because she should fear them,” said a woman from just behind me.

  I jumped forward and turned, and Stefan was suddenly between me and the new vampire. This one was neither ethereal nor seductive. If she hadn’t been a vampire, I’d have put her age somewhere around sixty, every year etched in the lines of grim disapproval that traversed her face.

  “Estelle,” said Stefan. I couldn’t tell if it was a greeting, introduction, or admonition.

  “She has changed her mind. She doesn’t want to come up to visit with the wolf. They can come to her instead.” Estelle didn’t seem to react to Stefan at all.

  “They are under my protection.” Stefan’s voice darkened in a way I’d never heard it before.

  “She said you may come, too, if you wish.” She looked at Samuel. “I’ll need to take any crosses or holy objects you are wearing, please. We do not allow people to go armed in the presence of our Mistress.”

  She held out a gold-embossed leather bag, and Samuel unhooked his necklace. When he pulled it out of his shirt, the necklace didn’t blaze or glow. It was just a bit of ordinary metal, but I saw her involuntary shudder when it brushed close to her skin.

  She looked at me and I pulled out my necklace and showed her my sheep. “No crosses,” I said in a bland voice. “I didn’t expect to be out speaking to your Mistress tonight.”

  She didn’t even glance at Zee’s dagger, dismissing it as a weapon. After pulling the drawstring tight, she let the bag dangle from it. “Come with me.”

  “I’ll bring them down in a minute,” Stefan said. “Go tell her we are coming.”

  The other vampire raised her eyebrows but left without a word, carrying the bag with Samuel’s cross in it.

  “There’s something more happening than I thought,” Stefan said rapidly. “Against most of those here, I can protect you, but not the Mistress herself. If you’d like, I’ll get you out of here and see if I can find the information without you.”

  “No,” said Samuel. “We’re here now. Let us finish this.”

  Samuel’s words slurred a little, and I saw Stefan give him a sharp glance.

  “Once more I offer you escort away from here.” This time Stefan looked at me. “I would have no harm come to you and yours here.”

  “Can you find out where the other wolves are, if she doesn’t want you to?” I asked him.

  He hesitated, which was answer enough.

  “We’ll go talk to her, then,” I said.

  Stefan nodded, but not like he was happy about it. “Then I find myself echoing your gremlin. Keep your eyes away from hers. She’ll probably have others with her, whether she allows you to see them or not. Don’t look at anyone’s eyes. There are four or five here who could entangle even your wolf.”

  He turned and led the way through the house to an alcove sheltering a wroug
ht-iron spiral staircase. As we started down, I thought we were going to the basement, but the stairway went deeper. Small lights on the cement wall surrounding the stairs turned on as Stefan passed them. They allowed us to see the stairs—and that we were traveling down a cement tube, but they weren’t bright enough to do much more. Fresh air wafted out of small vents that kept the air moving, but it also kept me from smelling anything from deeper down.

  “How far down are we going?” I asked, trying to fight off the claustrophobic desire to run back the way we’d come.

  “About twenty feet from the surface.” Stefan’s voice echoed a little—or else something below us made a noise.

  Maybe I was just jumpy.

  Eventually the stairway ended in a pad of cement. But even with my night vision, the darkness was so absolute I could see only a few yards in any direction. The smell of bleach danced around several scents I’d never encountered before.

  Stefan moved and a series of fluorescent lights flickered to life. We stood in an empty room with cement floors, walls, and ceilings. The overall effect was sterile and empty.

  Stefan didn’t pause, just continued through the room and into a narrow tunnel that sloped gently upward as we walked. Steel doors without knobs or handles lined the tunnel at even intervals. I could hear things moving behind the doors and scooted up until I could touch Samuel’s shoulder for reassurance. As I passed the last door, something slammed against it, ringing with a hollow boom that echoed away from us. Behind another door someone—or something—began a high-pitched hopeless cascade of laughter that ended in a series of screams.

  By the end of it, I was all but crawling up on top of Samuel, but he was still relaxed, and his breathing and pulse hadn’t even begun to speed up. Damn him. I didn’t take a deep breath until we’d left the doors behind.

  The tunnel took a narrow turn, and the floor became a steep upward set of twelve stairs that ended in a room with curved plastered walls, wooden floors, and soft lighting. Directly opposite the stairway was a sumptuous mocha leather couch whose curves echoed the walls.

  A woman reclined on two overstuffed tapestry-covered pillows braced against one of the couch’s arms. She wore silk. I could smell the residue of the silkworms, just as I could smell the faint scent I was learning to identify with vampire.

  The dress itself was simple and expensive, revealing her figure in swirling colors ranging from purple to red. Her narrow feet were bare except for red and purple toenail polish. She had them braced so her knees came up and provided backing to support the paperback she was reading.

  She finished the page, dog-eared one corner, and set it carelessly on the floor. She swung her legs off the couch and shifted so that her face was toward us before she raised her gaze to look at us. It was so gracefully done that I barely had time to drop my own eyes.

  “Introduce us, Stefano,” she said, her voice a deep contralto made the richer by a touch of an Italian accent.

  Stefan bowed, a formal gesture that should have looked odd with his torn jeans, but somehow came out gracefully old-fashioned instead.

  “Signora Marsilia,” he said, “May I introduce you to Mercedes Thompson, auto mechanic extraordinaire and her friend Dr. Samuel Cornick, who is the Marrok’s son. Mercy, Dr. Cornick, this is Signora Marsilia, Mistress of the Mid-Columbia Seethe.”

  “Welcome,” she said.

  It had been bothering me how human the two women upstairs had seemed with their wrinkles and imperfections. Stefan, himself, had a touch of otherness that I could see. I had known him for inhuman the first time I’d seen him, but, except for the distinctive scent of vampire, the other two women would have passed for human.

  This one would not have.

  I stared at her, trying to nail down what was making the hair on the back of my neck rise. She looked like a woman in her early twenties, evidently having died and become vampire before life had marked her. Her hair was blond, which was not a color I associated with Italy. Her eyes were dark, though, as dark as my own.

  Hastily, I jerked my gaze from her face, my breath coming more rapidly as I realized how easy it was to forget. She hadn’t been looking at me though. Like the other vampires, her attention was on Samuel, and understandably so. He was the son of the Marrok, Bran’s son, a person of influence rather than a VW mechanic. Then, too, most women would look at him rather than me.

  “I have said something to amuse you, Mercedes?” Marsilia asked. Her voice was pleasant, but there was power behind it, something akin to the power the Alphas could call upon.

  I decided to tell her the truth and see what she made of it. “You are the third woman tonight who has virtually ignored me, Signora Marsilia. However, I find it perfectly understandable, since I have trouble taking my attention off Dr. Cornick, too.”

  “Do you often have such an effect on women, Dr. Cornick?” she asked him archly. See, her attention was still really on him.

  Samuel, unflappable Samuel, stuttered. “I-I haven’t . . .” He stopped and sucked in air, then, sounding a little more like himself, he said, “I expect that you have more luck with the opposite sex than I do.”

  She laughed, and I realized finally what it was that bothered me. There was something off about her expressions and her gestures, as if she were only aping humans. As if, without us here to perform for, she would not appear human at all.

  Zee told me that modern advances in CGI allowed filmmakers to create computer-animated people who seemed very nearly human. But they found that after a certain point, the closer the characters looked to real, the more they repelled their audience.

  I knew now exactly what he meant.

  She had everything almost right. Her heart beat, she breathed regularly. Her skin was flushed slightly, like a person who has just finished walking in the cold. But her smiles were just slightly wrong: coming too late or too early. Her imitation of a human was very close, but not quite close enough to be real—and that small difference was giving me the creeps.

  Generally, I don’t have the control problems that the werewolves do—coyotes are adaptable, amiable beasts. But at that moment, if I had been in coyote form, I’d have been running away as fast as I could.

  “My Stefano tells me that you want to know about the visitors who paid me so nicely to leave them alone.” She had gone back to ignoring me again—something I wasn’t really unhappy with.

  “Yes.” Samuel kept his voice soft, almost dreamy. “We will eventually find them ourselves, but your information would help.”

  “After I give you this information,” her voice rumbled in her throat like a cat’s, “we shall talk a little about the Marrok and what he will give me for cooperation.”

  Samuel shook his head. “I am sorry, Signora, I do not have authority to discuss this matter. I will be happy to forward any messages you might have to my father.”

  She pouted at him, and I felt the impact of her intent upon him, could smell the beginnings of his arousal. The scary things making noise behind steel doors hadn’t caused his pulse to increase, but the Mistress of the seethe could. She leaned forward, and he closed the distance between them until her face was only inches from his groin.

  “Samuel,” said Stefan quietly. “There is blood on your neck. Did Lilly cut you?”

  “Let me see it,” suggested the Signora. She breathed in deeply, then made a hungry noise that sounded like the rattle of old dry bones. “I will take care of it for you.”

  That sounded like a really bad idea somehow. I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

  “They are under my protection, Mistress,” Stefan said, his voice stiffly formal. “I brought them here so you could speak to the Marrok’s son. Their safety is my honor—and it was almost lost earlier when Lilly came to us unescorted. I should hate to think your wishes were opposed to my honor.”

  She shut her eyes and dropped her head, resting her forehead on Samuel’s belly. I heard her take in another deep breath, and Samuel’s arousal grew as if she called it from hi
m as she inhaled.

  “It has been so long,” she whispered. “His power calls to me like brandy on a winter night. It is difficult to think. Who was in charge of Lilly when she wandered into my guests?”

  “I will find out,” Stefan said. “It would be my pleasure to bring the miscreants before you and see you once more attend your people, Mistress.”

  She nodded, and Samuel groaned. The sound made her open her eyes, and they were no longer dark. In the dimly lit room, her eyes gleamed red-and-gold fire.

  “My control is not as good as it once was,” she murmured. Somehow I’d expected her voice to harshen with the heat of the flames in her eyes, but instead her voice softened and deepened seductively, until my own body was reacting—and I don’t care for other women that way as a rule.

  “This would be a good time for your sheep, Mercy.” Stefan’s attention was so focused upon the other vampire it took me a moment to realize he was speaking to me.

  I’d been edging closer to Samuel. Five years of study in the martial arts had given me a purple belt, the muscles to heft car parts around almost as well as a man, and the understanding that my paltry skills weren’t worth a damn thing against a vampire.

  I’d debated the wisdom of knocking Samuel away from her, but something my senses had been trying to tell me for a while had finally kicked in: there were others here, other vampires I couldn’t see or hear—only scent.

  Stefan’s advice gave me something better to do. I pulled out my necklace. The chain was long enough that I could tug it over my head, and I let it dangle from my hand just as Marsilia moved.

  I grew up with werewolves who ran faster than greyhounds, and I am a little faster yet—but I never saw Marsilia move. One moment she was pressed against the front of Samuel’s jeans, and the next her legs were wrapped around his waist and her mouth was on his neck. Everything that followed seemed to happen slowly, although I suppose it was only a few seconds.

  The illusion hiding the other vampires dissipated in the frenzy of Marsilia’s feeding, and I saw them, six vampires lined up against the wall of the room. They were making no attempt to appear human, and I gathered a hurried impression of gray skin, hollow cheeks, and eyes glittering like backlit gemstones. None of them moved, though Stefan had wrapped himself around Marsilia and was trying to pull her off. Nor did they interfere when I closed the distance between Samuel and me, the silly necklace wrapped around my wrist. I suppose they didn’t consider either of us a threat.