Page 12

But the woman had been good. I’d given her an opening, thanks to my swimming head, but few people would have been able to capitalize on it. Most would have panicked in that situation, especially if she assumed that I was a vamp, as a master could have drained her in a moment. But she’d kept her head and managed a spell on the fly.

This one might be a problem.

I found a narrow staircase at the end of the hall and descended into a corridor that led to a decent-sized main room. It was dimly lit, open to the rafters, with a rush-strewn floor and a central stone hearth. It looked like something from a hundred years ago, which was probably when the place had been built, but it was cozy.

Smoke from a merrily burning fire was rising to escape through a hole in the roof, with the rain battering it back down again. An occasional raindrop won through to hiss against the coals, but it wasn’t enough to do damage. As a result, the place was warm, with the fire being helped by three large, painted cloths depicting the local countryside that hung on the walls, serving as both decor and insulation.

There were also two tables with benches on one side of the room. The benches did not have the usual reed mats or cushions, because Lancashire apparently believed suffering to be good for the soul. But there were people on them, and they had ale.

I went over to where a plump proprietress was attempting to flirt with an annoyed-looking vamp and ordered a flagon. I did not get one, but a glazed pot with a chipped side did eventually make its way into my hand. It came with a small loaf of maslin bread, the wheat/rye mix popular in terrible inns for being cheap, and no butter.

The ale was piss. Possibly literally. I overcame my usual scruples and drank it anyway.

And since I was being paid a king’s ransom for this, I also ordered essentially everything on offer to go with my ale, which included six baked herring in a dish, a pickled eel, a salad with boiled eggs, a mutton pie, a cheese tart, a custard tart, and some rabbit left over from the previous day.

I was stripping the rabbit bones with my teeth when I realized that everyone was looking at me. “Yes?”

Nobody said anything, but that could have been because somebody else was talking.

“I think she was aiming for the mage behind us,” one of the vamps said. “Not for Tura. He just got in the way.”

“Tura?” I asked.

“Upstairs.”

Oh.

“They didn’t seem to be targeting us,” he continued.

“And we should damned well keep it that way!” another vamp broke in, furiously.

The first speaker was brunette, a swarthy Italian like the corpse upstairs. I thought his name was Lucha. He was one of the more flamboyant of the group, and had been wearing blue velvet embroidered in silver thread when I first saw him at the village. He’d toned that down tonight, but that still left him in a fine leather jerkin with cutouts in the shape of birds, where dyed leather showed through.

One bird was yellow, one red, several were in different shades of blue, and one was an unlikely purple. He’d also paid an artist to sketch in their feathers and little faces in black giving them somewhat comical expressions. I wondered what the witch he’d been after had thought of that.

Probably not much since he’d lost her.

The second speaker was Lucha’s opposite in practically every way: an icy blond with cold blue eyes and a temper that didn’t match. Yvain was a Frenchman, and one who had dressed more appropriately for the evening’s activities in all black without ornamentation. Not that the clothes needed it; the number of times they would have had to be dyed to fix the midnight color was extravagance enough, but of a different type than Lucha’s.

Yet, it hadn’t saved him. He’d gotten too near a spell, which had peppered his handsome profile with grit and small pebbles. He was digging them out of his flesh with a knife—plink, plink, plunk—and with each one his rage seemed to grow.

“Why do we care if the damned mages want to kill each other?” he demanded. “I say leave them to it!”

“That’s a little hard when one of them is making monsters,” Lucha pointed out.

“Then let’s kill the bitch and be done with it—”

“Yes. The dhampir tried that. How’d it go?” a third vamp asked. His name was Rodrigo, although he had no accent to his perfect English. A sallow complected, dark-haired, ferret-faced type in unassuming brown, he could have blended into any group of townsfolk with no one giving a blink. I assumed that was his skill, because nobody would have turned him for his looks or charm.

But he wasn’t wrong in the implication.

“Not well,” I said, swallowing rabbit. “I messed up.”

“You’re damned right. Should have killed her when you had the chance—”

“But she didn’t kill us,” Lucha persisted. “Not even la puttana—” he broke off. “Sorry,” he told me, surprisingly.

“Been called worse.”