Page 29

CHAPTER 29

S iobhan brought me a small envelope while I was eating dinner. The Master had just left to meet with the Archbishop of Zürich.

“A messenger came to the door and left this,” Siobhan said. “He’s hanging around, waiting for an answer.”

My name was written on the envelope in a florid script. Curious, I opened it.

I wish we had time to chat the other night. Perhaps you can come for tea this evening. Use this note as a safe passage if you do.

Nicola Müller

I showed it to Siobhan.

“Holy shit. The Dragon Lady of the Langstrasse. You know who she is, right?”

“Roland and Nikolas’s aunt, right? I met her. She looks like she wasn’t much older than us when she was turned.”

“Turned by the Master of the City himself. It’s said that theirs is the original vampire-human love story, although I don’t believe it. But grab a copy of Love After Midnight by Josephine Alger if you want to read a really sappy, poorly written novel some evening. Nicola’s family sued the author but lost in court.”

She looked back at the note, then said, “I think you should show this to Frau Buckner.”

With the Master being gone, that sounded like a good idea, so after I finished my dinner, I went to find her.

She read it, raised her eyes to look at my face, then read it again.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “you can trust the safe passage. She won’t harm you, or let anyone else harm you.” She sat down and motioned me to the chair next to her.

“Kaitlyn, I went to school with Nicola, back in the dark ages. She was always a headstrong girl but not ever malicious. When Verner Karlsson seduced and turned her, I was shocked but not surprised. Her father was overcontrolling, and there were rumors he beat her mother. At the time, she was engaged to the son of another industrialist—a friend of her father’s—and I figured she saw it as the lesser of two evils.”

“She struck me as powerful,” I said. “Not just physically, but in force of personality, of will.”

“I would agree with that. Old Verner definitely doesn’t run her life, such as it is. I’ll tell you to go if that’s what you want—and I’ll stand by that advice if the Master objects. I’m rather curious as to what she wants.”

* * *

I considered what to wear. The safest option was an Enforcer uniform, with its ballistic cloth and Kevlar reinforcements, but it was distinctive, and Nicola’s pass wouldn’t mean spit to the Knights. Leather pants and jacket were my standard tracking outfit in Queen City, but as I held them up in the light, they were pretty grubby and a little tattered. Jeans and a shirt seemed underdressed, and most of my dresses were either too fancy or too flimsy.

I finally decided I was going to a nightclub, and the best disguise would be to blend in. A dark blue satin shirt with buttons that started far too low, and a black skirt that hit above the knee, with a slit almost to my hip, would probably mark me as a girl on the make. Knee-high black boots completed the ensemble. I left my hair loose but slipped a scrunchy around my right wrist. I strapped the athame to my thigh, where it would be accessible through the slit. I could fight in the outfit, and pulling up the skirt a bit, I could run. Good enough.

My glamored swords didn’t bother me. I had carried them so much—no matter what I was wearing or where I was going—that I barely noticed they were there.

I cast my personal shield and a glamor that made me look like a large, burly man with an unfriendly scowl, then hiked down into the Langstrasse to the club the Master and I had visited. Since no directions had accompanied the invitation, I had to assume that’s where Nicola Müller planned to meet me.

When I reached the club, I ditched the glamor, bypassed the line, and went straight to the bouncer at the door. Showing him the note got me waived through.

“Uh, do you know where I’d find her?” I asked.

He smirked. “Upstairs, turn right. When you reach another set of stairs on the left going up, take them. Knock on the last door you come to.”

Reaching the stairs I had climbed on my previous trip required walking past the bar and the dance floor. I could feel eyes on me, and I had never felt more like a piece of meat. About three-fourths of the patrons and staff were strigoi. Any traces of magic that I could feel were few and scattered, so I assumed almost everyone else was a normal human. I couldn’t imagine why they would welcome the strigoi’s attentions. Maybe some of the guys were unlayable, but any girl in there could’ve easily found a human to scratch her itch.

Maybe Nicola Müller would enlighten me—assuming I was able to work up the courage to be rude to her.

After all the stairs, the short hallway ended at a door. I raised my hand to knock, and it swung open. Looking around, I spotted the little CCTV camera above the door.

“Come in, come in! I’m so glad you’re here!”

I didn’t hear her voice on my previous visit—young and cheerful and enthusiastic. I wondered if she had been a cheerleader. I wasn’t sure they had cheerleaders in Zürich, though.

“Thank you for inviting me,” I said, surveying the room. As with the room where we’d met with the strigoi master, the light was red, but not quite as deep a red. Pink, maybe. It was decorated in a very modern style, not at all like Verner’s throne room or even Master Adolphus’s home. Chrome and colorful leather dominated the space, with abstract art on the walls. She was dressed in a halter top and a miniskirt, paired with high heels. She’d have fit right in going dancing with me and my friends.

Nicola watched me. “Do you like it?”

“You keep up with the times.”

She gave me a delighted smile. “I try to. Verner stopped worrying about fashion in the fourteenth century, but I think it’s important to continue growing as one gets older. Please, have a seat.”

She gestured to an orange—or at least, I thought it was orange; the pink light tended to alter colors—leather overstuffed chair by a small table. On the table sat a tea service, the chalice she had drunk from during our previous meeting, and a small crystal glass placed on my side.

I sat, and she asked, “What would you like to drink?”

Was anything she gave me safe to drink? I had a bottle of water in my bag, but the last thing I wanted to do was piss her off by being rude.

Nicola picked up on my hesitation. “Oh, darling, I would never poison you, or drug you. That would be so rude. And I’m sure you don’t want blood. I have black, green, and herbal tea, and a selection of cordials.” She swept her hand toward a sideboard lined with a dozen bottles. “Alcohol makes me sick, but I still like the taste of some spirits.”

“Black tea will be fine,” I said. “And perhaps some plain water?”

She took the teapot to the sideboard, spooned some tea from a tin box into it, and poured in hot water from a samovar. Then she filled a glass with water from a pitcher and brought both the teapot and the glass back to the table.

She sat and took a sip from her chalice. “On a scale of one to ten, how curious are you about this invitation?”

I laughed. “A ten, of course.” Sitting that close to her, I could feel a bit of magic. Not strong, and not elemental magic. That was strange. I thought that mages lost all their magic when they were turned.

Nicola smiled. Not the cat-eyeing-the-canary smile from the other night, but a genuine one. “Do you know how hard it is to make friends when you’re the Dragon Lady of the Langstrasse?”