Fool.
Perhaps it was best that he’d stayed away from the Venators if he was that careless.
Zavier stayed in the distance behind him, considering his options. He knew little about Vioget, but what he did know was enough to identify the influence behind the bastard and his defection: the legendary Beauregard.
Zavier’s hand searched the depths of his pocket, fumbling for the stake there. It was just about time that the vampire met his own damnation. He’d be pleased to help him. And whoever else dared get in his way.
“Where is the key?” Max asked as Victoria approached. Her skirts were drenched to her knees and so were her shoes. She should have found a pair of boots to wear before leaving the Consilium, but it was too late now.They had reached the stone wall on which the Door of Alchemy stood, after traipsing quickly through the tangled gardens with Max in the lead. He’d seemed to be in a great hurry to get here, and Victoria, who couldn’t quite tell where the sun was because of the clouds, didn’t argue. She was still more than a bit unsteady from the kiss they’d shared.
Although shared wasn’t exactly the word to describe the experience. Received, perhaps. Became immersed in. Was surprised by. Nearly lost her balance because of.
“Victoria.”
She snapped her attention back to the matter at hand, realizing he’d asked a second time. “It’s here.” She had to shrug out of her heavy man’s coat in order to get to the armband, which was pushed up under the long sleeve of her simple gown.
Max watched as she pulled off the wide silver armband and then bent it at the small hinge that divided its two halves. When the bracelet opened, the key was there on the inside of the cuff, fitted into a small nook.
Victoria thumbed it out and handed it to Max, who kept looking darkly at the sky. “Let’s hurry,” he said, taking the tablike key and pushing the scrubby bushes away from the door.
He knelt as Victoria had done a week ago, when she’d come with Ylito and Wayren, and scratched away the moss and dirt so that the small metal tab would fit into its place.
As he worked Victoria examined the other two keyholes—one had been filled before, and the other she hadn’t seen until now. She could see only the back edges of the flat little keys—for once slipped into the narrow openings, the thin metal rectangles fit into place and couldn’t be removed until the door was opened.
“Ah.” Max pulled to his feet and glanced at her. “Shall we?”
He grasped the round stone disk in the center of the door and began to turn it. When the circle actually moved in a clockwise direction, Victoria found herself holding her breath. She couldn’t quite believe the door would actually open.
There was a dull clunk, and Max glanced at her with a sharp nod. And then the door rolled to the side.
To her surprise he stepped back and let her enter first. Doing so, Victoria walked directly into a screen of cobwebs. Hiding an automatic shudder as she pushed away the stickiness, she brushed furiously at her arms and hair to make certain none of the spiders were crawling on her.
“You’re afraid of spiders?” Max said, amusement coloring his voice.
“I’m not afraid…Ugh!” She barely held back a shriek as one danced across her hand and she whipped it to the floor. “I don’t like them. They’re like little vampires, sucking blood, and they have too many legs.”
Once she’d cleaned herself off she stepped completely through the door and stood inside a dark chamber that smelled of age and damp. But she needn’t have feared, for just at the edge of the doorway was a sconce. Below it was a small tin kettle and a little table with flint and a coil of very old thread to start a flame.
There was oil in the kettle, she presumed, and she lifted it off its hook, pouring it onto the dry, brittle sconce. Max stepped in to help light a small piece of tinder, and only moments after the door was opened they had a blazing torch.
“Let’s close the door,” she said. The back of her neck wasn’t chilled, but it was best to take no chances. She had no idea how long they would be here.
The stone door rumbled back into its place, and Max said, “Bring the light here. I think we can remove the keys from the inside.”
She did, angling it over his shoulder as he bent toward the inside of the middle of the door. A few quick movements, the dull scrape of stone on stone, followed by a small grunt, and he produced the little silver key they had just slipped into its place on the outside of the door.
“Clever…so that one cannot get locked inside,” he said. She held the light and he removed the other two keys—one in gold and one in bronze—and slipped them into his pocket.
Then he stood and they were facing each other in the small circle of light dancing around the dusty chamber.“Let me have the shard,” she said, resisting the urge to step away even as her lungs constricted.
“No. Didn’t you learn anything from last time?”
Victoria bristled, drawing herself back to argue, but he reached out, captured her left wrist, and said, “Look.”
He lifted her hand, palm up, and brought it into the light. When she uncurled her fingers Victoria saw with a shock that the inside of her hand—the one that had held the shard—and her fingers were marked faintly with blue.
“What is it?” she said, handing him the sconce and opening her other hand to compare. When she saw that the bluish cast on the skin that had gripped the shard was no trick of the low light, she tried to rub it away.
“When the obelisk touches flesh for any length of time, its power begins to seep in, leaving such a mark. If you’re lucky it may fade in time.” He looked at her, his dark eyes flat and hard. “Don’t touch it directly again. Or who knows whom you’ll beg to kiss the next time.”
And he turned away, taking the sconce with him, leaving Victoria with burning cheeks and a flood of annoyance…and embarrassment. Beg?
Beg?
But he’d wanted to. She’d seen it in his eyes.
Giving her head a little shake, Victoria turned around to look at the chamber for the first time and saw now that it wasn’t a small chamber at all. The room was quite large and had been set up as a well-equipped laboratory. The single torch that Max held did little to light the room, but when Victoria saw another sconce on the wall she moved to light that one, and its illumination showed more details: long tables, five or six stools of varying height and condition, utensils, and scatterings of metal shavings and curds. There were shallow wooden bowls, deep metal ones, round and softly triangular, large and small. Goblets, corked jars, tiny carved boxes were all littered about, covered with dust, and some of them with dark stains. Larger chunks of silver, bronze, copper, iron, quartz, and marble were piled on the tables or littered on the floor, which was filthy with dust, dirt, and most definitely animal droppings.
She walked along one of the tables flanking the wall, quickly examining the remains of Marchese Palombara’s alchemical experiments for whatever it was the undead—and others—wanted so badly. But there was nothing that caught her eye, nothing that looked important enough to be notes or journals about the mysterious pilgrim’s work.
As she turned to look at another of the worktables, her wet slippered foot knocked against something on the floor. It made a soft metal clink, and she would have disregarded it as just another piece of scrap metal if it hadn’t rolled in front of her, spinning in smaller circles until it spiraled to a halt. Victoria bent to pick it up, the hair on the back of her arms lifting.
She’d seen this…something like this before.
It was a band—similar to Aunt Eustacia’s plain silver armband that had held the silver key—but this was made of copper, and it was more distinctive. While Aunt Eustacia’s ornament had been solid silver, as wide as three fingers, this band was made of three tendrils of copper, each perhaps the width of a finger and woven into a solid band. A smooth, elliptical shape had been formed where the ends of the three copper strands merged together, as if they’d been melted down and pressed flat. A symbol was etched into it.
One she’d seen before. Somewhere.
“Ah. And here we find our friend the Marchese Palombara,” Max commented from across the room, drawing Victoria’s attention.
Slipping the bracelet into her pocket, she walked over to find him standing above a skeleton, still dressed in the rotting clothes of two hundred forty years earlier. “Is that what we’ve come for?” she asked, noticing the yellow, curling packet of papers clutched by two bony hands. “I see nothing else that could be of interest to vampires and mortals alike.”
“I would suspect.” Max bent forward, the lantern casting long, eerie shadows over the gray bones of the long-dead marchese. When he touched the skeletal arm it fell away, bone and fabric crumbling to dust in the same way an undead disintegrated when staked. And yet…not.
He lifted the papers gingerly, taking care to keep them intact, and handed them to Victoria. They were sewn together by a leather cord, and, when she gently lifted the top page, she found faded ink writing, mathematical equations, and diagrams and sketches.
“Ylito will be overjoyed to see this,” she commented with a smile.
“Indeed. So, now that we’ve retrieved what we came for, shall we get it safely back to the Consilium?”
“Were you planning to take the obelisk shard with you?” she asked sharply.
“Of course not. While you were gawking about the room like a girl at court, I’ve already placed it over there.”
She looked and saw a small trunk in a dark corner. With a withering glance at him, she walked over and lifted the lid, still carrying the sheaf of papers. Inside the trunk was the shard of Akvan’s Obelisk.
“You didn’t believe me.” Max’s voice behind her was soft and…she could only describe it as menacing.
“You of all people ought to understand duty,” she replied coolly, looking at him. “I needed to make certain that the evil that I brought upon the Consilium has been contained. I needed to see for myself.”