“Why?” EJ asked.
Walter didn’t answer that question. “Considering what she suffered as a result of betrayingme, it is startling that we find her in this country, aligned again with the ones who betrayedher.”
Walter appeared relaxed, peaceful. At his most dangerous, because a fanghead this calm was lulling to humans. To witches too.
“Nyoka would not consort with them without an ulterior strategy, intending to protect me, intending to turn on them.” He paused, sipping, thinking. “She would never have willingly accepted to host a demon, become a slave again, no matter the power offered. Possibly she was ensnared by them to do their will.”
He waved a hand in the air, a languid gesture as if shooing a pesky fly, and added, “Nevertheless. Backing up to those details. Her lovers betrayed her, abandoned her, and left her alone in the Italian Alps. Or perhaps it was Switzerland. I never discovered the hamlet. I was simply keeping tabs on her as I could, and even in the vampire world, gossip is a double-tongued mistress.”
“Who did Nyoka leave you for? Which ones of our current enemies?”
“This goat Tomme is truly splendid.” Walter smiled slightly,something mischievous and unexpected in the expression. “Even better after drinking from Villetti.”
“You’re blood-drunk too, aren’t you?”
“Just enough, boy. Just enough to tell this tale.” Without pausing, he went back to his subject. “Once I learned Willim was alive, not the true-dead I had thought, I looked for him for a very,verylong time, to challenge and kill him. But he hid on the oceans of the world and even when electronic trackers were invented and could locate ships at sea, he eluded me. The reason I agreed to work for the queen is because I knew that eventually, Willim would position himself with someone of power and come after me. He had never relinquished his claim upon me. In his deranged and sexually frustrated mind, I will forever be his.”
“Who did Nyoka leave you for?” EJ repeated, dragging them back to the questions he needed answers for.
“You are persistent.”
“Who did Nyoka leave you for?” EJ repeated.
“Nyoka joined the Blood Master of Clan Marrazzo in Italy, Terenzio Villetti-Marrazzo. Julietta Ravensport was a young but powerful Mithran at that time, part of the Marrazzo clan when Nyoka joined. Terenzio and Julietta were her lovers. They are the two who betrayed her.”
“Son of a witch.”
“Yes, you are.”
History was always vital to understanding vampire alliances. “Bullet-point the timeline and the relationships,” EJ ordered. When Walter didn’t respond, EJ added, “Sorry. I am grateful for information, which you were under no obligation to offer. Please, continue.”
“It is…complicated. With my kind, it always is.” Walter swirled the wine. Sipped. “And there are gaps in my knowledge,and some supposition. Guesswork, you would call it.” Again he made that little swirling motion with his free hand, a European gesture, elegant and graceful. But he set down his glass and faced EJ. As he spoke, EJ heard faint magic, the minor notes of unhappy truth.
“There are multiple players that bring us here: Terenzio and Ravensport, who betrayed Nyoka; possibly Nyoka herself; Willim and Konstantin, the scion of Prince Oleg. Later, Karson.
“Hitler came to power in 1933. That is the beginning of the upheaval.
“In 1934, Nyoka fell in love with Julietta Ravensport and Terenzio Marrazzo, who was head of a small but well-connected and wealthy blood clan in Italy. At the time, they were what you might call outlanders, sworn to no larger clan or master, which gave them great freedom and yet no protection. Already, in Hitler’s Germany, there were signs of war and danger to what the Nazis calledothers.
“Hitler had a fascination with the occult, and sent out witch hunters and vampire hunters, to bring him the best and the finest. The paranormals of Europe fled. When one such witch hunter was too close on their trail, Ravensport and Marrazzo left Nyoka with a stake in her belly to be captured.
“She was taken by the witch hunter and imprisoned in a little village in the mountains. Her treatment was horrific even by the standards of the day. But Nyoka survived her torturer, forced the witch hunter to fall in love with her. She was not able to kill her abuser, but she freed herself and found safety. I never located anyone who knew for certain where or with whom she acquired safety, but it is during that time of upheaval that she must have met Prince Oleg and Konstantin.
“Hitler’s war was brutal. For everyone. I lost track of so many. Most of Europe was destroyed. People disappeared.Millions of them. The Jews were decimated. The Rom. The Mithran vampires. Blacks like me. Everyone who did not fit Hitler’s vision of the acceptable.
“Years later, after the Second World War ended, I heard that Nyoka was still alive, living again as an outlander, but nominally under the protection of Clan Hapsburg-Lothringen.
“Ravensport was in seclusion, somewhere unknown.”
EJ said, “We have Willim, you, and Nyoka. Then Julietta Ravensport and Terenzio Marrazzo, who is Karson’s sire. A witch hunter who tortured Nyoka. Possibly Prince Oleg. Any others you know?”
Walter gave amaybeshrug. “Before World War Two, Marrazzo’s clan was powerful. Afterward, not so much, his resources diminished by war. He sent his scion to America to set up Clan Marrazzo in Chattanooga, but Karson—though charming—was not particularly astute, and the American branch of Marrazzo did not flourish. Terenzio was unwilling to gamble resources to help a weakling in the United States.”
EJ listened, committing the timeline to memory. When long-lived vamps were involved, the layers of history were part of the present and vital to the future. There was the slavery. Then Walter’s freedom and his master’s supposed death, followed by a century in Europe cavorting with Nyoka until World War Two, when they parted ways. Later, Walter had discovered Willim had survived and had started trying to find him.
Walter revealed the heart of the problem. “I hadn’t seen Nyoka since the world war, when we ran into each other in a little café in Greece, on the Mediterranean, in the last part of the 1960s. She was searching for the human witch hunter, her torturer, even as I had been searching for mine, both of us seeking vengeance, neither of us finding success, except to know for certain that both had survived the war.”
His mouth softened with kinder memories. “We spent a lovely two weeks on the coast. She went her way. I went mine.”
