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And because nobody was looking at me anyway.
I cleared my throat and decided to try again. “I just want to see my father.”
And okay, that got a reaction. Not verbal, because I didn’t rate that. But the stony look in the vamps’ eyes got a little stonier.
“Sorry,” I said drily. “I forgot that it’s bad taste to mention that he is my father, but there you go. And I’m going to see him.”
I started to duck under the spears, only to have the two vamps on the other wall suddenly appear in my face. Or, at least, their crotches did. Another day, I would have made a cute remark about heat and leather jock straps, but I wasn’t feeling real cute right now. Apparently, they weren’t either, because the next thing I knew, the spears were gone, the door was shut and I was back inside the room, despite not being able to recall how I got there.
Okay, then.
I stared at the door, swaying gently, for what was probably a full minute. I would like to say that I was standing there planning my next move, but mostly I was just standing. My head felt really…odd.…My mouth was dry and I really, really wanted to crawl back into bed.
But I wanted to see Mircea more. And I was going to. Just as soon as I figured out—
My train of thought, such as it was, got derailed at the appearance of another otherworldly visitor. Only this one was a little different. Instead of E.T., it kind of looked like the blobs that used to goop around inside lava lamps, round and unformed and visible in a full-length mirror to the right of the door.
I turned around. It was on the same wall that the bed was facing, the one that held a large, ornate fireplace and a couple chairs. And, at the moment, some fuzzy blue stains that glooped along until they hit the mantel. And then flowed along its massive carved shelf until they fell off the other side.
I blinked at them for a moment, and then wobbled over.
They hadn’t waited. By the time I got there, they’d traversed the entire length of the room and disappeared. But before that, they’d gotten a little clearer for a moment. And instead of random blobs, they’d formed themselves into a vaguely person-shaped thing, with a distinct head, torso, and a couple smaller bits that might have been arms or tentacles.
I supposed the former was more likely, but considering where I was, I wasn’t ruling out the latter. But here’s hoping, I thought, and stuck my head in the fireplace. Or, more accurately, through the fireplace, because the bastard wasn’t really there.
It shouldn’t have surprised me—what does a vampire really need with a fireplace? And yet they were all over the building. And now that I thought about it, I vaguely recalled the consul vanishing into one the last time I was here, when she’d thought I was too out of it to notice.
Like I had just done.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and then to notice that I was standing in a corridor, surrounded by a wedge of hazy light. It was coming from a filmy ward over the surface of a square opening in the wall. The fireplace, I assumed, which was apparently just for camouflage. I could see the whole room from here, including the bed, which was creepy.
But not as creepy as another light monster coming my way.
What is this, Grand Central? I thought, staring stupidly at the haze for a second, which was getting rapidly brighter. And then I stumbled quickly in the opposite direction.
It wasn’t exactly a run, because running into utter blackness isn’t fun, and I wasn’t really up to it right now anyway. The best I could manage was a shuffle, with a hand on the wall for balance. But at least there was nothing to trip over, because nobody had bothered about decoration in here. It was just a concrete floor, cold against my bare feet, and an equally cold blank wall.
Or it was until a reddish light started coming toward me from the other direction. I turned around, but the purple light monster was still there and still coming up strong behind me, judging by the way shadows were jumping on the ceiling. Well, shit, I thought, backing up, trying to get a wall behind me.
Which would have worked better if there had been one there.
But my reaching hand foun
d only air, just my ears registered a difference in the echo. I was standing in front of another opening. And then I was through it and into an almost black room.
I threw myself to the side of the opening, hard enough to set my head spinning, so I didn’t see much as the blobs passed by outside. Just flickers of different colors strobing in through the opening for a second. And then they were gone and everything was dark again.
Except for something that gleamed to the far right of the room, displacing a tiny bit of dark.
My eyes fixed on it, and after a moment, it came into focus.
It was a candle.
I felt my spine relax, and I let out a breath I hadn’t noticed I was holding.
It was sitting on a small table by a bed. The bed was big and old-fashioned, with a canopy and curtains to close it off from the cold—and the consul’s spy tunnel, I assumed. It was the sort that had gone out of style with humans when things like central heating came into vogue, but had retained its popularity in the vampire community due to offering added protection from the sun.
Of course, that wasn’t needed here. A windowless room inside a vampire stronghold was about as far from sunlight as it was possible to get. But the bed was there anyway. So it probably belonged to one of the older vamps, who tended to be more traditional.
