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It had been deafening and terrifying, and completely unlike the quiet darkness on display here. But then, they couldn’t very well have captured any vampires with a golden maw screaming at them, could they? So they’d camouflaged it. Or else it was some other manner of mage trickery he’d yet to learn about, which was most of it, since he avoided the creatures like the plague.
Beastly people.
Like the ones thundering down the ladder now.
Mircea hadn’t gotten a good look at them before, but judging by their tread, it was the same two, one carrying a cudgel and the other having a meaty hand laced with lightning. Which dimmed and went out when he saw the woman. “Damn it!” He glared at her. “Not again!”
The other mage seemed even more incensed. He was a scarred-up specimen half his friend’s weight, with greasy dark hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken twice as much as Mircea’s, to the point that it had given up retaining any shape whatsoever. But it flushed like the rest of his skin when he suddenly rushed over, grabbed the screaming redhead, and slapped her hard across the face.
That stopped the screaming, but did nothing else. “I won’t!” she yelled. “I won’t do it anymore! You can’t make me!”
“Want to bet?”
“Ye’re a whore,” his companion said, coming forward. “In the stews when we found you, giving it up to any old codger with the cash. Now you wear nice clothes and eat good food. What’s so wrong with that?”
“I might have been a whore,” she shouted, “but I wasn’t a murderer—of children!”
The thin man raised his hand again, but the other mage caught his arm. He looked like a typical bruiser, one of the burly types who unloaded ships down at the docks, in between boasting about their sexual prowess and pissing into canals. But there was more than a glimmer of intelligence behind those black eyes.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“A child,” the redhead said, her voice catching. “He wanted me to—he was going to take a child—”
The bruiser sighed. “It’s a damned vampire, not a child. That thing is probably older than you—than all of us! And would kill you, given half a chance—”
“You don’t know that!” She glared at him. “You don’t know what he is—what any of them are! And I won’t—”
Mircea couldn’t see her anymore, as she’d moved out of his limited range of vision. But the sound of another slap was unmistakable. As were her renewed screams afterward. Like before, they sounded as much of fury as of pain.
“Cut it out!” the bruiser said.
“Why?” It was the scrawny man’s voice. “If she won’t work, she’s no good t’us.”
“Oh, she’ll work. And we need her pretty.”
“I won’t, I tell you!” It was the woman again. “I can’t—”
“You can and you will. If we have t’train another, it’s going to hold things up, and we haven’t time for that.”
“I don’t care!” A sudden gasp. “Let go of me!”
“Why? If you don’t get back to it, you’ll be servicing worse than us soon. Or have you forgotten what that’s like?”
“Stop it! Let me go!”
“I’ll stop it when you come t’yer senses.” He laughed. “Or maybe when I’m finished.”
“You’ll stop it now.”
The voice came from neither of the three humans. But from someone else who had slipped through the portal while everyone was distracted. And dropped to the ground, silent and unnoticed, which wasn’t surprising. Even now, looking right at him, Mircea couldn’t really see him. Just a vague, human-shaped shadow, slightly darker than the rest, but which could have been a trick of the light flickering in a nearby lantern.
“We were just—” the bruiser began, before a brief gesture cut him off.
“On deck.” The voice was a hoarse rasp. “Prepare for docking.”
The bruiser looked like he was about to argue, but for once, the gaunt sailor was smarter. “Come on.” He tugged at his companion’s arm.
They went back upstairs.
