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I glanced around, but the guys were nowhere in sight. I knelt on the floor and opened the cover with slightly shaking hands. Mircea had the diplomat’s ability to talk for hours without actually saying much, and what he did say was often suspect. I’d heard two versions—so far—about how he became a vampire, and still had no idea if either was true.
But photos didn’t lie. At least, not as often as master vampires. And suddenly I was confronted with a whole album containing hundreds of photos of Mircea.
Only it didn’t.
The photos had a theme, all right, but it wasn’t him. On every page the same face stared out at me—that of a beautiful, dark-haired woman of approximately my age. She combined sloe-eyed sultriness with petite delicacy and would have stopped traffic in no makeup and wearing a muumuu. Only she preferred form-fitting clothes that showed off a trim, athletic figure.
One picture showed her eating at a café. She was wearing old-fashioned clothes—forties era, at a guess—consisting of a white short-sleeved suit and a striped scarf. She was waving a fork around and laughing at someone off camera. Her hair was glossy and sleek in a sassy bob that made a mockery of bad hair days. Her nose didn’t turn up at the end, her cheekbones were sculpted, and if she had any freckles they didn’t show. She could have been a model for an early issue of Vogue.
I stared at her, the album open on my knees, feeling strangely dizzy. I felt something else, too, something I couldn’t quite define, but it heated my cheeks and burned in my stomach like acid. There were no photos of me in this room. Not one. But there was an entire album devoted to this mystery woman. Whoever she was, obviously she was important to Mircea.
More so than me.
Something hit the clear plastic protecting the image, rolled to the edge of the book and was absorbed by the cracked leather binding. I blinked away more somethings, vaguely appalled. This is stupid and petty, I told myself. With everything I had to worry about, here I was, preoccupied with who Mircea might be—God, I couldn’t even think it. And that was even more stupid.
What had I believed, that he’d been some kind of monk for five hundred years? After seeing the way women regularly threw themselves at him? And I couldn’t very well be jealous of events that had happened long before I was born, even if they did involve beautiful, sophisticated brunettes.
I looked down at a crinkling sound to see that my fist had balled around the page with the photograph, crushing the plastic and threatening to put permanent creases in the paper. Okay, maybe I could. All right, I very definitely could.
Mircea’s sexual history was something I’d been a
ble to put out of my mind, at least most of the time, because I hadn’t known any of the people involved. At least, I hadn’t thought so. Now I wondered.
He was closer than I’d like to the Chinese Consul, who had become fond of him while he was on a diplomatic mission to her court and who still sent him expensive presents every year. He’d also been pretty friendly with an icy blonde senator and a passionate raven-haired countess—and those were just the ones I knew about. The women had been pretty diverse in status, personality and background, but they had one thing in common: they were all heartstoppingly beautiful. Like this woman.
I flipped to the back of the book and got another shock. The brunette turned up again, but this time, she was jogging through a park. And the earbud to an iPod trailed down across her left shoulder. I went back through the album and realized that the photos were in chronological order—old sepia images from maybe the nineteenth century giving way to early black and white, then to bold sixties-era color and finally to the modern day. And, except for superficial details, she looked the same in every photo. She was a vampire, ageless and eternally beautiful.
Just like Mircea.
I put the album down with shaking hands and told myself to get a grip. I was just really emotional right now, that was all. That’s why I was feeling this way, like I wanted to gouge those pretty dark eyes out with my thumbs.
That was so very not me it was scary. I didn’t get possessive about people, any people. I never had. And Mircea and I didn’t have an exclusivity agreement, didn’t have any agreement at all, in fact. He could see anyone he wanted. Only for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that he might actually be seeing—might, in fact, be doing a hell of a lot more than just seeing—someone who made me look like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters.
With my thumbs.
“Find anything?” I turned to see Pritkin coming in the door. He glanced around without interest. Maybe he didn’t realize whose room this was, or maybe he just didn’t care. Mircea was only another vampire to him, and Pritkin had never been fond of those.
“No. Nothing.” I didn’t make any attempt to hide the book, and his eyes passed over it uninterestedly.
“Same here.”
“Feels like a ghost town,” Caleb murmured, joining us. I disagreed. Ghosts were livelier than this.
“They must have gotten out,” Pritkin said. “Trust the vampires to have an escape route even in a supposedly impregnable fortress.”
“But I doubt they stuck around to help anyone else,” Caleb added, glancing at me. I didn’t deny it; I doubted they had, either. “There may be people farther up. Let’s go.”
We were in the foyer, heading for the main entrance, when the crystals in the chandelier overhead started to chime. A blue and white vase that I really hoped wasn’t Ming danced across the central table and crashed to the floor before I could grab it. The ground beneath my feet groaned and shuddered for a long moment, and I had to brace one hand against the wall to keep my balance.
“An earthquake?” I said in disbelief. “What’s next? A tsunami?”
“It’s probably the upper levels settling,” Pritkin said, but he didn’t look convinced. “We should hurry.”
We exited into the corridor and Caleb started for a door near a set of steps cut into the rock and going up. “I wouldn’t do that,” I advised.
He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “Why not?” He gave me a suspicious look from under lowered brows, like he suspected me of assisting the vamps to hide some nefarious secret.
As if they needed my help.
