“Maybe she thought you should be able to control them.”
“I did try. But once the original hold is broken, it’s difficult to weave a new one, especially when the Were is infuriated and hurt. And so we did nothing.” He winced. “Which meant we had to sacrifice one of our own. Disa felt it was worth it. After all, he was one of the Trust’s least important members.” Niall sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Trying to maintain that loyalty to something bigger. I guess I can see that. But to the point where you’re rationalizing deaths and subverting your cantrantia? I gotta know more about this little woman who always gets her way. “How did Disa become part of the Trust?” I asked.
“You mean you don’t know?”
I shrugged. “Why should I?”
Niall snorted. “Because Vayl is the one who brought her here.”
Chapter Nine
I’m not psychic, but sometimes I get these feelings. Like once the phone rang and I knew I’d be happier if I didn’t answer it. But I did anyway. It was my Granny May, calling to tell me my mother, her daughter, had just died of a massive heart attack. Granny May didn’t last long after that, proving once again that parents should never outlive their children.
Now I realized I should let the details of Disa’s arrival into the Trust remain in the Blissful Ignorance drawer of my life file. It would have no bearing on the mission. Might even make it tougher to pull off. But I had to ask. “Vayl was here before Disa?”
Niall avoided looking at me. But, oh, I could feel the eagerness radiating off him. Like an old lip-wagger who’s trying to figure out if spreading her juicy morsel during the church service will count against her in the afterlife. “Long before.”
“Why did he bring her in?”
Niall looked around the suite, went to the hall door to make sure it was locked, and came back to sit on the bed beside Trayton. I drew the chair up beside it.
“Has Vayl told you about his sons?” he asked after we’d settled in.
“Yeah.” Hanzi and Badu had been the only surviving children of his eighteenth-century marriage to his fellow Roma Liliana. The boys’ murders had sparked their parents’ turning, Vayl’s revenge on the farmer who did the killing, and his endless search for their reincarnated souls.
Niall said, “In 1857, right around this time of year in fact, Vayl heard of a Seer who had gained great renown among the literati of Athens. He wouldn’t rest until he’d met with her and asked if she could feel the presence of his sons’ souls, either in the netherworld or here, on earth.”
“I imagine he was pretty excited.”
Niall leaned forward, got rid of a small bubble of silver. They’d slowed to a dribble, leaving Trayton to rest easier, though he’d gone as pale as his vampire nurse. “He was practically babbling with glee. Some of us thought he’d taken some bad blood he was so changed from his usual quiet demeanor.” Which would have been worse in April, the anniversary of the deaths of his sons.
“So he went to Athens?” I asked.
“Often. Every week for half a year. And all the time his behavior became more and more erratic. Great highs when he would laugh and dance and demand huge parties. Intense lows when he’d hunt the streets alone, endangering himself and the entire Trust.”
“What was he hunting?” I asked through lips that had suddenly gone dry.
“We eat to live,” Niall said flatly. “But even then we preferred willing donors. It is better to coexist than merely survive, yes?”
I might have nodded, but I wasn’t feeling quite connected to my head anymore, so I couldn’t be absolutely sure. “So Vayl went hunting for unwilling donors?”
“Precisely. People who would not be missed. Those whom other humans would prefer to be rid of. He would take on entire gangs of street thugs, come back bloodied and beaten, but still be triumphant. Then he would return to Athens.”
“What happened in the end?”
“He began to suspect Disa had not the second Sight she claimed. He asked me to come along with him to help discover the truth.”
“Wait a second. So Disa was this famous Seer—and she was human at the time?”
“Yes.”
“Okay . . . so you two met her, where, at her shop?”
Niall shook his head. “She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant who kept her well provided for in a home near the center of town. That was where she gave her readings.”
“Did she ask for money for her services?”
“No. But people seemed to enjoy giving her expensive gifts. Even Vayl had given her a diamond necklace and a pair of matching earrings in gratitude for her efforts.” Wow, she sounds like some kind of slick talker. Maybe I underestimated her.
Niall went on. “At any rate, we went to visit her on a cool October evening. Vayl had just been through an episode of abject misery during which he had not left his apartments for perhaps three or four days. Now all he could talk about was seeing Disa, getting a good reading, finally uncovering some real details. He became so eager and excited to hear about Hanzi and Badu that he forgot why he had invited me along in the first place.”
“You will be polite?” he asked me as we tied our horses to the rail in front of Disa’s house that night.
“Only until she raises the shade of my dead grandfather, and then all bets are off,” I joked. He didn’t laugh.
We used a massive boar’s head knocker to signal our presence at the entrance of a three-story town house that rose straight from the street with no architecture or garden to relieve its simple, white plainness. Its brown-painted windowsills were recessed, and without benefit of a light closer than the one halfway down the block, they seemed even to my vision like hollow eye sockets staring from the pale face of a dying man.
Disa came to the door after a prolonged bout of knocking. She had thrown a thin, white robe over her chemise. I didn’t think this boded well for my companion. How could the Seer not have foretold his visit? But this detail escaped him. He grasped both of her hands in his. “Tell me about my sons,” he demanded. “I cannot wait another moment. When will I meet them and where?”
I expected her eyes to go blank, her mouth to slacken as the truly Gifted’s will when the Sight is upon them. Disa just snatched her hands back and drawled, “Vayl, if it were that easy, don’t you think you’d have found them long before now?”
He looked at me then, and I could tell he remembered why I was there. “May we come in?” I asked.
She clearly wanted to refuse us. But then Vayl would know for certain. So she said, “Of course.”
She gestured for us to enter, and we followed her into a small room dominated by a round table covered with a floor-length black cloth and surrounded by ladder-backed chairs. Five black candles formed the table’s centerpiece. She lit these and then asked us to sit, one on either side of her.
I had a moment to register the long black curtains drawn across the two windows, the fireplace—its mantel empty, its hearth bare though it had been an extremely cool fall—and the white, floor-to-ceiling shelves containing all manner of mismatched bric-a-brac, from china teacups to pottery urns to a vase full of wilted flowers. And then I turned my attentions to Disa. She had made a new plan for her client.
She leaned toward Vayl, her robe gaping open to reveal a distracting view of her neckline. “Since I, and in fact all of your Seers, have had such a difficult time deciphering the whereabouts of your sons, may I suggest a different tack?”
Such was Vayl’s obsession that his eyes never wavered from her face. “What is it?” he asked.