Circe had been an enchantress. But Medea's blood also ran in the demon's veins. Don't forget that! Individually, the women were powerful — but together they were omnipotent, and this was the wisdom which had been passed down as it travelled the world and which now thrived in its place of origin. Circe had shown her niece how to create disguises, illusions, how to use the bulb of Colchis to deadly effect, and in return Medea had taught her aunt the black art of calculation. The demon saw them huddled over a cauldron in which perfidy, cunning and betrayal bubbled, waiting to be distilled into ruthlessness.
At which point it realized that blood was not its life source at all.
Power was the driving energy.
Destruction the foundation stone of its strength.
Once it grasped that basic principle, the demon's potency swelled. To have a human being at your mercy was the greatest power of all. To kill or to spare. To terminate life swiftly — or absorb the victim's vitality slowly.
Control.
To have total authority over the situation. To dominate the human spirit as well as the flesh.
That was the demon's inheritance. That was its destiny. Now it had to set about fulfilling it further.
Twenty
In her cottage on the hilltop, Clio lay on her bed, her hands folded underneath her head, and watched a spider make its spindly progress across her ceiling. She had been a fool. A bloody fool to think she could trust the word of a patrician. She rubbed at the throbbing in her temple and wondered what the hell she was going to do now. She had no money. Not so much as a copper quadran to her name. No possessions. Any food she'd needed up till now she had earned by staging peep shows for that buck-toothed runt of a priest from the Temple of Neptune.
Goddammit, Leo! How could you have reduced me to this?
Blistering tears welled up behind her closed eyelids, but Clio was not prone to self-pity. She had come here for a purpose, had gambled everything on Leo's assurances and discovered, belatedly, that they were as worthless as marzipan coins. But she wasn't beaten yet.
There was no breeze inside the cottage and the late afternoon air was sticky and cloying. Her cheeses were starting to smell. The bread would go hard in this heat, the fruit would be rotten by morning. This was no way to live. She rose, pulled on a fresh linen gown, belted it. Defeat did not figure in Clio's vocabulary. There would be a way out of this mess. She just had to find it.
Following a dusty goat track over the brow of the hill, she set her mind to thinking. And as her feet ate up the ground beneath her, so the sun dipped below the soft rolling Istrian hills across the water, the signal for a million cicadas to start rasping in the rough, dry, spiteful Cressian grass.
Leo had betrayed her.
(As men do.)
But there had to be something Clio could salvage.
After an hour the track led her back to the cliff path overlooking the island's single wide sweeping bay, where sunset had turned the waters a flat, matt, dusky pink. She settled herself on a rocky outcrop and gazed down at the jumble of stone houses and the wharf populated by human statues Today, the townspeople's lethargy and uncouth manners were no longer a source of amusement for Clio. Things were turning nasty down there, too.
What had started out as hilarious entertainment — that she was a witch, a sorceress, an eater of human flesh — was no longer funny. A girl, the wife of a fisherman, had died in the night. Her illness began, so the wagging tongues claimed, the day Clio arrived on the island. Now her spirit was gone from her body — and guess who they blamed?
Yesterday, Clio would have laughed in their faces. Told the townspeople straight out that their kinswoman had died from a wasting disease, any half-wit could tell she must have been ill for some time. But today the eight-year-old son of a carpenter had taken to his bed, and instead of admitting the disease might be catching, a scapegoat was sought. When she had returned from the market this morning, sprigs of whitethorn had been scattered close to her cottage. The bloodied guts of a piglet lay on the path. The message was unequivocaclass="underline" VAMPIRE KEEP OUT. Call it primitive, call it superstition, call it a straightforward knee-jerk reaction, but if they seriously believed whitethorn warded off those dark birds of the night and that intestines could propitiate bloodlust, then Clio knew it would only need one more victim to fall to the contagion and we'd be talking lynch mob mentality here.
There was no seeking protection from Leo on this. He'd made his position quite clear when he had called at the cottage shortly after midday.
'You'll have to leave the island,' he'd told her.
Commendably, under the circumstances, Clio had held on to her temper. She'd lost it last night. Big mistake. Power comes through control, not through the loss of it.
'And go where?' she'd asked.
'Istria,' he'd said, and with a cold thrill of horror she realized he'd been planning something along these lines all the time. The suggestion had tripped too easily off his tongue. He'd been looking to get rid of her from the moment she landed on Cressia. 'I have relatives in Pula,' he'd told her. 'That's less than a day's sail from here. I could easily call on you under pretext of visiting them.'
'Alternatively, you could send your estate physician to treat the carpenter's child. That would quash the vampire rumours.'
'Oh, that.' He'd dismissed the accusations with a wave of his hand. 'Ignore the wagging tongues, that'll pass. It's Silvia who bothers me. She knows about us, Clio. She's threatening to blab.'
'Let her. No one will take a blind bit of notice, not after the names I've been called here.'
'Clio, you don't understand my position here. I am effectively Governor of Cressia and if Silvia starts talking, it will spell total disaster. I'll be recalled to Rome — I suppose you know my cousin Marcus is attached to the Security Police?'
'What of it?'
'Don't play stupid,' Leo had snapped. 'You know damn well what the consequences will be. He's smart, too bloody smart for his own good sometimes, and I can't afford to have him sniffing under stones.'
She'd slapped his face so hard she'd opened the wound she'd made last night. 'I am not something under a stone.'
'You know what I mean,' Leo had said irritably, holding a pad to his cheek to staunch the blood. 'Look, the only sensible solution is for you to leave Cressia. Go to Pula. It's a lively city, you'll be happier there, trust me.'
'Trust you? I don't trust you further than I could throw you,' she'd said.
'A deal is a deal, Clio. I won't renege. It's just that I've-'
'Spent my share on that bloody villa of yours.'
'I've apologized about that. I didn't realize how much it was going to cost. Saunio, Nikias, Magnus, these guys don't come cheap. But the rose grower's coughing up a hefty dowry, and once the olives are harvested and the grapes pressed-'
'I'll still be left with nothing.'
'You're over-reacting,' Leo had said. 'You'll get your half it's just going to take longer than I thought. Three — well, all right, maybe six months, but if you can hold on that long and be patient, you'll get your money. With interest.'
Six months. Yes, she could cope with that. Just about.
'I'll need something to live on in the meantime,' she'd said, and he would never know what it cost her to ask him — a man — for money. 'Call it an advance on my share, if you like.'
'Agreed. I'll bring thirty gold pieces after nightfall, and you can leave it with me to arrange passage to Pula.'
'Who said I was leaving?'
'Clio!'
'I'm serious. If I have to wait six months for my money, then it will be in a place where I can keep my eye on you.'