Or that one of the men seated directly opposite them was wearing a necklace of what looked a lot like human finger bones.
Or that a man in a corner had taken one look at them and started muttering something to himself, and adding things from greasy pouches into a circle on the table in front of him.
Bezio noticed him, too.
“He’s just a nutter,” Mircea said, hopefully too low for human ears.
“They’re mages. They’re all—” Bezio stopped himself in time.
But he clearly wasn’t happy.
Mircea wasn’t, either, and he was also starting to think that maybe they had the wrong bar. “If this Hieronimo doesn’t show up soon, we’ll go, all right?”
“Define soon,” Bezio muttered.
“How about now?” Mircea asked, tensing, as the nutter in the corner got up and came staggering over—
Into a man seated at their table, who hadn’t been there a second ago.
Bezio cursed and jumped up, only to hit his head on the low ceiling, causing him to curse some more. Mircea flinched, but remained seated. Jerome did, too, but he edged over slightly, since the stool the man was sitting on—which also hadn’t been there until it suddenly was—had ended up a little too close for comfort.
The man held out a hand. “Give it to me,” he said dryly.
It took Mircea a second to realize that he wasn’t talking to any of them.
The nutter did some insane muttering.
“Don’t make me ask again,” the man told him, and snapped his fingers.
The creature, which had such long, filthy gray hair that any features were completely obscured, put out an equally filthy hand. It had long, thick, cracked, and yellowed nails. And held something that it dropped into the mage’s palm.
Something that gave a little gasp and then curled up into ashes as it spontaneously combusted.
Suddenly, Mircea really wanted to get out of there.
“Banned for a month,” the mage said shortly.
The creature gave a shocked cry and started arguing. Mircea didn’t catch much, but the gist seemed to be that there were three of them so there was plenty to go around. Bezio cursed and got up again, this time going around to the door.
“If you leave, he’ll only ambush you in the alley,” the mage said, as the gray thing turned to look at Bezio with renewed interest.
Bezio sat down.
The gray creature finally shuffled out, still muttering, and the mage turned to look at them. “I was with another client. My apologies.”
Mircea didn’t much like his tone, which belied his words, or the oily smile that went along with it. But at least he looked fairly normal. Just a man in his early forties, too pasty to be local, with a short trimmed brown beard and pale blue eyes.
Mircea didn’t like them, either.
But he needed information, and clearly this man was a mage. And if he was the right one, he knew his business. According to Cook, anyway.
“You are Hieronimo?” Mircea asked—doubtfully, because the man didn’t look Italian.
“Sometimes,” he said easily.
“What kind of an answer is that?” Bezio demanded.
“We take turns.”
“What the—”
“The pub—excuse me, tavern—was started by a man of that name, oh, two hundred years ago now,” the man told them. “When he died, he left it to his assistant, who kept using the name out of respect. The . . . association . . . that controls it now has kept up the tradition, but no one’s here all the time so we trade off. I’m Hieronimo for this evening.” He raised an eyebrow. “Is this what you came to ask?”
“We came to ask about poison,” Mircea said, and the man suddenly beamed.
“Oh, good. One of my fields of expertise. Who—or what—do you wish to kill?”
“No one!”
“Oh,” he looked slightly disappointed. “Then how can I help you?”
“We want to know about poisons for vampires. Poisons that would work on vampires, that is.”
“Most of them will work, if you can get them into the bugger,” the man said cheerfully.
Bezio growled something under his breath.
“I meant undetectable poisons,” Mircea said.
“There aren’t any.”
“None?”
“Not for your kind. Not that we’ve ever found, in any case.” The man looked wistful.
“There has to be,” Jerome said. “My old master was poisoned, and we never knew how.”
“Oh, I never said it couldn’t be done,” the mage told him. “Simply that there are no poisons a vampire can’t detect if he’s paying attention. But there are always ways if you’re determined.”
“Such as?”
“A dart or arrow, dipped in an appropriate concoction, can work, but there are considerable risks. Vampire reflexes might knock it away before it connects. If it does connect, but you don’t hit a major artery, the poison can be sucked out or the affected limb cut off—which will, after all, grow back in time. Such an attack also requires getting a little closer to their prey than many people are comfortable with. Which is why most prefer to hide it.”
“Hide it how?”
He shrugged. “Various ways. The best is to feed the poison to a human, and have the vampire bite him.”
“He’d taste it.”
“Possibly,” the mage agreed. “But the feeding instinct does tend to be somewhat . . . overwhelming . . . for your kind. And blood has a magnifying effect for you, so the amount needed would be much reduced. The main problem is keeping the human alive long enough to get him to the vampire.” He smiled.
Mircea wished he’d stop doing that.
“So how do you do it?” Jerome asked, with more interest.
“Jerome,” Mircea said, because this wasn’t getting them anywhere.
“I need to know, Mircea. My master—I need to know.” He looked back at the mage. “How?”
“Again, various ways. Overriding a human’s mind, to persuade them to ingest the stuff shortly before they are to be bitten, might work. But self-preservation is a hard thing to completely negate, and even a strong suggestion may not be enough. They may also be seen taking it, or searched and the potion found, or it may be smelled on them—”
“You said various ways. There is another?” Jerome broke in.
“Oh, yes. The best bet, especially if your target is particularly cautious, is to prepare your carrier ahead of time, and then do something to slow down the poison. Give it to him with a large meal, for example. The digestion process will retard the effects—possibly for hours, depending on which poison you use—giving the carrier time to reach his destination. Or you can give him an antidote—”
“An antidote?” Mircea asked sharply.
The mage nodded. “Not a complete dose, of course, just enough to delay the poison’s effects for a short time.”
“An antidote like Theriac?”
“Theriac?” The man’s eyebrow raised.
“Mithridatum. A friend of ours had some in his possession, just before . . .”
“Interesting.” He leaned his chair back on two legs. “What would a vampire want with a useless remedy?”
“Theriac isn’t useless!” Jerome said indignantly.
“No, it’s very good at parting fools from their money.” The mage smiled.
“It seemed to work for Mithridates!”
“Actually, the old legends state that Mithridates was saved by drinking the blood of ducks that fed off poisonous plants—the kind his subjects used in their king-killing efforts. Over time, the ducks developed a resistance that they passed onto him.”
“And that . . . works?” Bezio asked, sounding skeptical.
“No, not at all,” the man said, and then laughed at Bezio’s expression. “But the legend persists because it contains some truth. Animals who regularly take in small amounts of a toxin, or who produce it themselves—snakes, spiders, and the like—develop an immunity to it, an immunity that shows up in their blood.”