“I thought vampires weren’t able to kill their Sires.”
Marte smiled gently. “Now, we both know that can’t be true, don’t we?”
Mircea frowned in confusion, and she laughed.
“In fact, she didn’t intend to do it,” she told him. “She had accumulated a nice fortune over the years, and he decided to change her in order to get control of it. She objected; there was a struggle. And violence can increase blood lust as much as sex does. He prevailed, of course, but by then he was too preoccupied to notice the poison he was taking in along with her blood. By the time she awoke, he was dead.”
“She made herself,” Mircea murmured, remembering something Martina had said to Jerome.
“Hardly,” Marte said dryly. “He made her, she just killed him afterward. But she heard me say the term one day, and liked the sound of it.”
“You made yourself?” Mircea said, but she ignored it.
“So why not Martina, then?” she asked. “As you said, she makes a good villain. And she bought you.”
“At your instigation?”
She inclined her head.
“You can influence someone of her age?”
“Is that a backward way of asking how powerful I am?” He didn’t answer, and after a moment, she smiled. “I didn’t have to. I planted the idea that, if she could find the right man, perhaps the senator would be willing to grant her a pardon.”
“For killing her master? But that was his fault—”
“Not according to vampire law. It’s more concerned with outcome than intent, and the outcome was a dead master and a broken family. His vampires are still hunting her. It’s why she fled Athens, changed her name, and eventually came here. And took up the only profession she could without a family or the ability to make vampires of her own.”
“Because she would poison anyone she tried to Change.”
Marte nodded. “We met when she noticed I was masterless, and tried to recruit me. I eventually learned her story, and realized that what worked once might work again, in a slightly different manner. But you still haven’t explained why you cleared her and suspected me.”
“Your blood,” he said simply.
“Ah.” Marte sat back against the wall again. “So now we come to it.”
Chapter Forty-Four
There was silence for a moment. Mircea didn’t know what she was thinking, but he was worried. About a whole list of things: the seeping blood from several of his deeper wounds, which was sapping his strength just when he needed it most. The sound of the wind from the garden, which had lessened enough that he had started to be able to hear the crowd through it. The fact that, if the officer hadn’t come by now, he probably wouldn’t. Although that might be just as well—for him.
Because Mircea had started to put things together.
Things like the fact that the senator’s symbol was not one cobra but three: a large one with two smaller ones flanking it on either side. Things like that story she’d told him on the day of the regatta: Had she been feeling something that sparked a long buried memory? Things like Marte’s quip about children and masters.
But mostly things about what he’d seen and heard the night before. All of which should have been impossible for him. It should have been impossible for anyone, except a member of the senator’s family.
Or someone who had recently ingested a large quantity of their blood.
Marte had been watching him, with a little smile. Now she tilted her head. “But then, why not suspect Auria?”
“Auria wasn’t the one cataloguing the remains of the storeroom. Auria wasn’t the one who interrupted Sanuito and me in the courtyard. Auria wasn’t even there. But you were. And he wouldn’t talk in front of you.”
“Mmm. True.”
“And then there was the fact of why you were there: to tell me to make sure that the senator bit me the next time we were together.”
“But Auria told you the same.”
“Because you reminded her to include it.”
Marte’s eyebrow raised. “Or perhaps she asked me to talk to you that night.”
“But that wouldn’t explain my reaction to your blood, would it?”
“Blood I gave you when I saved your life.”
“Yes, because you had to,” Mircea said viciously. “You couldn’t let your carrier die, not when it would be impossible to find another in time. I remember feeling positively drunk off your blood the next day, for several days. The low-level vampire you were pretending to be couldn’t have caused that sort of reaction. Even Auria—supposedly older than anyone else in the household—didn’t affect me like that. Didn’t come close. I felt perfectly normal after drinking from her.”
An eyebrow went up. “You call what happened at the senator’s last night normal?”
Mircea licked his lips, and came out with it. “No. But we both know why that was don’t we?”
“Do we?” The slight smile was back. “That day at the regatta, which was the day after I bit you, you saw nothing.”
“And you know that how?” he asked, before he could stop himself.
She laughed and leaned her head back against the wall.
“In any case, I wouldn’t have,” he said, wishing they could drop the pretense. “I hadn’t seen the sun for two years. It completely dazzled me. To the point that I barely noticed anything else.”
“But you were right next to the senator,” she murmured.
“Yes, so that she could shield me. I was inside her power from the time she woke me, just before the entertainment started. Of course I wouldn’t notice it—or anyone else’s through it. And I only started to notice auras last night after it began to be crowded. But I was on the roof at the regatta, where it was not at all crowded. . . .”
“And now? Are you still seeing them?”
The question was deceptively mild, but there was something in the tone. . . .
Or maybe Mircea was being paranoid. But considering the circumstances, he rather thought he’d err on the side of caution. And be very careful how he answered.
Or avoid it altogether.
“I’ve already answered some of your questions,” he said evenly. “You haven’t answered mine.”
Marte looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, but then smiled. “All right, then. After all, you’ve already heard one side. . . .
“I was like all the others: born into a slum in one of the richest cities in the world, which only made me feel poorer. Every day, fascinating people poured through the port of ports, come to trade, come to sightsee, come just to be able to say they’d seen it.”
“But not Venice,” Mircea said, and felt his mouth go dry.
Maybe he didn’t want his suspicions confirmed, after all.
“No, not Venice,” she said gently.
She leaned back against the wall, with a sigh. “So long ago, but I remember it so well, great Alexandria. Although to me, it was mostly just a beautiful slum. Without money or connections, its opportunities stayed well out of reach.
“Until one day, my father did a favor for some minor bureaucrat, and he returned it by getting me a job at the palace. Not a good job, mind you. Not a handmaiden’s job. But a job nonetheless. And being ambitious—ye gods, I was so ambitious in those days—I worked and schemed and flattered and cajoled, until I was assigned to the queen’s own apartments.
“I still cleaned floors and emptied chamber pots, but I did it for her.
“And, in time, I thought perhaps I would be given more responsibilities, a larger role, a good match. . . . I hoped for so many things. But there was war, and she went away. And when she came back, she was changed. Moody; mercurial. Laughing one minute and throwing things in anger the next. Letters were sent and received. I didn’t know what was in any of them, but I knew they displeased her, for her temper became . . . so much worse.