Blood Spirits (13 page)

Alec looked down into the half-empty glass, his lashes shuttering his eyes, his expression withdrawn into his Mr. Darcy look. I hadn't managed to step into the gum, I'd stuck to it.

In other words, I'd said something wrong, and I had no idea what.

Beka touched his arm. “They're asking for you.”

Alec followed her back to the couch. I took a step, meaning to join them, but Cerisette expertly cut me off, leaving me following her elegantly knobby back. I slowed as she calmly took her place beside Alec, sitting slightly sideways, legs crossed, preventing anyone else from sitting on that couch besides the two of them.

How could it get any worse?

That was the moment the door opened on the noise of fresh arrivals, and in came the principal von Mecklundburgs—minus red-haired Percy, the only one I'd kind of liked.

Tony's uncle Robert, Cerisette's dad, strode ahead of the others, looking more than ever like a Russian emperor, though in an expensive double-breasted Italian suit. Now that Tony was the duke, this guy was technically Tony's heir, which would make him the new count. His wife, the countess, drifted at his side, as thin as a wraith.

The last set of cousins, Morvil and Phaedra Danilov, were right behind, walking on either side of Tony, who was dressed up for the first time I had ever seen. He wore a black suit with a black mandarin collared dress shirt, no tie. It was startling to see him in formal wear. He'd even pulled his wild hair back into a ponytail, revealing the fact that he wore a diamond in one ear.

They were clustered around the duchess, who had once asked me to call her Aunt Sisi—before she tried to get me killed. She looked like a Parisian version of Mom in her a mourning suit of silk, the glitter of diamonds on one hand and at her throat.

Aunt Sisi air-kissed Beka's mother and grandfather, bestowed a fond pat on Beka, greeted everyone else. By then the entire party had reformed with her at the center.

That's when she saw me.

Her stare was like glass, then her brows lifted in perfect polite surprise. Then she came smack up with a smile and a cordial, “Aurelia Kim,
chérie
. Someone said you had returned. What a charming surprise.”

The last time we'd seen one another, she'd sent me up a tunnel in her castle to rescue her daughter. After which she slammed the door in my face.

Could she
possibly
not know that I knew?

“Here I am,” I said brilliantly, and choked off a
How are you?
remembering in the nick of time why she was here. “I'm very sorry about Ruli,” I said, flashing prickly heat with embarrassment and awkwardness. “I just found out—” I choked off
or I wouldn't have come
.

“Thank you, chérie.” She took my hand. Hers was warm and soft, the skin fragile over her delicate bones, as she nodded toward Alec over on the couch. “Alexander must have invited you for the holidays, then?”

“No,” I said, and when she lifted her brows in question, I said, “Nobody knew I was coming.”

“A surprise? You wished to visit him as a holiday surprise?”

I wasn't going to see him at all
. I couldn't say that, but I really did not want to tell her about her daughter's ghost asking me for help. “No,” I said. “I, um, eh, thought I should come.”

Even in my own ears that sounded painfully unconvincing, though it was the truth. From the direction of the couch came the faint ring of crystal, and a titter from Cerisette.

I forced myself to meet Aunt Sisi's brown eyes so much like my own—to discover she wasn't looking at me at all. Before I could figure out who she was checking out, her gaze shifted back to me, and she smiled. “How very generous, my dear. Is your family with you?”

“No. I came alone.”

“It was probably a wise decision on Alexander's part to leave them to a peaceful holiday in London,” the countess drawled, her soft voice giving me those prickles of implied extra meaning. Then she flashed her invisible dueling sword and went for the kill. “If you will forgive the curiosity of an old woman, if you didn't know about . . . the event of my daughter's death, why
did
you come?”

The silence was profound. They were all waiting, and it was then that Nat's hints, Tony's
I don't believe in coincidence,
Beka's wary politeness, and Alec's tense
There is going to be trouble
punched past the days of jetlag and travel, the cascade of surprising changes, and most of all, my own conviction of my good intentions, which I had never thought to question or to think anyone else would.

The duchess, and no doubt many of these others, not only thought that Alec had caused that accident, they thought I was in on it.

For an endless second all I could do was stare at her in horror.

Then I thought: the duchess will never believe me no matter what I say. But I had to kill that rumor dead, if I could, with all these others.

I raised my voice and glanced around. “When I left last September, it was because I believed it to be the right thing to do. Ruli and Alec were engaged, which was supposed to bring peace between the families. I saw myself in the way. So I returned to the States and found a job.”

No one was speaking.

I took a deep breath and went on. “Last Friday, I finished my semester of teaching and drove home to see my parents. When I discovered they were going to London for the holiday, and my father had bought an extra ticket in case I came home, I decided to go with them rather than spend Christmas alone.”

I paused, looked around—and discovered that at least half of them weren't looking at me at all, but at someone behind me. Were they bored? Except they weren't talking.

So I gritted my teeth and slogged on. “Shortly after our arrival, Tony appeared, and invited me to take a trip on the Eye. Then he got the bad news, but he didn't tell me what it was. So I decided to come here, alone, and see what I could find out.” There. Let them deal with that, every bit of which was true.

Again, at least half of them were watching someone behind me. It wasn't Tony. He was standing three feet away from me, drink in hand.

He raised the drink in salute to me, and said, “My part is true.” He grinned, and I knew he was thinking of that sword fight. Maybe even daring me to mention it.

I turned away from him to find the duchess smiling thinly. She said to Baron Ridotski, “May I request one of those glasses of mulled wine,
cher
Shimon? The air is so chilly.”

She walked away, and everyone was in motion again, leaving me once more alone in the middle of a floor. I used the opportunity to take a look behind me to see who everyone had been checking out, to discover the only person there was Honoré de Vauban leaning against the bar, a glass held loosely in one hand.

Why would they be staring at
him?
No clue. Perhaps someone else had been there?
Oh, well.
I turned my mind back to Alec, behind me on the other side of the room. Now I understood his reaction when I showed up at the palace—that exclamation, seemingly wrenched out of him, that he wished I had not come. How many people in this room were watching us both, gleefully waiting for the least sign of friendship and affection between us, to verify that we'd conspired against Ruli? I shut my eyes, furious, sickened.
You're right, Alec. I should not have come.

Except Ruli had appeared in a window and begged,
Help me
.

“I don't think we've met.” I opened my eyes to discover a handsome man in a Vigilzhi dress uniform, complete with epaulettes and a ribbon across his chest. Instead of the small gold captain's stars on either side of his collar, the pins were stylized falcons, like those the Vigilzhi wore on the fronts of their hats. He was a well-built man with sandy brown hair and light eyes. “I am Dmitros Trasyemova, at your service.” Here was the duke I hadn't yet met, the leader of the fifth Important Family.

“Kim Murray. Glad to meet you,” I said, as a boy of about ten tugged insistently at Dmitros' uniform tunic. The boy's heart-shaped face and general resemblance to Beka and her siblings made it clear that this was the youngest of the many Shimons.

“Uncle Dmitros, you
promised . . .”

With an apologetic smile, Trasyemova excused himself and was pulled away to where a bunch of kids waited in the door to a far room. I was alone, and
so
not feeling the love. I chugged down the
limonade
, just to have something to do, then came a deep voice.

“Permit me to say it is a surprise to find you here.” There was Tony's Uncle Robert, he of the Russian emperor costume and the octopus hands last summer. “Did old Milo send you, is that it?”

“
No
one sent me,” I said. I couldn't prevent my face from heating up.

“He doesn't know you are here?” Robert's bushy brows rose.

“I don't know what he knows. All I can tell you is that I left London without telling him. He was busy.”

Robert's disbelief was so obvious I might as well have saved my breath. He then cleared his throat, giving me that false smile I remembered so unfondly from summer. It was more a leer than a smile, a brandishing of teeth below angry eyes. “I believe you are an opera connoisseur?” he began.

What?
Had I fallen down a rabbit hole? “That would be my mother,” I said, shooting my forefinger toward the west as I edged away from him.

“Kim. I was wondering if you'd like to—” Tony came up and, mad as I was at him, he was still a thousand times preferable to his Uncle Robert. Before he could finish his sentence, however, a thin, elegant blonde stepped between us.

“Take this. You need it,” drawled Tony's cousin Phaedra Danilov in her high voice, while pressing a tinkling glass into Tony's hand.

Beka came up on my other side with her short, salt-and-pepperhaired older brother—another Shimon—who gave me a rueful smile before he deftly intercepted the countess, Robert's wife.

Beka was equally deft in cutting off Tony's uncle and passing him to her older sister Malca, saying smoothly, “May we tempt you with something at the buffet, Count Robert? We've also freshly mulled wine . . .”

Malca then escorted Robert firmly away.

Phaedra gestured impatiently to her brother, and as he and Honoré joined us, Tony shifted slightly to let them in. Honoré said something under his breath that caused the cousins to laugh as Tony stepped closer to Beka. While everyone else's attention was on Honoré, he gave her a private smile, then ran his hand up the back of her neck to cup the back of her head.

Here's the weirdness of human nature. That gesture of tenderness, from someone I had extremely ambivalent emotions about, gave me a real jolt. Beka whispered something, and his hand dropped.

I looked away quickly, suspecting I was not supposed to have seen that. Since I did not want to be caught staring at Tony, I found myself face to face with the Danilovs, like a pair of golden bookends and about as friendly-looking. Morvil Danilov's blond hair was perfectly barbered in the same style as Alec's and Honoré de Vauban's, and Morvil, like Tony, wore a dress shirt with a mandarin collar (though his was white, with a hint of pleat showing in the V of his beautiful suit coat). Like Tony's coat, his was beautifully cut, exquisitely evoking the Edwardian era. The wink and glitter of diamonds drew my eye to his cufflinks.

Then Phaedra gave me a forced smile and cooed in her high, kittenish voice, “Tony and I were just talking. I hear you are adept with the rapier. Why don't you come to a practice at our
salle?
”

“Say yes, Kim,” Tony coaxed. Then he grinned. “You know you need it.”

Was this friendly invitation a gesture of apology?

“As soon as the sun rises,” Morvil Danilov said. “Day after Christmas.”

“It will be warm.” Phaedra added with another of those glances, “Quite warm.”

Wary, curious, gratified, wary again. “I don't have any fencing gear,” I said.

“We have plenty.” Phaedra's brows lifted.

“
Dienstbeflissenheit
,” Honoré muttered softly, from just behind Phaedra. I mentally translated that as German for “fuss,” but just as I was wondering if it was aimed at me, Phaedra flushed.

I could refuse and learn nothing. In that case, I may as well go directly back to London. But would that look like I was running away out of guilt? It was that flush of Phaedra's, the first human expression I'd ever seen from her, that decided me.

“Okay. Thanks.”

As Phaedra leaned toward Honoré to murmur something, and her brother reached past her to pick up a fresh drink from the end of the bar, Tony said low-voiced to Beka, “Want to come watch?”

“You don't need an audience,” she whispered.

Tony laughed softly, his smile intimate. The chemistry between the two was totally guns and roses.

During the brief lull in conversation, I heard an old councilor on the other side of the room: “Statthalter? You will forgive a moment of business, but I must ask . . .”

How was Alec dealing with this horrible party? I did not dare look, though I fancied I could feel his tension. As Phaedra and the rest of the von Mecklundburg gang chattered, I ducked around them and wandered in the direction of the buffet, concentrating on the voices at the other end of the room.

The foremost voice was the duchess—Aunt Sisi—probably at the center of a circle, as was appropriate for the bereaved mother. But when I focused, I realized she wasn't reminiscing about her dear departed daughter; she was in the middle of an amusing anecdote about the disastrous dinner she'd served before she left for Paris. Then she went on about the troubles she was having finding a decent cook who was willing to relocate to the middle of nowhere.