Blood Spirits (6 page)

“Your personal cock-up wasn't as bad as the one you left behind.” He swung around and paced across the room, stopping in front of the wide screen TV, which had a long sword scrape across the surface. “I know you think fast on your feet. Like the rest of us in the family,” he added over his shoulder as he regarded the sword still stuck in the wall, then he moved away. “It happened to me once,” he flicked a hand at the sword, “being attacked at sword point for the truth. It worked. I was too busy to lie.” He grinned unrepentantly. “So were you.”

Swordplay to get the truth was insane, but then, when one is furious, there's little or no sanity at work. I could tell that he was still very angry. “If you don't want to tell me what's going on ‘this particular day, now, today' fine,” I said. “But it's your turn to at least answer some questions.” I laid some heavy emphasis on the
at least
.

“We called a truce. Milo still holds my father's ring.” He gazed across the room at me, his mouth twisted sardonically. “Save your breath, I know what a fine upstanding democrat thinks of that.”

“Don't.” I shook my head.

“So you
did
have a reason for taking off so suddenly last September, even if it was barking mad?” He looked at me and went on, mockingly, “I wasn't the only one wondering. That's why Alec sent for me—in case I'd grabbed you again and Ruli'd lied to him about your leaving. His theory made more sense than what actually happened, what you actually did.”

“Wait,” I said, pressing my hands over my eyes. “Wait, wait. I don't get it. He did marry Ruli, right?”

“Of course. Had to, since you'd scarpered. Neither of them wanted it, which might be the reason why whatever was supposed to work didn't. Or maybe it was because everybody else in that cathedral was angry: with him, with my family, with one another, with you. Or maybe there isn't any Vrajhus left, if it ever existed.”

“But you say you've met vampires.”

He waved an impatient hand. “Please . . . vampires have nothing whatsoever to do with the Blessing.”

“How can you say that? Isn't everything . . . connected? Isn't Dobrenica . . . ?” I retorted feebly.

“You see ghosts,” he shot back, twirling his hand skyward. “Does that mean you have fairy dust, Tinkerbell? At the end of August my father suffered a stroke. He sent for Milo, who was still there when he died on the tenth.”

I remembered Dad's mention of
some old duke.
“So that was your father who died? That's what you meant by Milo holding your father's ring?” I dropped into one of the chairs that had been kicked aside. “I'm so sorry,” I whispered.

He made one of his lazy gestures, probably meant to mask his emotions. “He was older than Milo by four years. Drank like a fish. He wasn't close to any of us, though he and my sister shared a taste for breakfast cocktails.”

I said, “So you're now the duke?”

“Yes. Well, technically. As technically as Milo is king.” He glanced at the once-elegant room, now pretty well trashed. “What remains is all this.” He waved a hand in a lazy circle. “I always hated those damn tulip lamps.” He wiped a hand up over his face, then pulled his sword out of the wall and laid it on the table. “I was supposed to go back to Paris tomorrow, but all things considered, I'd better do that tonight. Where's that coat I brought downstairs? I'll take you back to Milo's.”

I stood there with the sword still in my hand, wishing I could high-handedly say that I'd take a cab, that I'd walk, that I'd do anything but get into a car with him again. But I'd been up for nearly thirty hours, and I didn't have my purse with me, or even Milo's address. Yeah, I could have held out my hand for some cash and demanded the address from my lofty stance on Mt. Moral Superiority, but there was so much pain in his absent gaze, that I thought,
His father's death hit him harder than he wants to admit.

So I laid my blade next to his on the table and said, “Let's go.”

 

Tony was preoccupied pretty much the entire way back. When he pulled into the driveway, and I started shrugging out of Ruli's expensive silklined coat, he said, “Keep it. She'll never wear it again.”

His caustic tone surprised me, then I remembered his mention of “a hundred coats upstairs,” which reminded me of Ruli's super-wardrobe last summer.

“Okay,” I said and slammed the door. There was no use talking to him anymore. He'd only tell me what he wanted me to know, not what I wanted to know.

He zoomed off, the tail lights vanishing at jet speed.

Milo's front door was unlocked, and the parlor lit. I found Mom sitting with her laptop, cruising the net. Her earphones were on. I sank down next to her, catching a few notes of Victoria de los Angeles singing
Madama Butterfly
.

“Kimli,” she said, pulling off the headphones. “You look weirded out.”

“Very weirded out. Things are definitely weird.”

Mom clapped her laptop shut and set it aside. “What's going on?”

“It started at JFK. I was passing this shop window. No, it really started at Fort Williams, when I was grading papers . . .” I filled her in, ending with Tony's attack. I repeated everything he said, finishing with “this particular day.”

“What does he mean by that?” I asked. “Do you think there's some connection? I don't mean with my officemate, necessarily, but what about some crazy connection with Ruli? Only why would he attack me to ‘get the truth'—” I made air quotes, “—just because I arrived today?”

Mom shook her head. “No idea. It isn't like Milo kept your grandmother's arrival a secret. She's been planning this visit for a month.”

“No one knew
I
was coming,” I said.

“True.”

I sighed. “The oddest thing is, he didn't go ballistic until after he answered one of his mother's fifty million calls. Maybe the duchess got mad that he was making nice with me, especially when you consider she once did her best to get me killed. But would that make him attack me?”

“Can't even guess,” Mom said. “Can't ask Milo, either, as he's been on the phone the entire time you were gone.”

Dad came in then, his wild hair and beard wet from the shower and slicked down. “Back already? That was a fast tour.”

I gave Dad the short version. He rubbed his chin through his beard, which was beginning to fluff out as it dried. “I know one thing,” he said. “If Tony's steely form of interrogation has any connection to Milo's being on the phone all this time, the last thing anyone is going to want is visitors underfoot. What's been going on with Dobreni politics, hon?”

Mom shrugged. “Milo and Emilio don't talk about Dobreni politics much, since I've never been there. But you can't help picking up vibes when you're around people, and I get the idea there's something or other happening with the mines.”

“A big part of the GNP, mines, right?” Dad asked. He sank into a satin-covered chair, then said, “How about this: If things still look bad in the morning, we'll vamoose and hole up in some tourist hotel. Leave Milo a polite note, make some excuse. We can hang around in London for a few days, and if their problem clears up, we come back here for the Christmas bash. If it doesn't, we can always go back to LA, and try again in spring, or something. How's that sound?”

“My mother would probably think it's the right thing to do,” Mom said. “I just don't know if she'd be relieved or disappointed.”

While this conversation was going on, I was only half listening.
Deal with it
, said LaToya's image.

Help me,
said Ruli's image.

I looked up at my parents. “Mom. Dad. I think I need to go back.”

“To Los Angeles?” Dad asked.

“To Dobrenica.”

“Whoa.” Mom set her laptop on the coffee table. “Whoa-ho.”

“Look. I'm beginning to wonder if Ruli got into some kind of trouble, and Tony's family thinks I'm to blame. Then there was that . . . vision? Apparition? Hallucination? Anyway, she begged me to help her.”

Mom tipped her head to one side. “Hey, maybe all that astral plane stuff we talked about in the seventies is true. Ruli sure doesn't sound like she's got much in the way of support from that family of hers.”

“Astral planes make as much sense as ghosts.” I sighed, wishing I didn't have to deal with this stuff while under the influence of megajetlag. “Then there was something Tony said: ‘The cock-up you left behind.' You guys know I thought I was doing the right thing, for all the right reasons. But if he's telling the truth, nothing worked out like it was supposed to. So maybe,
somehow
, my leaving is mixed up with politics, and Ruli's caught there in the middle.”

Dad grimaced, then coughed, trying to hide it.

“Spit it out, Dad.”

“What if it's not politics, but personal, Rapunzel? If it's something like her having had a royal fight with Alec, what if she wants you to trade places with her, like she suggested before you left Dobrenica? Without the hassle of divorce and remarriage?”

That gave me a sickening jolt, especially when I had to admit to myself that deep down (or maybe not all that far down) I wanted just that.

But daydreams and reality seldom match up. When Mom was a baby, Gran broke up with Armandros partly on ideological grounds but partly because she had found out their marriage was fake. Though Gran and I are at either end of Mom's generation, we are a lot alike. And my mom is more like her dad. I looked at my parents sitting side by side, representing yin-yang perspectives on how relationships worked.

If Alec wanted a divorce, who's going to stop the acting head of state? Also, it's not like he doesn't know where my parents live. If he'd wanted to find me, he could have
.

But he hadn't, because he's a married man.

“If she wants me to be a stunt double or something, then I come right back here.” I paused, because thinking about Alec always required me to stop and get a grip. “Anyway, this whole vision thing . . . like I said. She asked for my help. Twice. I think I need to go there, find out what trouble she's in and, if it's connected to me in any way, I have to fix it.”

Nobody had any argument to make with that. I could see that the apparition thing unsettled the parents nearly as much as it did me.

“Okay,” Mom said finally. “So when do you want to go?”

“Right away. If I can get tickets, first thing in the morning.”

“Do you want to talk to Milo about this?” Mom asked.

I thought about what Dad had said and made a face. “What if Ruli's thing is personal? No, I really don't. She came to me on the GhostNet. Let me scope it out myself. Sooner the better.”

“Christmas is four days away.”

“Do you have plans I'd screw up? You couldn't, since you didn't even know I was coming.”

“No plans that you'd screw up. Hon, I'm not standing in your way, I'm trying to get my head around it. Okay.” I caught a whiff of Mom's familiar, comforting patchouli as she reached forward to grab her laptop, her lopsided grin flashing. “One thing I'm real good at now is tickets. I don't think you know that Milo and I went to Paris in October? I can tell you all about it tomorrow morning. Before I put you on any plane, boat, or train, we're getting you some winter clothes. I don't know how successful I'll be in finding flights what with the snowpocalypse and the holidays, but one way or another you should be out of London by afternoon.”

“You two do that,” Dad said, “and I will heroically postpone my personal geek-fest at the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers and hold the fort here.”

FIVE

M
ILO DID NOT JOIN US the next morning.

Emilio was also absent. Either he was still asleep, or the poor old guy had been sent on errands, because it was us alone at the magnificent breakfast table, with formal apologies offered by the staff.

“Right. We're out of here,” Dad said, and as Gran put down her cup, looking worried, he said, “I'll go scout out a hotel.” He picked up a piece of toast and vanished, leaving Mom and me to bring Gran up to date using our typical mix of French and English.

At the end, Gran said only, “Aurelia Kim, you must remember that in Dobrenica, personal
is
political.”

“Are you saying I shouldn't go?”

She gave her head a definite shake, the morning light turning her silver hair to pewter. “
Au contraire
. I think you should keep your covenant with your cousin Ruli.”

This was my grandmother, who had firmly denied there was any such thing as ghosts. Or visions. Or magic. Until I came back and told her that I'd personally encountered two out of three.

She paused, then patted my hand as she said gently, “You ran away to Oklahoma in part because you could not bear how politics and the personal are inextricably intertwined. You will probably have to address that if you go back to Dobrenica.”

Mom said, “Let's beat feet.”

Mom had the use of a car, and she'd gotten accustomed to the left-hand driving situation. We crammed in a fast morning of shopping and talking a mile a minute. Too soon it was time to get on the boat to Ostend, as the planes were all booked and overbooked.

At last we stood above the briny-smelling dock and stared at the round-bowed boat riding at anchor in the choppy gray seas under a cloud of mewling gulls. Mom said, “Shall I get you a European prepaid?”

“Cell phones don't work in Dobrenica, remember?”