Blood Spirits (9 page)

When I reached the inn, Madam offered to serve me dinner and brought enough food for a platoon of marines. I ate, read until my eyes swam, and went to bed early, listening to the faint sounds of carolers walking up and down the streets.

The chill that had gripped my bones when Natalie told me Ruli was dead did not fade. When I got out of bed to figure out how to turn up the radiator, I discovered that my room was icy. I burrowed down in the thick coverlet and shut my eyes . . . and spent the rest of the night waking up from heart-pounding nightmares. Car crashes, fires, a horrible dream about standing in a garden looking up as snow fell, my limbs gradually freezing as the air got colder and colder.

I woke to the bleak, watery light of a winter dawn. My hands and feet were numb with cold. I felt the radiator. Warm. But the warmth seemed to dissipate within inches.

My head throbbed, my skin hurt. Noises were sharp, almost distorted. I went to the bathroom, relieved to find it empty in spite of all those guests. As the hot water slowly filled the tub, I wondered if I was getting sick—not only my body, but the entire world seemed askew. Guilt for coming here? I peered in the small mirror on the old plaster wall, glaring at my own bloodshot eyes.

Help me
, Ruli had said.

I got into the tub, concentrated on my tai chi breathing as I soaked, and when I got out of the bath, I moved through some of the tai chi forms I'd been learning, as I had not found a fencing club in Fort Williams. Then I went down to a good breakfast and, after eating, felt human enough to face the interview I wanted. Dreaded. Wanted.

How could I help Ruli now? How could I help
him?
Because one thing I was sure of: There was no way that he would cause an ‘accident' just to get rid of an inconvenient wife, no matter what rumors might be circulating. Rumors, I was willing to bet any sum of money, had to have at their center Tony's mother, the evil duchess, who had once smilingly asked me to call her Tante Sisi.

 

By ten I reached the great gates of the Royal Residence.

Its walls gleamed warmly gold in the wintry sunlight, reminding me again of Schönbrunn Palace outside Vienna. The snow-covered grounds were smooth either side of the pathway. Few people were around—no tourists lined up at the gate or shuffling behind a guide. A Vigilzhi in the well-remembered blue-piped-with-scarlet uniform, caped and gloved, peered at me. I hadn't tried to hide my face. Sure enough, his eyes widened. Then his expression went all official and blank as he saluted me and opened the ornate carved door.

“I wish to speak with the Statthalter,” I said in Dobreni. I could see my breath.

He gave me a short bow. “Please. Go to the double door there, in the south wing.”

The palace is shaped kind of like an E with a bent spine. The south wing lay to the left. Inside that door waited a young guy with a shock of curly black hair resolutely tamed. He, too, wore a Vigilzhi uniform, but with no insignia and no cap. Maybe a cadet. His eyes widened when he saw me. They were startlingly green. “Good day, Mam'zelle,” he said in careful French that sounded rehearsed. “Please to come this way.”

I followed him into the business wing of the palace, where the parquet floors were covered with rugs to protect the old wood, and where ceilings were smooth plaster above rococo molding instead of fabulous wood-carvings and paintings. As we walked, I considered and reconsidered what to say to Alec.

Then the cadet opened a set of double doors that had to date back to the seventeenth century.

By that time, I felt as if my nerves had poked through my skin, and though warmth emanated from the enormous china stove in the corner, I shivered. In the middle of the room was a splendid baroque era rosewood desk. A woman was seated there, and standing behind her, his arms reaching around her to rest on the tops of her hands, was Alec.

My brain shut down, and I stumbled to a stop.

They looked up as one. For about a hundred years I took in those shocked honey-brown eyes the same shade as my own, and Alec's enigmatic blue-gray gaze above.

Then Alec straightened up. I was peripherally aware of the woman putting something in her purse as he said, “Kim. Welcome back.” It was almost a question.

The woman's expression smoothed to blandness.

“Uh.” My voice came out sounding like someone else's. “I'm intruding. I can . . .” I waved my hand in a circle.

The woman got to her feet—not that she had far to go. She was short, built in the petite version of the pear shape, with a pointed face, a broad forehead, and a cloud of curly dark hair twisted up simply but in a way that framed her face with wispy tendrils. She wore a plain pearl-gray shirtwaist dress, but it was so stylish it had to have come from Paris.

Alec pinched his fingers to his forehead as though his head hurt. “Kim, this is Rebekah Ridotski. Beka, Kim Murray.”

Beka smiled at me. “Hello.” She flicked a glance at Alec. Her English was French-accented. “I'll see you tonight, then?”

He assented with a gesture. She stepped around the desk and whisked herself out, leaving a whiff of expensive scent as the door shut behind her with a decisive click.

I approached the desk but stayed on my side of it.

Alec looked exactly the same—wearing slacks, a good shirt, a hint of a tie at the V neck of a dark woolen sweater-vest. His eyes, the color of clouds on a rainy day, were steady. But he wasn't exactly the same; there were healing bruises on one side of his forehead and along his jaw. The cobalt Ysvorod signet ring was on the little finger of his left hand, and on the ring finger of his right he wore a plain gold band.

And he stayed there, on the other side of that huge desk.

I stood poised to close the distance between us, though I knew it would be wrong, that whatever his relationship had been with Ruli, he'd just lost her in a horrible way. “Alec, I'm sorry about what happened. I really, truly did not know. Until I got here. And Nat told me just now.”

“You just got here?” Alec repeated, sounding distracted the way you do when way too much is going on at once.

“Well, yesterday. On the train. You knew I was here? I told the Waleskas not to blab about—”

He was catching up; he gave me a look, with a hint of the old humor.

“Okay, old news before I even got to them. But how? I'd swear no one could have recognized me after I got off the . . . oh. Right. The train conductors. I'm sorry, Alec. Nat did warn me. But the whole concept of my being ‘a person of interest' seems totally alien to me. Anyway, I came because . . .” It was difficult to get the words out, because modern life makes it too easy to scorn what we don't understand. But it was too important not to try. “The other night. On our way to London. I saw a vision of Ruli.”

He stilled, almost a recoil. It was like I'd hit him. The words
Help me
froze right there in my mouth. What if he took them as accusation, and hard on that was the betraying thought: What if he
was
the cause?

No. Every cell in my body revolted against that notion. No matter how disastrous a marriage it might have been, Alec would not do something so evil as to cause an accident.

Or so stupid.

“A vision?” he repeated.

The instinct to avoid that was as overwhelming as the instinct to talk to him, to regain the understanding between us. But where to start?

I looked around wildly for any subject to break the nightmarish silence stretching out into
infinity
. “Vision. Hallucination, maybe, caused by jetlag. Do you know now
long
I have been traveling?” I babbled. “This country is beautiful even in winter. On the ride up I kept wondering if Wordsworth had ever been here—‘Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside—'“

His smile flickered, and the quote came automatically. “‘As if a voice were in them. . . . ‘ ”

He stopped himself before
the sick sight
.

Urgh. Only
I
could commit a poetical faux pas! I said quickly, “It figures you'd know ‘Simplon Pass.' Did you think of it when riding the train up here, when you were a kid?”

But it was too late. The smile was gone, and I knew without any mysterious visions that we were right back where we'd started, no matter how much either of us would rather have avoided it: Ruli. “Yes,” he said, neutral and polite.

I said, “I saw Tony in London.”

I may as well have hit him. He didn't quite recoil this time, but his chin lifted, and if possible he tensed up even more.

I blundered determinedly on. “He came over to meet my grandmother, but she was—your dad was—Tony and I were touristing around when he got a phone call, and—something was very wrong, but he wouldn't tell me what it was.”

I couldn't bear to see that painful question in Alec's tense face, the beautiful, dear face that I had tried not to think about even though I was reading the poetry he loved and practicing his language. And dreaming about him at night.

“Kim,” Alec began. “We should probably—”

There was a polite knock at an inner door, followed by muffled words in Dobreni: “Statthalter, they are all here but the Prime Minister.”

“A moment,” Alec called.

Noooo! Not with us like this, on opposite sides of the room, and the tension, the
questions
between us.

I said quickly, “Alec, before anything else, I wanted to apologize for leaving last summer without talking to you.”

Our gazes finally met, and personal space made that seven-points-on-the-Richter-scale shift to intimate space. The urge to run to him was almost overpowering. I watched his eyes, his hands, for the green light . . . and he looked down at the papers waiting on the desk, his long eyelashes effective shutters.

The last time we'd seen each other, I spent the night within the circle of his arms. The chemistry between us was as powerful as ever (and I discovered that I was gripping the edge of the desk) but something was definitely wrong, horribly and painfully out of balance.

I finished numbly, “I really thought I was doing the right thing.”

“I know.” He made an effort I could feel in my own bones and muscles. “You thought you were sparing me from . . .” He pinched his fingers between his brows again. The signet ring glimmered, a cobalt blue teardrop. “You thought you were doing the honorable thing,” he said. “I know you well enough to have been fairly certain about that.”

“Could I have possibly called it more wrong?”

As if the words were wrung out of him, he said, “Kim, I do not want you to take this the wrong way, but I wish you had not come.”

Sick and miserable, I gazed at him, completely unable to speak.

“No.” He flung up his hand in a sharp gesture. “No, I take that back. Please don't walk out of here thinking. . . . A week ago, I would have welcomed you more than—” I'd never heard him speak so wildly, so disjointedly. I felt the effort he made to stop, to take a deep breath. “Kim. I am afraid there's going to be trouble. I don't yet know how much, but one thing I want to prevent if I possibly can, is your being dragged into it.”

“Alec, I would do anything to help you. I hope you know that.”

“I do.” He dropped his hand and moved to a rosewood Louis XV cabinet in the far corner. “And I want you to know how glad I am to see you. In spite of. . . everything going on. But I—”

Another knock, more insistent than the first.

Alec's head lifted sharply, the fine skin over his cheekbones tense. “I can't make them wait any longer. We'll have to talk later. It's the best I can do at the moment.”

“Alec.”

He opened the glass door in the cabinet and removed a crystal decanter. At the sound of his name—perhaps at the sound of me saying his name—he jerked around, as though I'd reached inside him and yanked.

“If you want me to leave Dobrenica,” I offered, “say the word. You're the one in crisis mode right now. What's best for you?”

“The Prime Minister has arrived,” came that muffled voice from behind the inner door.

“It's too—”

He didn't say the word. I felt it and so, heard the sidestep in his tone. “It's too confusing right now. That is, there is too much going on. Let's talk later, shall we?” As he spoke he poured something from the decanter into his coffee mug.

Logic insisted I should get out of the country—go to the air field, since the train only ran once a week or so. But instinct clamored for me to stay, to fight against whatever it was that threatened him, to take a stand at his side.

“I'll be at the inn,” I said and opened the door to the hall.

I slipped out—

And found Rebekah Ridotski waiting for me.

SEVEN

“W
HY ARE YOU HERE?”Beka's English flared with a strong

French accent.

“I . . .” Though I had no right to complain if Beka and Alec were an item, I also didn't owe her any answers. “Why do you need to know?”

“Because it is I who must pick up the pieces after you—” She made a little shrug, then finished with the French verb
déguerpir
.

It means “take off ” or, closer, “ditch.”
Ditch Dobrenica? Ditch Alec?
“Pick up the pieces” was what I'd said to Nat.

I answered, “What makes you think I'll do anything of the kind?”

I expected her to dismiss me or, worst case, shoot back something hostile. Instead, her chin lifted slightly. “Permit me another question. Have you seen Natalie?”