Blood to Blood (5 page)

Joanna Tepes learned to read the night's shadows… the blinding ones thrown by the full moon, the dimmer ones of the partial moon, the softest ones unseen by any but night birds and vampires, the shadows of the stars.

And when these shadows began to dull at the edges, she would find shelter. There were always small canyons where the horse could graze, overcroppings of rocks beneath which her box of earth—her haven—could rest. The horse had a Gypsy coin embedded in its bridle. She added to this a coin of her own, a gold one stamped with the likeness of her brother. If a man ventured too close to the animal while she slept, the likeness of the Gypsy coin would keep all but the Gypsies from stealing her mount. As for them, the other gold coin would give them pause.

She doubted that any found the beast, though. She was careful in her resting places, and the land was so empty.

It took her two weeks to reach the settled areas along the coast. As the cities and farms grew more numerous, she was forced to take greater precautions during the day until the night when she woke at dusk she realized she was not alone.

Silent as the mist she became, she spilled out of the hairline crack in the side of her shelter and rolled along the ground until she was some distance from her makeshift camp. There, she took form and studied the intruder.

A slender youth no older than twenty, about the same age she had been when she was taken from her grandfather's palace. Sexless in appearance but the scent was female. Joanna moved closer, trying to decide what to make of the thief.

Not Gypsy. Not Turkish. The hair was too golden, the skin as pale as Karina's had been. Joanna moved closer and let her form become solid. Closer yet, until she was so close she could grab the girl and feed. Then she inhaled and spoke, her voice loud, intending to provoke fear. "
Nu te atinge de acela
!"

The girl only turned and looked at her curiously, saying something in a language Joanna did not recognize.

Had her own speech become so dated, or did the girl perhaps come from somewhere else? "Say something I can understand!" Joanna ordered with the last of the air still in her lungs.

"I thought the horse lost… ah…
am gîndit cal pierde"
the girl said slowly in Romanian. Her accent was thick and foreign to Joanna, but the words were understandable.

"
Pierde
." Joanna tittered and grabbed the girl's arm. She felt the pulse, barely noticeable to another human or the girl herself, rolling through her, rapid with fright.

"Yours?" The girl pointed to the animal. "I am…
îmi pare rau
." She reached into the dirty leather tunic covering her body from shoulders to knees and took out a coin, holding it out to Joanna.

"Not thief. For you," she said. Fear did not motivate this, Joanna thought. It was honor.

Joanna shook her head. There was something else here that she wanted desperately, though she dared not claim it. The hunger in her was immense, overpowering even her hysteria. If she gave in to it, the strength of it would fade, and with it her tenuous hold on sanity.

She shook her head again.

The girl backed away, then turned to face the road. To Joanna, who understood the feeling all too well, she seemed ready to bolt for freedom.

Something Joanna's brother had told her came back to her. She needed to find a creature like this to see her safely to the ship, across the seas to… The name of the place where he had gone, and where his enemies lived still eluded her. "Go Varna?" she asked simply, hoping the girl would understand.

The girl turned back to her, frowning. "What did you say?" she asked in that same language. Joanna realized that she had heard it before, not long ago. English, her brother had called it. The language of her enemies. He spoke it. So did Karina. Joanna had learned a few words of it from the English in the castle: hardly enough to get by.

"Go Varna?" Joanna asked and gestured toward the horse and cart before pointing to herself, something the girl seemed to understand more than the Romanian words. She nodded.

"You. I. Go," Joanna added in English and saw the girl's suspicious expression break into a happy grin.

The girl built a small fire. Joanna brought her meat, the remnants of her own kill, to cook and eat. During the next hour, through a mixture of English and Romanian spoken slowly, Joanna learned something of her new servant. She was Colleen Kelley O'Sh———, some name Joanna could never pronounce. She was from Ireland, and just eighteen. Through some quirk of fate Joanna could not understand. Colleen had stowed away on a ship she thought bound for her homeland, not realizing that it was not going to Ireland, but east. She nearly starved because she was afraid that if she came out of the hold she would be thrown overboard or raped. So she foraged at night, surviving as best she could. When the ship finally landed in Constanta some weeks ago, she had run as far from it as possible.

Since then, she had lived off the land, and begun to realize that this was not at all a haven for her. She had been making for the port at Varna, hoping to find a ship bound for the west, when she'd spied Joanna's horse.

And, though she had picked up a few words of Romanian, she had thankfully learned nothing about vampires.

If she had, Joanna would have been forced to kill her probably a dozen times during the two-day trip to Varna. Instead, the girl seemed to take Joanna's pale skin for granted, and accept her own story that she was an escaped hostage, a noble in her own land. Joanna told her that she had been traveling by night to avoid detection, and that she would continue to do so, hiding in the wooden box during daylight hours when she would be more likely to be seen and perhaps recognized.

She made up an incredible tale about concealed breathing holes, and how she was a queen in her own land but unable to return to it. Colleen believed it all, or seemed to, and the language problem made any questions difficult.

The ruse seemed so easily accepted that Joanna let out one of her anxious giggles when she'd finished. Colleen didn't question that either, but instead looked at her, head cocked as if trying to decipher the joke.

So they went on, reaching the outskirts of Varna three days later.

Colleen did as Joanna had ordered, and stopped some distance from the city. When Joanna joined her for the evening. Colleen had already made a fire and was eating bread and cheese she had purchased from a farmer earlier that day. "Would you like something?" Colleen asked when she saw her, holding out the bread so Joanna would understand her question.

Joanna shook her head.

"There's an inn just down the road, we could go there and have the stable tend to the horse. You could have a real meal."

Colleen was no fool. She knew her employer had odd habits. But what she saw when Joanna deciphered her suggestion was unconcealed terror. Though she pitied the woman, Colleen thought there was some benefit to her timidity. Colleen would have to be the strong one, the clever one, if they were to survive.

"Or we can stay here," she said in a soothing tone. "And where do you want to go tomorrow… into Varna? From there you can arrange passage to Russia? Turkey?"

Joanna shook her head, still trying to remember.

"India? Sweden? Egypt?"

Colleen spoke the names slowly, so Joanna would understand. Joanna frowned, struggling with the memory of her brother's destination. "Your language?" she finally asked.

"English?" I don't understand

"English, England… London, England. I wish to go there… London," Joanna said at last.

"Then I'll go too! I think we can find someone who can help us once we get there—that is, if you have the passage… the money."

"Money." Joanna repeated the word, savoring it. Her brother had often spoken of money, and of places where it was kept.

She suspected that she even had papers that would help concealed in her box. "You come. I pay and you come."

"You want to employ me, you mean?"

Joanna understood the words. She pulled in another breath of air and agreed.

"We have to buy tickets. And we ought to dress up like ladies, British ladies. There are enough foreigners in Britain that you will fit in. No one will be looking for a lady and her maid," she went on, watching Joanna to see if her words were understood.

"Yes. We do that," Joanna said. It pleased her that Colleen seemed to understand her words, seemed to actually relax now that she had some idea of their relationship to each other.

Joanna stared into the fire, remembering how she had treated her servants so many years before when she was young.

There had been so many that she could not remember even one name. But there had been one among them, a girl her own age who had become more than a servant, more even than a friend.

No! She would not think of that. Illona gave her good advice when she said it was not wise to dwell too often on the past.

And yet? She watched Colleen build up the fire that would keep predators away. She watched her comb the tangles from her light brown hair and twist it up under a loose-fitting cap to hide the weakness of her gender. She kept on sitting there, watching in silence, until Colleen wrapped herself in a blanket, lay between the blaze and the fire and went to sleep. Then Joanna rose, thinned to a mist and flowed down the road into Varna.

The city's life teemed around her, more life than she had experienced in centuries. Had she possessed substance, she might have lost her mind in its presence, but incorporeal, her emotions were as soft as her form. She moved through the most crowded streets, controlling her fear and that ever-present hysteria, searching for the fortitude to replace it with hunger and desire.

On the edge of town the buildings grew grander and farther apart, separated by expanses of lawns and gardens. She moved closer to one of the largest, certain from the number of people inside that she had discovered an inn.

She waited in the shadows until the lights inside were extinguished, then moved closer to the building. The night was oppressive, stuffy and hot, and a pair of European women slept on their third-floor balcony, thinking themselves safe from harm because they were so far above the ground.

Their open door and the public nature of the shelter were invitations enough for Joanna's kind, but she hesitated anyway. Half formed, she ran her hand over the younger woman's chestnut hair, thinking of the one who had killed Karina and her brother. The woman stirred in her sleep, rolled onto her back, the half smile of a pleasant dream playing on her lips.

Dare she take? If she pressed her lips against that pale neck, if she drank, if she killed, what rumors would circulate among the rabble of Varna? Suddenly fearful, she fought the urge to kill and instead moved quickly into the room, digging among the clothes scattered on the bed, taking only a pair of dresses and some shoes, dropping a coin to pay for them. She left the way she came, drifting over the balcony to the ground, fleeing in the shadows with the dresses fluttering behind her like kites tossed in the wind.

Colleen woke after midnight. Weeks as a fugitive, first in France, then on the ship, then in this strange land, made her instincts sharp, and so she lay still a moment, listening.

The horse stomped and snorted. A man whispered something. Beneath her blanket. Colleen's hand moved slowly up her side toward the knife she kept hidden in her belt. Before she could reach it, something came down hard on the side of her head. Dazed, she felt hands moving over her body, taking her knife, then realizing her sex, fumbling with her shirt.

She tried to roll out from under him but he was too quick for her, his body too heavy.

He reeked of old sweat, rotten teeth and brandy, and she turned her head sideways in disgust as he tried to kiss her. As least there seemed to be only one. Perhaps if she lay still and just let…

No! She'd had enough of that before she boarded the ship. She was through being passive. She jerked a knee up between his legs, hitting him hard but not hard enough. He grunted and hit her, not a slap this time but a punch that stole all thought of fight from her.

She wished he'd hit her harder, she didn't want to be awake for what would follow.

Half dazed, she felt his fumbles at her clothes and his own until she heard him grunt again, the weight of him jerked off her.

She forced her eyes to open, tried to focus on the sight of him struggling with nothing, or so it seemed. She did not understand the words he spoke, but heard the terror in his tone and in the final words he called: "
Strigoaica! Strigoaica
!"

A cloth fell over her face, whispy soft and scented with sweet perfume. Colleen pushed the fabric away and looked with terror at her enemy.

He was a huge man, larger even than she'd thought when his weight rested on her, yet something unseen had lifted him off of her, and now held him doubled over at the waist, his feet off the ground, kicking the air. Breathing hard. Colleen slipped backward on hands and feet, away from the firelight and into the comfort of the shadows. There she watched with growing horror as her attacker's head was jerked backward and his throat ripped through, cutting off the name he called again.

"Stri—"

His blood flowed for only a moment. Then a shadow covered and seemed to close the wound, a shadow that slowly solidified into dark hair and pale face, the long, thin arm that held him, the long, thin hand that grasped his grimy hair, holding his head up and back.

Colleen choked back a scream, turned and lurched down the road, then up a hill and into a stand of trees. There she crouched, trying to keep her knees from shaking, her breath slow and silent.

Joanna found her anyway. The woman's face and hands were smeared with blood, and there was a dark, shiny stain of it on her tattered black dress. "Come," she ordered and held out her hand. Colleen cringed at the sight of it but stood and, resigned, followed her mistress down the hill and into the firelight.

The body lay where Joanna had dropped it. The throat was ripped open, the head at an odd angle to the rest of the corpse. He had died horribly, yet Colleen was hardly sad that he was dead. She looked from the corpse to her mistress, noting the flush of pink in Joanna's cheeks, the fiery flash of life in the centers of her emerald eyes.

"What are you?" she whispered.

Joanna repeated the dying man's word, adding another.

"
Strigoaica mort
." The words were said with no emotion, as if she were beyond caring what Colleen thought of her.

Colleen wanted to step back, to run. Reason might have told her it was futile, but something else intervened before it could.

She looked from the corpse, bloodless and still, to the one who had killed him. And for the first time in all the fear-filled weeks of stealth and hiding, she relaxed. Convinced that loyalty was the only thing that could save her now, and that loyalty would somehow keep her safe, she bowed to the woman who stood before her and humbly took her outstretched hands.

For the first time since they'd met, she saw Joanna smile. Her canines were far too long, too sharp. Her look too triumphant.

Colleen stifled a shudder, pulled away slowly and crouched beside the body. She pulled the knife from her belt, only half aware of how Joanna crouched beside her, how she nodded as Colleen whispered, "Damn you!" She lifted the blade and brought it down hard into the man's belly, once then again and again, repeating the curse all the while until, finally, the tears began to flow. She fell against her pale mistress, lay her cheek against the lifeless breasts, cold, sticky with blood.

She cried, hardly aware of the one who held her, moving her wrist to Colleen's mouth. Blood pooled along a wound the man had made in his struggles. Without thinking. Colleen sucked it as she had her little brother's frequent scratches, pulling out the dirt so the wound could heal cleanly.

But this was not a protective gesture. There was too much purpose in how Joanna had held up her wrist, too much strength in how Joanna gripped it, holding the wound open so it would bleed freely.

And too much emotion in how she trembled as Colleen took in that small bit of herself. Tangy. Smoky as a long-aged red wine. Colleen swallowed and felt a fire not unlike that of strong drink fill her. As she moved her lips to the wound again, Joanna pulled away.

"Enough," she whispered. Her form thinned to a mist and vanished.

Colleen built up the fire, and sat with her back to the corpse.

staring into the comforting light. She thought not of the attack but of the creature who had saved her. Oddly, she felt no fear until she sensed rather than heard Joanna return.

She'd found some river or pond and washed the blood from her clothes. Now they clung to her body, weighted down by the water, showing how thin she was, how seemingly frail.

Joanna grabbed the body by one foot and dragged it effortlessly into the trees. "Wait!" Colleen called. "He may have some money. We ought to take it."

A tinkle of laughter said Joanna had heard. Moments later she returned, carrying a muddy sack and a handful of coins that she dropped into Colleen's lap. Though Joanna seemed to have no interest in the rest of what was inside the tattered scrap of cloth. Colleen did. She pulled out a filthy shirt wrapped around a bottle. She yanked out its cork, sniffed the bottle's contents, then took a taste. Spicy-sweet and heavily alcoholic. She swallowed; swallowed again.

The drink gave her strength. She looked from the fire to Joanna sitting beside her, rested her hand on her mistress's, feeling a hint of warmth in it. She touched Joanna's chin, turning her head so they faced each other.

It was time to learn what she was traveling with.

By the following afternoon, when Colleen hitched the horse to the wagon and to begin the final journey into Varna, she understood many things.

She understood that her mistress was not alive, and had not been alive for nearly six centuries.

She understood that, as a result of this condition, Joanna was forced to spend the daylight hours in the box she carried with her, and that to expose her body to the sun would most likely end her existence.

She understood that the blood she had drunk, such a tiny amount, had bound her to her mistress in a way that no human loyalty could have accomplished.

She understood that if she continued to drink it, she herself would begin to slowly change.

Last, she understood that she did not care.

Colleen had put on the simpler of the pair of stolen dresses and taken them those last few miles while Joanna hid from the relentless sun. In town, people stared at the strange combination of an Englishwoman on a Gypsy cart, but used to the eccentric ways of foreigners, did not try to question her.

She moved through the center of town, to the wilder streets north of the wharf, where the shipping firms were located. She stopped occasionally to ask directions until she located the shipping firm of Steranko and Summers.

She pulled her wagon in front of the door and went inside. A tiny office opened onto a large warehouse filled with containers of all kinds. She saw mesh bags of cured hams, crates of wine and, oddly, what looked like bottled water, stacks of cured hides and sheepskin. So much wealth behind an unlocked door, as if the owners feared nothing. "Is anyone here?" she called.

In response, someone laid a hand on her shoulder. She cried out, whirled and retreated, her hand instinctively falling to the place at her waist where she'd kept her knife hidden. "I am Mr. Summers. Can I help you?" an old man asked in cultured English, blinking at her from behind a pair of glasses thick as bottle bottoms.

"Yes… that is…" She took a deep breath and went on. "I'm here on behalf of my mistress, who wishes to obtain passage to London for her and myself."

"And why does she send you instead of coming herself?"

"Her knowledge of English is not good," Colleen replied, hoping the answer would be enough.

"Then she could speak to my partner, Mr. Steranko."

"That would hardly be—"

"Of course it would be," he said, cutting her off. "We need to know whom we are to arrange passage for."

This wasn't going as Colleen had hoped. She guessed it was her accent—that strange blend of cockney and Irish—that gave her away. Though she'd worked hard to learn to hide it, and to get an education of sorts, she'd never been able to leave the slums of London and Dublin behind. There seemed to be only one option. "She'll be along soon. If Mr. Steranko can wait, he can speak to her."

"Mr. Steranko just stepped out for a little while. I'm sure he'll return soon enough."

He took her back into the office and brewed them both a cup of strong black tea. By the time they sat down to drink it, the sun had already fallen behind the distant western slopes. Colleen could feel her mistress wake, feel their minds brush. The intimacy gave her comfort.

She turned toward the door, but the form she saw there was not Joanna's but that of a large man, well dressed but with long, unruly dark hair. "Mr. Steranko?" she asked.

He nodded and stepped forward. Some years younger than his partner, he nonetheless seemed to be the one in charge. He took her hand and kissed the back
of
it. "Please," she said, pulling it away from his grasp.

"Her mistress will be coming soon to arrange passage west," Summers explained.

"Ah, yes. I saw the wagon outside and the emblem on the bridle. I was wondering when the others in the family would decide to follow the count. Which one is leaving next?"

Before Colleen could decide how to answer, she saw Joanna take form in the doorway. She looked far more beautiful in the pale blue gown than in the tattered clothes she'd been wearing, and the flush of the life she had taken was still on her cheeks; but her pallor, the silence when she moved revealed everything to a knowing eye.

Steranko walked quickly to Joanna, taking both her hands, bowing so that his forehead nearly touched them. "Enter freely and be welcome. Countess," he said, revealing just how much he understood.

Colleen watched how Joanna took a seat in one of the office chairs. Her bearing was stiff and regal, and yet Colleen could sense in how her hands gripped the chair arms, her fingers playing with the turnings in the wood, how her unruly hair seemed to shiver in some unfelt breeze, that she was on the edge of another bout of hysteria.

What did she dream about in her long days in dark confinement? Colleen wondered. Did she dream at all?

Joanna had never looked into the eyes of a man who understood what she was, and yet was unafraid. She had to fight the urge to bare her fangs and arouse that fear, had to remind herself that he was undoubtedly someone who was used to her kind and whose help she needed. She wisely managed to keep it at bay, even while she grew more and more flustered as he spoke words she could scarcely understand, pointed to documents she could not read.

She had revealed that fact to Colleen last night. They had sat by the fire, sifting through the stack of papers she had taken from her brother's ruined castle. There were crumbling edicts written centuries ago, letters written in a language strange to both of them from someone in Szged, notes to a banker in Bucharest, and the most recent from some gentleman in England concerning the shipment of her brother's belongings to his new home.

Those last had provided the name of the shipping house he'd used, and brought them here. Now Steranko sat with the documents spread over his huge desk, explaining to her what each of them meant. She didn't understand half of what he was telling her, but there was no need, especially when he assured her that there would be solicitors in London more than willing to handle all her affairs.

He then took a map and showed the route their ship would take, and last explained the papers they would both need to travel openly.