Wicked as She Wants (37 page)

As if reading my mind, he squeezed my arm. “We’re going to kick that bitch’s ass,” he said.

“That we are,” I answered, squeezing back.

32

Our afternoon passed in the sweet haze of stolen indulgence. Browsing in shops, strolling down streets lined with tinkling snowdrops, visiting the world’s largest collection of blud creatures in the Muscovy Zoo and laughing at the camels. We kissed in the highest belfry of the Basilica of Aztarte as I sat in a window, my hair rustled by a breeze that smelled of the coming snow. I found that I was no longer frightened of heights. Afterward, Casper stood in the window himself, leaning outward over the whole city, and yelled something barbaric that sounded very much like “Yawp.” It brought him such strange joy that I found it bizarrely endearing.

Remembering Verusha’s favorite treat, I stopped at a vendor in the Franchian district and bought a painted box of sugared liver. What were a few more coppers when soon I would be either dead or the reigning monarch? And it was worth it, seeing her face light up when we walked through the door of the groomery.

“Ah, darleenk, you remembered!” She snatched the box and popped a sliver into her mouth, sucking blissfully as she ushered us into her sitting room. Casper moved toward the divan, but she plucked at his jacket and tugged
him into the last rays of afternoon sun by the window. She walked around him, old eyes narrow and calculating. “Tell me, now. Was it as horrible as they say?”

Casper managed to keep a straight face, and I merely inclined my head and said, “We managed to survive.”

Verusha slapped Casper in the ribs, and he stood up straighter. She ran his hair through her talons and slid a hand down his arm, squeezing his muscles. She held his fingers up to the light, saying, “Interesting. It’s coming on quite fast. But I can smell it on you, the vestiges of your humanity. You’ll need a good bathing.”

“Another grooming?” He grimaced and glanced at the door to the groomery.

Verusha drew back, one hand to her chest in affront. “A Bludman? In my groomery? How obscene.”

“We might as well drag you out to the trough with the bludmares,” I added with a grin. I swiped a bit of liver from the open box and savored the tartness of the sour sugar against the rich tang of blood.

“So I’m just suddenly . . . different to you?” Casper asked. His face was guarded, a strange mixture of anger and bemusement.

“My boy, you have gone from stew to stud,” Verusha said, popping another bit of candy into her mouth. “It is not often one changes species overnight. We should celebrate. You are hungry?”

He nodded silently, as if it pained him to admit it. Verusha opened the warming cube that hummed gently on a shelf and withdrew two vials of blood. She took down two teacups, poured for us, and served, bowing her head slightly to him and greatly to me in the proper show of deference.

Casper sat, rigid, on the edge of the sofa. He took a sip of blood, tentative and with great concentration, as if every time he tasted it, he was afraid to find it repellent. After a few more sips, he relaxed all over and settled back against the cushions.

“I told you hunger would make you peevish,” I said, and he chuckled.

“Funny how it loosens you up a little. Almost like alcohol but without the fuzziness. I feel just as sharp, just not like everything you say is a challenge. Much better.”

He leaned back, one boot on his knee, savoring his blood as if trying to puzzle out a rare vintage.

“I would swear it tastes like butter,” he said between sips. “How is that possible?”

“Verusha prefers good country stock,” I supplied. “These Pinkies would have access to fresh dairy and butter, and perhaps that’s what you’re tasting. I sense cream and sunshine and freshness. Quite round and full-bodied.”

Verusha settled back into her pillows with a handful of liver candy perched on her prodigious bosom. An easy life indoors, extra vials of country blood, and plenty of sweetmeats had made her cushy, and she was enjoying it.

“Good for the constitution,” she said.

“And what’s that, in the box?” Casper asked, setting down his empty teacup and leaning forward to pluck a bit of liver from the box on the table.

She hissed and made as if to swat him. “Stay out of an old woman’s sweets,” she muttered. “It’s too expensive to waste on someone with no taste for riches.”

He dodged her hand and sniffed the bit of deep red liver, coated with crystallized sugar and resembling a bright jewel. He had just opened his mouth when the
door swung in to reveal a cleaner-than-usual Keen, her hair pulled back under the traditional kerchief of low-ranking Pinky servants.

“Is that candy?” She grinned as if she’d never been gone, skittering to his side and plunking herself down on the divan. “All the food here is dull. No salt. What’s the point?” Before she could dig her gloved fingers into the box, he snapped it shut.

“It belongs to Verusha,” he said. “Please try to have some manners.”

“What the hell, Maestro? Who died and made you God?” She slung her booted feet up onto the small table and took out her clockwork tortoise, still in sphere form, tossing it from hand to hand. Casper quivered beside her and began breathing through his mouth, and I realized that it was the first time he’d been trapped in a small, airless room with a Pinky since being bludded.

“We should go.” I stood and held out a hand to Casper, unsure of what I would do if he rejected the offer. But he took my hand and hurried around the table, away from Keen, who smelled less repulsive after a good grooming.

“Where are we going?” she said, clearly puzzled. “And where were you guys last night? And where have you been all day?” Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the open neck of Casper’s shirt, and then she looked him up and down. “Smile,” she commanded, glaring.

“I don’t think I can.”

She threw her tortoise down and rounded on me, hands balled into fists, as vicious and small as the bludweasel we’d seen at the zoo. “What did you do?” She stepped close enough for me to smell the scent of violets from Verusha’s shampoo. “What did you do to him?”

“What had to be done,” Casper said tiredly, pulling her back by the shoulders while keeping his face firmly turned away. “We didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? You’re frigging sorry?” Keen backed away from us, one step after another toward the door. She was fighting tears, shoulders heaving. “You were fine, Casper. Why’d you have to ruin everything?”

“I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t. But it was getting bad in London. Worse on the
Maybuck
. I was starting to lose it. You don’t understand—”

“I don’t understand? Why you’d let her turn you into one of
them
? Jesus, Casper. You’re not even a person anymore. You’re a monster.” She whipped the kerchief off her head and wiped her eyes angrily. “I read your frigging journal, you whiny sack. I can’t believe that after that chick at the caravan chose a Blud over you, you kept drinking. You’re such a goddamn addict. You’re so sad. And weak. You’re just like . . .”

“Like what, Keen?” A deadly calm had come over him. “Like whom?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just expected better from you.”

“I was lost long before you showed up. There was no escaping my past. You can’t undo that much bludwine. It was this or madness.”

She snorted and leaned back against the wall beside the door. “Don’t you get it? This
is
madness. You’re totally bugshit. You’re always supposed to fight it, Casper. Dracula, the bad guys in
Blade,
the Lost Boys. Even Colin Farrell. They’re bad guys. They kill people. You’re
always
supposed to fight the vampires!”

“But vampires are cool. I thought it was zombies that you were always supposed to fight?” The corner of his
mouth quirked up hopefully, his dimples flashing with a Bludman’s killer charm, and she shut her eyes and beat her fist against Verusha’s damask wallpaper.

“You think this is a joke? Awesome. I guess I’m the punch line.” She pointed at me, right at my heart. “And I hope that gypsy bitch rips you in half. You’d make a suckass queen, anyway, considering you don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

One hand on the doorknob, she glared at him. He looked away, and she was gone. When the door slammed behind her, Casper finally inhaled. Verusha was already fetching another vial for him. He took the teacup and drank it down in several gulps, desperately and without testing or savoring it this time.

“She’ll be back,” he said quietly. “She always is.”

Verusha and I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure. That last look she’d given us had burned like a slap across the face. Somewhere deep inside me, the old version of Ahnastasia snarled and envisioned a slender head on a pike in the snow, the short brown hair dark against the hills and dripping blood. But the new version of me ached painfully and wished there had been some way to make her see the truth of it.

I picked the brass sphere off the couch and turned it over in my hands.

“She wanted a pet,” Casper said. “I always said I would buy her a clockwork, but I just never got around to it. She’d be hanged for stealing that. I guess I didn’t realize how much she needed . . .”

“A friend,” I whispered.

When I looked down, I found Casper’s hand in mine, but I couldn’t recall when it had happened or who had
reached for whom. I squeezed back anyway. I couldn’t explain it, but I had lost something, too, and I already missed the little urchin. I could only hope that we all survived long enough for me to find her and fix the mess I’d made of a fellow victim’s life.

I’d never had friends before, either.

We sat in silence for
some time. Verusha finally broke the dark pall of the room by standing up and exclaiming, “This. This is why we don’t allow Pinkies to think for themselves. Poor little fool!” She hurried out the door as if anxious to be away from us, calling, “There are beds made upstairs, the open doors. My darleenk, it is not silk and gold, but it is better than a valise. Sleep well. Tomorrow morning, we begin.”

“What does that mean?” Casper’s hand left mine, and he settled back to watch me. He looked haggard but handsome, the lines of his face sharper than they had been, as if an artist had gone over a sketch with a firmer hand, perfecting it.

“The Sugar Snow Ball is tomorrow night. Tomorrow morning, we’ll prepare and dress. We’ll board the carriage at dusk and ride through the forest to the Ice Palace. We’ll dance to bring down the snow, and then I’ll kill Ravenna.”

“And after that?”

I chuckled, sinister and sweet. “After that, I make the rules.”

“And what will you do?”

“So many things, darling. So many things.”

I breathed in deeply, dreamily. I would fix things. I would clean up Ravenna’s mess. I would send some very precious valises to the Svedish king with the heads of his ambassadors
and spies tied up like holiday gifts inside. I would send dangerous men to visit Mr. Sweeting on Ruby Lane and fetch my sister’s remains home. I would even put Keen’s picture in the papers and see if we could find her with a reward large enough that she would come claim it herself.

“I’m talking about me, Ahna. What will you do about me?’

“You’ll be the court composer for all of Muscovy. I keep my promises.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

The turn of his head, the way his throat moved—he was all Bludman now. And I might have been able to wiggle out of his clutches before, but I could already feel the sharpened force of him. Before, I could have run. Now he could catch me. He was stronger, and it didn’t matter that I was royal, a princess. I couldn’t escape the reality of his physical presence, and especially not its pull on me. Especially not when he demanded it.

He waited, quiet but alert, as the emotions roiled in me. He was bigger, stronger, and the beast in me wanted to submit, to roll belly up and lick his throat as wolves did in the wild. I liked him. I cared about him. But I didn’t know if we would survive tomorrow night and, if we did, if he would survive a single day in the Snow Court. He wasn’t the only one who would wish to stand by my side, although the others would do it for political power. Was it kinder to tell him now or later that the only way we could ever be together during my reign was with me as the stoic, married royal and him as the court composer who warmed my bed in secret?

“Ahna. Ahnastasia.”

He tried to touch my face, but I pulled back with a hiss and a blush. He smiled, lazy and slow. Leaning back
with his arm across the sofa behind my head, he said, “I’ve never seen you running scared before, darlin’.”

He could sense it, the bastard! I had been so eager to turn him into an ally I could use, someone like me, that I had forgotten the powers of an alpha-male Bludman in his prime.

“I’m not scared.” I stood, smoothing down my dress and hunting for something more useful to do. I couldn’t sit on the sofa beside him just then, with him so attuned to my feelings. I couldn’t find the words for how I felt, and the longer and closer I lingered, the faster he would decide for himself. What I wanted to say to him would be my choice, and I wouldn’t let his blud take that away from me. “But Verusha is right. We need sleep. Tomorrow will be long. Sleep well.”