Page 67 of Time's Fool

I didn’t have an answer for any of that, either.

Except for the obvious one, that it didn’t matter.

I had known nights in comfy inns, snuggled up in feather mattresses, with piles of blankets on top of me. And days eating good food in hearty enough portions to satisfy even a dhampirs’ appetite. And weeks or even months with coins in my purse, following a lucrative hunt.

But there had been just as many nights spent shivering under a bridge or in a foul-smelling barn, where the straw was damp and half dung and even the animals looked miserable. Or stealing food to get by, despite knowing that any report to the authorities could bring down a different sort of justice onto my head. Or wrestling a dog for its dinner and stripping the half-rotted meat off the bone with my teeth, before cracking it open to suck the marrow raw. And still being left curled up in a fetal position afterward as my body ate itself, the hunger pains slamming through me worse than the blows of any fist.

In desperation, I had taken jobs that were considered fool’s errands, even by those who dispatched me. And I’d had to go on them hungry and weak, without the expensive bought magic that at least evened the odds. Where had my sire been then?

I didn’t know exactly how old I was, but it had to be over one-hundred. Yet I had never before set eyes on the man. If he’d wanted to meet me, if he’d wanted a relationship, if he’d wanted anything at all, he had damned well taken his time!

Or had he?

Those fractured memories of my youth, and the pain that accompanied any attempt to retrieve more, started to make sense. Had we known each other once and he stolen those memories from me? He was capable of it, from what I’d seen. But if so, why? And why contact me again, after all this time? Why not leave me moldering in far off Italy, where no one need know that he’d sired a monster?

Did he really need a dhampir that badly?

The lightning flashed nearer and thunder boomed overhead, too close for comfort. But I didn’t want comfort tonight, and I didn’t move. There was something about the wildness of the storm that called to me, that matched my fury and confusion and pain. Instead of crawling lower, I turned my face up again as if daring it to attack me.

A gust caught my cap and would have whipped it away, but I grabbed it at the last second. Mircea had bought it for me in Paris, a simple coif-like thing so that I could be seen in public, since I was still in the bar maid’s dress and had lost my own head covering on the bridge. I’d lose this one, too, once we were done; my usual guise required nothing more than, at most, a leather hood.

In fact, I should toss it away now. It was sodden, just a wet lump, another drag on my already heavy woolen attire. Useless thing.

My hand clenched around it instead, and stubbornly refused to let go. After a moment, I stuck it in my belt, although God knew if it would stay there. I didn’t care a fig anyway.

Like I didn’t care about the vampire, except for how well he could pay me! Thinking otherwise was madness, not to mention dangerous. Hope was a fool’s game, and I was no fool. I was—

Seeing something odd, coming this way.

I had been staring sightlessly out at the night while my thoughts whirled about in my head, but a flicker of light where there should have been none caught my attention.

The rain blurred everything, but as far as I could tell, it looked like a nobleman and his retinue, headed this way. And it was quite the crowd he had with him. There was two score of them at least, and possibly twice that many, although the flickering light from the torches some of them held made it hard to be sure.

It rippled over men and buildings alike, highlighting a stern face here or a wet cloak there, but mostly confusing the vision. The men looked like they meant business, being in close, almost military formation, although that could have been due to the cramped confines of the road. Again, the torchlight made it impossible to tell.

If those were torches . . .

I lacked the vampiric ability to telescope my vision, and see things a mile off as well as if they were close up. So, I did it the old-fashioned way, abandoning my perch and jumping from rooftop to rooftop to get closer, until I was almost on top of the approaching throng and the light was a wash of fire spangling the buildings. I discovered that it did come from torches, after all, and not the magical lights I’d half expected.

But I hadn’t been completely wrong. Because the torches were somehow not guttering in the rain, and it wasn’t a nobleman’s retainers who held them. It was—

“God’s balls,” I said aloud, because the men and a few women who I’d taken for retainers were something far worse. Instead of bully boys with clubs to deal with potential robbers, or liveried types with swords and knives, they were loaded down with a different type of weapons, ones that flashed in the torchlight whenever a gust of wind blew their heavy leather cloaks aside. Not that they needed them, either. They were weapons, all by themselves.

War mages, and in force.

And headed in exactly the wrong direction.

“Mircea,” I murmured, hoping that he could hear me. I could barely hear myself over the cannon-like thunder echoing between the buildings, and the tramp, tramp, tramp of all those booted feet. But he and I had a connection—

One that he was ignoring, or just not able to hear right now, being busy with the other voice in his head.

But Marlowe, damn him, could wait. When he had chosen to ignore Mircea’s last instruction, he had been drinking on some fey hillside with a pretty girl and a bunch of layabouts. By now, he was likely back in the alehouse, warming his toes by the fire and consuming whatever swill passed for drink around here.

Or he would be, until a phalanx of war mages descended onto all of our heads!

“Mircea!” I hissed again, which was a mistake.

The war mage at the head of the party of drenched, cloaked figures jerked his head up. He should have had no way to hear a whispered word on the air, especially from four stories up. Yet he did, although that wasn’t the main problem.

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