Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(56)

“I’d have thought you’d be pleased,” I pointed out. “You’re getting Christine back.”

“I am relieved,” he said, after a moment. “Elyas is a sadist, delighting in the pain of others. I did not like to think of her there.”

“You think he hurt her?”

“No. He assures me that she has not been harmed.”

“And you believe him?”

“Yes. He enjoys the fear of his victims more than their pain, and Christine . . . As she once said to me, after one has lost their soul, what else is there to fear?”

“She hasn’t lost her soul,” I said impatiently. “Hell, Mircea is more devout than I am.” I didn’t mind going to mass so much, but confession was damned annoying. Even the supernatural confessors the Vatican kept on call always got a little . . . distraught . . . when I showed up. And, really, there weren’t enough Hail Marys in the world.

“But she believes she has,” Louis-Cesare said simply. “Her family was very devout. It was thought for a time that she would become a religieuse.”

I raised my eyebrows. “How does someone get from prospective nun to vampire mistress?”

“Christine was one of those rare individuals born with magical ability without coming from a magical family. She was never given any training, and therefore did not know about her gift until it began to manifest as she came of age.”

“That must have been a shock.”

“She mistook it for a miracle. She was a novitiate at the time, and people began to flock to the abbey to see her levitate the Host or to light candles with merely a touch. She believed she was the vessel of God’s grace, for she could find no other reason why she should be able to do such things. But magical power is like any other kind: it requires training to work safely—training she did not possess.”

“I have a feeling this isn’t going anywhere good.”

“No. One evening, she was startled while attempting to light the bank of candles before the altar, and the spell went awry. Within minutes, the chapel was in flames, the roof beams collapsed and many of the nuns died. The abbess survived, badly burned and newly convinced that they had taken a devil amongst themselves. Christine was whipped by the abbess and forced to run for her life with only the clothes on her back. Some of my vampires found her several days later, half dead from dehydration and un-healed burns, stumbling down the road near my estate.”

“And they recognized what she was.” It wouldn’t have been difficult. A vampire of any age could tell blindfolded the differences among human, were, mage and fey by smell alone.

“Yes. They brought her to me, and I nursed her back to health. During her recovery, we became . . . close. But I was not a mage. I could not give her the training she needed. Once she was well again, I thought to help her by putting her in touch with others of her kind. I contacted a mage on her behalf—a man I had known for years and had every reason to believe was scrupulous.” His fingers tightened on his glass, the first sign of emotion I’d seen.

“I’m going to guess he wasn’t,” I said, prodding him when he went silent.

“In the time since I had had dealings with him, he had amassed a great number of debts. He was desperate to find a way to clear them, and I gave him one. I brought her to his doorstep in my own carriage.”

“He sold her.” I knew this part of the story, at least. Radu had told me how Christine had become a target for the less salubrious part of the supernatural world. Dark mages lust after power. And a strong, untrained witch with no magical family to protect her? It just didn’t get any better than that.

“By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. I found her, but she was too close to death for any doctor to save her.”

“So you brought her over.” I was surprised it had worked. It often doesn’t when the subject is that far gone. But then, Horatiu had been on his deathbed when Mircea Changed him.

Of course, how successful that transformation had been was debatable.

“Again, I thought to help. And again, I made a bad matter infinitely worse.”

“You saved her life,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but Christine was not concerned for her life. She was concerned for her soul. Something she believes is now lost, wholly and irretrievably.”

“I don’t see why. She’d been a witch before. How is that any less ‘damned’ than a vampire?”

His lips twisted. “Magic, in her mind, was something that she did, requiring a conscious effort on her part, and was therefore something she could stop doing.”

“That’s stupid. Magical humans are not the same as—”

“But she did not see it like that. Her parents, her siblings—they were human. There must have been some magical blood in the family line, yes, but it does not seem to have manifested in anyone else. She therefore believed that her new abilities were the devil’s way of tempting her, and they could be overcome by prayer and good works. But vampirism?” He smiled grimly. “That was not something she did; it was something she was, and it could not be undone once the transformation was complete.”

It made a kind of sense, if you had a late-medieval mind-set. “And yet she chose to remain the mistress of the man who had damned her?”

His gaze shifted to the window, not that there was much to see. There also wasn’t a lot of traffic this late, and with no more passing headlights, I couldn’t see his expression that well. Assuming he had one. “The bond between a new Child and her master is very strong,” he finally said.