Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(4)

And then, the same voices. Lady Grey’s dead—what did I tell you? Chopped on the block. That’s what politics gets you, lads.

This was Lady Grey, but Lady Grey’s head had been chopped off, and hers was still attached.

He looked up, and like recognized like. The shine in her eyes, reflecting the torchlight. The hunger. The feral desire to live. She was like him, sugnwr gwaed, an eater of blood. A vampire. Interesting, that. He hadn’t thought a vampire could survive a beheading. Not an experiment he’d ever tried. Experiments—yes, he liked experiments. Tests. Trials. Learning the limits of things.

“Lady Grey,” he said. His voice sounded full of rust, like an old hinge all a-creak. “Forgive.”

“No need for that,” she said. “Let me see your hands.”

He held them out, hesitantly, and she made a sound of distress to see the burns that were on him beneath the silver manacles. She sorted through a thick ring of keys, found a silver one, and turned it in the lock. They fell apart, slipped free, and clanked heavily to the stone floor.

He staggered with the shock of freedom.

“Can you walk, Lord Myrnin?”

He could, he found, though it was a clumsy process indeed, and his bare feet slipped on the mold of the stones. She was ruining her hems on the filth, he thought. She gave no thought to it, though, and when he reached her, she clasped him fast by the arm and gave him support he badly needed. Her other hand still held the torch, but she kept it well away from them both, which helped his eyes focus on her face, oh, her face, so lovely and well formed. A mouth made for smiling, though it seemed serious just now.

“I am sorry,” he said, and this time it seemed more expert, his forming of words. “I am in no shape to entertain visitors.”

She laughed, and it was like clear chimes ringing. It was a sound that made tears prick painfully. Hope could be a deadly thing here. Torturous.

“I am no visitor, and I hope this is not your home,” she told him, and patted his arm gently before she took a firm hold again. “I am taking you out of here. Come.”

He looked around at this narrow stone hole that had been his home for so long. Nothing in it but the scratches he’d made in the stone, half-mad words and mathematics that led nowhere but in circles.

He went with her, into air that felt fresh and new. He could hear the weak moans and cries of others here, but she ignored them and led him up a long, shallow flight of stone steps to a door that hung open.

He stepped into a guard’s chamber, with a fire sizzling on the hearth and two men lying dead on the floor. Their dinner was still set on the table, and their swords lay unused in a corner. He knew these men, by smell if not by sight. They had been his captors for the past few months. They changed often, the gaolers. Perhaps they couldn’t bear to be down in the dark long, to think they were as trapped as their charges.

He smelled blood in them, and it was the same as coursed through his veins, filling him with strength. Lady Grey had bled them before she’d killed them.

He said nothing. She took him to another door, more stairs, more, until there was another portal that led to a cool, clear, open space.

They were outside. Outside. He stopped, all his senses overwhelmed with the night, the moon, the stars, the whispering breeze on his face. So much. Too much. It was only Lady Grey’s strong hand on his arm that kept him upright.

“Almost there,” she promised him, and pulled him on, stumbling and clumsy with the richness of freedom, to a pair of horses tethered nearby. Dark horses, hidden in the night, with muffles around any metal. “Do you think you can sit a saddle, my lord?”

He could. He mounted by memory, feet in stirrups, reins in hands that knew their task, and followed the glimmer of the lady’s dress into the darkness . . . which was, he realized, no darkness at all, to his quick-adapting eyes. Shades of blues and grays, colors muted but not hidden. The moon revealed so much . . . the castle’s bulk they were leaving behind, the empty fields around it, the clean white ribbon of the road they followed. The trees closed around them quickly, hiding them, and he felt, for the first time, that he was actually free again.

He didn’t know what it meant, really, but it felt good.

? ? ?

The ride lasted the night, and as the horizon began to take on a slow, low light, Lady Grey led him to a well-made hall—not a castle, nor yet a fortress, but something built for strength and purpose nevertheless. He did not know the design of it, but it felt safe enough.

There were no windows in it, save for shaded slits at the very tops of the walls.

The gates parted for them as they rode to the entrance, and once inside, he realized there were men, not magic, involved: vampires like himself, dressed in plain black tunics and breeches, who had opened and then shut and barred them behind. The horses were led away without a word, off to some stables, and then they were walking into an inner keep, one built even more solid and strong, lit for vampire eyes.

“Is this yours?” he asked the lady still supporting his weight as they walked. “This place?”

“It is one place of safety,” she said. “I didn’t build it, nor do I own it. I suppose you might say it belongs to many. In time of need, we share our shelters.” After a brief pause, she said, with what he thought might have been amusement, “You are quite filthy.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, I am.”