A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(29)

You ushered us out of Berlin quickly after that, as though the whole city had been spoiled by Magdalena’s continued illness. She sat at the divan and stared out the window, sallow and wan, as you ordered the house to be packed up with utmost expediency. I found myself powerless, wringing my hands while you brooded and Magdalena languished and strange men took my paintings down from the wall. I had no idea how to help either of you. The best I could do was quietly crawl into Magdalena’s bed and nuzzle her nearly-comatose form for an hour or so each day, and to sit with you as you took your fill of the morning news, listening to you read interesting headlines aloud. Neither of you would be consoled back into a smile. I learned to be content with my own company, to not take Magdalena’s every dark mood as mine to fix. She had an illness, the doctor you hired had said. A feminine hysteria resulting in listlessness and ennui.

I thought, perhaps, it was simpler than that. I thought that she was simply fading the way flowers denied sunlight droop and die. Magdalena lived for her freedom, and with it taken away from her, life lost its luster.

You never were able to give her her beloved freedom, since letting her roam freely was strictly against the design you had for our lives. But you were able to augment her joy for a time with a force so powerful it may as well have been the sunshine and free air she gave up to be one with you. A force of pure, unfettered joy.

I just never expected to have to travel all the way to the cold reaches of Russia to find him.





PART THREE





Alexi, our sunlight, our destroyer. My prince cast in marble and gold. We could have endured a hundred years more, clinging to each other even as we tore each other’s throats out, had it not been for Alexi. He was the antidote to our miseries, a short-lived splash of sweetness in our bitter lives. With Alexi in the mix, our household knew levity again. At least for a short while.

He was as inevitable as a revolution, and heralded in just as much violence.

It was autumn in Petrograd, in the heady October of 1919. The Tsar had been shot dead by the Bolsheviks only a year prior, and the vast Russian empire had fallen into civil war just as rebuilding efforts had begun to get underway. The nation wrestled with itself, struggling to define itself in a fast-changing world hurtling towards an ever-shifting destiny. But, despite her wartime scars and explosive temper, Russia was still a beautiful, mysterious ideal in your mind, the source of so much of your beloved philosophy and literature. You wanted to study the intricacies of all the political schools and systems battling for dominance. You believed that strife brought the soul of mankind to the surface of society, and you wished to chart the height and breadth of it for your studies.

“Are you sure it’s safe for us here?” I asked as we stepped off the steaming train. The Petrograd station was a swirling watercolor of browns and brass, echoing with the shouts of newspaper sellers and merchant women.

I breathed in the scent of the city deeply. I tasted hot bread, oiled machinery, and the tang of fresh blood ground into the cobblestones. This was a city on the edge of self-realization, or of dissolution. No wonder you were drawn irresistibly into her milieu.

You cupped my face in your hands, your silhouette wreathed like a devil in brimstone smoke by the steam pluming from the train.

“We’ve waltzed through a hundred tiny apocalypses, you and I, walked unharmed through the ash of countless crumbling regimes. We feast on the ruin of empires, Constanta. Their destruction is our high feast day.”

I pressed my lips together. Where you saw glorious progress, I only saw war, famine, and desolation. Humans had learned in recent years to make machines so ferocious they could blow a person to bits, vampire or no. I wondered if we should be more concerned about the way the world was tilting.

Magdalena emerged from the train, squinting against the thin dawn light. We would have to hurry to our apartments for a long sleep before the sun was at its full height. You kissed her gloved hand.

“Say hello to your fresh start, my love.”

The apartments you rented us were near the city central, optimum for hunting. I wish I could remember more about them, but we weren’t in Russia for very long. All I can clearly recall is the beautiful crown molding rimming the room Magdalena and I shared, tiny flowers rendered in swirling white plaster.

Autumn disappearing fast into a frosty winter, with the last rain-battered golden leaves still clinging valiantly to the trees. Still, we spent most of our time out of the house, attending night markets and visiting whatever theatrical performances were still running. The city was too dangerous for Magdalena and I to walk freely without a chaperone, you said, although I couldn’t fathom what terror any human could unleash on us that we weren’t fully prepared for. You urged us to stay at home, to read Pushkin and sew and practice our music, while you purveyed the coffeehouses and taverns. You trafficked with radicals and constitutionalists, anarchists and Decembrists and representatives of the Duma, cataloging them with rapt fascination. Such a vibrant symphony of human philosophy and desire on display, you said. Such a roiling brew of ideas, of potential.

Potential. You always loved that word. You were drawn to potential like a shark to blood.

Magdalena all but seethed with jealousy over your political connections, and begged you to inform her over every new coup, each philosophical principle. You doled them out the way you would candy to a child, smiling warmly at her as you teased her with your knowledge, all the while forbidding her from taking up correspondence of her own. It was too dangerous for a woman, you said.