Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(67)

She whispered, “Mercy has no place here, except that she is locked behind bars of steel and silver and magic.”

As if no one had ever had clever things to say about my name before.

“I think,” Mary told me, “that you should not anticipate escaping from here. We have kept your greater cousins here for months at a time, and none have escaped us that we have not let go. We will keep you alive, because that is what he wants. You should remember that—that you owe him your life.”

Him who? Bonarata? Oddly, I thought not. The other Master Vampire, Kocourek, had Bonarata’s support. Bonarata, evil and rotten to the core though he might be, had a code of honor he followed. I knew the stories—and some of them were gruesome. It was the belief that Bonarata would keep his word that had allowed him to amass power for as long as he had. If he supported one seethe, he would not undermine that with another in the same hunting ground.

So whom did she mean?

I cocked an ear at her. And she got it.

Her eyes half-lidded, and she smiled secretly. “Guccio,” she said.

It took me a moment to process his name. Pretty Vampire. Hadn’t his name been Guccio? I’d been meeting a lot of people in the past day or two. But I was pretty sure that Pretty Vampire had been Guccio.

“I see you know of whom I speak. Though you met him only briefly, he leaves an impression most rare.” She took a step forward and dropped to her heels, so her face and mine were even. “He said you were ugly and fat. He said he prefers me.”

Yippee. She was welcome to him. Even if I wasn’t married, I don’t date the dead.

Mary’s mouth was pursed unhappily as she examined me. “You do not look as though you are fat. You look puny and stupid, but not fat. I think he lied to me. And why would he lie unless he wanted you and he didn’t want me to know it? Are you ugly?”

Heaven save me from jealous vampires. I’d always thought that vampires were cold-blooded, and, if they thought about another creature at all, it came with thoughts of food.

I didn’t make the mistake of trying to answer her question. There was no right answer to a question like that. In my coyote shape, I had the perfect excuse to maintain my silence.

“You brought another witch with you,” she said after a moment.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Had Bonarata had a witch travel with me from the US?

“He said”—she frowned unhappily—“he said he wasn’t looking for another witch because he had me.” Shrewd eyes examined me. “But I’m not stupid—I’m not as stupid as he thinks I am, anyway. He lied about you. If he weren’t interested in the witch, he wouldn’t have brought her up.”

He wanted to keep her on edge, I judged. Keep her trying to please him. It was easier to control someone who understood that they were replaceable.

“He told me he thought about taking her, too, since I worked out so well for him. But she was old—and while vampires don’t age, they don’t get younger-looking, either.” She leaned close to the cage and murmured sweetly, “And it looked as though she had her claws into your mate anyway. They are sleeping together.”

My mate. Adam had made it to Milan, then, to speak with Bonarata. Had he brought Elizaveta? Why had he brought Elizaveta? That was a stupid question. Elizaveta was a very strong arrow in our quiver as long as she chose to aim herself in a useful direction. She liked Adam. I realized that I should have known he’d brought her—it must have been her magic that had allowed him to contact me while I was in the bus’s luggage compartment.

Mary made a disappointed sound. I guess I was supposed to be jealous over the comment about Elizaveta and Adam sleeping together. If there was one constant in my life, it was my mate. Pyramids would roll down the desert before Adam would break his word or betray anyone, let alone me.

Finally, with a little unattractive pout, she said, “It is good for you that Guccio didn’t like that witch. He said he didn’t think she’d be cooperative, not useful to him as I have been. If he chose another to do for him what I do—I would not have liked that. You might have had an accident.”

Elizaveta was well able to defend herself. I expected that if Guccio had tried to suborn Elizaveta, the vampire would have found himself overmatched. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew quite a bit about Elizaveta.

“He’ll be so pleased with me,” she said, apparently to herself, because she got to her feet and turned her back to me, though the translating vampire kept translating.

Her gaze fell upon the chained vampire.

“Why is he still here?” she said. “I told you that experiment was a failure.”

Someone said something.

“Not him?”

Apparently my translator was only translating Mary, so I was getting half the conversation.

She looked at the vampire on the wall and frowned. “This is Weis? He was doing well, I thought.”

The translating vampire looked up and met my eyes and broke protocol while Mary’s attention was elsewhere.

He spoke to me very quickly in a low tone. “She has been using witchcraft to try to make humans into vampires more quickly. Recently, she has been successful. That one took her two weeks to make, and he functioned for three months. But they devolve with suddenness and without warning.” He paused. “If you escaped the Master of Milan, then perhaps you will survive this. Someone should know what she has done, so that they are prepared for the problems this will cause. They should destroy any vampire who belonged to her, so that news of this does not get out.”