The Bleeding Dusk (The Gardella Vampire Chronicles 3)

The carnage was bad enough…the image of Mansur sprawled on the brown grass, drenched in his dark blood, made Zavier’s own blood churn and his stomach swish as though he were drunk from too much whiskey.

A waste. A fagging bloody waste.

And a betrayal.

Victoria wasn’t seeing clearly. She couldn’t be. She wasn’t weak like that, and Zavier wasn’t about to watch her tumble further. Aye, she’d hurt him; he could accept that, though it still burned his gut. But he couldn’t accept that it had been with the arse-dicht Vioget. The boughin’ bastard who couldn’t dirty his hands enough to fight with his kin. Unbelievably, apparently, he was a Gardella too, from somewhere back in the ages of his family. They all were.

How could he have turned his back on them?

The arse-dicht and Victoria had been locked away for too long in the same small chamber where Vioget had been held during the battle outside Santo Quirinus. They’d been in there so long it made Zavier’s fingers tighten into one another, his short, blunt nails creasing his leathery palms.

He didn’t want to think about the boseying that was going on in there. But he couldn’t help it.

It made his head spin as if he were rubbered.

So he took himself outside and waited in the rain, and hoped for it to help make him a bit steadier.

But the anger built inside, simmered, sometimes roaring into his ears as he remembered the deaths last night, the intimacy and the expression he saw on her face when she was with Vioget. The Venator betrayer.

He didn’t believe Wayren when she said he wasn’t the cause of the attack. How else could it have happened?

It was well nigh onto noon when Zavier sighted his quarry. He waited until he walked past, head foolishly bent against the rain so that he didn’t notice when Zavier slipped from the corner of a building to follow.

Fool.

Perhaps it was best that he’d stayed away from the Venators if he was that careless.

Zavier stayed in the distance behind him, considering his options. He knew little about Vioget, but what he did know was enough to identify the influence behind the bastard and his defection: the legendary Beauregard.

Zavier’s hand searched the depths of his pocket, fumbling for the stake there. It was just about time that the vampire met his own damnation. He’d be pleased to help him. And whoever else dared get in his way.

“Where is the key?” Max asked as Victoria approached. Her skirts were drenched to her knees and so were her shoes. She should have found a pair of boots to wear before leaving the Consilium, but it was too late now.They had reached the stone wall on which the Door of Alchemy stood, after traipsing quickly through the tangled gardens with Max in the lead. He’d seemed to be in a great hurry to get here, and Victoria, who couldn’t quite tell where the sun was because of the clouds, didn’t argue. She was still more than a bit unsteady from the kiss they’d shared.

Although shared wasn’t exactly the word to describe the experience. Received, perhaps. Became immersed in. Was surprised by. Nearly lost her balance because of.

“Victoria.”

She snapped her attention back to the matter at hand, realizing he’d asked a second time. “It’s here.” She had to shrug out of her heavy man’s coat in order to get to the armband, which was pushed up under the long sleeve of her simple gown.

Max watched as she pulled off the wide silver armband and then bent it at the small hinge that divided its two halves. When the bracelet opened, the key was there on the inside of the cuff, fitted into a small nook.

Victoria thumbed it out and handed it to Max, who kept looking darkly at the sky. “Let’s hurry,” he said, taking the tablike key and pushing the scrubby bushes away from the door.

He knelt as Victoria had done a week ago, when she’d come with Ylito and Wayren, and scratched away the moss and dirt so that the small metal tab would fit into its place.

As he worked Victoria examined the other two keyholes—one had been filled before, and the other she hadn’t seen until now. She could see only the back edges of the flat little keys—for once slipped into the narrow openings, the thin metal rectangles fit into place and couldn’t be removed until the door was opened.

“Ah.” Max pulled to his feet and glanced at her. “Shall we?”

He grasped the round stone disk in the center of the door and began to turn it. When the circle actually moved in a clockwise direction, Victoria found herself holding her breath. She couldn’t quite believe the door would actually open.

There was a dull clunk, and Max glanced at her with a sharp nod. And then the door rolled to the side.

To her surprise he stepped back and let her enter first. Doing so, Victoria walked directly into a screen of cobwebs. Hiding an automatic shudder as she pushed away the stickiness, she brushed furiously at her arms and hair to make certain none of the spiders were crawling on her.

“You’re afraid of spiders?” Max said, amusement coloring his voice.

“I’m not afraid…Ugh!” She barely held back a shriek as one danced across her hand and she whipped it to the floor. “I don’t like them. They’re like little vampires, sucking blood, and they have too many legs.”

Once she’d cleaned herself off she stepped completely through the door and stood inside a dark chamber that smelled of age and damp. But she needn’t have feared, for just at the edge of the doorway was a sconce. Below it was a small tin kettle and a little table with flint and a coil of very old thread to start a flame.

There was oil in the kettle, she presumed, and she lifted it off its hook, pouring it onto the dry, brittle sconce. Max stepped in to help light a small piece of tinder, and only moments after the door was opened they had a blazing torch.

“Let’s close the door,” she said. The back of her neck wasn’t chilled, but it was best to take no chances. She had no idea how long they would be here.

The stone door rumbled back into its place, and Max said, “Bring the light here. I think we can remove the keys from the inside.”

She did, angling it over his shoulder as he bent toward the inside of the middle of the door. A few quick movements, the dull scrape of stone on stone, followed by a small grunt, and he produced the little silver key they had just slipped into its place on the outside of the door.

“Clever…so that one cannot get locked inside,” he said. She held the light and he removed the other two keys—one in gold and one in bronze—and slipped them into his pocket.