As he turned, intending to seek out his former master's study and see just what artifacts and books of power he had hidden away, the voice of the Adversary spoke into his mind from hundreds of miles distant.
Oh, we are going to have so much fun, you and I.
So much fun.
Simon Logan, now the most powerful necromancer in the United States, merely chuckled in agreement.
BELLUM ROMANUM
CARRIE VAUGHN
In the Kitty Norville series, werewolf Kitty hosts a talk-radio advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. At first the show is all about consoling lovelorn women whose vampire boyfriends have become pains in the neck. But the farther Kitty delves into the supernatural world, meeting powerful vampires and sinister magicians, the more she realizes the world isn't what it seems and a deep, dangerous conspiracy is afoot. At the center of this conspiracy is a mysterious vampire named Roman. Before he became Kitty's nemesis, Roman was Gaius Albinus, a centurion of Rome, and two thousand years ago he was dragged into the supernatural world against his will. He's been seeking revenge ever since.
Gaius Albinus stood before the locked gates of Diocletian's Palace. Fifteen hundred years of planning, and he could not get to where he needed to go because of a chain and padlock, an electronic security system, and a modern sense of reasonable working hours, helpfully marked out on a placard bolted to the stone. What had once been a palace was now a museum, and it was closed.
So many obstacles in this modern era did not involve armies, weapons, or violence. No, they were barriers of bureaucracy and officious politeness. Another venerable institution of old Rome he ought to have known well, passed down to successive civilizations.
He couldn't help but smile, amused. To come so far, and to be confronted now by a sign telling him the site had closed several hours before and that he could not enter until daylight. Impossible for him.
Well. He would simply have to find another way. There was always another way.
What most impressed Gaius Albinus wasn't how much the city of Split had changed, but how much remained the same and recognizable. Even now, the city felt Roman.
The central palace complex still stood, amidst the sprawl that had grown up around it. The temple walls were identifiable. Many pitted stone blocks had fallen long ago and were now arranged in artistic piles in the interest of archaeological curiosity. At some point, cast-off stones had become valuable, worthy of admiration. Entire towns had turned into relics, museum pieces. And the roads--the roads still marked out routes across the Empire. The great engineers of Rome remained triumphant.
These days the onetime retirement retreat of Emperor Diocletian was a university and tourist town, raucous with nightlife, young people crowding into cafes, spilling onto the beach, drinking hard under strings of electric lights. Not so different from youths cavorting under suspended oil lamps back in the day, letting clothing slip off shoulders while pretending not to notice, making eyes at each other, offering invitations. That hadn't changed either, not in all his years.
Now, as then, tourists were easy to spot by how they wandered through it all with startled, awestruck expressions, most likely not understanding the local language. Gaius remembered going to Palestine as a young soldier, expecting to hear a cacophony of languages yet not being prepared for the sense of displacement, a kind of intellectual vertigo, that came from standing in the middle of a market and hearing people shout at one another using strange words, laughing at jokes he couldn't understand. The way people became subdued when he spoke his native Latin. More often than not they understood him, even when they pretended not to. They marked him as a foreigner, a conqueror.
Since then, he had learned not to particularly care what people thought of him.
Outside the old Roman center, the city was comprised of the blend of modernity and semimodernity along narrow medieval streets that marked so many European cities. After traveling out by car, he stopped at a squat town house of middling modern construction: aluminum and plywood. Clearly a product of the time when this country was part of Yugoslavia, communist, and short on resources. That era had lasted less than a century. The blink of an eye. Hardly worth remembering.
The hour was late. Gaius knocked on the door anyway, and a mousy-looking man answered. In his thirties, he had tousled black hair and wore dark-rimmed glasses and a plain T-shirt with sweats. An average man dressed for a night in. He blinked, uncertain and ready to close the door on the stranger.
"I need your help," Gaius said in the local Croatian.
"What is it?" The guy looked over Gaius's shoulder as if searching for a broken-down car. There wasn't one.
"If you could just step out for a moment." The man did, coming out to the concrete stoop in front of the door. People were so trusti
ng.
Gaius needed him outside his house, across the protection of his threshold. In the open, under a wide sky, the Roman could step into the man's line of sight and catch his gaze, then draw that attention close, wrap his own will around the small mortal's mind, and pull. In the space of three of the man's own heartbeats, Gaius possessed him.
Gaius's heart hadn't beat once in two thousand years.
"Professor Dimic, I need to get inside the palace. You have access. You'll help me."
He didn't even question how Gaius knew his name. "Yes, of course."
Gaius drove the archaeologist back to the city center and navigated the crowds to the quiet alley where the gate to the lower level of the palace was located. Gaius could have broken in himself--picked the lock, disabled the security system. But this was simpler and would leave no evidence. No one must track him. No one must know what he did.
Dimic unlocked the gate and keyed in the security code, and they were inside.
"Anything else?" he asked, almost eagerly. His gaze was intent but vacant, focused on Gaius without really seeing anything.
"Show me how to reset all this when I leave."