Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

“Damn it, I don’t want breakfast!” Marlowe said, running back in with a wastebasket full of water. Which he proceeded to use to save the bedroom and destroy a bunch of probably expensive old volumes.

“I can make more, of course,” Horatiu offered querulously. “But I do believe we’re out of rye.”

He tottered out, doubtless off to find more trouble to get into, and left a fuming, damp, and cursing Marlowe behind him. Who hadn’t seemed to notice the chick in the towel yet. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell, only to shut it again abruptly when Marlowe strode out through the room’s only other door.

And right through the middle of me.

There was this weird sense of disorientation as our bodies merged, the same kind I got when Billy stepped inside my skin for an energy draw. Only there was no missing energy here. Just the skin-tingling sensation of someone occupying the same space as me for a split second, before he was gone.

I spun around, clutching my towel and breathing hard, because vamps don’t leave ghosts. And even if they did, I doubted one would be able to argue with Horatiu. Or to put out a fire quite so effortlessly.

But it sure as hell had felt like he’d been a ghost.

Or . . . or that I was, I realized, with growing horror.

I stood there for a second, wondering if one of the many attempts on my life had somehow made good, and if so, why I hadn’t heard the blast or seen the shooter or felt the pain before I ended up here.

But I couldn’t be a ghost—I couldn’t be. My guards would have sensed an assassin. So something else was going on, and vampire senses were the most likely to help me figure out what. As long as I didn’t lose him.

Only it seemed like I already had, because Marlowe had disappeared through the door on the other side of a sitting room. One that started to close even as I ran after him. And when I flung myself through the narrow opening, barely making it before the door clicked shut, I saw—

An empty room.

It looked like an atrium, or one of those weird cubbyholes where several hallways meet and then branch off. There was another nice rug on the floor, a potted plant in a tub, and a fireplace with a mantel but no chairs in front of it because this wasn’t a room you hung out in. It was a room designed to do nothing and be nothing, besides a way to get from one place to another.

Except in this case, because there weren’t any other doors.

It would have freaked me out, but I’d seen this before. It was a popular security feature in vampire residences, meant to slow down intruders by forcing them to play find the exit. But I didn’t look for one.

Because I’d already found something else.

Something that cast a bright splash of color against the old-world paneling on the opposite wall. Something that made me momentarily forget about Marlowe and Horatiu and even my own predicament. Something that drew me forward like a magnet.

Something beautiful.

I couldn’t see it as well as I wanted, because the only illumination was a couple of recessed lights set on low up in the ceiling. And a candle burning on the mantel for some reason, so I grabbed it. And illuminated a painting.

A large one, judging by the way the light only reached the bottom half of a gown. I lifted the candlestick higher, and the golden haze gleamed off a surface cracked from age, but still vibrant with jewel-like colors: rich cream, salmon pink, dusky coral, and pale aquamarine. They formed a sumptuous gown in satin, a hand wearing a huge pearl ring, a gold-and-pearl snood over a bun of sleek dark hair, and . . .

And a face I’d seen before.

Not in painted form but in photographs, a whole book of them that I’d found by accident in another of Mircea’s many residences. I hadn’t known who it was then; still didn’t, because Mircea didn’t like to talk about his past, much less the women who populated it. Whenever I brought the subject up, he went into evasion mode.

And nobody evaded like Mircea.

I wasn’t completely naive. I knew he’d had other lovers; how could he not in five hundred years? But I hadn’t found photograph books stuffed to the brim with them. Hadn’t stumbled across a painting that must have cost a fortune of any of them. Hadn’t seen evidence that any of them were more than a passing fling.

I stared at the high cheekbones, the full red lips, the sparkling dark eyes. And felt my hand clench on the candlestick. Because this woman didn’t look like a fling to me.

The photos I’d seen had been modern, but the dress was Renaissance-era Italian; at least it was if you had pots of money. I’d seen ones like it occasionally, in some of the paintings that Rafe, Tony’s resident artist, had scattered around. It had a low-cut bodice over a delicate chemise, a high waist, and long, fitted sleeves that tied onto the shoulders with little bows. The cross draped around the wearer’s slender neck was heavy gold, and the fat, lustrous pearls that dangled from her ears might have come from a sultan’s treasure.

And it wasn’t just her clothes that were costly.

I held the light closer, because I wanted to be sure. And yes. Her jewelry glinted dull gold by candlelight because it was gold, made with applied gold leaf. Likewise, the red on her lips and cheeks wasn’t ochre but outrageously expensive vermilion. And the sea gleaming behind her . . . well, that wasn’t indigo.

That pure, intense color could only be ultramarine. Imported all the way from mines in Afghanistan, it was extracted through a very laborious process from genuine lapis lazuli. Rafe had told me about it while he mixed up some for his own use one day. How it might not be especially dear in modern times, but had once been the most expensive pigment in all Renaissance art. Literally worth more than its weight in gold.

Yet it was splashed around everywhere here, from the sky to the sea to the bright blue in the embroidery on the woman’s gown. A gown that must have cost a fortune yet wasn’t half as lovely as the woman wearing it. A woman who occupied not only an album full of photographs, but a canv