Then he stood and they were facing each other in the small circle of light dancing around the dusty chamber.
“Let me have the shard,” she said, resisting the urge to step away even as her lungs constricted.
“No. Didn’t you learn anything from last time?”
Victoria bristled, drawing herself back to argue, but he reached out, captured her left wrist, and said, “Look.”
He lifted her hand, palm up, and brought it into the light. When she uncurled her fingers Victoria saw with a shock that the inside of her hand—the one that had held the shard—and her fingers were marked faintly with blue.
“What is it?” she said, handing him the sconce and opening her other hand to compare. When she saw that the bluish cast on the skin that had gripped the shard was no trick of the low light, she tried to rub it away.
“When the obelisk touches flesh for any length of time, its power begins to seep in, leaving such a mark. If you’re lucky it may fade in time.” He looked at her, his dark eyes flat and hard. “Don’t touch it directly again. Or who knows whom you’ll beg to kiss the next time.”
And he turned away, taking the sconce with him, leaving Victoria with burning cheeks and a flood of annoyance…and embarrassment. Beg?
Beg?
But he’d wanted to. She’d seen it in his eyes.
Giving her head a little shake, Victoria turned around to look at the chamber for the first time and saw now that it wasn’t a small chamber at all. The room was quite large and had been set up as a well-equipped laboratory. The single torch that Max held did little to light the room, but when Victoria saw another sconce on the wall she moved to light that one, and its illumination showed more details: long tables, five or six stools of varying height and condition, utensils, and scatterings of metal shavings and curds. There were shallow wooden bowls, deep metal ones, round and softly triangular, large and small. Goblets, corked jars, tiny carved boxes were all littered about, covered with dust, and some of them with dark stains. Larger chunks of silver, bronze, copper, iron, quartz, and marble were piled on the tables or littered on the floor, which was filthy with dust, dirt, and most definitely animal droppings.
She walked along one of the tables flanking the wall, quickly examining the remains of Marchese Palombara’s alchemical experiments for whatever it was the undead—and others—wanted so badly. But there was nothing that caught her eye, nothing that looked important enough to be notes or journals about the mysterious pilgrim’s work.
As she turned to look at another of the worktables, her wet slippered foot knocked against something on the floor. It made a soft metal clink, and she would have disregarded it as just another piece of scrap metal if it hadn’t rolled in front of her, spinning in smaller circles until it spiraled to a halt. Victoria bent to pick it up, the hair on the back of her arms lifting.
She’d seen this…something like this before.
It was a band—similar to Aunt Eustacia’s plain silver armband that had held the silver key—but this was made of copper, and it was more distinctive. While Aunt Eustacia’s ornament had been solid silver, as wide as three fingers, this band was made of three tendrils of copper, each perhaps the width of a finger and woven into a solid band. A smooth, elliptical shape had been formed where the ends of the three copper strands merged together, as if they’d been melted down and pressed flat. A symbol was etched into it.
One she’d seen before. Somewhere.
“Ah. And here we find our friend the Marchese Palombara,” Max commented from across the room, drawing Victoria’s attention.
Slipping the bracelet into her pocket, she walked over to find him standing above a skeleton, still dressed in the rotting clothes of two hundred forty years earlier. “Is that what we’ve come for?” she asked, noticing the yellow, curling packet of papers clutched by two bony hands. “I see nothing else that could be of interest to vampires and mortals alike.”
“I would suspect.” Max bent forward, the lantern casting long, eerie shadows over the gray bones of the long-dead marchese. When he touched the skeletal arm it fell away, bone and fabric crumbling to dust in the same way an undead disintegrated when staked. And yet…not.
He lifted the papers gingerly, taking care to keep them intact, and handed them to Victoria. They were sewn together by a leather cord, and, when she gently lifted the top page, she found faded ink writing, mathematical equations, and diagrams and sketches.
“Ylito will be overjoyed to see this,” she commented with a smile.
“Indeed. So, now that we’ve retrieved what we came for, shall we get it safely back to the Consilium?”
“Were you planning to take the obelisk shard with you?” she asked sharply.
“Of course not. While you were gawking about the room like a girl at court, I’ve already placed it over there.”
She looked and saw a small trunk in a dark corner. With a withering glance at him, she walked over and lifted the lid, still carrying the sheaf of papers. Inside the trunk was the shard of Akvan’s Obelisk.
“You didn’t believe me.” Max’s voice behind her was soft and…she could only describe it as menacing.
“You of all people ought to understand duty,” she replied coolly, looking at him. “I needed to make certain that the evil that I brought upon the Consilium has been contained. I needed to see for myself.”
He gave a short nod, and when he replied there was satisfaction in his voice. “You’ve begun to learn, Victoria.”
She started to turn away and noticed that his dark shirt, which was cravatless, had gaped away from his throat. “Those are new bites.”
His hand jerked slightly, as though he’d begun to raise it to close his collar and stopped himself in time. “Unfortunately.”
“Was Sara right? Did you go to Lilith?”
“Let’s go. We’re wasting time.”
“Why would you do such a foolish thing?”
He spun away as if to start to the door, and she reached out and grabbed his arm. Hard. “Max.”
His muscles flexing under her fingers, he turned back, his expression flat except for furious eyes. “Yes, I went to Lilith. Yes, she left me with yet more marks of her possession.” This last word came out with rank bitterness. “Why it can make any difference to you, or to our current task, is not clear to me. Let’s go.”
“Alone? With her? Surrounded by all her guards? Max, she could have killed you.” She couldn’t let it go; she couldn’t drop the subject. How could he risk himself that way?