Laws of the Blood 3: Companions

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LAWS OF THE BLOOD: COMPANIONS

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 by Susan Sizemore

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 0-7865-3526-1

  AN ACE BOOK®

  Ace Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: MARCH, 2003

  Ace Books by Susan Sizemore

  LAWS OF THE BLOOD

  THE HUNT

  PARTNERS

  COMPANIONS

  For my dear Madison.

  Much love, March

  Chapter 1

  Necessary Evil

  The companion is a vampire’s property. A vampire may do with a companion as he or she will. It is death to a companion who attempts to harm a vampire.

  IN THE LAND BEYOND THE FOREST, 1457

  He was a Roma peasant, but the boyars across the campfire were afraid of him. He was not surprised at their fear, but having a pair of nobles in their furs and jewels, with heavy swords on their belts, come humbly into the camp of his familia, did make him curious. Curious or not, he did not make it easy for the boyars by asking them what they wanted. He sat across from them, well back from the fire so that his face was shadowed, and ate roasted chicken in silence while they got up the courage to say what it was they wanted.

  The rest of his familia gathered behind the boyars, staring at them. He was aware of the eyes of his people, their thoughts and feelings, always so aware that he had stopped paying much attention to them a long time ago. He knew they feared he’d brought them trouble and hoped that he’d bring them wealth. When strangers had sought him out in the past, he’d always come back with gold. But no one had ever come to him before tonight that was not one of the Roma people.

  Finally, one of the boyars tugged on his thick beard and said, “Are you the dhamphir?”

  It was his oldest uncle in the crowd standing behind the seated boyars who cackled, and answered, “He’d better be, for he doesn’t look like any Roma we’ve seen before.”

  He was tall. He was blue-eyed. But gajo soldiers raped Roma women all the time. Who knew who his grandfathers were? His parents, though, everyone knew who his parents were.

  “He is dhamphir.” The words came from his mother. If she said it was true, it was true.

  This assertion brought the other boyar to his feet. His jaw jutted out proudly, and his hand was on his gold-chased sword hilt. “The prince has sent us to bring you to him.”

  While the rest of his familia gasped, he considered what the boyar had said. The prince was not a man to be disobeyed, not if you didn’t want your hat nailed to your head or a stake stuck up your ass. The prince sending for a Roma peasant was seriously bad news for that peasant. Unless, of course, that peasant was a dhamphir. But if the prince had need of a dhamphir, that was seriously bad news for the prince.

  He did not fear the prince; he feared nothing, either mortal or demon, but he was mindful that the existence of all Roma was precarious. He would not put his familia and his tribe in danger by refusing to go with the boyars. He tossed aside chicken bones and got to his feet.

  “I will go with you.”

  He didn’t go with the boyars only because of concern for his people. He went because he wanted to see what sort of trouble Vlad the Impaler had gotten himself into.

  “Do you act on your feelings, dhamphir?”

  The prince expected no answer just yet. When he did speak, the only word the man seated before him wanted to hear was yes. So he waited, down on one knee, gaze on the cold stone floor, head carefully uncovered, and his body as still as death, to find what it was he would be saying yes to. It would be deadly dangerous, that was certain, otherwise the man who ruled the towns and villages and great estates would not have brought a landless road rat into his own bedroom to ask for help.

  He didn’t think much of the prince’s bedroom. A man with the power to plunder the countryside ought to surround himself with piles of gold and silver if he was going to waste his time living inside thick stone walls. This prince didn’t seem to need much more than a sure awareness of his place at the top of the world. He had a bed, a chair, and a fire in the grate behind him. The prince’s clothes were rich, embroidered with pearls, but his bed hangings were shabby, and there were no rugs on the floor to ease the discomfort of a kneeling Roma with bony knees.

  “I trust my feelings, always,” the prince went on. Prince Vlad banged a hand down on the chair arm. His back was close to the fireplace, and he wore a heavy robe lined in thick black fur. “And my feeling about Tirgoviste is not a good one. Evil dwells there.”

  It was good to see that the prince was warm, but a cold chill permeated the dhamphir from the cold stone walls and the cold night air, but mostly from the fear he read in the great man he knelt to. Silence drew out for a while, and it occurred to him that the prince was not going to name the cursed thing that so disturbed his feelings about his capital city. The word was too dirty for his lips, perhaps?

  If the prince would not speak the word, he might not want to hear it. So, practicing discretion, he said, “The vermin I hunt rarely come into walled towns. They prefer drawing their victims to isolated places.”

  “So I had heard.” Prince Vlad gestured sharply. “If it is true that it is their nature to live like wolves, what do I care if they thin the herds of the old and crippled?”

  Because the herds are humans, and mostly Roma. This prince was not shepherd to his kind, but he was. He cared.

  “But if, as I suspect, the vermin move into towns, perhaps into my own court, then I will destroy them.”

  No, he thought. Not you. You call on the only one who can destroy them. He cared nothing about what went on in towns, but he cared about killing them. He had not stopped killing them since he first found out they were flesh and blood rather than fear and rumor.

  “They never dwell alone,” he said. “The true ones keep secret armies around them for protection.”

  “I have heard that.”

  From where? the dhamphir wondered. Did one of them whisper into the prince’s ear, feeding Vlad some truth to use the prince to unknowingly stamp out a rival? It might bear looking into, but later, after the prince’s wishes were carried out. It mattered not to the dhamphir who died first.

  “They gather secret followers, you understand,” he explained carefully. “People who appear innocent in the daylight, in the churches, in the beds of their husbands and wives, but live only to serve the darkness. The slaves carry no physical mark.”

  Prince Vlad leaned forward. “But you recognize them? Them and their slaves?”

  “I was born knowing them.”

  The prince pulled off a heavy gold ring and tossed it to h
im. “Show that, and you will be obeyed. Do whatever you must to cleanse the city. Destroy these creatures and their slaves, or I’ll put everyone within the walls to the sword.”

  He did not try to explain to Prince Vlad that killing all the mortals within Tirgoviste would not necessarily solve the problem. Slaves could be replaced. Though he carefully kept his gaze lowered, he rose to his feet. “I will cleanse your city of the strigoi, Lord. This I promise.”

  The city terrified him. Not the evil that dwelled within but the size and very sight of the place itself. He’d passed through many villages. He had lived in a castle for a while when he was a boy, walled in among dozens of people. He had found it easy enough to cope with the presence of a few hundred in the stronghold of Prince Vlad. A city, though, was like nothing he’d imagined, though he knew well enough what such a place was. Tirgoviste was not even large as such places went. He remembered laughing at the unbelievable tales of a cousin who’d been to Budapest. He’d laughed even harder when that cousin made wild claims about the Hunyadi and even the Turkoman having cities that were greater still: huge walled places with thousands and hundreds of thousands dwelling within.

  He wasn’t laughing now.

  But he wasn’t showing his fear. He always claimed never to know fear, and did not like discovering he was wrong. He was angry with himself that a place could make him break out in cold sweat. There were too many streets within the thick walls, too many buildings, too many churches and inns and brothels and too, too many people. Their souls pressed against him worse than the stench of unwashed gajo bodies and the filth in the gutters.

  The thoughts that came slithering into his head were mostly filthy as well, full of all those seven sins the priests spoke of, and some things beyond even priests’ imaginings. There were very few wishes hidden away in the depths of his own heart: freedom, food, a barren woman for his bed who didn’t fear him. What he wanted to do in that bed with a woman who could not give him sons bore little resemblance to many of the imaginings that assaulted him as he rode through the crowds with the guards the prince had sent with him.

  The soldiers had paid him little mind on the ride to the city, and they showed him even less attention now. They were happy to be in Tirgoviste, their thoughts on women and drink and sleeping on straw-stuffed mattresses rather than cool earth with the stars for a blanket. Fools, he thought, and kept his sanity through the rest of the ride up to the castle by remembering the feel of the ground beneath him as he slept alone deep in the empty forest.

  By the time they reached the castle courtyard, he knew what he must do to accept the size of the place and the shape of the seething energy bottled within. Evil thoughts came to everyone, he reminded himself, a city only held more people than the countryside. More people allowed for more sin in one place, that was all. He had work to do, and as much as he wanted, he could not block his mind off from the thoughts and emotions all around him.

  So, when his guards brought him to the proud boyar who demanded to know his business in Tirgoviste, he only showed the prince’s ring to the boyar and made them give him a room in the highest tower overlooking the city. There he stood alone and looked out the narrow slit window and opened himself until he was so immersed in the soul of the city that there was no place in his heart for fear. He became Tirgoviste. The process caused him to spew his guts a few times, and it made his head ache, but by the time the watchmen called out the hour of midnight, he was ready to begin his work in the city.

  He went out walking. The guards gave him no protest when he said he would go alone. Who cared what a Roma did, despite the prince’s orders? He grew quickly lost in the twists and turns of the street. Hordes of whores and beggars and cutpurses appeared out of the shadows, wheedling and threatening. He would not let himself flinch away from the touch of their hands, though he took neither woman or boy, gave no coin, and left a thief or two bleeding out their life in the piss-filled gutter. By dawn he had found no strigoi, but he knew what he needed to know and the first thing that must be done. Then he had only to find his way back to the castle to order it.

  “It is wise of Prince Vlad to finally grant the church the honor it is due.”

  He smirked as he overheard the words the bishop said to the boyar as they stood in the square outside the cathedral.

  “This is a fine way to celebrate the feast of the Magdalene,” the boyar answered. His voice was calm, but his gaze shifted around the square, resting briefly everywhere but on the bishop and the dhamphir standing nearby. The boyar was a creature of Prince Vlad’s court, carefully schooled in blank-faced lying, but his near panic was a silent shout against the dhamphir’s senses.

  He did not give too much attention to the men of power and their meaningless talk. He looked around cautiously, eyes narrowed. The wide space before the great open doors of the church was decorated with banners and flowers. Tables piled with food and drink filled the square, along with the city’s merchant and craftsmen families in their finest clothes. Soldiers with bright tabards over polished armor looked as decorative as the banners that fluttered from the windows. Straw and wood were set in great piles to the sides of the cathedral steps in preparation for a bonfire. The merrymaking had been going on since daybreak, and wine and ale flowed as freely as the laughter. The prince had indeed granted the people of his capital a great holiday, and they made the most of it. At a signal from the bishop, the crowd parted, making way for the parade that had been heading to this spot for hours.

  Sacred music played by very bad musicians sounded at the head of a procession consisting of clergy and more of the prince’s soldiers herding the poor of the city, the beggars and the whores and all the scum of the street toward the church. The tables set up outside were but measly fare, compared to the feast waiting inside the church, for heralds had announced a beggars’ banquet was to be the prince’s gift to the most wretched of his people to commemorate the feast day of a whore turned saint.

  Those who watched the procession might be a merry lot, but many of the rabble that had been rounded up at pike and sword point had a surly, wary look about them. There were enough foolish grins at the promise of a feast among the city’s poor to keep the rest calm enough. Many of them blinked like half-blind rats, once out of their alleys and exposed to the full light of day. The stench that rose up off most of those in the procession came from more than their rags and the filth crusted on their skin. To the dhamphir, the taint of the strigoi came off the walking dead in hot, sick waves. His inner eye saw the invisible puppet strings stretching away from the mass of bodies toward the sleeping master who claimed their service.

  But he could not see where those threads led, for they were many and tangled. This told him that there was more than one strigoi for him to hunt. It would be a hard chase to hunt several of the creatures down. This morning’s work was only the opening move in the game.

  The bishop and many priests doused the beggars with holy water as they were made to climb the cathedral steps. The scent of fresh-baked bread and hot, roasted meat drew the beggars forward. The soldiers and a double line of black-robed monks made sure no one strayed away from the church. The dhamphir followed after them. When all the poor and outlaws of the city were inside the church, the dhamphir tossed a lit torch inside as soldiers pushed shut the heavy cathedral doors.

  The bishop did not know that kindling and pitch were spread across the floor of his beloved church and piled on top of the banquet tables. The smoke and fire would spread quickly, even quicker than the screams that began even before the doors were closed. Just to make sure, the dhamphir gestured. Soldiers under the command of the boyar held back the stunned crowd and clergy in the square, while the rest of the men hurried to shift the woodpiles and start the blaze that would consume the cathedral from the outside. Many of the soldiers looked sick and terrified at what they did, but they all knew what happened to any who hesitated to obey Prince Vlad. Better to massacre worthless dregs of the street than risk their own impalement.
r />   Better to kill the slaves of a strigoi quickly and under the sight of God, the dhamphir thought. Better to free their souls than keep the poor bastards in the living hell forced on them by their demon master.

  He expected to be stalked. He walked the streets of Tirgoviste alone that night and the next, not really expecting the attack to come so soon, but leaving himself open just in case. No one came after him. He watched his back in daylight as much as he did at night. He knew the masters would want revenge for the death of the slaves. The only question was whether the strigoi would take revenge personally or send mortal minions to do the job. Why the strigoi chose to enslave the dregs of Tirgoviste he did not understand, but he could feel no taint in the souls of anyone else in the city. Perhaps he would take the knowledge of what they had planned before he killed them. Then again, probably not. He wasn’t really interested in how their minds worked.

  The boyar sent word to Prince Vlad about the executions. The bishop sent complaints about the massacre. Citizens kept to their homes and kept their thoughts on the matter to themselves. The soldiers complained at the lack of whores, and a waiting stillness settled over the capital city. On the third day, word came from the prince that he would come to inspect the feel of his city. The dhamphir did not like that the prince was coming. It felt, somehow, like a trap. His loyalty was to the Roma people, and he thought it best for the Roma people, as well as for all the gajo, to keep the strigoi from controlling a man who was already a harsh and heavy ruler.

  So, on the third night after the burning of the church, he went out of the city to seek the scent of strigoi in the countryside. It was when he went into the forest that the trap was sprung, not for the prince, but for him.

  They surrounded him in a clearing, five strigoi, more than he’d ever seen together before, more than even he could hope to defeat at one time, and a handful of their special ones: companions. He took the heart out of the youngest of the strigoi before the others fell on him. He did not expect to die quickly after what he’d done to their kind, so it was no surprise when they tied him to a tree and began beating him.