Mother of Chaos Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

  For Jade and Carolyn

  Chapter 1

  Pisa, Italy, 1730

  “You want to summon a fallen angel.” Ruxandra managed to keep her composure right up to the word angel. Then it left her entirely. “Are you insane?”

  When Kade showed up out of nowhere after 120 years apart, suddenly there outside her favorite café, she had run from him, overwhelmed by memory and emotion. But as she crossed the rooftops of Pisa, the beautiful and faded Italian city that had become her newest home, the lit buildings smears of gold against the night sky, the peaceful views had calmed her and she’d stopped, letting him catch up. She was a vampire, not a victim. And he was not her worst enemy. But what he wanted shattered her facade.

  “No,” Kade said. “Though I nearly became so, traveling with Elizabeth.”

  “To hell with Elizabeth! You can’t summon a fallen angel, Kade. A fallen angel created me!”

  “I know.”

  “You know because I just told you.” Ruxandra snarled the words. “Because you certainly didn’t know before you came here.”

  “I did, actually.”

  “How?” Ruxandra demanded. “By the time I remembered it, things were already out of hand in Vienna. I never told any of you.”

  “She is still the same, you know,” Kade said, moving a little closer to her on the roof where they stood, overlooking the Arno. His presence shone to all her senses, bright as a star, more vivid than any human’s. “Elizabeth, I mean. She murders with impunity. She tortures girls and young women whenever she wants. She bathes in their blood because she enjoys the feel of it.”

  Elizabeth Bathory had been a monster before she met Ruxandra. She tortured and murdered girls in a desperate quest to maintain her youth and power. She sent men to track Ruxandra, daughter of Vlad Dracula, and bring her out of the wilderness. Ruxandra had been a mindless Beast, living on the blood of animals. Elizabeth helped her regain her intelligence and strength. She also manipulated Ruxandra to her own advantage.

  Ruxandra made Elizabeth a vampire, thinking they would travel the world together.

  Instead Elizabeth showed her true colors, returning to her castle and going on a rampage of torture and murder. Ruxandra stopped her, but not before Elizabeth turned her servant Dorotyas into a slave vampire and vilely abused both the girls and Ruxandra. During the fight that ended Elizabeth’s reign of terror, Kade drank Elizabeth’s blood, becoming a vampire.

  One hundred twenty years ago and he’s trying to change the subject.

  “God dammit, Kade—”

  “Whereas you”—Kade spread his hands wide, taking in Ruxandra’s outfit and sword—“have changed immensely.”

  Ruxandra looked down. She wore a blue coat of proper knee length and tight black breeches over a white shirt with a short, plain collar. Her red hair hung down her back in a ponytail, held in place with a strip of leather. A long cloth tied down her breasts to help her disguise. Her boots and stockings currently sat on a rooftop a half mile away, thanks to the chase Kade had led her on.

  “I dress as a man for simplicity’s sake,” Ruxandra said. “Women cannot roam the streets at night.” But someday I shall, she thought. As a woman. The world has to change eventually.

  “You are at the height of fashion.”

  “And you are fifty years out of date and changing the subject.”

  He wore a hip-length coat that clung tight to his body, with puffed sleeves. His trousers hung loose on his legs, and his cape and boots were both too short and unfashionable. His beard was gone, his skin now as pale and smooth as Ruxandra’s own. He was beautiful in a way he had never been, though easily recognizable as the same man.

  “I do not think of my wardrobe,” Kade admitted. “I’m not seen by many, and those who see me do not care about clothes or fashions.”

  “Dressing out of date makes you stand out, which we cannot afford. The angel, Kade. Why?”

  “It only makes one stand out if one is noticed, which I am not.”

  He leaped to the ground, the edges of his body shimmering in the darkness. All vampires could go unnoticed. This was not invisibility, but a persistent ability to be ignored by any human, even those who stood mere inches from one’s face. Only other vampires saw through it. She followed, also unnoticed, though there were few around to see at this hour. Kade held out his arm. “Shall we talk as we walk?”

  Ruxandra stared at his arm as if it were a foreign object. “You are joking.”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “You show up out of nowhere, follow me, and then tell me you want to summon a fallen angel? Of course something is wrong! I don’t even trust you; I’m certainly not going to walk arm in arm with you.”

  Kade’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t trust me?”

  “You made me a prisoner, Kade.” Ruxandra growled the words. “You made it so I couldn’t leave Elizabeth. I could have been stuck with that sadistic monster forever.”

  “Elizabeth made you a prisoner,” Kade corrected. “Yes, I cast the spell that kept you by her side, but it wasn’t done willingly.”

  “You still did it!”

  “She would have tortured me for weeks.” The calm demeanor he’d been wearing to that point vanished, replaced by a dark intensity. “Killed me in as horrendous a manner as she could conceive. You know what she could do.”

  “So you let her torture me instead? You let her torture those girls?” Ruxandra turned her back on him. “Coward.”

  She stalked away from him. In truth, she did not know how brave or cowardly she’d have been if she’d been allowed to grow up, if she’d been a man like Kade with independence and choices. Perhaps those very privileges made it harder to give up life. But she would never know who she could have been, how she might have lived—only that she felt an overwhelming loss when she remembered the girl who had not yet been turned vampire, not yet killed.

  She shoved down the feeling. Killing was something she’d had to come to terms with, and she had. Right now she wanted to get her boots, kill Pasquale—the bullying rapist she’d been on her way to dispatch before Kade showed up—and go to bed. She wasn’t in the mood to talk anymore.

  “Ruxandra, please.” The
tapping of Kade’s boots on the cobblestones echoed off the wall, so noisy compared to Ruxandra’s bare feet. “A hundred years have passed. More, in fact.”

  Ruxandra didn’t look back. “I know how many years have passed. I’ve been enjoying them all.” Not entirely, of course, but certainly they’d been better than the time spent with Elizabeth and the hundred years before. She had love, art, music, and freedom. She had seen high places and low, watched and listened to the talk in cafés and noble houses, marketplaces and bedrooms—not always with the knowledge of those she was observing. She’d read and learned.

  “You were not a person when I cast that spell.” Kade caught up to her. “You were an animal and a danger to everyone around you.”

  Ruxandra stopped walking. “That had nothing to do with it, and you know it. She bound me to her so she could manipulate me, and she used you so she could keep manipulating me when I turned her into a vampire.”

  “I know.” Kade’s tone softened. “That is why I didn’t cast a spell that protected Elizabeth from you. I thought that if worse came to worst, you could kill her and escape.” His voice was low and seductive, and she shivered. If only I had.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why do you think?” He stepped in front of her, his eyes blazing. “You are immortal, Ruxandra. Elizabeth is immortal. I wanted immortality. If I had told you how to escape, we would not be standing here, one hundred twenty years later, having this argument. I would be dead and moldering in the ground while you wandered the world.”

  He took one of her hands in his. “I only wanted to be like the two of you. Supernatural creatures with all the freedom in the world, able to see and learn! Is that so wrong?”

  Hating that his mention of learning echoed her thought, Ruxandra extended the talons in her fingertips. Kade pulled his hand away before they dug into his flesh.

  “I know you were angry,” Kade said. “I hoped time would make it less painful.”

  “Do you know what she did to me?” Ruxandra kept her tone even to hide her pain at the memory. “Her and Dorotyas?”

  “No.” Kade’s voice was gentle. “You never told me.”

  “They tortured me,” Ruxandra said. “Dorotyas stomped on me like she was killing a rat. Elizabeth whipped me for hours. I had to let them or they would have murdered all the girls in Elizabeth’s gymnaesium.”

  “Given how you hurt Elizabeth and Dorotyas after, I think that score was settled.”

  “That’s not the point!” Ruxandra drove a finger into his chest hard enough to make him grunt and take a step back. “You’re the reason it all happened. You trapped me! I wanted to see the world but your magic dragged me back.”

  “I know.”

  “So what made you think I would ever forgive you?”

  He looked at her for a moment, his eyes unreadable. “Time.”

  “Time?” Ruxandra scoffed. “Time means nothing to me, Kade. I remember everything that happened at the castle.”

  “So do I.” Kade opened his hands. “I remember the agony of transforming into a vampire. I remember how I slaughtered those men to feed. I remember how the sunlight trapped me inside the castle. I hunted the hallways, mad with hunger, until night fell. Then I went to the woods and found a cabin. A man, his wife, and his three children. The youngest was five.”

  Ruxandra looked away.

  “I remember what each of them tasted like, Ruxandra. I remember waking up surrounded by their corpses and thinking, I am a monster.”

  “You chose to be a monster. You and Elizabeth.”

  “Yes, I did.” Kade’s shoulders slumped, his head coming down. “I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t realize how little control I would have at the beginning or how it would feel to be the author of atrocities rather than the witness. I’d grown insensitive to others’ pain, I admit. I assumed that would continue to be the case. And then there I was, committing murders myself and fully aware of the horror.”

  Both fell silent. Ruxandra remembered when she had changed. She’d slaughtered her father and six men the first night, then other innocents until she’d run off to live in the woods like an animal.

  “It is a dreadful thing to acquire a conscience just as one can no longer make use of it. Or so it seemed to me at first. So I denied it. I quashed it and traveled with the other monsters. For fifty years I stayed with Elizabeth and Dorotyas. I watched Elizabeth torture a thousand girls before drinking their blood, and torture a thousand more for the fun of it. I watched Dorotyas use a thousand men for her pleasure and kill them all. And I helped them. I joined in their games, and I reveled in it.”

  “So now what?” Sarcasm filled Ruxandra’s voice. “You’ve reformed? You’ve stopped drinking blood?”

  “I stopped doing it for fun,” Kade said, his voice firm. “One night, in Chartres, I watched Elizabeth torture a fourteen-year-old girl. Just another girl, just another victim. No one important. Elizabeth had gagged her so no one would hear her scream. She did worse things to that child than anything I saw when I was a fiscal in the Inquisition.”

  Ruxandra’s eyes went wide. “You? You’re a sorcerer. What were you doing in the Inquisition?”

  “There is no better place to hide than in the enemy’s ranks. And no better way to make money than by extorting the guilty.”

  “Noble of you.”

  “I have never been noble.” Dark, bitter anger filled his voice. “I was born the son of a farmer and a hedge-witch. A nobleman murdered them both because my mother helped his wife end her twelfth pregnancy.”

  And that was your excuse for torturing others? Ruxandra didn’t say it. She wanted to find out why Kade left Elizabeth, not start another fight.

  Kade took a deep breath. When he spoke, he sounded calm once more. “I may have deserved pity once but certainly not anymore. I know that, Ruxandra. I know I could have walked away from Elizabeth at the very beginning. I chose not to. But when I was watching Elizabeth and this screaming child, it suddenly struck me how utterly pointless it all was. I was living a life without purpose, without reason. I didn’t want that. Even when I was human, I never wanted that. So I left and searched for a purpose.”

  Ruxandra’s eyes went to the night sky. In the east the stars were fading, and a line of dark blue edged up against the darkness. She felt tired and weighted down by the past in a way she had not felt for more than a hundred years. Elizabeth was a nightmare—her nightmare. She had made her.

  “And that’s why you want to summon a fallen angel?” Ruxandra asked. “To give you purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why drag me into it?” Ruxandra’s shout echoed off the buildings around them. “Why not just do it and leave me alone?”

  “Because immortality is lonely!” Kade’s voice, much quieter than hers, held no less passion. “I have friends, scholars I work with, but no one who understands the past. Not the way you and I understand it. None of them have lived there. So I spent months tracking you through Italy, just to speak to someone who has. I want to hear what happened after you left the castle. I want to know if you saw Venice during the Cretan War. I want to know if you read Galileo’s treatise on the moons of Jupiter. I want to hear about what you saw and heard, learn what you experienced, and share what I experienced with you.”

  Ruxandra hesitated, just for a moment. It had been difficult, these many years, to talk as though she had only the eighteen years she appeared to have lived. Ruxandra had seen and done more than any woman alive, but she could not share it with anyone. She was always curbing her speech, thinking through every comment, playing a part.

  But just that he’s lonely is no excuse . . .

  “Meet with me tomorrow,” Kade said. “I will tell you all I know about the angel.”

  Ruxandra’s eyes narrowed. “Fine. Tomorrow after the sun goes down, at the Aquila Café.”

  “Thank you,” Kade said. “I look forward to it. Now, where is this place?”

  “You’re the one who is a
lways learning.” Ruxandra jumped in the air, landing on the tile roof some twenty feet above. “Figure it out yourself.”

  ***

  When she reached the Aquila Café, Kade was already there. He sat alone at a small table, an empty chair opposite him, a cup of coffee cradled in his hands. The men at the other tables—a dozen in all—were having lively discussions on everything from politics to animal husbandry. Kade didn’t seem to hear them. He sat still, eyes closed, inhaling the coffee’s aroma with a smile on his face. He opened them, saw Ruxandra, and waved her over.

  “I forgot how wonderful coffee smells,” Kade said.

  Ruxandra sank into the chair opposite him. “Elizabeth did not allow it?”

  One of his eyebrows rose at the sarcasm in her voice. “Neither she nor Dorotyas partakes of anything except blood. They said that now they have . . . risen to a higher level of existence, to use Elizabeth’s turn of phrase.”

  Ruxandra shook her head. “Still fixated on being Blood Royal.”

  “Of course. I, on the other hand, find I enjoy the taste of tea and wine and spirits. And coffee, which I have not drunk for twenty years.” He signaled the waiter to bring another cup, then sipped his own.

  “Why not?”

  “Because coffee has not reached the place where I was.” He took another sip and set it aside. “Now tell me, Ruxandra, why is it we exist?”

  Chapter 2

  The demon lifted her hand to her mouth and ran the end of one finger over the tip of one of her teeth. The skin split open, and silver blood welled up on her fingertip. She lowered the finger to Ruxandra’s lips. “Open your mouth.”

  Ruxandra wanted to protest, to beg for God’s forgiveness and the creature’s mercy, to run screaming from the cave, but she couldn’t find words or strength in her limbs. She could do nothing but cry as the fallen angel parted her lips.

  “I send you out instead, my child,” the fallen angel said, “to sow chaos and fear, to make humans kneel in terror, and to ravage the world where I cannot.”

  “Ruxandra?”