Mother of Chaos Read online

  Men in uniform peered through the slits in the walls, some glaring out at whatever enemies might attack, others looking glazed with boredom. Kade went unnoticed and jumped onto the wall with ease. Ruxandra did the same and landed beside him. All the running had tuned his prowess, she decided. Perhaps after Moscow they could take a long lap around the huge country, see what was happening in Russia’s other cities. It was good to have a companion. She switched her voice to vampire frequencies. “My, they do like their walls, don’t they?”

  Inside the outer wall lay farms, and beyond them a second wall surrounded the city proper. And beyond that, rising higher than the rest of the city, stood yet another set of walls, made of gleaming white stone.

  “They have reason to,” Kade said. “The Crimean Tatars attack the city regularly, taking slaves and burning down the buildings.”

  He pointed to a wall gleaming white in the distance. “The last time they burned everything but the buildings inside the Kremlin. Now everything is walled, in the hopes of keeping them out.”

  “Does it work?”

  “No. But they hope. This way.”

  Kade let her to the city proper, and when they jumped the wall, Ruxandra discovered that smaller walls surrounded each neighborhood, connecting the houses and churches. The buildings were wood, save for a few stone churches. Paint covered everything, giving life to otherwise drab boards. Onion-shaped towers rose above the churches, looking down on the houses like benevolent parents gazing at their children.

  They jumped off the wall into the city proper. Kade led her down one fence line, then through a tall gate. That opened onto a series of small, fenced-in farms. Some held cabbages ready to be picked; others held trees, the last summer fruit still dangling from the branches. Others contained drowsy cattle sleeping where they stood. Kade led her between them to a small cluster of buildings. She saw houses with a few chicken coops and a single field. In the middle of these buildings, standing higher than the others, rose a three-story house with a high-peaked, wooden-shingled roof. Red shutters closed the windows, and curlicues decorated the gables.

  “This is it,” Kade said. “The magicians live here.”

  Ruxandra, curious, reached out with her mind. She stopped walking.

  “What?” Kade said. “Surely you’re not shy of meeting a few old magicians?”

  “There’s no one inside,” Ruxandra said. “Check.”

  Kade stared at the building, his eyes growing wider every second. He took off at a run, rounding the building.

  The front door lay open. Nothing stirred inside.

  Chapter 4

  Kade stepped inside, Ruxandra at his heels. The house was well appointed, with thick, colorful tapestries on the walls to keep in the warmth. The furniture looked decent, though not rich—it lacked the excessive ornamentation so popular in Italy. But the house was a mess. The chairs lay overturned on the floor, and a table in one room lay on its top. Bloodstains, dry and dark, splattered the floor.

  “I don’t understand.” Kade stalked from room to room, taking in the scene. “They were safe when I left. No one felt concerned about anything. They had no reason to vanish.”

  “They didn’t vanish,” Ruxandra said, looking at the mess. “They were taken.”

  Kade nodded. “I know. But by whom?”

  Ruxandra crouched and lowered her nose to the floor. She sniffed deep, but the scents were old and faded.

  “I don’t understand how you can do that,” Kade said. “I can smell a hundred smells in a room, but to differentiate them, or follow them . . .”

  “Practice,” Ruxandra said. “I recommend having to hunt your food for a hundred years. It does wonders.”

  “I’m sure,” Kade said. “What do you smell?”

  Ruxandra shrugged. “I can’t tell. There’s no scent here less than a month old. Even if I knew whom I was tracking, it would barely help. Any scents outside vanished weeks ago. Right now I just want to learn the smells, in case I run into them again.”

  Kade growled in frustration. “Follow me.”

  He headed through the house, passing a parlor, a dining room, and a smaller, cozier room with comfortable chairs and a fireplace. He stopped in a doorway.

  “Derr`mo,” he snarled. “They didn’t.”

  Ruxandra looked past him and saw a small room with dead plants on a table near a wide window. In the center of the floor sat an open trap door. Before she could ask if it led to the library, Kade was already half out of sight down the stairs. Ruxandra followed.

  The stairs went down deep, hemmed in first by wooden planks that held back the packed earth, then by natural stone walls. The air grew stale and musty, and the darkness closed in on them as the light from above faded.

  When Ruxandra was first made a vampire, she’d learned that all things gave off their own light, even stones, walls, and old wooden stairs. After all this time, she had stopped noticing it, except in moments like these, when a human would have needed a lantern. It was a thin, gray light, but enough for them both to see by as they descended deeper into the earth.

  The stairs ended, and the walls opened up. They stood in a cavern at least as large as the house above. Dozens of shelves lined the walls, stretching the length of the cavern and down the middle of the floor.

  All stood empty.

  Kade turned in a slow circle, his eyes wide. If the empty house had surprised him, the empty basement practically sent him into shock. Ruxandra watched as disbelief, grief, and fury all took turns on his face. Fury won out, blazing. Ruxandra kept a wary eye on him, not sure what he would do.

  “All this way.” Anger made the words sound like a growl. “All this time spent traveling, and this is what I come back to?”

  Ruxandra said nothing.

  “I will find them,” Kade said. “I will find who came to this house, then I will destroy them all.”

  “Who would do it?” Ruxandra asked. “The church? The empress?”

  Kade shook his head. “Not the church. They would tie the men to the bookshelves and burn them with their books. The empress . . . maybe. But why?”

  Kade headed back up. “We go ask the neighbors before the sun comes up. They saw something, I am certain.”

  The nearest neighbor, an old woman, did not at all like being disturbed. Kade and the woman spoke rapid-fire Russian at one another. The woman spoke loudly and shrilly at first, but Kade hissed a command in Russian, and she quieted. Ruxandra recognized the irritation in the woman’s tone, though not much else at first. But with every word spoken she began to understand more.

  “One day” was followed by a string of words Ruxandra didn’t understand. Then, “not my”—more words—“to know.”

  Kade’s reply was unintelligible, except the ending words, “My friends.”

  “Those were friends?” The old woman scoffed and then spoke at length in words Ruxandra didn’t understand.

  “Go back inside,” Kade commanded. The woman went in, and Kade shook his head in disgust and switched back to Italian. “The woman knows nothing. Worse, she made sure to know nothing. She said she heard a ruckus before they all went away, with lots of shouting and horsemen.”

  The next two neighbors were just as helpful, saying only that they’d heard horsemen and fighting. The fourth neighbor, two houses away, owner of a snug little cottage with a well-tended fence and barn, had seen everything. He was more than happy to tell them once Kade stopped his complaints about the early hour.

  “They were in black,” he began, and Ruxandra understood that much. He went into a long-winded explanation that Ruxandra barely understood. She caught “horses,” “fighting,” “books,” “taken to the palace” and a few other random words and phrases. Kade looked grimmer as the man went on. When he finished, Kade thanked him and commanded him back to bed.

  “Are your friends still alive, then?” Part of Ruxandra fervidly hoped not. The rest of her realized that, if these people didn’t summon the dark angel, whoever had taken the books wo
uld. Power called to power, and what power greater than a dark angel?

  Assuming it doesn’t kill them.

  “I don’t know,” Kade said. “I think so. The night is drawing to a close. We should rest.”

  “Where?” Ruxandra asked. “Down below?”

  Kade shook his head. “They know of that place. I would hate to be caught below with an army above, especially one armed with oil and fire.”

  “True. Do you have another place?”

  “Two,” Kade said. “One is known to everyone. The other is known only to me.”

  “A bolt-hole?”

  Kade nodded. “Moscow is not always safe or stable. It is good to have a place to run. This way.”

  Someone followed them.

  At first Ruxandra wasn’t sure. She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, but something made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She reached out with her mind but felt only the people in their houses, most of them asleep. She looked behind her, scanning the ground and the buildings, searching for . . .

  For what? What am I sensing?

  She switched her voice to vampire frequencies. “I think we’re being followed.”

  Kade didn’t change his pace or turn around but answered in his own vampire voice. “I don’t sense anyone near. Are you sure?”

  “No.” Ruxandra’s frustration came out in her tone. Kade looked back at her, eyebrows raised. “There’s no sight or sound of anyone, but . . .”

  “You think we’re being followed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall we speed up?”

  “Not until we get around the corner.” Ruxandra pushed her chin toward the next building. “No sense letting them know we spotted them.”

  Kade went around the corner and sped up, going unnoticed at the same time. Ruxandra followed a second later, also disappearing from notice. Unlike Kade, whose footfalls she heard as he ran, Ruxandra moved silently. Instead of following him, she circled the building to come up behind whoever followed.

  She saw no one.

  There’s someone here. I’m sure of it.

  The ground was hard and dry, but she saw scuff marks where people and animals walked during the day. She spotted Kade’s footprints and her own, but didn’t see anyone else’s. Ruxandra sniffed deep, searching for the scent of man. Many men were nearby, but inside the houses. Outside she smelled no one.

  They’re gone.

  If anyone was here to begin with.

  She had been a hunter for more than a hundred years. She knew what it meant to stalk prey and to be stalked. Once she’d led a mountain lion on a three-day chase through the woods before taking it from above. Every instinct she possessed told her that someone followed.

  There’s still no one here.

  She began walking in a widening spiral across the road, searching for a whiff of someone—or something—different from what she saw.

  There.

  A fresh boot print, barely visible in the dust of the road. She knelt down, caught the scent of leather first, then the sweat of the man wearing the boot. She smelled fear in that sweat, and excitement. She wondered if whoever followed knew what he pursued. She breathed deep again, then reached out with her mind and found Kade. She ran and caught up with him.

  “Did you find them?” Kade asked, still using the vampire voice.

  “No,” Ruxandra answered, speaking in the same tones. “I found a boot print, and I smelled someone, but I didn’t see anyone or anything.”

  Kade frowned. “That is . . . disconcerting.”

  “Yes.” Ruxandra spread her mind wide. Still she sensed no one outside. “He’s human, though.”

  “A human you cannot see, hear, or sense?” Kade’s eyebrows went up. “A magician?”

  “One of yours?”

  “They would not hide from me.” Kade frowned at the street, then at the lightening sky above. “We should get under cover. This way.”

  Ruxandra followed him through the city. She sensed no more pursuers, but her mind raced the entire time they went to Kade’s other house.

  If it is a human who knows how to hide from vampires, how did he know that vampires would come?

  Kade’s house lay across the river. They ran the entire distance, silent and unnoticed, seeing only tired guards who turned away from them as they went by. They slowed down when they reached the yard, and even then Ruxandra looped back in a slow spiral search in case someone still followed them. This time there wasn’t even a footprint in sight.

  The house stood only one story high, with wooden walls and shingles and three rooms. The first held the fireplace, a large table with chairs, and a kettle and teacups. A shelf along the wall held twenty different blends of tea, the sharp scents of each forming a symphony of smells in Ruxandra’s nose. The second room had a bed, the coverlet dusty from disuse. Beyond it was a small room with a thick door that could be barred. A pair of shutters hung on the inside of the window, thick nails driven into the window frame securing them closed. A pair of tapestries hung above, ready to drop down and cover the window. A chest large enough for a man to lie in stretched the length of one wall. Kade opened it to reveal a mattress with a thick blanket and pillows.

  “I’ll take the bed,” Ruxandra said. The idea of lying closed in the chest all day made her stomach crawl and reminded her too much of when she’d tried to kill herself. She had woken under the earth and panicked, tearing at the ground until she broke free.

  “As you wish.”

  “May I make tea?”

  “Of course,” Kade said. “There’s a tinderbox and kindling in the box beside the fireplace.”

  “Good. Teach me more Russian while we wait.”

  It took time for Ruxandra to get the fire, longer still for the water to boil and the tea to steep. Kade joined her at the table, sitting across from her and speaking in Russian and Italian, expanding Ruxandra’s vocabulary.

  Ruxandra picked a fragrant tea to drink, and the two sipped it until the sky grew light and the sun stood just below the horizon, ready to break free from the earth. Ruxandra doused the fire and went to the small room.

  “In all the rush, I completely forgot that I could wear boots again,” Kade said as he slipped into his chest and lay down. “I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to that.”

  Ruxandra chuckled. “Fair enough. I’m looking forward to putting on a dress.”

  “I am sure you will be lovely in it,” Kade said. He yawned.

  Ruxandra smiled and lay back on the bed. “Kade?”

  “Yes?”

  “What if we don’t find your friends?”

  “We will,” Kade said. “Not all of them lived in that house, and the ones that didn’t may still be free.”

  “So where do we look for them?”

  Kade chuckled. “The place where one looks for all great Russian visionaries. The kabak.”

  It was not a word that Kade had taught her, and Ruxandra puzzled over what it meant until sleep took her.

  ***

  When the sun slipped behind the horizon, Kade led Ruxandra back across the city. Both went unnoticeable before leaving the house and stayed that way. Ruxandra kept eyes, ears, nose, and mind all wide open, searching for the one who’d followed them the night before. She detected nothing.

  This early in the evening the entire neighborhood was out and about. Old women gossiped over their back fences, men talked and argued cheerfully in the street, and children dashed in and out among adults. Kade wove through them with ease, going to a long, low-slung building with a wide-open door and much noise coming out of it.

  “The kabak,” Kade said, using his vampire voice, “is where everyone gathers to drink. If any of my friends survive, they will certainly visit one.”

  He led her inside. The noise grew five times louder the moment they stepped through the door. Men and women shouted at one another, laughed, and sang. Two men danced in one corner, singing at the top of their lungs, while two others engaged in an ar
m-wrestling match.

  “Is it this lively every night?” Ruxandra asked, also in vampire voice.

  Kade looked around and shrugged. “Tonight is calmer than most.”

  He slipped through the crowd. The people moved out of his way, even though they couldn’t see him. Ruxandra followed in his wake. He rounded the bar and stepped into the back room. He stepped back out, noticeable, and shouted to the barman in Russian. The man put a cup on the bar and poured a generous amount of vodka into it. Kade thanked the man and then commanded him in Russian. Ruxandra caught every third word. She sighed, wishing her Russian would improve faster, and turned to survey the crowd.

  Then she noticed the empty space.

  So many people crowded the bar that the walls threatened to burst. Yet against one wall, amid a crowd of people talking and laughing together, she saw an empty space. Ruxandra turned away, watching it out of her peripheral vision. Kade still questioned the man at the bar. Ruxandra extended her mind to the empty space, but felt nothing. She inhaled, long and deep, learning the scents of the room. By the second breath, she had identified every alcohol the men drank. By the fifth, she knew each person’s scent.

  By the sixth, she knew the man standing in the empty spot, a different man from the last time. He smelled of steel and leather and silver and sweat.

  “Come,” Kade said. “Time to go.”

  He pushed his way through the crowd. Ruxandra followed after, still keeping the spot in the corner of her eye. The man there didn’t move to follow them.

  Once they were outside, Kade led her at a rapid pace away from the tavern. His boots struck the ground with unnecessary force, and he made no attempt to go unnoticed.

  “They have not been there in a month,” he said, agitation filling his voice. “None of them. Not the magicians, not the librarians. All are missing.”

  “It is very bad,” Ruxandra said. “We were followed again. Or they were waiting for us.”

  “What?” Kade stopped and turned on his heel. His eyes scanned the streets around them. He frowned, and Ruxandra could tell he did the same with his mind. “There’s no one here.”

  “There is.” Ruxandra tapped her nose. “It’s not the one from last night, but someone is definitely there.”