“We’ll take care of her,” Clive promised.
“No. I will. I want to look up her name, see if there are relatives in a cemetery around here. We can’t take her home, but we can at least do that.”
“Yes,” Clive said. “When it gets dark, we’ll go out and find her people.”
Nodding, I went back to the cage, grabbed the door, and tore it off its hinges, throwing it as Vlad had. Taking off my jacket, I knelt beside her and gently laid it over her, my tears splashing on the fabric.
“Come on, love,” Clive said, helping me up. “Let’s go upstairs. We’ll get you another jacket and then we’ll go out and look for the Csonkas.”
I took his hand and squeezed, following him out of that hellish room. “Don’t you have to attend one of those gatherings?”
Scoffing, Clive said, “If they wanted me to attend, they shouldn’t have poisoned me.”
Vlad waited for us at the stairs, my pastry box and book in his hands. He handed them to me, and I waved him up with us.
“Come to our room. How much time do we have before you guys can go out?” I asked.
“Roughly thirty minutes,” Vlad said.
Clive paused at the door, listening. After a moment, he opened it and stepped out. “Can we assume no cameras are pointed in this direction?” Clive’s voice was so low, I barely caught the words, but Vlad nodded.
The door snicked closed as we made our way down the main hall before turning right, into the hall of bedrooms. At our door, Clive pulled out his key and glanced back at Vlad, who gave him a barely discernable shrug of one shoulder.
We all went in and Clive closed the door. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Why are you guys acting so weird?”
Clive went to the closet and pulled out the jacket I’d worn yesterday. “Our kind rarely ever visit each other’s rooms. And certainly not to chat.”
I looked between the guys. “So, if anyone sees us walking out together…” I left the rest of that sentence unspoken, my cheeks flaming as I turned to Vlad. “Sorry. If you want to go, we can meet up later.”
Vlad walked over to the couch and sat down, stretching his legs out. “Given what they normally say about me, this will be a nice change. Keep them wondering.”
“We were all together in Vlad’s room—” I realized why things were a little tense when Clive found me there, why Vlad was explaining to Clive how I’d ended up in his room.
I turned to Clive. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
He gave me a soft kiss. “Your loyalty was never in question. My only thought was how to explain a pile of dust in Vlad’s room if he’d tried anything with you.” He helped me on with the jacket and we sat in the two chairs opposite the couch.
Pulling out my phone, I looked up Aliz Csonka while Clive and Vlad discussed the best way to move her. “Oh, Csonka—or however you pronounce it—is a pretty common name. There’s a museum, and a statue, and a machine shop, a glass blower, a lawyer, a high school, a bus stop… This is dumb. One of you needs to do the search. I can’t read Hungarian, so I don’t know what it’s telling me.”
Clive reached over for my phone and started tapping.
Vlad’s brow was furrowed, his expression dark.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
Clive glanced up at Vlad and then resumed searching.
Shaking his head, Vlad said, “No. Just thinking.”
He misses his wife, love, Clive told me.
“You mentioned your wife Ilona when we were downstairs,” I said. “Can I ask how you met? Given how vampires respond to me, I doubt it was a typical meet cute.”
He tilted his head and finally said, “I don’t know what that means, but we met in the woods.” He paused again. “I should go back. I saw her for the first time in the palace. She was a cousin of the Hungarian King, Mathias Corvinus.
“Between campaigns, I was often summoned to the palace to report.” He shook his head. “How many times am I supposed to say we killed them all? They wanted to hear every grisly detail while painting me as a madman. My first two wives were daughters of nobles, the marriages arranged to create alliances. They both hated me.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t the kindest of men. They were probably right to turn to other, gentler men while I was away at war.
“My second wife had died the previous year in childbirth.” He paused again, the silence growing. “I wasn’t looking for another wife. I’d planned to report to the king and leave. Ilona was in the throne room, standing with other ladies of noble birth.” His mustache twitched.
