Blood on Silk by Marie Treanor Read Free Book Online

the Vampire Slayer. “Um . . . Before you go . . . what do you know about Saloman’s death?”

    Thanks to the delay caused by the “vampire hunters,” whom she’d shaken off with extreme difficulty in the end, it was almost midday before she parked outside Maria’s house once more. The village was quiet, most people having sought shelter from the worst of the sun’s heat. But as she approached the familiar rickety gate, where only yesterday she’d paused to talk too long to Dmitriu, she saw Maria’s daughter sweeping the garden path beneath the shade of the thick, tangled vines.
    Catching sight of Elizabeth, she straightened and leaned on her brush. “ Domnişoară ,” she called in greeting. It wasn’t clear from her closed face if she was pleased, annoyed, or even embarrassed to see her.
    Elizabeth returned the greeting, adding, “I’m looking for Dmitriu.”
    There was a pause, but the woman came no closer. “He isn’t here,” she said at last.
    “Do you know where I can find him?”
    She shook her head.
    “Does he live in the village?”
    The woman shrugged and returned to her sweeping. “He moves around a lot. I’d find someone else to talk to.”
    Yes, I’ll bet you would , Elizabeth thought with a hint of bitterness. They’d all been in on it. Fool the crazy foreigner. Butter her up with Maria’s nonsense, and then set Dmitriu on her as the more acceptable face of legend. Only, what was the point? Didn’t it get boring after a while? She never paid anyone for talking to her—on the grounds that for one thing she couldn’t afford to, and for another it would just encourage people to say what they imagined she wanted to hear.
    She got back in the car and drove the now-familiar road through the hills to Sighesciu—not forgetting to check her rearview mirror for any vehicles following hers. She didn’t put it past the “vampire hunters” to dog her footsteps until she left the country.

    The village looked different in the brightness of the afternoon sunshine; though still down-at-the-heels, it was less depressing. Parking her car in the shade of a parched tree in the empty market square, she found she could actually laugh at herself, and at the sight she must have presented last night, fleeing in panic from a “vampire” come to life from a stone sarcophagus. Her colleagues would laugh themselves silly if they ever found out—though she’d take damned good care they didn’t.
    And yet, despite everything, as she walked up the hill toward the castle ruins, she found her heart beating too hard and too fast. She knew she should feel as angry with Dmitriu as with his accomplice “Saloman,” but the truth was, she needed to talk to Dmitriu again, to find out if any of what he’d said was true. The heat of her fury was reserved for “Saloman,” who’d scared her, tormented her, and, worse than anything else, excited her out of her normal, reserved skin. For that, for him, she felt something approaching hatred.
    She had no idea how she’d cope if she met him again. Would she yell at him, gibber like a fool, turn all tongue-tied like the shy schoolgirl she often still felt she was? Or would she still melt like butter under the heat of his hungry, mesmerizing eyes?
    She curled her lip, knowing that in daylight, in the brightness of her returned common sense, he’d look no more than ordinary. No charisma, no magic would touch her or arouse her, which was a pity in some ways because she hadn’t even known she could feel like that. It had been edgy, breathless, exciting. . . .
    Hastily, she shut down that line of thought. It was the adrenaline, the fear, that had intensified and confused everything. That was all.
    Diggers and workmen swarmed all over the hilltop. Keeping a low profile, she got quite close to the crypt corner before the foreman she’d spoken to last night spotted her. He yelled something to the driver of a large mechanical beast, who inched his charge forward out of her