Blood on Silk by Marie Treanor Read Free Book Online Page A

line of vision while the boss walked toward her.
    Elizabeth gazed beyond him, at a completely flat piece of ground. The hole crumbling onto the crypt had been filled in. This entire part of the hilltop was smooth and even.
    “You filled in the hole,” she blurted before the foreman had even greeted her.
    “What hole?”
    “I found a hole in the ground last night—just there. There was a room underneath, like a crypt, with angels carved on the walls. Shouldn’t you notify the authorities before building starts?”
    The man smiled at her, a pitying smile, though why he pitied her wasn’t clear. “There was no hole over there; nothing to fill in. We’d have seen such a thing, and if we hadn’t, the surveyors who swarmed over the site last week would have. So, will you be buying a house?”
    It was pointless. Either Dmitriu and “Saloman” had covered it up themselves, or the builders didn’t want to wait for archeologists to grub about in the foundations before they started work, and so they would deny everything.
    “No,” Elizabeth said ruefully. “I couldn’t live here now.”

    Over a cup of coffee in the village square, she asked about Dmitriu, but no one seemed to have heard of him. She wasn’t surprised. She’d been expecting to work without him. Her next stop was the churchyard.
    However, there were three churches in Sighesciu: the Roman Catholic at one end of the main street, a Lutheran church at the other, and about halfway between, the Eastern Orthodox church. Each had its own graveyard. The “vampire hunters” had looked at her as if she’d grown horns when she asked them which religion Saloman had followed, although they’d all known he’d been staked in 1697.
    “Did Dmitriu tell you that?” she’d asked suspiciously.
    “I’ve never met Dmitriu,” Konrad had answered with what seemed complete honesty. “The date is in our records.”
    Elizabeth began to think, having scoured all three graveyards in search of likely monuments, that she might have to ask to see these records, whatever they were. However batty, they might just contain the odd kernel of truth that would help her. After all, that’s what she’d been doing in all her research so far, rummaging for pearls among the dross. Her reluctance to engage with the “vampire hunters” again was down to the simple fact that their very solemnity freaked her out.
    Dropping onto a table stone facing the church building, she pulled out her water bottle and took a sizable swig as she cast her gaze around the cemetery in an accusatory way. Well, what had she expected? A nice, clear stone that read, Here lies Saloman, a very ancient vampire, staked in 1697 by the following people ?
    Perhaps he really had been buried under the castle chapel. If that was the case, his body and any inscriptions were lost for good—unless her photographs showed something?
    Brightening, she shoved the bottle into her bag and held up her face to the sun, eyes closed. She’d head back to Bistriƫa, get the photographs onto her computer, and see what she could see. And that would be the last time and effort she’d waste on Saloman. Tomorrow, she’d head south and pick up a few more legends.
    A shadow fell across her face. Her eyes flew open and she sat up, shivering. No one stood over her; no vampire threatened to drink her blood; no one dressed up as a vampire threatened to drink her blood. It was just a tiny cloud passing across the sun; yet there’d been an instant, a tiny instant, when she could have sworn she smelled the cool earth and spice scent of the man who’d pretended to be Saloman.

    She had some good pictures of the angels in the crypt. She even had one of the stone sarcophagus.
    Sprawled on her hotel bed with the laptop on the pillow, she blew the sarcophagus picture up as far as she could and stared at it. It was as exquisite as she remembered, a beautiful piece of art with the handsome, expressive face, the lean yet muscular body very similar