Masks Read online

  Also by Karen Chance

  The Cassie Palmer Series

  Touch the Dark

  Claimed by Shadow

  Embrace the Night

  Curse the Dawn

  Hunt the Moon

  Tempt the Stars

  The Midnight’s Daughter Series

  Midnight’s Daughter

  Death’s Mistress

  Fury’s Kiss

  Masks

  Karen Chance

  InterMix Books, New York

  INTERMIX BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  MASKS

  An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  InterMix eBook edition / March 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Karen Chance.

  Excerpt from Touch the Dark copyright © 2006 by Karen Chance.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

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  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18293-6

  INTERMIX

  InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  INTERMIX® and the “IM” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Karen Chance

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Seven Years Later

  Special Preview of Touch the Dark

  Author Bio

  Chapter One

  There were no dungeons in Venice, but they made do. Mircea sat against the freezing stone wall of a small storeroom, in the home of some condottiere who hadn’t bothered to introduce himself before turning half of Mircea’s face to mush. He had been able to feel the bones shifting under the skin for almost a day, before they finally managed to orient themselves in what he hoped was the right direction.

  That was especially true considering that now was not the time to look weak.

  His ran his eyes over the three figures slumped around the small space. It looked like the paid thugs of Venice’s vampire community had tended to them as well. They were dirty, their hair was matted, and the minimal clothes they’d been left after everything of value had been stripped off them did little to cover signs of rough treatment. If they’d been human, they’d likely have been dead by now.

  Fortunately for them, they’d already taken care of that. Unfortunately, the condottieri didn’t see fit to feed their prisoners, and young vampires are always hungry. Even enough to attack one of their own who is thrown into their cell bloody and beaten.

  They’d fallen on him before he’d made it all the way through the door.

  With three to one odds, it should have been over quickly. But as a professional gambler, Mircea knew that odds didn’t always tell the whole story. And as a former professional soldier, he knew how to fight.

  Unlike the three in question, who had been left to starve until their eyes were gaunt and staring and their flesh was shriveled on their bones.

  So now they sat, a day later, each in his own corner of the small space. Battered and broken, no longer having the strength to heal. And silent, since no one seemed interested in conversation.

  No one except him.

  Every once in a while, Mircea rasped out a question, on the theory that their lousy chances were slightly less lousy together than apart. He even tried different languages because you never knew where someone was from in Venice. Half the population, it sometimes seemed to him, had come from somewhere else.

  But none of his efforts had sparked a response, and after a day, he’d mostly given up. He was now recounting the story of how he came to be in their august company out of sheer pigheadedness. And because he was furious.

  “It never occurred to me that my biggest problem as an undead monster would be money,” he said bitterly. “I hardly even thought about it as a human. I had other worries, many of them. But whatever funds I needed were always there, without question.”

  Nobody said anything. No one even moved. Except for the one who put his head down on his knees in utter boredom.

  Mircea decided he didn’t care.

  “But then I died. And discovered that you do, in fact, need to take it with you! Or you can expect a very unhappy afterlife.”

  He’d been forced to spend most of his money on extortionate bribes just to get to Venice. It was the European vampire community’s only open port, and therefore the only place he could live without violating another vampire’s territory. But once there, it hadn’t proven to be the sanctuary he’d been expecting.
br />   The vampires that washed up on Venice’s beaches like the tide had come to be viewed by the locals as just another industry. The wealthy were fawned over and flattered, and given huge gifts they didn’t need as a way to curry favor with them or their powerful masters. Whereas the poor . . .

  Mircea had quickly discovered that the poor, the unwanted, and the masterless might technically be allowed in in the city, but that didn’t mean they were welcome.

  “Go to Venice, I was told; it’s a free territory.” He laughed. “That word must have a different definition than in my country!”

  Nobody replied, but one of the vampires nodded slightly. Or maybe he was nodding off. Mircea decided to take it as encouragement.

  “They subject us to bribes just to be able to live without constant harassment. Or the fear that someone will open a window one morning, and cook us as we sleep! It’s as if they expect us to give everything we make to them, as if we have no reason to exist but to make them money!”

  And as if he had no other expenses. Yet Mircea had discovered that death was many things, but cheap wasn’t one of them. Especially in the not-remotely-serene republic.

  On top of the bribes, he’d had to buy clothes for himself and his elderly tutor, who had followed him into exile. And then there were the expenses he’d never thought about before, which had always simply appeared as he grew up. Things like candles for his tutor’s fading eyesight. And food, for the man was human and needed sustenance. And a roof over both their heads so that Mircea’s newly cursed body didn’t burn up in daylight.

  “I finally turned to gambling out of desperation,” he told his captive audience. “And discovered to my surprise that it’s much easier with vampire senses. An elevated heartbeat, slightly quickened breathing, heavier than normal perspiration—humans have a thousand tells. I thought I had finally found a way forward.”

  One of the vamps, the same one who had nodded, was already shaking his head. Damned right, Mircea thought savagely. If there was a way forward in this godforsaken city, he had yet to find it.

  “And so we come to last night,” he said viciously. “And the thugs the vampire community employs to harass us. The same thugs I have been paying off for months to turn a blind eye to my activities. You can imagine, then, how surprised I was to see them. Although not as much as when they stole my money, beat me up, and dragged me here!”

  He’d been sitting forward, talking with his hands, but now he sat back against the cold stone again, exhausted. And disgusted. And hungry.

  No, more than hungry. A vampire of his age couldn’t afford to go this long between feedings. Not without paying for it, anyway.

  The pain would start soon.

  And after that . . .

  Mircea swallowed, trying not to think about the days following his Change, which had been via a curse instead of a bite. He’d had no master to tell him anything, including that he needed to feed—and what would happen if he didn’t. He’d spent his first days as a vampire in sick, desperate, aching torment, until the madness overcame him and he’d attacked someone.

  He wondered how long he would last this time.

  “Three weeks,” a slight-built vampire said hoarsely, out of nowhere. It was the one who had been interacting with him, however vaguely. He looked more like a boy than a man, with large gray eyes, scraggly blond-brown hair, and delicate features underneath all the dirt.

  For a moment, Mircea regarded him blankly, confused at the apparent non sequitur. Until he remembered a question he’d asked some time ago. And which he really hoped wasn’t the one the vampire was answering.

  “You’ve been here three weeks?” he asked cautiously.

  He received a nod.

  “And you were . . . fed?”

  The vampire just looked at him.

  Mircea closed his eyes. He was already starving; by tomorrow, he would be ravenous. He couldn’t imagine what he’d be after three weeks. He wasn’t sure he’d still be sane. Or alive, for that matter, since he usually fed twice a day or more. He had the impression that some of his kind had less urgency, but then, most of them had masters to loan them energy in emergencies.

  He didn’t.

  He also didn’t see the point.

  “They bring us here merely to watch us starve?” he asked harshly.

  “No. To make a profit,” one of the others said.

  Mircea opened his eyes to see that it was a sallow brunet who’d spoken this time. In addition to yellowed, shriveled skin and filthy rags, he had been blessed with pock-marks and protuberant front teeth. The latter were visible because he was chewing on his remaining scrap of clothing, a long, dirty, stained camisa. Mircea couldn’t understand why, until he noticed: it had been spattered with a few drops of his blood in the fight.

  Which the creature was now attempting to suck off.

  Mircea swallowed, and tried not to look as horrified as he felt.

  He tried harder not to imagine himself that desperate a week from now.

  God, he had to get out of here.

  The blond nodded, apparently oblivious. “That’s how the condottiere makes most of his money. He gets paid for patrolling the city, but he makes a lot more by collecting fines and selling off anybody that can’t pay.”

  Mircea didn’t bother asking how much the fine was, since his net worth at the moment was zero. And there was a more pressing question. “Selling off?”

  The vamp looked like he thought Mircea might be a little slow. “You know. As slaves?”

  Mircea just stared at him.

  He knew Venice had slaves, of course, of all types and varieties. Ships regularly brought in everything from red-headed Russians to curly-haired Greeks, from bronze-skinned Saracens to Nubian beauties. Most were women and girls, sought after for domestic help and to warm their master’s beds. But there were always a few strong male backs resold to Egypt as soldiers or to the plantations on Crete or Cyprus as workers.

  But that was among the human population. Vampires had their own ways of acquiring the help they needed, and it was far more permanent than any slaver’s chains. Why would a vampire need a slave?

  “Different reasons,” the blond told him, when he asked. “The weaker the master, the worse the slaves he makes. Some prefer to buy them to get better stock. If they end up being useful, they get added to the family.”

  “Or maybe they got a job they don’t want to risk a family member on,” the brunet said, more cynically. “It takes power to make a Child. A slave just takes money.”

  “Or sometimes they need somebody with special skills,” the blond said, ignoring him. “And if they can’t find him among the humans—”

  “And maybe you’re kidding yourself,” the third member of their unholy trio said, speaking for the first time.

  The voice was bitter and jaded, like the face that went with it. The filthy hair was half gray, the jowls were heavy and sagging with late middle age, the eyes had dark circles that turned the swarthy skin almost black, and the nose appeared to have been broken more than once. Like the creature’s spirit, apparently, because he looked resentfully at the hope in his fellow prisoner’s eyes.

  But the blond wasn’t having it. “Convocation’s coming up,” he insisted.

  He was talking about the biannual meeting of the governing bodies that ruled the vampire world. Or failed to rule it as far as Mircea could tell. He hadn’t seen much that resembled governance in the years since he fell asleep a man and woke up a monster.

  “And that matters to us how?” the jaded vampire asked.

  “It’ll bring hundreds of vampires to the city, maybe thousands—”

  “Doesn’t mean any of them will be interested in us.”

  “Doesn’t mean they won’t, either!”

  “Go ahead and believe that,” the older vampire said. “Right up until you’re left standing at the e
nd of the day, leftover again, unwanted again. And they come to slip a stake between your ribs since you’re not worth feeding. Then maybe you’ll learn—we are nothing. We are no one. We have no family, no protector, no guide. Your master made you by accident or threw you away—”

  “He did no such thing! He died—”

  “—then his vampires threw you away. Does it matter? You ended up here because nobody wanted you. And you’ll die here. Just like me.”

  “I’m not like you!” the blond snapped. “I was wanted, but there were too many of us. Without the master’s strength, they couldn’t protect us all—”

  “So they left you to protect yourself. Knowing that if you ventured into someone else’s territory, they’d kill you. And if you made it this far, you’d fall foul of the local constabulary, who are tired of their port being flooded by powerless vermin, and they’d kill you. Either way, they knew what they were sending you to. If they really cared, they’d have slit your throat.”

  “You take that back!”

  “Or what? You’ll kill me?” The older vamp leaned his head back against the wall, baring his neck. “Come on, then. It’s no worse than what they’ve planned for us.”

  “It is worse,” Mircea rasped, and the cynical brown eyes moved to him.

  “Name one way.”

  “It’s stupid.”

  “Oh.” The older vamp smiled slightly. “Another optimistic fool.”

  “No. Just someone who wants to live.”

  “And where there’s life, there’s hope?” the vampire asked sardonically. “Give it up, son. We’re not getting out of here, any of us, except as corpses. The kind that don’t get back up again. And anybody who believes otherwise is—”

  A scream of rusty hinges interrupted the conversation.

  The prisoners jumped, having been too caught up in their discussion to have heard approaching footsteps. And then the door swung inward and the bare, dirt-floored room was inundated with torchlight and filled with the flutter of silks and fans and the gleam of satins, their saturated colors glowing like jewels in the gloom.

  A moment later, still half blinded by the glare, Mircea was jerked off the floor and shoved roughly against the back wall. The others were getting the same treatment, as the soldiers lined them up around him, kicking the blond to make him stand up straight. He unfolded from a hunched position, looking miserable, and Mircea realized why.