One With the Darkness (3 page)

Donnatella sat there, stunned. She couldn’t think. A time machine? If so, it was one that confused even the grand intellect of the one who made it. The possibilities thrilled through her. Could going back change what happened? If she changed what happened, couldn’t it have some unintended consequences? How could one possibly risk that? She took a sharp breath. What if Gian had never been born? Could she bear that? What if making Jergan vampire made
him unable to father Gian? She’d often thought the only reason she conceived was that Jergan was human. She found her throat constricting at the thought.

But no. She’d conceived Gian before Jergan was wounded. If she made Jergan vampire at the moment he was close to dying and not a moment before, she’d still have her son.

She leafed through the pages of the journal. Lord God in heaven. Was this possible? Complicated drawings, long blotted passages containing theoretical explanations of the vortex of time, records of Leonardo’s useless attempts to find enough energy to power the machine, all flipped past her. She stopped and read a few passages. She was doing it only to delay the moment of decision.

And why? She knew what she would do here. Once she had been too timid to break the Rules and grab for the prize. Now she was willing to risk everything, everything but Gian.

Her heart thudded in her chest as she rose from the table and stared up at the great machine. Did her Companion have enough power to run it? She had fed recently and translocated only once tonight. But who could know? She might just test the theory—pull back if she got some initial result. But she wouldn’t. What if timidity ruined everything as it had so long ago? What if she drained herself in an experiment, making the real effort impossible?

It was all or nothing.

She swallowed, her eyes filling for the second time tonight.

The handle of the machine was a brass lever about two feet long and topped by a glowing jewel. She reached out for it. The great diamond fitted her palm exactly.

She pulled. There was a creak, but nothing else changed.

“Companion,” she called on her other half out loud in
the wavering lamplight. A surge of power shot up her veins. A red film fell over her field of vision. Above her, the early-morning light would be filtering into the nave of Il Duomo. The priests would be moving quietly about, tending the votive candles or kneeling in prayer. The machine was still.

“Companion! More!” The whirling black vortex of translocation began to swirl around her feet. She couldn’t allow that. She pushed it down but kept the power humming in the air. There was a great grinding sound, and the largest of the metal cogs in front of her began to move. Still she called the power from the parasite in her blood that was part of her and more than her. A white glow formed a halo around her. Every detail of the cavern stood out, sharp-edged. The movement of the gears cascaded down from the great, cogged wheel to the hundred smaller ones. The jewels sparkled. Gears whirled ever faster until the eye could not follow them.

“More!” she shrieked into the hum that cycled up the scale, and lifted her arms in supplication. Her Companion was at its limit. Was that enough?

Nothing more was happening. The machine was faint behind the white glow. Her body stretched itself taut with effort. What now? She couldn’t hold this level of power forever.

Ahhhh. The destination.

She thought of the moment she had almost decided to make Jergan vampire. Emotion poured through her as she stared at his wounds, not knowing if he would survive them. She could feel the machine move even faster. It was just a blur beyond the corona of her power. And then it slowed. From somewhere outside herself she saw her body standing, glowing, in front of the great machine as it creaked almost to a halt, it moved so slowly. Had she
failed? The power still poured from her body into the room. A feeling of incredible
tristesse
came over her. She would not win through. Her only hope of happiness, or of giving Jergan his own forever, faded.

It was only luck that she had met him at all. Her friend Titus had talked her into buying a slave as bodyguard. Poor Titus….

Everything snapped back to motion and she felt herself being flung like a stone in a slingshot into more and more speed. The jewels lit up. They magnified the power into colored beams that crisscrossed, swinging in arcs across the stone ceiling. Pain surged into every fiber of her body.

Then, blackness.

2

D
ONNATELLA LAY WITH
her cheek against cold stone, aching in every joint.

She opened her eyes. They wouldn’t focus. She blinked several times, but it did no good. It was dark, though normally that didn’t hinder her. What was that smell?

She pushed herself up, fighting nausea. Had Leonardo’s wonderful machine done what it was made to do?
Breathe
, she told herself. Air rushed into her lungs in desperate gasps.

The place smelled like a charnel house. The room wavered into focus. The dull gleam of the great machine loomed above her. She blinked again. The giant gear creaked to a stop. The smaller gears slowed. Where was she? In the dimness behind the machine she saw the niches of a catacomb. She thought for a moment she had just transported a few feet into the maze under the Baptistery without changing times at all. But these bodies were only a few years dead at most, thus the smell of putrefaction. Crucifixes were clutched in moldering hands. Flesh still clung to bones.

These catacombs were still being used. Where were the narrow confines of the subterranean passages underneath Taurus’s arena? That was what she had been thinking of….

But she hadn’t thought about the moment she had planned. She stumbled to her feet. She had thought, right at that last incredible moment, of the day she met Jergan.

That was, what, a week before the day she failed to make the right decision? It didn’t matter. She would just make him vampire immediately and return to the machine and her own time. But maybe these were the Baptistery catacombs of Florence at a time when they were new. Had she changed times but not places? If she was in Florence, she had a journey of a week or more to Rome ahead of her to get Jergan, and back again. … The machine would surely be gone by the time she returned.

Then there was no time to be lost. She stumbled away from the giant machine and felt along the walls until her hand touched the cold, mushy surface of putrefying flesh, still moving with the maggots that spawned in it. She jerked her hand back and stared into the darkness. The squeak of rats was plain. She picked her way down the corridor, keeping her hands to herself until she stumbled against something. Stairs. She looked up. There was a line of very faint light in the darkness above her. She headed upward.

A great stone door stood slightly ajar, letting in moonlight filtered through something. She pushed on the stone. It creaked open, resisting, revealing a garden bright with the light of a full moon. The doorway was cut into a rock wall and covered with a thick mat of trailing wisteria vine. Now the vine was rolled aside like a cascade of hair. She was not in Florence.

This was her garden in Rome. Lord, she had forgotten how beautiful it was with the sundial, telling no hour at the moment, and the carefully tended beds of herbs, the olive trees. Not much was blooming. It had been January when she bought Jergan. The wisteria kept its leaves, but no purple flowers floated like shed tears upon the walkway. The
garden was empty, the gardeners who worked in daylight long retired. She turned to the house. Her house. Her name had been Livia Quintus Lucellus then. And this house was the center of her effort to ease Rome back into a republic. Impossible as that had turned out to be. Of course a woman could have no public power. She could not hold office, and office was everything in Rome. She could not vote. She had power only through a man: husband, father, brother. But Livia had always thought on a larger scale. She gathered power through many men. Most of the senatorial class came to her audience room to consult her, unofficially of course. But her name had the power of her wisdom and her cunning behind it, and was whispered in the corridors of the Forum.

She moved silently toward the house, keeping to the shadows. Wonderful Leonardo. She had a chance to rectify her horrible mistake. Ahead, servants were tending braziers in the house, which was open to the elements inside its courtyard walls. She looked down. Her everyday dress made in 1821 and sturdy half boots seemed out of place here. But perhaps she was invisible to those who lived in this time. What would happen if she ran into herself as she had been? This might be the night after she met Jergan. If so, he would already be in the house somewhere. Her stomach did a little somersault of anticipation.

Then she frowned. This wouldn’t be so simple. She couldn’t just make Jergan vampire immediately. That act must be consensual—otherwise it was a violation worse than rape. She’d have to wait until he knew what she was, got over his horror, if that was even possible, and perhaps felt something for her. That would never happen before the machine returned to 1821.

So she must wait, use his wounds in the arena a week hence as an excuse as she had planned, and hope he
would forgive her. What if he resented being vampire so much he ended in hating her for what she’d done?

She stood, wavering, in the garden. What a tangle. She took a breath. Well, maybe she could tell him what she was earlier than she had the last time she’d lived through this. Maybe she could tell him that she loved him sooner. Perhaps that would allow his acceptance when she’d finally did the deed. She certainly wasn’t going back down those stairs to Leonardo’s machine and run home to her own time without even trying to get what she came for.

Ahead she heard voices. She slid through the columns onto the marble floor patterned with deep green and white triangles arranged in circles and ringed in rose-tinted stone. She had always loved that floor. Several senators were being escorted out the front door.

One voice was familiar. Titus Delanus Andronicus, always a trusted advisor. “You should buy bodyguards, Livia. Good, strong backs who can wield a sword and are broken for the arena.”

“I can take care of myself, Titus.” Was that her? Did she really sound like that?

“But that is just the problem. Gaius has arranged two attacks, and twice you have eluded death, even though you spurn a retinue. I don’t know how you survived. Neither does anyone else. And they are starting to wonder. You can’t afford curiosity.”

“True.” He didn’t know how true. She hated having to bow to convention. But she least of anyone could afford close scrutiny of her actions, not only because she plotted against Gaius Caesar, but also because if they found out that she was as strong as any ten men and could dispatch her attackers single-handed … well, they couldn’t kill her, but her life in Rome would be over, and her plot to rid Rome of Gaius a failure. She heard herself sigh. “You Romans find
all your slaves about you a comfort. You dislike being alone. But I am from Dacia, and those are not my ways.”

Dacia was the Roman province that included what was, in 1821, called Transylvania, though Rome held no sway high in the Carpathian Mountains where she had been born. There only the Council of Elders ruled.

“Well, then buy one well-broken, brawny brute who knows he will be killed most painfully if you die. That will motivate him to protect you. And it will still the wagging tongues.”

Donnatella could now see Titus, the white toga of a Roman citizen bordered with the rich purple band of the senatorial class and embroidered with the pattern of his family. Now where was Livia? She meant, where was
she?
Or at least the she of long ago. How disconcerting …

“I dislike brutes who know only how to shed blood.” The voice that must be hers was almost petulant. The conversation was all coming back to her now.

Titus threw up his hands. “Then train him as a body slave and have your pleasure of him as well. I don’t care, Livia. But get some protection whether you need it or not. I know you dislike the sunlight. Let me accompany you to the night market.”

Dear Titus had always respected her privacy. He did not ask her too many questions about how she had survived the attacks. And of course, he had been right about needing a slave as camouflage. Donnatella moved closer and edged around a column. Had Titus known more about her than he let on?

“Very well, Titus. I am putty in your hands,” the earlier her sighed.

Titus laughed. “Quite the opposite, my beautiful witch,”
he said. “You have all of us old men under a spell, I am certain.”

Donnatella peered around the column.

There she was, her former self, hair piled in intricate knots of shining black, a flowing
stola
, a tunic sort of thing, made of fine red wool embroidered with gold hanging from one shoulder, fastened with a jeweled broach and bound at the waist with a girdle of golden mesh. The face was the image her mirror had shown her for two thousand years and yet it startled her. Her skin was fine, of palest olive, her eyes dark, expressive pools fringed by long dark lashes and slanted slightly. Her lips were full and she had prominent cheekbones. The whole effect was slightly exotic, not quite Roman. Her
palla
wrapped around her petite, almost delicate form, giving the
stola
shape. She felt the energy vibrating around her former self. Donnatella vibrated in sympathy.

And then the vibrations in the air cycled up until they were almost painful. The woman who was herself turned, eyes wide in shock. Their eyes locked. Vibrations rocked Donnatella. She felt as though she was disintegrating. She stepped forward into the room, pulled, sucked almost, toward Livia. Shrieking, Donnatella clutched her belly. And then she was hurtling toward the form of Livia, a mist, disintegrated into a million, million tiny pieces.

And then nothing.

L
IVIA HAD THE
oddest feeling she was being watched. Her Companion itched in her veins, though she had just fed. She couldn’t be hungry. “Very well, Titus, I am putty in your hands.”