might not be able to scent his observers, but he could smell the warm bread and the bloody meat these folk carried, paper-wrapped parcels in string shopping bags. He could scent the bundled violets and roses, wrapped in newspaper against the chill and pressed close to coat-covered bosoms. A gift for a lover, a gift for a wife, a little color to brighten a bare, spare chamber. So many of them had nothing.
So many of them, Sebastien thought, would never have more.
But none of his doubling-back or pretending to crisscrossing errands gave him any clue of who might be watching, and in the end he was forced to admit that either he was merely feeling the effect of nerves, and not pursuit. . .or that he was simply going to have to take his chances with whomever might be observing.
He let the thinning crowd carry him to the street upon which stood the hotel within which Jack had said the prime minister's mistress awaited her lover, and stepped out of the bright-lit thoroughfare.
The radiant globes on their high wrought-iron towers were an advantage to the dark-adapted eye, if one could manage to not be dazzled. For the shadows between were cool and velvet, and a man—or something shaped like a man—in muffling black could vanish into them.
And so, Sebastien turned up his coat collar, stripped off his gloves and secured them in a buttoning pocket, and did exactly that.
When you watched a mortal move, you could see the weight of his or her body in the gestures, the resistance of the muscles against gravity, the way the strength and elasticity of tendon and sinew fought the hungry pull of earth. There was a grave at the end of that struggle, and mortals, however straight and young, eventually bowed under the weight of it.
Sebastien faced no such fate. His body was light and hard and cool, animated not by the transformation of sunlight and soil nutrients and water into energy, nor by the digestion of sustenance in the gut, but by the harvesting of that energy refined and re-refined in its passage up the chain of being. The sunlight that gave green grass strength to grow and flourish was the ultimate source of life in the cow that cropped the grass, and the man that butchered the cow.
And so it was Sebastien's nourishment, he thought, as surely as it was his destruction. Nourishment which he drew with blood from the veins of his court. Pure and refined, concentrated—as the suet was the richest bite of beef, as the fruit was sweetest of the harvest. The blood was only a metaphor.
It was that strength—and the lightness of body of the dead, freed of the weight of the grave by having passed through it—that gave Sebastien the ability to thrust his fingertips into the mortared cracks between the bricks, flex and press until fingertip ridges caught, and rise effortlessly along the hotel's soot-stained facade.
He felt, for the moment, a right bastard of a cliché. Still, despite his chagrin, it was effective.
It was early in the evening, though the winter made sure of the dark, and as he edged around the corner of the building toward a lighted window, he contemplated how long his wait might last. Minutes? Or hours?
Time enough to feel the roughness of mortar and the grit of rain-etched brick under his fingertips, and brood.
Abby Irene, he thought, was here out of complex and primarily noble motivations, rooted deep in her patriotism and personal honor, and her sense of justice: she would see Michael Penfold brought to book if it meant overthrowing a corrupt government to do so. Jack was here because he was young, and young men needed to feel that they were carving their mark on the world in the name of idealism. Phoebe was here because she was not the sort to pass up on adventure, especially if it were the sort of adventure that was generally considered radically inappropriate for women.
Sebastien was here for revenge, though he could pretty it up with Justice's blindfold if he cared to play the hypocrite. The self-absorbed machinations of Duke Richard and Governor Penfold had led to the destruction of a friend. Sebastien. . .was not always of a forgiving disposition.
He might be an eccentric. But he was still of the blood. And he could afford his eccentricities because other wampyr knew the cost of rousing him.
It seemed odd that his height gave him no greater vantage, but the street was