Blood on Silk Read Online Free PDF Page B

through her hair. She felt as if she’d just fallen asleep. “Hello?” she croaked.
    “Can we come in?” asked a woman’s voice, but it didn’t sound like the chambermaid. Perhaps this was a different girl.
    Elizabeth glanced at her travel clock—nine o’clock. She was normally up, breakfasted, and out researching by this time. But then, she hadn’t gotten back until midnight.
    “Domnişoară! ”
    “Coming,” Elizabeth mumbled, sitting up and staggering out of bed in one clumsy movement. She grabbed some clean clothes from her open suitcase on her way to the door. Unlocking it, she opened the door a crack before heading back toward the bathroom. “Give me five minutes and I’ll be out of your hair.” That probably didn’t make much sense in Romanian, judging by the girl’s lack of response.
    “Miss Silk? We’re not hotel staff.”
    Elizabeth turned in surprise. Through her half-open bedroom door she could see one woman and two men, young and casually dressed, though not as casually as she was in the thin and ancient T-shirt she wore for sleeping. Clutching her clothes in front of her like a shield, she walked toward her visitors once more.
    “What can I do for you?” she asked, puzzled.
    “We need to talk to you,” said one of the men. He was tall, fair, good-looking in a robust, square sort of a way. He was perhaps her own age, just shy of thirty. “About last night.”
    Her heart seemed to plunge to her toes. “Last night? Oh shit. Dmitriu?” They were the police. She really had run Dmitriu over and just hadn’t seen the body.
    “Dmitriu?” The three exchanged baffled glances, leaving Elizabeth to sway with relief.
    “Sorry,” she said. “It was a bad night. Er—who are you?”
    “My name is Konrad,” the fair man said. “This is Mihaela, and István. May we come in?”
    “I’m not dressed.”
    “We’ll wait outside,” the girl, Mihaela, said.
    Elizabeth, still half asleep and dizzy with relief at not having killed Dmitriu, shut the door on them and went into the bathroom for a quick shower.
    As the cool water hit her, so did understanding.
    By the time she’d pulled on her cotton skirt and top and was dragging the comb through her wet hair, she was sure she knew who her unexpected visitors were and why they were here.
    It had taken her most of the drive back to Bistriƫa before she’d realized the Saloman thing had been a trick. But she’d gotten there in the end, with a weird mixture of relief, guilty shame, and cringing humiliation for having fallen for it and been so damned scared, not to mention turned on. Who’d have thought staid, frigid Elizabeth Silk would have been so aroused by the idea of the undead she’d been studying so clinically for two years? Even now, the memory made her squirm. Thank God no one at St. Andrews would ever know.
    But these people, her morning visitors, must have had something to do with last night. They must have been part of the trick. She wasn’t quite sure what they’d done or how, but she knew it had gone too far. Probably they knew it too, which is why they were here.
    She should have examined them with more care. One of them could be “Saloman.” Involuntarily, she touched her throat, where she’d imagined the vampire bit her. A spooky atmosphere was a wonderful thing. She’d been so sure he’d pierced her skin, drunk her blood, when all he’d done was gum her a little. There was no wound, no pain, just a residual sensitivity. Even she had suffered more bruising before from a love bite. The dried blood that had spattered her neck and her top clearly hadn’t come from there at all but from the annoying thorn wound in her palm, now healing at last—unless it was fake blood from the vampire trickery.
    Oh well, she’d made a complete arse of herself and would have to live with it. Her one hope of retaining a smidgen of self-respect now was to accept their apology with dignity and good humor.
    She threw down the comb and gazed