Chapter 12: Invitation to a Different Kind of Party

February, 1994

The weekend found me in another gown, getting ready to go to another party. Tascha wound up dragging me to not one but three boutiques that apparently catered to the Washington society dames, the staffs of which all fell over themselves in their zeal to outfit me. At the third boutique, Tascha stepped into the store, scanned the room, and smiled. “We are done for the day,” she said with an oddly satisfied tone. “That is your gown.” I looked to where her eyes were locked and simply had to agree. On a rather small mannequin was a scarlet silk gown with gold satin highlights. It was floor length with a high neckline and sleeves that ended in fingerless gloves. I am not a clothes horse and only manage to dress myself well because Eoin’s ex Elizabeth gave me a summer’s worth of lessons on the finer points of being an English lady. Having said that, however, I had to agree. That was my gown.

So an hour’s worth of fittings, and Tascha running out for a few pairs of shoes to try to match the dress later, and I was ready for the party.

Saturday night found me once again awaiting Eoin. The shoes Tascha got me were three inch heels so I was sitting and not pacing. According to Tascha, despite the heels, I would be able to run in the shoes and feeling them as I walked made me agree with her. They were Italian leather the same shade as my dress and more like half boots than shoes as they came up over my ankles with snug support and heels that each had a shank of steel through them. Despite that, they were heavenly. They didn’t pinch my toes and seemed to cup my feet gently in spite of their shape. The gown whispered around me when I moved and hugged my lean frame rather fetchingly. It had a braided cord-like belt the ends of which hung down to my knee from my left hip that was made of scarlet and gold silk that matched the red silk of the gown and the gold satin in the neck, lining of the shoulder cutouts, and the backs of the fingerless gloves. I almost looked like Princess Leia at the beginning of Star Wars, only more sexy glamorous.

And my hair wasn’t in earmuff-like swirls on the sides of my head. Tascha also took me to a hairdresser she knows and the woman cut and styled my hair. Gone was the Farrah Fawcett style. The Polish woman cut about two inches off the back of my hair, making it just about to my shoulders, and trimmed my bangs. She then showed me how to twist my hair up to make a fan of hair with the back and hold it in place with chopsticks. When she was done, I was impressed with both her skill and how good I looked.

So when Eoin came out of his room that night, his eyebrows rose involuntarily and he smiled with surprise. “Wow! Whoever this Tascha is, I want to hire her away from wherever she works to be your stylist,” he said, only half-jokingly. “Elizabeth showed you how to get by dressing yourself. Tascha has brought out your full potential and I am happy to finally see it.”

“Hey! I thought I looked pretty good last time,” I objected with a frown.

Eoin nodded as Ambrose and Edgar laughed. “You did. This time you look like you could be walking down a Hollywood red carpet, my dear. You look exquisite and very ladylike at the same time!”

He, of course, looked dashing as always. Men’s fashion is about as complicated as a paint-by-numbers with only two colors. You have the black shoes, pants, jacket, and bowtie and then you have the white shirt. About the only difference is in the cut and material. Eoin never wore anything other than Armani and so his tux looked great on him. Slightly Bond-ish, as always.

Eoin looked the boys over and they both looked good in their bodyguard chic black suits and black ties. “Very nice, gentlemen. Shall we?” he said, holding out his arm to me.

I will admit to being a little nervous. Not because of the location. Usually once I go through something like that I can deal with the crowd, the setting, and the cameras. No, I was nervous this time because there would be multiple people here who were, like me, not who they were pretending to be. I was curious and anxious about meeting the Exarch (if that was, indeed, who Karl was bring to the dinner) and very, very wary of what Rafael von Feldberg (if he showed up again) would have to say about our mutual problem. And if those two men were there, they might attract others who might want to use a White House dinner as a good place for neutral ground get-togethers between people who would normally kill one another on sight. Needless to say, but my nerves were wound a bit tight and the only weapon I was carrying was a silver-coated asp that collapsed down to something that looked like an industrial-sized lipstick.

Unlike the last dinner, where everyone sort of stuck to their own corners of the room before sitting down to eat, there was a lot more mingling going on that night. I wandered around the room with Edgar at my shoulder and John orbiting us at a distance. While I exchanged pleasantries with a few people I knew from the embassy and those I met at the last dinner while we waited for everyone to show, I was actually looking for one person in particular: Pavel Ustinov. He slipped out early last time and I wanted to make sure I pinned him down before he could do so again.

“We are looking for someone in particular?” Edgar inquired after we parted ways with Sir Robin and Markus Indrek, the assistant to the Russian Ambassador to the U. S.

Just talking to the man, I had a feeling he was a bit more important than a mere assistant, especially if he was drifting about with Sir Robin. “Yes. Pavel Ustinov was the only person in the files Eoin gave me on the Russian negotiating team that I did not like the look of and he managed to duck out last time before I could run him down. I was hoping to do that early so he couldn’t skip out. There is something off about that man and I don’t like that the Russians seem to be going to a fair amount of trouble to keep him hidden. Eoin says the man hasn’t been at a single negotiating session since they started,” I replied as my eyes scanned the room. Which is how I saw Rafael von Feldberg arrive with a talk, leggy blonde in a skin-tight red silk dress with a fairly short skirt on it. “Trouble just arrived.”

Edgar saw them and grunted. “I take it I can’t convince you to avoid him.” He wasn’t really asking. He already knew the answer.

I saw the blonde recognize me and she whispered into Rafael’s ear even as he was talking to Andrey Kozyrev, the Russian Foreign Minister. The Vampire continued talking but I saw his eyes scan the room and land on me. The three of them wandered over to me, continuing their talk.

“Ah, Dame Alice! So nice to run into you again,” Rafael said with a smile, his eyes dancing with mischief. His German accent was almost nonexistent tonight, so he must be trying really hard to blend in as an American businessman for the evening. “Andrey, have you met the charming and rather brilliant Dame Alice Spencer-Killdare? She is the niece of Lord Spencer. Dame Alice, this is Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev. He is one of the men trying to sort out this mess in which our public servants seem to have embroiled us.”

Kozyrev was a handsome man in a cold, Russian sort of way. He was, of course, taller than me with a decent build. He nodded his head to me and said something in Russian that made Rafael laugh. “No, I doubt she speaks Russian yet. Though I understand her German is much better than your English. Correct, Dame Alice?”

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch, Minister Kozyrev?”

“No. We try English, yes?” he said with a thick, thick Russian accent. He apparently understood English better than he spoke it.

“I could always translate,” von Feldberg offered, to which we both glared at him. He raised his hands and the blonde next to him smothered a giggle. “Just a suggestion.”

I looked at the Russian and he looked at me and I could see we had an understanding. Neither one of us trusted the Vampire enough to believe he would translate honestly. “I know ... no, I understand you look for Pavel Ustinov. May I know why?”

I looked at him for a long moment and decided the truth was probably more likely to yield answers. “My uncle gave me the papers he had to prepare for these talks and asked me to go through them and tell him what I thought. Pavel Ustinov was the only person in your delegation that I did not like what I read,” I told him honestly. “I thought if I talked to the man I could put my uneasiness to rest.”

Kozyrev nodded through my explanation until the last sentence when he shook his head. “You find no answers to your enjoyment. Enjoyment? Liking! You find no answers to your liking,” he replied thickly, slowly, as if trying to remember the proper words to go in the proper order. “This mess was, how you say, constructed? Yes, constructed by patrons of Pavel Ustinov. He is here because they insist he come. Why, I know not. He comes not to meetings. He only reads notes taken by secretaries. This mess, and meeting to fix, stupid. No reason to go so slowly when all want same thing.”

As he was talking, I wished I knew whether he knew what von Feldberg was or not. It made formulating my response to him a little hard. Did he know what was standing next to him, and therefore he knew that it was most likely the monsters who had set this whole thing up? Or was he blithely ignorant and simply trying to fix a mess he thought incompetent or agenda-driven humans had created? Halfway through Kozyrev’s reply to my answer I flicked a glance at Rafael and he merely smiled at me, giving me no hint either way.

I was about to answer when I saw a stir at the entrance to the dining room. Madeline Albright entered with two men and President Clinton to flashing of many cameras. One of them was Karl in a black shirt, pants, and jacket with a white clerical collar. The man next to him was dressed the same only his collar was as scarlet as my gown. Both talked with the Secretary of State and the President for a few minutes before heading off to mingle in the crowd, slowly making their way toward me and the three in front of me.

“Ah, I did not know they would be here else I would have brought more of my people,” von Feldberg said with a slightly anxious crease between his eyes. “Did you know they were coming?” he asked in German.

I shrugged. “I was informed someone from the Vatican would be attending but I was not given names. I guessed who it would be, however,” was my reply in the same language. Kozyrev gave us both an odd look before excusing himself and going to speak to his American counterpart.

Rafael grunted and petted the hand that had tightened on his arm. The blonde’s eyes were wide and scared. “Easy, my dear. They will not start anything in the middle of a White House dinner,” he reassured her. Then he looked at me and smiled tightly. “I, however, have not survived as long as I have by hobnobbing with Order warlords. I will try to find a way to speak to you later. If such an opportunity does not avail itself, I will try to arrange an appointment elsewhere sometime early next week. I do have news to discuss with you concerning the matter over which we exchanged information. Enjoy your dinner, Dame Alice.”

Rafael and the blonde left as Karl and the man next to him were about halfway to me. Karl was scowling, his face rather amusing in its ire. It was times like this that I realized he was not really all that much older than me. Probably somewhere in his early to mid thirties, which meant he was very young when he saved me and killed my mother’s murderer.

The man next to him, however, was a tall, leanly muscled man somewhere in his late middle age. He was handsome, with classical Italian features and a pair of oddly black-pupilled eyes that seemed to pierce me as he watched me on his approach. A slight smile curved a sculpted mouth. Both men came to stand before me and Karl nodded to me.

“Alice, allow me to introduce someone who has been wanting to meet you for a long time. This is Exarch Thomas III. Exarch, this is Dame Alice Spencer-Killdare,” the monk said as he introduced us.

The Exarch held out a hand scarred with blade cuts, the pinky of which looked like it had been broken and healed wrong. His heavily calloused hand enfolded mine warmly but firmly. “It is an honor to finally meet someone about whom I have read so much,” he said, his English nearly perfect and accentless, or rather accented with London, which had come to mean accentless to me. His smile widened and those black eyes took on a mischievous cast. “I have to say that you are even more ... petite than I was led to believe, which only makes your exploits even more amazing.”

I wanted to scowl at him but he was a stranger so I scowled at Karl. “What brings you to Washington?” I grated irritably.

Both men held in the chuckles, but I could see them in their faces. “Well, the Exarch needed to visit with the Alexandria headquarters of the Order. The representatives of the Order in the various cities around the world are called Archskopi. They are sort of like the Order’s version of an Archbishop. The Archskopos of Alexandria died shortly before you arrived in Washington or you would have already met him,” Karl explained somewhat pedantically.

Exarch Thomas III grimaced and shook his head. “That we have to explain even that to you shows that Jerome was correct. We have mishandled our relationship with you and for that I apologize. In our defense, I would say that your case has been unusual since before your birth, my dear. It is not often there is a pitched battle in the middle of a U. S. military hospital to announce the birth of a Warrior of God, especially the Left Hand of God. Such people are usually born in out of the way places to simple villagers or farmers. Quite frankly, I can’t recall the last Warrior who was born in a large city,” he told me with an air of complaint. He glanced at Karl with the question in his eyes.

“Louis Joliet? He was born in Quebec. It wasn’t a big city, and he was born on the outskirts, if I recall correctly, but it was a city,” Karl ventured with a shrug.

“And he was probably one of the least powerful Warriors of God we have had in a millennium,” Thomas added. “But you are probably right. You should read the Order’s papers on his companion Marquette. There are similarities between you and him.”

Thomas returned his gaze to me and the skin between his rather fierce eyebrows creased. “I don’t suppose you would tell me why you were talking amiably to one of the most powerful Vampires on this side of the world, would you?” he asked politely, a scowl plain in his voice even though he was able to keep it off his face.

I looked at each of them and then sighed with a shrug. “We have a mutual problem that he was hoping to use this dinner to discuss in a neutral location,” I answered reluctantly. “He saw you and spooked. He said something about not surviving as long as he has by hanging out with Order warlords.” I looked my question about that description at them and they shared a concerned look.

“Nobody knew you were coming, correct?” Karl asked, sounding slightly worried.

The Exarch shook his head. “And I left plenty of security around the White House grounds,” he said soothingly. They saw me watching them with a scowl on my face and both smiled lightly. “Smile, Alice. There are watchers here. Keep on your toes. Others beyond Feldberg might have decided to finagle an invitation to this event. Since you don’t have any weapons on you, run should there be trouble. There will be Order personnel outside and there is a large white van parked down Pennsylvania Avenue with ‘Alexandria Dry Cleaning’ on the side of it on the left as you exit the main gate of the White House. Head for that. Our response team is waiting inside it.”

“Dinner is about to be served and we have to attend the President. Apparently we are the guests of honor for this,” Karl added with a grimace. “The Secretary failed to mention that when she invited us. The Americans are using our arrival to give the negotiation team a night of relaxation. We will talk later in the week. I believe Thomas was going to invite you to the anointing ceremony for the new Archskopos?”