Free The White City by Elizabeth Bear Page A

the irony of it. One of the blood could enter a hotel room with impunity—whatever mystic authority regulated the restrictions on their power did not consider a lodging to be a dwelling place—but a mortal policeman must wait to be invited.
    Human rights , he thought, smiling. “Of course. Would you like some tea?”
    “Please.” Dyachenko shut the door behind him. His other mitten came off and he stuffed them both into the square patch pocket on his coat. He came up to the dresser to warm his hands before the samovar. It was small of its kind, the coal burner no bigger around than a muskmelon, enamel glistening oil-thick and jewel-deep over chased brass. Phoebe had found it in a secondhand shop, and it kept the Englishwoman and the Bostonian in tea quite nicely.
    “We’ve identified the victim,” Dyachenko said, as Sebastien relieved him of his coat and went to fetch another glass and holder. “Olesia Valentinova Sharankova. She was an art dealer and apparently a good friend of Irina Stephanova’s. Did you know her?”
    The name conjured no face, voice, or scent to Sebastien’s awareness. He shook his head, pouring concentrated hot tea into the bottom of the glass and handing it to Dyachenko along with a spoon, to dilute to his taste. Jam and sugar cubes stood on the tray beside the samovar, and Sebastien reasoned that Dyachenko could figure out what to do with them.
    He withdrew. “Perhaps Irina made her acquaintance after we parted company.”
    “Mmm.” Dyachenko turned to the ladies as he finished doctoring his glass. “Would either of you care for fresh tea?”
    “Thank you,” Phoebe said. “Inspector, your English is excellent. May I ask where you studied?”
    She held up her glass by the silver handle. He came to relieve her of it. “The University College Dublin.”
    Abby Irene’s eyebrows rose.
    Returning the glass to Phoebe, Dyachenko said, “My parents are quite bourgeoisie.”
    Abby Irene laughed in recognition, and, shaking her head, looked down. Dyachenko smiled at her benevolently. “Ah, I see you know the type.”
    He set his tea on the table so bits of strawberry seed swirling through cloudy amber fluid caught the lamplight, then settled down behind it. His fingers dipped into his waistcoat pocket and came up pinching something round and silver. He laid it on the table by Abby Irene’s hand. “Do you recognize this?”
    She made a face and produced a silk handkerchief from her bodice, handling the ring only through it. “I wish you hadn’t touched that. You will have disturbed the elements of contagion.”
    “I am sorry,” Dyachenko said. “I am not used to working with sorcerers. But you do know what it is, don’t you?”
    She studied the stone for a moment, head bent, turning it this way and that. Her expression registered surprise. She handed the handkerchief and the ring wordlessly to Phoebe, who repeated the performance almost identically.
    “It’s a wampyr courtesan’s ring,” Abby Irene said. “But that’s not all.”
    Abby Irene turned her hand to display the flat silver band bezel-set with a red trillion-cut garnet that decorated her own finger. Phoebe lifted Dyachenko’s ring beside it. They were superficially identical, but the new band was larger and broader, and the stone set in it was oblong in shape and a brilliant, saturated violet-blue.
    “Sapphire?” Sebastien hazarded. That had been the stone of preference of one of his own offspring, Epaphras Bull, dead now in Boston in Sebastien’s stead—but Epaphras had used a cloudy cat’s-eye stone, not this pellucid azure.
    “Close.” Phoebe rotated the ring and the stone’s color faded to limpid clarity, as if by magic.
    “ Water sapphire,” Sebastien corrected himself.
    “Dichroite,” Dyachenko said.
    Abby Irene nodded. “Also called iolite . It’s usually from Sweden or Connecticut, and notable because it functions as a natural polarizing filter. It has any number of thaumaturgic properties and