Blood Trade

  “Yeah. And no limos, no armored cars; just ordinary cars right off the car lot. That’s odd.”

  “Or you’ve been spoiled by Leo and his über-rich cronies.”

  Which wasn’t something I wanted to consider, but was a possibility.

  Along the side street, the building boasted three arched openings sized for horse-drawn carts and wagons, solid-looking wooden doors closed over them. An alley ran along the other side, a windowless brick expanse two stories tall, the upper story painted with an old ad for Brown & Williamson Tobacco. The back of the building had only one entrance on the ground floor and it was sealed shut, guards standing to either side, both wearing vests with small sub guns of a make I’d never seen, tucked under their arms.

  Eli murmured a soft curse. “They’re carrying German UMP .45s. Even people with military connections have a hard time getting those, and they cost a fortune. Now you know why there aren’t any limos. They put their money into firepower.”

  I pulled on Beast’s night vision to get a better look. I had seen pics of the UMP on the H&K website. It was a vicious little weapon. Not worth a dang at any distance, but it would chew a body in half at close range.

  Fully automatic weapons were never covered in the constitution’s ruling on citizen militia members owning and carrying guns. They were not used for hunting. They were used for killing sentient beings. Period. Which is why I didn’t carry them, own them, or want them around, despite the number of such weapons Eli owned, and despite how handy they would be against vamps.

  I looked over the guards’ heads to see a second-story door open for fresh air. “I don’t like the fact that there’s only one door open on the ground floor.”

  “I’ll stay by the entrance while you talk business.”

  “And shoot anybody who tries to lock us in.”

  “That’s the idea.” We were both packing silver shot rounds, so shooting a bad guy with fangs meant he’d likely stay down. Shooting a human with anything had the same effect, but I was not here to kill anyone. That was not in the plans.

  Eli parked the SUV one block down, doing a fast parallel parking job but with one front tire on the sidewalk. When I looked my question at him, he said, “Saves us time if we get blocked in and have to jump the curb.”

  I studied the area and realized he had chosen a spot that would let us pull out over the sidewalk and down a side street. I was used to bikes and they were easy to get out of narrow spaces, so I didn’t think about getaway routes as a matter of course. Eli made me think outside my own coffin-sized box. I got out to adjust the weapons on my person, and the smell of vamp hit me like a wrecking ball. I put a hand on the SUV to steady myself and sniffed. A vamp smorgasbord met my nose and I opened my mouth, drawing in air over my tongue. Beast reared up in my mind and sniffed with me, parsing the scents.

  Good vampire smell, Beast thought.

  I grimaced. Not that long ago, Beast had thought vamps smelled like things to hunt. Not so much now that she was chained to Leo—something I had to correct as soon as I figured out how. My new mantra: Get free from Leo.

  I adjusted my weapons, chambering rounds but safety-ing everything. Popping Velcro loops, making sure the blades would slide free, and hearing Eli do the same on the other side of the vehicle. There would be a tug-of-war at the door, Hieronymus’ goons trying to take weapons off me and me not letting them go. I had a statement to make and keeping my weapons was going to be part of that. I wasn’t dressed in vamp-hunting armor, but I wasn’t dressed like a little old lady for Sunday church either. I repositioned the ash and silver stakes in my bun, fanning them out like a deadly halo. I’d had to smash them into the hair on the ride because they kept hitting the top of the SUV.

  This event should be a simple business meeting, but with vamps nothing is ever simple. They were always trying to see who was an alpha predator and who was prey. So this little conference was going to be a dance on a knife blade, poised and balanced, having to prove myself on one side but not going too far and getting myself sucked dry on the other. I was much better at getting myself in trouble than anything else, but no way was I coming across as prey.

  Lastly, I pulled a dirty white handkerchief out of the glove box and tucked it into my décolletage. I saw Eli watching and I said, “Insurance.”

  It was a hanky with Leo’s blood on it. The scent claimed me as his. Bruiser, Leo’s primo, had marked me with it once to keep me safe. I’d been ticked off about it back then. Times had changed. Or maybe I had changed.

  In theory, the MOCs of one city were supposed to respect the life and “property” of another MOC, but it didn’t always work that way in real life. I had no idea if Leo had enemies in the crowd I was about to meet, enemies who would kill me to tick off the blood-sucking fiend I worked for. Come to think of it, Leo likely had enemies everywhere.

  For safety reasons, I had to go in looking like the Enforcer I was, but, technically, I wasn’t here in the capacity of Leo’s Enforcer. I was here outside of that job description and the safeguards it provided, so a little scent reminder of the biggest bad among the Big Bad Vamps might be a good thing.

  “Ready?” Eli asked. I nodded and headed toward the door; Eli fell into step a little behind me at my left. I could hear the roar of voices and the plink of music from inside and smell the vamp scent. It made my nose itch. Ahead of us, two male vamps walked arm in arm, heads together, either chatting or necking—which had a totally different meaning with vamps. The wind swirled and they both slowed, turning to look at us, catching our scents. I saw human-looking eyes widen before the vamps seemed to disappear. Even over the distance I could hear the pop of displaced air as the bloodsuckers achieved super vamp speed.

  “Oops. Most vamps don’t like my scent,” I said as a warning to Eli. “They smell another predator.”

  We kept moving, and three steps later two armed blood-servants rushed out the front door, weapons at the ready. I took a slow breath and felt Eli do the same, though neither of us missed a step or seemed to tense visibly. The humans pointed small submachine guns at us, but we just kept walking. Along the street, the security types moved in, forming a loose half circle near the door. The music from inside went silent. So did the voices.

  “Looks like our cozy couple spread the word that something dangerous is approaching.” Eli said.

  “Afraid so. And here I thought being an invited guest would make it easier.” I could think of four ways to handle this: stop and chat and get strong-armed, shoot them all and likely die in the ensuing firefight, run like my pants were on fire and lose total face, or take them before a fight could even start.

  I drew on Beast and felt her pawing, milking my mind, her claws bringing on a headache. Strength flooded my system with a burst of Beast-adrenaline. My pace didn’t alter, but I smiled—a Beast-type smile, all teeth. I felt her looking out at the world and knew my eyes were doing that weird glow thing they do when she’s close to the surface.

  We reached the door. I acted like the thugs weren’t there and put one foot on the single step. The two guys from inside moved quickly in front of me, close enough to make a wall of their chests and guns. I didn’t slow. I hit out fast, striking one in the side of the neck with my right fist. Pivoted hard. Kicked the other in the left knee. It was so fast and balanced, it worked like a single move. I heard a gag, a pop, and an agonized scream as I pushed between them and they started to fall. I walked into the warehouse-turned-party-room as if I owned it, trusting Eli to make sure I really did. Behind me, the sounds indicated that Eli further incapacitated the men I had taken down, and then started in on the rest of the security. Good thing vamp blood heals their servants’ injuries so well. My booted feet rang on the old wooden floors in the silent room as I left my backup behind.

  I took in the place and the occupants. One big room on the lower level; lots of small tables and chairs. The seating was from various time periods and cultures: long couches in the Roman style; pillows, rugs, and hookahs in the Persian st
yle; some odd seating that must have been African or maybe South American, the chairs low to the ground and carved from dark wood, dished like dough bowls. Weird.

  Vamps in black tie and evening gowns were everywhere. Humans half-frozen in position looked to their masters for orders. From the loft overhead I smelled humans and blood. They had set the blood bar upstairs, with matching spiral wrought-iron staircases on either side and exotic, scantily dressed human blood-slaves at the bottom, like advertisements. The place reeked of vamps and blood and sex and sickness, but the sick stench was elusive, so I figured only a few vamps here had it. The vamps themselves couldn’t smell the disease, which was how it raced through them with such speed. Vamps shared a sick blood meal, and the partakers all became infected.

  As the security detail tried to rush through the front doors and Eli reacted, I spotted Hieronymus against a wall on the lower level, sitting in a big peacock-style chair made of wood inlaid with green and blue mother-of-pearl and paua shells, delicate and beautiful.

  I turned on Beast-speed and darted to him. Stopped fast, my boots sliding for the last few inches on the wood. “I’m Jane.” I flicked a business card into his lap. Behind me were grunts and thumps as thugs and their weapons hit the floor.

  Big H stared at me with eyes that were bleeding slowly vampy. “You profane my presence with weapons and attacks upon my people?”

  “You block the door and meet guests with guns?”

  Hieronymus looked past me at the doorway while I studied him. He was paler than most vamps I’d met, and though his face was unlined, he had probably been older when he was turned than most—maybe forty human years. He wasn’t classically pretty, which was rare in a vamp, and, like in his photographs, his head was totally bald. The only hair I could see was a thin fringe of eyelashes, which hadn’t been present in the pictures I’d studied. He wore a tux, tie, cummerbund, and shirt all in black, and had an ancient copper chain around his neck, over the fancy clothes. Dangling from it, in the middle of his chest, was a sliver of corroded metal shaped vaguely like a toothpick, wrapped with copper wire. It was a peculiar fashion accessory—butt-ugly. It hadn’t been around his neck in any of the photos I’d seen of him.

  The front door slammed shut and I heard something heavy fall. Keeping my host in sight, I risked a glance in that direction and saw Eli standing with his back to the closed and barricaded door, nunchacku in one fist, brass knuckles on the other, and blood on his face and thigh. “Any trouble?” I asked him, letting the words drawl.

  “Negative.” He slammed his weapons into their hidey-holes and drew two handguns, holding them at his sides. He wasn’t even breathing hard. And only because I knew him fairly well could I tell he was having fun. Uncle Sam trained its killers well.

  At his feet, five humans lay, all out cold, and I chuckled at the sight. Their weapons were in a pile in one corner. I shifted my attention back to Hieronymus. Big H sniffed the air once, taking in my scent. He cocked his head as if processing the signature and stared at me for a time that I could measure in my own heartbeats and that lasted way too long. He was doing that dead-as-a-marble-statue thing they do, where they don’t blink or breathe and you just know that in a fractured second they can be on you and drinking dinner. My chest started getting tight, my breath wanting to come too fast. Tension spread into the room like a wave of polluted water. I did not want to have to fight all the vamps in this building, but I could feel their bodies aligning toward me and their eyes boring into me as if picking which pulse points would be the most tasty.

  I didn’t see his heir, Lotus, in the crowd behind him, but it looked like enough of his people had shown up that they could drain and kill us before I could fire off a single shot. Tension skittered up and down my spine like an army of fire ants, and I broke into a hot sweat that the vamps had to be able to smell. I worked at keeping my breathing slow and measured, but much more of this and my knees would be knocking. I decided to go with bravado. “Let’s start over. I’m—”

  “Jane Yellowrock,” he said, reading my card as if he had never heard of me. “Have Stakes, Will Travel. Amusing. This is your motto?” He had an elusive European accent, the kind that likely started a thousand years ago and had undergone dozens of changes as languages transformed and evolved through the following centuries.

  “My mission statement and company slogan. The weapons and the motto are for rogue vamps, Naturaleza vamps, and vamps targeted by the local ruling council as dangerous to their way of life and continued undead health. I’m not a vigilante. Much. I’m a licensed hunter. And as for the little display at the door, why hire me and my team if a few poorly trained human security toughs could take our weapons away? You want to hire the best? You’ve met us.”

  Big H breathed out and leaned back, letting his body lounge against the pretty chair. I remembered to inhale. “You are impertinent,” he said. It wasn’t a question, and it was the truth, so I didn’t reply. I’d been called worse. “You are here with Leonard Pellissier’s acquiescence?”

  “Not exactly. I work on retainer, under contract, like we’re proposing to do.”

  “His Enforcer works on retainer?” It wasn’t exactly a question, more like a stunned recap.

  “The Blood Master of New Orleans, Sedona, Boston, and Seattle, and all of the Southeast except Florida, needs more than one Enforcer. I’m his . . . part-timer.”

  “It is not possible to bind more than one Enforcer,” he said.

  Which was news to me. So I just raised my eyebrows, stared him down, let one corner of my mouth relax in what might charitably be called amusement, and waited. Never admit you’re wrong when silence lies that you’re right. Not that long ago, I’d have felt guilty about letting a falsehood persist. Now I just let it hang. And let my partner beat up humans. And didn’t even think about it. I was so going to hell.

  “Leo released you to work for me.”

  I let my smile rise. “Not only that. His laboratory in Texas came up with a cure for the vamp plague, so you won’t have to keep drinking down humans carrying the antibodies.” Big H sat up slowly, his hands resting on the inlaid chair arms. “I brought a supply with me,” I continued, “and will be giving out the cure to anyone who needs it. If we can come to an accommodation.” Which didn’t exactly say that I had permission to cure someone Leo was ticked off with, but I was going to hell already, so in for a penny, in for a gallon of blood.

  Hieronymus’ eyes bled back to fully human. He lifted his fingers to his neck and stopped, then dropped the hand. As he did, I caught a whiff of the sick scent of the vamp plague. Big H had the disease. “You have this cure with you?”

  “Not on my person, but it’s available to me. Leo is powerful enough to be . . .” I searched for a word and settled on “magnanimous.” Which didn’t actually make him magnanimous, but I didn’t say that. Skirting the truth with a vamp was scary business, because they could often smell a lie and they could always smell nervousness.

  “I will validate our proposed contract, including the changes your legal advisor, Alex Younger, has suggested.”

  I nearly dropped my jaw at the thought of the Kid as a legal advisor. And he had done what with my contract? “Ummm,” I said.

  “You will destroy the Naturaleza who run rampant and wild through my countryside, and I will pay you the agreed-upon price—”

  “Couple questions,” I interrupted. Big H frowned. Master vamps don’t get interrupted often. “How many are there, what steps have you taken to correct the problem, and where do you think they’re hiding?”

  “My Enforcer was killed trying to track them down. Witnesses said he was attacked on all sides by the Naturaleza and torn to shreds. He is mourned and will not be forgotten. My primo, Clark, has all other details.” He waved a negligent hand at a nondescript human man to his left. Clark was a medium guy. Brown and brown, maybe five feet seven, slender, wearing—yes—brown.

  Clark stepped forward, bowed slightly, and handed me a leather folder. “Estimates on
numbers are imprecise,” he said. “Originally we thought less than twenty, but before he was killed, our Enforcer staked four who were later seen on the streets.”

  “Naturaleza are hard to kill,” I said. “Locations?”

  “They have been spotted all over the county and in Vidalia as well. We do not know where they lair.” Lairs were jealously guarded daytime resting places for vamps, so I wasn’t surprised, but it did make my job a lot harder. “If we knew where they were, they would be dead now,” he said, sounding just a bit snippy.

  Big H was clearly done with question time. “I will accept the largesse of my sworn master,” he said, “and the cure he can provide my people. If you also negotiate a parley that repairs the rift between my master and me, I will provide you a generous bonus. The business details you may discuss with Clark at a later time. You will attend me before dawn with this cure.”

  Before I could reply to that order, Big H stood, lifted his arms, and raised his voice. “My people. We have a guest. Meet and speak with Jane Yellowrock, the Enforcer of Leo Pellissier. She brings good tidings from my master and a cure for the plague that infects some few of us. Rejoice and enjoy the festivities.” Some of his people applauded and a number of others moved forward with unseemly haste. Scuttled like bugs was more like it, but I was feeling generous. I figured they were sick vamps needing the cure.

  Hieronymus extended his hand, palm out, holding them back, and passed me a business card. “This is Clark’s contact information. Whatever you need, all assistance we can provide, is yours. And”—he gave me a fangy smile—“we are very generous.”

  “Good to know.” I pocketed the card, in case my electronic genius didn’t have all the contact info already.

  He handed me a microdrive shaped like a shark’s tooth, which was way snazzy. “The dossiers of the Mithrans you have permission to deliver true death to, and descriptions of the ones who were never mine and who are unknown to us, the ones brought by Lucas Vazquez de Allyon, may his soul rot in hell.” Big H dropped his hand, I pocketed the shark’s tooth microdrive, and was surrounded by vamps. Sick vamps. Desperate vamps.