He looked out at the water. “But I thought I’d clean up my front porch a little first. The newspapers have been piling up because no one is living there now.” I had the sinking feeling I knew where this was going. “I was thinking I’d have to call and have the newspaper stopped—and then I read the newspaper. About the man you killed. So I went to Zee and got the full story.”
He looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I stood up deliberately and shook as if my fur was wet.
He smiled again, just a quirk of his lips. “I’m glad you killed him. Wish I’d been there to watch.”
I thought of where he’d been, tortured by Marsilia, and wished I could watch him kill her as well.
I sighed and walked over to him, then put my chin on his knee. We both watched the water flow under the sliver of moon. There were houses nearby, but where we sat it was only us and the river.
9
I LEFT STEFAN FINALLY I NEEDED TO GET UP EARLY TO get back to work, and it might be nice to have some sleep. When I glanced back over my shoulder for a last, concerned look, he was gone. I hoped he hadn’t gone back to his house—that didn’t seem like the smartest place for him to hang out—but he would do as he pleased. He was like me in that way.
The lights were on at home, and I redoubled my pace as soon as I saw them. I dove through the dog door and found Warren pacing in the living room. Medea sat on the back of the couch and watched him with an annoyed look on her face.
“Mercy,” Warren said with relief. “Get changed; get dressed. We’re attending a peace powwow with the vampires, and you were specifically requested.”
I ran into my room and shifted back to human. What with one thing and another, I had a roomful of dirty clothes and nothing more. “We’re talking peace-treaty time?” I asked throwing dirty pants over my shoulder.
“We hope so,” Warren said, following me into the room. “Who shot you?”
“Vampire, no biggie,” I said. “He wasn’t aiming to kill. I don’t even think any of the shot stuck.”
“Nope, but you won’t be happy about sitting down tonight.”
“I’m never happy sitting down when there are vampires around—Stefan usually excepted. What did Marsilia say?”
“She didn’t call us, and we couldn’t get a lot of sense out of the vampire who did. She read a note, then giggled a lot.”
“Lily?” I looked at Warren.
“That’s what Samuel said.” He pulled a shirt off his shoulder, where I must have thrown it, and dropped it on the floor.
“She called him, too?”
He shrugged. “Yes. Marsilia wanted him there, too. No, I don’t know what it’s about, and neither does Adam. However, it’s unlikely that she’s going to annihilate us once we get there. Adam sent me here to bring you when you got back. I think he wanted you dressed, though.”
“Smart aleck,” I told him, hopping into my jeans. I found a decent bra and put that on. I finally found a clean shirt folded in the shirt drawer. I wondered who’d but it there.
It’s not that I’m not neat. In my garage, every tool is exactly where it belongs at the end of the day. Sometimes there’s a little friction when Zee has been in there because he and I have a different idea of where some of the tools should be.
Someday, when time presents itself, I’ll clean my room. Having a roommate forces me to keep the rest of the house reasonably clean. But no one cares about my room, and that puts it pretty far down on my list of to-dos. It’s below, for instance, keeping solvent, saving Amber from Blackwood, and attending the meeting with Marsilia. I’ll almost certainly get to it before I get around to planting a garden, though.
I pulled on the clean shirt. It was dark blue and emblazoned with BOSCH GENUINE GERMAN AUTO PARTS. Not the shirt I’d have picked out to pay a formal call on the Vampire Queen, but I supposed she’d have to take it or leave it. At least it didn’t have any oil stains.
Warren picked up a handful of jeans and unburied my shoes. “Now all you need is socks, and we can go.”
His cell phone rang, and he tossed the shoes at me and answered. “Yes, boss. She’s here and almost dressed.”
Adam’s voice was a little muffled, and he was talking very quietly—but I still heard him. He sounded a little wistful.
“Almost, eh?”
Warren grinned. “Yep. Sorry, boss.”
“Mercy, get a wiggle on,” Adam said in a louder voice. “Marsilia’s holding things up until you’re here—since you were a material part of the recent unrest.”
He hung up.
“I’m wiggling. I’m wiggling,” I muttered, pulling on socks and shoes. I wished I’d had a chance to replace my necklace.
“Your socks don’t match.”
I marched out the door. “Thank you. Since when did you become a fashionista?”
“Since you decided to wear a green sock and a white sock,” he said, following me. “We can take my truck.”
“I have another pair just like it, too,” I said. “Somewhere.” Except I thought I’d thrown out the mate to the green sock last week.
THE WROUGHT-IRON GATES AROUND THE SEETHE WERE open, but the driveway was clogged with cars, so we parked off the gravel driveway. The Spanish-style adobe compound was lit with orangish lantern-style lights that flickered almost like the real thing.
I didn’t know the vampire at the door, and, very unvampirelike, he simply opened the door, and said, “Down the hall to the stairway at the end and downstairs to the bottom.”
I hadn’t remembered there being a stairway at the end of the hall when I’d been here before. Probably because the huge, full-length-and-then-some painting of a Spanish villa had been in front of it instead of leaning against a side wall.
Although we’d entered on the ground floor, the stairway we were on took us down two full flights. I can see in the dark almost as well as a cat, and the stairwell was dark for me—a human would be almost helpless. As we descended, the smell of vampire clogged my nose.
There was a small anteroom with a single vampire—another one I didn’t recognize. I didn’t actually know more than a handful of Marsilia’s vampires by sight. This one had silvery gray hair and a very young-looking face, and was dressed in a traditional black funeral suit. He’d been seated behind a very small table, but as we came down the last three steps, he stood up.
He ignored Warren entirely, and said, “You are Mercedes Thompson.” He wasn’t quite asking a question, but his statement was far from certain. He also had an accent of some sort, but I couldn’t place it.
“Yes,” said Warren shortly.
The vampire opened the door and swept us a short bow.
The room we entered was huge for a house—more a small gymnasium than a room. There were stands of seats—bleachers really, on either side of the long side of the room. Bleachers filled with silent watchers. I hadn’t realized that there were so many vampires in the whole of the Tri-Cities, then I saw that a lot of the people were human—the sheep, I thought, like me.
And in the very center of the room was the huge oak chair festooned with carvings and accented with dull brass. I couldn’t see them, but I knew the brass thorns on the arms of the chair were sharp and dark with old blood ... some of it was mine.
That chair was one of the treasures of the seethe, vampire magic and old magic combined. The vampires used it to determine the truth of whatever poor being had the brass thorns stuck in its hands. It’s gruesomely appropriate that a lot of vampire magic has to do with blood.
The presence of the chair raised my suspicions that this wasn’t to be a negotiation for peace between the vampires and the werewolves. The last time I’d seen that chair, it had been at a trial. It made me nervous, and I wished I knew exactly what the words were that had been used to invite us here.
It was easy to pick out the werewolves—they were standing in front of two rows of empty seats: Adam, Samuel, Darryl and his mate, Aurielle, Mary Jo, Paul, and Alec. I wondered which ones Marsilia had specified and
which were Adam’s choice.
Darryl was the first to notice us because the door was almost as silent as the crowd of vampires. His eyes swept over me from head to toe and for a moment he looked appalled. Then he glanced around the crowd—all the vampires and their menageries were dressed up in their finest, be that ball gown or double-breasted suit. I thought I saw at least one Union army jacket. He looked at my T-shirt, then relaxed and gave me a subtle smile.
It seemed he decided it was okay I hadn’t dressed up to meet the enemy. Adam had been talking rather intently with Samuel (about the upcoming football game, I later found out—we don’t discuss important matters in front of the bad guys) but looked at his second, then looked up as we walked over to him.
“Mercy,” he said, his voice ringing in the room as if it were empty. “Thank goodness. Maybe now we can get some business done.”
“Maybe,” Marsilia said.
She was right behind us. I knew she hadn’t been there a moment ago because Warren jumped when I did. Warren was more wary than I was—no one snuck up on him. Ever. The side effect of being hunted by his own kind for most of his century-and-a-half-long life.
He turned, shoving me behind him, and snarled at her—something he wouldn’t have normally done. All the vampires in the room rose to their feet, and their anticipation of blood was palpable.
Marsilia laughed, a beautiful, ringing laugh that stopped a second before I expected it to, making it more unsettling than her sudden appearance. Her sudden, businesslike appearance. The only other times I’d seen her, she’d worn clothing designed to attract attention to her beauty. This time she wore a business suit. The only concession to femininity was the narrow skirt instead of pants and the rich wine color of the wool.
“Sit,” she said—as if she were talking to a poodle—and the roomful of vampires sat. She never looked away from me.
“How kind of you to make an appearance,” she said, her abyss-dark eyes cold with power.
Only Warren’s warmth allowed me to answer her with anything approaching calm. “How kind of you to issue your invitations in advance, so I could be on time,” I said. Perhaps not wisely—but, hey, she already hated me. I could smell it.
She stared at me a moment. “It makes a joke,” she said.
“It is rude,” I returned, taking a step to the side. If I got her mad enough to attack me, I didn’t want Warren to take the hit.
It was only when I stepped around him that I realized I was meeting her gaze. Stupid. Even Samuel wasn’t proof against the power of her eyes. But I couldn’t look down, not with Adam’s power rising to choke me. I wasn’t just a coyote here, I was the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack’s mate—because he said so, and because I said so.
If I looked down, I was acknowledging her superiority, and I wouldn’t do that. So I met her eyes, and she chose to allow me to do so.
She lowered her eyelids, not so far as to lose our informal staring contest, but to veil her expression. “I think,” she said in a voice so soft that only Warren and I heard her, “I think that had we met at a different place and time, I could have liked you.” She smiled, her fangs showing. “Or killed you.”
“Enough games,” she said, louder. “Call him for me.”
I froze. That’s why she wanted me. She wanted Stefan back. For a moment all I could see was the blackened dead thing that she’d dropped in my living room. I remembered how long it had taken me to realize who it was.
She’d done that to him—and now she wanted him back. Not if I could help it.
Adam hadn’t moved from where he’d been standing, telling the room he trusted me to take care of myself. I wasn’t sure he really thought so—I knew I didn’t—but he needed me to stand on my own two feet. “Call whom?” he asked.
She smiled at him without looking away from me. “Didn’t you know? Your mate belongs to Stefan.”
He laughed, an oddly happy sound in this dirge-shadowed room. It was a good excuse to turn my back on Marsilia and quit playing the stare game. Turning my back meant that I didn’t lose—only that the contest was over.
I tried not to let the sick fear I felt show on my face. I tried to be what Adam—and Stefan—needed me to be.
“Like a coyote, Mercy is adaptable,” Adam told Marsilia. “She belongs to whom she decides. She belongs everywhere she wants to, for just as long as she wants to.” He made it sound like a good thing. Then he said, “I thought this was about preventing war.”
“It is,” said Marsilia. “Call Stefan.”
I lifted my chin and glanced at her over my shoulder. “Stefan is my friend,” I told her. “I won’t bring him to his execution.”
“Admirable,” she told me briskly. “But your concern is misplaced. I can promise that he won’t be hurt physically by me or by mine tonight.”
I slanted a glance at Warren, and he nodded. Vampires might be hard to read, but he was better at sensing lies than I was, and his nose agreed with mine: she was being truthful.
“Or hold him here,” I said.
The smell of her hatred had died away, and I couldn’t tell anything about how she felt. “Or hold him here,” she agreed. “Witness!”
“Witnessed,” said the vampires. All of them. All at exactly the same time. Like puppets, only creepier.
She waited. Finally, she said, “I mean him no harm.”
I thought of earlier tonight, when he’d turned down Bernard even though I was pretty sure he agreed with Bernard’s assessment of her continued rule of the seethe. In the end, he loved her more than he loved his seethe, his menagerie of sheep, or his own life.
“You harm him by your continued existence,” I told her, as quietly as I could. And she flinched.
I thought about that flinch ... and about the way she’d let him live even though he, of all her vampires, had reason to see her dead—and had the means to do so. Maybe Stefan wasn’t the only one who loved.
It hadn’t kept her from torturing him, though.
I closed my eyes, trusting Warren, trusting Adam to keep me safe. I only wished I could keep Stefan safe. But I knew what he would want me to do.
Stefan, I called, just as I had earlier—because I knew he would want me to. Surely he knew where I was calling from and would come ready to protect himself.
Nothing happened. No Stefan.
I looked toward Marsilia and shrugged. “I called,” I told her. “But he doesn’t have to come when I call.”
It didn’t seem to bother her. She just nodded—a surprisingly businesslike gesture from a woman who would have looked more at home in a Renaissance gown of silk and jewels than she did in her modern suit.
“Then I call this meeting to order,” she said, strolling to the old thronelike chair in the center of the room. “First, I would call Bernard to the chair.”
He came, reluctant and stiff. I recognized the pattern of his movement—he looked like a wolf called against his will. I knew he wasn’t of her making, but she had power over him just the same. He was still wearing the clothes I’d last seen him in. The harsh overhead fluorescent lights glinted off the small balding spot on the top of his head.
He sat unwillingly.
“Here, caro, let me help.” Marsilia took each hand and impaled it on the upthrust brass thorns. He fought. I could see it in the grimness of his face and the tenseness of his muscles. I couldn’t see that it cost Marsilia anything at all to keep him under her control.
“You’ve been naughty, no?” she asked. “Disloyal.”
“I have not been disloyal to the seethe,” he gritted out.
“Truth,” said a boy’s voice.
The Wizard himself. I hadn’t seen him—though I’d looked. His light gold hair had been trimmed close to his skull. He had a vague smile on his face as he strolled down from the top of the bleachers across from us. He used the bleacher seats as stairs.
He looked like a young high school student. He’d died before his features had had a chance to grow into maturity. He looked soft
and young.
Marsilia smiled when she saw him. He hopped over the last three seats and landed lightly on the hardwood floor. She was shorter than he was, but the kiss he gave her made my stomach hurt. I knew he was hundreds of years old, but it didn’t matter—because he looked like a kid.
He stepped back and reached out a finger and ran it over Bernard’s hand and down to the chair arm. When he picked it up it dripped blood. He licked it off slowly, letting a few drops roll down the palm of his hand, over his wrist, until it stained the light green sleeves of his dress shirt.
I wondered who he was performing for. Surely the vampires wouldn’t be bothered by his licking blood—and I was sort of right but mostly wrong. Bothered might not be the word, but there was a generalized motion from the stands as vampires leaned forward and some of them even licked their lips.
Ugh.
“You have betrayed me, haven’t you, Bernard?” Marsilia was still looking at Wulfe, and he held out his hand. She took it and traced the drying blood, letting her mouth linger over his wrist while Bernard quivered, trying not to answer the question.
“I have not betrayed the seethe,” Bernard said again. And though she grilled him for ten minutes or more, that was all he would say.
Stefan appeared beside me. His eyes were on the sleeve of his white dress shirt as he casually fixed a cuff link, then he pulled the sleeve of his subtly pin-striped gray suit over it with a just-right tug. He looked at me, and Marsilia looked at him.
She waved her hand at Bernard. “Get up—Wuife, put him somewhere obvious, would you?”
Shaking and stumbling, Bernard rose, his hands dripping on the pale floor all the way to the stands, where Wulfe cleared out space on the bottom tier of seats for them both. He began cleaning Bernard’s hands, like a cat licking ice cream.
Stefan didn’t say anything, just ran his eyes over me in a quick survey. Then he looked at Adam, who nodded regally back, though he smiled a little, and I realized that he and Stefan were wearing the same thing, except that Adam wore a dark blue shirt.
Mary Jo saw the resemblance and grinned. She turned to say something to Paul, I thought, when a surprised look came over her face, and she just dropped. Alec caught her before she hit the floor as if this wasn’t the first time she’d done something like that. Leftovers from the close brush with death, I hoped, not something the vampires were doing.