Death''s Mistress

  The two in front were scenting the air, mouths open, looking almost comically like their nickname for a moment. But there was nothing funny about it. Hounds—vamps with an almost uncanny sense of smell—were one of the few creatures who might have a chance at tracking Louis-Cesare through the scentscape of a city.

  Or of picking up the trail of Ray’s other half.

  Almost as though he’d heard me, the lead vamp lifted his head and sniffed, deep. A second later, bright black eyes were staring directly into my own. “Dorina?” Mircea’s voice was a static tickle in my ear.

  “No time.”

  “What is it?”

  “Hounds.” I snapped the phone shut and towed Ray across the roof. The other side overlooked the street, which was empty but wouldn’t stay that way for long. And by the time I maneuvered a stumbling vampire down three flights of steps, they’d be on us.

  It looked like we were going to find out about that abuse thing, after all.

  I waited until I saw them emerge from the club and vanish into our building. They should have left someone in the street, maybe several someones. But there were only three of them, and they had to know by now what I was.

  Occasionally those old legends came in handy.

  “Uh, Ray? The next step’s kind of steep,” I said, and pushed him off the roof.

  He landed on the top of an ancient tan Impala parked along the curb, shattering a window and punching a hole in the top with one leg. That was lucky because I didn’t have time to break in properly. I landed hard on the sidewalk beside him, suppressed a groan when my ankle twisted, stumbled over to the car and yanked him out.

  I looked up to see three furious faces glaring down at us from the roofline. They prepared to jump as Ray rolled off the top and began desperately trying to get the door on his side open. I reached in through the hole and popped the lock on mine, and was about to do the same for him when he busted out the window and slithered through the forest of shards.

  Each to his own.

  I wasn’t exactly unskilled in the fine art of carjacking, even under pressure. But that was with proper tools. I’d brought them along, just in case, but they were in the duffel along with everything else. I mentally added another tick beside Louis-Cesare’s debt as I feverishly worked to get the car started.

  A bullet drilled into the seat just beside my left ear. I pulled my Glock, slammed another clip home and pressed it into Ray’s shaking hands. “Try not to shoot me or the car,” I told him, and crawled under the dashboard.

  The vamps must have landed in a V formation around the car, because the bullets came from three directions at once. Ray returned fire wildly, and from the sound of things, he killed a bag of trash, the windshield of a car across the road and the streetlight overhead. I doubt he so much as winged the vamps, but they nonetheless backed off, waiting for him to run out of ammo. Bullets might not kill them, but no one likes getting shot. And I guess they didn’t think we were going anywhere.

  It was a point of view I was starting to share, as I struggled to strip wires without the proper tools and without electrocuting myself. Then Ray started kicking me. I glanced up and saw him miming needing another clip. I shook my head. “They’re in the damn duffel!”

  He kicked me again, just to be an ass, then began chucking things out of the hole in the roof. The car must have served as one of Chinatown’s infamous tailgate stores during the day, because the back held several cases of knockoff DVDs, fake Gucci handbags and a big box of glass bongs. Ray threw it all, as well as a large portion of the backseat, but it wasn’t enough. A vampire’s fist smashed through the windshield and grabbed him.

  The vamp tried to pull Ray through the shattered window, but I grabbed his waistband and pulled back. Ray’s stylish khakis strained and then split down the middle like stripper wear, leaving each of us holding a leg and him in a pair of red satin boxers with Feeling Lucky? emblazoned across the crotch. “Not really,” I said, and punched the vamp in the face.

  He staggered back, but the two others had figured out that we were out of ammo—of all kinds—and rushed forward. One of them reached through the hole in the top and grabbed Ray, by the arm this time. That left me struggling one-handed to break the lock on the steering column—with a knife, no less—while holding on to Ray by one hairy leg.

  It would have been easier if he hadn’t been struggling like he was afraid he’d end up the same way as his pants. I kept getting kicked in the head, which did nothing for my concentration. And to make bad matters worse, the club doors banged open and more vamps poured out.

  But instead of jumping us, they went for Cheung’s men. It looked like the boss had neglected to order Ray’s boys not to help him, and protecting their master is one of a vamp’s foremost priorities. Not that they were any match for the much more senior vamps, but they did manage to overwhelm one by sheer numbers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the one holding Ray.

  I’d finally gotten the steering wheel unlocked, but I couldn’t start the damn engine and hold on to Ray at the same time. Then someone embedded a tire iron in the vamp’s head, sending him staggering backward. I started the car, and when the master launched himself at the windshield again, I ran him over.

  Of course, that just pissed him off. I saw one of the other vamps run for a dark blue Mercedes coupe parked down the street. And Ray’s boys weren’t going to be able to delay them for long without getting shredded. “Buckle up,” I told Ray, and floored it.

  I concentrated on putting some distance between us and the club, while he rooted around in the glove box. He threw a flashlight out the window, and did the same with a tire gauge. But a ballpoint pen he kept. I skidded around a corner onto Canal Street, and he started jabbing me in the leg with it. Hard.

  “Give me that!” I tried to take it away from him, but he jerked it back and started waving it around. It took me a second to realize that he was making scribbling motions.

  I got this weird idea and started looking for some paper, but there was none to be had. I did come up with an old map of the city, however, in a pocket behind the seat. I gave it to him to doodle on while I did my best to confuse our trail, hoping against hope that he’d manage to circle his missing piece’s location.

  He stabbed at the paper with all the coordination of a two-year-old. He finally proffered his masterpiece when we stopped at a red light. The lines were wobbly and slanting, like a right- handed person trying to communicate with the left. But they were definitely words.

  I snatched it out of his fingers and held it up to the windshield. I HATE YOU.

  “You can write?” I stared at him incredulously. So much for expecting Mircea to give away trade secrets. “Then how about telling me where you are?”

  Ray took the map back and painstakingly crafted another sentence around its margins. I DON’T KNOW!

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? You’ve got to be able to see something! A street sign, the name of a shop, anything!”

  IT’S DARK.

  “What the hell do you mean, it’s dark? You’re a vampire! You see at night!”

  NOT IN A DUFFEL BAG!

  “A duffel with a hole in it,” I reminded him impatiently. “Look around!”

  AND SEE WHAT? I’M IN A TRUNK!

  I frowned. “A car trunk? Are you moving?”

  NO.

  “Give me sounds, then. Smells, anything!”

  THERE’S NO NOISE. AND ALL I SMELL ARE YOUR DIRTY SOCKS.

  Great. There weren’t too many places that would be totally silent to a vampire’s ears, even a somewhat-mangled vampire. So they were in an enclosed garage, probably underground. And Manhattan only had about a thousand of those.

  “Try harder!” I ground out. “We have a week here, remember? Then you and I are both—”

  The car behind us laid on the horn, and Raymond and I simultaneously flipped it off. A second later, the interior of the Impala was strobed with garish light. I glanced in my mirror and confirmed that, yes, we’d just g
iven the finger to a policeman. At least we’re wearing our seat belts, I thought, and hit the gas.

  The cop had gotten out of his car before I took off, giving me a few seconds while he scrambled back into his vehicle. I used it to grab the phone. “You know that assistance you mentioned? This would be a good time,” I said when, miracle of miracles, Mircea actually answered himself.

  “Where are you?”

  “Headed south on Mott. Cop on my tail.”

  “The human police?”

  “Yes!”

  “And this constitutes an emergency?”

  “It does if he draws attention to us,” I hissed, as a dark Mercedes coupe did a 180 and swerved into the street behind the cop.

  I hate being right all the time, I thought, and floored it.

  “I’ll arrange something,” Mircea said, his voice going crisp. “Remain on the line.”

  The cop turned on the siren as I whipped onto Hester, and also took the turn on a dime, while no doubt radioing for backup. And in case I’d had any doubt about who was in the coupe, it stayed glued to the cop’s tail. Mircea finally came back on the phone to give me a complicated set of directions that had me totally lost in less than five minutes, but didn’t do the same to my pursuers.

  “I’m hearing multiple sirens now,” I pointed out.

  “Not for long.”

  Mircea had barely finished speaking when a huge moving van rumbled out of an alley. I managed to squeak by on the sidewalk, sacrificing the front bumper to a fire hydrant, but the cop wasn’t so lucky. He stood on the brakes, judging by the sound, but still plowed straight into the side of it. The coupe rear-ended him and their combined force pushed the truck onto the sidewalk and took out a candy store.

  “If I’d known you were that efficient, I’d have asked for help before,” I told Mircea.

  “You don’t usually require it.” It was mild enough, but it sounded like a rebuke.

  “I don’t usually get mugged by family, either!”

  “Who?” Mircea asked sharply.

  “Radu’s bright-eyed boy. You might have mentioned Louis-Cesare was involved.”

  “I was not informed.” His voice suggested that someone was going to pay dearly for that little lapse.

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” I said tightly.

  “Meaning?”

  “That I don’t think it’s coincidence that three first-level masters from three different Senates all suddenly formed an intense desire to talk to—”

  “Dorina!”

  “—a certain person on the same night. There’s more here than you bothered to tell me.” Not like that was new.

  “It should have been an easy errand. You didn’t need to know.”

  “Oh, no. No, no. That’s not how I work. If I’m going to take someone’s freaking head, I need to know why! You want blind obedience, send one of your boys.” It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why he hadn’t.

  “You do freelance assignments for many people,” Mircea said, before I could ask. “You were not as easily connected with me as one of my own stable.”

  “I hate when you do that,” I told him.

  “Do what?”

  “Answer questions before I ask them. It makes it seem like our conversations are planned out four or five steps ahead, and you’re just waiting for me to catch up.”

  “If that were the case, they would not end in arguments much of the time.”

  “Most of those arguments are because of this kind of thing. Start trusting me with the truth, or use someone else.”

  “I will explain the situation later, if you wish it.” Translation: it’s bad enough that I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. “Did Louis-Cesare mention what his interest was in your errand?”

  “He wasn’t feeling chatty. But probably the same as yours. Whatever that is.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I sincerely hope not,” he said quietly.

  It really is amazing what they can do with their voices, I thought, as gooseflesh broke out over my arms. I couldn’t translate that particular tone, because I’d never heard it before. But it had sounded a lot like: I’d hate to have to kill a member of the family.

  “Come again?”

  “Pull over. My men will locate you and assist with the search.” Translation: I’ll have my loyal minions take over and find Louis-Cesare, because you might not like what I plan to do to him.

  I stared at the phone for a moment. I owed Louis-Cesare a world of hurt, and I fully intended to deliver. But that wasn’t the same thing as throwing him to the lions. This was personal, and until somebody bothered to give me a good reason otherwise, it was going to remain that way.

  “Sorry. I didn’t get that,” I said.

  “Dorina! Pull off and wait for—”

  “I’ll call you back,” I told him, then chucked the phone out the window so he couldn’t use it to track me.

  It looked like we were on our own.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A quick check in the rearview mirror showed that the coupe was back on our tail, with a crumpled front bumper but no other obvious damage. It had also acquired a buddy, a black sedan. It sped past the accident, passed the coupe and was coming up fast.

  Ray flapped a hand frantically at me and held up the map. HE’S AT THE CLUB. I RECOGNIZE THE CARPET.

  “The club? But why would he go back—”

  The sedan rammed us from behind, and it was a hell of a hit. We went spinning into an intersection, barely missed a motorcyclist and didn’t miss a streetlight. Fortunately, the Impala was from the era when cars were built like tanks. Even more fortunately, the light toppled onto the sedan as it tried to follow us onto Leonard Street, and put a mass of white cracks in the windshield. Things were starting to look up until the coupe screeched in behind us, and our front left wheel started going soft.

  I didn’t know if we’d run over some glass or if the tire had just been crappy all along, but either way, we were screwed. A bullet whizzed through the air, like an exclamation point on that thought, and took out my driver’s-side mirror. And Ray stuck the map in front of my face again.

  It was flapping in the breeze, and there wasn’t a lot of light. But even so I managed to see that he’d circled a street five or six blocks ahead. “Read the map,” I told him impatiently. “That’s a dead end.”

  He snatched it back and wrote PORTAL over the top in bold black letters.

  “That doesn’t help! If I stop, they’ll shoot us before we get anywhere near it!” Not to mention that portals give me the creeps, and that’s even when I knew where they went.

  Ray shook a fist at me and stabbed the spot, repeatedly. If he’d had a head, he’d have been screaming it off. “I get it!” I told him, stabbing back with my finger. “But I can’t stop, and cars don’t go through portals!”

  We were rammed again before he could respond, and the pen in his hand went flying. But he really didn’t need it. I didn’t know what our odds were of surviving the portal, but they had to be better than staying here.

  “You better be right about this,” I told him, and swerved hard to the left.

  There aren’t many true dead ends in Manhattan, but this one qualified. On either side were tall buildings and narrow sidewalks, and in front, only more of the same. There was a walkway for pedestrians that cut through to another street, but it didn’t look wide enough for the car. And then it didn’t matter, because Ray wrenched the wheel toward the plywood-covered front of a restaurant.

  We hit going about forty, which doesn’t sound like a lot unless you’re plowing into a wall of wood. The plywood front was apparently real enough, because it splintered and flew everywhere. As did glass, brick and drywall as we hit something fairly substantial on the other side. But there must have been an active portal in there somewhere, because I felt the usual nauseating drop as it caught us.

  I’d never heard of portals being approved for vehicular use, and now I knew why. There was suddenly no road an
ymore, no up or down, no anything but a rushing slur of color and noise and out-of-control momentum. We were tossed down its long gullet, twisted violently around and then hurled out onto a quiet, tree- shaded street. Upside down.

  We hit the ground hard, smashing in what was left of the roof and shattering the remaining windows, before flipping twice. Then something caught on the asphalt, slinging us sideways toward the curb—and the very large, very hard-looking tree just beyond it. I couldn’t do anything—the engine had died, and anyway, there was no time. I braced for impact.

  It didn’t come. Instead, we rode a wave of sparks toward the side of the road, with various metal bits cutting deep gouges into the street. They slowed our momentum somewhat, but we still hit the curb hard enough to tip us over onto one side. We scraped along the gutter like that until the car finally came to a halt. It teetered on the edge for a long moment, while deciding whether to give up the ghost or not. Then it gave a metallic sort of whine and slowly fell back onto all four tires.

  I clutched the steering wheel with nerveless hands, wondering why I wasn’t in a thousand pieces, while the car bounced up and down like a boat on rough seas. I finally swallowed and glanced to the side, to see Ray clinging to the seat next to me. He was clutching it backward, with a leg wrapped around one side, and vibrating from missing head to toe.

  “I told you to buckle up,” I said shakily.

  He’d have probably flipped me off, but that would have required moving, and he and the seat appeared to be welded into one entity. That was a problem, because we weren’t out of the woods yet. If we could use the portal, so could the vamps, as soon as they figured out it was there. And that wouldn’t take them long, since there weren’t too many ways we could have vanished into thin air.

  “Come on, Ray.” I tugged at him, but he was having none of it. He was clinging to the seat like it was a lifeline, his fingers buried deep into the leather cushion. “You know we can’t stay here!”

  Nothing.

  I tried pulling his fingers out of the seat manually, but as soon as I let go of one, plop, back in the seat it went. “It’s like a roller coaster, Ray. If you don’t get out, they make you go again.”