Death''s Mistress

  I didn’t intend to end up drunk in a seedy dive. It was pretty cliché, after all, but there are times when the only response to life’s little jokes is to get hammered. And if this wasn’t the greatest joke ever, I didn’t know what was.

  There’s a bar downtown that’s so well-known to the regulars that it doesn’t need a sign. Just as well, since it’s named after the owner and there was no way that many syllables would fit. I left Ray’s body in the back of the car, because if Cheung found it here, good luck to him. The garage was guarded by a couple of demons who really loved thieves—preferably seared with a shot of tequila.

  I took the duffel in with me. After everything I’d been through to get it, there was no way it was leaving my sight. Possibly ever.

  I grabbed my usual booth in the back, under a suspended TV that flickered blue light across the tabletop. It was showing one of the telenovelas the bartender loved. He wandered over after a minute and put down my usual, beer. “Nice dress.”

  “The reserve, Leo,” I told him, scowling. There was nothing on the regular menu that was going to give me the burn I needed.

  The shaggy eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say anything, just took the bottle away and shambled into the back.

  Claire was going to be worried. It was going on sixteen hours since I’d left the house, and I needed to call her. I also needed to get the ball rolling with Elyas, or at least make the attempt. But I didn’t want to do either. I didn’t want to think at all. I wanted to keep drinking until I was so staggeringly smashed that I couldn’t remember how stupid I’d been.

  But I wasn’t sure Leo had that much in stock.

  He returned and sat a small blue bottle on the table in front of me. I drank the contents straight, keeping pace for three shots with the cigarettes a guy at the bar was chain-smoking, until I started to feel the burn. Then I slowed down and stared at the TV without seeing it.

  It was just the novelty of it, I told myself. A vampire who didn’t act like I might go for his throat at any minute was a new experience, much less one who talked to me like a person, who held me like I might be fragile and who bought me silly, soft clothing, like he wanted to know how it felt against my skin. . . .

  I decided the whole not-thinking thing had been the best plan, after all.

  Another inch gone and the glass hit the table, tipped and rolled off the edge. Leo slid into the opposite seat. “Want to talk about it?”

  “No. Want to get wasted.” I started to retrieve my errant glass, but succeeded only in hitting my forehead on the very hard tabletop.

  “I think you’re already there,” he told me, and pushed my hair out of my eyes. His face was craggy and scarred, but his mouth was soft, the eyes assessing my condition without judgment. “If you were anyone else, I’d say it was man trouble.”

  “He’s not a man.” Not anymore.

  Leo raised those caterpillar eyebrows. “Some Weres can be very nice.”

  “Not Were, either.” I took a drink straight from the bottle and wondered why I hadn’t gone home to get shit-faced. Oh, yeah. I hadn’t wanted to drive that far.

  “You’re dating a demon?” He leaned forward. “What kind? And don’t tell me it’s one of those damn incubi. They get all the pretty girls.”

  Leo was only the first part of a half-hour-long name, but it fit. His type of demon has vaguely leonine features, and he always wore his sandy blond hair long. Like all bartenders, he could be damn talkative, although usually he had more tact than this.

  “Just drop it, Leo.”

  “I knew it. It is an incubus. Useless damn things—”

  I slammed down the bottle. “It’s not a demon, okay? And can I please get drunk in peace?”

  “Not a—Oh, no.” He looked shocked. “You’re not dating a fey. You can’t trust those bastards, Dory. Ask anybody.”

  “Just because they overcharge you for your supply—”

  “It’s price-gouging,” he said resentfully. “They know nobody but fey can make the stuff, so they set the price as whatever they want and we damn well have to pay! You don’t want to have dealings with them.”

  “Funny thing—they say the same about demons. And he’s not fey.”

  Leo wrinkled his massive forehead. “Not human, Were, demon or fey? What’s left?”

  “Hey, once you go vamp, you never go back,” Ray said from the depths of the duffel.

  Leo jumped. “What the—”

  Something buzzed against my hip. It was my phone, wedged up against me inside the duffel bag. I almost didn’t answer it, but it was Mircea, and I was going to have to talk to him sooner or later. Considering how that usually went when I was sober, I decided to try it drunk for once.

  “You’re dating a vampire?” Leo asked, looking shocked.

  “No, just boinking,” Ray told him.

  “I’m not—That’s not even a word,” I told him, and hit TALK.

  “Dorina?” Mircea wasn’t putting so much effort into the dulcet tones this time, I noticed.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Downtown. Leolintricallus—something or other. It goes on for a while.”

  “We get an additional syllable for every century we live,” Leo said, frowning. “Although I never thought I’d live long enough to see this. What the heaven were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “That’s clear enough!”

  Great. The only thing worse than falling for a vamp would be having Leo tell everyone I’d fallen for a vamp. “Look, Leo, it’s not what you—”

  “Dorina!” Mircea’s voice snapped.

  “You sound annoyed.”

  “It would not be without cause!”

  “What now?” I asked wearily.

  “Point number one,” he said grimly.

  “Wait. There are points?”

  “You do not tell me you are being chased by Hounds, and that you will call me back and then fail to do so! You have not answered your telephone for the majority of the evening!”

  “I didn’t have it for the majority of the—”

  “Point number two: you have free access to my properties, but I would very much appreciate it if in future my bedrooms were off-limits!”

  “Woah. You did the boinking in your dad’s bedroom?” Leo looked vaguely impressed.

  “Stop eavesdropping!”

  “Are you kidding me? Your life is way better than anything on the soaps lately.”

  “Dorina.” It sounded like Mircea might be grinding his teeth.

  “Is there a point number three?” I asked. “Because you’re interfering with my drinking here.”

  “Yes. If it will not inconvenience you too greatly, I should like to speak to Louis-Cesare.”

  “Sorry. You missed him.”

  “And yet Horatiu tells me he recently left tracking you.”

  “Tracking?” I asked, getting a sinking feeling.

  I jerked open the duffel, and there it was, buzzing softly. I stared at it for a moment in disbelief. He’d tagged me. The son of a bitch had tagged me with my own damn charm.

  “I’m going to have to call you back,” I said grimly, clicked the phone shut and jumped up—only to find myself staring into a pair of burning blue eyes.

  “Uh-oh,” Ray muttered.

  Louis-Cesare didn’t say anything, unless you count breathing heavily.

  “Look, this isn’t what you think,” I said, getting a solid grip on the duffel. “I wanted to get Ray away so we could talk—”

  “There is nothing to say. You will return the vampire to me. Immediately.” His tone might have been that of a king talking to a peasant. It made me quietly furious.

  “I’m not one of your servants,” I snapped. “You can’t give me orders. And if you’d listen for a minute, you’d learn why you don’t want to take Ray to Elyas.”

  “I know precisely what I want to do.”

  “Okay, then while you’re up there, you might want to ask him what he
was doing at the club just before the fey was found murdered,” I said sarcastically. “And why Ray thinks he already has the rune, and intends to keep it and Christine. You might want to ask why he’s been playing you!”

  There was silence for a moment. “An excellent idea,” Louis-Cesare said softly. And disappeared.

  I stood there for a second, staring stupidly at empty space. I’d seen vamps move quickly before, but that was just ridiculous. And then I snatched up the duffel and headed out the door.

  “What are you doing?” Ray demanded as I dashed across the garage floor, stabbing at the key fob repeatedly with my thumb.

  “Going back.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Not at the moment.” I slid into the seat, threw him on the passenger side and started the engine, all in one motion. Louis-Cesare was on foot; if I didn’t hit any traffic, maybe there was a chance—

  “You could have fooled me!” Ray said as we tore out of the garage on burning rubber. “When two first-level masters are determined to rip into each other, the only sane place to be is somewhere else!”

  Normally, I’d have agreed. But there was no way Louis-Cesare could win a confrontation. If Elyas had the rune, he was toast, and if he didn’t and Louis-Cesare killed him, it would break the ban set by the Senate. And their punishments tended to be draconian even when there wasn’t a war on.

  Five minutes later the car fishtailed to a stop in front of the mansion, and I leapt out. I grabbed the duffel, which contained most of my weapons, and headed for the front door. “What about the rest of me?” Ray shrieked.

  “Stay in the car!”

  “What if the master shows up?”

  I threw him the keys. “Outrun him!” My last sight rounding the first bend in the stairs was his hairy butt, bent over searching for where the keys might have landed.

  I took the stairs three at a time, hoping it would be good enough. It wasn’t. I’d barely hit the foyer when I felt it—a swell of power coursing through the apartment, flickering though every vamp in the place who had ever tasted Elyas’s blood.

  Marlowe had been right: the death of a vampire hits his children hard, and at no time is that more true than the death of a first-level master. Heads whipped around; confusion and fear gripped the younger ones, one of whom screamed and collapsed from the shock. But there were enough masters around to regroup—fast.

  Doors and windows slammed shut on all sides, including the ones behind me. I barely noticed. I stepped over a collapsed doorman and ran up a staircase in the direction of that swell of power.

  A long corridor branched out from the stairs in either direction. A door was open at one end, and I went that way. It turned out to be a large study with a fireplace, a couple of maroon leather chairs, a cherrywood desk and a dead man.

  The head was down, cradled in his arms, almost as if he was sleeping. Blond curls spilled over a green velvet jacket that matched the drapes and the marble desk accessories. If it wasn’t for the knife protruding out of his back and the cloying scent of blood, I might never have known anything was wrong.

  Then again, the vamp standing over him, clutching another blade sheened in blood, might have given me a clue.

  For a moment, I just stared. I’d expected a confrontation, maybe even a duel, since master vamps weren’t that great at following other people’s rules. I hadn’t expected cold-blooded murder.

  Then I snapped out of it and kicked the door shut behind me. “You killed him?”

  “Non.” Louis-Cesare looked up at me, his eyes dark with shock.

  “Then what the hell—”

  “I came here to demand Christine. I found him like this.”

  Ray snorted from inside the duffel. “ ‘He was like this when I got here’? That’s your alibi?”

  “I do not need an alibi!” Louis-Cesare told him stiffly. “I did nothing!”

  “And you’re holding a knife because . . . ?” I asked.

  “The knife was on the floor, and the blood dripping from his wound was rapidly covering it. I picked it up to get it out of the way, and as I did so, he died.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. If that was his story, he was completely screwed. And then running footsteps were coming down the hall, and I realized it didn’t matter. He could have the best damn story in the history of the world, but no vampire was going to take time to listen when his master had just been killed.

  We needed to get out of here and worry about damage control later. There was a single window in the room, or there had been. The force of Elyas’s passing had blown it out, letting in a breeze that stirred the heavy drapes. I used my elbow to knock out the remaining glass, then stared downward. A five-story plunge onto concrete, which was not doable for me. But Louis- Cesare ought to be able to manage it.

  “Feel like giving me a—” I began, turning. Only to see him disappear through a door to the left.

  “Where the hell is he going?” Ray demanded.

  I just shook my head and ran after him. Beyond the door was some kind of sitting room, with a big window and a lot of soft, comfortable- looking armchairs. There was no one there, but a door on the other side of the room was open. I went through and found Louis-Cesare about to put his foot through a locked door.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, as the sound of fists pounding on the study door came from behind us.

  “Searching for Christine.” He kicked in the door and disappeared inside.

  “Now? They’re going to kill you if they find you here!”

  “And they will kill her in three days if I do not.”

  “You don’t know that she’s here! Elyas could have her anywhere.”

  He didn’t even slow down. He disappeared into what looked like a bathroom, while I stared back and forth between it and the office. Damn it! I turned around and ran back.

  The door was shuddering under the blows from outside, but it must have been warded, because it hadn’t already caved in. I didn’t know how long it might last, but I needed a look at the body. God only knew what kind of condition it would be in by the time any of the Senate’s people got here, and a dhampir witness was better than none at all.

  The big leather chair was on wheels, so it was easy enough to move it out from the desk a couple inches, to give me a view of the body from underneath. The only light in the room was a thin ribbon under the door, the residue of a few low-burning sconces in the hall, and a little grayish city light from outside. At first I didn’t see anything other than the unnatural tilt of his head and the wet, clotted gape of his slit throat. Then I took a pencil and pulled at the open collar of his dress shirt and there it was: a glint of gold.

  “I don’t get it,” Ray said. “He had the rune—I know it. So why’s he dead?”

  I tugged at the chain and the heaviness already told me Ray was right, even before the necklace appeared. Ray had been correct about the size, but not the gaudiness. It was large, maybe four inches across, but beautifully made. The striations of gold radiating out from the center caught the light in a starburst that lit up the floor with a pattern of rainbows.

  “Jókell’s?” I asked, holding it up.

  “Yeah. That’s it,” Ray told me, over a cracking sound.

  A glance at the door showed me that someone had tried to put a foot through it. They hadn’t quite made it, but part of the wood had bowed inward, with splintering around the indentation. Only the ward was keeping the fibers in place at this point, and it was failing. We were out of time.

  I pulled the carrier off Elyas’s head and shoved it in the duffel. I spared a second to check the knife sticking out of his back, to make sure I knew what had happened. Then I ran for it, hearing the door explode into pieces behind me.

  A couple vamps had been smart enough to go around the long way. I guess the waiting room door must have been warded, too, because they met me in the bathroom. One was a medium-grade master—level five, at a guess—who tried to put a fist through my head. I dodged, and he hit the m
irror instead, spraying glass everywhere and giving me a second to shove an incendiary stick down his pants.

  It went off with a hissing flare and he fell back into the bathtub, screeching and fumbling for the faucet. The baby vamp with him just stood there for a second, before quickly putting his hands up. I rolled my eyes, pushed him out of the way and ran out the door.

  It exited into the hall, where a crowd of people now wreathed the ruined study door. And, of course, one of them saw me. There was one of those startled moments when everyone just looked at one another, and then came a collective surge down the hallway. Louis-Cesare reached out of a small bedroom, jerked me inside and slammed the door.

  Yeah, like that was going to help.

  Someone put a foot through the door a second later, and when they drew back, I threw a disorienting sphere out the opening. It was designed to make vamps forget why they were fighting, but either I’d gotten a dud, or these vamps were especially motivated. Because an arm reached through, grabbed mine and slammed me into the door headfirst.

  I twisted the wrist enough to get myself free and turned, still seeing stars. And then I saw Louis-Cesare gathering a woman into his arms. “We must get you out of here,” he told her gently.

  There was no light, but a spill of moonlight through an open window highlighted high cheekbones, sensual lips and sleek dark hair pulled back into a smooth chignon. She looked like a fashion model, if they’d had them in the nineteenth century, which was when her high-necked white lawn nightgown appeared to have been made. And she smelled like apples—crisp, fresh and succulent.

  Oh, yeah. He’d really been suffering, I thought viciously.

  And then the arm grabbed me again.

  I stuck a knife through it as the woman turned her face up to his. She smiled. “Louis-Cesare.”

  The French window led onto a small balcony. He carried her out and looked over the edge. “It is a long drop,” he told her in French. “Land on your feet in a crouching position.”

  She shook her head, grasping him around the neck. “It is too far for me.”

  “It is not too far,” he said patiently. “You must try.”

  She shook her head more violently, starting to panic as she looked down. “No! No, I cannot. Please do not make me—”