by Karen Chance
“Hello? Anybody home?” Ray’s strident tones cut through the endless loop in my head. For once, I was almost grateful.
“I thought you were supposed to be a witness?” I said, pushing off the door. “Why are you still here?”
“They said they didn’t need me, after all. Something about having plenty of other stuff to talk about.”
“I bet.”
“So can we go? This place is giving me the creeps.”
“It is unsettling,” someone said from beside the hall door.
I looked over to see Christine sitting on a mountain of luggage. She’d been so quiet, I hadn’t even noticed her. “They left you, too, huh?” I asked, dropping Ray in the duffel. What the hell? He didn’t take up much room.
“They said my testimony would not be helpful,” she told me. “I did not see anything, and I am close to Louis-Cesare. I believe they think that I would lie for him.”
“So all that packing for nothing.”
“Oh, no. Not for nothing,” she said as I dug around beside Ray’s gory self. As always, the keys had migrated to the farthest reaches of the bag. “I have been informed that the family doesn’t want me here. They have . . . What is the term? Knocked me out.”
“Kicked you out,” I corrected. “So where to now?”
“I do not know. Where are we going?”
I hadn’t found the keys, but at that, I looked up. “Come again?”
“Louis-Cesare said that I should stay with you.”
“Oh, boy,” Ray muttered.
“He said what?” I asked, very carefully.
“I am sure he will come for me, when this trial is over.
Do you live far?”
“You can’t come with me,” I explained, my fist finally closing on the damn keys.
She frowned slightly, a small dent forming between those beautiful eyes. “But I must. Louis-Cesare said—”
“I don’t care what Louis-Cesare said. And neither should you. You’re three hundred years old, for God’s sake. Go out. Live a little.”
I grabbed the duffel and started for the door, but a delicate hand shot out, snaring my wrist in a motion too fast to see. It was the only indication I’d seen so far of what she really was. Well, that and the tensile strength of that grip.
But her face was lost, panic-stricken, and innocently distressed. “But . . . but I cannot fail him! Not on his first command in . . . I cannot!”
“You probably misunderstood,” I said, striving for patience.
“No, no! I know what he said! And dawn approaches, and I have nowhere else to go, and they will throw me out on the street!”
God, she was crying again.
“Louis-Cesare probably wanted me to drop you off at his place.” Not that the bastard had bothered to ask. Or to mention it.
“H-his place?”
“He’s staying at the Club. Come on; I’ll give you a lift.”
“Oh, thank you!” Christine looked so relieved, I felt a little guilty suddenly. What would it be like to live for a century being told every single thing to do and not to do? It had to erode a person’s self-confidence, after a while. And it wasn’t Christine’s fault that her master was a complete—
“What are you doing?” I demanded. Christine had jumped up and started to gather up some of that mountain of luggage. She looked at me blankly. “That’s not all going to fit in the car.”
She gazed at her cheerfully mismatched cases. “But . . . but what should I do?”
“Pick the stuff you need for today and Elyas’s people can send the rest on.”
“But they won’t. They’ve been horrid! What if they throw it out? What if they never . . .” Her lower lip began quivering.
“Oh, shit,” Ray said. “Squash it in! Squash it in!”
We squashed it in. After three trips, a lot of cursing, and no help at all from the family, we somehow got me, Ray, Ray’s body, Christine and her worldly possessions all inside the car. Fortunately, the Club wasn’t far, and they had porters.
Or make that had.
Fifteen minutes later I sat staring at the burned- out hulk of what had once been a luxury hotel, wondering why the universe hated me. I couldn’t see much, because there were still some emergency vehicles scattered around, although it appeared that most had trundled off. But the acrid, waterlogged smell in the air would have been enough.
“What is it?” Ray demanded.
“A curse,” I muttered. “It’s the only possible explanation.”
“The master burned it down, didn’t he?” he asked.
“He likes burning stuff.”
Now he told me.
“I’m going to have to take you to a hotel,” I told Christine.
Her eyes got wide. “A human hotel?” she asked, like I’d suggested throwing her in a snake pit.
“There’s some very nice ones in—”
“No!” she whispered, looking horrified.
“Plenty of vampires stay at human hotels,” I said, which was true for those who couldn’t afford the Club’s staggering rates.
“The sun—I can’t—I’ll die! I’ll die!” She grabbed me by the shoulder in a grip that threatened to crush bone. I pried her fingers off, and she just sat there, huddled in the passenger seat, looking devastated. And I began to worry about whether it was such a great idea, after all.
Vamps did use human hotels when up against it. But it was dangerous. Few hotel curtains were constructed to properly block all those dangerous daylight rays. And even sleeping in the bathroom, as uncomfortable as that was, might not be enough. All it would take was one careless maid ignoring a do-not-disturb sign, and Christine would be toast.
I could take her to vamp central and toss her out on the curb, and technically, that was exactly what I ought to do. But Louis-Cesare was there facing trial for murder, and he didn’t need another headache right now. And Radu had said there were no vampire- friendly rooms to be had in town, thanks to the damn races.
“I’ll be very quiet,” she whispered, as if she somehow knew I was weakening. “You’ll never know I’m there.”
“It’s not me we have to worry about,” I said, thinking of a certain half dragon with a serious vampire phobia.
I really hoped she wasn’t hungry.
Chapter Twenty-four
Forty-five minutes later, I pulled into my street. I was exhausted and cramped, and a bag or something had shifted when I had to stop for a red light suddenly, and it had been poking me in the back ever since. I wanted a drink or three and bed and I wanted them now.
Only that wasn’t looking too likely.
“Crap,” I said with feeling, almost standing on the brakes.
“What? What’s wrong now?” Ray demanded. His body was squashed in back between half a dozen suitcases, two garment bags, a trunk and five hatboxes, with the duffel on his lap.
“We have a welcoming committee.”
We were maybe a third of a block from the house, so I couldn’t see them very well. But someone was there, all right. Make that a lot of someones, I thought, as more shadows broke away from the house and drifted into the street, trying to get a look at us.
Ray’s body held his head up so it could see, and the tiny eyes almost bugged out. “Shit. It’s the master.”
“Cheung?” I’d almost forgotten about him. Too bad the reverse didn’t appear to be true.
“What are you waiting for?” Ray asked, starting to sound a little frantic. “Go, go, go!”
“I can’t go,” I snapped. “Your master has a dozen guys across the driveway.”
“I didn’t mean go in,” Ray said, like I might be slow. “I meant, get us out of here.”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“Why the hell not?”
“The wards have held so far, but there’s at least a couple hours to dawn.”
“Which is a good argument for not getting trapped in there!”
“There are already people trapped in there. And Cheung has to know that. His
Hounds can smell them from here.”
“Life sucks,” Ray said callously.
“It’s going to suck more for you if he takes hostages.”
“You’d give me up?”
“In a nanosecond,” I said, switching gears.
“I thought we’d developed a bond here!”
I didn’t even bother to respond to that. “Get ready to run,” I told him, just as one of Cheung’s men got close enough to recognize me. And then decision time was over.
A dozen black streaks started our way, and I floored it, aiming for the driveway and the line of vamps stretched across it. I didn’t really think I’d make it through; playing red rover with a line of masters is not a good bet. But I didn’t need to get through. I just needed to get close enough to the wards to make it inside before they caught me.
A couple of the nearest vamps grabbed the passenger door, ripping it half off its hinges. Christine screamed, which didn’t help, and her heavy trunk tumbled out on top of them, which did. But the rest of Cheung’s boys figured out where I was going and surged that way, to bolster their buddies in the drive. So I swerved at the last minute and cut across the lawn, throwing up grass and mud in my wake, and fishtailed to a stop just inside the wards.
The two vamps who had grabbed hold of the passenger door hit the invisible shield around the house head-on as we passed safely through. They were still sliming their way down it, like juicy bugs on a windshield, when several more ran forward and grabbed the left bumper of the car. It had remained just outside the wards, providing them with a convenient handle to use to drag us backward.
I hit the gas, but after days of rain and an unexpected blizzard, the front lawn had turned into a mud field. I had zero traction. I did get the satisfaction of seeing Cheung’s men completely drenched in mud, but they were going to have the last laugh if they succeeded in dragging us back out.
Christine was scrabbling at her seat belt, trying to get it undone. I tossed the duffel onto the front steps and started helping her, while keeping my foot glued to the gas pedal. I was hoping the car would dig itself far enough into the muck to buy us a few seconds, but no dice. The vamps managed to get the whole rear end out just as the seat belt finally gave way
There was no time to exit gracefully. I grabbed Christine with one hand and Ray with the other, and dragged them over the hood. We jumped free even as the car was being yanked out from under us, and landed—of course—face-first in the sea of mud. But it was a sea of mud inside the wards, and that was all that mattered.
I got to my feet, dripping in muck. The beautiful dress was ruined, and I hadn’t even gotten to wear it anywhere. And somewhere along the line, I’d lost one of the shoes.
I was royally pissed, and that was before I saw the guy coming to talk to me in my mud- slimed finery. He was wearing a suit that would have made Mircea jealous. The fine black wool fit him like a dream, the burnt orange silk tie adding just the right amount of spice. It also matched the orange-and-black tiger tat leaping from his neck to his right cheek.
And the dressing gown of the very bedraggled figure he was leading by one arm.
“Radu!” I blinked. “What the hell?”
“Yes, yes, thank you! My point exactly,” he said, obviously livid.
“You said you’d be okay.”
“I would have been, if not for this madman!” he said, struggling uselessly against his captor’s hold. No introductions were made, but then, I didn’t really need any. Radu, despite appearances, is a second-level master. Pissing him off is a very bad idea—unless you happened to be a first-level.
“Mircea will kill you for this,” I said conversationally, as Cheung’s polished shoe tips stopped just outside the wards.
“Had he not interfered in my business, there would have been no need to inconvenience his brother.” The voice was a low, pleasant tenor without a trace of an accent. It didn’t match the looks, which were anything but bland: bronze skin, high cheekbones, dark, almond-shaped eyes and a hawklike nose with a proud tilt.
“Inconvenience? Is that what they call kidnapping these days?”
“You kidnapped my servant first,” he pointed out. “Return my property and I will return yours.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said, checking ’Du out.
His dressing gown was ripped along one seam, his hair—usually so sleek and shiny—was everywhere and he had somehow acquired a smear of mud on his nose. He looked pathetic and miserable. I smiled at him sympathetically.He smiled back.
“Ray’s the Senate’s property now,” I told Cheung. “If you want him back, you’ll have to petition them.”
“What?” Radu’s expression faded.
Cheung’s forehead acquired a slight wrinkle. “Perhaps you did not understand me.”
“I understood perfectly.” A drip of mud oozed down my temple, and I took a second to wipe it off.
“Then release my servant.”
“Or what?” I demanded. “I’m fair game. Ray’s fair game. But you can’t hurt ’Du, and you know it. It would break the truce, and even if it didn’t, Mircea would kill you. Slowly.”
“What are you talking about?” Radu demanded, his embroidered satin bed slippers slowly sinking into the lawn. “We’ve already been out here half the night! Give the man what he wants, Dory!”
“No can do,” I said while flipping through the key-chain for the front-door key I never used. “But don’t worry, ’Du. I’ll inform Mircea about this, next time I see him.”
“Next time you—” He broke off, staring at something over my shoulder. I turned to see Christine floundering around in the mud. Her delicate little slippers didn’t appear to have much traction, and every time she got up, she fell down again.
“Is that . . . Christine?” he asked, looking appalled.
She slowly got to her feet, hands spread out on either side of her, like a toddler learning to walk. “Lord Radu,” she said tremulously, before her foot slipped and she fell backward into a puddle. The resulting splash rained muck down on me and ’Du.
“Well, that explains it,” he muttered.
“You think I am bluffing,” Cheung said evenly.
I sighed. “You’re either bluffing, or you’re an idiot, and that’s not your reputation,” I said, finally locating the house key. “Hurt ’Du, and you’ll die for it. Let him go, and Mircea may let you off with some groveling. I don’t know.”
“I see I need to prove my sincerity.” Cheung didn’t move, but two of his boys ran up with sledgehammers—and started taking apart the Lamborghini.
Radu just stood there, mute in horror, as a beautiful piece of Italian engineering was quickly reduced to scrap. It didn’t take long. I opened the front door, hauled Ray’s mud-covered self inside and then went back for the duffel and Christine.
“This does not move you?” Cheung demanded, as one of his boys sent the steering wheel flying off into the night. Radu made a small whimpering sound.
“It’s ’Du’s car,” I told him, before shutting the door in his face.
The house might be repairing itself, but it wasn’t getting there in any hurry. There were still holes in the floor, the walls and the ceiling, giving a three- story atrium effect to the front hall. Moonlight cascaded down through the now much more open floor plan, flooding the old boards in a pale light that was strangely otherworldly.
It provided enough illumination to allow me to thread my way through the stacks of worm-eaten furniture in the vestibule. I didn’t topple a single piece over, even while dragging Ray. That was lucky, because something else otherworldly was in the hallway, flitting through the far end of the corridor, near the back door. I stopped dead.
Everything else looked normal. The house was dark, quiet, still. But that wasn’t surprising. Claire had to have given up on me a while ago and gone to bed. And while my roommates tended to be active at night, they weren’t exactly homebodies. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home to a mostly quiet house.
But not
to one that smelled like a deep cave, dank and chill, with that curious sharp underbite that my brain had filed under “Oh, shit.”
Svarestri, although I couldn’t see them. Not that that meant a damn. I suddenly wondered if there was anyone left alive for Cheung to attack.
“Hey, can we—”
I clapped a hand over Ray’s big mouth and grabbed my new iron sword out of the duffel. It felt good in my hand—a cold, solid weight with some serious heft behind it. I just hoped the fey hadn’t come up with another way of fighting without actually being there. If they’d hurt Claire or the kids, I wanted something that could bleed.
Christine caught my arm. She didn’t say anything, but her face spoke volumes. “Stay here,” I told her softly. Normally, a three- hundred-year-old vamp would be an asset in a case like this, but I didn’t think she was going to frighten the fey by crying at them.
The dress was already ruined, so I wove a knife through the silk at the small of my back and tied another to my thigh with one of the stockings. I stuffed the duffel under a table in the foyer and left the rest of Ray on guard over it. Then I moved carefully into the hall, keeping close to the tattered walls.
The house must have prioritized wallpaper pretty low, because pieces of it still fluttered everywhere, brushing my cheeks as I slipped past. It was like being in a forest of slowly moving tree branches, heavy with moss. The dried paste on the back felt like scaly fingers brushing over my skin, and the constant movement gave my eyes too much to watch.
Not that they were doing so hot. Light cascaded down three stories, through the ruined roof. But it was dim antique silver—a combination of moonlight and the vague radiance from the street. The city had recently installed new, energy-efficient streetlights that saved money by not actually illuminating anything.
The situation wasn’t helped when a thin, cold rain began to fall. It sent odd, rippling shadows down the windows and across the squares of gray they cast on the floor. I felt my heart rate speed up, my skin prickling. The damned Svarestri were giving me a complex about the weather.
The white backing on the wallpaper glowed under the moonlight, waving across my vision like long silver blond hair. Everywhere I looked, I thought I saw fey for a split second. But I hadn’t. Because there was no mistaking when I finally did glimpse one. Something black twisted down through me at the sight, from head to feet, colder than the night air at the bottom of a ravine.