You're So Vein

by Christine Warren

  Who currently sat, pretty as a picture, on the end of a comfortably elegant sofa, with her long legs crossed at the knees and her hands folded daintily in her lap. She nodded to him and offered a small smile.

  “Dima.” Her voice emerged as regal as ever, but with its characteristic arrogance surprisingly absent. It made him frown. “I want to apologize right away. I wasn’t thinking when I left your apartment, and I realize it was badly done of me. I hope you’ll accept my sincere apologies and know I will not discard your advice so lightly in the future.”

  His frown slid into a glower. “Who are you, and what have you done with Ava Markham?”

  She made a face. “You’re just as amusing as Graham. Why is it so hard to believe that I recognize I behaved badly, and that I sincerely want to apologize for the trouble I’ve caused in doing so?”

  “Maybe because you’ve never done anything remotely like it in your life?”

  “You’ve known me for two days. How can you possibly draw that kind of conclusion after so short a time?”

  “Intuition?” he hazarded.

  “He looks like a pretty bright guy,” Sam offered.

  “We may have let something along those lines slip,” Missy murmured.

  “You three should take your act on the road,” Ava observed sourly before turning back to Dima. “Whatever the case, the apology I’m offering now is sincere. If you don’t believe it, that’s your problem, but at least acknowledge that I offered it before I’m tempted to shove it down your throat.”

  “See? She’s fine,” Graham reassured the other man.

  Dima gritted his teeth. He had come here expecting a fight, not an apology, and he was finding it surprisingly difficult to change gears now that she’d swept his rage out from under him.

  “Damn it, Ava, what were you thinking?” he snapped, but the question came out sounding more like a sigh than a bellow. There wasn’t even much point in asking it, but it had been dancing on the tip of his tongue for so long that it had leapt out before he could stop it. “You could have been hurt, or you could have hurt someone else.”

  “I know,” she said calmly. “In fact, I almost did. If not for Missy and Graham, I would probably have either bitten her or passed out and cracked my head open on her kitchen counter. I was stupid, and I’m admitting it freely. For the last time.”

  His jaw snapped shut. He looked to Graham. “What happened?”

  “Hello? Sitting right here.” Ava waved a hand at Dima. “I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry when I left the loft, but I didn’t realize I needed to do a slightly macabre version of a diabetic monitoring his blood sugar. By the time I got here and was talking to Missy, the hunger had gotten a little out of control. I snapped at her, then nearly passed out, so she and Graham poured some of that down my throat.” She pointed to the bottle of Nosferatu on the table, then pursed her lips. “They said there’s wine in it. I wonder if I might not be a little tipsy.”

  Dima didn’t recognize the label of this particular bottle, but blood watered down with wine—or even spiked with hard liquor—and enhanced with flavors was a common enough thing. Vampires had existed for as long as humans. It wasn’t like they hadn’t experimented with developing a sort of cuisine of their own over the millennia.

  He grunted. “How much did you drink?”

  “Only a couple of glasses,” Missy assured him. “We told her she would still need to feed later tonight, but we don’t tend to keep a lot of whole blood around, and we generally go through most of that on Friday and Saturday nights at the club. The new stock won’t come in until Thursday for this coming weekend.”

  “I will take care of her.” He blew out a breath and looked back at Ava. “Are you feeling all right to leave? You and I should talk, and it would probably be more comfortable for both of us at home.”

  “Why bother? Everyone here knows you’re angry at me, and they know why.” She didn’t react to his instinctive slip in calling the loft “home” for both of them but couldn’t tell if that was good or bad. “You might as well lecture me here. That way if you miss anything, one of the others can chime in.”

  “Sure, and then maybe you can explain about that note Ava found in her purse,” Graham suggested, looking innocent and earning his wife’s elbow driven hard into his ribs. “What? Ava said she thought it sounded like it was about vampire stuff. Of course she’d want to share it with Dima. He is her sire, after all.”

  Ava shot the Lupine a very disgruntled look.

  Dima asked, “What note?”

  She hesitated a moment, looking uncomfortable; then she sighed and reached into the black handbag on the coffee table in front of her.

  “This one.” She handed him a small slip of white notepaper decorated with an obviously feminine and very old-fashioned script. “The writing is so ornate that I can’t make out the signature at the bottom. I’m guessing it’s someone’s initials, but as far as I can tell, the first one could either be a K or a Y, or maybe an R, and the second one looks like an O or a C, but who knows for sure?”

  Dima accepted the note, took one look at the initial on the bottom, and swore up and down, using curses in both Russian and English that he’d forgotten he even knew.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  It took him a moment before he thought he could answer Ava’s startled question without shouting. Even then, it was a near thing.

  “The letters are a Y and a C,” he confirmed. “The note is from a female vampire by the name of Yelizaveta Chernigov, and it implies that the vampire who turned you was a member of her bloodline, which means that you would be as well.”

  Graham rolled his eyes. “Christ, if I didn’t know better, I’d think every bloody vampire in Manhattan had immigrated here from Russia. I thought some of you were supposed to be from Romania, at least.”

  Ava just furrowed her brow. “Wait, do you know the vampire who wrote me this note?”

  Dima’s head jerked in a nod. “I do. In fact, she is the reason I came to the United States several weeks ago.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  At another time, Dima might have wondered if the snappish note in Ava’s voice indicated jealousy and been pleased, but at the moment he was too busy wondering how he was going to explain this to the ECV.

  Yes, my lords, I am aware that it is expressly against the Laws to create a fledgling without your authorization, or to lend aid to a declared enemy of the council by such actions as willfully aiding a minion of said outlaw.

  But technically I wasn’t the one who created her, and when I lent her aid, I didn’t know she was one of the Chernigov woman’s minions. Really. I swear.

  That would go over well, he was sure.

  “It means that I am in New York for a highly specific, and up until now classified, purpose,” he said, feeling the reins of his mission torn from his fingers by the laughing hand of Fate. That bitch. “Yelizaveta Chernigov is a vampire and a criminal who has escaped from the custody of the European Council of Vampires in order to avoid a sentence of imprisonment for her many crimes. The latest intelligence we had was that she had fled to the United States and was in hiding. I am a member of the council’s division of enforcement of the Laws, and I was ordered to track her down and see that she is returned to prison in Russia, where she belongs.”

  Dima noticed that Ava looked confused, Missy looked worried, and Graham looked angry. The other woman, Samantha, looked invisible. At some point in Dima’s speech, she had left the room. Damn it.

  “Do you mean to tell me that you came here on official business as a representative of another nation’s governing body of an Other population, with the intent of finding and seizing a resident of our jurisdiction,” Graham asked, his voice growing slightly louder with each word, “and you didn’t bother to clear this with our governing body?”

  Dima met the Lupine’s angry glare head-on. “The members of our council did not feel it was necessary to alert yours. We did not believe we wo
uld require your assistance, and we believed the matter would be handled quickly and quietly. It was deemed unnecessary to inconvenience you with the details of my mission.”

  “Funny, but I think that’s more of our decision to make. And I’m sure the head of our Council of Others will agree with me.”

  “I am certain he would.” Dima didn’t back down and instead let Graham see how he intended to calmly play the next turn of this hand. “From what our sources revealed before I came here, the head of your council is a very close friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  The werewolf stiffened, his lip curling in a definite snarl. “Are you implying that the head of the council is somehow corrupt and couldn’t be trusted to make a sound decision about this Chernigov person’s acts because of that?”

  In his peripheral vision, Dima saw Missy step forward to position herself discreetly but decidedly within arm’s reach of her husband. Dima just wasn’t sure if it was so she could interfere if Graham decided to attack or so she could help.

  “I imply nothing.”

  “So you’re just going to say it flat out?”

  “Perhaps the real reason the European Council of Vampires concluded it would be wise to conduct this mission under the radar of your council was to avoid discussions and accusations just like this one.”

  “And perhaps the two of you need to calm down and remember the point behind this discussion.” Ava stepped between the men, silencing each of them with a pointed look. “Let’s bring it back to me here and ask the really important question: Why is some runaway vampiress I’ve never heard of summoning me like a debutante being called up for her royal presentation?”

  “She says you belong to her house,” Dima answered roughly. He looked at Ava while he said it, but part of him was keeping a weather eye on Graham. Just to be safe.

  “And in English that translates as … what?”

  “It means she believes you share a bloodline passed on to you by the vampire who turned you. In Europe, many of our kind still adhere to the system of houses and clans, where vampires who can all trace their lineage to the same set of ancestors form a sort of extended family network among themselves. Each house is headed by a vampire who is usually older and more directly related to the founder of the house than the others. In this case, Yelizaveta was the daughter of the first member of a noble family to turn to vampirism. Her father, Kazimir of Chernigov, embraced the change for himself and then crossed over his only son, Stepan. Stepan later changed Yelizaveta. When the men died, Yelizaveta stepped up to assume control of the house. She has been its head since roughly the fourteenth century.”

  “Okay.” Ava nodded. “I get that. It makes sense, in a feudalistic, very droit du seigneur sort of way. But why would she need to meet every single person who’s part of her bloodline? If she’s really been around that long, there must be thousands of them. Does she honestly think she can keep track of that many people?”

  “There aren’t really that many of them. Two hundred, maybe two hundred fifty at the outside.”

  Dima could read the surprise on Ava’s face.

  “Why not more? Do they have a ‘one bite per century’ rule or something?”

  “No, but they have been a cause of much trouble among the other houses in Europe. Their numbers have been … thinned over the years.”

  Ava’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”

  Dima met her gaze unflinchingly. “Only that when you initiate as much trouble as the Chernigovs have over the years, it can cut down on your population. Or rather, I can cut it down.”

  “So she would want to meet me, why? To recruit me to do her bidding or something?”

  “She would want to see if you could be … influenced. Yes.”

  Graham snorted. “Obviously she’s new in town if she thinks she can influence the Ava Markham to do anything. New, or terminally stupid.”

  “That is not a word I would use to describe Yelizaveta Chernigov.” He shot Graham a quelling look. “But if ‘stupid’ is a word you use for women who slaughter two of the most powerful vampire princes in Europe and nearly bring both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires to their knees at the height of their power, that is a personal choice with which I would not want to interfere.”

  The Lupine’s smirk disappeared. “When and how did she do that?”

  Missy put a hand on her husband’s shoulder and shook her head. “I’m not sure now is the time to get all those details, honey. You know as well as I do that if there really is a dangerous vampire fugitive on the loose in the city, the council is going to need to know about it. Dima shouldn’t have to go over the same story twice.”

  “Fine,” Graham said, his reluctance to wait clear. “I’ll call Rafe. The council was going to meet on Tuesday and deal with Ava then, but when they hear about this, they may want to move things up.”

  In the doorway, the sound of someone clearing her throat drew everyone’s attention.

  “Actually, sir,” Samantha said, a look of sheepish anxiety clouding her features, “the council has been alerted and has already begun to gather.”

  Graham did not look pleased. “You alerted them?”

  “Indirectly, Alpha.”

  “Explain.”

  She shifted her weight, pointed her chin down and to the side, and fixed her eyes on the empty space beside the Lupine’s upper arm. Dima recognized the signs of one werewolf attempting to pacify another and wondered what else the woman would reveal.

  “I recognized the name that Mr. Rurikovich mentioned,” she said. “Yelizaveta Chernigov. It rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite remember why, so I slipped out to check my files. I was reacquainting myself with an incident at the opera a few years ago involving the then head of the council and a female vampire named Lisette. Apparently Lisette turned out to be—”

  “Yelizaveta’s sister,” Dima finished for her.

  Samantha nodded. “She had been targeting the head of the council for retribution for a past slight. Apparently, there was quite a long history between the Chernigov woman and his family.”

  Dima could have said that a sound caught his attention, some soft footfall in the hallway, or the sound of the latch on the door through which he’d entered earlier clicking open, but the truth was, there hadn’t been a sound. All there had been was a change in the air, a slight adjustment in the temperature, a thickening of the ions, an infinitesimal something that was both imperceptible yet unmistakable.

  By the time the shadow filled the doorway, his eyes were already locked on it, and when he saw who stood there, he experienced a riot of conflicting emotions, but not one of them was surprise.

  “She means ‘our’ family,” Dima corrected, his pale gaze catching a much darker one that emerged from eyes that appeared nearly black in the shadows.

  Dmitri.

  Misha.

  He looked much the same as he had the last time Dima had seen him. Perhaps a little less gigantic, but then, at their last meeting, Dima had been all of fifteen, still scrawny and underdeveloped, and Dmitri Rurikssen had been a man full grown. In a boy’s eyes, Dmitri had seemed to tower over everything but the sun itself. But that had been before he left. Before he disappeared and left his people to the fate the Chernigovs had planned for them.

  So far, nothing like recognition had shown on the darker man’s face, but then, a lot of time had passed. More than eight centuries, in fact.

  He wore the years well.

  Mouth curving in a smile of little warmth, Dima stepped forward until he could look clearly into the other man’s face. “Moyo pochteniye, bratok,” Dima drawled, watching as puzzlement flitted across his brother’s face, catching in the creases of his brow. “It has been a long time, no?”

  Dima saw confusion give way to disbelief as eyes as dark as his own were light traced the lines of his features, swept over his tall, muscular form, took in the fair hair and the hardness wrought in warfare.

  “Otets?” Before Dima could correct him, Misha c
aught himself, shook his head. “No, it is not possible. It cannot …”

  They stared at each other for a moment in silence.

  Then Misha stirred, stepped forward. Behind him, a smaller form stirred, and Dima recognized Ava’s friend Reggie from her visit to the loft. So, he thought, his brother had married this hot-tempered redhead, had he? He had been the husband named Misha that the woman had alluded to. Dima had tried to write the name off as a coincidence when he first heard it, but no longer. And it appeared as if their marriage was a strong one, judging by the way his brother gripped the woman’s hand like a security blanket. Disbelief had been ousted from his expression and replaced by wonder.

  “Vladimir,” Misha breathed, halting just before the other man, close enough to touch. But he held back. They both held back. “Vladimir,” he repeated, wondering. “Brat. Eto-vay.”

  “Da.”

  It was anyone’s guess how long they might have stood there if Ava hadn’t interrupted. Dima felt her eyes on him, but he couldn’t tear his own from Misha’s face, not after having not seen it in so long. When Dima refused to look at her, she poked him solidly in the ribs.

  “What did all that mean?” she demanded. “Was that Russian? Are you Russian, too? Damn it, I was really hoping that was Lithuanian or something you were speaking all those times. Christ, how did I get mixed up with another one of you? Wasn’t the one Manhattan already has enough? We needed another one?” She looked at her friend and scowled. “Did you catch any of that? You said he’s taught you to speak some Russian. What did they say?”

  “Misha called him Brother,” Regina said, sounding as confused as her friend. “And he agreed.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ava nearly choked on an incredulous gasp. “Brothers?” she shouted, stepping back as if they had announced both had leprosy. “You two are brothers? Of all the vampires in the world who could have rescued me, I had to be rescued from certain death by Dmitri fricking Vidâme’s brother?”