by Karen Chance
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 mirror 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—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Ray said. “What? Are you afraid she’ll bruise?”
Louis-Cesare looked at me. “I’m with Ray on this one,” I told him, as someone kicked in the door.
It fell onto the bedpost, which blocked it somewhat, but several vamps slithered around the sides anyway. Louis-Cesare put Christine down to face them, and she ran into an adjacent room. I followed her and found her hugging the back wall of a small dressing room.
“Please, please do not let him force me!” she begged.
My first thought was that Louis-Cesare had been right—her power signature was so low, she could have been a newborn. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might have mistaken her for a human. My second thought was that for someone who wasn’t afraid of anything, she seemed pretty damned timid to me.
My third was how lovely that head would look on a pike, but I shook it off and grabbed her wrist.
“Okay,” I promised. “It’s okay. Louis-Cesare won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
“You promise?” With tears trembling in her dark eyes and her color high, she was truly stunning.
“I promise,” I told her, pulling her back toward the door.
She followed me through meekly enough, flinching when Louis-Cesare broke off a bedpost with a crack. He wedged it against the door, which he’d somehow forced back into place. “We must go!”
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said, and shoved Christine off the balcony.
Louis-Cesare ran to the edge, looking over. “What did you do?” he asked me, in disbelief.
“What needed to be done.” I pulled out a gun and emptied it into the swarm of vampires behind us. And then his arm was around my waist, and we were falling.
We landed on something hard, but more yielding than concrete, and then we were moving into Central Park in a squeal of tires. We were in the Lamborghini, with Christine in the front, clutching the seat. And Ray driving.
“You can’t drive!” I told him, trying to get my limbs sorted out as we barreled diagonally across the street, heading straight for the curb.
“No shit!” We jumped it, and the resulting jolt almost threw me out of the car. I grabbed the back of Christine’s seat as we slammed back down on a footpath and careened toward a fountain. And then somebody started shooting at us.
The only good thing was that by midnight, even most of the bums had gone home to sleep it off. That was lucky for them, because Ray was the worst damn driver I’d ever seen. And that was after I jerked his head out of the duffel and parked it on the dashboard.
“Gah! That makes it worse!” he told me, as I tried to get the eyes facing forward.
“How can it possibly be worse?”
“Because I got double vision now! Get it off! Get it off!”
He batted at his own head and succeeded in sending it tumbling into Christine’s lap. She immediately went into hysterics and slapped it away. The head fell out of the car; Ray hit the brakes and we came to a screeching halt.
“What are you doing?” I screeched, as he hopped out. “There are people firing at us!”
“Tough!” came from somewhere under the car.
Louis-Cesare had pulled a gun from the duffel and was returning fire, and either he was a good shot or he got lucky, because the left front tire of our pursuers’ car suddenly blew out. The explosion of rubber caused their car to swerve violently, sideswiping a tree and disappearing over an embankment.
I used the brief reprieve to roll under the chassis to help find Ray’s missing piece, but the car was built too low to the ground to provide me much access. I was feeling around with my arm when a line of bullets strafed the side door, causing me to hit the dirt. A quick glance showed three vamps’ heads poking up over the embankment, a streetlight gleaming on the muzzles of the guns they had pointed at us.
And then the car took off, leaving me hanging out in the open.
Fortunately, Ray had decided to move it only a few yards, apparently having the same trouble retrieving his missing part that I was. It jerked to a stop, scraping along the side of a rock wall, and stymieing Christine’s attempt to climb out over the side. She turned around the other way, scrambling into the backseat just as I slid back behind the protection of the bumper.
Louis-Cesare was holding on to her with one hand and trying to return fire with the other, which wasn’t working out too great, judging by the number of bullets that peppered the ground around me—half of them his.
“Would you cut it out already?” I snarled. “If I’m going to get shot, I’d like it to be by the bad guys.”
He glared at me over the head of a hysterical Christine, who had him in a sobbing neck lock. “And if you will hurry up, we can get out of here before they manage to fix their vehicle!”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
More bullets slammed into the back side of Radu’s baby as I peered under the car. But I could see the whites of two small, angry eyes glaring at me from near the right back wheel. I swept out a leg and hit the side of the head, and it rolled out from under the car—just in time to get drilled through the forehead with a bullet.
“What? What was that?” Ray demanded, his eyes crossing, as I snatched him up by the short and spikies.
“Nothing,” I said, and dove over the backseat, and we were off.
The vamps abandoned their car and took off after us on foot, which was a smart move considering the number of obstacles in our path. They were gaining and Ray was cursing and Christine was sobbing. “Please, please let me out!”
“If I let you out, they will shoot you!” Louis-Cesare told her in French.
“They won’t!” She shook her head hard enough that a spill of ebony hair flowed down over her shoulders. “I know them; I can talk to them!”
“I don’t think they’re in a talking mood,” I said as Louis-Cesare thrust her at me. I thrust her back.
“You cannot drive a stick shift,” he reminded me.
“I also can’t return fire and hold on to your girl-friend at the same time,” I snapped, scrambling over the seat.
“Relax—we’ll lose them,” Ray told me as I tried to take the wheel. “I got a portal right up ahead.”
“We can’t go through another portal!” I said as we bounced across grassy hills, apparently not missing a rock or a root on the way.
“I’m not looking forward to it, either, but you got a better suggestion?”
“Any suggestion would be better!” I said, dropping his spare part in his lap and trying to ease in behind him. “If we go through a portal, we’ll explode.”
“We didn’t explode last time.”
“I didn’t have my duffel last time!”
“What difference does that make?” Ray demanded, his cheek smushed against the steering wheel.
“The putty’s in there.”
“What putty?”
“The putty I was going to use to blow up the portal at your office,” I panted, finally realizing that he had the damn seat belt on. A bullet parted my hair as I worked frantically to get it undone.
“So don’t shoot at it and we’ll be—”
“It doesn’t need to be shot!” I told him as the seat belt slithered free. “If it comes into contact with a portal’s energy, it detonates automatically. And that much would not only kill us, but take out a full city block!”
Ray paled. “Then you might want to turn here,” he said as a familiar flash split the air right ahead.
I swerved hard to the right, sending his hairy butt tumbling into the passenger seat. We plowed through a park bench, skidded into a road and were back on asphalt, if not out of trouble.
I leaned over the seat. “Where to?” I yelled.
Louis-Cesare shot me a pained look. “Vampire hearing!”
“Human adrenaline!” I shouted back, just as loud. “Where?”
He swallowed and faced the inevitable. “We have to report this.”
I nodded and shifted gears. For the first time in my life, I was actually relieved to be headed to vamp central.
CHAPTER 19
It was an hour later and Elyas was still dead. We were back at the mansion, and things were starting to get a little creepy. Not so much because of the dead body, but because of the ones that remained alive. So to speak.
Exhibit number one was in the hall outside the study. The vamp must have been young enough not to have much power of his own, because without his master’s to aid him, he was little more than an automaton. He had a broom in one hand and a dust pan in the other, and he’d been sweeping the same patch of already-gleaming floor over and over for the last ten minutes.
I had this crazy vision of him standing there, sweeping and sweeping, until he dried up entirely and began to crumble. Until he became dust himself. If his arms go last, he could sweep himself up….
“How long does it take to find a freaking bullet?” The crabby voice jolted me out of an exhausted haze.