Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  I headed for the nearest exit as fast as Ray’s stumbling feet would go, but had to stop short. Two large shadows were standing beside the doors. The first had a gun bulge under his sleek black coat; the other looked like a weapon would be an insult to his hulking masculinity. But he was probably faster than he looked. Not all giants are lumbering, at least not when they’re also master vampires.

  My every instinct said attack, but my instincts always say that. And right now it wouldn’t be smart. On my own, two was doable, even two masters. But I wasn’t on my own. And a fight would allow the rest of the family time to zero in on our location.

  There was some muffled foul language from the duffel. I gave it a poke. “Settle down!”

  “Let me out! I’m suffocating in here!”

  “You don’t have lungs.”

  “I’m going to puke in this thing.”

  “You don’t have a stomach, either,” I told him, steering the body over to the wall. I unzipped the bag and a big nose popped out. “Gah! What the hell have you been carrying in this thing?”

  “It’s my gym bag.”

  “It smells like something died in here!”

  “If we don’t get out of here soon, something might,” I told him grimly. “The main exits are guarded. Tell me you’ve got a secret way out.”

  “Do you have any idea what those cost?”

  Of course. I would decide to kidnap the only vamp dumb enough to skimp on the necessities. “A back door, then!”

  “There’s a courtyard behind the bar, but it’s just a space between buildings. There’s no exit that way.”

  “There’s about to be.”

  We booked it back across the club, wove through the five-person-thick crowd around the bar and pushed through a door. The storeroom proved to be a claustrophobic brick rectangle, with no windows and only a narrow aisle between shelves. But a small breeze drifted through a slightly ajar back door.

  I pushed it open and found myself in a narrow courtyard containing broken pallets, bags of garbage and a couple cats. Their eyes glowed at me for an instant before they scampered up a fire escape to safety. On every side, buildings rose tall and dark, hemming us in, as Ray had said. The shortest was three stories, and while I might have scaled it on my own, I couldn’t do it towing a half-dead vampire.

  It looked like the only way out was the one the cats had taken.

  I tugged on the pull-down ladder, wondering how I was going to get Ray’s well-padded ass up four flights. And then I wondered if I’d get him up at all when the structure shrieked in protest and refused to budge. Decades’ worth of rust clung to my hands and sent a cloud of red flakes into the air. The ladder probably hadn’t been touched since the building was erected, maybe a century ago.

  It finally came down, but it wasn’t wide enough for me to haul anybody up alongside me, and I doubted it would hold the weight of two adults anyway. So I sent the body up first. Its coordination was about what you’d expect for someone without a head, and it didn’t help that the stairs shuddered with every step. But amazingly, they looked like they might hold.

  Of course, the universe wasted no time in punishing me for that nanosecond of optimism. Halfway up the second landing, a scream of overstressed metal echoed around the courtyard and a hail of old bolts came rattling down. The fire escape tore away from the building on one side and sagged out into the air.

  The body stopped, quivering in fear, and one look at Raymond’s face showed why. The two parts were obviously in some sort of communication, or it wouldn’t have been able to move. But the only thing being communicated at the moment was terror.

  So I slapped him.

  Furious blue eyes swiveled up to mine. “Wasn’t beheading me enough?”

  “Move. Or you’re going to be headless permanently,” I hissed.

  Ray’s eyes swung back to his body, which had slumped over like the corpse it was, causing my jacket to begin to slide off. I moved forward to catch it, and thereby narrowly missed being skewered by a spear of metal that fell off the building. It took out the awning over the back door instead, crumpling the heavy aluminum like paper before slamming into the paving stones.

  Ray gave a startled yelp, but the near miss got his body moving again. And this time, he wasn’t messing around. Freedom was a few steps away, and he went for it, taking the last few flights with the fire escape collapsing under him. He leapt into the air on its final shudder and grabbed the edge of the roof next door, dangling there precariously.

  I didn’t wait around to find out if he made it. Rusted metal rattled down the old bricks and exploded against the paving stones, flinging shrapnel everywhere. Along with it went a crashing cacophony of sound loud enough to wake the dead—and that included the dead searching for us.

  Chapter Eleven

  Grabbing the duffel, I headed back across the courtyard at a run, leaping over fallen pieces while trying to dodge the ones still raining down. Something hit my right shoulder like a hammer blow, but I couldn’t waste time seeing how bad it was. I charged back through the storeroom and burst through the door—just in time to see half a dozen vamps converging on it.

  I ducked back inside and slammed it behind me. It was sturdy old oak—probably a relic from the club’s original incarnation as a factory—but that would buy us seconds at best. Maybe they hadn’t seen us, I thought hysterically, before doing a Ray and throwing the lock.

  “Did you see that?” Raymond sounded vaguely awed. “Did you see what I did?”

  “What’s on the other side of this wall?” I asked breathlessly.

  “I was like . . . like Superman or something! I almost flew—” He broke off as the door shuddered under a heavy blow. So much for hoping they hadn’t seen us.

  “Ray! I need to know—”

  “My office is next door. Why?”

  “You’re going to need to redecorate.” I pulled a wad of explosive putty out of one of the duffel’s side compartments and worked to get the wrapping off.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something I planned to use on the portal.” It was the latest thing, specifically designed to use an energy sink’s own power against it. But it ought to do a pretty good job on the wall, too. I tore off a small piece and slapped it in place.

  Ray stared at it, his small eyes wide. “Are you kidding me? This is an old building. You’ll bring it down on our heads!” He paused for a moment. “And that’s all I got left!”

  “I’m not using that much,” I told him, tugging my jacket back on for protection. I retreated to the other side of the room, threw up an arm to shield my face and pulled my Glock—only to have a leg smash through the bottom half of the door and kick it out of my hand.

  So I grabbed my backup Smith & Wesson and emptied a clip into the vamp, but other than shredding the guy’s trousers, it didn’t have much effect. His flesh absorbed the bullets like water before forcing them out again, the wounds closing almost as soon as they were formed. He was obviously a master; all I was doing was pissing him off.

  As he demonstrated by shooting a basketball-sized hole in the top of the door. For once, I didn’t feel like complaining about my lack of height. If I’d been a couple inches taller, Raymond wouldn’t have been the only one missing a head.

  And then a cascade of bullets from a machine gun came through the hole, kind of negating the height advantage. Raymond was screaming, despite the fact that I’d hit the cement floor in front of the door, flattening us out. That didn’t stop the stream of bullets, but it allowed me to reach through the hole in the door, grab our attacker’s leg and pull.

  He hit the floor, and I jerked him through the opening. I’d pulled a stake out of my jacket, but I didn’t need it; one of the tough old pieces of the splintered door did the job for me. Another vamp yanked him back out, using his body to snap off the remaining shards, and slid through the cleared gap as quick as if he’d been oiled.

  I’d hopped back to my feet, but he used the shotgun he’d brought along t
o sweep my legs out from under me. He tried to bring the butt down on my head, but I jerked aside, got a foot in his sternum and shoved. He staggered into the far wall, and I dove for my Glock. My hand closed on it just as I heard the distinctive sound of a shotgun cock. I looked up to see it leveled on me, and the vamp grinning.

  “Mine,” he told the others, who were jockeying for position at the new porthole in the door. He noticed my little gun and his lip curled. He spread his arms wide. “Go ahead,” he told me. “Give it your best shot.”

  So I did.

  A second later I had a room full of smoke, a jacket coated with vampire bits and a three-foot fissure in the bricks. The bullet had passed through the center of the vamp’s chest and hit the patch, setting off the equivalent of half a stick of dynamite. I glanced at the remaining vamps, who were gaping at my weapon. “Okay. Size doesn’t always matter.”

  They didn’t say anything, and nobody made any attempt to open the door. I snatched up the duffel and scrambled through the hole, ignoring the edges that tore at my flesh. And belatedly noticed white tile, bathroom stalls and a woman with a jagged line of lipstick running from her mouth to her ear.

  “Oops,” Raymond said.

  The woman stopped staring at the hole to stare at my duffel instead. “Th-there’s something sticking out of your bag.”

  I looked down to see a by now familiar nose poking out the side. Damn it, he’d bitten a hole through the nylon. “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s right there!”

  “One too many, huh?” I sympathized, pushing Raymond back inside.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Well, maybe you should start!” Raymond yelled, as I burst out into the hall. “I gotta make a living here!”

  There was more smoke outside, of the fake variety usually seen on Halloween boiling out of plastic skulls and jack-o’-lanterns. It allowed the laser light show to cut ominous blue flashes through the darkness and ensured that I couldn’t see a damn thing. But the sense that allows me to tell when a vampire is near doesn’t need sight. It’s like a tidal pull in the blood, forceful and elemental. And at the moment, it was shaking me harder than the bass line throbbing under my feet.

  The place was crawling with vamps, even more than before. It looked like Cheung had called in some backup. And wasn’t that just all I needed?

  And then the front doors blew open, allowing another dozen vampires to pour into the room. I don’t think most of the patrons noticed, other than those getting jostled aside as the new arrivals cut a swath across the floor. But the power emanating off them almost knocked me down.

  They were all masters. Third- level, at a guess, easily able to have courts of their own. Which made it a little ridiculous that they were after one lone dhampir. I mean, I’m good, but I’m not that good. They surged forward, and I didn’t even hesitate. I turned on my heel and ran.

  The pulse of the music felt like the rhythm of my heart—fast and frantic—as I fought my way over the sticky floor to the elevated DJ booth and climbed the vibrating metal frame. The lousy visibility wouldn’t bother the vamps, but it was a different story for me. I needed a vantage point.

  The DJ was another young Asian guy with a fall of bleached blond hair. He was also human, judging by the fact that his tank top was stained dark down the spine. “Lost my date,” I yelled.

  He nodded in time with the deafening music. “What’s your name?”

  I pretended I couldn’t hear him and scanned the room. It was obvious at once that the ground floor was hopeless. The warehouse dated from the bad old days before anyone started worrying about things like natural light or ventilation for the toiling masses. It had no windows that I could see that hadn’t been bricked up long ago. But there was a catwalk around half the room with the old manager’s office perched in the middle. And I was betting he’d had light.

  The DJ grabbed the back of my jacket as I started down. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said into his microphone, “if anyone out there has lost a lady, she’s up here keeping me company. Don’t hurry to claim her, all right?”

  He turned a spotlight on me, causing the eyes of half the people—and all of the vamps—in the place to swivel in my direction. I hit the switch for strobes, slammed my heavy-ass duffel into the side of the DJ’s head and jumped the six feet to the floor. I landed badly enough to almost twist an ankle, and knocked over a guy with a tray of Jell-O shots. The room went black- and-white and stuttering as I slipped in the mess, righted myself and headed for the balcony.

  I didn’t make it.

  Someone darted in from the side, snapped the strap on the duffel and took off. I changed course to follow and saw the duffel disappear into the hallway beside the bar. It was empty by the time I got there, but a door beside the ladies’ was just closing. I kicked it back open and got a brief glimpse around—a desk, a chair, a sagging fan set in a water-stained ceiling—and then a furious vampire caught me by the wrists, using his body to pin me to the desk.

  I tried to wrench free, but nothing happened. I tried again in disbelief, because I’m stronger than all but the senior masters. This time, he did let go, but only so he could grab my hips instead. He swung me up and slammed me backward onto the scarred wood, clearing the surface with a sweep of his arm. Papers, a laptop, glass and metal went flying, half of it shattering against the nearby wall.

  I managed to wrestle a knife out of my boot, but he grabbed it before I could drive it home, flinging it away to land quivering in the side of the fake wood paneling. I got an elbow in a sensitive spot, but he pinned my wrists to the desk. He pressed his hips hard against me and swore softly, viciously, “If we get out of this alive, I will kill you!”

  Startled out of fighting for a moment, I paused, staring at him. There wasn’t much light in the room, but a few beams of pale blue leaked in from the hall. They struck highlights in the thick auburn hair, which as usual was confined by a gold slide at his nape, and turned his face into a sculpture of elegant bone, skin and shadow. It made him look more dangerous than the man I remembered, and he’d been plenty dangerous enough.

  But at least I knew why I couldn’t move. Tight black jeans and a matching cashmere sweater showed off six feet of solid muscle he didn’t need. A first-level master, Louis-Cesare could have held me against the desk with a tendril of power he wouldn’t even miss.

  “You haven’t been alive in four centuries,” I pointed out, as he tore off my jacket. My weapons hit the floor, followed in short order by my tank top and bra. “Hey!”

  “They saw what you were wearing.”

  “Pretty soon I’m not going to be wearing anything!”

  “Exactly.”

  He ripped my belt out of its loops and popped the line of buttons on my jeans, all in one smooth motion. I caught his arm. “This isn’t going to work. They’ll scent us!”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “We have a bloody head in a bag!”

  “I have hidden talents.”

  Not so hidden ones, too, I didn’t say, as he shoved his own jeans down. It was the only disrobing he bothered to do before pushing me onto my back. The desk was cold against my bare skin, like the steel of the knife he used to cut my thong away.

  I started to ask if the vamps had seen the color of my panties, too, but he swallowed the words, kissing me as his fingers worked roughly, expertly, between my thighs. He broke the kiss after a moment, to give me time to breathe, I suppose, but air wasn’t what I needed. I knew he was just trying to fool Cheung’s boys into believing we were having an assignation, but it had been a long, dry month and, damn it, I’d missed him. My hands fisted in his shirt, giving me leverage to pull him down and kiss him back, brutally.

  He tasted sweet, with a bitter edge of hard liquor, and he smelled even better. And he wasn’t wearing anything under those jeans. My hands slid down the thickly muscled back to the taut mounds below, fingernails sinking deep.

  Olga had definitely been right, I thought vaguely, as a shudder we
nt through him. He raised his head to glare. “That was completely unnecessary.”

  “Oh, it was necessary,” I said, wishing it had been my teeth, but I couldn’t reach that far, and then he did something with his fingers that made the breath fracture in my throat. The best I could do was a growled command: “Faster, faster, you son of a bitch—”

  He obliged, although the desk really wasn’t built for our current activity, and my head and shoulders fell off the back. Not that I was complaining. Not even when his fangs—damn him—sank into the tender flesh his fingers had been tormenting. My spine arched with a combination of pain and pleasure so intense that I didn’t even notice when the door burst open.

  Until he spun, snarling.

  “Sorry,” a deep voice said, and the door shut again.

  He drew in air he didn’t need, his lips glossy and a little swollen. I thought of how they had gotten that way and met his eyes. “If you stop now, I will kill you,” I told him distinctly.

  The threat had no apparent effect, but a shiver went through him when I suddenly grasped evidence that he hadn’t been entirely playacting, either. “Dorina . . .” The tone was a warning, but I was way past caring.

  I tugged him a little, sending a shiver through that strong frame. “Louis-Cesare. It’s good to finally have you in hand.”

  He winced, either at the pun or the sensation, and his right hand tightened on my thigh. His left was occupied with the duffel, which he’d snatched from under the desk as soon as the door closed. I found that pretty telling, considering that he hadn’t even bothered to pull his pants up first. “You don’t.”

  “More or less.” He was a big boy. Everywhere. “Although I’m a little fuzzy on why you stole my duffel bag.”

  “It seemed the easiest way to get you off the floor without a fight.”

  I stared at him incredulously. Louis-Cesare was the dueling champion of the European Senate. He didn’t walk away from fights; he relished them. I guess it’s true what they say about only being able to think with one head at a time.