Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  “I don’t know any princesses,” Geminus told me, sounding amused. “But next time she’s in town, do tell her to stop by.”

  The crowd seemed to think that was funny. I wasn’t feeling so amused. I’d assumed my chances with Ming-de were pretty low. She was powerful enough that even the fey were going to think twice about challenging her, particularly when there was no evidence that she’d done anything more than place a bid. But I’d had higher hopes for Geminus.

  He was a senator, not a consul, with far less personal power to draw on. And his own Senate wasn’t likely to protect him over a power play gone wrong. I’d thought that there was at least a decent chance that he’d panic at the thought of facing the fey and cough up the rune.

  Only he didn’t appear to be panicking.

  “You may not know her, but you know something about a piece of her property,” I said. “You were at the auction—” An unseen hand suddenly clasped me around the throat, restricting my air. Not enough to truly choke me, but a definite warning.

  I hadn’t planned to mention Naudiz, hadn’t even wanted to bring up the fey, especially not in front of an audience. But I wasn’t going to stand there and be drained—or whatever else he had planned. Let him explain what the fey wanted with him.

  After a moment, the pressure eased a bit. “What princess did you say?”

  “Read the note. Left- hand-side pocket of my jacket.”

  He picked it up off the floor and felt around the pocket. He took enough time to read the note two or three times, before he finally moved away. The power holding me broke at the same moment, so abruptly that I went to one knee.

  “And what does this princess want with me?”

  “To do you a favor.” I got my back against the wall before I even pulled up the jeans.

  “I like favors from pretty women,” he told me easily. “Come.”

  I jerked the T-shirt back on, not bothering with underwear, grabbed my jacket and followed him through a door on the far side of the room. We passed down a long corridor, which gave me a moment to get my breathing under control and remind myself that I wasn’t allowed to kill him. Yet.

  We eventually stopped at an office. Or, at least, I guess it was supposed to serve that function. It was so stuffed with weaponry that it was a little difficult to tell. I shoved an antique shield off a chair and sat down, as Geminus got behind the desk.

  “What is this princess going to do for me?”

  “Her name is Claire, and she’s half- human,” I told him shortly. “She grew up here and only recently claimed her heritage when she agreed to marry a Blarestri prince. But she’s never really gotten used to the way the fey do certain things. She’s a vegetarian pacifist, for instance; she hates unnecessary violence.”

  “I’m fascinated.”

  “You should be. Anyone else would have just turned you over to her family for punishment.”

  “I don’t recall angering any fey. Not of the royal kind, at any rate.”

  “They tend not to like it much when you steal from them.”

  “Then I am fortunate, for I have stolen nothing.”

  “You were seen at the club, right before the fey ended up dead and the rune went missing.”

  It was a lie, but I thought it was worth a shot. But he didn’t take the bait. “Was I?”

  “And you’re certainly strong enough to take out a fey warrior.”

  “You flatter me.”

  I glanced up at the wooden sword mounted over the fireplace. It was old and crumbling, barely held together by some stained twine, but carefully preserved behind a glass case. Two thousand years ago, Geminus had gotten his start as a gladiator, one of the few ways for poor young men of the time to rise to fame and fortune. He was rumored to have been fearless, despite a seer prophesying that he would die on the arena sands. He hadn’t, instead winning the sword and his freedom after successfully defeating numerous opponents.

  By all accounts, he’d been doing the same thing ever since.

  “I don’t think so,” I said simply.

  He laughed. “Strong enough but not stupid enough. No relic is worth that kind of trouble.”

  “Not even if it gets you control of the Senate?”

  “But I do not wish to control the Senate,” he told me easily. “Let them bicker and squabble and plot and plan. My interests lie elsewhere.”

  “You expect my employer to believe that you just shrugged off what happened at the auction? Come on, Geminus. That’s not your style.”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  He sighed and kicked back against the wall, one foot propped up on the desk.

  “After Cheung did his fiddle with the auction, I was . . . annoyed. It was obvious that he’d never intended to give the stone to anyone but Ming-de. I don’t like being played, so I had my servants to do some checking. They discovered who the sellers usually used for authentication. And fortunately for me, the little bastard was swimming in debt.”

  “You’re talking about the luduan.”

  “Yes. I offered him a deal. I’d pay his debts if he switched the rune for a fake when he examined it.”

  “And once the fey found out and tracked him down?”

  “That was his problem. But he could always deny it. There was no way anyone was going to know where, exactly, it went missing.”

  “Why were you at Ray’s, if you already had a plan in place?”

  This time, he didn’t budge. “I wanted to make sure he didn’t double-cross me. The stone was worth considerably more than I was paying on his debts. I didn’t trust him.”

  “What happened?”

  “My men and I surrounded the building, and the luduan went in. He was supposed to bring me the rune, but he never came back. I finally sent one of my boys in to check on things, and he found the luduan gone and Raymond screaming about a dead fey. I decided it might be prudent to leave at that point.”

  “You’re telling me a luduan killed a fey warrior?”

  “They’re both fey, and the guard might not have been expecting it.”

  “If I were him, and I had something worth a king’s ransom, I’d have been expecting it.”

  “Yet someone managed to do it.” He had a point there. “I don’t know if he killed the guard. I don’t know that he has the rune. I only know I don’t. You can tell your lady that.”

  “I will. And she may even believe you; Claire’s the trusting type,” I said, standing up and tucking my card under a corner of his blotter. “Unfortunately, her family isn’t, and they’ll be here tomorrow. Knowing Caedmon, he may decide to find the rune in the most efficient way possible.”

  “And what would that be?”

  I shrugged. “Attack everyone who was at the auction and see who doesn’t die.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Five minutes later, I hit the sidewalk in front of Geminus’s building. Not literally, this time; he hadn’t thrown me out, but he also hadn’t admitted a damn thing. Leaving me hours away from the trial and fresh out of ideas.

  Two silent shadows peeled off the bricks and followed me as I headed down the street. They didn’t say anything, including asking about what had happened upstairs. Of course, my cursing had probably already told them it wasn’t good.

  I leaned against the side of a building a few blocks over and lit the crumpled old joint I found in my jacket. Sucking in a long breath, I held it for a second before letting it out. Drugs don’t do a lot for me thanks to my revved-up metabolism, but they’re better than nothing. And this was excellent weed.

  After a moment the wave hit, lifting my bones away from one another and loosening the joints in sequence—neck, shoulders, wrists, fingers—leaving me feeling like I was floating on the tide. The tension washed out of me from spine to fingertips before coursing away, leaving me calmer, if not any happier.

  Not that I needed to be calmer. That little scene with Geminus had disturbed me, but probably not for the reason
he’d intended. It wasn’t the first time I’d been assaulted; it was, however, one of only two times in my life I could remember really wanting to fall into a dhampir rage and being unable to do so.

  The other had been yesterday, whensubrand attacked.

  I should have been able to break Geminus’s hold, at least long enough to give me a chance to get my weapons. And when I stabbedsubrand, it should have been somewhere vital. Instead, they’d both made me look like a fool, and I strongly suspected I knew why.

  The fey wine had seemed like a godsend, but I should have known better. Everything that came out of Faerie looked better, prettier, more enticing than it really was. It glittered like gold, but scratch the surface and what was revealed was a lot darker. So I was left with a choice: take the wine and put up with memories I didn’t want and a substantial power loss, or don’t take it and suffer homicidal blackouts.

  Wonderful.

  The clock ticking steadily inside my head wasn’t helping my mood, either. Geminus had my number, but he hadn’t used it. Either he really didn’t have the stone or he was cocky enough to believe he could take on the fey. That left no one on the party list who wasn’t dead or buttoned down tight. At least as far as I was concerned. Caedmon might have more luck, but he wasn’t here. And by the time he arrived, Louis-Cesare would have been sentenced and possibly executed.

  Marlowe had been right: something needed to shake loose, and it needed to happen now.

  I hailed a cab. There was one person who hadn’t been on the list who might know something. I’d already had my daily quota of ancient vampires with attitude problems who weren’t going to tell me shit. But talking to Anthony beat doing nothing.

  Although not by much.

  A yellow taxi slid to a stop in front of me, and the silent duo got inside. I started to do the same when my phone rang. “Yeah?”

  “Who the hell taught you how to answer the phone?” a brisk voice asked.

  I wasn’t sure I recognized it; the weather was overcast and the signal was lousy. “Fin?”

  “The one and only. You still interested in that deadbeat?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because he just showed up at his apartment. My boys are downstairs. If you want to talk to him before they take him apart, now would be the time.

  “Now’s good,” I said fervently. “Thanks, Fin.”

  “Where to?” the cabbie asked.

  “Chinatown.”

  A body hit the dirt at my feet, hard enough to send a gout of blood splashing up onto my face. I wiped it away and stared upward. I hate it when that happens.

  “You will die a worse death if you do not leave my domain,” a voice thundered down from the third story of the old tenement. “I am a servant of the Sacred Fire, the wielder of the flame of Arnor—”

  “So I should call you Gandalf?” I asked, getting the toe of my boot into a crack in the wall.

  There was silence for a long moment, except for the sound of brick flaking off under my boots as I scrabbled for purchase. I got a hand on the lowest rusty rung of the fire escape just as my toehold gave way. A wiggle and a heave got me up to the first landing, where a feral-looking cat hissed at me before jumping up to the next level.

  I’d have preferred to use the door, but we were trying to cover all exits. Fin’s boys were in the lobby, and Frick and Frack were watching the sides. This was the only way out left, and I wasn’t about to let him use it.

  “Aw, fudge,” floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. “You’re a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?”

  I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. “After five hundred years, you’ve read just about everything. Besides, he had hella world-building skills.”

  “You’re five hundred?” A head with small, curved horns came into view. “No way.”

  “Yep.” I followed the cat up the trembling staircase. Flakes of rust clung to my skin and ate into my palms as I hefted myself over a couple missing stairs and up another floor.

  “Well, you don’t look a day over four,” I was told, as a ceramic lamp exploded on the railings right beside me.

  One of the shards must have hit the cat, which sent up a mewl of distress. Suddenly, my objective’s entire head stuck out of the window, regardless of the danger. “Oh, no! Pooky!”

  “Pooky?” I demanded, as a squat creature crawled out onto the window ledge and held out a pawlike appendage beseechingly.

  “Come to Daddy,” it crooned, but the cat was having none of it. It hissed at both of us and tried to run between my legs, but I scooped it up, careful to keep those sharp, little claws out of my flesh.

  “You have a cat?” I asked, one brow raised, as the fur ball in my arms spit and hissed.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” The creature’s face wasn’t real expressive, but its voice was defensive.

  “You’re a dog.”

  “I’m a luduan!” it said huffily.

  I looked it over. It would be maybe three feet tall in its stocking feet, if it had feet, which it didn’t, or was designed to walk standing up, which it wasn’t. The body covered in golden brown fur looked a lot like a dog’s, except for the too-large lionlike head with a curly brown mane. To further confuse the issue, it had a unicorn- type horn in the center of its forehead.

  “Dog-ish,” I corrected.

  “Give me my cat!” it demanded.

  “Or what? You’ll smite me like a Balrog?”

  The golden eyes narrowed. “I quote Tolkien because he puts it better. But I can still open a can of whup ass all over you.”

  “You’re right,” I told him. “He does put it better.”

  The creature used its horn to snag a radio by the handle, preparing to launch it at me. I dangled the kitty over the long drop. “Just try it.”

  His face crumpled. “Oh, come on. Don’t do that. You’ll scare her!”

  “Maybe we can work something out,” I offered.

  He sighed in resignation. “I don’t have any money, okay? So you can tell whichever one of those sharks you’re working for that he’s wasting his time.”

  “I don’t want money.”

  “And you’re not getting a pound of flesh, either!”

  “I’m not here to beat you up.”

  The big head tilted. “Then why are you here?”

  I pulled the cat back in. She didn’t look particularly scared to me. Maybe because the “body” down below had vanished like the cut- rate illusion it was. “I just want to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “About what happened at Ray’s place last night.”

  He blinked those enormous eyes at me. “Come again?”

  “You heard me.”

  “No, I didn’t. That’s the kind of talk that could get my horn ground up.” He petted it nervously. “It’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac, you know? Not that it’s done me any good lately. Do you know how few lady luduans are in existence?”

  “Not really.”

  “Neither do I,” he said miserably. “I just know there’s none around here.”

  “That’s a bitch. Now are you going to help me or not?”

  “Not!”

  “Here, kitty, kitty.”

  “Cut that out!”

  “Look, you can talk to me, or you can talk to Fin’s boys. They’re waiting downstairs. But I’m nicer.” He shot me a look. “Okay, that was a lie. But I can help you out.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me what you know, and I get you off the hook with Fin.” I couldn’t afford it, but if it helped Louis-Cesare, I didn’t think Mircea was going to quibble about the expense account.

  He looked at me for a long moment, those lamp-lit eyes brighter than the streetlight across the road. “Touch the horn,” he finally said.

  It was my turn to look wary. “Is this something kinky?”

  “As if.” He sniffed. “You’re not my type.”

  Thank God for
small mercies. “If you poison me, I can’t help you with Fin,” I pointed out.

  He yawned, showing a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. They matched the talons at the end of its paws. “Relax. All that was just good propaganda. Not that I don’t know a few tricks, mind you.”

  “Like the flame of—”

  “Shut up.”

  I decided I didn’t have time to be cautious, hiked up to the third- floor landing and touched the horn. And no sooner had my finger brushed the tip than he rammed it into my skin. “Ouch!”

  “Don’t be such a baby,” he told me, as my blood sank into the apparently porous bone. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he sat there, humming and making these weird faces. I let him get away with it for maybe a minute, and then I gave the kitty a little squeeze. The spoiled thing mewed, and his eyes shot open. “You’re a piece of work—you know that?” he demanded.

  “I told you this had better not be kinky.”

  “It isn’t!”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “Like that’s hard,” he sneered. “And you may as well let Pooky go. I know you won’t drop her.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  He sighed. “Lady—or may I call you Dorina?”

  “No!”

  “Okay, Dorina, it’s like this. I’m a luduan. I taste your blood, and I know what kind of person you are, whether you’re lying to me, yadda yadda.” He waved a paw. “You know the score, or you wouldn’t be here. Don’t waste my time.”

  I sighed and pulled a gun. “You’re right. I can’t kill an innocent creature just for sport. You, on the other hand . . .”

  “Hey!” Those bright eyes narrowed. “No need to get nasty. Did I say we couldn’t do business?”

  “Then what was all that about with the blood?”

  “Establishing some guidelines. It saves time. Otherwise, people try to lie to me and it gives me a real headache”—he tapped the space above the horn with his paw—“right here.”