Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  “Ray. They put you back together already?”

  “Good as new.” He walked over and bent down to show me his scar. “Better, really,” he said in a low voice. “The Senate’s got some good bokors on their payroll. When they finished with my neck, I had them look at . . . other stuff.”

  “So no more Mr. Lumpy?”

  “Naw. I’m a stallion, baby!”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I told him as he settled off to the side, well out of the sun.

  I looked at Caedmon. “How did I end up with Naudiz? I wasn’t at the auction and I never met Jókell.”

  “But I did,” Ray said.

  “What difference does that make?”

  Ray leaned back against the wall, getting comfortable. “We think it went down something like this. Jókell’s in the office, waiting on the luduan to authenticate the stone so he can get his money. The door opens, but he doesn’t sense anything dangerous, just some human looking for the john or something.”

  “Because Christine’s power signature was deceptive,” I said. “She was one of those rare vampires able to hide her true strength.”

  “Right. So he’s not worried. No human is gonna be a problem for him. So he gets caught flat- footed and she guts him.”

  “That’s not speculation,” I said. “I talked to the luduan yesterday, and that’s what happened.”

  “Yeah, we talked to him, too, this morning. He said Jókell had the rune in his hand and was about to hand it to him to verify when Christine showed up.”

  I nodded. “He told me that, too.”

  “Okay, so there’s Christine, who must have heard about the rune from eavesdropping on Elyas. She knows he’s coming to do his own snatch and grab any minute, so she doesn’t have much time. She checks Jókell’s clothes, turns out his pockets, but doesn’t find the rune. And then she senses Elyas approaching and has to leave or blow her cover too early.”

  “Following you so far.”

  “Then Elyas comes in. He sees Jókell lying there, all but dead, with the carrier he’d seen at the auction around his neck. He grabs the carrier, assuming it has the stone, and hurries off before anyone spots him. Leaving Jókell behind with the rune still in his hand.”

  “But if he had it at that point, why didn’t he cast it?” I asked. “He had to know how it worked or he wouldn’t have been able to sell it. Any buyer was going to need that information.”

  “He did cast it.”

  “Then why is he dead?”

  “Because he made a mistake. Naudiz takes a few seconds to activate once the incantation is said. He was half unconscious with blood loss and in a lot of pain. When I came back, all he could think about was getting my attention, to let me know he needed help.”

  Light dawned. “H grabbed your ankle.” I remembered Ray mentioning that, but it hadn’t seemed important.

  “With the hand holding Naudiz,” Ray agreed. “It transferred to me and the next second, Jókell was dead.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how I got it.”

  “Naudiz is designed to sustain life,” Caedmon said. “It cannot function properly on a creature that, by its definition of the term, is already dead. It lent him some additional energy while it searched for a living body to fulfill its function, but it could do no more.”

  “The bokors said that’s why I came through the whole dismemberment thing so good,” Ray added. “According to them, I should have been pretty out of it.”

  Come to think of it, Ray had seemed remarkably . . . resilient. “But why transfer to me?”

  “No reason other than you were the first living body with which Raymond had extensive contact,” Caedmon explained.

  “Yeah, your hands were all over me,” Ray said with a cheerful leer. “And at some point—boom! It transferred. Probably during that crazy pursuit. I mean, who would notice, right?”

  “But I’ve been hurt since,” I protested. “subrand broke my wrist!”

  “Naudiz isn’t a shield, Dorina,” Caedmon told me. “It does not protect you against all injuries. It does ensure that those injuries are not life-threatening.”

  I nodded and started to ask something else when a huge yawn interrupted me. “She’s tired,” Claire said, getting up. “We should go.”

  “I’m okay,” I protested, only to have her look at me severely.

  “The healers said you’ll need lots of rest, probably for the next week. The rune may have kept you alive, but you took a beating down there.”

  “It couldn’t have been that bad. I—”

  “Louis-Cesare had to pry your body out of the brickwork!”

  I was suddenly grateful not to be able to remember anything. “Okay, but one more thing,” I said as everyone else got up. “How didsubrand know I had the rune? I didn’t even know.”

  “The most likely explanation is that he tracked the fey to the nightclub and saw Christine leaving the office,” Caedmon said. “By the luduan’s description, she was heavily muffled up, and from what I understand, she did bear a superficial resemblance to you.”

  I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guess, from a distance, we would look something alike: dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin and roughly the same height. Of course, her hair had been long, but she’d usually worn it up. And the luduan had said she had a hood. I decided it was feasible. It also seemed irrelevant.

  “There must be thousands of people in this city who look like me,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but there are not thousands who could take on a fey warrior and hope to survive.subrand saw a small, dark- haired woman with no discernable power signature leaving the office shortly before Jókell was found murdered. He does not know many humans, and therefore his thoughts must have immediately gone to you. He had his spies check your home and discovered that Claire was here. His logical conclusion was that she had asked you to retrieve the stone, and that you had done so.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “My people tell me that he has returned to Faerie for the present, no doubt realizing once we arrived that the rune was lost to him.” He looked at me soberly. “But you should be careful, Dory.subrand is not the type to forget a defeat, and you have bested him twice now in front of his men. I think you may see him again.”

  I remembered the fey I had seen following LouisCesare. Hadsubrand hoped he would lead him to me? I decided I owed Marlowe’s boys a drink.

  Claire bent over to retrieve Stinky. “Get well soon,” she told me. “I want to go see some movies, eat some greasy human food, go shopping. . . .”

  “So you’re not headed right back?”

  She shook her head. “I know it doesn’t sound like it from the way I’ve been talking, but there are things I love about Faerie. But I’m half human, too. And I think I’ve been away too long.”

  “Maybe you need to visit more often, then.”

  She grinned. “Maybe I do.”

  Radu was the last one remaining. He settled beside me on the bed, looking sober. “Louis-Cesare is downstairs. He’s been here since he brought you back.”

  “Why didn’t he come up?”

  “He doesn’t think you want to see him. I told him he was being ridiculous, but you know how he is.”

  “I’m learning.”

  “Should I tell him to come up?”

  “Yeah.” I had a few questions for him.

  Radu nodded, but he didn’t leave. “You know, even if she hadn’t been an evil mutant, she was always quite bad for him. Not that I meddle.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But she was. He needs a nice, levelheaded girl. You’re levelheaded, Dory.”

  “I’m insane, ’Du.”

  “Well, not all the time. And when you’re not, you’re quite lovely . . . in your own odd little way.”

  “Uh, thank you?”

  Radu patted my arm. “You’re welcome.”

  I closed my eyes for what felt like a brief moment after he left, and when I opened them again it was dark. Mo
onlight poured through the window onto the bed, tracing Louis-Cesare’s face with a slender outline of silver. “I guess Claire was right,” I murmured. “I must have been tired.”

  “With cause,” he said softly.

  “You didn’t have to stay.”

  He brushed sweaty hair out of my eyes. “I have left you twice, and each time, you were almost killed.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t leave, then.”

  He let his fingers, soft and featherlight, trail over the skin of my face. “I’m not going anywhere. But you need to sleep.”

  “Un-uh. You don’t get off that easy.” I didn’t feel like getting up, so I bunched a fist in his pretty blue shirt and pulled him down beside me. His chest made a good pillow, I decided; my eyes were already trying to slip closed.

  I forced them back open, because there were a couple of things I wanted to know. I decided to get the big one out of the way first. “Was Christine really your mistress?”

  “For a brief time, before the Change. But afterwards . . . even had I been inclined to continue our affair, she hated vampires. She would never have been involved with one of us.”

  “Then why tell people that?”

  “She required constant supervision and it was not a task I could trust to another. Had she managed to get away, any deaths she caused would have been my fault. I had to keep her constantly with me, and I had to have a believable reason for doing so.”

  “So you let everyone think you were just too smitten to let her out of your sight?”

  “Essentially. But it backfired when Alejandro decided that kidnapping my beloved mistress would be a perfect way to force me to deal with Tomas.”

  “That’s why you were so crazy to get her back. You knew how dangerous she could be.”

  “I had no idea how dangerous she could be,” he said drily. “She kept her abilities very well hidden. I was more concerned with the possibility that she would give herself away. Christine was quite lucid much of the time, but at others . . .”

  “I saw.” That image of her playing in Anthony’s mutilated chest would stay with me a while. She’d seemed so . . . happy.

  “But at Alejandro’s court, eccentricity is the order of the day. Apparently no one noticed. And Alejandro kept her closely confined; he knew that I would be looking for any way to steal her back.”

  “But Elyas wasn’t so careful.”

  “No. Alejandro transferred Christine to him once he discovered that Tomas was missing, fearing that his threat to kill her might lead me to desperate measures. Elyas agreed to take her, but it seems that his only concession to security was to tell the doorman not to allow her egress! She appeared timid and powerless to him—not someone to worry about. Not someone to fear.”

  “Which is one reason she was able to kill so easily. Everyone else thought the same.”

  “Fortunately she appears to have concluded that killing single vampires would do little good in her quest to eradicate the breed. And it might lead to her discovery and execution before she could put a larger plan in place. At least, Marlowe can find no reports of mysterious deaths, either here or near Elyas’s estate. We do not know what occurred at Alejandro’s, but I assume it was the same.”

  “She was saving it up for one big blowout.”

  “It would seem so.”

  I rolled over so I could see his face. “Okay, end of the easy questions. What were you doing in my head?”

  “Mind speak is part of your legacy, from your vampire half. I assume the wine you have been drinking allowed it to manifest.”

  Fey wine—a curse and a blessing, I thought. And then my eyes narrowed. “But how did you know that? I haven’t been mind speaking to you, or to anyone.”

  He looked away, and his tongue swept over his lips again. “There may have been a few instances when I picked up . . . thoughts.”

  “Thoughts?”

  “Feelings, mostly.”

  “Good feelings?”

  His eyes flicked back to mine, and a faint smile tugged at his lips. “Very good.”

  Considering the kind of things I’d been picking up from him, I decided to let it drop. For the moment. “All right. But why tell me all that crap about you and Christine? You let me believe that you two were going to pick up where you left off.”

  “How could I do otherwise? You have spent a lifetime killing revenants. How could I tell you that I was harboring one?”

  “You were afraid I’d kill her?”

  “That, yes. But there was also your reaction. I knew you would be shocked, disgusted, horrified—everything I saw on your face in the tunnels. I did not want you to think less of me and I knew . . .”

  “Knew what?”

  “That there was no chance for us!” His face was serious, passionate. It made me want to thump him.

  “Why? Because Marlowe disapproves and the Senate won’t like it? Personally I think that’s kind of a bonus.”’

  He looked at me in disbelief. “I stole from you. I lied to you about Christine. I left you with a madwoman—”

  “Twice.”

  “You have every right to wish to never see me again!”

  “Yes. But then, you also helped me fight off a bunch of crazy fey, ran out on your murder trial because you thought I might need help and, from what I hear, pried me out of a wall.”

  I yawned, and when I looked up again, Louis-Cesare had that same mix of hope, uncertainty and fear on his face that I’d seen once before. “What are you saying?” he asked carefully.

  “I’m saying . . .” I paused. What was I saying? Was I actually thinking about this? Was I actually doing this? Because out of a lifetime of crazy things, this had to take the prize. Dhampirs didn’t have relationships—not long-term ones, at least. And certainly not with the creatures we were supposed to be hunting. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and this was probably going to end in disaster. Everyone knew, there was no such thing as happy endings, and princes didn’t end up with the family pariah.

  But now it seems that I am a pariah, too, drifted through my head.

  “Stop it,” I said, leaning back against him. His arms were tight around me, but his hands were gentle. I could hear a heartbeat in my ear, and it sounded natural, soothing. “What are you saying? That I can’t corrupt you?”

  He brushed his lips over mine, the faintest of touches, his breath warm against my skin. “I intend to give you every opportunity to try.”

  I smiled as I drifted back to sleep. Okay. That could work.