Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

by Carrie Vaughn

  “You first.”

  I sighed. “It’s a long story. And you?”

  “Same. You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I hate this town.”

  Chapter 18

  It was true. Something about the adrenaline spike of extreme danger and a near-death experience could give a mega-boost to a person’s sex drive. Ben and I retreated to our hotel room with the intention of cleaning up and changing clothes, and ended up tangled in bed together, enthusiastically reasserting our identities as a mated alpha pair.

  It didn’t make the rest of the world go away.

  I lay half on top of him, my head pillowed on his chest, clinging to him with arms and legs, catching my breath. He held me close, one hand woven in my hair, the other braced around my hips. I could feel his own heavy breathing against my scalp.

  Then he said, “Okay. Tell me again how you ended up smelling like the King of Beasts show and wearing Odysseus Grant’s shirt.”

  “That does seem pretty compromising when you put it that way.”

  “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation.”

  Well, there was an explanation, at any rate. Lycanthropic sacrifice to an ancient Mesopotamian goddess was off the scale even for my usual explanations. But I explained, in detail this time.

  I finished, and after a pause Ben said, “That’s fucked up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But nothing happened. Between you and that guy.”

  “What do you mean, nothing happened? He wanted to rape me.”

  “But. . . never mind.” He settled his arms more firmly around me.

  He wasn’t getting out of it that easy. I propped myself on my elbows so I was looking down on him, into his sparkling hazel eyes.

  “Are you asking if I liked it?”

  He smirked. “Clearly you didn’t. Even if he was hot.”

  I glared at him. “What about you? What happened to you? And why do you smell like. . . like. . .” It hit me, all those smells, all those women. “Were you in a strip club or something?”

  Was that a guilty look in his eyes?

  “Actually, it was. . . I guess you’d call it a brothel. That’s where Faber was holding me.”

  We did have a lot to talk about, didn’t we? “But nothing happened,” I said. “You didn’t. . . do anything.”

  He brushed hair out of my face; his touch tingled on my skin. We lay together, heartbeat to heartbeat. “Nothing happened,” he said. “Do you trust me?”

  I could smell him, and the faint trace of otherness I’d sensed on him before was gone. All I smelled on him now was him, the pack, and me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I can smell that nothing happened.”

  “Me, too.”

  I kissed him, happy to have him close to me again. “You’re going to have to stop doing that, running off and getting in trouble and making me worry about you. What the hell happened? Why did those guys kidnap you at all?”

  He closed his eyes and sighed. “Well—”

  His cell phone rang. He reached for it, and I flopped aside, face into a pillow.

  “Yeah? Oh, really? Give us ten minutes.” He shook my shoulder. “That was Evan. He wants us to meet him at the patio bar at the Hanging Gardens. He says we don’t want to miss this.”

  “I need a vacation from my vacation,” I said, moaning into the pillow.

  “If Evan says this is going to be good, it’s going to be good. Come on, sunshine.” He kissed my shoulder. He was kind of hard to resist, in the end.

  So ten minutes later, still looking rather the worse for wear in our disheveled shirts and jeans and mussed hair—like it wouldn’t be obvious we’d been interrupted—we arrived at the patio bar overlooking the front entrance of the Hanging Gardens.

  Evan and Brenda had claimed a table with a full view of the hotel drive, including the half a dozen police cars and vans lined up. The flashing blue and red lights were hypnotic. Brenda had her club soda with lime, Evan had a tumbler of whiskey. Wasn’t it a little early in the morning for this? Actually, my brain had been left somewhere behind last night. And it wasn’t tomorrow until the sun rose. I could sure use a drink.

  “Thought you’d want to see this,” Evan said, gesturing us to the empty chairs.

  We sat, and Brenda pushed a second whiskey to Ben and a margarita to me. Suddenly, she was my best friend. I beamed and took a sip. Maybe everything would turn out all right, after all.

  Evan continued. “The police have been swarming the theater for the last hour or so. They found five bodies brutally shot and killed. Including Balthasar.”

  My heart skipped a little at that. I’d really wanted to like him. I’d wanted him to be a good guy.

  I’d wondered what had happened after Grant spirited me out of there. It had to be a mess. Preoccupied with my own situation, I hadn’t thought about the aftermath and who’d be cleaning it up. I wondered when someone would call me about where I’d been and what I’d been doing.

  “Look look look, here it is,” Brenda said, leaning forward.

  We looked. A crowd of cops emerged from the hotel. In their midst, they escorted Boris and Sylvia. In handcuffs.

  Brenda grinned mightily.

  Evan explained. “We used their weapons. Their fingerprints are over everything. We lured them here in time for them to paw the bodies and get blood all over themselves. They’re going down.”

  Astonished, I let my jaw drop. “But they didn’t—”

  Evan put a finger over his lips. Quiet. He said, “But they would have. They were certainly after you, weren’t they?”

  I couldn’t deny it, and I couldn’t say I wasn’t pleased to see them folded into police cars and driven away. There was a hint of karmic justice in all this.

  “Couldn’t happen to a meaner couple,” Ben said, raising his glass in a toast. “Unless it happened to you two.”

  “Why, thank you,” Evan said. “And now we can discuss how much you owe me for looking after Kitty and for tipping the cops about Faber’s operation.”

  “What?” I said. “You mean you figured it out?”

  Ben intervened. “That would be a fine discussion, except I busted out of there before the cops raided the place,” Ben said.

  Evan furrowed his brow, skeptical. “What? No.”

  “I even got shot,” Ben said, like he was proud of it. “Which I have to say is another advantage of being a werewolf you may not have considered.”

  “It’s not an advantage when all my bullets are silver,” Brenda said.

  “I still tipped off the cops,” Evan said. “I tell you what. I’ll give you the friends-and-family discount. Twenty percent off.”

  Ben said, “That’s your friends-and-family discount?”

  Brenda murmured, “It’s because he doesn’t have any.”

  I stared. This was all so wrong. “You people are insane.”

  Brenda just shrugged. Didn’t deny it.

  A couple of the police cars drove away with Boris and Sylvia. More stayed, including a van marked CSI. This was going to end up on an episode of the show, wasn’t it? I guessed they’d be here a while. Five bodies, Evan said. Aside from Balthasar, I wondered which ones, who was left, and what would happen to the show. Not that I could think about them without shivering. Not even Avi, who’d seemed so friendly and earnest. I hoped the cult was broken up for good.

  I said, “What about the vampire?”

  “Vampire?” Evan said.

  “Yeah. The woman in charge of the ceremony. That priestess. She was a vampire.”

  “You sure?” Brenda said. “I remember her—I’m sure I capped her.”

  “I smelled her. She got shot and nothing happened. She’s the real one in charge of that mess. If she got away, it’ll just start up all over again.” Or she might be looking to take revenge.

  Brenda flattened her hand on the table. “What would a vampire be doing fronting a Vegas show?”

  I thought about it: A vampire at
the head of a pack of lycanthropes was a pretty powerful vampire. She’d be a rival to the Master of the city—unless she was something else entirely. Like a Babylonian priestess, heading a cult of a goddess who hadn’t been worshipped since the ancient Mesopotamian empires.

  I nudged Ben. “Let me use your phone.” I dialed Dom’s number. It rang, and rang, and rang.

  Did Dom even know that the head of Balthasar’s pack was a vampire—maybe even an ancient Mesopotamian vampire? And how old would she have to be to be the priestess of a Babylonian cult? Four thousand years old? I didn’t want to think about that. Would Dom know about her if she didn’t want him to? Now that she’d been disturbed, maybe even exposed, what would she do next?

  “What’s wrong?” Ben said, reading the anxiety in my expression.

  “He’s not answering.”

  “Who?” Evan said. “Who are you calling?”

  “The Master of Las Vegas.”

  Brenda narrowed her gaze and looked confused. “You mean that cult was headed up by a vampire, and she isn’t the Master of Las Vegas?”

  “I think something weird’s going on,” I said.

  Evan laughed. “She says this now?”

  I’d noticed lately how my baseline for weird had shifted a bit. Werewolves and bounty hunters of the supernatural were normal. A borderline BDSM stage show starring a millennia-old vampire with a set that doubled as a temple for rituals of human sacrifice? That was weird.

  “What do we do about it?” Ben said.

  “Nothing,” Evan said.

  “Nothing?” That woman had tried to kill me, and I didn’t like the thought of her running loose. But what the heck were we supposed to do about it?

  “Not our bailiwick,” Brenda said, shrugging. “You can’t expect us to go after something that powerful just because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “We only have your word that she’s a vampire,” Evan said. “Are you sure about that?”

  “I smelled her.”

  Brenda said, “If there’s a different Master here, I’m betting she isn’t even a vampire. Look—we took care of that gang. They’re not going to be sacrificing anybody anytime soon. Until she shows herself again—if she does—there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Personally, I’m thinking she’s one of the five bodies we took out.” Evan gestured to the hotel driveway, where the first of the gurneys, carrying a body in a black plastic bag, was being brought out. Once again, I wondered who it was.

  “I might be able to get a copy of the police report by tomorrow,” Ben said. “Can you wait that long?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Assuming she doesn’t kill us all in our sleep.”

  “You’re really a jumpy one,” Brenda said.

  “Can you blame me?”

  Ben took hold of my hand under the table and squeezed. Chill out. Don’t freak. She was just trying to get to me—it was her job.

  “What do you want to do?” he said.

  “I think I want to go see Dom. We have a little time—we can get over there before sunrise.”

  “Then let’s go.” He pushed his chair out. “Thanks for the drinks, and the help, and the save. I’ll send you a check.”

  He shook hands with Evan and Brenda over the table. “Tell Cormac I said hi,” Brenda said.

  “He’ll laugh his ass off when I tell him that.”

  “Good,” she said. “He probably needs a good laugh these days.”

  “Real interesting meeting you, Kitty,” Evan said.

  I smirked. “Not nice, or good, or a pleasure—”

  “I’ll say it was a pleasure,” Brenda said. “I haven’t had this much fun at a gun show in years.” She grinned, and for some reason I thought about a snake getting ready to strike.

  The sooner Ben and I were out of here, the better.

  But I paused. “Brenda, can I ask you kind of a personal question?”

  “Sure. Amuse me.”

  “Let’s see, how can I put this. . . do you dress like that on purpose?” I gestured to her tight-pants, cleavage-revealing, spike-heeled ensemble.

  “Like what?” she said, totally deadpan.

  “Never mind.”

  Hand on my elbow, Ben pulled me away.

  Dawn was nearly here. The Strip’s glitter looked tired, desperate almost, in the near-morning light. Like Christmas on downers. Dom might or might not be up still. I had to find him, because no matter how blasé Evan and Brenda were about it, I knew the priestess of Tiamat was a vampire, and I believed she was still at large. I wanted to warn Dom.

  He probably just wasn’t answering his phone. Didn’t mean he was in trouble or anything.

  “Thanks for humoring me,” I said to Ben as we walked to the Napoli. I felt like we were a team again.

  Ben said, “If he’s not answering his phone, how do you even know he’ll be there?”

  “Maybe he’s not. But I have to try. And if he’s in trouble—”

  “Kitty. You can’t save the world. What makes you think he even has anything to do with that mess at the Hanging Gardens?”

  “It’s vampires. They’re always tangled up. Nothing’s ever simple with them. Maybe you’ve noticed.”

  “Yeah, I have. So what, we ask for him at the front desk again?”

  “I still have the key card to his penthouse. Let’s hope it still works.”

  Inside the elevator, I tried the card, and surprise, surprise, it worked. A smarter guy would have had the card canceled or asked for it back. But Dom was a gracious host. He was also a vampire, which made me wonder what his veneer of amiable cluelessness was hiding.

  Beside me, Ben was fidgeting, nervous. “This may be a bad idea, walking into a vampire’s lair like this.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  He did an actual double take. “Really? You’re admitting it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t help but notice we’re doing it anyway.”

  Er, yeah. . . I wrapped my arm around his and squeezed close.

  The elevator stopped. The doors opened to the foyer of Dom’s suite. Both Dom’s vampire bodyguards were on watch. Sven stood at the elevator doors, a six-foot-five mass of polished Nordic chill. His smile showed a hint of fang. Behind him, at the other end of the foyer, the other, silent bodyguard stood watch. I avoided looking at him and concentrated on Sven.

  I smiled back and waved. Told myself to be brazen. “Hi. Is Dom in?”

  “What are you doing here?” Sven said, not angrily or defensively, but curious. Definitely not surprised. He’d probably seen us coming on some security video. It would be easy to keep track of anyone coming to Dom’s suite. Didn’t mean the vampire priestess couldn’t sneak in.

  But everything looked normal. Sven even looked relaxed—amused, maybe, at the werewolves who thought they could march in here without a by-your-leave.

  I couldn’t make excuses or bluff my way out of this one, so I laid it all out.

  “Earlier tonight I had an encounter with the woman from Balthasar’s show over at the Hanging Gardens, and I couldn’t help but notice that she’s a vampire, and I have this sneaking suspicion she may be a really, really old vampire. Like the Babylonian motif over there isn’t just a gimmick. And, well, I had this encounter because she and her boys chained me to a wall and tried to sacrifice me to some goddess called Tiamat. I know this all sounds really silly, but—”

  From the suite’s interior came the sudden wail of a woman reaching sexual climax. That kind of orgasmic noise used to make me jealous when I was single and living alone in an apartment complex with thin walls. So. A couple of people were having sex in Dom’s living room. At least, I assumed it was two. And I only assumed they were having sex.

  The wail faded to a soft moan, then to a sigh. I might have been blushing. Ben raised his brow. Sven’s expression didn’t change a whit.

  “So,” I said. “Am I to take it that Dom is here and just. . . not answering his phone for obvious reasons?”


  “Correct,” Sven said.

  Ben leaned close to me and whispered, “Maybe we should take the hint.”

  “Follow the example?” I whispered back, and he nodded.

  “I’m sure everything here’s just fine—”

  “Sven? Is that Kitty? Tell her to come in.” Dom’s voice echoed from the living room.

  “Actually, we can come back later—”

  Sven stepped aside and tilted his head, indicating that I should enter the vampire’s lair. The second bodyguard’s lips curled in an amused smile.

  Now, this was awkward.

  “You asked for this,” Ben said helpfully. “How about I wait right here?”

  “Don’t you dare,” I said, taking his hand firmly in mine.

  We crept forward. I peered ahead, ready to duck away at the first sign of something I didn’t really want imprinted on my memory. I didn’t have to look at Dom to talk to him. The living room with its panoramic windows came into view.

  Fully clothed, Dom reclined on one of the sofas, cradling a woman, also fully clothed, in his lap. He held one arm across her chest, bracing her against him. His other hand was hidden under her skirt, between her spread legs. She was flushed, her head thrown back and her mouth open in a grimace of ecstasy. One side of her pink spaghetti-strap cocktail dress had slipped off her shoulder. She clung to him, white-knuckled, and blood trickled from a wound on her neck.

  He licked the blood, kissed the spot, then carefully worked his way out from under her, barely jostling her as he moved. She remained lying on the sofa in daze, her eyes closed. Dom adjusted a pillow under her head, then smoothed her dress into a semblance of modesty.

  I had never yet had the guts to ask a vampire if blood tasted better with all those sexual hormones saturating it. I figured it must, because they always seemed to be wrapping the blood thing and the sex thing together. I wasn’t sure vampires actually had sex in the conventional sense. But they could sure make people get off on being blood donors. It made a strange kind of symbiotic sense.

  Standing before us, hands behind his back, looking suave as ever, Dom licked his lips before saying, “It’s really too bad that thing about having to invite people in only works on vampires.”