by Faith Hunter
“That would suck,” I said, succinctly.
Laughter spluttered from him, untouched by the sexual teasing, and I took the moment to ask, “What is Dolore? I thought it was a name, but it isn’t.”
He stilled. Softly he said, “It is the state that Mithrans enter when they grieve. It can make them go rogue if their blood-family and their intimate, human blood-servants are not most careful with them.”
I put a hand on his arm, urging him to quiet for a moment. I tensed, smelling the maker of the young rogues. This was why I had come. My lips parted slightly and I slowly drew a breath over my tongue and through my nose, tasting and scenting all at once. I closed my eyes to concentrate. The scent marker was faint, buried beneath the aromas of cooked meat, old warehouse, and vamps galore. But it was here. He had been here.
Most of the time Beast could help me tell by scent the carriers’ gender, race, mating readiness, general health, age, what they had to eat recently, others who had been in close contact—a whole host of things. But I wasn’t getting much from the traces of the rogue maker I’d found. I had yet to be in Beast’s form when I scent-checked him—it. I still wasn’t certain of the gender. I needed to shift and prowl. I grinned and dropped Bruiser’s arm. Bet that would go over well, a mountain lion come a-calling. “Go call Leo. Tell him that the maker of the young rogues has been here. I smell it. The perfume it wore,” I corrected. “It’s faint but it’s been here. I need to mingle.”
Bruiser looked at me strangely but stepped away, pulling his cell. I almost reminded him about Innara’s statement that cellular communications were being monitored, but what the heck. He was a big boy.
I moved into the open area, scent-searching. I walked through the entire place in the next few minutes, breathing shallowly, letting Beast stare through my eyes and parse the scents. But the faint reek of the rogue maker vanished. It—he? pretty sure it was a he—was gone.
Frustrated, I let Beast settle back to her rest and stared out over the throng, which had grown considerably since our arrival. I spotted a small group of blood-servant-security types, all by their lonesome. They were my kinda people, and I had met some of them, so I smoothed my dress, pasted on a smile, and approached. Two of the men—identical twins, right down to the matched tuxedoes—parted to provide me with an opening. “Hey, gorgeous,” one said. “You clean up right nice.”
“Brian and Brandon of Clan Arceneau,” I said, accepting mirror-image cheek pecks from them. “Or is it Brandon and Brian? You look restored, rested, and healthy.”
“Thanks to you,” one said, sliding an arm around my waist and pulling me into the group. To the others he announced, “This is the Rogue Hunter, who saved Grégoire.” That got me sharpened interest from the ones I didn’t know.
The other twin said, “And incidentally, our butts too. The ugly one”—he thumbed at his twin—“was nearly dead from blood loss by the time she dispatched the rogue and sent help our way. But I’m distraught that you can’t tell me apart from the ugly twin. That is a sympathy hug you’re giving him, isn’t it?” he said, sliding into my other side.
Looking back and forth between them, I grinned to show appreciation of their twin-based humor. “I try to be diplomatic to the less fortunate, and if I could figure out which is the prettier twin, I would ignore him, I promise.”
“That ugly mole marring the perfection of Brandon’s face is how you can tell us apart.”
I spotted the tiny mole at Brandon’s hairline, and said, “That lovely little beauty mark?”
“Nicely said. For a killer in a vamp-whore dress,” a small woman interrupted.
Shock went through me in a jolting zing. Brandon and Brian went still. I slid out of their loose embraces and in front of them, instantly assessing. Growing up in a children’s home, I’d been verbally and physically sucker punched a lot, but it never got easier to take. It hardly seemed fair that she would come at me now, when I had to fight in a dress and couldn’t stake her to kill her. And Bruiser had my good knife. Before I could respond, a second woman joined in the wordplay.
“Are you saying she’s a vamp-whore, Sina?” the second woman asked. “Or the dress is made by a vamp-whore?”
“Adrianna says she stinks of Leo Pellissier,” Sina said, “but the dress is slutty advertisement too.”
“Adrianna?” I asked, through lips suddenly gone numb with an adrenaline spike.
“First Scion of Clan St. Martin,” Brian said slowly. “Meet her blood-servants, Sina and Brigit.” St. Martin, who had just broken with Pellissier and formed a new playground gang with Rafael of Mearkanis as head bully boy. The two vamps in red dresses had been Adrianna’s as well. What was this, tag-team-Jane day? A way to stir the vamp waters? I had to assume old Rafe had sent Adrianna gunning for me, but I had no idea why.
The two women had been standing together but now separated, breaking the tight grouping of blood-servants. The circle expanded, like a fighting ring, as the nonparticipants stepped back and the two women moved in. Both were short with wiry, fat-starved bodies and frizzy brown hair, though Sina was African-American and Brigit was Caucasian. They were dressed in similar black, sleeveless dresses that showed off their well-defined arms and freed their limbs for fighting. My heart rate sped up and Beast bared her killing fangs in my mind. My arms automatically lifted away from my sides, ready for defensive moves. I couldn’t help the smile that pulled back my lips as Beast thought, Fun!
“Yeah, she does smell of Leo. The Master of the City is sucking on his son’s murderer,” Sina said.
“Not just sucking, you ask me.” The two women laughed, taunting.
“Actually, I’m the one who scent-marked the Hunter,” Bruiser’s soft voice said over my shoulder, “in the hopes it would keep her from having to kill some stupid little vampire for assaulting her or some stupid little blood-servant for living up to the designation.”
“You calling us stupid, George?” Brigit asked, her eyes brightening in anticipation. “You wanting to take us both on?”
“The thought is unpleasant in the extreme,” he said. “It gives me nightmares.”
Several onlookers laughed and the two women looked puzzled, until Sina got the sexual insult. She snarled and reached to pull a gun, stopping when her partner placed a restraining hand on her arm. But the woman’s fingers held tight to the butt of a tiny weapon in a pocket holster.
“Her dress is a creation by Madame Melisende, Modiste du les Mithrans, not a vamp-whore. I believe that Jane has one of the designer’s cards should you, or your mistress Adrianna, ever wish to dress well. Jane?” he asked as he took my little purse in hand, pulling the strap across my chest. I had forgotten it was there. “Ah, here they are.” He extended a handful of cards over my shoulder at the little bullies, which brought his body in contact with mine. His other arm went around my waist, pulling me close against him. “Tell Adrianna the designer could make even her long, lanky body look sexy. To someone.”
The twins behind me chuckled, and the laughter this time was more widespread. The two women glared at me as if I, rather than Bruiser, were the one who told them they and Adrianna looked dowdy. Brandon and Brian stepped up to either side of me, giving me a man on each side and one hanging over my back. Which felt rather nice, truth be told.
No one said anything else for a long moment. Almost in tandem, the two women turned on their heels and left the room.
“Sad,” Bruiser said, dropping his arm to cuddle me, the cards still spread. “They really needed the fashion help.”
The laughter was freer and the tension level in the group dropped dramatically. “I’ll take a card,” another woman said. She was only a bit shorter than I, muscular, with a wrestler’s shoulders, and carried a semiautomatic holstered beneath her man-style jacket. “Jackie, with Clan Desmarais,” she said to me, and shook my hand as she plucked cards from Bruiser’s fingers. So she belonged to the one unaligned clan. “I could stand looking elegant. It isn’t easy to look feminine with these shou
lders. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, not quite sure what had just happened.
The twins pivoted to look at me and at Bruiser, who still hung across my shoulder. “You scent-marked her for Leo?” Brandon asked.
“Or for yourself?” Brian asked.
“Myself,” Bruiser said easily. “But she’s not falling into my arms as quickly I’d hoped.”
I ducked out of Bruiser’s arms and stepped next to Jackie, who had already shared Madame Melisende’s cards with another woman. She looked at me through short bangs and said, “All they ever think about is sex. Take them to a museum and they stare at the naked statues; take them to a park and they ogle the joggers; take one to dinner and he thinks it’s a prelude. Something about vampires pushes up their testosterone levels to a teenager’s raging desperation.”
“You trying to say you don’t think about sex, Jackie?” Brandon said. “Because if you have trouble in that area, I could help you think about sex.”
“Thanks for the offer, sugar, but I still prefer pure humans in the sack. It’s the totality of the thing, you know? Human males think about sex only every other second. A male blood-servant wakes up thinking about sex and goes to bed thinking about sex and then dreams about it till it’s time to wake up again.”
“Not just sex,” Brian mused. “There’s fighting too.”
“Hunting,” Bruiser agreed. “Fishing. Fast cars. Making money.”
“Fast cars and money lead back to dames, though,” Brandon said.
“See what I mean?” Jackie said to me, and the small group laughed.
The laughter included me, which lent me an unexpectedly warm feeling; the emotion of inclusion wasn’t familiar. And then the way she used the words “pure human” intruded into my thoughts. As if the blood-servants didn’t think of themselves that way. Beast didn’t either. They smelled . . . different.
“Why is Adrianna coming after me?” I asked, looking through the door where the two women had disappeared. “I have a feeling I’ll be meeting her servants again soon. And it won’t be for tea and crumpets.” I was licensed to kill rogue vamps, not humans, or even blood-servants, no matter how annoying or dangerous they might be.
“I don’t know, except that you carry Leo’s scent marking, and therefore add to Leo’s power base,” Bruiser said. I noticed that he didn’t add “I’m sorry.”
A flush of anger pulsed through me. The forced scent marking, meant to protect me, had turned around and bit me, hard. My fists clenched against the urge to pull a stake and ram it into Bruiser.
Wary, the security types looked at the makeup of their own group, reassessing alignments. Three men turned and left the cluster. Silent, we watched them walk away. I pushed aside my anger for later. There were worse things to worry about right now.
“They’ve been listening to us chat,” Brian said. “Not good.”
“Taking info home to the new alliance,” Brandon said.
“Lotta things keep coming back to old Rafe,” I said, remembering him standing in the shadows, watching me, twice tonight. “Maybe I need to pay him a visit.” And get a better sniff of him and his underlings, but I didn’t add that. Nor did I miss the look Jackie shared with Bruiser, though I had no idea what it might mean.
“Rafael is a problem,” a woman said. “A big problem.”
The talk turned to recent changes in vamp politics and quickly became both tedious and bewildering as I listened to gossip about personal and clan relationships that had persisted for hundreds of years. Vamp gossip could originate in the seventeen hundreds, yet still be fresh and painful, and have an impact on clans today, on people dead and alive. Vamp blood feuds could last for centuries. I learned a lot but nothing that I could use. The only thing that mattered to me was the new coalitions and how they impacted my current contract. With Leo’s scent marking on me, it was going to be hard to stay out of the brewing war.
And then I remembered the strange look Bettina had given me in the midst of her invitation to visit. Something wasn’t right.
CHAPTER 10
Feeding frenzy
An hour later, still early by vamp standards, I asked directions to the powder room and excused myself. The crowd had reached maximum capacity, with shoulder-to-shoulder partygoers. I saw Bruiser in intense conversation with another blood-servant; was watching when he paused, drew up short, and disappeared into the crowd. I smelled vamps from Clan Pellissier several times, Leo’s scent pungent on them. Two looked familiar from the fire threat in the aftermath of the hurricane. They saw me, but ignored me with vamp disdain.
The warehouse air was permeated with the stink of vamps, humans, and blood-servants. The smell of sex and fresh blood intermingled, wafting down from the second story. The mixed stench prickled my nose, a sneeze-warning, and blunted my senses, or I’d have caught the predatory smell of a hunter. But my mind was full, mulling over the twisted skeins of vamp politics.
I slid open the pocket door to the darkened powder room, seeing myself in a slanted mirror, haloed by the hall light. Stepping in, I flicked on the light.
A blur swept toward me from the left. Across the mirror. Time dilated and slowed. Beast screamed within me. Shoved her strength and reflexes into my veins with a rush of power and heat. Teeth and claws flashed in the mirrors. Falling toward me.
I dove down and right. Pulled a stake and my knife. The impact came hard, knocking the breath from my lungs. Stunning me. Stopping Beast’s raging scream. Slamming my elbow to the tile. The knife spun from my nerveless grip. Clattered away.
I crashed to the tile in a jumble of limbs. Twisted my spine. Banged my knee. My oof of pain was buried beneath two vamp bodies. As their weight crushed down on me, my brain caught up. Before I could consider the meaning of an attack at a vamp party, they had me immobilized. Hands gripped and held me, my left arm twisted, canted painfully against my chest. Legs secured my torso and lower limbs.
I drew a breath that stank of my own fear, realizing what had happened, but too late. Angled mirror images had confused everything. My attackers had planned on and used my momentary confusion.
Mouths bit and slashed, the cuts like blows, the pain delayed. I couldn’t see for the bodies. Couldn’t strike out. Vision and movements were constricted by powerful hands, locked arms, and snake-fast legs. Pinning me as I struggled. Fangs buried behind my knee with none of the painkilling gift of vamp saliva. Another set buried in my right arm, above the elbow. That arm went numb as teeth grazed the nerve. I grunted with pain. The legs constricting my chest tightened with killing force. I couldn’t get a breath.
They intended to drain me dry. I saw, above me, another vamp, watching. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted with excitement.
Beast shoved her strength into me. With numb right fingers, I tugged the packet free of my dress and shook my cross out. The vamp’s teeth cut deeper with my action, but Beast blunted the pain. The cross flared with silver, retina-burning light. I pressed it into the skin closest. A wrist. A vamp shrieked. Ululating into my eardrum. Deafening. The sound was like a fist, beating my head. Abruptly cut off. Her body flipped away, leaving behind the acrid smell of burned vamp skin.
Fangs pulled from my knee and the body holding my chest shifted up, clamped into my jugular, cutting like twin knives. Agony branded me. Lightning shot through my veins. The legs constricting my chest were gone, but my breath was frozen in my lungs, the pain so sharp I couldn’t expand my ribs.
My vision telescoped down to a narrow image, like looking through a straw. If I went out, I was dead. Beast took me over. Undulated my lower body. Held my upper torso unmoving to avoid ripping out my throat.
I shoved the silver cross into her cheek. Her wail began, low, deep, and full of torture. She rolled away, her fangs tearing out. I sucked in a breath of precious air. My blood rolled from my wounds in rivulets and splashed on the mirrors. I had a glimpse of burned face, my blood on her fangs. I pulled my legs under me. Curled my injured arm into my chest, fingers a
gainst my bleeding jugular. I recognized the two scarlet-clad vamps from the aborted confrontation in the hallway and remembered my worry from earlier. Another tag team? I didn’t have the breath to laugh.
In the mirror I met the third vamp’s eyes. The unknown. She stood over me, where I crouched on the floor. Cold power flowed from her like icy air from a glacier. Red hair, curly and wild, fanned out around her. Resting on her collarbones was a gold torque etched with Celtic symbols, and a gold cuff shaped like a snake climbed one upper arm. Her dress was cerulean blue shot with gold threads, toga-like, knotted on one shoulder, leaving the other bare. The bare shoulder was splattered with my blood like a tattoo of my death. She looked like some ancient and feral goddess. I was pretty sure her blue eyes were not quite sane.
For a fractured second she stared at my blood running down my throat as hunger blazed into her eyes, vicious and wild. Her lips pulled back. She launched, fangs and three-inch claws striking at me.
I reversed the stake in my left hand. Pushed up from the floor with my one good leg. Levering power into my shoulder, arm, stake.
She drove herself onto it. The wood pierced just below the torque, driving in three inches before she noted it. Her scream added to the others, so high-pitched it was like an emergency beacon, decibels strong.
An arm caught mine before I could alter the angle, driving for her heart. Icy flesh yanked me back, out of the small room, away from the keening vampires. Into the dark hallway. Whirled me around, against a cold, hard body.
I looked up into Leo Pellissier’s eyes. Power crackled the air around us. Beast went silent, withdrawing her claws from me, and taking with her all the strength she had lent.
He was fully vamped out, pupils black in bloody red sclera, fangs snapped into killing position, his fingernails knives. His gaze was on my throat where my blood ran fast from the torn punctures. He growled. My death leaped into his eyes. Knowing there wasn’t time, I curled my fingers into my hair for my remaining stake. But he lifted his stare away, to the woman vamp in the blue dress instead.
