Rusted Veins: A Sabina Kane Novella

by Jaye Wells

  She laughed. “Please. He would never accept an invitation from a human.”

  “Well,” Brooks said, “we definitely need to talk to him. The last entry in Cadence’s diary mentions that she finally agreed to meet with him.” He looked up. “That was the night before she went missing.”

  Everyone looked at me expectantly. “Crap. All right. I’ll talk to Nyx.”

  Brooks’s face cleared. “Thank you so much, Sabina.”

  * * *

  OCTOBER 29

  Nyx agreed to meet me the next night at Muriel’s, one of my favorite restaurants in the Quarter. Luckily, she’d decided to stick around town after the council meeting to enjoy the Halloween festivities.

  The room the maître d’ put us in held a single table and two walls covered in racks of wine. A third wall held a large window that looked down on Jackson Square and the inky expanse of the Mississippi at night. Down on the street below, revelers were dancing through the streets in costumes with plastic cups of Abita or hurricanes from Pat O’Brien’s clasped in their hands.

  Nyx looked up as I approached. “How do you think they’d react if they knew monsters like us actually exist?”

  I frowned at her pensive tone. “They’re all too drunk to care.”

  I took my seat next to her and ordered a drink from the hovering fae waiter who’d shown me to the table. He was of slight build and had long hair pulled back into a neat queue; most humans wouldn’t know he wasn’t one of their kind. I only knew he was fae because of the telltale lavender scent rising off his pale skin. I was glad he wasn’t a vamp who might report the details of our chat back to Damascus White.

  “So,” Nyx began, “how was the trip to Europe? I didn’t get to ask during that clusterfuck of a council meeting.”

  I rolled my eyes at the memory of the drama between Queen Maeve and Mike Romulus. “Everything was fine. Just glad to be home for a while. How are things in L.A.?”

  She sighed. “I’ve got some old-school vamps protesting the laws we just passed allowing our race to interbreed with the others.”

  “Nothing too violent, I hope.”

  She made a dismissive noise. “Nothing I can’t handle. Slade is meeting with some of them this week to try and make them see sense.”

  I laughed. “If anyone can set them right…” I let that comment drift off. As close as Nyx and I were, the fact she had been with my father and was now sleeping with my ex was still a bit of an awkward topic. Don’t get me wrong, I thought she and Slade were perfect for each other, but it was still kind of odd.

  The waiter delivered our drinks and proceeded to share that night’s specials. We both ordered—two steaks, bloody. Once he was gone, Nyx leaned forward across the table.

  “You going to tell me the real reason you asked for this dinner?” she asked. “Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but you don’t normally go for the girls’ night.”

  I took a sip of my Sazerac. “I need a favor.”

  “Of course,” she said immediately. “Anything.”

  “I need to set up a meeting with the head of the NOLA coven.”

  “Damascus White? Why?”

  “One of Brooks’s friends is missing and we have reason to believe she’s been in contact with White recently.”

  She paused before answering. “You believe he’s involved in her disappearance?”

  This is where I had to be careful. Even though Nyx and I were good friends, outright accusing one of her own with foul play was not a smart move. “We have no reason to believe he’s directly responsible. Just want to see if we can piece together a picture of her activities before she disappeared. Her diary indicated she had a meeting with him. We’re hoping he might be able to shed light on what she was into.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I can arrange it for whenever you prefer.”

  “Sooner the better,” I said. “Thanks, Nyx.”

  She smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Just be prepared for him to refuse.”

  A thin vein of embarrassment wove its way into my voice. “I was kind of hoping you could do some gentle arm twisting if that turned out to be the case.”

  She laughed. “I see. Well, I can try, but I’m afraid it’s not like the old days when your grandmother ran the race.”

  My grandmother, Lavinia, had been the Alpha female in the triumvirate of vampires who had controlled the race for centuries. She’d led through a combination of violence, cunning, and more violence. Now, the structure of the vampire government was much more democratic, which was a good thing, even if it was damned inconvenient sometimes.

  “Just do what you can. I promise to tread lightly with him.”

  Nyx made a strangled noise that one might mistake for a chuckle. “Just be prepared. You may have to do some groveling.”

  “We’ll see.” I pushed down the annoyance that rose at the humor in her tone. Adam’s ex had better really be in trouble and not just off on a lark or I was going to kick her ass when we found her.

  “Regardless, I wish you luck. If you run into problems, let me know.”

  Nyx was no slouch when it came to leadership, but the idea I couldn’t handle a vampire was a little insulting. I was the granddaughter of the former Alpha Domina of the entire race. Granted, I’d killed her, but still. I’d learned a lot of tricks about bending people to my will from Lavinia Kane. And if that didn’t work, I’d just use the charm I’d picked up from the mage side of the family.

  I polished off my drink. The sooner we found Cadence, the sooner Adam and I could get her back out of our lives. I wasn’t about to let Damascus White throw a wrench in that plan. “Oh, I’m pretty sure he’ll be the one with the problems if he refuses to help me.”

  * * *

  OCTOBER 30

  As it turned out, the meeting with Damascus White was arranged fairly easily. Word came from Nyx the next day that White wanted to meet that evening at a bar frequented by the fanged and fabulous.

  That’s how I ended up walking into an Absinthe bar in the French Quarter at half-past midnight the night before Halloween. I would have brought Adam with me, but bringing a mage to a vampire meeting wasn’t just foolish—it was dangerous. Even though there was peace among the races, some old-school vampires still saw mages as prey instead of allies.

  The front of the bar was filled with late-night revelers who’d stumbled in off Bourbon Street to get their first taste of wormwood liqueur with its cloying anise flavor. The place was done up in ornate Belle Époque style with thick green silk curtains, gas lanterns along the wall, and vintage lithographs inspired by the work of Jules Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec. Ornate armchairs and divans provided comfortable resting perches for customers to watch the bartenders conduct the ritual of dripping the bright green liqueur over sugar cubes and adding water from ornate funnels that looked like they belonged in an alchemist’s lab.

  I passed the bar with a wave to Jean-Paul, the vampire who ran the joint. He was a friend of my old pal Georgia’s, who’d moved to Los Angeles to work for Nyx. He jerked his head toward the back to indicate Damascus was already waiting for me upstairs in the Dark Races–only section. The upstairs area was a large open space that led out to a veranda that hung over Bourbon Street. Booths lined the walls, and each could be sealed off from the rest of the room using black velvet curtains. It created an intimate atmosphere that invited the sharing of confidences. Whether Damascus White was in a sharing mood or not remained to be seen.

  It didn’t take a lot to guess which booth my host inhabited. Two red-headed goons flanked the seams of the only closed curtains in the row of otherwise empty booths. Seeing them, I sort of regretted not bringing an entourage of my own. Not that I felt I needed protection. But vampires were all about displays of power.

  One of the vamps stepped up like he thought he’d intimidate me as a warning before I spoke to his leader. I shot a glare that promised painful, fiery death if he so much as breathed on me. He stepped back. Smart of him.

  Without
much ceremony, I threw open the curtain. Damascus White sat dead center in the back of the booth. The power position. His face betrayed no expression at my arrival. His hair was red, like all vampires, but so dark it was almost black. He was old. Real old. Not as old as some of the vamps I knew in Europe, but old for American vampires.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I said.

  His eyes were gray and too shrewd for me to let my guard down. Those eyes had seen things and missed nothing. He wore a velvet blazer and dark denim jeans that hinted that Damascus, despite all his years, had kept up with the times. “Had Nyx not interceded on your behalf, I would not be here.”

  “Going through Nyx was merely a formality. If you’d refused, we’d be meeting under much less comfortable circumstances.”

  He chuckled. “Careful, or I’ll show you why they called me the Butcher of Belfast before I came to the States.”

  I failed to hide my complete lack of awe over his ridiculous nickname. “I’m here about Cadence McShane.”

  He frowned, as if I’d finally managed to catch him off guard. “Who?”

  I smiled tightly. “According to her diary, Cadence was on her way to meet you the night she disappeared.”

  “Oh,” he said with a twitch of his lips. “Her.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Her. What happened?”

  “Never showed.” As he took a sip from a glass of blood, I eyed him for signs of lying, but a vampire that old didn’t reach his age without knowing how to tell a lie well. “I assumed she’d changed her mind.”

  “What were you two meeting about?”

  His eyes flicked to mine and the corner of his mouth lifted. “Let’s not play coy. I had every intention of fucking her and drinking that sweet blood. Not necessarily in that order.”

  If he’d been trying to get a rise out of me, he failed. Vampires loved mage blood. It was the extra kick of magic. Up until recently, mating between the races was forbidden by all the Dark Races ruling bodies, but since those restrictions had been lifted, there was a lot of interracial hanky-panky going on. Vampires might not respect mages as equals, but that didn’t stop them from wanting a piece of their magical action, so to speak. “And when she didn’t show, you just let it go? According to her diary, you’d been quite persistent with your pursuit.”

  “I may be persistent, but I am not desperate. When she didn’t show, I decided it was time to focus my affections elsewhere.”

  My brows rose. “You really expect me to believe that as the leader of a powerful vampire coven you were cool with getting stood up by a mage?”

  “You may believe whatever you wish. That won’t change the truth. I assure you I am not wanting for blood nor sex partners.”

  That I didn’t doubt. First, he was beyond handsome in that predatory way of many vampires. Second, he was old enough to be a master of seduction. Third, in his position he could just take what he wanted. The question is, did he take Cadence, and if so, why was he hiding her? Or was she even alive?

  I pushed aside that thought because I didn’t want it to be true. The idea of having to be the one to tell Adam that Cadence was dead was too horrible to contemplate.

  Time to try another tact with Damascus. I leaned back and watched him for a few moments. “Where did you and Cadence meet?”

  He glanced away and back so fast a lot of people wouldn’t have seen it. But I did. “A party.”

  “Which party?”

  He shrugged and shifted in his seat. “Don’t recall.”

  I pinned a pitying expression on my face. “Old age affecting your memory?”

  “I am invited to a lot of parties.” His reluctance to share the name of his host told me there was gold in this lead. The person who threw the party may not be responsible for Cadence’s disappearance, but he or she damn sure knew something Damascus was trying to hide.

  “Listen, asshole, I have been extremely patient thus far. But I assure you that I have reached the bottom of that barrel. It’s time to give me the answers I want.”

  He leaned forward. “Or what? You’ll use your special magic on me?”

  For an elder vampire like Damascus White, my mage blood meant I was automatically inferior. The fact I was the Chosen, selected by the mother of all the Dark Races to lead her children, didn’t matter to this guy. I leaned forward too. With a flash of fangs, I smiled. “I don’t need magic to make you bleed.”

  He smiled then. “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s a motherfucking promise.”

  He laughed. “That shit might work on the faeries and weres, but around here it’s a declaration of war.”

  I sighed. “You’d really go to war over a mage? I wonder what your followers would say about that.”

  He paused.

  “Just tell me who hosted the party and you can walk away with your pride intact.” He opened his mouth with a sneer, but I held up a hand. “If you refuse, my first step will be to call Nyx and inform her that you need to be removed from your post as coven leader. My second will be to introduce you to my friend, the sun.”

  I could tell from the spark of fear in his eyes that he’d heard all about how I was able to walk around in the daylight.

  “They call him the Reverend.”

  “Who does?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Vamp?”

  He shook his head. “Adamite.”

  I frowned so hard an ache formed between my brows. “What the hell are you doing going to human parties?”

  “The Rev knows all about the Dark Races. We’re his best clients.”

  “Clients?” I asked. “Wait—he’s a dealer?”

  Damascus nodded.

  “Was Cadence there to score drugs?”

  He shrugged. “She certainly seemed to be having a good time,” he evaded. “So much so that she captured the attention of many appreciative eyes.”

  “Yours.”

  He nodded. “And the Rev’s.”

  I nodded, understanding. “You think he might know where to find her?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  “Where was the party?”

  He opened his mouth to lie again. I took my time removing my gun from my jacket. I hadn’t wanted this to escalate so fast, but he was seriously wearing on my nerves. “I’d advise you to answer the question.”

  His eyes narrowed, promising that this was yet another reason he’d keep on considering me his enemy. “Near the Garden District. Lee Circle, I think.”

  I lowered the gun and scooted out of the booth. “That wasn’t so difficult, now, was it?” I stood over him, waiting for the reply.

  His lip curled and he looked up at me with the same expression someone might use for a pile of shit. “You’re a real bitch, Chosen.”

  “Damn straight.” I smiled. “Bye now.”

  * * *

  I went straight from the bar to Zen’s shop. Turned out Brooks had plenty to say about this Reverend guy. “I’ve seen him around the Quarter. Everyone knows he’s bad news. Got a gang of vamp goons to watch his back.”

  I sat back in a chair in Zen’s living room. “Damascus said he’s a dealer.”

  Brooks’s eyes darkened. “Kind of. He’s more of a pimp, you ask me.”

  Zen frowned. “Prostitution?”

  Brooks shook his head. “He hooks vampires up with drug addicts.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Blood junkies are the worst.”

  Adam and Giguhl walked in then. I’d called them on the way over and asked them to join me so we could come up with a plan. Adam got one look at my face and obviously realized I had bad news.

  “Tell me.”

  “She’s taken up with a group of blood junkies.”

  Adam’s face went pale. “Shit.”

  “Blood junky?” Giguhl asked.

  “Vampires who gets off on drinking blood from drug addicts,” I explained. “They get their blood and their drug fix in one.”

  “And since Cadence is a mage, they’d ge
t a third high from her magic,” Giguhl concluded.

  “Where is she?” Adam demanded.

  I told them what I knew about the house where Damascus had attended the party. Brooks nodded. “I think I know the place.” Judging from his tone, we weren’t headed to the Four Seasons.

  “You guys stay here and I’ll go check it out.”

  Adam cleared his throat and crossed his arms. “Like hell.”

  “It’s not safe, Sabina,” Brooks said. “Those vamps she’s hanging with? They’re ruthless.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but Adam spoke up. He looked more pissed off than I’d seen him in a long time. “We’ll show them ruthless.”

  * * *

  The old Victorian might have been impressive back in its heyday, but now it looked like something out of a creepy horror film. Three stories of rickety wooden bones with paint peeling like decayed skin. Half the windows sported holes and the others were completely missing. Beer bottles, cigarette butts, and stray animal feces littered the weedy front yard. This place hadn’t just been abandoned. It’d been desecrated.

  From my vantage point across the street, I could sense some movement inside. Giguhl sat on my shoulder in cat form. “What you picking up, G?” I asked.

  He lifted his snoot and sniffed the air. “Besides body odor and the scent of despair? I’m picking up enough dirty copper smell to mean we’re dealing with at least six vamps.”

  “How about you, Mancy? Getting anything?” Adam was on the roof of the house. He’d flashed up there shortly after we arrived. We’d borrowed walkie-talkies from Zen. Brooks was up there with him because he’d claimed, as Cadence’s friend, he should be allowed to help.

  “Quiet up here.”

  “Don’t go in until G and I are in position.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. I could tell by the tone of his voice he was looking forward to this as much as me. With all the worry and speculation, it was nice to be doing something active. The chance to kick some blood-junky ass felt like a play date in the middle of a shit storm.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to try this the polite way first,” I said. Giguhl snorted. Ignoring him, I continued. “If they don’t cooperate, we go with Plan B.”