by Karen Chance
I wasn’t sure if Claire’s expression had more to do with fear that a guest was about to combust or awe at the spectacle that was my uncle Radu. Because that blending-in thing? That really wasn’t Radu’s style.
Not that his current outfit was showing him to best advantage. He looked like he’d been plucked from his lab at vamp HQ, where he did nefarious things he wasn’t allowed to talk about, without being given time to change. Because he was in boring old work clothes. Of course, for him, that translated into head-to-toe sapphire satin to complement his glossy dark hair, white silk hose to show off his fine calves, and no-doubt-genuine diamond buckles on his high-heeled shoes. He looked like the Blue Boy all grown up and fabulous.
His attire had been the height of male fashion in the mid-seventeenth century, which was the last time Radu had bothered to update his wardrobe. But sitting in a circa 1950s-era kitchen, drinking Sanka out of a chipped New York Giants mug, he was breathtakingly out of place. Like a curious peacock slumming with the pigeons in Central Park.
“And when he climbed out, what was I supposed to do then?” Ray demanded.
“Preferably something that did not involve running into the middle of a public highway to cower under your jacket with your ass in the air,” Marlowe said drily.
“Hey! Not everybody is almighty first level, you know. Some of us still burn up in sunlight!”
“If only.”
“Oh, sure. Insult me while I’m on fire. And while we wait for my master to come kill me. And if that don’t work—”
“I’m going to kill you,” Marlowe muttered.
“Hey, come at me, bro!” Ray said, appearing in the doorway, all spiky black hair and outraged expression. And then dodging back into the darkened hall, before anything else started smoldering. “What you got, huh? What you got?” drifted around the doorframe.
“You’re only encouraging him,” Mircea said, looking amused. And completely at home, because unlike the rest of our visitors, he never seemed out of place anywhere.
It was a good trick, since daddy dearest had the same dark coloring and handsome features as his brother, minus Radu’s delicacy and stunning turquoise eyes. But Mircea stood out only when it would benefit him. Case in point: he’d left the car in a navy business suit similar to the russet one Marlowe was wearing. But one look at the dilapidated Victorian slowly moldering on its weed–choked lawn, and he’d realized that this Would Not Do. The result was a missing jacket and tie, a popped collar, and sleeves pushed up to the elbows.
And the attitude matched the new look. Unlike Radu, who was peering around like a tourist at an exhibit on “The Habitat of the Modern American Brooklynite,” Mircea could have been any corporate drone relaxing with family after a long day of cubicle sitting. It was an impression heightened when he swung Claire’s young son into his lap.
To be fair, it had been the kid’s idea. Aiden had toddled over from his nest of toys and blankie in the corner to tug on the new arrival’s pant leg. And was now balancing on his thighs, looking at him with lively curiosity, two little fists bunched in what was no doubt a painfully expensive shirt.
It didn’t surprise me; for some crazy reason, children liked Mircea. As did their mothers, as evidenced by the fact that Claire had yet to knock him through a wall despite his undoubted vampire-ness. What was odd was that Mircea genuinely liked them back.
The outfit adjustment was pure bullshit, but the indulgent smile he was aiming at the towheaded tot was the real deal. It made no sense at all because he was otherwise a ruthless, scheming son of a bitch with a take-no-prisoners attitude when it came to getting what he wanted. But there you go. Humans are weird, and vampires used to be human. And they sure as hell didn’t lose any of their quirks when they transitioned.
“He’s a fine boy,” Mircea told Claire, who had stuffed her hands behind her back, probably to keep them from snatching her baby back. But then Mircea transferred the smile to her, all whiskey-dark eyes with little crinkles at the corners, and honest, self-deprecating humor—the kind that had made him the most successful negotiator the Senate had ever had. And Claire blinked.
It was funny, because she relaxed almost to the point of smiling. And then got angry at herself for it and tensed up again, only to bite her lip in confusion as two strong instincts battled it out. I thought there was a chance that the great negotiator might actually lose this round, because Claire had taken overprotectiveness to a whole new level. But then—
“Does anybody care that I’m dying out here?”
I sighed, turned off the water and went back into the hall, only to find Ray rubbing himself lewdly on the wallpaper. He’d already singed it in a long, dark streak, which was less of a concern than the eww factor. “Quit that!” I told him, and grabbed his tie.
“Don’t start,” he gasped. “I got hemorrhoids that don’t hurt this bad.”
“Vampires don’t get hemorrhoids.”
“We don’t get ’em, no. But if we already got ’em when we die, they stick around, and I’ve been nursing these for four hundred years. So don’t tell me I don’t know pain, okay? I know pain, and this—”
“I won’t tell you anything if you’ll just stop talking.” I spun him around, bent him over and dumped half a gallon of water onto his smoking ass.
Which just made it smoke more, and start to sizzle. “Ow! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! What the hell are you doing?”
“Trying to put the fire out,” I said, starting to get worried, because that should have worked. But then, what did I know? I’d set plenty of vamps ablaze through the years, but this was the first time I’d tried to extinguish one. And it didn’t appear to be going well.
“A little help here,” I said, sticking my head back into the kitchen.
“Try this,” Claire said, grabbing something out of a cabinet. “I keep it around for kitchen burns and it’s usually really—”
She stopped because she’d gotten close enough to catch sight of Ray, on the floor with his butt in the air, like the world’s worst stripper. The khakis were still in place, thank God, but the seat had burnt out in two little moons, like assless chaps. The image was heightened by the fact that he was grinding and humping and wiggling in a way that would have gotten him a g-string full of exactly nothing because nobody was going to pay to see that.
“I told you to cut it out,” I said, jerking him up.
“And I told you to do something, and I ain’t seen—” He paused when I shoved the small jar of ointment into his hand. “What’s this?”
“The cure for what ails you.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? Spread it on.” And he turned his back and bent over again.
I looked hopefully at Claire, who had trained as a nurse. But it looked like the Florence Nightingale gene stopped just short, because she was in full-on retreat. Great.
I regarded the gyrating moons, which were currently as smooth as a baby’s bottom since most of the hair had singed off. Just when you think the day can’t get any worse, I thought grimly. And then I slapped on a palm-ful of pale green goo.
“OW! What the hell?”
“Hold still,” I told him, smacking on another blob. The stuff was slippery and it kept oozing off the burnt part.
“How can I hold still when you’re beating on me? Hey, hey, somebody, she’s beating me!”
“Any moment now,” I grumbled, and grabbed him when he tried to run.
But he was smoking and panicked and now also slippery, and it was like trying to catch a greased pig. “Let me go, you crazy bitch!”
“I’m trying to help you, you stupid— Oof!” I took a heel in the stomach and an elbow to the chin before I managed to wrestle him to the floor and sit on his legs. Which gave me a chance to finish gooping him up while he yelled and cursed and bucked like a rodeo bull.
And then suddenly stopped, and craned his head over his shoulder to look at the damaged area. It was shiny and pink and pimply, the parts that weren’t faintly green. But at least it was n
o longer smoking. “Hey. Hey, that feels pretty good.”
“So glad you approve.”
“Yeah, it’s okay.” He thought about it for a moment. “But I think I still feel a little bit of a burn. Maybe you ought to massage it in some more. You know, really get in there and—” He cut off, noticing the bare feet that had stopped in front of him. The ones attached to the strong calves and muscular thighs and terry-clothed torso of the guy glaring down at him. “Or, you know. Not.”
I slapped the last of the salve on, just to hear him squeal, and then climbed off. “Your things are where you left them,” I told Louis-Cesare, who nodded and edged past, giving me a hell of a view as he made his way up the stairs.
“No way he really looks like that,” Ray said enviously. “It’s probably just a glamourie. I bet he’s really got zits and a potbelly and saggy buns.”
I bit my lip. I could personally guarantee that absolutely no part of Louis-Cesare sagged. “You know he can hear you, right?”
“Like I care. I mean, what’s he gonna do to me? What’s anybody gonna do? I’m already a dead man.”
“Yeah. You’re a vampire.”
“Not that kind of dead. Not the good kind—”
“There’s a good kind?”
“Not lately. My life is hell,” he said melodramatically. And then he paused, obviously waiting for me to ask why.
I let him wait.
The scene in the kitchen hadn’t changed, except that my ward or son or possibly pet—the jury was still out—had also left the blankie and clambered up onto the seat next to Mircea. And was eyeing him suspiciously, like he didn’t trust him.
Smart boy.
I sat down and scooped Stinky into my lap.
“And who is this…young man?” Mircea guessed, because Stinky’s brown fur was poking out of the sides of a diaper and a pale blue undershirt. The matching booties were nowhere to be seen, possibly eaten, or just left somewhere because they hadn’t been designed to fit long monkey-like toes.
Claire noticed about the same time I did. “Where are your booties?” she demanded.
Stinky blinked huge gray baby eyes at her, and attempted to look innocent. But there was a self-satisfied air about him that did not bode well for the despised footwear. I stifled a smile.
“He likes being naked,” I reminded her.
“Well, he’s going to learn to like clothes,” she said adamantly. Stinky and I exchanged glances. We had our doubts about that.
Mircea was still looking at me, so I shrugged. “You’ve met him before.”
“I have?” An elegant eyebrow went up. Because Mircea was not accustomed to forgetting a face. Much less one like Stinky’s.
“You were a bit out of it at the time,” I said, and left it at that. Bringing up the events that had led to the death of his and Radu’s other brother would ruin any mood, and this one was problematic enough as it was.
Fortunately Mircea didn’t pursue it. “He is fey?”
“Duergar-Brownie,” I said, my chin resting on the downy fur atop Stinky’s head. “He’s one of the hybrid crossbreeds the Dark Circle’s been littering around. I found him at an auction a while ago—”
“Fascinating,” Marlowe interrupted harshly. “But can we get on with this?”
“Depends on what this is,” I said, pretty sure I didn’t want to know. Mircea was being too nice. This was really going to suck.
If I’d had any doubts about that, the looks the others exchanged around the room would have clued me in. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad is it?” I asked Radu, because he was the least likely to lie to me.
He pursed sculpted lips. “Sevenish? Perhaps eight?”
Wonderful.
But I might as well get it over with. “Lay it on me,” I told him.
“Yes, well, it’s a little involved. Perhaps you could start by telling us what you recall from last night—”
“She doesn’t remember a damned thing,” Marlowe said sharply. “She wouldn’t have asked that question if she did. I told you—”
“Anything at all could be helpful,” Radu added, ignoring Marlowe with aristocratic ease. “Even small details.”
And then everybody looked at me.
Claire had set a glass of orange juice at my elbow, because the arrival of unwanted guests was not going to interrupt her morning routine. I took a moment to sip it, as if gathering my thoughts, which I wasn’t really doing because there weren’t any to gather. But I somehow didn’t think that was going to go over well.
“We know you made it as far as the marina—” Radu began, before Marlowe cut him off.
“Don’t help her! If you compromise the memories, they’re of no use to us!”
“The marina,” I repeated blankly, and then something did stir. Something about me and a vampire and a job we were supposed to—“Crap.”
“What is it?” Claire asked.
“Headache.” Which was putting it mildly. A stabbing pain had just run ear to ear, like an ice pick through the brain. And why did that sound familiar?
“We need whatever you can give us, Dory,” Radu said. “The smugglers are bad enough, but with the Black Circle—”
“Damn it, Radu!” Marlowe exploded.
“Oh, pish. She already knows they’re working together.”
“But other people don’t!”
“Such as?”
“Such as a yard full of fey, not one of whom we know a damn thing about!”
“They’re my security,” Claire said indignantly. “And part of the royal guard.”
“Oh yes?” Dark eyes flashed. “And would that be the same royal guard who betrayed you and almost got your son killed—what? Two weeks ago?”
“I’ll vouch for them!”
“And who will vouch for you?”
“Kit, please. This lovely young woman isn’t going to say anything,” Radu said, patting her hand. And thereby saving Marlowe a world of hurt without even knowing it.
Not that he was grateful. “How the bloody hell can you—”
“She is the daughter-in-law of one of our senior fey allies,” Mircea murmured. “Is she not?”
Marlowe did not look pacified, maybe because the first time they’d met, Claire had thrown him out of the house. And judging by the narrowed emerald eyes, she was contemplating an encore. “Not to mention that this area isn’t secured,” he continued. “There could be listening devices all over the place!”
“Like the ones you left in here that we had to remove?” Claire snapped.
“Why bother to remove them if there was nothing to hear?” Marlowe snapped back.
Claire flushed almost as red as her hair. But before she could say anything, Radu broke in. “And what if people are listening? Our allies already know what we’re doing and our enemies…Well, after last night, I think it’s safe to say they have figured it out.”
“All right. What happened last night?” I asked, dropping the pretense. Because it was starting to look like maybe I did need to know.
“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to tell us,” Radu said reasonably. “But I’ll see what I can do to jog your memory—without compromising anything,” he added before Marlowe could intervene again.
He waited a moment, but the chief spy didn’t say anything else. That had a little smirk flitting around the edges of Radu’s mouth that shouldn’t have been there, because Marlowe was perfectly capable of delivering a smackdown if he felt like it. But it looked like he wanted the info more than he wanted to bitch about security.
“Now,” Radu said complacently, “you’ve been working with us on a task force to destroy a network of illegal portals—”
“I know that. I lost a day, not a month, ’Du.”
“Hush.” He leaned over to swat my knee. And then proceeded to tell me a lot of other things I already knew, because the Great Portal Hunt, as I had started to think of it, was the biggest thing in otherworldly vice at the moment.
All sorts of dangerous crap fr
om Faerie was being smuggled through portals that weren’t supposed to exist. Only they did, and a bunch of fat cats had been getting noticeably fatter as a result. The fattest of them all had been a douche named Geminus, who had used his portals to smuggle in Dark Fey for a series of underground fights that had gotten him a lot of money and them a lot of dead. This had continued until he recently met his own maker, and not in the vampire sense of the word. Who was probably as skeeved out as the rest of us who had known him.
But as bad as Geminus had been, things weren’t any better with him dead. In fact, the reverse was true, as would-be successors popped out of the woodwork to divvy up the very large pie he had left. Lately, the infighting had been getting pretty vicious, as every crook with delusions of grandeur struggled to become the new king of the hill.
There was just one problem, namely that Geminus hadn’t been the trusting type, and had failed to share the location of his portals with the riffraff. And it wasn’t like they could just go out and replace them. Even the few smugglers with money and connections enough to manage it had to contend with the fact that every time a new portal was brought into existence, it lit up the metaphysical skyline like a searchlight. Which tends to be bad for businesses that run on secrecy.
So, the criminal element was trying to find Geminus’s portals in order to beat each other out in the smuggling game. The Black Circle, a group of dark mages, was trying to find them to bring in more weapons for the war they were waging on the Vampire Senate. And the Senate was trying to find them to shut them down before either of the other groups got lucky. But the only person who actually knew where they were was Geminus’s lieutenant, who had been smart enough to guess how much fun life would be with everybody breathing down his neck.
“Varus,” I said, interrupting Radu as my memory coughed up a name.
“Yes, well, I was getting there,” ’Du said.
“What about him?” Mircea asked softly.
“He agreed to give the Senate the location of the portal system in return for immunity,” I said, trying to focus on slippery-soft memories that slid out of reach every time I grabbed for one.
