by Karen Chance
But this wasn’t a one-night stand. This was…well, I didn’t really know what this was, since I’d been avoiding discussing it. Talking about it meant facing the fact that this weird little interlude or experiment or whatever the hell I thought I’d been doing had run its course. Because how could you care about someone when his very means of existence made your stomach hurt?
Not that Louis-Cesare needed to snack on random clerks when he probably had a whole stable lined up and eager to be used. I knew that. But still. It was what he was.
And I killed what he was.
“What size you think they take?” Ray asked.
I looked up, blinking, to see that it was my turn. “Does it matter? We have plenty.”
“Well, yeah. But they’re all different sizes,” he said, piling boxes on the counter. “And what if the—what if they need something like extra small? You got enough extra smalls?”
“They’re not extra small,” I told him irritably. “They don’t need extra smalls.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know.”
“They’re seven feet tall!”
“Don’t matter,” he argued. “Plenty of big guys got a Tiny Tim. Sometimes I think they all do. I mean, why else spend all that time in the gym? Why get all those muscles? If you got it where it counts, the ladies know. You don’t gotta advertise.”
The mocha-skinned clerk, who could easily have made two of Ray, snorted.
“Well, there’s no way to know,” I told him, “so we’re just going to have to chance it.”
“You could call her and ask.”
“Call—” I stopped. “You mean Claire?”
“Well, it was her idea.”
I had a sudden flash of Claire’s face if I called to ask what size condom her fiancé took. It was kind of breathtaking.
“You want me to ring these up or not?” the cashier asked.
“If they don’t fit, can we bring them back?”
“No refunds on condoms.”
“Just call her,” Ray said.
“I am not calling Claire and asking…I’m not calling Claire.”
“Okay by me. I mean, I don’t care. But you get ’em too small and they pop off, and you get ’em too big and they slide off, and either way, it’s pointy-eared babies all ar—”
“Ray!”
“I mean, I guess they’d go over pretty well at a Star Trek convention, but the rest of the time—”
“All right! Stop it! All right!”
“It’s not just Claire who’s a little tense,” he said, as I dug around for a cell phone I didn’t have, and then commandeered his. I didn’t waste time trying to figure out how to phrase this because some things are better just winged.
“If you’re not buying anything, you gotta get out of line,” the cashier told me.
“There’s nobody else in the store.”
“Don’t matter—there’s rules. Somebody could come in, and I’m the only one on.”
“Start ringing things up, then. This won’t take long.”
“Which ones?”
“I don’t care.” I pushed some at her. “These.”
“These?” She looked dubious.
The phone was still ringing, but nobody was picking up. “Why not those?”
She glanced at Ray. “’Cause if that’s your man, I’d say you can leave these off,” and she pushed the three biggest sizes to the side.
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” Ray said.
“It’s your own fault,” I told him. She might have thought it, but she probably wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t been snacking earlier. But that sort of thing puts some people in a bad mood—usually those with enough magical blood to recognize the theft but not to name it. And the anger tends to resolve itself into a generalized dislike of the vamp in question.
And then someone picked up. “Oui?”
Damn. I thought about hanging up, pretending to be a wrong number, as cowardly as that would have been. But I guess he recognized my breathing or something—which was disturbing enough right there—because he said, “Dory?”
“What are you doing there?” I asked, harsher than I’d intended.
“I was about to ask you the same. Where are you?”
“Buying condoms,” I said, watching the salesclerk ring up a box of mediums and hand them to Ray.
“Why?”
“Is there more than one reason?” I asked, because “we have a garden full of randy fey” wasn’t on the approved-conversation list.
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“What’s this shit?” Ray demanded, looking at the salesclerk.
“Honey, truth hurts, but ain’t no way you’re a Magnum.”
“Well, I ain’t no medium!”
The clerk smiled. “Yeah, but I was being generous.”
“Dorina,” Louis-Cesare finally said. “You do realize…I thought you had been with our kind before.”
“I have.”
“Then why…” He stopped. And when he spoke again, his voice had changed. “Who are they for?”
“What are you doing?” the cashier demanded, as Ray grabbed another box. “I ain’t rung those up yet.”
Ray pulled out a foil package and tossed the box back on the counter. “So ring it up.”
She arched an eyebrow, but didn’t bother, maybe because she was watching him unbutton his fly. I caught his wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Proving a point.”
“Not in the middle of the store, you’re not.”
“Ain’t nobody here,” the cashier reminded me, grinning. “And ain’t no way he’s filling that thing out.”
“Dorina?” Louis-Cesare’s voice was loud in my ear. The one I had squeezed against the phone, which was squeezed against my sore shoulder, because I was using both hands to keep Ray’s point in his pants.
“The fey, damn it!” I told him. “They’re for the fey!”
“Which one?” Louis-Cesare asked, his voice going velvety soft.
“All of them— No, Ray! Ray, cut it out!”
“All of them?”
“No, that’s not what I—”
Ray gave a sudden twist, and the phone went sliding across the floor. And I went sliding after it, because it was that or risk an Interspecies Incident. But I didn’t pick it up. Because my hand landed on it about the same time that a foot did—a foot in a size sixteen boot belonging to a guy big enough to need it.
No, not a guy, I thought, looking up when the phone didn’t budge. A vampire. And not one of the nicer ones.
Chapter Twelve
“Mm-hmm. Now that’s a Magnum,” the clerk said behind me. She sounded impressed.
I was, too, but for a different reason. “I didn’t hear you come in,” I accused, standing up. And then getting a few feet between us.
The vamp grinned, all big white teeth in a handsome Asian face, which upset the tiger tat sleeping on his left cheek. It uncurled, stretched, and muscled down to the open neck of his black polo, watching me the whole time through narrowed emerald eyes. It looked like it was thinking about going for my jugular. Unlike its owner, who was in a worryingly good mood.
He switched the toothpick he’d been chewing to the other side of his mouth. “Takes talent,” he said mildly. And then he lunged.
A fist with enough force behind it to punch through a wall went whistling toward my face. But it didn’t punch a wall—or anything else—because I did a limbo-like maneuver that had me bent almost double in the wrong direction. And that much momentum doesn’t stop on a dime. It took him a half second to recover, and that was a half second too long.
I whirled, got my boot in his ass and pushed. He went barreling straight into the cash register, causing the clerk to jump back, the machine to hit the ground and the drawer to pop open. Change scattered, bills fluttered and he turned, grinning, because he was nuts and always had been.
I tried to remember his name, since it helps if you’re trying to talk som
ebody down. But “Scarface” was the only thing coming to mind. It was the nickname I’d given him the first time we met—you know, a couple of minutes after I tried to blow him up.
In fairness to me, he’d been trying to kill me at the time. In fairness to him, I’d been trying to steal something that belonged to his master, namely Ray, who the Senate had wanted to squeal on his boss’s White Tiger triad and its network of illegal portals. So you could say we had been about even on the fault scale when the bomb decided matters—temporarily, because the guy was a first-level master.
A little thing like a bomb going off practically on top of him hadn’t slowed him down for long. It had left him with a face full of scars, however, and an attitude. The scars had faded, and I thought the attitude had, too, when we ended up on the same side—sort of—a little later. So I wasn’t exactly facing an enemy.
Of course, he wasn’t a friend, either. At least, not in the conventional sense. Like in the not ripping the ICEE machine off the wall and chucking it at my head sense.
I ducked, which avoided decapitation but did nothing to prevent cold neon blue sludge from drenching me when the tank burst against the wall. He grinned. “Not your color.”
“What is your problem?” I asked, scooping the freezing mess out of my cleavage.
“We got unfinished business,” he reminded me.
“My name’s not Bill.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I loved that movie. Shoulda brought a katana, but it seemed like an unfair advantage.”
And then he pulled out a shotgun and blew the shit out of the fixture behind me.
It would have blown a hole through me, too, but I’d already been on my way to the ground. I rolled, slipped in the guts of a shampoo bottle, got to my feet and slid behind a row of fixtures. Which went up in a line of explosions right on my heels, because vampire reflexes on reload made almost any gun an automatic.
Until the crazy bastard firing it runs out of shells, anyway.
I crouched behind a bunch of mirrors on a pegboard, which were making a lot of oh, shit faces at me. I debated shooting back, but it wouldn’t have done any good. I had an M1911 .45 under my arm and a 9mm Glock 17 in a concealed holster at my waist, plus a cute little .22 I kept as a backup in my boot. None of which would do more to this joker than piss him off.
But it looked like I’d better come up with something, judging by the gun butt that obliterated the mirrors a second later.
I launched myself backward, flipped and sent three knives into his heart, one right after the other. Which didn’t buy me any time, unless you count the second he took to do an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression and flex a pec at me. And pop the damned things out.
“Don’t you hate it when they do that?” he asked sympathetically.
“They…don’t usually do that,” I admitted.
“Yeah.” He looked smug. “But I been getting a lot of practice lately. You know the games are on.”
“So I heard.”
Everybody had heard. Everybody in the vampire community, anyway. Thanks to the war—and Geminus’s recent demise—the Senate was currently missing seven members out of thirteen. It left them vulnerable as all hell and seriously overworked, but it was an unprecedented opportunity for ambitious first-level masters. Because by tradition the seats went, as Alexander the Great had once said about his empire, “to the strongest.” There was a series of duels, with the winners—aka the survivors—taking all.
To the vamp world, it was the Olympics, the World Cup and the Super Bowl all rolled into one, with contenders like Scarface having the time of their deaths advancing through the ranks. And since he was still here, I assumed he was advancing just fine. It didn’t surprise me; I hadn’t managed to kill him, and I’d given it a damned good try.
“You seen any of the matches?” he asked, holding up on my demise long enough to get his ego stroked.
“My invitation got lost in the mail.”
He chuckled. “Too bad. I’d bet on you next to some of those jokers. Can’t even take a punch, but think they ought to be a senator.”
“It’s a scandal.”
“Damn right.” He shook his head. “You know, I was gutting this loser the other day, and I thought, It’d be more fun fighting that little dhampir. I wonder if she’s recovered yet. And here you are.”
“Lucky me,” I said.
Scarface grinned. “You know, I might even let you live. You’re funny.”
I had a good comeback for that, but didn’t get to use it, being too busy dodging left, right, left a dozen or so times, as rapid-fire fists punched the air all around me, like some kind of automatic hammer. At least, they did until—
“This is a damned shame right here,” someone said, and another shotgun blast tore through the shop.
It wasn’t from Scarface’s gun, which he’d abandoned when he started trying to use me for a punching bag. I looked behind him to find the clerk standing there, 12-gauge in hand, and eyes huge. Maybe because we were looking at each other through the hole she’d just blown in Scarface’s sternum.
He looked down at it and then back over his shoulder at her. “That stings,” he said. She didn’t answer, being too busy staring at him with her mouth hanging open. He turned around and closed it for her with a finger. “You got a name?”
“D-Delisha.”
He checked her out. “Yes, you are. You got a man, Delisha?”
“Had one. Fool cheated on me so I kicked his ass to the curb.”
Scarface got out a card and tucked it in the pocket of a truly magnificent pair of jeans. “Save me the trouble.” Then he took the shotgun away from her, turned the butt sideways like a paddle and smacked her ample rear with it. “Get,” he told her.
She got.
He turned his attention back on me. “Where were we?”
“You can’t do stuff like that in front of norms,” I reminded him.
He shrugged. “She works for Singh. He rents half the damned shop out to trolls.”
And yes, yes, he did. Olga and a partner ran a beauty parlor/weapons emporium out of the back room, because trolls like one-stop shopping. For some crazy reason, that had slipped my fevered brain. But come to think of it, it might turn out to be—
I didn’t get to finish the thought, being too busy avoiding another swipe with the shotgun—Delisha’s, because Scarface had tossed his. In the middle of a cross aisle. Not five yards from me.
He saw the direction of my gaze and grinned. “What are you gonna do? Club me with it?”
“Seems to be a popular choice.”
“Yeah, but that won’t hurt me. Any more than that little peashooter at your waist will. And the shotgun’s out of ammo, sweet cheeks.”
I didn’t answer. I just lunged for it. He didn’t even come after me, so sure I didn’t have ammo for a gun I wasn’t carrying.
But only because it was on a dock somewhere, or more likely at the bottom of the ocean. Which it hadn’t been when I’d packed this jacket a few days ago. My fingers closed on the gun, the shells slammed home and I turned, still on the floor.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
And then I blew his face off.
At least, I assumed so, although I didn’t wait around to find out. If a bomb hadn’t stopped him, that wouldn’t either, not for long. I ran for the door, not screaming for Ray because I figured he was long gone by now.
Or rather, I did until he ran into me coming back inside.
“What the—”
“Aughhh!” he said, which didn’t explain anything, and then I looked over his shoulder and saw a bunch more tiger-tatted guys, which did.
It looked like they’d been loitering out front, smoking cigarettes and waiting for their buddy to finish trashing me. Now they were standing around with those cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, since clearly my survival hadn’t been in the game plan. And still might not be, because there were five of them and while I doubted they were on Scarface’s level, they were master
s. And, right now, that would be good enough.
“Um,” I said creatively.
They didn’t say anything.
I licked my lips, trying to think. And finding it really hard for some reason. Maybe the same reason I was all but swaying on my feet.
“What is wrong with you?” Ray hissed, because we weren’t presenting much of an intimidating front right now.
“Missed dinner,” I muttered, hoping I hadn’t skipped out on my last meal. And the one before that. And the one before—
“What?”
“I didn’t eat.”
“What difference does that make?”
“I’m not like you. I can’t recharge by feeding off of someone. I need food.”
“I know that! When was the last time you ate?”
“Yesterday?”
“Yester—why the hell didn’t you eat?”
“We had to go buy condoms, remember?”
“And you couldn’t grab something on the way out?” he said hysterically. “I’m gonna die because you couldn’t grab a sandwich?”
“No, you’re going to die because you wanted a snack. You could have stayed home.”
“Well, excuse the hell out of me! The Senate didn’t feed me, okay? I hadn’t eaten either, in like two weeks! And what was I gonna eat at the house? All you have is fey and part fey and they all taste like shit. And their blood doesn’t even do any—”
“May I say something?” one of the vamps asked politely.
The voice was cultured, with a faint British accent. It sounded a little odd coming from a guy with white-blond hair done up in eighties punk spikes, a leather jacket with more zippers even than mine and eyes so pale they looked blind. If he was going for disturbing, he was right on the money. But I guessed he was pretty important, because Ray’s grip on my wrist had suddenly turned painful.
“Sure,” I told him.
“This contest, it is between you and the Exalted Zheng-zi. We are not here to interfere.”
“Really.” Good to know. Well, possibly good. “So…why are you here?”
“For the traitor.” Those colorless eyes swiveled to Ray, who probably didn’t see them because he was busy trying to hide behind my back. “Give him to us and you may go.”
