The bottom subterranean floor consisted of storage and three very sturdy cells, not that any vampire who might require a cell was likely to survive long enough to make use of one. Still, they were there, for the rare occasion when the Council wanted a vampire held for questioning. Aboveground were the public rooms where business was conducted and meetings were held, as well as the rooms a human would expect to see should one be allowed inside: a dining room (unused), a kitchen (also unused), a parlor, some private offices, regular bedrooms. To the outside world, the vampire headquarters was an old, elegant, privately owned building with nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the neighborhood.
The private apartments were opulent; each furnished according to the Council member’s individual taste. They had all the modern conveniences, including whirlpool tubs, Internet, big-screen televisions, music systems, saunas—anything and everything they desired. Hector’s apartment was on the first basement level; the elevator opened onto a richly appointed foyer, decorated with antique furniture probably bought directly from the maker, or plundered from a palace. Luca had never been much on furniture, so he didn’t know a Louis of any number from a Hepplewhite or a Brandenburg or whatever the hell those guys’ names were; he was much more of a weapons collector. From a hatchet to a fine Toledo blade to a Browning shotgun to a Sig Sauer nine millimeter, he knew his killing instruments.
He paused, but even with his sensitive hearing he heard nothing. If any of the Council members were awake, they weren’t moving around or talking. There was something else, though … he stopped, the hair on the back of his neck rising in response to the presence of something with which he was well acquainted: his old friend, Death. The lingering violence wafted through these silent, luxurious halls like something he could almost smell, almost touch. Through all the hundreds upon hundreds of years that he’d lived, he’d become so intimate with violence that he could often read details in the echoes of energy that remained behind.
“I’m going into Hector’s apartment,” he said brusquely, striding down the hallway with Enoch a half-step behind. He kept all his senses at a high pitch, so acute that he could even hear the rapid thumping of Enoch’s heart.
“But—”
Luca didn’t pause, and Enoch bit back whatever objection he’d been about to make. Hector’s apartment was on the left, at the end of the hallway. Luca gave one sharp knock and the door swung open beneath the force of the blow. Looking down, he saw where the heavy wood had been splintered, the metal of the lock twisted. Even though both the door and the lock had been industrial strength, they couldn’t withstand the sheer force of a strong vampire.
He stepped inside, Enoch right behind him. “Hector!” Enoch called, his tone edgy with tension. “Hector, are you here?”
In a way, Luca thought, but kept the idea to himself. Hector had been right … but then he almost always was. Death had been coming for him.
Rapidly he gathered what impressions he could from the swirling miasma of leftover violence and the thoughts Hector had hurled out, not as weapons with which he could protect himself, but a means perhaps by which his murderer could be found. He would need more time to sort through all the impressions and thoughts, the essence of Hector’s life that he’d left behind, but that time wasn’t now. There would be no other opportunity for him to read the initial reactions of the other Council members to Hector’s death, which meant he had to move now, before they could be forewarned.
“Wake the Council members,” he ordered, retreating from Hector’s quarters and drawing Enoch with him. He kept his expression cold and blank, to keep from giving away anything. For now, he needed to keep what he’d sensed to himself. “Don’t tell them why. Just say it’s an emergency, and they’re needed in the Council chamber.”
Enoch looked as if he wanted to spew objections and questions, but Luca turned his pale, glittering gaze on him and despite himself Enoch looked away. Luca was the only one who knew the extent of his powers—and, conversely, his own limitations. Other vampires whispered and wondered, but the ones who had dared try him had all gone to dust at his hands.
“Yes, sir,” Enoch finally said, and went to the nearest house phone to begin rousing the sleeping Council members. Luca stood beside him, making certain none of the members were given a heads-up about the situation. Enoch followed his instructions to the letter, despite the complaints Luca could hear coming loud and clear from eight powerful and very unhappy vampires. After making those eight calls Enoch looked very unhappy himself. There had to be someone, or several someones, on the Council whom he would have liked to warn, but with Luca standing right there he couldn’t disobey his instructions.
In a remarkably short time, considering how fractious and uncooperative the Council members could be when they weren’t happy, Luca stood in the primary Council chamber and stared grim-faced at the eight seated members. Women had always outnumbered men on the Council, whether because they were more cunning or paid more attention to surviving rather than dominating; currently there were five women—Alma, Marie, Nadia, Eleanor, and Darnell—and three men—Theodore, Pablo, and Benedict. Of the eight of them, Luca couldn’t think of a single one he’d trust with his life. But which one of them would undermine the Council’s chosen path, and murder Hector to prevent him from interfering?
“If you’re as smart as you think you are, you’ll have a very good explanation for this,” Theodore growled, his thick black brows drawing together. He sat down with a thump, drawing his extravagant ceremonial robe around him. He was the only one who had taken the time to put on the Council robe; the others were dressed in whatever had been at hand. Granted, with vampire speed they could have found anything they wanted and been dressed in it in almost the same length of time, but Theodore was the only one who had bothered. Being on the Council was a huge ego stroke to him, and he always dressed the part.
From the scowl on his face, it was obvious Theodore didn’t like that Luca had arrived without his knowledge; as the one tasked with giving Luca his assignments he looked on himself as Luca’s supervisor. Much as the humans had comforted themselves with completely useless bits of folklore about what worked to repel vampires, some on the Council, and especially Theodore, had convinced themselves, or were trying very hard to, that Luca was their tool, their employee, and subject to their orders.
Luca, on the other hand, regarded Theodore as nothing more than a pain in the ass and had made his opinion plain on several occasions. What was the Council going to do? Fire him? They could certainly stop giving him assignments, as well as the very nice payment that went with those assignments, but in the larger picture Luca would scarcely miss the income—and they would have to find someone else capable of doing what he did.
His reasons for taking the jobs weren’t complicated; he saw a need for what he did, and he liked to fight. He was at heart a creature of war, and if living over two thousand years had taught him anything, it was to keep things simple and uncomplicated inside himself, no matter how tangled and problematic life on the outside might become. So long as pursuing rogue vampires gave him an outlet for his battle skills, he’d keep doing it.
On yet another side of the equation, the Council members looked to him for protection, if need be, and none of them would like it if he were no longer available, so while Theodore might posture and growl, he certainly didn’t want to push Luca into quitting. He’d do just enough to satisfy his own ego that he hadn’t been a wuss. The mere knowledge that Luca stood ready to meet any threat had undoubtedly, over the years, dissuaded many hotheaded, ambitious vampires from hostile acts.
The Council members were powerful in their own right, but having Luca as a deterrent was definitely a bonus even though that meant they then had to deal with him. Luca had played nice over the years, taking their assignments and not giving them cause to worry about him, but each and every one of them was aware that playing nice had always been his choice, not theirs, and he could change his mind at any moment.
Mutual distrust made for an interesting working relationship. To Luca’s way of thinking, it kept him on his toes, kept him aware, on edge—and alive.
“Hector’s been murdered,” he finally said, ignoring Theodore’s bluster and watching the faces before him. Vampires weren’t known for their lively expressions, merely because of all those years of practicing self-control, but there were still small flinches and gasps, and not even a vampire could control whether or not his or her pupils dilated.
Darnell blinked her eyes once, slowly. “How do you know? Did you find his dust?” No one except she knew what name she’d been born with, in what was now Ethiopia, or why she’d chosen an Irish name. She was deliberate in manner and intensely private. She had always voted to maintain the status quo, but at the same time she was so contemptuous of humans that Hector had never been certain of her vote.
“I could tell,” he replied, his tone flat. If they had no idea how he could tell, that was their problem, not his.
“From thousands of miles away? You were in Scotland, weren’t you?”
“Enoch opened Hector’s door for me.” He’d always made certain that no one, not even Hector, knew exactly where his homes were located, but abruptly he decided that the fact they even knew the country was more than he wanted them to know. He had other bolt-holes, of course, but they were for emergencies only. Though he was safer from the Council than the average vampire—since no human ever remembered seeing him, no human could give directions to his homes—the Council members did have their own skilled hunters.
“And you saw his dust?”
“I didn’t have to.”
Marie, the oldest and the only blood born on the Council, sat back with a quick, tiny sip of air. “If Luca says that Hector has been murdered, I believe him. That means … one of us killed him. No one else in the building is powerful enough to have done it.” She stared at him, then looked around at her fellow Council members, the faint shock in her eyes morphing to one of calculation as she considered all the ramifications and how she could use this to her advantage. Hector had been the head of the Council; perhaps she would be elected to succeed him. Her pragmatic Gallic nature meant she wouldn’t waste time regretting that someone she’d known, served with, and respected had finally met an end to his long life; she was a political creature to the core.
“We’re supposed to believe that you ‘sensed’ this?” Theodore demanded truculently, which was his normal tone. “How do we know you didn’t kill him? That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
Not for the first time, Luca had the thought that the Council members were strong enough to kill him, if even two of them combined to attack. Also not for the first time, he assessed Theodore as not having the balls to be one of those two, because he would always expect the remaining Council members to turn on them. Did it follow, then, that neither would Theodore be likely to have orchestrated the attack on Hector? He thought so, yes. He didn’t miss the irony that the member he least liked was probably the one he could most trust, at least in this matter.
“Enoch can vouch for me,” he said, the slight hint of boredom in his tone letting Theodore know that his attacks weren’t coming anywhere close to hitting a target.
Theodore turned to Enoch. “Is that true?”
“I’ve been with him since he arrived, less than half an hour ago,” Enoch admitted, the normally unflappable house manager uneasy at being put on the spot. He made a tiny shift of his weight, which in a vampire was the equivalent of wringing his hands.
“And Hector has really been murdered?”
Enoch darted a quick glance at Luca. “He isn’t in his quarters.”
Nadia threw up her hands. “So we are having all this drama and no one knows for certain if Hector is dead or merely elsewhere?”
“He called me,” Luca said, still watching their faces. “He said there’s a rebel movement to bring open war against the humans.”
“Why is that a bad thing?” Alma growled in her deep-throated voice. “I’ve said the same thing for years.” She sat near the foot of the table, her pale green eyes slumbrous as she watched him. Alma was a piece of work—ancient, bloodthirsty, beautiful, red-haired, and power hungry. One of the newer Council members, having been seated barely fifty years ago, she was constantly advocating for change in their community and generally making a nuisance of herself with her complaining. Luca was surprised they hadn’t booted her out years ago, though getting rid of a Council member wasn’t as easy as adding one. She could be the traitor, but he reserved judgment on that.
A scan of the other faces at the table told him she wasn’t alone in her opinion. It grated on most vampires that they had to hide their existence, that their food had more power than they did.
Sorting this out was going to be like swimming through a school of piranha. Council members were chosen for their age, their strength, and their commitment to maintaining the status quo, though that last sometimes depended on the mood of the moment. The youngest Council member had been around during the Wars of the Roses; one didn’t manage to live that long, especially in the treacherous mire of vampire politics, without an innate cunning backed by mental toughness and unusual power.
Then Marie sat forward, her dark gaze pinned on him. “So. What you are saying is that one of us is a traitor.”
Luca smiled, an expression that held all the humor and friendliness of a shark going in for the kill. “Exactly.”
CHAPTER
THREE
They were all quick to make the connection, but then cunning and trickery were necessary parts of their lives. Hector could only have been killed by a powerful vampire who was already inside the building, and knew where his quarters were. Tie that with news of a brewing rebel faction, and his killer was obviously part of that faction. Yes, there were aides and servants inside the building, but the key word was “powerful.” A vampire in a support position wouldn’t fit that description.
This was the tricky part. The traitor had had help in killing Hector, which meant Luca was currently outnumbered and handicapped by not knowing who all the players were. He could feel his heartbeat speeding up in anticipation of a fight to the death—vampires almost didn’t know any other way to fight—but he quickly focused and brought his heart rate back to normal. With their acute hearing, every person in this room could hear one another’s heartbeats and he didn’t want his to be racing. He’d been listening, but the only fast heartbeat he could hear was Enoch’s, though the manager was settling down now. Whoever the traitor was, he or she was either very controlled or not at all worried—or both, which brought up some interesting possibilities.
First he had to make it out of here alive, and that meant making the traitor think he was safe, at least for the time being. The only thing Luca had going for him was that no one other than himself—and Hector—knew how he could read the remnants of energy, of both life and death. That was his ace in the hole, the thread he could pick up that would, with luck, eventually lead him back to the traitor.
He hadn’t been able to pick up a betraying flicker of expression from any of them that would tell him who was behind Hector’s murder. He’d hoped he could, but that had been an outside chance. Not one of them was unduly upset by Hector’s death, and in the rarified air of the ruling Council, a vampire killing another vampire wasn’t something they worried about. What concerned the Council—most of the Council members, anyway—was preserving the wall of secrecy that protected them all. A simple murder … bah! Unless it was done in a public manner, who cared?
He cared. Hector had been his friend.
Deliberately he dragged back the chair Hector had always occupied, the seat of the Head of the Council, and sat down. He didn’t pull the chair up to the table; instead he kept it back and slightly at an angle, his long legs sprawled out and crossed at the ankles. He was just far enough from the long conference table that he didn’t give the impression of taking Hector’s place, but at the same time the fact that he’d taken the chair at
all offended their egos. He liked to keep them a little off balance. He figured it was good for them—and in this instance might startle one particular member into making a tiny mistake.
Every one of them was highly conscious of their privileged status, and they didn’t like the casual way he’d just put himself on their level. Even Marie looked taken aback, though for what felt like centuries—hell, maybe because it had been—every time there had been an opening on the Council she had lobbied him to accept the position.
He lifted his arms and laced his fingers behind his neck, the very picture of indolence. “No question one or more of you is working with the rebels,” he said lazily. “The bigger question is what the Council wants me to do about it.”
The eight of them looked at one another, weighing, considering. He could almost hear their thoughts: Which of them was the most likely to go behind the backs of the others? Who thought it was time to come out of the shadows? Who most resented the humans? Unfortunately, the answers to those three questions weren’t necessarily the same.
Alma was the one who had always harped that they should resume their natural positions of superiority, but Theodore was the one most likely to go behind their backs. As to who most resented the humans … who knew? Possibly they all did, which meant that the answer became one of degree. None of this told him who they thought the traitor could be, just that any of them were possible.
“You’re assuming Hector was correct about the rebel faction,” Benedict finally said. He was Roman, a patrician, and had never liked associating with those he considered lower than himself, which was almost everyone, vampire and human alike. It amused Luca that, as blood borns, both he and Marie presented a dilemma to Benedict; they were members of the Rolls-Royce class of vampires, but their respective parents, in their human lives, had obviously not been as highly born as Benedict, so in his eyes they were tainted by low birth … but they themselves had never been human, which threw Benedict’s value system out of balance.
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