This was quite an about-face for the woman who, ten minutes earlier, had made it sound as if the civilized world as she knew it would come to an ignoble end if any of her peers saw her granddaughter in casual clothing. Not to mention that the old woman actually sounded agitated. Adele never sounded agitated. It would have implied the entire universe was not firmly under her control.
“Nana, it won’t take me more than a minute to grab my things and follow you.”
“No. We will not keep the Council waiting. Come along.”
Adele didn’t wait for another argument. She turned abruptly, rapped her cane once on the floor, and set off down the hall with a gracefully intimidating stride.
Cassidy watched her go, brow wrinkled in a frown. “I wonder if the world is coming to an end.”
“I don’t know,” the man behind her rumbled, his granite mask cracking just enough for Cassidy to catch a glimpse of the curiosity beneath. “But if it’s not, it must be nearing intermission, because I’ve never seen that group of people look so worried in my life. And I’m two hundred and forty-seven next month.”
Cassidy caught a glimpse of fang as he spoke and took note of the worried crease in his forehead. Whatever had the Council in an uproar was enough to worry a two-hundred-and-forty-seven-year-old-vampire. Oh, right. Now the evening was looking up.
Six
It might lack the cliché-worthiness of a cold shower, but the news Quinn received the moment he returned to the party downstairs managed to calm his libido just as effectively.
“What did you say?”
He’d heard the report perfectly clearly, but shock made his lips move before he could stop them.
“Ysabel Mirenow is missing,” Richard Maccus repeated, his voice offering almost as creditable a growl as any Irish Lupine could have managed. That was saying something, considering the British representative to this summit was a Scot and a Selkie, one of the shapeshifting seafolk who populated the rugged coasts of the British Isles. It must come from having been Quinn’s close friend for at least a decade. “We just got word from Moscow. She disappeared sometime last night. Yesterday afternoon in this time zone. While she was out shopping. No one saw the actual incident, but Gregor became suspicious when she didn’t return in time to accompany him to the opera.”
Quinn swore under his breath. Gregor Kasminikov was probably the most powerful vampire in Eastern Europe. Rich as Croesus before the fall of the Soviet Union, he’d since become even richer, thanks to his involvement in the black market. He had also amassed greater power in the region than most governments, but then, he’d had almost five centuries in which to do it. He’d only had his human companion, Ysabel, for about sixty years, but that was still long enough for a woman who didn’t appear to age to acquire a great deal of information about the Other world. Information some human groups would go to great lengths to have for themselves.
“There’s no chance she’s just run off?” Quinn asked. “Maybe they had a fight. After all, Gregor is not known for his skill with fidelity.”
“No. The shocking part is that he swears he hasn’t strayed. It’s the longest the man has gone since his change without getting bored with a mistress.”
Gregor was not the sort to imagine things, either, which only made Quinn swear again, even more colorfully. Still, he clung to his last shreds of hope.
“He can swear all he likes; that doesn’t make it true. Why don’t we think she’ll call from a friend’s house in a day or two?”
Richard shook his head. “Gregor sent his best men out searching for her. He was truly worried. They returned after nearly eight hours, reporting that a shopkeeper in one of the high-rent districts saw her speaking with a priest less than half an hour before she was last seen.”
The bottom of Quinn’s stomach took a quick dive south. “A priest?”
“So he assumed,” Richard said, mouth set in severe lines. “He called the man a priest, but when pressed, he admitted all he could swear to was that the man wore black and had an ornate, silver rosary around his neck.”
Well, shite.
“I don’t suppose there has been any demand for a ransom?”
“Not a word. Whoever took her seems inclined to keep her. At least for a while.”
Quinn clenched his teeth. “You mean until they get the information they want from her.”
Gregor had been right to worry. Ysabel had been a human servant for several decades, her aging suspended indefinitely by the occasional ingestion of the blood of her immortal lover. The blood exchange also gave a human servant limited increases in strength and sensory perception, but nothing too far out of the range of ordinary. As a human, she remained vulnerable to attack in a way no Other could be, and she’d been immersed in their world long enough to know almost as much about them as a native. Quinn should have known Gregor wasn’t the type to overreact. You didn’t live that long as a Russian vampire without the ability to distinguish between an inconvenience and a crisis.
Hell, Quinn hadn’t lived thirty-five years as an Irish Lupine without developing that skill. He added up the puzzle pieces in his head: the human mistress of one of Russia’s most powerful vampires had gone missing, she had last been seen with a man who looked like a priest and wore an eye-catching rosary, and there had been no demand for ransom, despite the fact that Gregor was one of the richest men in Eastern Europe. That could only mean one thing. The kidnappers didn’t want money; they wanted information.
“What are the chances that she’s still alive?”
Richard shook his head. He looked about as bleak as Quinn felt. Like the rest of his seal-shifter brethren, he was more prone to isolation than to violence. But in this situation, a saint could feel driven to the edge.
“At the moment, there’s a chance,” he said, “but no one has much confidence that will last. If it is the Light of Truth who’ve taken her, she’ll be dead before much longer. They’ll use whatever means necessary to get the information they want, and then they’ll kill her. And probably congratulate themselves on saving her soul.”
Quinn knew his friend was right about what would happen to Ysabel and about who had taken her. The fanatic religious sect that called themselves the Light of Truth had been around in one form or another for many years now, but few Others had believed they would ever come this close to achieving their goal: gathering enough proof of the existence of vampires, werewolves, and all nonhumans to inspire a crusade that would wipe those “monsters” from the face of the earth.
It had taken Others like Quinn and Richard and the rest of their delegation the better part of the last two years to convince the European Council to take groups like this seriously. Now, at least they understood that the best way to counter the ever-increasing wave of threats from people like the Light of Truth was to take away their ammunition. By revealing themselves to the human world before the choice was taken entirely out of their hands, they could destroy their enemies’ most powerful weapon. The delegation had come to explain that to the Americans, just in time for fate to hand them a big piece of ammunition of its own.
“I’m sure Gregor has someone out looking for her,” he said with a touch of desperation.
“Of course. He’s still holding out hope. And even if he isn’t, he knows he can’t allow the Lightheads to go unchecked.” Richard sneered when he mentioned the cultists, as if the derogatory nickname hadn’t offered a clue to his feelings about them. “But that’s not the worst part.”
Quinn blanched. “There’s a worse part?”
Richard nodded. “Gregor also said that one of the initial trails they followed in trying to find Ysabel didn’t lead to her, but it did lead to some other interesting information.”
“Like what?”
“Like the original orders for the kidnapping might not have come from the Light of Truth cell in Moscow. It might have come from outside the country.”
“How far outside?” Quinn tensed.
“From America.”
�
��ShitepissfuckbollocksChristJesusandHolyMary.” The string of curses stopped when Quinn ran out of breath but continued to rain down in his head. “You’re telling me they might have already established working cells in the United States?”
The Lightheads had operated in Europe for decades—centuries if one cared to count their antecedents, such as the perpetrators of the Inquisition and the crusades against heresy that had run rampant during the Middle Ages. But until now, the Others had at least known small comfort of believing them confined to that continent. Sure, America had its small groups of troublemaking humans with penchants for conspiracy theory, but they had neither the long history nor the fanatic dedication that made the Light of Truth so dangerous. Knowing the group had spread might add urgency to the European delegation’s appeal to the Americans, but Quinn couldn’t be happy about it. It meant things were getting worse a lot quicker than anyone had anticipated.
“We came on this trip to tell the Americans we feared we’d be forced to Unveil sooner than any of us had planned, but if we don’t do something about the Lightheads now, they could rip away the Veil any second, whether we’re ready or not.” Richard’s voice was as grim as his face.
“Brilliant,” Quinn growled. “I’m sure the Americans will be thrilled to hear this.”
“I’m sure. So who’s going to tell them?”
Quinn reached into his pocket and drew out a one-euro coin. “Heads or tails?”
If Quinn hadn’t flipped the damned coin himself, he would have sworn it was weighted. No way could Richard have won best three out of five any other way.
Unless, of course, God simply hated him. Which he’d long since established was a strong possibility.
He knew for certain that the member of the Council whom he’d cornered a few minutes ago hadn’t liked him much when he’d insisted that the meeting scheduled for tomorrow night couldn’t even wait another hour. The changeling whose name Quinn couldn’t remember had argued for a good three minutes before Quinn had threatened to pull his intestines out of where his wings should have been. Changelings, the descendants of humans and Fae left after the Fae had fled the human world a few millennia ago, almost never actually had wings, but this one understood the imagery well enough. It had convinced him that Quinn’s message for the head of the Council was urgent, and Rafael De Santos had agreed. As soon as he finished hearing the changeling out, he’d moved the start time of tomorrow night’s Council meeting to tonight. To right now, if you wanted to be technical about it. Quinn didn’t; he just wanted it done.
But he’d have been happier not to be the one to do it.
So much for that famed Irish luck.
He hadn’t felt this much tension in a room since he’d negotiated a peace between his pack back home and the prince of the local Deerskin Clan. That mess had started when the prince’s lover had been eaten after she wandered too close to Quinn’s clan’s hunting grounds in her doe form on a full-moon night. The gentle, distant relatives of an extinct race, the Deerskin used the preserved hides of their magical deer ancestors to shift shapes, but they weren’t the brightest stars in the sky.
If Quinn had thought that was a messy situation, he now figured it had only been a warm-up for tonight. He needed to concentrate on the business at hand, not on playing show and tell with the locals or drooling over luscious young foxes with honeysuckle fur—
Well, hell. That’s what he got for trying to think of something more pleasant than the missing mistress of a vampire who was likely being tortured to death even as he spoke. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the remembered scent of sweet, female flowers out of his mind and looked around the room instead.
When the club staff had led them down into Vircolac’s basement and through a warren of stone tunnels with vaulted ceilings and torchlight, he’d almost thought it was an elaborate practical joke being played on the new wolf in town. Did the Manhattan Council actually meet in this Gothic nightmare, or were they going to have someone dressed like Bela Lugosi jump out at him from a suitably dark corner as a hazing prank?
No, they had been perfectly serious. They’d led him through the bad movie set and into the underground stone chamber filled with firelight, dark old mahogany, and rich Corinthian leather. As he settled into his massive, creaking chair, he heard the voice of Ricardo Montalban in his head and rolled his eyes.
“I almost wish someone would crack a smile. This place is too close to a tomb for my liking.” On Quinn’s right, Richard leaned in and grumbled through a scowl. “And I doubt we’ll find much amusement in the rest of the night’s proceedings.”
“I’m trying not to think about that.”
“Mark my words. These American Others are nearly as narrow-minded as their human countrymen. They wouldn’t have liked the news we came here with, let alone tonight’s twist in the plot.”
Quinn couldn’t disagree with his friend, especially since he disliked said twist so much himself, but he had rowed too far up Denial to come right out and agree with him. “Everything I’ve heard about their Council leader points to his level head and sound judgment. Let’s not give up hope too soon.”
“Oh, I’ve no quarrel with Rafael De Santos. He’s a fine chap. It’s his constituents who scare me down to my soles.”
Quinn snorted and shifted in his seat, his attention caught by the new group of delegates entering the room. Rafael De Santos stepped into the melodramatic torchlight accompanied by two other men and two women Quinn hadn’t met. They exchanged quiet greetings with those already in the room.
Tall and lean, with an innate and fluid grace to his movements, the Felix werejaguar—a loose equivalent to an Alpha pack leader in the less structured world of the feline shifters—was hard to miss. He entered the room as if he owned it, which some might argue he nearly did, looking dangerous and elegant in a well-tailored suit the color of slate.
The dark-haired, bronze-skinned shifter had taken over the leadership of the Manhattan Council when the former head had stepped down. His greatest coup so far had been the treaty brokered between the Council of Others and the American Witches, with whom they’d been feuding for the better part of four centuries. Quinn had even heard De Santos had sealed the deal by taking a witch as his mate. That made quite a statement of professional dedication. Witches weren’t known for being all that easy to live with, but the sharp and watchful glint in the man’s eye made Quinn think if anyone could handle a witchy wife, it would be Rafael De Santos.
He tried to place the other newcomers based on the descriptions he’d received while researching the Council before his trip. The two women were easy. One had the delicate, exotic looks of a geisha and the aura of a displeased cobra. That made her Chikako Izumi and an oni, one of the Japanese race who had been spawned by the demons before their banishment from the human world. The oni delighted in meddling with humans just for fun. Quinn would remember to stay out of her way. The other woman was short, a little solid, and the most remarkable shades of brown he had ever seen. From the top of her short, potting-soil brown hair, to her cocoa skin and the chocolaty brown of her clothing, she lacked any other color but that of the earth. Clearly, he was looking at Emma Higgenbottham, a brownie, to overstate the obvious.
The two men weren’t quite so easy. Both were tall, lean, and of indeterminate age. The major difference between them seemed to be the air of arrogance one wore like a bad Dracula cape and the intense blankness of the other. If he had to hazard a guess, Quinn would say the clean slate was most likely Jeffrey Saxon, one of Manhattan’s most prominent doppelgangers—those who could assume the shape and face of any humanlike individual. The other he couldn’t be sure about, but he was leaning toward guessing the man was one of the Council’s several vampire members. The arrogance always gave that kind away.
Quinn watched as the group began to take their seats around the massive council tables. De Santos settled into the thronelike chair at the center of the head table, flanked on one side by a short, stocky fellow with a close-croppe
d goatee and on the other by an elegantly pale and befanged type. An assortment of vampires, werefolk, changelings, and Others occupied the remaining seats, most of whom Quinn had been introduced to at the party earlier. The Americans outnumbered the European delegation fourteen to five, but he supposed that was natural. This was their sandbox, after all. He just gave thanks they were only facing the Inner Circle of the Council, not the full company of them, which was nearly one hundred strong.
Quinn saw De Santos glance down at an elegant gold wristwatch and frown. He barely had time to raise an eyebrow before a soft but deliberate thump drew everyone’s attention to the chamber entrance.
Adele Berry stood in the dimly lit archway, draped in burgundy silk and expensive perfume, leaning on her silver-handled cane. “Forgive me, gentlemen,” she said in a voice that sounded far feebler than the one she’d used on Quinn a couple of hours earlier. “I don’t get around quite as quickly as I did once. I hope I haven’t kept everyone waiting.”
De Santos shook his head, his mouth betraying a hint of amusement, and waved for an attendant to pull out a chair. “We are honored as always to have you join us, Mrs. Berry. Please take a seat and we can begin.”
“Thank you, Rafael, but first allow me to present my granddaughter to the Council.” Adele stepped aside to reveal the petite form concealed in the shadows behind her. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Cassidy Emilia Berry Poe? Forgive her appearance. She had a mishap upstairs with her cocktail, and I’m afraid we weren’t prepared for a Council meeting this evening. I had understood we were to meet tomorrow.”
Quinn watched, curious to see what sort of woman could have been born with the grande dame’s genes and not ended up in a convent in the mountains of Switzerland out of self-defense. The blushing figure who stepped forward did so with a reluctance with which he could sympathize. Life in Dame Berry’s household couldn’t be a bowl of pudding. His eyes widened when the girl shifted and the torchlight glinted off her fiery russet hair.
Wolf at the Door Page 5
