by Karen Chance
“This is your job, until I say otherwise.”
I smiled. I was feeling fairly mellow for a change. I wasn’t sure if that was because of all the violence earlier or the laughing fit, but either way, I actually didn’t feel like tearing his head off. “And you used to have such good hearing.”
“You will not defy me on this.”
I waited for a minute, but he just stood there, looking all grim and macho. It was the face that usually caused other vamps to sink to their knees, babbling apologies and trying to kiss his expensive, leather-covered toes. It had never worked on me. “Um, I’m assuming there’s another half to that sentence. Because I’m really not seeing—”
“Claire.” That one word stopped me in midrant.
“I had better be misunderstanding you,” I said softly.
“You are fond of the human, aren’t you?”
“If you had anything to do—”
“I did not take her,” he said calmly, “but I could arrange to get her back for you. I can call on the Senate’s resources, which you must admit are far greater than your own.”
“I’ll find her myself.”
He arched a dark, expressive brow and gave me his patented condescending smile. “In time?”
I didn’t answer for a moment, my brain being busy with a replay of that night in London. All I could hear was the faint sound of bootheels on cobblestones, far away but getting closer. That even, measured tread had echoed in my head for years. I didn’t think about what had happened after the steps stopped, right in front of where I was concealed. No. I never thought about that at all.
“Uncle Drac,” as I flippantly referred to him to keep myself from gibbering, was the only thing on earth that truly scared me. I think my laughter earlier had been less about Daddy finally admitting I was good for something, and more hysterics from the thought of going up against Drac again. I had lobbied hard for the final solution to the problem more than a century ago, since trapping him had been as much about luck as skill. With nothing else to do to while away the decades, he must have dissected that night a thousand times, analyzing it in that brilliant, broken mind of his, figuring out exactly where he went wrong. Dracula deserved his legend, however mixed-up much of it was due to that Victorian hack writer. He wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice; in fact, I doubted he would make any at all.
A mental picture of Claire’s face wavered in front of my eyes. She was one of the few friends I’d ever been able to hold on to for more than a few months. It wasn’t that the rages didn’t scare her, but rather that she had never been exposed to them. I had never thought of myself as a magical being before I met her, but there was no doubt that she had the same calming effect on me as on a spell or ward. Living and working alongside her had given me the closest thing to peace and a normal life I’d ever known. I still had occasional fits, but only when outside her orbit, and even then, they were rarer. The idea of never seeing her face screw up in thought as she surveyed my latest painting, trying to figure out what the hell it was supposed to be, was brutal.
But Claire was more than my friend; she was also the only chance for me to master my rage once and for all. She’s from one of the oldest magical families on earth, House Lachesis, who specialize in healing. They have access to ancient lore that even the Circle itself doesn’t know. Claire once told me that there is a branch of the family that does nothing but scavenge, in areas so out of the way as to make Antarctica look like Forty-second and Broadway, for unusual cures, potions and amulets. Another branch researches new treatments, and yet another comes up with debilitating spells to sell to malevolent types to ensure a steady supply of wealthy afflicted.
Despite the fact that she had worked in the business side of things rather than in research and development, she’d been using her contacts to try to find something that would decrease my fits. Because of my metabolism, human drugs don’t stay in my system long enough to register. I was hoping a magical solution would have more effect, but no one had ever thought to develop anything for dhampirs. There are so few of us as to make it impractical, and we’re not exactly top of the popularity chart. There was a good possibility that Claire’s work was the first of its kind ever done. And if I didn’t find her soon, it might also be the last.
I would find her—I had no doubt of that—but Mircea, damn him, was right. I might not manage it in time. Michael was only a low-level master, sixth at a guess, who ran errands for a couple of vamp bosses in Brooklyn. He was nothing I couldn’t deal with half-asleep, but the information I’d gotten from his thugs was that he’d recently skipped town. No one knew where he was, and tracking him with only my own resources to draw on was going to take time. Time Claire might not have.
Mircea, on the other hand, could put an organization on the search that made the CIA, the FBI and Interpol look like a bunch of retarded children—even more so than they usually do. By this time tomorrow, she could be back in our dilapidated house, clucking over her herb garden and two spoiled cats. And, if the pregnancy thing wasn’t a figment of Kyle’s warped imagination, I’d have time to talk with her and explain a few hard truths.
I glanced at the other vamp, only to see him regarding me with faint contempt. He probably thought he was hiding it, but I’d learned a few things about reading expressions over the years. Or maybe he didn’t care if I knew he thought me a coward. He was, after all, quite correct, at least when it came to my scary uncle. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of him was either a lunatic or really stupid. I wondered which type Mircea was trying to foist off on me.
“I’d want her back first. Payment only on delivery.”
“No.” Mircea didn’t even bother to look regretful. “Vlad has been on the loose for over a week. To give him more time to lay his plans is folly.”
“He’s had more than a century to plan already,” I pointed out. I didn’t like the Vlad reference. If Mircea would just once forget that the monster we were discussing was his brother, it would make things so much easier. But he has this weird affection for family that I’ve never understood. It ensured that he tracked me down every few decades, even knowing we’d end up in the usual knock-down, drag-out, and it had kept him from staking Dracula when he’d had the chance.
“True, but we dismantled his support network, if you recall. Unless he plans to move entirely on his own, he will need time to find followers. At the moment, he should be vulnerable. But he will not stay that way for long.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that “vulnerable” and “Dracula” really didn’t belong in the same sentence. At no point in time had he ever been anything but utterly capable and completely ruthless. But Mircea had a point. If I had to take on Drac, I’d vastly prefer for him not to have found any helpers. He was bad enough on his own, but the stable he used to control had been another source of nightmares, to the point that I’d spent more than a decade hunting the worst of them down. It had let me sleep a little better afterward, although only a little. Knowing that their lord and master was only one step away from being back in business had never gone down well. I felt my temper rising at the thought that if, just once, Mircea the perpetually hardheaded had listened to me, Dracula would be in a coffin permanently right now and none of this would be necessary. Of course, in that case, I wouldn’t have help with Claire.
“Fine. But if I start hunting him tonight, I want the search for Claire to start at the same time.”
“Done.”
I didn’t ask for surety. Mircea is a lot of things, but he keeps his word when he gives it. You just better be damn sure you know what that word is, because he is one of the slipperiest bastards out there when he wants to be. I decided I wanted things spelled out a little more. “If she’s alive, I want her back. If not…”
“Would you prefer to deal with the parties responsible yourself, or have us do so?”
“What do you think?”
Mircea smiled slightly. “I will order them held for you. I take it we have an agreement?”
I looked at the French guy and wasn’t pleased at what I saw. Yeah, there was enough power emanating off him to rival Mircea’s aura, which raised hairs on my arms every time I got within five feet of him, but taking down someone like Dracula was going to require more than raw power. A whole lot more. “Yes, but I’d prefer a partner I already know,” I said, trying to blunt the insult. “We won’t have time to learn each other’s styles. What’s Marlowe doing?”
Kit Marlowe, vamp, playwright and onetime Elizabethan bad boy, was head of intelligence for the Senate. He was one evil son of a bitch, as I could testify on a personal level, and we weren’t exactly buddies. But if I had to track the meanest vamp on the planet, I’d like to have one of the runners-up at my back. As long as he wasn’t gunning for me this time.
“We are on a wartime footing, Dorina. I can hardly pull the chief of security away for a personal errand at such a moment.”
“It’s not gonna stay personal for long,” I pointed out. “Our names may head Uncle’s list, but we’re hardly the only ones on it. The war may seem like a sideshow if he really gets going.”
“Nonetheless, the Consul would never permit it.” Even Mircea would think twice about bucking the Senate leader’s orders, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d met her only once, and that had been more than sufficient. My personal opinion was that she was crazier than Drac, but no one had asked me.
“So who is going with us, then?” I hoped he had some better backup in mind than the guys I normally used. One or two could handle themselves in some pretty tough situations, but nothing like this. The only connections I had who might have been useful were currently incommunicado—locked away for crimes the vamps or mages didn’t like, but hadn’t viewed as being serious enough to merit a cell six feet under. And since the war had intervened, their trials were on permanent hold—there’s no such thing as habeas corpus in the supernatural world.
“I would prefer to keep this in the family,” Mircea said.
I snorted. I didn’t doubt it. Anyone not under his direct command would have no compunction about staking good old Drac at the first opportunity. It was certainly my plan. Assuming he didn’t get me first.
Something occurred to me. “So what’s he doing here?” I jerked a thumb at the fashion plate. I wasn’t on great terms with the family, but at least I knew who was who. And Mr. Lack of Congeniality wasn’t on the list.
“I told you,” Mircea said in that überpatient voice he reserves for me and the mentally challenged. “This is Louis-Cesare.” I looked expectant. He sighed. “Radu’s get.”
I gave the pretty vamp another, more interested look. “I wasn’t aware my marginally sane uncle had any offspring.”
I was being kind. Radu—Mircea and Dracula’s younger brother—was a real weirdo. Not in the contender-for-homicidal-heavyweight-title kind of way like Drac, but almost as creepy. For one thing, he insisted on dressing like a reject from a Three Musketeers film, only reluctantly putting on up-to-date clothes when strong-armed into it. Some vamps liked to dress as they’d done in life when out of sight of humans, but Radu had been brought up in fifteenth-century Romania, not seventeenth-century France—hence, the weird. For another, he’d never, or so I’d thought, made another vamp in his life, although he had been a second-level master for centuries. Someone that powerful without a stable was unprecedented. Followers gave you income as well as protection, and who would voluntarily forgo both? He used Mircea’s stable almost like it was his own, but sponging off elder brother would have gotten tiresome to me. But then, nobody much cared what the skeleton in the closet thought.
“This is the only one.” I waited, but Mircea didn’t elaborate. Again, no real surprise. Why tell cannon fodder any more than she has to know?
“Okay, I understand you want him along, and that’s fine. I’m sure I can find something for him to do, but—”
“I think you are laboring under a misapprehension,” the Frenchman interrupted, his accent a bit more obvious than it had been before. “You speak as if you will be deciding strategy. You will be under my direction, not the reverse.”
I slowly turned to face him, and something in my expression caused him to lower a hand to the hilt of his rapier. He didn’t draw it, but he didn’t take his hand back, either.
“I don’t know who you think you are,” I informed him evenly, “and I don’t care. But I take direction from no one. Are we clear?”
“We most decidedly are not,” he responded, equally crisply. It would have been funny at another time, our trying to out-enunciate each other, but at the moment I didn’t feel like laughing. This was going to be hard enough without backup who couldn’t follow orders.
“Then we have a problem,” I told him honestly. I looked back at Mircea, who was wearing an expression that on anyone else I would have described as petulant. “You know what’s at stake here. I know you don’t like me any more than I do you, but we have worked together before. I think it was luck, but maybe we’ll get lucky again. And you already know how I operate.”
Mircea was shaking his head before I even finished. “Normally that is the way I would choose to proceed. But not now.”
“Why not?” I thought my question was reasonable, but he suddenly looked angry.
“After all these years, can you not follow a simple command?”
“Not when it’s likely to get me killed, no.” I looked between the two of them, trying to figure out what unspoken communication was going on. For a brief moment I felt something—not anger exactly but something more elusive—that Mircea and this stranger could communicate so easily without words. Because that’s exactly what they were doing. A normal human wouldn’t have noticed the few, almost-too-quick-for-the-eye glances, but I did. That was one of the harshest parts of the dhampir experience: the fact that your senses never allow you to be oblivious, never let you for a moment fool yourself into thinking you belong.
Once, when I was very young and even dumber than I am now, I actually let a vamp try to turn me. I’d just reached the century mark and seen my mortal acquaintances age and die before my eyes, with the last one buried earlier that week. I was all alone and tired as hell of it. Not that I’d ever fit in with humans very well, but, God, how I had tried. So I figured, why not? I’m almost there anyway, why not cross over and actually be part of something for a change?
I knew it was a risk, of course: even if the vamp didn’t just bleed me dry and leave me to die, most vamps spend eternity tied to a master they can’t disobey. They are little more than slaves until they reach master status—which few ever do—and even then their responsibility to their master remains a debt that can be called in anytime. But at that moment, I didn’t much care. Turns out, though, I had chosen well, and he gave it his all, I guess hoping for whatever fame would come out of being the first on record to turn a dhampir. But the next morning I woke up exactly as I’d been before, a little light-headed from the blood loss, maybe, but not changed one iota. So add another rule to the books: dhampirs can’t be brought over. This meant that, after torturing me for a few days or weeks or whatever time he could spare, Drac wouldn’t even try to add me to his new stable.
“I’m risking a lot here,” I told them in what had to be the understatement of at least my last century. “I don’t think it’s asking too much to know why I can’t have decent backup.”
I never saw it coming. Despite the fact that I’ve survived longer than anyone would have bet by being unbelievably paranoid and very good at defense, I didn’t see a thing. I also didn’t hear, smell or otherwise have a clue what was happening. One second I was facing off with Mircea, and the next I was facedown on the ground, being pinned very effectively by the hard body pressing into mine.
My reaction was immediate and unthinking. When you’ve been in literally more fights than you can count, often against opponents much bigger than you who have no compunction at all about fighting dirty, you learn a few things. I used them all and then some, yet the face-to-the-carpet th
ing didn’t change. I was stunned almost into disbelief. This simply wasn’t happening. I would have believed that Mircea was helping out, except that he had moved off to lean against the bar. I could see the toes of his perfectly shined shoes and the knife-edge pleat of his trouser cuffs, meaning that I was, incredible as it seemed, being held by only one vamp.
Son of a bitch.
“We can continue this as long as necessary,” an infuriatingly calm voice said near my left ear, “but we are wasting time. Agree to my mastery and we can begin to plan how to overcome our prey.”
“Bullshit!” I tried unseating him again, but no luck. The asshole was strong, but no way would any single vamp have pinned me if I’d been expecting it. I tried to ignore the little voice reminding me that one of the first lessons I had ever learned was to always expect it.
“You cannot seriously believe you could lead a mission of this magnitude,” he continued. “You know your place, dhampir. Stay in it and you may be of some use to the family. Fail to do so and I will be pleased to remove this stain on my lord’s honor. Permanently.”
“You will do no such thing.” Mircea’s less-than-pleased voice startled both of us. “I want your word, Louis-Cesare, that you will neither harm nor allow harm to come to my daughter if you can prevent it.”
“My lord, you know what she is!” The voice above me sounded startled, as if he hadn’t thought twice about threatening Daddy’s little girl in his presence. Apparently, he didn’t understand Mircea’s family obsession. Which was odd, considering that, as Radu’s get, he was part of our dysfunctional clan.
“Your word.”
It sounded like Frenchie was choking, but he got it out. “You have it.”
I bit back a smile and took advantage of his distraction. I relaxed all my muscles as if I had fainted, which, considering that most of the air was being pushed out of my lungs, wasn’t far from the truth. The best I’d hoped for was that he would let up on the pressure enough for me to get a little room to maneuver, so it was a real shock when he suddenly pulled away altogether. “I do not question your judgment, my lord,” I heard from far above my head, telling me that the idiot had actually stood up, “but obviously this… woman… is not up to the task. May I suggest—”
