by Karen Chance
“Thank you for the tip,” he said, through gritted teeth. In a lightning movement, he hooked his foot behind my leg and jerked back, unbalancing me enough that I ended up on the floor. I couldn’t stop the fall, but I still had hold of his hair and I dragged him down with me. He landed on top, his weight causing the air in my lungs to come out in a whoosh. Before I could regain my feet, Louis-Cesare had pinned my arms and straddled my thighs, effectively immobilizing me. The few blows I managed to get in were ignored, and within seconds he had captured my wrists and forced them to my sides.
For a moment, we stared at each other, the only motion the faint vibration of the airplane’s floor beneath us. “I will not be mastered, manipulated or controlled by a… dhampir,” he finally said, his voice rough. “Regardless of her parentage!”
I bucked, but his thighs flexed, pinning me on either side. “Ditto,” I told him furiously, “except substitute ‘arrogant vamp’ in that sentiment.”
His eyes dropped and almost tangibly caressed a path across my body. “You seem well mastered to me. And if I may offer some advice, your close-combat skills require work.”
I arched up against the weight that held me down, deliberately rubbing against unmistakable evidence that his body disagreed with him. “Really? I’ve never had any complaints.”
Anger and heat flashed in his suddenly storm-colored eyes, but his response wasn’t what I’d expected. One moment to the next, something changed. It was nothing I could name, beyond a collection of gestures: one eyebrow rising in an elegant arch, a barely there, Mona Lisa tilt to his lips, a slight fall of lashes as long as a girl’s. Inconsequential details, but the air between us suddenly went electric, as quickly as if he’d thrown a switch. I was straining toward him before I knew it.
I clenched every muscle to halt the movement, while Louis-Cesare, damn him, was smiling. He slid a hand across my shoulder to my neck, his fingers tangling in my hair as he cupped the back of my head. I don’t like feeling overpowered, and when it happens, I fight back. But I wasn’t fighting now. I’d let him maneuver me into position and now I was letting him touch me. I remember thinking, Oh, no, he isn’t—even as he pulled me the rest of the way up. He dropped his other hand to my waist, settled my body firmly against his own and kissed me.
Such perfect pressure on my lips, such a skillful tongue in my mouth… it had been a long time since I’d been kissed with expertise and passion. A warm tongue expertly twined around my own, sending signals all over my body. I hadn’t paid much attention to the brief embrace in the car. I’d been stunned and freezing, and more interested in the Fey than in Louis-Cesare. He had my full attention now. A strong hand slowly moved downward until it gripped my backside, pressing me close.
I told myself not to respond, but my body wasn’t listening. My hands, no longer restrained, were pulling him closer, my fingers twisting in the decadent softness of his sweater, and I was kissing him savagely. I was furious with myself, knowing in a moment he’d push me away, but even knowing, I couldn’t seem to stop. My left leg hooked itself over him, pulling him hard against my body, and we began moving against each other, craving friction, craving intimacy.
Then he shifted, just right, and a jolt of bone-dissolving pleasure wracked my body. My breath squeezed out of my throat in a broken, shaky groan as his lips found my ear. The tip of his tongue began to trace the whorls delicately, a barely-there sensation in stark contrast to the feel of him, huge and persistent, pressed hard against me.
“Dorina.” He delicately licked along the soft curve, slowly, down to the lobe, which he caught between his teeth sharply enough to make me gasp. Then his tongue plunged inside, tracing the inner channel and leaving a slight wetness when he withdrew. His breath over the moist center made me shiver helplessly. “Neither have I.”
It took me a second to realize what he meant; then I was assailed by a vision of strangling him until he turned more purple than my hair. The maddening, adjective-inspiring, devious son of a bitch! I managed to get a foot into his stomach and pushed hard. Because of the awkward angle, he didn’t end up sailing down the aisle again, but it did send him forcefully back into his chair.
When he made no immediate attempt to get up, I righted myself and moved away a few steps on the pretense of picking up my joint from the table. I needed it to steady my nerves, and I preferred having something to look at besides him. I realized I was shaking, and it pissed me off. One kiss and my brain almost trickled out my ears! It had simply been a long time. A very long time, I realized, since I’d known the taste of another’s breath in my mouth, the feel of a nipple hardening under my tongue, the way that muscle at the top of the thigh jumps when you bite it…
I sat down and took a long drag. For once, Claire’s skillful concoction didn’t seem to be working. “That was fun,” I drawled offhandedly, amazed that my voice sounded so normal. “Of course, the last vamp who kissed me ended up with a stake through his rib cage.”
I swear, I didn’t even see him move. Before I could blink, he was bent over me, hands braced on my shoulders, forcing me back against the seat. I caught his wrists, my grip as hard as I could make it, and we paused, staring at each other.
I don’t know what I looked like, but Louis-Cesare’s pupils were dilated, wide and dark, and his lips were parted. I felt my body react to the heat in that stare, and a shiver spilled through me. It was probably just my usual perverseness kicking in—Daddy’s pet vampire was the last person I should even think about getting involved with, so of course my libido had latched on to him.
“Do not provoke me, Dorina.” The voice was harsh, but not entirely steady. So, he wasn’t as unmoved as he’d like to appear. It wasn’t much of a victory, but at the moment, I’d take what I could get.
“Don’t provoke you?” I stared at his lips. I couldn’t help it; we were close enough to kiss. Do it, my pulse was beating. Do it, do it, do it. “Why, are you really that easy?”
Louis-Cesare flinched as if I’d slapped him. His expression changed, and for a split second he actually looked stricken. No, I thought. No, no, no. I felt like I’d twisted a knife in my own gut, when I should have felt triumphant. What the hell?
Louis-Cesare abruptly pulled away. He ran a hand through his hair and stared at me while I tried to get my breathing under control. When he finally spoke, it was nothing I’d expected to hear. “Why did you say that Lord Dracula will come to us?”
I searched around the carpet by my feet and found my joint. I took another much-needed drag before answering. My pulse was pounding hard enough that I could barely hear, but Louis-Cesare already had himself back under control. His sweater had recovered from our little tussle without anything so déclassé as a wrinkle; other than for slightly mussed hair, he looked like nothing had happened.
Damn vampire.
God, he could kiss, though.
“Because three people put him away last time, but only two are family,” I managed to say evenly.
“Then, logically, he should go after—”
“I wasn’t finished. His warped idea of logic only makes sense if you know his history. Radu betrayed him half a millennium ago, leading a Turkish army to force him off his throne. He spent years in exile, plotting revenge. By the time he got back, Radu had joined the life-challenged segment of the family—he’d picked up a bad case of syphilis and Mircea brought him over because at that time there was no cure. But was that good enough for Drac? Hell no.”
I stubbed out joint number one after using it to light number two. I was going to need to score some weed in ’Frisco at the rate things were going. It wouldn’t be as good as Claire’s stuff, but hopefully she’d be back tending her highly illegal herb patch soon. “The only reason he didn’t take Radu out immediately was that an assassin in the pay of some local nobles got in a lucky shot. Unfortunately, Daddy chose to bring Drac over instead of leaving him to die. And as soon as he rose, he started in on Radu as if nothing had changed. He wasn’t strong enough to kill him, being
only a baby vamp, but he didn’t let that stop him from hiring others to attempt it.”
“But that did not succeed.” Louis-Cesare looked like he had forgotten to whom he was speaking for a minute, and actually seemed to be listening.
“Nope. But Drac doesn’t get over things. Didn’t as a human, doesn’t now.”
“Yet he did give up eventually. Radu is quite well today—”
“Because of luck,” I said flatly. “I don’t know what you were told, but Drac never did stop his games. He was finally locked away because it came out that he was the one who set a mob on Radu in Paris, leading to a very nasty imprisonment for your sire that almost got him killed.”
“I know.” Something about the way he said it made me glance up sharply, but there was nothing in his expression to tell me anything. I wondered exactly when he and Radu had met, and under what circumstances. It was possible, I decided, that Louis-Cesare might know more about Uncle’s stint behind bars than I did. But I knew better than to ask.
Most of the older vamps carry a lot of baggage. Humans are amazingly adaptable, able to reinvent themselves when times change, but vamps have a harder time shrugging off the centuries. Some cope by keeping their function constant over the long haul: Mircea is the Senate’s chief diplomat, for example, and has been for some time. The world might change, but people’s basic natures don’t, so their lives have a sense of continuity. Others, like Radu, drift along in some kind of denial, trying to recapture a past in which they felt at home. And some, like Drac, never stop trying to make the world over in their image. I really didn’t care which category Louis-Cesare fit. His baggage was his problem; I had enough of my own.
“And then, when Drac escaped a little over a century ago, what do you think was the first thing he did?” I continued. “Went straight back on the hunt as if nothing had changed. We were able to catch him again by using Radu as bait.”
“No.” Louis-Cesare sounded adamant. “I will not allow my old master to be subjected to that level of risk—”
“Radu is perfectly safe, at least for the moment. He isn’t Drac’s chief target anymore. Don’t misunderstand—I’m certain he’ll get around to him in time—but his isn’t the first name on the list.”
Shrewd eyes that were, thankfully, back to blue, met mine. “And who does have that honor?”
I watched my smoke being pulled into odd patterns by the plane’s air-conditioning. “You’re looking at her.”
Chapter Five
The Electric Hedgehog is a punk cybercafe run by a couple of British guys Kristie knows in a backstreet near the Bay. It’s a funky little place where you can log online, get a body piercing and buy some weed under the table, all at the same time. One-stop shopping; I like that.
Believe it or not, I hadn’t come just for the weed. I also needed a safe place to meet the rest of the team and Kristie had suggested the Hedgehog’s back room. It was a testament to the very different attitudes and styles of its two owners. While the front was all black walls and neon graffiti, the back was hippie coffeehouse chic, with vintage shag carpeting and Che Guevara posters.
I passed the time sipping some really nasty chai, which was the most appetizing thing on the menu, and watching the colors cast by the iridescent bead curtain separating the rooms. Louis-Cesare preferred to pace back and forth like a big cat in a cage. We were the only ones in the back at the moment, which wasn’t surprising as the coffeehouse didn’t usually rev up until nightfall. Since it was currently seven a.m. ’Frisco time, there weren’t too many people interested in bad coffee and worse poetry. After tasting the former and reading samples of the latter that the proprietors had scribbled on the walls, I decided to be long gone by nightfall.
“This is the most irresponsible—”
“Would you calm down?” He didn’t seem to be the patient type. “They’ll be here. And quit pacing. You’re making me dizzy.”
“And that could not possibly be the result of the enormous amount of marijuana you have smoked in the past eight hours, or the half bottle of tequila you called breakfast.”
“At least I didn’t snack on the owners.” I’d noticed the length of the handshake he’d given Alan, the taller proprietor with the tongue stud. The older vamps don’t have to use fangs to feed. A touch of skin or, in the case of really powerful ones, just proximity to the victim will do as well. Louis-Cesare had had to endure sun at the airport and in the taxi all the way here, and he’d been hungry. It hadn’t been hard to guess.
“That was well within the guidelines.” He meant that he hadn’t taken enough to be harmful and that the owner was none the wiser. It was the PC way to feed, and he’d managed it without a hitch. That didn’t make me view it as less of a violation.
I lit up the last of Claire’s joints and smiled at him. It was either that or ruin the Hedgehog’s back room trying to take him apart. “Whatever.”
“The point I was endeavoring to make,” he said after a moment, “was that unless your friends—”
“Acquaintances.”
“—are even more irresponsible than I was expecting, they should have called by now. There is a very good chance that they have absconded.”
I shook my head. “No way. Not that they wouldn’t double-cross the Senate or the Circle in a heartbeat, but they made an agreement with me. They know what I’d do if they broke it.” I got up and stretched, feeling my spine snap back into place. “Besides, they don’t know what the assignment is yet. After they do, we may need to watch them.”
Actually, I doubted that. I’d picked José and Kristie as much for their attitudes as their skills; they were the only two I knew crazy enough to think that going after Drac constituted a challenge. It also helped that they had never actually met him. Anyone who had would be a much harder sell.
“Then where are they?” Louis-Cesare was back to pacing again. I glanced at the clock and felt a slight twinge of concern. True, José might be passed out under a table in a dive somewhere, but that wasn’t Kristie’s style. And even if she’d gotten hung up, she’d have phoned. No way would she risk going back into the Circle’s tender care if she could avoid it. Unless something was wrong, she’d be here.
“Maybe they decided to drive and then broke down. José thinks he’s a mechanic and usually rides around in some old clunker he’s trying to fix up.” I didn’t really believe it, but it was vaguely possible.
“And neither have cell phones?” Louis-Cesare demanded.
“They just got out of jail,” I reminded him, but it didn’t ring true to me, either. Kristie had stayed a step ahead of both the Senate and the mages for years, dealing in all kinds of illegal magical items. She wasn’t the type to take chances. No way would she have agreed to cross the desert in one of José’s rattletraps without stopping at a convenience store for a prepaid cell phone first. “And my phone’s on the fritz half the time,” I added, trying to convince myself more than him.
Louis-Cesare looked pointedly at the phone sitting behind the bar. Okay, point taken. But pacing a worn spot in the rug wasn’t going to help.
“You know,” I said, getting to my feet, “I think breakfast sounds like a plan. I saw a bakery down the street when we came in—”
“You are not going alone,” I was informed.
“Suit yourself.” I picked up my big bag o’ toys and slung it over my shoulder. I told Alan we were going for a walk and to tell Kristie we’d be right back, if she showed.
“You want that eyebrow pierced later?” he asked. “It’d look good on you.” What a businessman, always trying to make a sale.
“I’ll think about it,” I assured him. Alan nodded cheerfully and I shook my head. A punk morning person was just wrong.
The bakery had the advantage of a few tables outside with a clear view of the Hedgehog’s front door. I let Louis-Cesare have the seat near the café’s wall, as it was the best shaded, and immediately regretted it. I felt the familiar prickle of nerves between my shoulder blades as soon as I sat dow
n, the awareness of how bare my back was with nothing to cover it. I scooted my chair over until Louis-Cesare and I were practically side by side, and ordered three doughnuts, a croissant, a ham and cheese bagel and a real, honest-to-God latte.
Louis-Cesare watched the load the waiter set before me a few minutes later with slightly widened eyes. “Metabolism,” I said, before he could ask.
He leaned back in his chair as I slathered butter on the bagel. A shaft of sunlight was seeping through a gap in the awning, but he didn’t move to avoid it. Show off.
“Are you really going to let that man prick you?” he finally asked.
I choked on my latte. “Excuse me?”
“With the needle. Comme ça.” He gestured at his forehead.
I laughed in spite of myself. “No. I heal too fast.” He looked a question. “The one and only time I tried earrings, I had to tear them out of my flesh after it grew over them. It took about an hour.” I really didn’t want to know what ripping off half my eyebrow felt like.
“You heal faster than a human, but slower than a vampire, yes?”
I stared at him suspiciously. I hoped he wasn’t asking for future reference. “Depends on the vamp.”
“Then your kind gains in power over the centuries, as we do?”
I didn’t feel like doing Dhampir 101. Especially since the answer in my case was no. “Depends on the dhampir.”
To my surprise, Louis-Cesare took the hint and backed off. “There are other types of jewelry,” he commented, as if that thought had never occurred to me.
“Bracelets and necklaces rattle at inconvenient times and are hazards in a fight,” I told him shortly. I’d found that out the hard way, when a vamp almost succeeded in strangling me with my own choker.
“You do not have to fight every day.”
“I don’t have to eat every day, either, but I get really cranky when I don’t.”
“Comment?”
“Never mind.” I could live without rehashing my physical inconveniences. “Hair color is the only ornamentation both my body and my profession can handle,” I added, to forestall more questions.
