Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 20

Muttonchops left a moment later to arrange for extra blackout curtains. As soon as the door closed behind him, I got up and put the necklace on the desk. There was no way a dhampir was going to be allowed to address the Senate, which didn’t even recognize me as a person. But Mircea was going in there, and he needed more than a speck of wax.

“Plenty of other people had a reason to kill Elyas,” I said simply.

Mircea clicked on the lamp and bent over the desk to get a good look. Then sharp, dark eyes turned up to me. “Where did you get this?”

“Off Elyas’s neck.”

Marlowe started to squawk something, but Mircea held up a hand. “Tell me,” he said quietly. Louis-Cesare moved to the door, making sure that we had a moment of relative privacy.

“Elyas tried to buy the rune before the auction, but was told he’d have to bid for it like everyone else. When Ming-de won, he was furious—”

“A great many people were,” Marlowe said resentfully. “The auction was obviously rigged.”

“Yeah, only Elyas wasn’t going to take that lying down. He went to the club, killed the fey and took it—”

“Raymond saw him?” Mircea asked sharply.

“No, he smelled him. You can ask him if you want details, but there aren’t many. Basically, the fey showed up, Ray left him alone for a few minutes, he returned and the guy was dead. Elyas’s scent was in the air, and the necklace was missing.”

“How lovely,” Christine said breathily, her face alight. She’d come in so quietly that even the vamps hadn’t heard her. I saw Marlowe start.

She didn’t notice, being too busy gazing raptly at the carrier. The cold electric light sparked a fountain of prisms off the intricate surface, bathing her face with rainbows as she leaned closer, seemingly mesmerized. And before anyone could stop her, she’d picked it up.

“Drop it!” Marlowe barked.

She looked up, eyes wide and startled. And the carrier slipped from her fingers, hitting the desk and sending dancing beams across the dead man as it rolled toward the edge. She stared at it. “Je regrette! I did not mean—”

“You foolish girl!” Marlowe looked like he wanted to shake her. Christine transferred her gaze to him, looking part-mortified, part-confused.

“No harm done,” Mircea told her, and caught the heavy disk with a handkerchief.

“No harm done?” Marlowe demanded. “You’ll never get anything off it now!”

The supernatural community didn’t usually check fingerprints, because there are plenty of things that don’t leave any. But a good clairvoyant might be able to get something off the thing, if not too many people had touched it in the meantime. It was why I’d been careful not to handle it.

“That remains to be seen,” Mircea said mildly.

Christine backed into the wall, looking like she wished she could melt into it. She seemed on the verge of tears again. Louis-Cesare came over and led her to a chair. “Ça ne fait rien.”

Marlowe looked disgusted. “Oh, no. Not important at all. Just one less piece of evidence that might have exonerated you!”

“This held Naudiz?” Mircea asked me, wrapping it securely in the square of linen. “You are sure?”

“Originally. Ray saw it when the fey first arrived, but it was empty when I took it off Elyas’s neck. There’s a space in back where the rune should be, but there’s nothing there now.”

He frowned. “But… did Elyas steal an empty carrier, or did he succeed in stealing the rune and was killed for it tonight?”

“If he’d had the rune, he wouldn’t be dead,” I pointed out.

“Not necessarily. I have seen other runes from the same set. If this one functioned similarly, then it had to be cast in order to function. Wearing it alone, particularly when not touching the skin, might not have been enough.”

“If he was fighting for his life, I think he’d have cast it!”

“But was he?” Mircea nodded at the body. “He did not die in a fighting pose and there are no wounds on the body other than the ones that killed him. It appears that he was caught off guard.”

Marlowe nodded. “If he knew his attacker or did not expect to be assaulted when surrounded by his family—”

“They never do,” I muttered.

“—he might well have chosen not to use the stone. It is a talisman with a set amount of power at its disposal. Exhausting it for no purpose would be foolish.”

“Unlike wearing it around his neck while somebody killed him,” I said sarcastically. Louis-Cesare had said that Elyas liked to take risks. It looked like he’d taken one too many.

“Whether the rune was stolen last night or tonight, it gives us something to offer the Senate,” Mircea said. “Anyone at that auction is a suspect—”

“And at least one who wasn’t,” I added reluctantly. I didn’t know how the hell I was supposed to tell them aboutsubrand without landing Claire in the middle of this. But they had to know. The ice-cold prince of the fey was probably the prime suspect.

Mircea had been putting the carrier in his suit pocket, but he paused at my tone. “Dorina?”

I got a reprieve because Muttonchops took that moment to return with the list of party guests, and everyone crowded around the desk. “Was anyone on this list at the auction?” I asked Ray.

“It doesn’t have to have been someone who was invited,” Marlowe pointed out.

Muttonchops shook his head. “On the contrary. We had someone on the door. No one who was not on that list would have been allowed in. Other than Louis-Cesare, of course, who was expected.”

“What level?” Marlowe asked.

“What?”

“What level of master was acting as doorkeeper?”

“We do not typically use a master for such a menial task,” he was told.

“Menial? Is that how you consider your frontline defenses?”

The small amount of cheek showing between Muttonchops’s mustache and sideburns reddened. “This is a home, not a fortress!”

Marlowe looked pointedly at the dead man. “So I see.”

“It could have been anyone at the auction,” Mircea said calmly. “None of them would have had difficulty fogging the mind of even a low-level master.”

“That goes for a lot of other people,” I pointed out.

He shook his head. “I do not think any of the participants would have been eager to discuss the auction. Some of their families doubtless knew, but they were under their direct control. It would have been foolish to tell anyone else and increase the competition.”

And the chance that the fey will hear about it and hack your head off, I thought silently.

“Any one of them could have determined to do as Elyas did,” Mircea mused, “and have gone to the nightclub in search of the fey, either to make a bargain with him or to kill him.”

“Only when they arrived, they found that someone had beaten them to it,” I said. “And they either smelled Elyas on the air or actually saw him leaving. But why not attack him last night? Why wait?”

“Perhaps because the idea of killing a Senate member was more daunting than merely disposing of a fey guard,” Louis-Cesare said.

Marlowe shot him a cynical look. “Or perhaps because he had been invited here tonight and thought the party would be a good cover. If the culprit was on the guest list, he didn’t have to fog any minds to get in!”

Ray still hadn’t said anything, so I poked him. “Who was at the auction?”

He licked his lips, looking between Mircea and Marlowe. “I–I won’t have to testify, will I?”

“Yes,” Mircea told him, holding up the list so he could see it.

“But… but… in front of the Senate?” Ray’s voice dropped to a whisper. He looked terrified.

“I can tell them only hearsay. You were there,” Mircea pointed out.

“Yes, but…”

“And testifying might help your case.”

“My case?”

“The smuggling case against you.”

Ray looked like he’d almost forgotten that trivial detail.

“He also has master problems,” I put in.

Mircea’s lips twisted. “We will see what can be done. Assuming his memory improves.”

“Ming-de, Elyas, Radu, Geminus, and Peter Lutkin,” Ray said quickly.

“Cosmopolitan group,” I commented. “Ming-de from the Chinese court, Elyas from the European Senate, Radu bidding for Mircea, and Geminus—”

“Also North American Senate,” Mircea said, somewhat grimly.

“Oh, yeah. The prick.” He was one of the older senators, rivaling the consul in age, but not in power—or in anything else except ego. He also believed he was God’s gift to women and didn’t know how to take no for an answer. He’d grabbed my ass within thirty seconds of meeting me, and had not taken the resulting knife through the wrist well.

“I don’t know any vampires named Lutkin,” Marlowe said thoughtfully.

“He’s a mage.” Everyone looked at Ray. “Their money spends, too,” he said defensively.

“Lutkin was here tonight,” Louis-Cesare pointed out, tapping a name near the bottom of the list. “And Geminus. But none of the others.”

Marlowe’s expression brightened. “We can blame it on the mage. The others are too prominent or too unreachable in any case.”

“And if he did not do it?”

Marlowe looked at him like he didn’t understand the question.

“There were no silent bidders?” I asked Ray. “Nobody bidding by phone?”

“No. Seller insisted on a binding spell. And that don’t work unless someone’s physically there.”

“He was worried about fraud?” I asked incredulously. “With that group?”

“He was worried period. The guy was freaking paranoid.”

“He probably knew who was chasing him. He didn’t want to risk anyone using a glamourie and impersonating one of the bidders.”

“That’s what I figured.”

I frowned. “So he knew he was being hunted, knew he was in serious jeopardy, yet he still let his guard down enough for someone to…”

There was a sudden silence around the desk. I looked up to find everyone staring at me, a ring of bright, narrowed eyes. “Hunted by whom?” Mircea asked quietly.

There was no point in postponing it. “subrand.”

Louis-Cesare’s head jerked, like he’d been stung. “Comment?”

“And you know this how?” Marlowe asked, his expression darkening.

“He dropped by the house last night.”

“Dropped by?” Mircea asked sharply.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Marlowe glared at me. “Our spies have reported no such escape.”

“Then maybe you should get new ones.”

“I don’t need new ones. You clearly mistook another fey for him.”

“Doubt it,” I said drily.

“You are sure?” Mircea pressed. “You saw him clearly?”

“He was about an inch from my face while he was trying to kill me,” I said sarcastically. “So, yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

“He tried to—” Mircea broke off, his jaw tightening.

“Why did you say nothing of this?” That was Louis-Cesare.

I shrugged. “It didn’t come up.”

“It did not come up?”

“What happened?” Mircea demanded.

“I already told you: he tried to kill me; he failed. The point is that he’s here and he has a definite interest in the rune. His mother was the one who stole it in the first—”

“Stole it from whom?”

That was Marlowe, and if I hadn’t been so tired, I’d have really rubbed it in. The guy thought he knew everything. “The Blarestri royal house.”

“The what?” Marlowe was the only guy I knew who could bellow in an undertone.

I glanced at him impatiently. “Well, where the hell did you think they got it, Marlowe? Or didn’t you and Daddy bother to ask?”

He flushed. “You’re telling me that the rune up for sale was a royal fey relic?”

“Yeah. And they want it back.”

“And how do you come to know this?”

“I’m acting for the family.”

“Another fact you failed to mention before now,” Mircea said pointedly.

I smiled. “Like you failed to mention what you really wanted with Ray?”

“That is hardly the same thing.”

“It is exactly the same thing! You sent me after him under false pretenses.”

“There were no false pretenses.”

“You let me believe he was a smuggler.”

“Which he is.”

“And which had nothing to do with why you wanted him. If we’re going to keep working together, you have to—”

“You do not work with Lord Mircea,” Marlowe informed me. “You work for him. It is not your place to question his commands.”

“Is that how you think, too?” I asked Mircea.

Before he could answer, the door opened, and several vamps walked in like they owned the place. Which one of them did, I realized, as Muttonchops’s head jerked up. “Master!”

He obviously wasn’t talking to Elyas, so that cry could mean only one thing. Elyas’s servants hadn’t been the only ones to feel his passing. His master had done so, too.

“Anthony,” Mircea said, straightening, as Muttonchops almost fell over himself trying to get around the table. “I thought we were meeting in an hour.”

“Yes, I received your message,” the dark- haired vamp said carelessly. He wasn’t tall, maybe five nine, and his features were handsome but not outstanding. His nose looked like it had been broken at some point, and his skin was a little weather-beaten. It meant he wasn’t exerting power to alter his appearance, which was strange, considering how much he had to spare. It felt like it seared my skin, even from this far away.

“Anthony?” I asked Louis- Cesare, who was looking a little ill suddenly.

“My consul.”

Oh. That Anthony.

The vamp circled the desk, taking his time, getting a look at the body. “Oh, don’t mind me,” he said, looking up with a smile. “Continue with what you were doing.”

“We’ve already examined the body,” Mircea told him. “You are, of course, welcome to do so yourself—”

“How kind of you,” Anthony murmured.

“But we will be reporting the findings shortly.”

“Really? To whom?”

“To the Senate.”

“And which Senate would that be, Mircea?” Anthony asked, whiskey eyes gleaming as they looked up from examining the gory throat.

I felt Marlowe tense beside me, but Mircea showed no outward change. “This happened on North American soil.”

“But Elyas belonged to the European Senate.” He smiled. “As does Louis-Cesare.”

“That is under discussion,” Mircea said sharply, which was news to me.

“Yes. But you have not stolen him away from me yet.” The smile didn’t slip, but the tension in the room suddenly ratcheted up about a hundred notches. “Therefore he will be judged by his peers—not his family.”

“And defended by whom?” Mircea demanded.

“Whomever he likes.” Anthony waved over his companion—a young vamp with long, dark hair spilling over the shoulders of a tailored gray suit. “As Elyas’s master, Jérôme will, of course, be prosecuting.”

Not so young, then, I thought, staring at the vamp. I wouldn’t have guessed. Big eyes that matched his suit almost exactly in color, pretty, almost feminine features, delicate white hands—and a power signature no greater than that of the vamp I’d nailed to the bathroom wall at Ray’s. It was hardly even discernible next to the inferno of Anthony’s, like a single candle next to a bonfire.

But if he was prosecuting, he had to be a Senate member. So the signature was a lie. He had to be one of those rare vamps who could hide his true strength. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have mistaken him for a baby, something that would have gotten me killed very fast—if I was lucky.

“And you?” Mircea demanded.

“Oh, didn’t I say?” Anthony’s smile broadened slightly, showing some fang. “I’m the judge.”

Nobody moved; nobody blinked. But the air was starting to feel a little thick in my lungs. I suddenly really, really wanted to be somewhere else.

Luckily, Anthony agreed.

“And now, if you wouldn’t mind, we would appreciate the same recourse to the body you have enjoyed.”

No one had anything to say to that, so we retired to the adjacent sitting room. Or at least I tried to, before I was waylaid by an angry vampire and jerked into the hall. Christine had followed us out, and started to say something, then saw Louis-Cesare’s face and shied back.

“I–I thought I would go pack,” she said quickly, in French.

Louis-Cesare glanced at her, and his expression softened. “Yes, yes, please.” It was gentle enough, but she all but fled down the corridor. Too bad I couldn’t go, too, but I appeared to be trapped between his body and the wall.

“What bug crawled up your ass?” I demanded.

“If you mean, why I am upset? I should think that would be obvious!”

It took me a second, but I got it. “Oh, come on. You’re not still pissed about—you did the same damn thing to me!”

He had the utter gall to look offended. “I did nothing of the sort—”

I stared at him. “And just how do you figure that? You stripped me butt naked, diddled me over a desk and stole my duffel bag. And my clothes!”

Somebody made a choking sound. I glanced up to find the door to the study open, and the old vamp looking scandalized. “Diddled?” Anthony asked, apparently delighted. Mircea closed his eyes.

Louis-Cesare made some indeterminate French sound and dragged me farther down the hall. A bedroom was empty, so he shoved me inside, which was a complete waste of effort. If it wasn’t soundproofed—and I doubted Elyas had wasted an expensive spell on a guest room—the others could hear us perfectly well.

But Louis-Cesare didn’t look much like he cared.

“I was speaking ofsubrand. You knew you were in danger, yet you said nothing.”

“Why should I have? It was none of your business.”

“If someone is attempting to murder you, it is most certainly my business.”

“Why?” He didn’t say anything, which pissed me off. I was tired and starving, and I must have bumped my hurt wrist somewhere, because it throbbed in time to every heartbeat. I was in no mood for games.

“Why is it your business, Louis-Cesare?”

“You know damn well why!”

“No, I don’t know. I don’t know a goddamned thing. Maybe you should try spelling it out for once.”

“And perhaps both of you should try learning some discretion,” Marlowe hissed. He came in and slammed the door behind him. It wouldn’t help with privacy; I think he was just pissed off.

“We would like some time alone,” Louis-Cesare snapped.

“It seems to me you’ve had too much of that already.” Marlowe stared back and forth between the two of us. “I don’t know what’s going on here—and I really do not wish to know. But now is not the time to hand Anthony more ammunition.”

Louis-Cesare didn’t even look at him. “What did he do to you?” he demanded.

“Maybe I should get it on a T-shirt,” I said, crossing my arms. “None of your—”

“You have been favoring your left hand all night. Is that why?” Trust a swordsman to notice.

When I didn’t say anything, he pulled me to him and began running his hands over me—as if he hadn’t done enough of that already.

I was about to knock his hand away when Marlowe did it for me. Louis-Cesare’s usually sunny blue eyes suddenly went chrome—cold, flat and dangerous. “Have a care, Kit.”

“I am not the one who needs to take care. Have you gone mad? She is dhampir!” Marlowe said it in the same tone someone in medieval Europe might have used for leper, which was fair, since that was pretty much the way he’d meant it.

I don’t know what would have happened next, because both men were crackling with energy, and neither was the type to back down. But then Mircea walked through the door. “Your consul wishes a word,” he told Louis-Cesare mildly.

Louis-Cesare cursed under his breath and started to say something, but Mircea held up a hand. “This is bad enough as it is. Provoking the man for no reason would be foolish, do you not think?”

Apparently he did think, because he went, after shooting me a look that said this wasn’t over. He’d barely gotten out the door when Marlowe rounded on me. “What in the hell game are you—”

“Kit. I think we have given Anthony enough amusement tonight, don’t you?” Mircea asked.

“More than! Do you know what this will—”

“Yes. We’ll discuss it in a moment.”

Marlowe sent me a final glare and left. I’d have been right behind him, but Mircea was between me and the exit, and he showed no sign of moving.

“Don’t you think it’s time we talked?” he asked with a smile.