Death's Rival

CHAPTER SEVEN I Whirled and Caught the Naked Man

She was using a silver-tipped wood stake, which was much longer than one of mine, and she wasn’t aiming at the heart. She was stabbing him in the right side of his chest. He was screaming and bleeding, his chest already punctured several times. I raced up and caught her wrist, ripping the stake out of her hand. Innara whirled on me, her short blond hair flying. Before I could react, her fangs were at my throat.

And then she was ten feet away, screaming in pain, dancing like a burned child. Her lips were blistering, swelling as I watched. I touched my silver mesh necklace. I’d never seen it work quite so well on a vamp. Usually they had to bite me, or attempt to, and their tongues might sting a bit before they jerked away. But this—

A blur I halfway saw and totally felt tackled me from the side; her anamchara. My spine formed a sharp C shape and slapped me against the earth with a whiplash speed. I might have cursed again had I any breath. Instinct made me grab her hands, forcing her back and off me. I caught a breath and it hurt when my ribs moved. Another broken rib. Great. I held Jena off; her lips were blistered too, and she hadn’t touched my necklace. Anamchara are mind linked, meaning that they know the other’s thoughts and feelings, and apparently, if they are linked closely enough, their bodies react to the other’s pain. Now I had both of them ticked off. Then I caught a whiff of the blood. Leo’s blood.

I whipped my head to the vamp Innara had been torturing, and threw Jena from me. She let me, landing on her feet and backing away, half stumbling, arms out to the side like a wounded bird.

Derek and El Diablo were holding the vamp up, Derek with the vamp’s hair in his fist, supporting his head. Diablo was still smiling, and this time the smile was calculated and cold. I was still holding Innara’s stake, and I twirled it like a marching band baton as I strode to the vamp. I didn’t even look at Derek. I bent over the vamp and breathed in his scent over tongue and mouth with a soft scree of sound. He hissed at me through two-inch fangs. Which I ignored. I leaned so close I could feel the grave-cold of his chest on my face as I sniffed. Yes. Leo’s blood mixed with the blood of this vamp. I moved close to his face and caught the odor of Leo’s blood on his mouth. I placed the tip of the stake against his heart and looked at Derek. “Do we know where Leo is?”

Derek’s dark eyes were full of disdain, the disdain of the human for the nonhuman. Me. I smiled at his expression, showing my teeth, letting him know I had seen the scorn. He cocked his head in a “We’ll have to fight one day” expression. I chuckled. We understood each other. “No,” he said. “Fanghead boss got to Katie’s front door, but was intercepted in the street. Three of my boys are injured. Leo’s missing.”

Leo’s missing. On my watch. I looked at the vamp and let my teeth show in what was not a smile. “You know, doncha, Corpse? You know where Leo is, right? And we’re going to find out. Take him to Katie’s. Him and any other vamp still alive. Make sure they talk. I want to know everything.”

“Torture seldom provides accurate intel,” Derek said.

“True. But if Corpse talks, I’ll make sure he lives and is adopted into a clan where he has a chance of moving up in the hierarchy. If he doesn’t, I’ll give him to Innara and Jena for dessert.”

The vamp spat at me. I moved fast enough that he missed. Derek didn’t like the speed, but I was getting tired of hiding what I was, feeling ashamed of what I was. I wasn’t fully human, never had been. Or maybe was both fully human and fully other. Whatever.

With a whoosh of air, the scene in front of me blurred in the moonlight. Corpse was gone, ripped out of Derek’s grip. I blinked and tried to focus, seeing Grégoire and Corpse rolling on the ground, vamp-speed making it impossible to tell their limbs apart. Grégoire’s blond head was my only clue who was who. He was latched on the stranger vamp’s throat. I leaned in and grabbed a handful of Grégoire’s blond hair and yanked, pulling him off Corpse and to his feet. Grégoire was maybe a hundred pounds and short, having been changed at age fifteen by a vamp with a predilection for young boys. Pretty, young boys, but he wasn’t pretty now. Grégoire was blood-smeared and vicious, wounded and smelling of the dead. He growled at me and struck out with fangs and claws. Derek and one of his men grabbed Grégoire’s arms. Four others subdued Corpse. I shook Grégoire. “He’s for info on where Leo is. He’s not for killing.”

“He drank from my master. I smell Leo on his mouth.”

“Yeah, I know. Which is why we want him alive until he tells us what he knows, and if he tells us, he gets to live.”

“I will hound him until the day of his true-death. I will challenge him in a blood-duel and chase him—”

Rage roared up in me. “Later!” I screamed. The night fell silent. Fury, like steam, boiled in my blood. I was breathing heavily. So were the other humans. But the vamps had stopped speaking, stopped breathing, and if their hearts ever beat, they went silent too. Like marble statues, they stood or kneeled or sat in the field of hay, immobile as stone. “You can sort it all out later according to the Vampira Carta and Leo’s wishes. For now, I want to know what he knows, and I’m not picky how that’s done.” If he’d been human, I’d have been way picky, a small quiet part of me whispered, which was a double standard I’d look at later. Someday. Maybe.

“If Leo has been kidnapped,” Grégoire said, “he will not survive until the new moon. The swine who calls himself a master Mithran, yet violates the Vampira Carta, will kill him.”

“Swine?” Corpse spat, again. It seemed to be a personal tic, an unhygienic version of a sneer. “Your master’s Enforcer killed my master’s Enforcer without any good reason.” He was speaking in a strong country accent, which still sounded weird coming from a vamp’s mouth. “The Carta and its protocols say she cain’t do that.”

“Ramondo Pitri?” Derek asked.

Corpse stared at me, ignoring Derek, his body posture doing the whole “I’ll never talk, no matter what you do to me” thing, all without him saying a word.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Derek said softly. “I have all the intel on ol’ Ramondo’s made-man past on the streets of New York. So gut this piece of crap. We don’t need him.” Which was just the opposite of what Derek had said earlier. I took that to mean that we were back to playing good cop, bad cop, but with versatile roles.

“No. We’ll give him an opportunity to talk,” I said. “Who knows? His boss might want him alive and come to save him, which would give us the chance to take him. We need a place to hold you, Corpse.” I looked at Grégoire. “And we need him and any of the others who are still breathing—even it’s only when they chat over dinner—alive. Or undead. Whatever.” My voice wandered to a halt as the fury in my blood drained away. Exhaustion tugged at me, a heavy weight.

“I have silver cages,” Grégoire said. “Two of them.” He smiled, and it was an eerie expression on the boyish, beautiful face. Terrifying. It made me not want to know what had been done to him when he was newly sane after being turned.

“Bring everyone still alive and your cages to Katie’s,” I said softly. “We’ll talk with them there.” I knew what I was saying. What I was condoning. I shivered that I could consider the torture of anyone, even a vampire. I wasn’t sure what I was becoming, but was sure I didn’t like me much.

I entered Katie’s Ladies, one of the oldest still-operating whorehouses in New Orleans, through the front door. I was one of the last to arrive from Leo’s and was greeted by Troll, a tall, bald, burly blood-servant with a voice like a hill of gravel being massaged by a shovel. His real name was Tom, but I’d called him Troll the first time I met him and it had stuck. “Jane. You’re late to the party.” His eyes and tone said he didn’t approve of the festivities, or maybe just the guests, but because he was a blood-servant, his opinion wouldn’t have been sought.

“Yeah. I had to deal with cops and fire trucks before I could get away from Leo’s.”

He leaned to me and sniffed. Blood-servants’ sense of smell was better than that of humans, and his crinkled his nose. “You stink. How’s the clan home?”

I smiled at the insult, but it fell off my face fast. “Gone.”

Troll grunted and there was remorse in the tone. “I liked that old house. What about people?”

“We lost two of Leo’s vamps, both from Clan Bouvier, Louise D’Argent and Peter Schansky. I didn’t know either one, but from their injuries, they were ambushed, immobilized, drained, and then cut to pieces.” I looked away. It had been bad—a slaughter. Whoever had killed them had wanted to leave a message, and it had been up to me to take their heads so that they didn’t rise as a revenant at sunset. That didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was bad. “We also lost two humans—their blood-servants. I had to deal with informing their clan masters.”

“Sorry, Jane.” Troll patted my shoulder. It should have felt awkward, but it didn’t.

“Any word on Leo’s location?” I asked.

He shook his head. “They’re in the parlor. It isn’t pretty,” he warned.

“Yeah. Big surprise.” I squared my shoulders and went on through the house, Troll following me. A thick Oriental rug muffled our footsteps in the entry, and I automatically checked out the security upgrades I had recommended, the cameras, sensors, and monitors tied into Katie’s security console hidden behind the doors of a seven-foot-tall, black-lacquered chest with gold-leaf dragons capering across its doors. I might be heartsick, but I still had a job to do.

The house was stylish and elegant and only slightly overdone, recently decorated in hundreds of shades of gold from palest yellow to darkest golden brown, with paintings and statues and objets d’art everywhere, each of them probably worth more than I make in a year. The Christian children’s schoolgirl inside me was always torn between cringing and staring when I came inside. “Where are the girls?”

“Katie canceled the clients for the night,” Troll said, “and sent the girls to a hotel on St. Charles Avenue.”

I lifted a hand to indicate I heard and took the twisty hallways the back way to the parlor, the place where the girls met with the customers before taking them upstairs for kinky games, which might include the transfer of blood, depending on whether the john was human or vamp. I passed the open doorway of Katie’s office and was struck silent and still by the contents of the small room. All the stuff that usually lay on the leather surface of the massive, dark wood desk had been shoved to the floor, and two people lay on the cleared top—Bruiser and a black-skinned woman. Both were mostly naked, but it wasn’t sex, not in any way I could ever think about sex, even with the nudity. It was something else entirely.

Bruiser lay on his back, spread-eagle, his skin death-pale and marbled blue, the veins appearing like waterways on a map. He was wearing socks. That’s all. Socks. He wasn’t breathing. The black vamp half sitting, half-curled on top of his hips was wearing a wildly patterned, full-circle skirt in shades of indigo, with a matching turban-thingy on her head. No shirt. Perky boobs with dark aureoles brushed Bruiser’s unmoving chest. Bethany Salazar y Medina, one of the vamp priestesses, had slit her wrists and they lay over his mouth, her blood dripping into him. Her fangs were buried in his throat. She was deep in a healing.

All by itself, my back hunched up and my eyes filled with tears. Grief, black and viscous as tar, cold as glacier ice, flowed through me. Over the pain rode a wave of lesser emotion; a spear of jealousy lanced through me, jealousy not my own, but my cat’s. Deep inside, Beast whispered, Mine! And wanted to growl. As soundless as possible, I moved on down the hallway, boots in the deep butter-colored carpet, though, if a herd of moose had charged through the house, I doubted the priestess would have known it. And Bruiser, well, he was dead.

I lifted a hand to Deon in the kitchen; the three-star chef from one of the Caribbean islands was loading a tray with sushi, and he waved back. There was sushi rice on his fingers, and despite my warring grief and jealousy, it made my mouth water. I wasn’t sure when I’d last eaten a real meal. It might be the steak in the Lear. Two days ago? My stomach rumbled. I was ashamed that I could feel hunger when Bruiser was in such danger.

In the shadows of the servant’s entrance to the parlor, I stood silently and studied the core of Leo’s gathered scions and blood-servants. There were five vamps in the room, five blood-servants, and seven humans in night camo. I knew them all. And one of them might be a traitor. I just had to figure out which one. When I got the chance. Currently, my money was on Sneak Cheek, who had pummeled a vamp after the battle, but what did I know? Maybe the vamp had tried to coerce a drink, or worse, mesmerize dinner for himself, and the marine had refused. Aggressively. I had done the same thing myself a time or two. Judgment without sufficient data is stupid, and I was withholding mine.

The parlor was too fancy to call a living room, and too bawdy to call a gathering room. Parlor fit, from the upholstery in shades of gold silk to the bigger-than-life artwork of a nude Katie herself, to the polar bear rug on the Italian marble floor. A real skin, according to Beast, who had wanted to hunt one ever since she first got a sniff of the bear’s white fur and a look at his huge white teeth. Polar bears are predators and prey, taking down seals for food and becoming food for killer whales and sharks. I didn’t know where Katie’s decorator had gotten the hide, but it wasn’t old. It still smelled faintly of modern taxidermy chemicals and oils. It was missing a foot as if a bigger predator had taken off a hunk and the bear had died.

The blood-servants and humans had pushed the furniture against the walls, and two cube-shaped, six-foot, tarnished silver cages took up the floor space, gleaming blackly in the light of a chandelier. Beast reared up and I fell back a step as terror slammed through me, intense and hot as a heated blade. Danger, she thought. Run! And I had an instant vision of steel mesh and a room beyond, gray and dim with night. Cage! Run! Fear spiraled through me, slamming my heart into my ribs. I could feel the cage beneath my paws, metal cold and unyielding. Feel the place in my hip, sore, where white-men-with-guns had shot me. Made me go to sleep. RUN!

I caught the doorway with both hands, forcing myself up from my Beast-mind, shoving away the memory, one we had never shared, tamping down the fear-stink, knowing that only an idiot entered a roomful of angry, tired, hungry vamps smelling like terror—like dinner. Idiots who wanted to come out on a slab, drained. I held my breath, forcing it out slowly, slowly. Took another. Beast retreated far into the dark, watching, claws working in and out, piercing my mind with pain. Big-cats purr when they are happy and they mutter a low growl when they are not happy. Beast was growling with each of my breaths, hyperalert, watchful. Worried.

The vamps would have heard the soft growl, except that the vamp in the cage closest started screaming. Derek was prodding the half-naked vamp with a long stick. On the end was a silver cross, and where the cross touched his skin, the vamp was burning. Smoke swirled up, contaminating the air like the stench of rotten meat on a hot grill. The prisoner carried the vamp disease, and it was heavy on the air with a ripe, sick stench.

The captive leaned as far from the cross stick as he could, his back only millimeters from the silver mesh; when he overbalanced, he fell into the cage walls, skin sizzling. His wail pierced the air, making my eardrums vibrate. The scream was nearly as earsplitting as a vamp’s death wail. The vamp in the other cage was whimpering, his black pupils so wide they almost obscured the scarlet sclera. It was Corpse, who showed his own silver burns, and he knew he was next. I smelled scorched flesh and vamp blood, and at Derek’s feet were vials of blood, labeled, dated, and timed. Someone had drawn the two vamps’ blood for testing. I doubted it had been done with their approval or cooperation.

Angel Tit, Martini, and Chi-Chi, three of Derek’s Vodka Boys, were watching the torture, faces in battle mode, unyielding and closed. Leo’s vamps were standing apart from one another, vamped out as well, staring, mesmerized by the caged vamps’ pain and fear. I could smell their arousal and bloodlust, hunting instincts quickened, even for the pain and blood of one of their own. The blood-servants were busy with handheld electronic devices, or looked bored, or stared at the portrait of Katie with rather more interest than the painting warranted, except that it was not in the line of sight of the cruelty.

“Your master’s name,” Derek said, his voice holding no inflection, no clue to his feelings. If I hadn’t been able to smell his anger and self-loathing, I’d never have known how he felt about the job he was doing. “Your master’s name.” When the vamp shook his head and whimpered, Derek jabbed him again. The smoke was reddish, as if suffused with aspirated blood.

“Where is the master of New Orleans? Where is Leo Pellissier?”

The vamp shook his head violently. “I don’t know. I saw him taken away. I don’t know where. I don’t know!” he screamed, when Derek touched him with the cross again.

“Ramondo Pitri,” Derek said, changing the subject of the interrogation, pulling the cross away. A layer of skin clung to it, crinkled with heat.

“The Enforcer,” the vamp shouted. “Pitri was my master’s Enforcer.” As if the admission had released a dam, he took a gasping breath, his ribs shivering oddly as they expanded, not a human breath at all, ribs moving snakelike. He kept speaking, the words gushing. “He was sent to reconnoiter and research Pellissier’s Enforcer, in preparation to initiate a legal blood-challenge to her as laid out in the Vampira Carta.”

I blinked. Stepped into the room. Leo’s scions turned as one to me, staring, still as death, still as vamps. A laugh wanted to titter up in my throat. I’d killed Ramondo Pitri. I’d killed a man and started a vamp war.

“Ramondo was trying to discover information,” he continued, “to find out why Jane Yellowrock was so special.”

“Shut up, Kleto. Shut up!” the other vamp whimpered. That gave us one name and one nickname, Kleto and Corpse. We were making progress.

Kleto ignored him. “He wanted to learn how Leo’s Enforcer made her way up the ranks so quickly, before he challenged the stranger to draw first blood.”

Katie stepped toward me, her blond hair falling forward in a wave that swished like silk as it moved. Her interest pricked my predatory and territorial instincts; I almost reached for a blade but stopped myself before I could complete the move, which would have been taken as the gravest insult. A smile answered my abortive attempt, and it was like being studied by a hungry predator, daring me to try and take her down. It all happened inside of three heartbeats, banging against my ribs.

And the caged bird kept singing, as if having something he could say were a lifeline. “He was supposed to issue a Blood Challenge to Yellowrock according to the Carta, but he was worried that she was some kind of supernat, a were or something, so he went to her hotel room.”

“A blood-challenge, Enforcer to Enforcer, for first blood,” Katie said, her eyes holding me, unblinking, black and bloody, “is one acceptable first step to one master issuing a Blood Challenge to another—mortal combat for his position.”

“But Leo’s Enforcer killed him. Without provocation.”

I didn’t think shooting an armed man in my hotel room, one carrying multiple weapons, including the gun he had drawn—the gun with an illegal suppressor—was exactly without provocation, but I kept my mouth shut. Or Katie stared me down, which was not something I was willing to consider. Once again, flying by the seat of my pants and without enough info to do my job had caused problems—this time, big problems—and had resulted in a ticked-off, vamped-out vampire holding me within her sights. I could feel her compulsion wrap around me like electric razor wire, cutting and burning.

She took a breath, and I forced myself not to take one with her. Katie tilted her head to the side, that snakelike movement they do when they forget to act human. “You killed an Enforcer before he could issue challenge to you. This is not allowed under our law. You are permitted to take a life only in self-defense, official challenge, or mortal combat. As an Enforcer without a blood-bond, you are a danger to us all.”

“Leo got a copy of the police reports. It was good enough for him.”

Her shoulders lifted and her fingers opened out, claws dropping down and spreading. Her fangs clicked down, not instinct, but a carefully controlled action, something she did with purpose, a control only the very old ones, and very powerful ones, have. “Leo is not here,” she said. “He has been taken by an enemy. For now, perhaps forever, I am master.” Which made little lizards rush up and down my spine on cold, sticky feet. “This war appears to be, technically, legally, your fault. Now the rival Mithran may do anything he wants.”

“Not Jane’s fault,” a voice croaked behind me.

I whirled and caught the naked man before he hit the floor. “Bruiser,” I whispered.

His skin felt colder than a cadaver’s. He was sweat-slicked and ashy and he stank like a three-day-old grave. But he took a breath and I felt his heart against my chest, beating like a wounded kitten’s, fast and weak. Not concerned about what I was giving away by a show of strength, I lifted him up and over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, steadying his bare lower back and his thighs, his arms dangling over my shoulder; Bruiser was too big to cart any other way without dragging his feet or banging his head on the floor. I carried him back down the twisty hallway into the office and set him down gently on the leather sofa, found a throw, and wrapped it around him. It was teal cashmere with aqua silk tassels and fringe, the soft textures sharp as nails on my fingers, the colors overbright, almost harsh. Shock. I was in shock.

The priestess was nowhere in sight, but Katie knelt at his side and stroked his temples, her claws scraping his skin. She focused on him as if she could read his state of being through his skin. And maybe she could. What did I know? “George,” she murmured. “You will live. And still mostly human. Do not despair. Do not despair.”

Mostly human? What did that mean?