Mercy Blade

CHAPTER 17 You Belong to Me

Beast roared up through me. My breath came hot. My heart thumped a hard, painful beat. Slammed adrenaline into me. I pushed off the floor. Leaped. Up, over the table edge. Midair, I slid my hands over the weapons and closed my grips. Time slid sideways and stuttered. I landed on the table, crouched. Leaped again. Slid the safety off in midair. Aimed. Gee was gone.

I landed, knees absorbing the energy of the jump. Whirled. To find Gee sitting in my chair, his sword resting across the table. “Impressive,” he said. “Inhuman.” He breathed deeply and smiled, holding my gaze. “You smell wonderful. Like animal, but not like were. You smell like . . . like the old tales of Lolandes. She too smelled of predator and the hunt.”

I swallowed down my fight-or-flight response, forced my breathing to slow. Stood straight. But I didn’t put the weapons away. Lolandes? A shape-shifter, like me? “Pot, Kettle.”

“Too true. I should like to spar with you. With naked blades,” he added almost as an afterthought. “But I have no time. What do you make of my photographs?” he indicated the pages. “Good, yes?”

Spar? With naked blades? No freaking way. “If they’re not manufactured,” I said.

“And why would I do such a thing?” Gee looked honestly curious, as if he wanted to hear my thought processes and conclusions. When I didn’t answer, he sat back in my chair, crossed his arms over his chest in a posture that left him looking harmless and small, and waited.

Annoyed, I said, “I don’t know. But it’s mighty convenient for the wolves to come back to New Orleans just now. Convenient that you just happen to be here at the same time. It’s also convenient that you have photographs and put them together for me. Call me paranoid, but I stopped believing in true coincidence a long time ago.”

“Mercy Blades are fine thieves. I am a fine Mercy Blade.” He cocked his head, the motion weirdly birdlike. “There was no Mercy Blade after I left.”

I frowned at his right angle topic turn. “Repetition is boring.”

“Every Master of the City has a Mercy Blade to do what he cannot. There is a reason for us. A”—he seemed to think a moment, staring up at the ceiling—“a symbiotic relationship. They need us, we need them.”

Us. As if he meant more than it might appear. I kept my face impassive, slightly bored. “You kill their children for them. I got that.”

“We take the blood and the life force of the rogues for our sustenance. In turn, our blood keeps the Mithrans sane through dolore after a scion dies. It is our blood that mends their minds and bodies when they are sent to earth for healing. The relationship was parleyed by the Sons of Darkness, when they realized their scions were ravening and could not be made sane. You have seen Katherine. She is an example of what happens when Mercy Blades are not part of a healing gather.”

I had seen Katie put to earth to heal from a mortal wound, her body in a coffin filled with vamp blood offered by almost every member of the New Orleans vampires—a healing gather. And I had seen her after, loony tunes, raving, nutso. She had drunk from the dead were-cat, Safia. Not normal or healthy vamp behavior. She had attacked Leo. Not smart vamp behavior. I dipped my chin to show I was listening.

“I have visited little Katherine. A single sip of our blood gives assurance of sanity and good health, and one sip can last them decades. The weakest of us can provide emotional well-being for several clans; the strongest of us for an entire region of Mithrans.” He said it with pride, and I knew where he fit in. Gee was strong enough to satisfy bunches of vamps.

“Besides a good meal when you kill the rogues, what do you get out of the relationship?”

“Being in their presence allows us to easily open a passageway from this world into our own. They enrich us. They fulfill us. They bring us joy.”

That was what I’d been waiting to hear. All Mercy Blades were . . . whatever Gee was. Not human. Not vamp. They were other. “How many of you are there?”

“Four in this hemisphere at this time.” He closed his mouth firmly, and I knew that was all I’d get about his kind.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Gee took a slow breath and closed his eyes as if to keep me from seeing what was in them, but his scent increased, the jasmine growing stronger. He opened his eyes and watched me as he spoke. “George Dumas did not kill Safia.”

That was what I had been thinking too. Bruiser had been set up.

“I believe that the were-cat’s clandestine lover witnessed her murder, when she allowed him into Leo’s private office in the council chamber, through the outer wall.”

My heart stuttered. He meant that Rick had seen her killed. I didn’t react, though my heart squeezed down painfully on the probability.

“If I am correct, then he saw her die, and escaped from the killer by great luck. If I am right, then he would know why she was killed. He would know who used the gun and who tore through her throat. He and he alone would know.”

I answered, my voice calm and reasoned. “It’s a possibility. But the lov—the guy is missing at the moment.”

Gee’s eyes stared into mine. I wondered what he saw in the instant before he leaned close and breathed in my scent. His lips were open, his tongue touching the roof of his mouth. I froze, holding still. His tongue was pointed like a hawk’s, deep red in color. Not human. “You are goddess born,” he whispered. “Ask one of the old ones what this means.” Without another word, he left the house, the door opening and closing behind him as it hadn’t when he entered. The ward, which shouldn’t have admitted him in the first place, didn’t buzz.

I closed my eyes with the sudden release of tension. And with pain. Rick had been sleeping with Safia, according to Gee, who had no obvious reason to lie to me. I looked at the photos Gee had provided and wondered what else I’d need to bring this case to a close. Finding the guilty parties was worth what I was spending minute-by-minute for Reach to find Rick—who knew more than anyone alive what had happened in Leo’s office.

I stared down at the photos as I dialed Bruiser’s cell. When he answered, I asked, “Of the cold case files, how many of the victims were Leo’s enemies?”

“All of them. Hello, Jane. How are you today?”

I didn’t answer his pleasantry. “Had they been his enemies for a long time?”

“Likely. The humans were all blood-slaves of his uncle Amaury, and they became Leo’s enemies after his uncle’s demise. The Mithrans were Amaury’s scions as well.”

“So anyone who had been part of the clan back before 1915 would know who had needed to be killed to make it look like Leo was cleaning house. That’s a lot of blood-servants, -slaves, and vamps.”

“Yes.” His voice deepened. “Have lunch with me.”

“No.” I clicked off the phone, but not before I heard him laugh.

I couldn’t do anything for Rick, and nothing else came to mind, so I made a call to the Pellissier clan home to set the stage, then dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, packed a small bag, and left the house. I was about to play a hunch, go with my gut, and unlike in TV-land, guts were notoriously unreliable. But . . . someone was trying to prove that Bruiser had been Leo’s hired gun. Which he had been. And someone was trying to prove Leo was guilty of murder. Which surely he was. Bloodsucking fangheads didn’t live centuries without killing somebody. I didn’t mind if the guilty went to jail for crimes they committed, but I did mind that someone might be planting and manipulating evidence to force the issue.

Tyler was the only player in the game who had tried to tick me off. Tyler was trying to take Bruiser’s position, which gave him motive to help whoever was trying to frame the big guy. Or at least turn a blind eye. Tyler lived in the clan home, with access to info and all the older vamps and vamp-blood-enhanced humans. I had a feeling that Tyler could tell me something. Or his belongings could.

Leo’s house stood at the end of a well-paved but little-used road, no other houses within sight, and farm and fallow land lining the road for miles. It was on a bend of the Mississippi River, the levee visible in the distance in the daylight, a tug boat hooting, sounding lonely. The clan home was built on high ground, the artificial hillock rounded and smooth, some twenty feet above sea level, higher than the levees. Curlinglimbed live oaks arched over the long drive, standing like sentinels on the rising ground.

The white-painted, two-story brick house was a mixed architectural style, half plantation home, half something vaguely European, with dormers in the tall slate roof and gables at each corner, and with turret rooms on the second floor.

Porches wrapped around both stories, interrupted by and incorporating the turrets. It was originally built in the nineteenth century, and to me had always screamed construction by slave labor. Slave labor currently kept Leo’s clan home painted and pristine, but by willing blood-slaves, not by humans bought and transported wearing chains.

Slinging the strap of the bag I had packed around my shoulders, I climbed the front stairs and knocked on the door. The woman who opened it was pretty, wearing a conservative, gray housemaid’s dress and apron. She smiled at me with recognition, and her eyes twinkled; she had once served me breakfast on the house porch. A lot of breakfast. I handed her my card anyway, and said, “Nettie, I called ahead and spoke with the . . . butler, I guess? I need access to Tyler Sullivan’s rooms. And any of Magnolia Sweets’ belongings she left behind.”

“Miss Yellowrock, Grayson told me that the vampire hunter was due. Come in.” She opened the door wider and stepped back. “Grayson told me to assist you in any way I can. Mr. Sullivan is still not here, and is not expected back until nightfall.”

My phone call had assured me that Tyler did indeed have a room on the estate, and had paved the way for me to root around in other people’s stuff. Sometimes my job was just too cool.

Inside, the AC was turned up to max and the house was freezing. The sweat on my skin chilled fast and goose bumps rose, but I had learned early on that most New Orleans homes, businesses, and offices were kept icy, as much to lower the humidity as the temperature.

The foyer was as big as my living room, floored in white marble with a black, white, gray, and maroon marble mosaic heraldic emblem in front of the door, depicting a griffin with drops of blood spraying from his claws, a battle-axe, shield, and banner. A stone fountain splashed near the crest, and a round table stood in the center of the foyer with a huge aromatic bouquet in its center.

There were two sets of stairs, one on each side of the foyer, curving up and around to a small space at the top, like a stage, with another hallway extending back. I wondered if they had gotten all the blood out of the carpet where Immanuel and two witches died, but it was only a passing thought. I wasn’t interested in the suites of the house’s occupants. I was more interested in the rooms of the blood-servants. The maid led me through the foyer, down to a formal reception room beneath the upper floor. The furniture was done in shades of charcoal, gray, and soft whites with color in the paintings lining the walls and the pillows on the couches. Rich rugs were scattered all over the marble floors, looking freshly vacuumed.

She led me through a connecting doorway, past the two-storied library, and to a wing of the house not visible from the front. It was a single, beige-painted hallway with doors to either side, bland and boring, and vaguely like a hotel corridor. The maid stopped in front of one, pulled a batch of keys on a retractable cord, and unlocked the door.

I said, “This is not to be discussed with Tyler.”

Nettie pursed her lips and lifted her nose in disapproval. “No ma’am. Rest assured, Mr. Sullivan and I do not see eye to eye on anything, including the way that women in this house are to be treated,” she said. “With respect, I hope you find something to fry his . . . his behind.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

“In that case, be sure to look into his musical preferences.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Note to self: Never tick off the help. Inside, it was colder than the rest of the house, the air conditioner turned down to freezing, I was sure. I closed the door and tugged on a pair of nitrile gloves. I went through the closet, which was neat, almost OC in its order, clothing and shoes lined up by color and season. Expensive European-style suits in black, gray, and charcoal, dress shirts in matching shades and starched white, a few casual button-down shirts, workout clothes, two tuxedoes, and jeans all were on hangers. Nothing was in any of the pockets or hidden in the hems. He had a shoe fetish as bad as Molly’s younger sisters. I counted fifteen pairs of boots as I checked the shaft of each for hidden contraband, three pairs of running shoes, two pairs of sandals, well-worn hiking boots, four pairs of dress shoes, three pairs of loafers, and three sets of slippers.

Why did anyone need so many shoes? He couldn’t wear but one pair at a time anyway. Personally, I owned three pairs of boots, my dancing shoes, running shoes, three pairs of sandals, and flip-flops, half bought here in the city.

T-shirts were neatly stacked on shelves, his tighty whities were actually all dove gray, as were his socks and under-shirts. There were several hats on the shelf above the hanging clothes, and a portable gun case that contained three handguns, nothing older than twenty years, and nothing that would fire .385 rounds, like the ones that killed the cold case corpses and Safia. I returned everything to its proper place, glad that the room was dust free. It was much harder to rifle a dusty place and not leave evidence behind.

In the shelving unit were novels in French and German, very few in English, and none familiar to me. One shelf held gun manuals and books on paramilitary and police procedures. Two on forensic practices were interesting, but why would he need them? A drop-down desk was dropped flat against the shelving unit, a laptop to one side. I turned it on and found it was password protected. Tyler wasn’t dumb. I turned it back off and hoped he couldn’t tell it had been touched. I’m not a computer whiz and today’s units could do stuff that seemed nearly impossible.

A big-screen TV and sound system faced the bed. I turned on the sound and heard a left-wing radio personality who sounded as if he threw spittle with each word. I touched the remote once and Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic tones reverberated in the room. I returned it to the leftie politico and shut it off. Tyler was a well-rounded political junkie.

An MP3 player was beside the TV, and I set the earpieces in my ears and hit play. After a minute of rifling through his playlist, I turned it off. His musical preferences, the maid had said. The guy liked German and French stuff, but there was nothing incriminating there.

The bed had military-precise sheets, nothing under the mattress or the pillows. Both bedside tables were vacant, no photographs, no little plate with change and gum wrappers, only the remote device, a landline phone, a pad, and two pens lined up perfectly. Nothing was written on the pad, and I couldn’t tell that it had ever been used. A sitting area with two comfy-looking upholstered chairs and a small round table were in front of the windows.

I checked the bathroom. Dull, dull, dull, our boy was dull. But sexually active, if the half-empty packet of condoms indicated correctly.

I stood in the bathroom doorway and surveyed the room, looking for anything out of place. A guitar case was propped in the corner, half hidden behind a chair. I knelt and checked its position so I could put it back perfectly, pulled it to the floor and opened the case. Inside was a guitar. Big surprise. But there were two storage areas with small tops, maybe to be used for picks and extra strings. Inside one was a smudged, sealed baggie filled with brass shell casings. “Bingo,” I whispered. In the other compartment was an old but well kept Smith and Wesson 9 mil semiautomatic weapon, which I bet was loaded with .385 ammo. “Got you, you little twerp.” I was relatively certain that this was the evidence the cops were using in their investigation against Bruiser in the cold case murders. The cops could find motive, if they searched hard enough, but I had none, except for Tyler to become prime. Maybe that was enough for an upwardly mobile blood-servant.

I felt a compulsive urge to take the gun and the shells: If Tyler learned I’d searched his room, he would move the evidence. If he wanted to move up the case against Bruiser, he had plenty of evidence right here to do so. And, I just plain ol’ wanted to be in charge of it all. But that would destroy any case that human law enforcement might make against him. The only other recourse was to turn him over to Leo. Who would likely kill him, probably before I could put it all together, sniff out the person behind it all. Vamp justice was swift and merciless. And the vamp behind it all? Tyler drank from Alejandro. Alejandro had been with Leo for over a hundred years, which predated the vamp war of 1915. Could it be that simple?

Without touching anything, I sniffed the gun; it had been cleaned recently. Kneeling on the floor, indecisive, I chickened out about taking anything. I unslung the small bag I’d packed and took pictures of the casings, the gun, the guitar case, the room. Using my cell phone, I e-mailed them to myself and to Jodi with the texted caption, “Tyler Sullivan’s room at Leo’s. Used to frame GD. Fingerprints on baggie.”

After I replaced everything and closed the guitar case, I set it back exactly where I had found it and repacked my bag. I stood and removed my gloves, tucked them into a pocket and looked around the room one last time. Everything looked unchanged, as if I had never been here. I never wore scent, so even the sensitive nose of a blood-servant shouldn’t be able to detect my presence. I hoped.

I stepped from the room into the hallway where Nettie was waiting, pretending to dust, and her eyes flew to my hands as I approached. “I didn’t take anything,” I said. “But I have a few questions. One: Where did Tyler come from?”

“From France, with Immanuel’s fiancée, Amitee. He was head of security for the Rochefort clan.”

That stopped me. Rochefort clan. I had seen that name recently. Amitee Marchand had been a blood-servant to the Rochefort clan in the south of France before catching the eye of Immanuel Pellissier. She was also a vamp who had been passing notes at the big vamp-were soirée, something that looked a lot like high school pranks—except when high jinks involved high-level predators, it stopped being cute. It might have nothing to do with the death of Safia or the disappearance of Rick. But I didn’t like it.

“Two. The cops will want to see Tyler’s musical preferences too.” Her face fell. “You be up front with them about how you found the hidden gun and the casings. If you touched anything, you tell them. Don’t hold anything back, including me being here today. Okay?” She nodded, but I could see that something still bothered her. “Blame it on me if Leo gets his panties in a wad about anything.”

Her laugh was involuntary and musical. She looked down quickly to keep me from seeing her expression, but I got a glimpse. Nettie had a crush on Leo, not surprising in a blood-servant, but I figured she was more amused at the thought of Leo with his panties in a wad.

“Three. If you had to guess, which of Leo’s closest scions would either like to see him dead or take his place?”

“Mr. Leo drinks from his most confidential scions, and has for the last few months. They couldn’t hide anything from him.”

The last few months. She meant since the recent cleansing and reduction of the clans. I remembered Leo saying that Alejandro had his blood. All of which might mean that vamps can read the intentions of the vamps they drink from. Interesting. “Can vamps read the minds of the humans they drink from?”

Nettie blushed a deep red. “Sometimes.”

“Ah. Of course.” They could read when they rolled their marks. Sexual attraction had a scent all its own. “Four. Any idea where Tyler Sullivan hangs out when he’s off duty?”

She rattled off the names of four dance clubs. “The chest you wanted is in the foyer,” she added. “You could take it with you, but with the motorcycle . . .” Her words trailed off.

“Right. No trunk. Any way that someone could deliver it to me?”

“Horace will be heading into town later this afternoon for gardening supplies. Give me directions and I’ll see that he drops it off at the right place.”

I gave her the address, and because it was in the Quarter, no directions were needed. I made my way back to the main house through the long shadows of the early Saturday evening, and back to my bike. When I got home, I dialed Sloan Rosen and asked, “Any word?”

“No,” he said. “But Jodi got your message. Don’t touch anything. She has plans.”

The connection ended. I was left out of the loop. As usual.

It was a summer Saturday night in the French Quarter, hot, steamy, sultry, and packed with tourists. I was dressed in dancing clothes, which meant a flowing aqua print skirt, a tight cami under a matching top, dancing shoes, and my hair up, out of the way. It also meant stakes in the French braid, two knives strapped to my thighs, three crosses under my shirt, and my tiny derringer buried under the hair, loaded for vamp or were with silver rounds. I was going to party, but any party where I spotted Tyler Sullivan might be a dangerous one.

Going dancing in the middle of an investigation, and with Rick missing, felt stupid on the surface. But there was one bar, owned by Leo Pellissier, where Ricky Bo played with his band, and Tyler hung out, and I could kill several birds with the one club. I also needed a release from the tension between Bruiser and me and a diversion from Evangelina, who was acting downright weird—dancing all around the house, singing and drinking a lot more than I thought she usually did. I left Leo’s cell-gift on the table by my bed and carried my throwaway phone when I locked the door behind me and headed out walking to RMBC.

I took a deep breath of the night air and my head started to clear the instant I left the house, my worries spilling away as my dancing shoes tapped on the old sidewalks, and my skirts swung against my thighs and knees. It was hot out, and wet, the air feeling like it weighed a hundred pounds. But my breathing still felt freer than it had since Rick took off.

The night was redolent of bug spray, hot grease, cooking seafood, and the water that surrounds and passes through New Orleans. Most people think of the city as being along the Mississippi River, but there’s a lot more water than that, with Lake Pontchartrain spreading wide, and bayous winding through it; salty, silty, stagnant smells are everywhere. And the music. Jazzy, bluesy, Southern rock, pop-country heaven. I worked my shoulders back, rolling them to loosen up.

The crowds thickened with both tourists and locals out for the food and music and shopping, and street artists were everywhere. A four-person band played on one corner, trombone, banjo, percussion, and a guitar, a stack of CDs with the name MamaMamba in front of them. They were playing an old Negro spiritual with all the pathos of slavery and pain, and it was spectacular, the woman guitarist tearing up the vocals. I made a mental note to look them up on the Internet and buy a CD or download something.

Across the street from them was a guy in carpenter clothing, carrying a hammer and screwdriver in one hand, a length of two-by-four balancing, wobbling with the slight breeze, on one shoulder. He was perched on a ladder at an angle. Not a stepladder, not a folding ladder, but a fireman-type ladder, one length of wood. Except for the slowly moving two-by-four, he was immobile as a statue. I had no idea how he could stay so still. I dropped a five in his carpenter’s bucket and moved on.

Royal Mojo Blues Company was a thirty-something-year-old restaurant and dance hall that had an outside dining area, a bar, a grill that served great food, and a dance floor I knew as well as I knew my own house. I had danced here several times, a few for Rick as he played sax. And maybe some small part of me hoped he would be here tonight.

The smell of fried food, beer, and faintly of Leo, and the sound of live music blasted its way into the street, an Alabama-style band rocking the house. When I stepped inside, the scents were momentarily overpowering: old and new beer, fried grease, fish, beef, spices and peppers, cleansers, human and vamp scents, marijuana, sweat, and sex pheromones. The place was packed, shouted conversations merging into a background roar, and overpowered by the band.

An ethnically indeterminate, dark-skinned man crooned, shouted, and sang with a smoky voice, eyes closed, swaying his head, mike, and dreadlocks back and forth, one hand at his thigh shaking a tambourine. He was backed up by four musicians on drums, keyboard, bass, and guitar. I waved to Bascomb, the bartender tonight, ignored three men who looked my way with a sexual, predatory interest, and flowed onto the floor, into the crowd, and up to the band. As I moved, I sight-searched for Tyler or Rick. Saw neither.

Dancing alone was never frowned on at RMBC, and couples and singles were pressed together, a writhing mass of dancers. Into the heat and the beat I raised my arms over my head and started to move. One of the courses I took between children’s home/high school/teenaged misery and the freedom of adult life was a year of belly dance classes. The best thing about belly dancing was the freestyle moves it added to my repertoire. I opened with hip pops and shifted into a series of mayas, remembering Bruiser’s hands on my hips as we danced. I threw back my head and shoulders and moved with the beat. Segued into a series of circular figure eights, dropping my arms slowly in front of me, hands moving in opposing, mirrored, wavelike motions from above my head to below my hips.

I watched and sniffed for the men I was hunting, but it was vamp I smelled first, up close. The tang was sharp and astringent as wormwood and dusty like dried sage, remembered from the first time I saw her in her office. I knew who she was even before I heard the silky laugh that her kind can give, low and erotic, like vocal sex. She was close, her vamp power cutting like razors against my skin.

I tensed and whirled, facing away from the stage, grabbing the ends of stakes in my hair, searching with eyes and nose and band-blasted ears. Katie of Katie’s Ladies was in the crowd behind me. Watching me. I stepped her way and stopped. Taking her in. Dropping my hands from the stakes. This was a totally different Katie from the mad, zombielike, flesh-eating monster.

Her fangs were snapped back into the roof of her mouth. Her blond hair was clean and brushed, falling like a thick, solid sheet of gold around her as she undulated to the beat. She was wearing a short, teal silk sheath, so tight there was no question that she was naked beneath it. And she was sane, not vamped out, not a nutso killing machine. Her eyes glittered, holding mine, her irises a grayish hazel as she swiveled up beside me, giving that caramel liqueur, sex-on-a-stick laugh. My Beast purred. She liked the sound, she always had, and she liked Katie, in a predator-fascination kinda way. The way a big-cat reacted to cobras, staring and entranced.

Katie’s skin was flawless, pale as alabaster, but with a faint blood blush on her cheeks, indicating that she had fed well and recently. She danced her way around the men from the bar, who had found me, whooped, whistling as she matched her moves to mine. I watched her, leery of this woman, this vamp-predator-woman, being here.

I caught a whiff of Gee. And I understood. Gee had, as he said, found and fed Katie, restoring her to sanity far faster than she would have without his blood. What the heck is that guy? I nodded to the bar and mouthed over the pulsing music, “Buy you a drink?”

She mouthed back, “I’d rather drink from you.” She did a full body slither, snakelike, ending up with her chest inches from me. Power sparkled off her, electric and cutting, scalding and icy. The three men hooted and hollered.

I had stopped dancing and I shook my head, no. “Bar.”

Katie pouted, her mouth making a little moue and, vamp-fast, moved off the dance floor. I followed Beast-fast, not caring that the men saw my speed.

At the bar, I took the stool Katie indicated, noticing the couple who stood and stepped away, looking confused, their drinks still in front of our confiscated seats. Stifling a sigh, I handed them their drinks and a ten for their trouble, said, “Thanks,” as if they had given up their seats voluntarily, and waved to Bascomb. The noise level was marginally lower here and when he came over I could hear his comment, “Missed you around here, Janie. Good to see you dancing. Miss Katie, a pleasure to see you here tonight. Your usual gin martini?”

The drink sounded perfectly hideous to Beast, but Katie cooed a yes. I asked for a Coke, something sugared and caffeinated. With a vamp—recently insane—near, I might need the kick.

We were silent until our drinks came, and Katie tasted hers, which was bluish green and smelled toxic, delivered in a stemmed glass with an onion on a toothpick in the liquid. She nodded to Bascomb, who moved away for another customer. I cut to the chase. “You drank from Gee DiMercy.”

“I did.” Katie looked at me from under her lashes, flirtatious. “You can smell him on me?” I nodded and she said, “With the taste of his blood on my tongue, I began to awaken, as if from a long sleep filled with dark dreams. And for a delicious, delirious moment I remembered.” She closed her eyes as an expression resembling ecstasy claimed her face. “I remembered the power. So very much power. Until Leo drank my power away, my magic was great enough that I might have taken the entire city, might have drunk from every throat I encountered.” She opened her eyes, and in them I could see her emotions as easily I might a human’s. She was grieving, in pain, and though she was sane, there was something frantic, something ecstatic and manic in her eyes that held me still and ready inside, prepared to ward off an attack.

Her fingers fluttered up her throat and down, across her chest and down to her décolletage, resting on the V of her low neckline. “I might have grown fat and content on the blood of this city, not starved as I am, as we always are.” I started to ask what she meant when her face hardened. “But Leo drank from me, drained me, and took it all away.”

I tried to understand what had happened, but my knowledge of vamp physiology and culture was based on killing the crazy ones, and my experience with the sane ones was still limited. Before I could put it into some kind of order, Katie said, “I wish to hire you to kill Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City. How much money will you require?”

I put my Coke on the counter, too surprised to hold the icy glass without spilling it. Cripes, she was serious. “Um, Katie, I work for the council, for Leo. He pays me.”

Katie said something in French and slammed her martini glass on the bar. The stem broke. Gin, bluish and harsh smelling, splashed over the counter. Her power spat over me like burning sleet, and out across the room. Even the humans flinched, as the air went suddenly arid and electric. The band stopped playing midsong and stood on the small stage, holding their instruments awkwardly. “I hired you. I!” she said in English, her words ringing into the silent room. “You belong to me.”

Belong to . . . My first instinct to quiet her vanished, and I spoke in a low rush of whispered words. “I don’t belong to anybody. You hired me to do a job, which I did. And then Leo extended my contract. I’m not a hired killer, Katie.”

“Of course you are. It is what you do, what you are. It is what all vampire hunters are, murderers of my kind.”

Deep inside, Beast growled, exposing killing teeth. She murmured, Jane is killer. Killer only. I ignored her. Beast and I’d had this conversation before. I disagreed with her opinion, but there are times for internal debates, and when faced with an unhappy vamp wasn’t one.

Katie glanced up the bar and called out into the odd silence, “Barkeep. Another drink!”

Her words broke a spell over the crowd; on the stage, the players seemed to shake themselves and put down their instruments, announcing a short break. Canned music came over the loudspeaker system, Aaron Neville singing “Jailhouse.” The humans in the place started to move again, recuperating from the blast of vampire energies, and I spotted the ones still unmoving in the crowd. Vamps, three of them. Each of them focused on Katie.

“Katie, why do you want Leo dead?” I asked, keeping an eye on the vamps.

“He buried me with the blood of all the clans,” she said, surprised. When I made a little, so what, gesture, she said, “He gave me the power of them all, and then he took it away. He drained me near unto true death. I would still be chained with the scions had not the Mercy Blade found me and set my mind free. It isn’t . . .” She struggled for the right word. “It isn’t fair.”

I grinned and picked up my Coke again, draining it to exchange the glass for the fresh one Bascomb brought. The concept of fairness from a vamp was amusing, but I had a feeling that laughing would win me nothing but a battle I wasn’t dressed for. And my momentary concern that Katie might be the vamp trying to get Leo and Bruiser arrested for murder eased. She was too nutso to have arranged the scenario. Bascomb wiped up the mess of Katie’s spilled drink.

When he left, I said, “So, challenge him to personal combat.”

“He has my blood, my power,” she spat. “I will not win.”

“He challenged you to personal combat when you were unable to fight back at full strength due to the dolore, which by vamp law isn’t an issue. But he won and didn’t kill you, which means he respects you and wants you alive.” Katie looked up at that, her drink poised halfway to her mouth, her exquisite eyes opened wide in surprise. “He drank from you against your will, right?” Katie nodded and sipped, her face puzzled. “I don’t know much about vamp law, but I think you’re number two in the city, now. Ask him to make you his heir.”

Katie pulled in a harsh breath and met my eyes again, hers going half vampy. “His heir,” she whispered. “Yes.” And suddenly, in a snap of imploding air, she was gone. Katie, pulling the vamp gift for speed that only the old, powerful ones have. And I got stiffed for her drink bill. Figures. Dang vampires.