Death's Mistress (21 page)

“Of course I’m all right, no thanks to you,” Radu told him severely.

“We would have been here sooner, but there was a disturbance in the—”

“But there shouldn’t be any disturbances, not at these prices. I was assured that this was a quiet and peaceful retreat. Yes, here it is.” He picked up a flyer off the nightstand.
“ ‘Quiet and peaceful haven in the heart of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities
.’ Cosmopolitan!” he snorted. “Why, I suppose that’s true. The caviar is American, the vodka is British and I strongly suspect the plumbing of being Russian!”

“You don’t need plumbing,” I reminded him.

“I do bathe, Dory!” he snapped. “And then there’s Gunther.”

“And Gunther would be your—”

“Bodyguard.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

“We’re all required to have them now, since the war. Anyone senior, that is.”

“Making a virtue out of a necessity?”

“Virtue?” He examined the embroidery on his cuff. “Well, that would be a novelty.”

The guard had been looking back and forth between us, and finally decided he’d had enough. “Sir, I—”

“And for what I am paying, I should have a guard permanently assigned to my room!” Radu said, rounding on him. He swept an elegant hand, indicating the cream-and-ice-blue drapes, the matching Aubusson carpet and the large sitting area with the antique marble fireplace. “Not that there’s space in this closet.”

Several of the guards started looking at their leader with apprehension. I didn’t think there’d be too many volunteers. “Sir, I will inform the management of your, uh, concerns,” the leader said, backing slowly toward the door.

“See that you do! I naturally expect some inconveniences when away from home, but they seem to believe we should all live like savages!”

The door shut on Radu’s final word, and he slumped back against the pillows, fanning himself with the flyer. I tilted the bottle at him, and he nodded gratefully. “You had better hope that works, Dory, or I may be staying with you,” he said as I handed him his drink.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, ’Du. You’re a Basarab. They’re probably going to name the room after you.”

“Not if I keep getting visits like this. Did you do a great deal of damage?”

“I didn’t do any. The guys chasing me, however . . .”

“Yes, well. Let us hope they’re blamed instead. Although that would be more likely if you weren’t here when management stops by.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me, ’Du?” I asked thoughtfully.

“Yes! Yes, I am! It’s nothing personal, Dory, but your condition—”

“I’m a dhampir. It isn’t catching.”

“But it’s hardly going to help the Club’s reputation, is it? You’re the sort of thing most of the guests stay here to avoid.”

“They’re not going to see me with the door closed,” I pointed out, swirling the amber liquid around my glass.

“See, no. But scent—”

“I smell like a human.” I knocked the drink back, faster than the quality deserved. But it was a shame to waste good cognac.

“Perhaps so,” he said crossly. “But you see how it is.”

“I’m beginning to.” I put the delicate crystal glass down carefully on the side table, and was out the door before he could stop me.

There were only three other rooms on this floor, so my odds were pretty good. The one right across the hall was empty and obviously unrented, with a light film of dust over the antiques. The one next door to Radu’s was occupied by the blond human, who was lying on the bed flipping through a magazine.

“I’m disappointed,” he told me. “The last time you paid us a visit was a lot more dramatic.”

“I’m not done yet.”

I went to the last door, which opened before I could get my hand on the doorknob.
“Merde.”

“I suspected the family would have the whole floor,” I told Louis-Cesare.

“How did you find me?” he demanded, exasperation in the glassy blue of his irises. They matched the fresh blue shirt he’d put on over impeccably pressed charcoal trousers. The shirt had a tone-on-tone stripe in a satiny weave that caught the light, like his perfect shining hair. Mine was everywhere, my borrowed T-shirt was wet with sweat and I smelled like cigarettes and beer. And I hadn’t even gotten to drink the beer.

I scowled. “You mean after you left me naked and defenseless—”

“You are never defenseless, and I left you your weapons.”

“—in a club full of vampires—”

“I made a commotion upon leaving. Lord Cheung’s men followed me!”

“Oh, well. That makes it all right, then.”

He frowned. “How did you find me?” he repeated.

“Because I’m just that good,” I lied. “Now let me say this nicely. Give me back my fucking head!”

“We cannot do this now!” he told me, trying to push past. Like it was going to be that easy.

I caught his arm and spun him into the wall hard enough to cause a cascade of photos, small mirrors and the vase on the hall table. “Sure, we can.”

He scowled and pushed off the wall. “Go home, Dory.”

“Give me what I want, and I will!”

Radu appeared in the doorway. “I know this is a stupid question before I ask it, but is there any chance that we can discuss this like civilized people?”

Louis-Cesare glanced at him over his shoulder, then looked back at me, eyes narrowing.

He stepped back a pace and dangled the duffel off one long finger. “Come and get it.”

I stared. “Oh, no, you didn’t.”

“Oh, yeah. He did. You gonna take that?” Raymond piped up from the depths of the duffel.

“You really want to do this?” I demanded. “Because I’m not going to play nice. You know that, right?” The only answer I got was a flying tackle that caught me around the knees and sent me skidding on my back over hard wood.

I grinned. Well, all right, then.

“That’s what I thought,” Radu sighed.

I’d landed at the top of the stairs, with my knees up and Louis-Cesare on top of me. So of course I flipped him. He went over my head but didn’t fall far because security was on their way up again. He landed on a couple of guards, who grabbed him for the second it took for them to recognize him as a guest. It gave me a chance to jump back to my feet and topple over a grandfather clock.

It went chiming downward, only to be batted aside by Louis-Cesare in a blow that turned it into musical kindling. The same was true for a marble statue, a painting in a heavy gilt frame and a large potted plant. The junk in the stairwell caused a few vamps to lose their footing and slide backward, and the disorienting sphere I pulled out of my duffel and exploded in their midst had the rest staring around in bewilderment.

Except for Louis-Cesare, who in one inhumanly liquid movement topped the stairs and caught me in a tackle that sent me sliding backward again, this time on the carpet runner. It was tacked down, so it didn’t move, leaving me with a massive case of rug burn. “Ow,” I said distinctly.

“This wouldn’t be necessary if you would—” He smelled the blood and flipped me over, yanking up the T-shirt. “
Dieu!
I never know what to do with you!”

“How about telling me the truth?”

“Would you know it if I did?” His voice was sharp enough on the edges to cut steel.

“Try it.”

His hand smoothed along my back instead, soothing, calming, healing. “The truth is that your father has no stake in this anymore,” he told me, his breath in my ear because he was bent over me, shielding me from the stares of the guards. “He lost. It may be a state with which he is unfamiliar, but it is nonetheless—”

“For the last time, I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I said, exasperated.

“Then why are you here?”

I felt like throwing his own words back at him, like telling him it was none of his damned business. But if I wanted answers, I was probably going to have to cough some up myself. And it wasn’t like there was any big secret.

“I’m freelancing on the smuggling task force. You know, the one you’re supposed to be helping with? And not because Mircea snapped his fingers. I happen to like the idea of the war ending early and the arms manufacturers dying poor.”

“And that’s all.”

“Yes! That’s all!”

Louis-Cesare frowned, and his hands stilled on my ass. “That is why you want the vampire? Because you suspect him of smuggling?”

“Well, it damn sure isn’t for the pleasure of his company!”

“Right back at you,” floated over from the duffel, which had landed by the wall.

“Why? What do you want with him?” I asked, thoroughly confused now.

“To buy back Christine!”

I blinked. Okay, that wouldn’t have been my first guess. Christine was Louis-Cesare’s former mistress, who had been kidnapped in order to blackmail him. A vampire who was accustomed to getting what he wanted had asked Louis-Cesare to stand in for him in a duel. One of his subordinates had challenged him, and if he lost the duel, he wouldn’t just lose his position, but his life.

That sort of substitution was allowable by vampire law, and Louis-Cesare had fought for other people in the past. But the man in question this time—Alejandro, head of the Latin American Senate—was known as a sadist who regularly did things that made even vampires blanch. The general consensus was that he wouldn’t be missed, and I guess Louis-Cesare agreed, because he told him to fight his own battles. So Alejandro had—by kidnapping Christine and vowing to return her only after his enemy was dead.

Unlike most vamps, Louis-Cesare seemed to have a problem with cold-blooded murder. He’d defeated Tomas, the challenger in question, but refused to kill him because the man’s only crime was trying to rid the world of a monster. So Alejandro had refused to release Christine. It was the sort of brutal politics vampire courts abound in, counting the lives that were ruined as insignificant as long as a sought-after goal was reached. I’d been burned by that sort of thing myself, and normally I’d have been sympathetic.

If it hadn’t all happened a century ago.

“That’s where you’ve been?” I demanded, squirming. He let me turn over, but didn’t get up. Which would have been nice if we didn’t have an audience of staring guards, and if I wasn’t close to livid. “We’re fighting a war and you’re off—God! She’s been missing for a century! What difference does a couple more years—”

“She doesn’t have a couple of years!”

The leader of the guards seemed to have recovered, because he put a hand on my arm. “Sir, would you like me to—”

Louis-Cesare knocked the man’s arm away. I used the moment of his distraction to get a knee in a sensitive spot and, when he flinched, roll out from under. I grabbed the bag, scrambled to my feet and fled down the hallway, in the opposite direction from the stairs. We were only two flights up, and I could do that jump easily—

Louis-Cesare grabbed the duffel’s strap and jerked, but I’d expected that. I already had a knife in hand and cut the thin nylon. He staggered back a pace, and I put my foot through the window—and almost got it blown off. “Goddamn it!”

“What is it now?” Louis-Cesare demanded.

“Cheung’s men. I thought they’d left.”

He took a quick peek out the window, prompting another volley from the vamps camped out on the sidewalk below. He shied back and rounded on the guards. “Why haven’t you cleared them out?”

“Sir!” The lead guard was beginning to show signs of stress. “The management felt that a dhampir on the premises was more of a concern than—”

“A party of mercenaries in the street, shooting out windows?”

“With all due respect, sir, they only blew out the window because they sighted
her
!” The vampire gave me a less than friendly look. I showed him some fang.

Louis-Cesare didn’t look much happier. He glanced at his watch. “Radu, my apologies. But I must—”

“Yes, yes, we’ll be fine. Go.” Radu waved him off.

“Running away again?” I demanded.

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Explain it to me,” I said, backing up. I put the bag between me and the wall. Ray’s big nose was stabbing me in the butt, but no way was Louis-Cesare prying it out of my hands.

“Dorina—”

“It’ll be faster to convince me than to fight me.”

He said something in French too colloquial for me to translate, which was probably just as well. But he seemed to reach the same conclusion himself. “Alejandro swore that Christine would live only as long as Tomas was no threat to him,” he told me abruptly. “For over a century, I was forced to keep him in thrall, virtually imprisoned at my estate unless he was with me personally. But a month ago, he managed to escape, and search as I might, I cannot find him.”

“Mircea says he’s hiding out in Faerie,” Radu chimed in from the doorway, before ducking back inside to avoid another volley of gunfire, which took out the last few knickknacks on the wall.

“Putting him beyond my reach,” Louis-Cesare added, his jaw tight. “To make matters worse, Alejandro learned that Tomas was free and informed me that I had thirty days to secure him again.”

“That’s why you left so abruptly last month,” I said. I had wondered. Our acquaintanceship hadn’t been long, but it had been . . . intense. A good-bye would have been nice.

“I knew if I didn’t find Tomas quickly, Christine’s life was forfeit.”

“And Ray knows where he is?” I asked, confused. I couldn’t see where a seedy club owner fit into all this.

“No. But I can exchange him for her.”

“Come again?”

Someone took that moment to lob in a grenade. Louis-Cesare caught it midair and lobbed it back, but it exploded close enough to break the rest of the glass in the window. And from the sound of things, several more besides. The remaining guards decided that maybe I wasn’t the biggest threat, after all, and went running downstairs. The sound of fighting from the street escalated a moment later, along with the distant wails of sirens.

“Alejandro knew that I would have people watching his every move,” Louis-Cesare told me quickly. “And he was afraid that I might be able to buy loyalty at his court. He therefore sent Christine to Elyas, of the European Senate, with whom he’d had business dealings.”