Death's Rival (12 page)

Great. Just freaking great
. I had no doubt that Koun meant for me to take his place in the assault too. I looked
back at the barn. “I’ll take Koun’s place. Fill me in.”

Instead, Innara spoke into her mic and a moment later I saw a form that seemed to
float through the trees like a dark mist, like an owl in flight, his feet never appearing
to touch the ground. “The little goddess will fight with me?” Gee DiMercy asked, his
teeth flashing in the night. “We fought well in the past. This battle will be a joy
and a thing of beauty to behold.”

I flipped the long blade I held, letting it settle firmly in my hand.
Goddess. Yeah, right.
“And the tactics?”

“Attack from two sides at once, create a diversion, and leave the way open for the
Mithrans to eat the fallen. The human soldiers may clean up the leavings.”

“Wrong. No one eats or drains the vamps or the humans,” I said.

Innara growled and the hairs on my neck quivered in atavistic response. “No one tells
me who I may not drain on the field of battle.”

I carefully did not make eye contact, to avoid ratcheting up the tension. “The vamps
are diseased. And maybe on some chemical. Drug. Something. Can’t you smell it?”

Innara lifted her nose and sniffed, her head moving like a snake, in little jerking
motions with each breath. “I smell nothing.”

“Well, I do. It smells metallic.”

“Like silver? Many of our old masters were poisoned when a blood-slave drank colloidal
silver and brandy and allowed them to drain her.”

I knew that story. I lifted my blade and sniffed it, smelling the iron in the steel
and the silver in the plating. I frowned. “Not silver. Not iron. But something metallic.
Maybe a drug. Just don’t drink from them and don’t get bit. Okay?” Innara studied
me. The disparity in our heights should have allowed me to feel superior, but I didn’t,
I wasn’t. Not next to the fierce little vamp, her fangs picking up the moonlight.

“You think their bite is dangerous?” she asked. “You think the blood of their servants
is poisoned?”

I shrugged. “I smell something that isn’t right.” And vamps were getting sick. I didn’t
have to add that part.

“My anamchara and I will herd them into a small group. And then we will cut off their
heads.”

I chuckled softly at the bloodthirsty comment. “It would be nice to have something
left to question after. Also there are cops nearby. I’m surprised they haven’t shown
up here already.”

“The police are human, and humans can be swayed to see what we wish them to.”

Which sooo did not make me happy.

Derek walked up, nearly silent in the night, with his soldier’s training, but Innara
and Gee DiMercy turned, hearing him coming. “I won’t be part of a slaughter,” he said,
“even if the fangheads are naturally armed and bat-shit crazy.”

“You will do as you are told, human,” Innara hissed.

“Enough,” I said. “Derek, do you have flashbangs?” At his nod, I said to Innara, “No
slaughter. You and your vamps make a diversionary feint directly at the front of the
barn. Gee, you go left with half of Derek’s men, aiming for the open, middle stall
door. Derek, you and the rest of your men go in on the right”—I pointed—“to that door,
but behind me. When we get to the barn, we throw in every stun grenade we have. It
isn’t a confined space, which will limit the noise and concussion factor, but I’ll
take what we can get with the light.

“After the blasts, we go in.” I pointed to Gee and me. “We’ll take care of any vamp
old enough to still be standing after the candle flash. Derek and his men will round
up anyone blinded and temporarily disabled.” Flashbangs produced enough noise and
light to incapacitate a human and to blind vamps. Maybe permanently. But old vamps
had enough power to survive things the young ones did not, and I’d never tested them
on a master. Without a pause, I went on.

“Innara, you and your fan—vamps come in behind us. No drinking, no killing. I want
them alive.”

Her eyes lit up, bleeding back to human, her pupils shrinking, sclera paling down
from scarlet to merely bloodshot. “So that we can make them tell us everything they
know. Yes! I like your plan.”

It wasn’t much of a plan, but I didn’t argue. For some reason they were listening
to me. Maybe that ill-fated Enforcer situation. Derek handed two flashbangs to me
and one to Gee, demonstrated the use of the military-grade, M84 stun grenades, which
I was pretty sure he should not have had in his possession. He said, “We need to pull
and throw together, otherwise the suckheads will have time to react and look away,
cover their eyes. It’ll be on three.” He tapped his mouthpiece three times to demonstrate.

The vamps moved into the night like snakes in the grass, their bodies weirdly not
human, disjointed. I dropped into the hay, Derek behind me. It wasn’t a long crawl,
but it wasn’t going to be easy as loaded down with blades as I was. And wearing the
wrong boots. And the wrong clothes. Not that I would gripe about it. I didn’t have
time to gripe about anything.

We crawled through the hay, crushing the stiff stalks, disturbing insects, sending
rodents scurrying and snakes slithering. From one whispered curse, I gathered that
Derek was not fond of reptiles. We also set up a cloud of mosquitoes as we moved.
With all the activity, the vamps had to see and hear us coming. Great plan. We’d have
been better to just charge, except that one group had done that, and engaged someone
at the front of the barn. Blades clashed and voices shouted.

I stood up at one corner of the barn, Gee across from me. We met eyes, and the smaller
man nodded. Derek tapped his mic. On one, I pulled the pin. On two, I stepped to the
door, Derek behind me, mirroring my actions. On three, I threw the grenade. Derek’s
lofted high and at a different angle from mine. I pulled the pin on the second flashbang
and tossed it, eyes closed, and continued the arc of the throw, bringing up my hands
to cover my eyes and ears. A flashbang explodes at 170 decibels and a pyrotechnic
metal-oxidant mix of magnesium and ammonium, at over six million candela. The night
went white in a series of blasts. Moments later, we rushed in.

I figured it was useless, but I shouted as I ran, “Surrender and you’ll live. Put
down your weapons.” Surprisingly, a few listened and surrendered. The fight with the
rest was short and brutal. Derek and his men herded half-blind vamps and injured humans
out into the night and dropped them onto the ground. Three enemy vamps who could still
see went after Derek and his men, leaping off huge farm equipment and out of the hayloft
at the former marines. Innara and her vamps attacked before they landed. Sneak Cheek
moved off the side at a dead run and clubbed two vamps to the ground. They stayed
down. Tequila Sunrise staked them in the lower bellies to immobilize them. It was
nice work.

Gee and I turned to the two vamps rushing us from the corner. I fired the M4 at one,
emptying both barrels, two hand-packed, silver fléchette rounds into his abdomen,
the recoil reverberating through me. The vamp went down but was still alive, struggling
back to his feet, even without any flesh between ribs and hips, and only a damaged
spine holding him together. He was gripping a sword and an old six-shooter pistol.
I kicked the gun away and blocked his human-slow-because-he-no-longer-had-blood-inside
strikes until he fell for good.

Shotguns loaded with silver made fighting vamps way too easy, especially the old ones.
They didn’t have the mind-set to fear guns and so took few precautions against them.
But there was no fair in war. I stood over the vamp. “Yield and you’ll live,” I said.

“No,” he gasped, his face set in stubborn, frantic lines as he bled into the dirt.

I waited until he stopped gasping for breath, until his blood stopped flowing, giving
him a chance to surrender. Then, when he looked dead, I took his head to keep him
from rising as a revenant.

Gee was a two-blade fighter, moving like the love child of a flamenco dancer and a
bird of prey, his swords like two wings, sweeping together and apart, cutting and
slicing, his feet balletic, his body graceful. After making sure there were no more
vamps in the barn, I holstered the M4 and leaned against a wall, watching him play
with the vamp. And it was play, because though the vampire had obviously been fencing
for centuries, he looked like a first-year student against the Mercy Blade. I had
never fought against Gee DiMercy, and it was a good thing, as he would have cut me
to ribbons. Literally. Just as he was doing with a fighter who was way better at swordplay
than I was.

When he took mercy on his opponent and called for him to surrender, the man charged
him, and Gee took his head. It was just like in the old TV shows and movies about
the Highlander, and the saying “There can be only one.” Only without the lightning
and wind when the head fell. I couldn’t help it. I clapped.

And Girrard DiMercy whirled with a flourish and bowed, one sword behind him like a
wing, the other across his body, pointed down to the floor. “Very pretty,” I said.

He rose with another dramatic flourish and said, “I am, aren’t I?”

I snorted and followed him out of the barn, to find Innara casually staking a vamp.

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.