Laws of the Blood 4: Deceptions: Deceptions (8 page)

“No, I couldn’t. What I’m going to do is find out if this mortal qualifies as rightful prey. If he doesn’t turn out to be involved with the government or military in any significant way, I’ll let the girl have him. Then she can move with her nest to somewhere far away from my town, and they can live happily ever after. Which brings us to the most important topic of the evening.”

“Nice segue,” Sara acknowledged.

“And?”

“I’ve laid the groundwork for getting the nests to move via an initial meeting with the companions of all three nest leaders. They were not happy.”

“Doesn’t matter if they were happy. Their duty is to deliver the news to their nests.”

Sara radiated stubborn, impatient annoyance at her.

“You think I should have taken a more direct route, don’t you? Gone to each of the nests and had a little chat to explain why their abandoning home and territory is so important to the survival of our kind.” Olympias shook her head. “You have no idea how territorial we really are, Sara. We can be mindless savages when it comes to defending what is ours. If I went to each nest leader with the news that they had to move, I’d have a fight on my hands with every one of them. They couldn’t help but see red and attack me. Even knowing who and what I am, they’d respond to the instinct to defend what’s theirs. I’d respond the same way if some vampire walked in here and told me to take my household elsewhere. Sending word through their companions makes it less of a threat. Those nest leaders aren’t going to kill their own companions.” She shrugged. “They might beat the crap out of them, but they aren’t likely to kill them.”

Indignation blossomed around Sara like a red flower. “Beat the—”

“Better them than me having to beat the crap out of the nest leaders. I don’t want them believing in the black depths of their hearts that I’m displacing them from rightful territory. I just want them to leave. I’m long over the era when I thought it was fun to make and defeat enemies. I will have to deal with each nest leader directly eventually, but in theory, delivering the order this way will make them amenable to it sooner than if I were to show them my fangs and tell them to get out.”

“In theory.”

“I thought it was worth a shot.”

“You could have told me.”

“You were going to be humiliated and patronized by the companions anyway. Always remember who you belong to.”

Sara was not impressed. She was, in fact, quite bitter. Her unspoken emotion left a bad taste in Olympias’s mind. Sara’s tone was mild despite the feelings she couldn’t shield. “Please don’t give me a lecture on how being a slave to an Enforcer is better than blah-blah-blah.”

Olympias admired the mortal girl’s ability to appear calm. She’d liked Sara since the moment she’d followed the scent of psychic talent out of the DuPont Circle Metro station. Olympias had given the girl one wild night, and Sara had been paying for it ever since. Suspecting that an attack of conscience might be in the works if she spent too much more time in her slave’s presence, Olympias decided it was time to wrap up the nightly meeting and get out of the house as quickly as possible.

“How did the companions take the news?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” Sara wondered.

“Companions always reflect their lovers’ current interests and moods.”
And vice versa,
she thought. “How did the little mirrors react?”

“There were tantrums. Dishes were broken. There were
threats. Gerry got punched out by Gavivi.”

“That sounds promising.”

“Well, there was one sane person in the bunch. Roger Bentencourt, he’s Rose’s boy. He was the only one who seemed to understand the necessity of what you want from them. He promised to present the facts rationally to his mistress.”

“Rose is as sensible as any of us can hope to be,” Olympias answered. “Let’s hope the nest in Alexandria won’t give me any trouble.” She scratched the hellhound’s ears. “Time for us to go for a walk, Bitch.”

“
I
DON’T SEE why you should have to put up with this,” Bentencourt said to Rose. “The so-called Enforcer of the City has no right to dictate to you. You don’t live in her city. She’s high-handed, rude—I cannot believe the contempt and arrogance she showed you of all people in having a slave summon me when she should—”

“It would hardly have been polite for a slave to summon me,” Rose said reasonably, interrupting his well-rehearsed tirade.

Fortunately he knew that Rose would read his very real frustration as being for her rather than at her. They were alone in Rose’s large upstairs bedroom. The lovingly polished dark wood Federalist furniture was original, built for Rose when the city of Washington was new. The Audubon bird prints on the teal green walls had been purchased new, as had all the leather-bound books in the tall bookcase. The rugs were hand-braided on the Virginia plantation Rose had owned since before the Civil War. About the only furnishings less than a century old in the nest leader’s private sanctuary were the heavily insulated drapes that covered the tall, narrow windows
that looked out on the back garden. The mattress on the finely carved bed was new as well. Bentencourt had insisted on a certain amount of creature comforts—though his pretext, as always, had been that Rose deserved to treat herself better.

He’d almost been surprised to discover the place had plumbing, electricity, and a telephone when he’d moved in. Fortunately Bentencourt’s two predecessors, as Rose’s lovers in the last century, had persuaded her to make a few concessions to the times. Bentencourt wondered what excuses they’d used, since Rose was conservative to the point of stagnation. She actually believed in the ancient laws that forbade strigoi from sharing in the technological advances of the mortal world.

These days even the Enforcers ignored laws that had been forced on the Council sometime in the Renaissance by a group of religious fanatics who’d still believed they’d been turned into vampires by the wrath of an ancient goddess. This bunch believed vampires existed to punish evil mortals, but didn’t deserve to share in any good thing that came from the still pure and holy daylight world. Bentencourt didn’t know what had become of that particular faction of strigoi, but at least their influence had significantly waned in recent centuries. This didn’t stop some vampires, like Rose, still having a penitential streak in their natures.

Rose was also shy and demure, unworldly even by underneath world standards—especially strigoi standards. She Hunted no more than once a decade, did not take companions very often, and her only slave was a lawyer who managed her finances. His family had belonged to Rose for generations. She took in only enough nestlings and young vampires to retain her standing as a nest leader. Bentencourt found her useful. Because he’d seduced her into sharing her blood with him, he really couldn’t rouse up the contempt she truly deserved. He loved his Rose even as he used her.

He took a seat beside where she lounged on the bed,
propped up by a pile of tapestry, satin, and floral chintz pillows. He took her long-fingered hands in his and kissed them one at a time. Heavy, jeweled rings gleamed on every finger of her hands, gifts from former lovers. He’d given her the three-carat diamond set in platinum she currently wore on the third finger of her left hand. She was such a romantic.

“Perhaps I haven’t conveyed the gravity of the situation to you,” he confessed, gentle and contrite. “You, my love, are being ordered to leave your home. You, me, and everyone in your nest have been given an eviction notice. We must go, and it is not right.”

“Go?” Rose caught his gaze, and he felt her looking deep into his mind—or, as deep as he would let her. A part of his mind was open, the thoughts he placed there easy for her to read. For all her great psychic talent, Rose was a simple person. He saw worry finally begin to crease her lovely, smooth brow after she had examined his thoughts for a while. She drew her hands from his and sat up from her languid pose, pushing herself away from the luxury of the pillows. “This cannot be true,” she declared.

He nodded slowly. “It is, my love. The hag’s slave gave the order as if it meant nothing. As if you meant nothing.”

Rose blinked huge blue eyes at him, eyes that finally held a hint of comprehension. “This is my home. This has always been my home.”

“I know how you love this place.”

She rose up off the bed, not with her usual grace, but with the speed of a vampire. She moved across the room to stand before the fireplace and gaze at the portrait over the mantel. From the style and the dress of the man in the portrait, Bentencourt guessed that the painting dated from some time in the late seventeenth century. The man in the painting was fine boned and had a square, cleft chin, but was not particularly handsome. The style of his clothing showed that he was a well-off merchant or
landowner, a solid, middle-class gentleman, perhaps. And probably a vampire, for he was pale, a candelabra blazed on a table beside him, and a full moon showed through an open window behind his head. Bentencourt assumed this was a portrait of the vampire that had sired Rose, but he had never noticed her pay any attention to it until now.

“This is my home,” she insisted. Her fingers stroked the finely carved wood of the mantel, then she picked up and put down several pieces of the bric-a-brac that rested on the shelf beneath the painting, including a small, tapestry-covered box. “Our home.” He got the impression she spoke not to him, or even to herself, but to the man in the painting. “I’m an American vampire.” She chuckled. “Sometimes I’ve even thought about applying for membership in the DAR. That’s how long I’ve been here. Longer. A good American. In England I was just an ignorant girl who told fortunes in a highwayman’s tavern. When the king’s soldiers cleaned out that thieves den, I was loaded onto a ship without so much as a trial. Sent as a bondservant to the new world. I made it my world. I was worked hard, and I nearly starved that first year. I nursed the sick when the swamp fever came. I hated the man who owned me and loved the land like I’d never loved the place where I was born. Then one night I heard a call in my head and ran away from the farm, ran into the woods, into the night, into the arms of a good man who took my blood and taught me how to kill to survive. I learned how to love, how to think, how to fend for myself. Ours was the first nest in the colonies. Only one for a long time. When I made the change, we stayed together because there was no one else who could foster me. We obeyed the laws, never touched each other again, and we both took companions when I was old enough to feel the need. We cleared the land and worked it, and our slaves were bought with blood, not caring about the color of their skins but the spark of magic that makes the weak need to serve the strong. The tobacco merchants
built their port town around our land. We fought in the war for independence and the war with the British in 1812 and used our magic to call up the storm that kept the city from being completely burned when the English set fire to it. You felt the need to wander out west, my first true love, but I stayed with the children, with the nest we founded. This is my place.”

Rose turned back to face him. “The Greek woman came with the turn of the twentieth century, after the Great War. This is not her land. She works for the Council. She’s an ambassador, not an American. She can’t make me leave. She can’t mean me.”

“She can. She does.” His words were emphatic, final. He put all the regret he could into his voice. “I’m sorry, but she’s ordering you to leave your home.”

Rose crossed her arms beneath her ample bosom. “Is she?” she asked. Her voice was ominously soft, and for the first time her eyes took on the glitter of a very dangerous animal. “Is she indeed?”

Bentencourt almost laughed with glee at Rose’s reaction. Satisfied that he had his vampire lover’s attention directed where he needed it to be, he immediately turned his attention to other factors in his plans. He didn’t need to worry about Lora right now. She was in her room, frantically pacing, trying to control the heat coursing through her blood. Lora didn’t have to do anything but seethe with pent-up hormones. All he had to do was wait for Olympias to refuse to let the young vampire take a mate. That should take a few days yet. In that time he would continue to work on Rose.

He’d also spend the time cultivating the lovely Ms. Sara Czerny. He’d read her vulnerabilities earlier in the day. The slave was going to be invaluable to him. It was going to be so delightful to seduce Sara away from Olympias and use her as the knife pressed to the bitch queen’s throat.

•••

Alone in his house on a very quiet Georgetown street, with the door to his office locked behind him, Falconer took the tape out of his pocket and tried to decide exactly what to do with it. As he tossed the cassette from hand to hand, every sense he had told him that Grace wasn’t going to give up digging into what they’d recorded on this cassette, despite what they agreed on, despite the orders he’d given. They’d gone someplace they shouldn’t when they’d tried her little regression experiment. Someplace logic told him could not be real. Grace was going to want to go back, he knew that, maybe to prove that it was all a group hallucination. He hoped it was.

Falconer put the cassette down on the desk in his home office. He glanced at the wall safe and thought about locking away the strange, eerily similar statements made by each of the Walker Project staff. Those similar statements would have been eerie on a normal Walk, though Walking was a psychic phenomenon they were trying to refine into a science.
Astral projection
had been the term for what they did once upon a time. Then some bureaucrat trying to get funding for a study of the phenomenon had coined more obscure and prosaic terms, which certainly sounded a lot less weird when going begging for funding. The people who became involved in these programs were certainly obscure, and anything but prosaic. With the Walker Project they had gone out of their way to find participants that were psychic but sane. Until today Falconer had thought that he and his loons were basically stable personalities, despite the extra added something that made them special.