Chapter Thirty

My thoughts were still on the puzzle from last night when I reached the hall, and found it full of vampires. That would have been bad, but not surprising, since Ray had come with accessories. Only these accessories were naked.

They were standing in a line from the dining room to the downstairs bathroom, leaving the what the hell stretching almost the entire length of the house. Some had towels wrapped around their waists or draped around their necks; others sported embellishments in the form of flip-flops, shower caps, or bath brushes; and a few even carried baskets of toiletries. But there were also plenty of different-colored buns in view, along with sunken chests, man boobs, and hairy shanks.

And then it got worse.

“Dory?” Claire’s voice came from somewhere upstairs. “Is that you?”

I looked up, and I swear my heart stopped.

Holy shit.

I grabbed Ray, who for some reason was completely filthy, and shook him. “What?” he asked.

“Dory?”

I swallowed. “Uh, yeah? Hi, Claire.”

“Hi, yourself.” The voice floated down from the direction of my room. “I’m just going to change your sheets, okay?”

“Sure,” I squeaked. “Thanks!”

“Do you need any towels?”

“Yeah, we could use—” Ray began, before I clapped a hand over his mouth.

“What was that?”

“I said, sure, if it’s no trouble,” I called up.

“No trouble. I have some fresh ones in the laundry room—”

“No!” The laundry room was downstairs. “I mean, no, I just remembered—I’m fine. Tons of towels!”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely!” I shoved Ray at the dining room door, but he didn’t want to go.

“Mmhfmf!”

“What?”

He pulled my hand away. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “Get them back in the dining room!”

“Why? They gotta get baths—”

“Not now!”

“Then when?”

“After I have time to talk to Claire!”

“You haven’t talked to Claire?”

“When have I had time to talk to Claire?”

He put dirty hands on terry-cloth-covered hips. “You had time to talk to her last night. You telling me she don’t know we’re here?”

“That’s what I’m telling you!” I whispered, while shoving Ray into the dining room and pushing his guys in after him.

“And I’m telling you this is bullshit!” Ray ducked under my arm. “I’m gonna go—”

“Back inside,” I said, and whirled him through the door again.

“Cut that out!”

“Then stop being a dick!”

“I’m being a dick? You—”

I slammed the door on him, and casually leaned against it as Claire came down the stairs. And then noticed, about the same time she did, the small yellow object at the bottom of the steps. She bent down and picked it up.

“I don’t remember us having a rubber ducky.”

“It’s mine.” I smiled brightly.

Her eyebrows raised.

She came the rest of the way down the stairs. “Are you . . . waiting for something?”

“Dinner. Starving. You know how it is.”

“I saved you some soup—”

“Someone ate it.” I smiled winningly. “So hungry.”

Claire blinked at me. “I’ll, uh, go make you something.”

“That would be great!”

I smiled some more.

And then stopped, because it appeared to be freaking her out.

She disappeared into the kitchen, after looking back at me once over her shoulder, and I opened the dining room door and slipped inside.

I tossed Ray the damned duck. “You’ve got to get out of here!”

“That’s what we’re trying to do! My boys need to feed—”

“So go!”

“Like that?” He gestured at the oily-haired, scruffy-jawed, smelly bunch who were currently congregated in the far corner of the room, staring at me. Because dhampir.

I sighed.

“They didn’t eat all day yesterday,” Ray told me. “And they’re not strong like me. They can’t go for days with no food, okay?”

And, sure enough, they had the twitchy, pasty-faced look of vamps in need of a meal.

Shit. Claire was going to love the idea of a bunch of hungry vampires around her kid. Not that they were anywhere close to losing control; they weren’t babies. But try telling her that.

Only I didn’t intend to tell her that.

I hadn’t talked to Claire yesterday because I’d planned to have them gone by now. They’d been out of it last night, trying to heal, and might as well have been the logs they’d resembled, all rolled up in their blankets, safe from the sun. Today, I’d planned to smuggle them out at first dark, only today had mostly been spent recovering.

And it wasn’t like I could just rent them a cheap hotel room. A random maid opening the drapes at the wrong time could cook them to a crisp. The only hotel safe enough was the Club, a super-expensive vamp-owned chain for traveling masters, which I couldn’t have afforded even if the local one hadn’t recently burned down.

“Look,” Ray began.

“Shhh!”

I poked my head out the door and then hopped into the hall to take a quick look upstairs. The coast was clear. But knowing this place, it wouldn’t stay that way.

I waved at Ray and mouthed, Come on!

They came on. Up the stairs on silent vamp feet and across to my room. Olga came out of hers in time to get flashed by the lineup, who reared back against the wall, clutching their towels and looking spooked. Guess they’d been too out of it yesterday to remember her.

She looked at them; they looked at her; she looked at me.

And then slowly took a step back inside her room and shut the door.

The vamps sprinted past, towels flying, and disappeared into mine.

I stayed behind with Ray to gather up armloads of their crap and run after them. It took three trips, but we got it all. Even the goddamned duck.

I closed my door and stayed pressed against it, looking at them. There were a lot. More than I recalled. Ten, twelve, fifteen.

What the hell?

“You can use my bathroom,” I said. “To get cleaned up. Then go out the window.”

I nodded at the big windows framing the bed, and when they turned to look at them, I pulled Ray back out the door.

“Fifteen?”

“I know, okay?”

“You’re too weak to support fifteen!”

“Not when I was with Cheung. I got a boost from him, remember? But I lost that along with my head, so—”

“So now you’re trying to support fifteen vamps on your own?” No wonder they needed to feed. Ray likely couldn’t give them any help at all.

“What else am I gonna do?” he demanded. “I’m responsible for them, like you’re responsible for me—”

“I am not your master!”

“See, this is why we have problems. You’ve never fully committed to this relationship.”

“Ray! I’m a dhampir.”

“You’re a senator. The boys are thrilled to be part of your family. Thrilled!”

I opened the door again.

They did not look thrilled.

“Bathe!” I told them, and they jumped, and then stampeded for the bathroom.

I closed the door again.

“They can’t stay here,” I said. “We’re going to have to work something out.”

“I had something worked out. Then somebody just hadda be a hero. Well, I hope you’re happy. Curly’s in the wind, his theatre’s trashed and, even if he does show up again—”

“Wait. What?”

“—he won’t want anything to do with the two of us—”

“Curly isn’t dead?”

“—Nobody is gonna want anything to do with the two of us if what happened to Curly gets around. We’re gonna be known as the people you need protecting from.”

“What happened to Curly?”

“You were there!”

I clapped a hand over his mouth and towed him to the stairs, and then up to my office. It was in what had been the attic, and was pretty well insulated, especially when I closed the trapdoor. And then turned around to see Ray peeling something nasty off his shoulder.

“What is going on? Why do you look like that?”

“Oh, Ray. I’m so glad you’re all right.” It was a falsetto and nothing like my voice. “I was so concerned—”

“I was concerned!”

He looked at me.

“I would have been concerned—”

“Sure, when you remembered I existed.”

“I remembered! It’s been a hard few days, all right?”

“Tell me about it. My old master rips me off, my new master denies me, and that’s after I almost end up buried alive!”

“What?”

He nodded vigorously. “The damned portal sucked in half the street.”

“Half the street?”

“Okay, maybe not half. But three other buildings collapsed when it pulled the ground out from under ’em. There’s supposed to be controls on a portal, you know? So it don’t go crazy? Only something must have happened, because Curly’s was set on full-bore ‘let’s swallow the world’ mode and almost did!”

I thought of the grenade Dorina had thrown at whatever control they’d had down there.

Yeah, that would do it.

Although where she’d even gotten the thing I couldn’t imagine. What kind of security guard carries grenades? Even for dark mage smugglers, that seemed a little extreme.

“—looking like a sinkhole had opened up underneath it,” Ray was saying. “With the damned roof sitting curbside! It probably woulda been gone altogether, but the Circle showed up and shut it down. They’re still pawing through the wreckage—”

He paused to look around for somewhere to stash the nasty thing from his shoulder, but didn’t find anything. “You got a trash can?”

I shoved an ashtray at him, and he coiled whatever it was into it. “The audience got out okay,” he added. “Being smart enough to run like hell. But those of us still inside when that wave hit—”

He shuddered.

And, suddenly, I did feel bad, because I had barely thought of him. Not that I didn’t have about a thousand other things to think about, but still. Ray could have died.

“I could have died!” he told me, flopping down into my desk chair. “I was trying to swim out when that portal sucked the floor out from under me. I got pulled two, maybe three stories down, and couldn’t see shit, ’cause there was water and mud and furniture and who knows what else being dragged down on top of me!”

I reached over and touched his arm. “That must have been terrifying.”

“Yeah, well.” He looked slightly mollified. “You know. Anyway, I finally found a staircase—completely full of mud—and just burrowed my way up. And stepped into freaking air again, and man, you shoulda seen it.”

“Seen what?” I sat down on the visitor’s chair I kept for clients, back when I had clients, and scooted it around the desk.

Ray looked pleased to have an audience.

“The main auditorium held together pretty well, I guess ’cause the floors underneath were getting chomped on, while it was just kinda sinking. Anyway, it looked like some big, dark underground cave, full of broken shit and puddles and waterfalls pouring down everywhere. It was crazy!”

“So, that’s when you saw Curly?”

“No, that’s when I almost got scared to death. The Circle broke a hole in the roof and sent some of their boys down on ropes, only I didn’t know that, right? So there I am, freaked out, mud everywhere, including in my eyes, and there’s this mist of water in the air, making everything sort of foggy. And then one of those assholes starts running at me, and he hadda helmet with a searchlight on it, and looked like some kind of one-eyed monster—” He paused. “You know, a real one-eyed monster, not—”

“I get it.”

“Anyway, that’s when I saw Curly.”

“What?”

“Yeah. He was with one of his boys, some young, skinny guy, and they were booking it across the other side of the theatre. I called out, and I know that bastard saw me, but he just kept going. The guard shot one of those Spidey webs at the hole in the roof and they bounced.”

I thought of the young guard who had been Dorina’s ride. Maybe she’d managed to get him out, and Curly, too? But if so, where were they now?

“Beats me,” Ray said, when I asked. “We used to call him Squirrelly Curly, ’cause he runs at the first sign of trouble. He had bolt-holes everywhere, back in the day. That’s why he wanted out of the business. He don’t have the nerves for smuggling.”

“It looked like he was still in the game to me.”

“Where his precious theatre was concerned, sure. Nothing was too good for that thing. Damn, if he’s alive, I bet he’s pissed—”

“Enough to rat out the people he was working with?”

Ray stopped. “Why?”

“Something Dorina overheard.”

He scowled. “You know it’s weird when you talk about yourself in the third person, right? It creeps me out.”

“It doesn’t do a lot for me, either.”

“Then why not stop it?”

“I can’t stop it.”

“Why not?”

“Because she isn’t me!”

“Creep factor intensifying.”

“Would you listen? She was roaming around the theatre’s guts while we were upstairs, and she overheard—”

“Roaming around? She can roam around now? Like what? A ghost?”

“Not exactly—”

“When did this start?”

“Just recently—”

“I know it’s just recently, or I’d know about it!” He glanced around the room, and he was looking genuinely spooked. “Is she here now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know?” He got up.

I pushed him back down.

“Just listen.”

“You can’t spring something like that on a guy and then say, ‘Just listen.’ Like it’s nothing. Is she gonna keep doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Just . . . adding more powers?”

“I don’t know—”

“Well, what do you know?”

“That you’re getting on my last nerve!”

We sat there, glaring at each other for a moment, before Ray let out a breath he didn’t need. “All right. I’m listening. What?”

I told him.

“Okay, no.” He got up and headed for the door.

I caught him halfway.

“Look, Ray—”

“No, you look! Geminus’ group was straight-up savage, okay? Everybody knew it; nobody messed with ’em. Until he died. And the damned Senate got involved and cleaned house! They killed every one of his boys who were even suspected of smuggling—”

“I know that.”

“—so if anyone decided to go right back to what just got half their family butchered? They are not the kind of guys you wanna mess with!”

“I don’t want to mess with them. I just want to know who they’re working for. If they’re in it for themselves, smuggling some refugees or fey wine or whatever, then fine—”

“That’s not what they’re smuggling. That response last night? You don’t get that over wine!”

“That’s my point, Ray. If they’re working with Aeslinn, they could be bringing in some very bad stuff for the war.”

“Then why not just tell the Senate? Have them deal with this?”

“Ray, I’m on the Senate. But if I’m going to talk them into diverting resources in the middle of a war, I need to have some evidence to offer. All I have right now is something Dorina overheard, which made it sound like first the albino and then a mage had taken over control of Geminus’ family. And you know that’s impossible.”

Ray shook his head. “It’s not impossible. In the trenches, you make alliances where you have to.”

“Yeah, only I don’t think it works like that for senators. But we know Geminus was working with Aeslinn before he died, and a bunch of dark mages. So, if the mage is Aeslinn’s contact—”

“Then the vamps wouldn’t be working for a human, but for a king of the fey.”

I nodded. “And their ally in the war.”

Ray frowned. “So you need Curly to find out if you’re right.”

“He was working with them. He has to know something.”

Ray sighed. “Maybe. Or maybe he just grabbed the first offer he got after Geminus bit the big one. People like Curly and me, we team up with mages or weres or whoever the hell is gonna help us survive.”

“Even a dhampir?”

“That’s different. You and me, we got a bond.”

I started to dispute him, but there was suddenly something in his face, something I’d probably worn on my own, more than once. Ray looked like a guy who was bracing to get hit, with words if not with fists, because he’d just risked something. And every time he did that, every time he trusted anybody, he paid for it.

I’d spent a lifetime like that, and yet, like Ray, I always seemed to come back for more. Always seemed to hold out hope for something . . . I wasn’t even sure what. Acceptance? A place I belonged? Some kind of certainty in an uncertain world, that somebody had my back, and would always have it?

So I didn’t say anything.

Except to ask if something was wrong, because I’m nosy like that.

Ray sat on the edge of the desk. His dark hair flopped in his face, and his blue eyes were serious. More so than I could remember seeing them.

“My boys . . . they’re not doing so good,” he told me. “When Cheung cut me loose, he didn’t bother to think, or didn’t care, that he was doing it to them, too. And then the club burnt down, and most of our stuff went with it. I keep telling them that we got a new place, that you’re our master now, but they don’t believe it. They tell me, ‘What’s a senator want with us?’ They think you’re gonna kick us out, and then they don’t know . . .”

He didn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t have to. Somebody like Ray needed a protector. He was going to have to cut a deal with someone, and soon, and he would not be negotiating from a position of strength. He and his boys were likely in for a very tough time, if they found any place at all. And if they didn’t—

Well, in some ways, the vamp world was like the human.

It wasn’t kind to those of us on our own.

I didn’t know how this thing between Dorina and me was going to play out, and it seemed insane to take on any more responsibilities until I did. But if the worst happened, and if Ray and company had been acknowledged by me, then somebody in the family would take care of them. They’d have to.

We Basarabs stick together.

“Yeah,” I told him, after a moment.

Ray looked up. He’d been contemplating his naval, with a crease in his forehead, and his eyes shadowed with worry. He looked like he’d forgotten what we’d been talking about.

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah. I guess we have a bond.”