Chapter Forty-one

Everything stopped, including Louis-Cesare. Who burst through the door and then just stood there, still as a statue, staring at the tableau. The only good thing was that it was Dumb and Dumber, aka Purple Hair and Blondie, who had apparently decided on another target but had been misinformed. Because Radu wasn’t on the Senate.

He was, however, protected by a couple of people who were, one of whom had started to breathe heavily.

“Oh, hello, Dory,” Radu said, because Radu is special.

I climbed down and glanced at Louis-Cesare’s face. And started talking fast. “How about we take a moment?”

“How about he dies?” Blondie said carelessly. Because he obviously had a death wish.

He was also the only one with a lethal weapon. Purple Hair looked like a proper badass, in a shiny black jumpsuit straight out of the Catwoman catalogue, but she’d opted for a gun. While not ideal, it wouldn’t do lasting damage to a second-level master like Radu.

Blondie, in khakis and a frat boy polo, hadn’t been so nice.

It was about to get him killed.

“I have a roomful of important guests downstairs,” Kit said quickly. “We need their cooperation for the war and this is not going to help!”

Everyone ignored him.

It’s kind of hard to look commanding while holding your junk.

“Put the stake down, and move away,” I told Blondie. “That’s Mircea’s brother, Radu. He doesn’t have a seat on the Senate—”

“I know that!” he sneered. “We’re here for you!”

“You’ve tried that twice, and it hasn’t worked out so well,” I reminded him.

“Twice?” Louis-Cesare hissed, and yeah. The gorgeous Frenchman wasn’t looking so refined right now. The blue eyes were tinged with silver, the color they turned whenever he pulled up power. And the fangs were out, a drop of his own blood glistening on that luscious lower lip. He looked . . . feral.

“They’re just being stupid,” I told him, staring at the blood. And fighting a strange urge to lick it. “Making a try for my Senate seat—”

“I’m on the Senate,” Louis-Cesare said, his eyes solid silver now. “Why don’t you try me?”

And, okay, I might have been wrong about one of them. Because Purple Hair flipped the gun around, walked over, and handed it to me. “Let him go,” she told Dumber.

Who lived up to his name. “What the hell? What is wrong with you?”

“He’s going to kill you if you don’t,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“He can’t do that! I haven’t challenged him!”

“But he can challenge you. Now step away!”

But Blondie was either really stupid or really entitled or both. Because his chin got a stubborn tilt to it. “We have no quarrel with you,” he told Louis-Cesare. “We just want a fair fight with that bitch of a—”

Annnnnd, that’s why you’re careful what you wish for, I thought, as Louis-Cesare disappeared. Not like he did with his master power, because he didn’t need the Veil with this joker, but moving so fast that it almost looked like it. The next time I blinked, he was by Blondie, who he grabbed and threw into Marlowe. Because I guess he wasn’t finished with him yet.

And then a bunch of guys, Marlowe’s men at a guess, ran in and started chasing the fight around the ballroom. I considered interfering, but seriously, it was like twenty to one. I thought they could handle it.

Probably.

I bent to help Radu instead, but found that he’d already freed himself.

“You were loose all the time?” Purple Hair asked.

“Your friend isn’t very good at bondage,” Radu said, tossing the cuffs on the floor and a shining curtain of dark hair over his shoulder.

Radu was Mircea’s younger brother, but only by a few years. Something that ceases to matter when you’re both on the wrong side of five hundred. But while Mircea looked thirty, maybe thirty-five on a bad day, Radu could have passed for a teenager—if an elegant one.

And tonight was no exception. Louis-Cesare’s Sire was sporting a sapphire and gold patterned robe and some plain—if buttery satin can be called that—lounge pants. It was an attractive set, leaving a deep V at the neck that showed off naturally bronzed skin and brought out the startling turquoise of his eyes.

“It . . . wasn’t bondage,” Purple Hair said slowly. “And why didn’t you do something?”

“I didn’t want to make you feel bad.” Radu patted her gently on the arm. “You were trying so hard.”

“How did you know I’d be here?” I asked her, as she stood there, blinking at Radu. Who tended to have that effect on people. For his part, he wasn’t trying to rescue his son, who clearly didn’t need it, but had instead started puttering around in some plastic storage containers stacked behind the chair.

“Hello?” I tried again, snapping some fingers near her head. “Find me? How?”

“Phone,” she said, still looking at Radu. Before shaking herself and refocusing on me. “We tapped your phone, and overheard you talking to Vincent—”

“Vincent?”

She looked pained. “The happy one.”

Oh, Burbles.

“So we knew you’d be here sometime tonight. We persuaded a few party guests to include us in their group and, well . . .” She shrugged.

I frowned. With the mental gifts I’d seen her use, I could well believe that she could persuade some humans—even magical ones—that she was their best friend, at least long enough to get in the door. But there was something I didn’t get. “How did you bug my phone? You never had it.”

“There are ways to do it remotely. It’s not my thing, but Trevor said—”

“Trevor?” Despite everything, I felt myself start to grin.

She bit her lip.

“You’re partnered with a guy named—”

“There aren’t a lot of people willing to take you on!”

“For reasons,” Radu murmured, still puttering.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He beamed at her. “Such a pretty girl. You wouldn’t like being on the Senate, you know. So many boring meetings.”

“It’s the pinnacle of our existence! It’s what we live for, fight for! The chance to lead—”

“Yes, yes, that’s what they tell you,” he said, examining something he’d pulled from one of the cases. “Until you get on it. Then it’s all fiscal reports and bad coffee.”

She blinked at him some more.

“Hey!” I called to Louis-Cesare. “Don’t kill Trevor. I need him to fix my phone.”

“Trevor?” He looked confused for a moment, and then down at his bloody lump of a club. He tossed it away, and it tried to crawl off, before being trampled by the cavalry chasing their boss.

I turned back around, to see Purple Hair glowering at me.

“Don’t blame me,” I told her. “How did you think coming to Mircea’s apartment was going to go?”

“We didn’t have a choice!”

“You couldn’t just catch me out somewhere?”

“Like the theatre?” she asked sourly.

I grinned. “Dry out yet?”

She scowled. “Sure. This is all funny to you.”

“It actually wasn’t that funny,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.

“Like running around in old sweats or—” She gestured at my sensible underwear. “Here the rest of us are, trying to be as intimidating as possible, and you go around like that. Like we’re all just ridiculous and you don’t have to care.”

“I don’t actually dress with you in mind.”

“I know. That’s what’s so infuriating. Everyone else is so concerned with their image, and you just . . .” Her lips tightened. “You walked out of that house the other day, no weapons, no makeup, barefoot. And I wondered why my skin suddenly tightened. I realized later: the most intimidating look is not to have one at all.”

“And yet you came back.”

“What else is there? You don’t know what it’s like, starting with nothing and clawing your way up, year after year, century after century. Until, finally, you get within sight of everything you ever wanted, only to have the rug ripped out from under you.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Bullshit! Daughter of a senator, dating another one, you’re practically royalty!”

“And a dirty dhampir.”

“Yeah, but even that. No one knows how to fight that. You’re something out of legend, while the rest of us—”

She suddenly turned around and walked away.

I turned back to see Radu looking at me disapprovingly.

“What?”

“You could have been nicer.”

“Nicer? She’s been trying to kill me all week!”

Radu tutted. “She isn’t powerful enough to kill you—”

“She brought a friend!”

Radu glanced at Trevor, and rolled his eyes. “She simply thinks she has to try, that’s all. They brainwash them into believing that there’s nothing else to do with eternity than rule over everybody else. Then they finally make it, and wonder why they hate it.”

“Are you trying to tell me I won’t like being on the Senate?”

“You’re already on it. How are you finding it?”

“A pain in the ass.”

“Ah. The usual, then.”

“Is that how Geminus found it?”

Most people would have asked why I wanted to know, but not Radu. “Geminus thought he was Caesar reborn, and we were merely his court.”

“Well, he was the oldest on the Senate, except for the consul.”

“A two-thousand-year-old fool is still a fool.”

“And his family?”

“He trained them to believe that they were meant to rule over us lesser creatures. And yet, he never bothered with any sort of contingency plan for when he died. One had the impression that his plan was to live forever. When that failed”—he shrugged—“it left them scattered, leaderless, and at the mercy of us lesser creatures.”

I remembered Ray saying that at the bottom, you allied with whoever would help you survive, no matter who it was. Who had they allied with? And where the hell did they fit in?

Usually, I had to try to roust suspects out of the woodwork, but this puzzle was the opposite: too many pieces, and none of them seemed to connect. There were smugglers and slavers and smugglers who were also slavers. There were trolls battling the bad guys and trolls who might be the bad guys. There was a vargr who might or might not be a queen of the Light Fey, or possibly an operative sent by her husband to make it look like she was guilty. Or possibly someone else altogether, because who the hell knew?

After four days, I didn’t know much more than I had when I started.

I didn’t even know what the hell they were smuggling!

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Marlowe being thrown into the middle of a very nice baby grand.

“Oh, really,” Radu said in annoyance. “I was going to keep that.”

“Seriously, he didn’t do anything,” I called to Louis-Cesare, who was now pounding out a sonata courtesy of Marlowe’s head. “And we’re broken up anyway. This is childish.”

Louis-Cesare belted Marlowe, and watched him go down. “This isn’t about us!”

“Then what is it about?”

Marlowe staggered back to his feet, and Louis-Cesare hit him again. “I don’t like his face.”

“Oh, that’s mature.”

Purple Hair wandered back over with a drink in her hand, while a dozen of Marlowe’s guys jumped Louis-Cesare, I guess to give the boss a moment. “You broke up?”

“Yeah.”

We watched Louis-Cesare throw off the guards, grab Marlowe, and launch him at a marble column hard enough to crack it. He’d lost his nice blue suit coat, and his shirt was torn, showing off the kind of physique a vampire doesn’t need, but which is still . . . decorative. And his auburn hair had escaped its usual clip, falling around those broad shoulders like he was about to pose for a romance novel cover.

Fabio wished he’d looked that good.

Purple Hair must have thought so, too, because her “Why?” was tinged with disbelief.

“It’s a long story.”

“Then you wouldn’t care if I—”

“I’ll rip your throat out.”

Louis-Cesare, who had been pounding Marlowe into the parquet, looked up. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

And then Marlowe’s guys re-formed and charged, all at once.

I looked back at Radu. “Why are you dressed like that? Are you staying here now?”

He nodded. “It has everything I need. Several floors, a nice amount of space for entertaining, and a good number of servants’ rooms. Of course, it needs work.”

He frowned around at the gold and white extravagance, the gleaming parquet floor, and the glittering chandeliers, all three of them.

“You bought it?”

“Yes. I’m staying with Mircea while I get it sorted, but Kit was having a party—”

“So you came up here.”

He nodded.

“And Horatiu?”

“We followed him,” Purple Hair said. “He was serving hors d’oeuvres, but he got lost.”

That sounded about right.

“But then he started screaming his head off for no reason,” she said. Because it would never occur to her that someone like Horatiu could pick up on her intentions. But he had an echo of Mircea’s gifts, like everyone in the clan, and while he might be weak as a kitten, he was brave as a lion. My fist clenched. If they’d hurt him—

“He was going to raise the whole house!” Purple Hair said.

“So you had to shut him up.”

“Trevor said if he was going to scream bloody murder, we should oblige him—”

I felt my fangs drop.

She saw and her lip curled. “I don’t make war on . . . whatever he is. He’s fine. He’s tied up with that big blond in the bedroom.”

I assumed she was talking about Gunther the Gorgeous, Radu’s “bodyguard,” a giant with the suntan and six-pack of a professional athlete—maybe a surfer, because the shag was a little long. But he was nobody’s fool. And despite the fact that Radu hadn’t hired him for that reason, he was actually good at his job.

Bet he was pissed right about now.

“I hope you did a better job on Gunther than on Radu,” I told her.

“Didn’t have to. He was already tied up when we got here.”

I looked at ’Du.

He shrugged. “It was his turn.”

I sighed.

“Why didn’t you just call for help?” Radu had Mircea’s gifts to a far greater extent than Horatiu. He could have had half the clan here in a few minutes.

“I tried. She blocked me.”

I looked at Purple Hair with new respect. “Impressive.”

Her lips twisted. “Well. Not so much now.”

And then we had to duck because a shirtless guy flew overhead, spinning like a Frisbee.

I looked after him for a moment, confused, because he was one of Marlowe’s boys, and they’d all been fully clothed when they came in. Then I spied Marlowe himself, throwing a settee at Louis-Cesare, while wearing a new white dress shirt. Louis-Cesare and the sofa went sailing backward, and Marlowe snapped his fingers at another of his guys, who was trying to get out of a pair of trousers.

He was getting dressed on the fly, I realized.

“He’s too tall,” I yelled, and saw Marlowe’s head jerk up.

“The trousers.” I pointed. “They’re gonna be too—”

The sofa came whipping back across the room, taking out Marlowe and his guy.

“Never mind.”

“It will be good to get back to normal,” Radu was saying, when I turned back around. “I’ve spent so much time going to and fro, from the consul’s to Louis-Cesare’s—you have no idea. It’s been so inconvenient.”

“The consul’s?” I felt my nose wrinkle. “Why would you want to go there?”

“It’s where my laboratory is—was, before her men dismantled it.” And, for the first time, I saw what looked like genuine anger. “I went in the other day to find my equipment in boxes, all jumbled up!”

“They just moved you out?”

“They carried in a bed while I stood there! Said it was for some ambassador or other.” He sniffed.

“Is that what all this is?” I asked, nodding at the boxes. “Lab stuff?”

“Oh, no. That arrived yesterday.” Perfectly arched brows drew together. “I wasn’t going to let the Senate’s brutes move a damned thing. Heaven only knows what shape I would have received it in!” He held out a familiar-looking orb. “This is what I’m meant to be experimenting on.”

I took it gingerly, because Radu was the Senate’s mad scientist, and had been known to work with some scary stuff.

But not this time.

I held the little orb in my hand, and decided that the universe was fucking with me.

“What do you think?” he asked, watching me with bright eyes.

“I think you overpaid.”

“They were free.”

“I still think you overpaid.”

“What is it?” Purple Hair asked, peering over my shoulder. Because most vamps don’t need to buy the kind of insurance that I do.

“Junk,” I told her, and tossed her the orb. It looked exactly like the ones James had found at the warehouse.

“Where did you get it?” I asked Radu.

“From a smugglers’ warehouse out in Queens. We’d planned a raid for earlier tonight, but somebody beat us to it. They managed to evade us, but one truck hit a light pole and was left behind. It was full of these.” He gestured at the containers.

Huh. Well, that couldn’t have been Blue; he’d been busy tonight. So maybe the reporters had been right, after all. There really was an underworld war going on. But over these? Why not just knock over another semi, or hit up the manufacturers, if you wanted them so badly? According to James, that’s what everyone else had been doing.

“That’s what the Senate wants to know,” Radu said, when I asked. “I was hoping you’d have an idea. You know about magic, Dory.”

“Not this kind.”

But still. There was something going on with these “weapons.” Somebody was risking their lives for the magical equivalent of whoopee cushions, and I didn’t know why.

Radu sighed. “No more do I, I’m afraid. But you know how the Senate is. Everything they don’t understand is automatically my purview. Of course, it would be easier if, at the same time they’re increasing my workload, they weren’t also kicking me out of house and—”

His lips kept moving, but I couldn’t hear anymore. Because an alarm had gone off, loud and insistent, drowning them out. And then the lights flickered off, and an electric frisson flooded over my skin, a wash of power so strong that it lifted my hair like a lightning bolt had just struck nearby.

“The wards?” Purple Hair yelled, looking around. Because the big boys had just come online, and they don’t play well with modern power sources.

“How odd.” Radu frowned. “Must be a malfunc—”

The whole house shuddered, hard enough to almost knock me off my feet, and to send Purple Hair to one knee. Hard enough to set the chandeliers swinging violently, throwing small scintillations of light everywhere, moonlight refracted through crystal. Hard enough to stop the fight in its tracks, and to have Marlowe yelling, “What the hell?” from under Louis-Cesare’s arm.

Too hard.

Mircea was a senator; senators have enemies. They also like to sleep in safety. And while he always had some human servants hanging around during the day, just in case, good wards were simply what you did.

The kind that didn’t shudder from a single blow.

Or blow inward in a carnage of expensive glass and fine painted wood a second later, followed by a bunch of guys in masks.

Looked like somebody wanted their stuff back, I thought, right before the world whited out.