Chapter One
There was no sign on the abandoned church, but someone had scribbled “Let us Prey” above the main doors. As a Catholic, I didn’t approve. As someone bent on doing exactly that, it seemed oddly appropriate.
I pushed open the heavy wooden doors and went in. It looked like I’d guessed right in going with office chic when I’d gotten ready for the evening. There were a minority of Goths and some tourist types in the church-turned-nightclub, but most of the crowd seemed to be composed of those recently released from corporate hell.
I fit in well enough, in a blue silk tank top I sweated through within five minutes and a short black skirt. The tank matched the new streaks in my short brown hair; the skirt matched my eyes. I got a beer at the bar and wandered around, looking for trouble.
It didn’t take long to find it. The club was populated mostly by humans, but it was owned by a vampire. A group of the fashionable undead showed up every night for the all-you-can-eat buffet, and from the look of things, the owner was dining early.
He had a pretty brunette in a corner, his hand up her skirt and his fangs in her throat. That was frowned upon by the Vampire Senate, the ruling body for North American vampires, who preferred feedings to be kept nice and subtle. But then, this guy had already proven he wasn’t too concerned about the Senate’s point of view—about a lot of things. That was why I was here. They intended to teach a lesson, and to make it memorable.
The woman was facing out toward the crowd, and by the time I reached them, he’d managed to get her dress open all the way down. She wasn’t wearing much underneath, unless you counted the scrap of black lace he had his hand inside. He did something that caused a quick, indrawn breath and a helpless shift of her hips. One of the bystanders laughed.
There were a dozen of them, all vampires, and at least a few were masters. I’d hoped to catch him alone, or at worst with two or three others. I hadn’t planned on the show, and it complicated things.
He pulled the dress off her shoulders and it slithered to the floor, over skin already so sensitized that every tiny movement was torture. She began to breathe heavily through her nose, trembling like a fever had gripped her. He hadn’t bothered to fog her mind, because it’s no fun if they aren’t terrified. And because his boys wanted to play.
Vampires have a limited ability to project thoughts, and because of my heritage, I pick them up better than most. She wouldn’t meet their eyes, wouldn’t raise her head. But she knew what they saw by the images they thoughtfully kept sending.
From a dozen perspectives, she was bombarded with images of her body, slick and shining under the lights, of the rivulets sweat had carved through the goose bumps on her skin, of her last piece of clothing being jerked down her thighs. And the pictures came in stereo, with every sound that was ripped from her throat magnified a dozen times and sent back to her. The watchers’ emotions leaked through, too: arousal, anticipation and, most of all, rising bloodlust.
That was especially true of the monster draining her, yet still she writhed back against him. And when his hands roamed over her sweat-slick skin, she moaned desperately. She was trapped in the feedback loop of sensation that went with the feeding process. It was better than a drug as it coursed through her veins, tightening her nipples, shortening her breath and siphoning out her life.
I’d assumed that, with so many available donors, he wouldn’t choose to drain her. Body disposal was messy and time-consuming, and prompted investigations that he had every reason to avoid. But he must have liked her taste, because even as her legs gave out and she collapsed, he followed her down.
It’s crazy to interrupt a vampire when he’s feeding, when he’s at his most vulnerable and his most deadly. But then, I haven’t been sane in centuries. The toe of my boot caught his wrist, tossing it away from the girl.
“You want to dance with me,” I told him clearly, as he rounded on me with a snarl.
Odds were that no human had treated him that cavalierly before, and he clearly didn’t like it. He liked even less that some of his vamps had seen me do it. But it intrigued him, too. I was suddenly a tastier dish than the one who lay gasping like a fish out of water, the velvet of her dress crushed beneath her.
“You know, I think you’re right,” he said, flashing me a winning smile with more than a hint of power behind it
I ignored it and tangled a fist in his shirt so I wouldn’t have to touch him. I dragged him onto the dance floor and he didn’t try to get away. He just followed me with a glint in his eye that promised pain to come.
He had no idea.
He grinned, and his eyes dropped to my hips as I followed the beat. “You look hot.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same. His eyes were glued to my chest, maybe because it was directly in his line of sight. I’m five foot two inches, and the boots added another three, but that still meant he was missing a crucial element of the tall, dark and handsome stereotype. It didn’t matter, since he was missing the rest, too.
Not that he appeared to know it.
“Thanks,” I said.
He laughed. “I meant, you look like you could use a drink.”
“If we can have it in private.”
A blond eyebrow rose. “That can be arranged.”
He took my hand, towing me across the sticky dance floor, scattering the crowd like peasants before royalty. The analogy amused me, considering that he’d been born the bastard son of a pig farmer. Not that I was in any position to talk. I was the illegitimate daughter of a serving wench and a vampire. It didn’t get much trashier than that.
Of course, we’d both come a long way from our inauspicious beginnings. These days, he went by the name of Hugo Vleck and operated a successful club when he wasn’t selling illegal fey narcotics. And as for me . . . Well, I solve problems of the vampire kind, and Vleck was making my employer very unhappy. My job was to cheer him up. The fact that I was going to enjoy it was just a bonus.
The crowd was five thick around the bar, but we didn’t have any trouble getting served. That wasn’t too surprising since my date owned the club, but he shot me a look over his shoulder, checking to see if I was suitably impressed. I smiled and he put a hand on my ass.
“Cristal for the lady,” he told the young vamp bartender, giving me a little squeeze.
“Will you be drinking, too, sir?”
Vleck grinned, showing off his fangs. “Later.”
He and the bartender exchanged a look, while I tried to appear like someone who didn’t know that a lot of vamps prefer their alcohol straight from a victim’s veins. They say it increases the high they get from feeding, and is the only way to feel the burn with their metabolism. Vleck was clearly calculating how much more it would take to get me all the way to drunk. I could have told him there wasn’t that much booze in the world, but why spoil his evening?
He had so little of it left.
The bartender sat a champagne flute on the bar but Vleck shook his head. “I’ll take the bottle. Wrap it up.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“My place. It isn’t far.”
Wow. He must have really planned to get nasty. I draped an arm around his waist, and rested my chin on his shoulder. “I don’t feel like waiting. Isn’t there somewhere we could go here?”
“Naw. The office is too small—you can barely turn around in that thing.”
“So? You’re the boss. Make some space,” I said, smiling seductively and pulling him away from the bar. Like with most crappy clubs, the bathrooms were down a dark hallway. I dragged him into the men’s room and tugged his shirt off.
He chuckled and disengaged long enough to haul a couple of guys out of a stall and throw them out the door, one with his trousers still around his knees. I leaned against a sink while he instructed one of the vamps acting as bouncers to tell everyone that the facilities were out of order. Then he turned and grabbed me by the waistband.
“Let’s see what you got.”
“Thought you’d never ask.” I smiled and shut the door with my foot.
Five minutes later, I emerged, a little out of breath but not too bad, all things considered.
The bouncer caught my eye on the way out. He seemed surprised, maybe because I was still alive. But then he grinned. “Have fun?
“Loved him to pieces.”
I pushed open the heavy wooden doors and went in. It looked like I’d guessed right in going with office chic when I’d gotten ready for the evening. There were a minority of Goths and some tourist types in the church-turned-nightclub, but most of the crowd seemed to be composed of those recently released from corporate hell.
I fit in well enough, in a blue silk tank top I sweated through within five minutes and a short black skirt. The tank matched the new streaks in my short brown hair; the skirt matched my eyes. I got a beer at the bar and wandered around, looking for trouble.
It didn’t take long to find it. The club was populated mostly by humans, but it was owned by a vampire. A group of the fashionable undead showed up every night for the all-you-can-eat buffet, and from the look of things, the owner was dining early.
He had a pretty brunette in a corner, his hand up her skirt and his fangs in her throat. That was frowned upon by the Vampire Senate, the ruling body for North American vampires, who preferred feedings to be kept nice and subtle. But then, this guy had already proven he wasn’t too concerned about the Senate’s point of view—about a lot of things. That was why I was here. They intended to teach a lesson, and to make it memorable.
The woman was facing out toward the crowd, and by the time I reached them, he’d managed to get her dress open all the way down. She wasn’t wearing much underneath, unless you counted the scrap of black lace he had his hand inside. He did something that caused a quick, indrawn breath and a helpless shift of her hips. One of the bystanders laughed.
There were a dozen of them, all vampires, and at least a few were masters. I’d hoped to catch him alone, or at worst with two or three others. I hadn’t planned on the show, and it complicated things.
He pulled the dress off her shoulders and it slithered to the floor, over skin already so sensitized that every tiny movement was torture. She began to breathe heavily through her nose, trembling like a fever had gripped her. He hadn’t bothered to fog her mind, because it’s no fun if they aren’t terrified. And because his boys wanted to play.
Vampires have a limited ability to project thoughts, and because of my heritage, I pick them up better than most. She wouldn’t meet their eyes, wouldn’t raise her head. But she knew what they saw by the images they thoughtfully kept sending.
From a dozen perspectives, she was bombarded with images of her body, slick and shining under the lights, of the rivulets sweat had carved through the goose bumps on her skin, of her last piece of clothing being jerked down her thighs. And the pictures came in stereo, with every sound that was ripped from her throat magnified a dozen times and sent back to her. The watchers’ emotions leaked through, too: arousal, anticipation and, most of all, rising bloodlust.
That was especially true of the monster draining her, yet still she writhed back against him. And when his hands roamed over her sweat-slick skin, she moaned desperately. She was trapped in the feedback loop of sensation that went with the feeding process. It was better than a drug as it coursed through her veins, tightening her nipples, shortening her breath and siphoning out her life.
I’d assumed that, with so many available donors, he wouldn’t choose to drain her. Body disposal was messy and time-consuming, and prompted investigations that he had every reason to avoid. But he must have liked her taste, because even as her legs gave out and she collapsed, he followed her down.
It’s crazy to interrupt a vampire when he’s feeding, when he’s at his most vulnerable and his most deadly. But then, I haven’t been sane in centuries. The toe of my boot caught his wrist, tossing it away from the girl.
“You want to dance with me,” I told him clearly, as he rounded on me with a snarl.
Odds were that no human had treated him that cavalierly before, and he clearly didn’t like it. He liked even less that some of his vamps had seen me do it. But it intrigued him, too. I was suddenly a tastier dish than the one who lay gasping like a fish out of water, the velvet of her dress crushed beneath her.
“You know, I think you’re right,” he said, flashing me a winning smile with more than a hint of power behind it
I ignored it and tangled a fist in his shirt so I wouldn’t have to touch him. I dragged him onto the dance floor and he didn’t try to get away. He just followed me with a glint in his eye that promised pain to come.
He had no idea.
He grinned, and his eyes dropped to my hips as I followed the beat. “You look hot.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same. His eyes were glued to my chest, maybe because it was directly in his line of sight. I’m five foot two inches, and the boots added another three, but that still meant he was missing a crucial element of the tall, dark and handsome stereotype. It didn’t matter, since he was missing the rest, too.
Not that he appeared to know it.
“Thanks,” I said.
He laughed. “I meant, you look like you could use a drink.”
“If we can have it in private.”
A blond eyebrow rose. “That can be arranged.”
He took my hand, towing me across the sticky dance floor, scattering the crowd like peasants before royalty. The analogy amused me, considering that he’d been born the bastard son of a pig farmer. Not that I was in any position to talk. I was the illegitimate daughter of a serving wench and a vampire. It didn’t get much trashier than that.
Of course, we’d both come a long way from our inauspicious beginnings. These days, he went by the name of Hugo Vleck and operated a successful club when he wasn’t selling illegal fey narcotics. And as for me . . . Well, I solve problems of the vampire kind, and Vleck was making my employer very unhappy. My job was to cheer him up. The fact that I was going to enjoy it was just a bonus.
The crowd was five thick around the bar, but we didn’t have any trouble getting served. That wasn’t too surprising since my date owned the club, but he shot me a look over his shoulder, checking to see if I was suitably impressed. I smiled and he put a hand on my ass.
“Cristal for the lady,” he told the young vamp bartender, giving me a little squeeze.
“Will you be drinking, too, sir?”
Vleck grinned, showing off his fangs. “Later.”
He and the bartender exchanged a look, while I tried to appear like someone who didn’t know that a lot of vamps prefer their alcohol straight from a victim’s veins. They say it increases the high they get from feeding, and is the only way to feel the burn with their metabolism. Vleck was clearly calculating how much more it would take to get me all the way to drunk. I could have told him there wasn’t that much booze in the world, but why spoil his evening?
He had so little of it left.
The bartender sat a champagne flute on the bar but Vleck shook his head. “I’ll take the bottle. Wrap it up.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“My place. It isn’t far.”
Wow. He must have really planned to get nasty. I draped an arm around his waist, and rested my chin on his shoulder. “I don’t feel like waiting. Isn’t there somewhere we could go here?”
“Naw. The office is too small—you can barely turn around in that thing.”
“So? You’re the boss. Make some space,” I said, smiling seductively and pulling him away from the bar. Like with most crappy clubs, the bathrooms were down a dark hallway. I dragged him into the men’s room and tugged his shirt off.
He chuckled and disengaged long enough to haul a couple of guys out of a stall and throw them out the door, one with his trousers still around his knees. I leaned against a sink while he instructed one of the vamps acting as bouncers to tell everyone that the facilities were out of order. Then he turned and grabbed me by the waistband.
“Let’s see what you got.”
“Thought you’d never ask.” I smiled and shut the door with my foot.
Five minutes later, I emerged, a little out of breath but not too bad, all things considered.
The bouncer caught my eye on the way out. He seemed surprised, maybe because I was still alive. But then he grinned. “Have fun?
“Loved him to pieces.”
* * *
Go to Top
I stopped by vamp central, aka the East Coast Office of the North American Vampire Senate, to get my check. The vamps usually took care of fungus like Vleck themselves, holding each master responsible for his own servants’ behavior. But the system wasn’t as perfect as they liked people to believe.
Vampires could be emancipated from their masters’ control when they reached a certain power level, freeing them from forced obedience. Others were under the control of senior-level masters on other Senates, who didn’t always care about the rules laid down by their North American counterpart. And then there were the revenants, who had had something go wrong in the Change, and ended up answering to nobody but their own twisted minds.
When any of these types started causing trouble, the Senate stepped in. And luckily for me, the current war in the supernatural community had stretched their resources. It had gotten so bad lately that they were even willing to employ a dhampir—that hated cross between a vampire and a human—on the cleanup crew. But I always got the impression that they disinfected the office after I left.
The elevator opened onto a scene of old-world elegance. Shiny cherrywood pillars surrounded a polished table set with exotic flowers, dappled by the light of an exquisite crystal chandelier. Underfoot, an inlaid marble floor in a sunburst pattern in warm shades of gold and amber anchored the scene. It would have been an attractive room, if not for the strokes of too-white meanness propping up the walls.
One of them peeled off to block my path. Waspish and fine-boned, he was wearing a close-fitting coat and knee pants of midnight blue velvet and heels an inch higher than mine. His long, pin-straight blond hair was pulled back into a queue, and he had an honest-to-God cravat. He looked like he’d stepped out of a period movie—the kind where they don’t stint on the costumes—and his expression said he smelled something bad.
“Who let you in?” he demanded.
Every time they changed the guards, it was the same story. And it was always worse with the older ones. They recalled the good old days when dhampirs were killed on sight, preferably slowly. Their attitude pissed me off, considering that I’d been working here for over a month now, and the nightclub scene had left me spoiling for a fight. Vleck hadn’t been nearly enough of a challenge.
But damn it, I’d promised a certain someone to be on my best behavior. “I’m here to see Mircea,” I told him, instead of punching the vamp through the pretty brocaded wallpaper.
“Lord Mircea.
“Whatever. I have a delivery,” I said, pushing past.
And found my arm seized in a bruising grip. “You can wait in the alley with the rest of the garbage until sent for.”
“I’m tired, I’m hungry and I have a head in a bag,” I warned him. “Do not fuck with me.”
He slapped me, hard enough to rock my head back, so I nailed his hand to the wall with a knife. He pulled it out, the slice through his palm healing instantly, and lunged. And ended up dangling off the floor like an errant puppy.
“Best behavior?” someone asked. I looked up to see the pleasant goateed face, curly dark hair and gleaming brown eyes of Senator Kit Marlowe. His agreeable expression didn’t stop him from squeezing the guy’s neck hard enough to make his eyes pop.
Since Marlowe hates me only marginally less than, say, bubonic plague, the smile made me nervous. I suspected that was why he did it, but it worked every time. I shrugged. “I didn’t stick it in his heart.”
“Perhaps you should have,” he said mildly, and opened his hand. The vamp hit the floor, jumped to his feet and went for me again in a blur of speed. So I grabbed him by the neck and punched his head through the pretty wallpaper.
“Bring her in, Mikhail,” someone called from off to the right.
Mikhail must have been the one with his head in the plaster, because nobody moved. I released him and he pulled out, pale eyes glittering with hate. I smiled. It’s always so much easier when the vamps I deal with despise me. It’s the ones who profess anything else that confuse the hell out of me. Mikhail and I understood each other; he’d kill me if he got the chance, and I’d make sure he never did. Easy.
“I’ll take her,” Marlowe said, while Mikhail stared at him.
“My lord. She attacked me!”
“If you are foolish enough to assault Lord Mircea’s daughter while he is on the premises, then you deserve what you get,” Marlowe told him shortly.
I raised an eyebrow. “While he’s on the premises?” I repeated.
That disturbing grin widened.
I followed him through the open doorway. We passed through a sitting room and into an office with more of the same, decor-wise: hand-carved moldings, a soaring ceiling and a mural of fat cherubs that gazed down on visitors with smug superiority.
There was also a desk. It was a massive old mahogany masterpiece with carved this and original that, but it didn’t draw the eye nearly as much as the man seated behind it. Unlike Vleck, Senator Mircea Basarab knew how to rock the tall, dark and handsome thing, and tonight he’d gone all out in full white-tie regalia. He gleamed, from the top of his burnished head to the toes of his perfectly shined shoes.
“All you need is a red-lined cape,” I told him sourly, dropping my duffel bag onto the desk. It squelched a little. He winced.
“Your word is really quite good enough, Dorina,” he informed me, as I fished out the remains. “I do not require a physical specimen unless I wish to question him.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Vleck was dripping onto the nice marble floor, so I set him on the desk. But that didn’t work either. He rolled and Marlowe had to jump to rescue some papers before they were ruined. I glanced around, but there were no handy baskets. So I stuck him onto the dagger-shaped memo holder. There was still some dripping, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere.
I looked up to find two unhappy vamps looking at me. “Okay,” I said, “it’s all the same to me. I just want my check.”
Mircea took out a leather-covered check book and started writing, while Marlowe regarded Vleck thoughtfully. “I’ve always wondered, how do you get out?”
“What?”
“Of the club or the house or what have you.” He waved a hand. “As soon as a master-level vampire dies, every one of his children knows it. Even if they are old enough and powerful enough to have been emancipated, they feel it here”—he tapped his chest—”like a blow. Yet you regularly kill such vampires and escape the premises without your own head ending up on a pike. So I ask again, how do you get out?”
“I walk.”
He frowned. “I am serious. I would like to know.”
“I’m sure you would,” I said sarcastically, as Mircea tore off the check. Marlowe ran the Senate’s intelligence organization, and he’d probably vastly prefer to keep matters like Vleck in the hands of his own deadly little hit squad. But he couldn’t afford to risk them in wartime on nonessential missions.
The conflict between the Silver Circle of light mages and their dark counterpart had been going on for a while now, and just to confuse the hell out of everyone, the vamps had decided to ally with the light. But it stretched their manpower, and they seemed to have more trouble taking care of the Vlecks of this world than I did.
I intended to keep it that way. This was the best money I’d made in years.
“Every vampire in that nightclub knew the moment their master died, yet you simply walked out,” he said resentfully, refusing to let it go.
I put on my innocent face, which seems to annoy him about as much as those damn smiles do me. “Yeah. I guess I got lucky.”
“You do it every time!”
“Really lucky,” I amended, trying to take the check. But Mircea held on to the other end.
“Have you by any chance seen Louis-Cesare recently?”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Why can you never answer a simple question?”
“Maybe because you never ask any. And what would the darling of the European Senate want with me?”
We’d met only recently, despite being members of the same dysfunctional clan. It wasn’t too surprising since we came from opposite ends of the vampire world. I was the dhampir daughter of the family patriarch, the little-known stain on an otherwise immaculate record. Dhampirs are feared and loathed by vampires for obvious reasons, and most families who accidentally end up with one quickly bury the error. Why Mircea hadn’t done so was still something of a mystery. Maybe because I was sometimes useful, unlike tonight.
Louis-Cesare, on the other hand, was vamp royalty. The only made Child of Mircea’s younger and far stranger brother, Radu, he had been breaking records almost since birth. He’d become a master, a rank many vamps never reached, before he’d been dead half a century. Another century had elevated him to first-level status, on par with the top players in the vamp world. And within a decade after that, he’d become the darling of the European Senate, feted for his looks, his wealth and his ability on the dueling field, which had gotten them out of many sticky situations.
A month ago, the prince and the pariah had crossed paths because we had one thing in common: we were both very good at killing things. And Mircea’s bug-eyed, crazy brother Vlad had needed killing if anyone ever had. But our collaboration had had a rough start. Louis-Cesare didn’t like taking orders from a dhampir, and I didn’t like having a partner, period. But we eventually sorted things out and got the job done. He’d even learned some manners, before the end. And I had started to think that it was kind of…nice, having someone to watch my back for a change.
Sometimes I could be really stupid.
“Radu mentioned that the two of you had grown…close,” Mircea said carefully.
“Radu was mistaken.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Marlowe observed. “Have you seen or had any contact with him in the last few weeks?”
“Why? What’s he done?”
“Nothing . . . yet.”
“Okay, what are you afraid he’ll do?”
Marlowe glanced at Mircea, and they held one of those silent conversations vampires sometimes have, the kind I’m not supposed to know about. “I would merely like to ask him about a family matter,” Mircea said, after a moment.
“As you’re constantly reminding me, I’m family. Tell me and maybe I can help. Or does the family thing only work when you want something?”
Mircea took a deep breath, which he didn’t need, to show me how much of a pain I was being. “It’s about his family, Dorina, and is not my story to tell. Now, have you seen him?”
“I haven’t heard from him in a month,” I said flatly, suddenly tiring of the game. Most vampire clans unlucky enough to end up with a dhampir quickly bury the problem—six feet under. I supposed I should be happy that Mircea had taken a somewhat more enlightened view. But as far as my status as family was concerned, it was and always would be second-class.
“Should that change, I would appreciate receiving word,” he told me.
“And I’d appreciate receiving my check, or are you planning to hold it all night?”
Mircea raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t let go. “I may have another commission for you tomorrow.” He pushed a folder across the desk, careful to avoid the blood splatter.
“May have?”
“It has yet to be decided. Will you be available?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And, Dorina, should I choose to go through with it, I will need this one alive.”
“Will the handy-dandy portable size do?” If I didn’t stake the heart, a master vamp could live in pieces anywhere from a week to a month, depending on his power level. And it was a lot easier to sneak out a head in a bag than a whole body. Plus, there was something about decapitation that made even the most obstinate vamp feel chatty.
“That will be sufficient,” Mircea said, gazing cynically at Vleck. The ex-vamp’s mouth had slipped open and his tongue was hanging out. At least he wasn’t drooling, I thought, and snatched the check.
God, how I loved easy money.
Vampires could be emancipated from their masters’ control when they reached a certain power level, freeing them from forced obedience. Others were under the control of senior-level masters on other Senates, who didn’t always care about the rules laid down by their North American counterpart. And then there were the revenants, who had had something go wrong in the Change, and ended up answering to nobody but their own twisted minds.
When any of these types started causing trouble, the Senate stepped in. And luckily for me, the current war in the supernatural community had stretched their resources. It had gotten so bad lately that they were even willing to employ a dhampir—that hated cross between a vampire and a human—on the cleanup crew. But I always got the impression that they disinfected the office after I left.
The elevator opened onto a scene of old-world elegance. Shiny cherrywood pillars surrounded a polished table set with exotic flowers, dappled by the light of an exquisite crystal chandelier. Underfoot, an inlaid marble floor in a sunburst pattern in warm shades of gold and amber anchored the scene. It would have been an attractive room, if not for the strokes of too-white meanness propping up the walls.
One of them peeled off to block my path. Waspish and fine-boned, he was wearing a close-fitting coat and knee pants of midnight blue velvet and heels an inch higher than mine. His long, pin-straight blond hair was pulled back into a queue, and he had an honest-to-God cravat. He looked like he’d stepped out of a period movie—the kind where they don’t stint on the costumes—and his expression said he smelled something bad.
“Who let you in?” he demanded.
Every time they changed the guards, it was the same story. And it was always worse with the older ones. They recalled the good old days when dhampirs were killed on sight, preferably slowly. Their attitude pissed me off, considering that I’d been working here for over a month now, and the nightclub scene had left me spoiling for a fight. Vleck hadn’t been nearly enough of a challenge.
But damn it, I’d promised a certain someone to be on my best behavior. “I’m here to see Mircea,” I told him, instead of punching the vamp through the pretty brocaded wallpaper.
“Lord Mircea.
“Whatever. I have a delivery,” I said, pushing past.
And found my arm seized in a bruising grip. “You can wait in the alley with the rest of the garbage until sent for.”
“I’m tired, I’m hungry and I have a head in a bag,” I warned him. “Do not fuck with me.”
He slapped me, hard enough to rock my head back, so I nailed his hand to the wall with a knife. He pulled it out, the slice through his palm healing instantly, and lunged. And ended up dangling off the floor like an errant puppy.
“Best behavior?” someone asked. I looked up to see the pleasant goateed face, curly dark hair and gleaming brown eyes of Senator Kit Marlowe. His agreeable expression didn’t stop him from squeezing the guy’s neck hard enough to make his eyes pop.
Since Marlowe hates me only marginally less than, say, bubonic plague, the smile made me nervous. I suspected that was why he did it, but it worked every time. I shrugged. “I didn’t stick it in his heart.”
“Perhaps you should have,” he said mildly, and opened his hand. The vamp hit the floor, jumped to his feet and went for me again in a blur of speed. So I grabbed him by the neck and punched his head through the pretty wallpaper.
“Bring her in, Mikhail,” someone called from off to the right.
Mikhail must have been the one with his head in the plaster, because nobody moved. I released him and he pulled out, pale eyes glittering with hate. I smiled. It’s always so much easier when the vamps I deal with despise me. It’s the ones who profess anything else that confuse the hell out of me. Mikhail and I understood each other; he’d kill me if he got the chance, and I’d make sure he never did. Easy.
“I’ll take her,” Marlowe said, while Mikhail stared at him.
“My lord. She attacked me!”
“If you are foolish enough to assault Lord Mircea’s daughter while he is on the premises, then you deserve what you get,” Marlowe told him shortly.
I raised an eyebrow. “While he’s on the premises?” I repeated.
That disturbing grin widened.
I followed him through the open doorway. We passed through a sitting room and into an office with more of the same, decor-wise: hand-carved moldings, a soaring ceiling and a mural of fat cherubs that gazed down on visitors with smug superiority.
There was also a desk. It was a massive old mahogany masterpiece with carved this and original that, but it didn’t draw the eye nearly as much as the man seated behind it. Unlike Vleck, Senator Mircea Basarab knew how to rock the tall, dark and handsome thing, and tonight he’d gone all out in full white-tie regalia. He gleamed, from the top of his burnished head to the toes of his perfectly shined shoes.
“All you need is a red-lined cape,” I told him sourly, dropping my duffel bag onto the desk. It squelched a little. He winced.
“Your word is really quite good enough, Dorina,” he informed me, as I fished out the remains. “I do not require a physical specimen unless I wish to question him.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Vleck was dripping onto the nice marble floor, so I set him on the desk. But that didn’t work either. He rolled and Marlowe had to jump to rescue some papers before they were ruined. I glanced around, but there were no handy baskets. So I stuck him onto the dagger-shaped memo holder. There was still some dripping, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere.
I looked up to find two unhappy vamps looking at me. “Okay,” I said, “it’s all the same to me. I just want my check.”
Mircea took out a leather-covered check book and started writing, while Marlowe regarded Vleck thoughtfully. “I’ve always wondered, how do you get out?”
“What?”
“Of the club or the house or what have you.” He waved a hand. “As soon as a master-level vampire dies, every one of his children knows it. Even if they are old enough and powerful enough to have been emancipated, they feel it here”—he tapped his chest—”like a blow. Yet you regularly kill such vampires and escape the premises without your own head ending up on a pike. So I ask again, how do you get out?”
“I walk.”
He frowned. “I am serious. I would like to know.”
“I’m sure you would,” I said sarcastically, as Mircea tore off the check. Marlowe ran the Senate’s intelligence organization, and he’d probably vastly prefer to keep matters like Vleck in the hands of his own deadly little hit squad. But he couldn’t afford to risk them in wartime on nonessential missions.
The conflict between the Silver Circle of light mages and their dark counterpart had been going on for a while now, and just to confuse the hell out of everyone, the vamps had decided to ally with the light. But it stretched their manpower, and they seemed to have more trouble taking care of the Vlecks of this world than I did.
I intended to keep it that way. This was the best money I’d made in years.
“Every vampire in that nightclub knew the moment their master died, yet you simply walked out,” he said resentfully, refusing to let it go.
I put on my innocent face, which seems to annoy him about as much as those damn smiles do me. “Yeah. I guess I got lucky.”
“You do it every time!”
“Really lucky,” I amended, trying to take the check. But Mircea held on to the other end.
“Have you by any chance seen Louis-Cesare recently?”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Why can you never answer a simple question?”
“Maybe because you never ask any. And what would the darling of the European Senate want with me?”
We’d met only recently, despite being members of the same dysfunctional clan. It wasn’t too surprising since we came from opposite ends of the vampire world. I was the dhampir daughter of the family patriarch, the little-known stain on an otherwise immaculate record. Dhampirs are feared and loathed by vampires for obvious reasons, and most families who accidentally end up with one quickly bury the error. Why Mircea hadn’t done so was still something of a mystery. Maybe because I was sometimes useful, unlike tonight.
Louis-Cesare, on the other hand, was vamp royalty. The only made Child of Mircea’s younger and far stranger brother, Radu, he had been breaking records almost since birth. He’d become a master, a rank many vamps never reached, before he’d been dead half a century. Another century had elevated him to first-level status, on par with the top players in the vamp world. And within a decade after that, he’d become the darling of the European Senate, feted for his looks, his wealth and his ability on the dueling field, which had gotten them out of many sticky situations.
A month ago, the prince and the pariah had crossed paths because we had one thing in common: we were both very good at killing things. And Mircea’s bug-eyed, crazy brother Vlad had needed killing if anyone ever had. But our collaboration had had a rough start. Louis-Cesare didn’t like taking orders from a dhampir, and I didn’t like having a partner, period. But we eventually sorted things out and got the job done. He’d even learned some manners, before the end. And I had started to think that it was kind of…nice, having someone to watch my back for a change.
Sometimes I could be really stupid.
“Radu mentioned that the two of you had grown…close,” Mircea said carefully.
“Radu was mistaken.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Marlowe observed. “Have you seen or had any contact with him in the last few weeks?”
“Why? What’s he done?”
“Nothing . . . yet.”
“Okay, what are you afraid he’ll do?”
Marlowe glanced at Mircea, and they held one of those silent conversations vampires sometimes have, the kind I’m not supposed to know about. “I would merely like to ask him about a family matter,” Mircea said, after a moment.
“As you’re constantly reminding me, I’m family. Tell me and maybe I can help. Or does the family thing only work when you want something?”
Mircea took a deep breath, which he didn’t need, to show me how much of a pain I was being. “It’s about his family, Dorina, and is not my story to tell. Now, have you seen him?”
“I haven’t heard from him in a month,” I said flatly, suddenly tiring of the game. Most vampire clans unlucky enough to end up with a dhampir quickly bury the problem—six feet under. I supposed I should be happy that Mircea had taken a somewhat more enlightened view. But as far as my status as family was concerned, it was and always would be second-class.
“Should that change, I would appreciate receiving word,” he told me.
“And I’d appreciate receiving my check, or are you planning to hold it all night?”
Mircea raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t let go. “I may have another commission for you tomorrow.” He pushed a folder across the desk, careful to avoid the blood splatter.
“May have?”
“It has yet to be decided. Will you be available?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And, Dorina, should I choose to go through with it, I will need this one alive.”
“Will the handy-dandy portable size do?” If I didn’t stake the heart, a master vamp could live in pieces anywhere from a week to a month, depending on his power level. And it was a lot easier to sneak out a head in a bag than a whole body. Plus, there was something about decapitation that made even the most obstinate vamp feel chatty.
“That will be sufficient,” Mircea said, gazing cynically at Vleck. The ex-vamp’s mouth had slipped open and his tongue was hanging out. At least he wasn’t drooling, I thought, and snatched the check.
God, how I loved easy money.
Chapter Two
The gray weather we’d been having for the last few days was doing an encore, but I made it home before it started to rain. I parked my latest rusted hulk, a Camaro that had once been blue and was now a sort of mottled gray, on the overgrown driveway to one side of the house. My key hit the lock as the first few droplets spattered down.
The leaden skies made the battered old Victorian look even more dilapidated than usual. It had been built by a retiring sea captain back in the 1880s, when Flatbush was Brooklyn’s happening new suburb. It still sat on a decent-sized lot with old growth trees, but its glory days were over. The paint was peeling, the porch was sagging and the gingerbread trim was missing a number of pieces. It made the house look a bit like an old person with broken teeth. But it was home, and it was glad to see me.
After a moment, a frisson of welcome spread up my arm and the door opened. I hopped over a hole in the floor, sat a couple of takeout bags on the counter and lit an old fashioned hurricane lamp. On full power, the wards caused the electricity to go bonkers. And while it still worked okay for larger appliances, constantly blinking lights made me dizzy.
I snared a beer out of the fridge and stood at the counter drinking it, flipping through the day’s mail. Someone had thoughtfully left it on the table, maybe because it was mostly composed of bills. My one-time roommate Claire had inherited the house from her uncle, and when she went off to bigger and better things, she’d left it in my care. And it needed a lot of it.
Most importantly, it needed a new roof. There was a worrying stain on the ceiling of my bedroom that had started out roughly the shape of Rhode Island, but now looked more like North Carolina. Another few more days of rain and it was going to be Texas. And then it wouldn’t be anything at all because the battered old shingles were going to cave in on my head.
I filed the bills in the usual spot—the breadbox–and started to unpack the take out when a clap of thunder struck directly overhead. It sounded like a grenade going off, and was near enough to shake the house. I froze, my heart in my throat.
Oh, please, oh, please, I begged, listening with all my might.
For a long moment I didn’t hear anything, except the rumbling aftermath of the weather and my thudding pulse. And then a thin, tremulous wail filtered down from upstairs. My blood ran cold.
Within seconds, the cry had intensified to orchestra-like crescendos. A glass in the kitchen sink trembled and then shattered, along with what remained of my eardrums. I put my head down on the counter and thought about sobbing.
In my somewhat extended lifetime, I’d been through war, famine and disease. I was a strong woman. I was a warrior. But I’d never faced anything like this.
I really, really wanted to kill something, but there wasn’t anything handy.
There was nothing to do but pick up the shards of the tumbler and dump them in the trash. The horrible noise that was threatening every window in the house stopped for a second, then two, and I took a cautious breath—before it began again with renewed vigor. I put the beer back and went to the liquor cabinet for whiskey.
I was cursing my roommates, who had cleaned out all the liquor in my absence, when I heard the soft scrape of a footstep in the hall. It should have been impossible, even with my hearing, to detect anything over that din, but some desperate instinct brought it to my attention anyway. Maybe because it was so unusual.
There were a lot of creatures around the house these days, lumbering and stomping across the old wooden boards at all times of the day and night. But there was no one who just stepped. No one who was here by invitation, anyway.
I could feel the muscles bunching under my skin, ready to explode outward into motion. My breath started coming faster and a bead of sweat slid into my eye. It could just be the house settling, I told myself sternly as I reached for the cleaver. Don’t get excited.
Then the tiny sound came again, along with a squeaky protest from one of the boards in the hall. My mood lifted. Maybe I’d get to kill something, after all.
I crossed to the hall door and grasped the green glass knob, but didn’t turn it. Normally, the kitchen door was left open because the hinges screamed with protest whenever they were used. But someone had closed it and now I couldn’t open it again without letting whatever was out there know I was coming. I was going to have to wait for it to come closer.
I expected to be able to tell a lot about the intruder even without sight. The weight could be guessed from the heaviness of the tread, the height by the soft susurration of breath, possibly even the sex if he or she was wearing cologne. But when I extended my senses, all I received was the shock of contact as my humanness brushed up against something Other.
My hand jerked back from the knob, but I still felt it: a fluttering sensation cascading along my skin, a sort of electric prickle. It wasn’t painful, sharp or hot. It was like being caressed by fingers of water, a gentle, melting touch that soothed and reassured and calmed.
And made my skin crawl.
I didn’t want to be reassured when there was a danger in the house. I couldn’t afford to lose my edge. But I could feel it slipping away anyway, my heartbeat slowing, my breath coming easier, the sweat that had popped out on my arms a moment before cooling in the night air.
Even more worrying, the house itself wasn’t reacting. The wards usually relished doing nasty things to trespassers. But the kitchen remained dim and silent, the only movement the flickering flame inside the lantern.
Its light danced off a row of chef’s knives on the wall, some battered copper cookware hanging from a pot rack, and a broom with a solid wood handle in the corner. Any or all of them would have been useful against a large range of creatures, but probably not one who could so completely fool the house wards. And that went for anything I had on me, too.
I was contemplating sneaking out the back way and doing a Spiderman impression up to my room, where I had a cache of much nastier weapons. But then the shrieking stopped. It didn’t taper off, it just cut out between one breath and the next, like a hand had been clenched around a small neck. And suddenly I forgot about subtlety, tactics and strategy. I threw open the door and dove into the dark hallway, knife raised, a battle cry building in my throat.
And got slammed against a wall hard enough to rattle my ribs.
Rolling back to my feet, I threw a small table at my enemy, trying to buy myself a second to figure out what the hell I was fighting. But no such luck. I got a glimpse of huge, luminous eyes, with horizontal pupils like a goat’s, and then a ball of fire came out of nowhere, reducing the table to cinders and sending rippling shadows up the walls. I leapt forward, looking for a vulnerable spot, but a massive clawed foot covered in gleaming scales slammed down on me with the force of a jackhammer.
My back hit the floor with my neck wedged between two curved talons the length of daggers. My own knife had lodged in the ball of the paw pinning me to the boards, between a couple of overlapping scales, but I doubted it was more than a thorn prick to the enormous creature. I thrashed and fought to free my weapon, but only succeeded in driving it a little further into the thick hide.
And somewhere above my head, someone cursed. “Cut it out already!”
I paused at the very human-sounding voice, but I still couldn’t see. And then a thin ribbon of flame shot out of the darkness and lit a row of candles on the wall, all at once. It was a good trick, but I was in no position to admire it. I was too busy staring at the sight of a large dragon wedged into my narrow hallway.
It didn’t look very comfortable. Its small black wings were squashed against the ceiling, its huge legs were up around its neck and its elongated snout was sticking haphazardly out between them. The only part it appeared to be able to move was its foot, which was leaking a stream of black blood.
“That hurts like a bitch!” It bent its massive head a little closer to take a look at the damage.
I just stared.
An acre of pewter scales was broken by a ridge of gleaming amethyst down its back. Two horns the color of molten glass sat on its head, framing a tuft of absurd lavender hair. It matched the creature’s eyes, which were creepy as hell, but had irises the color of pansy petals.
A nictating membrane slid first across one great eye and then the other as it regarded its wounded foot. After a moment, it transferred that alien gaze to me, and the whorl of scales across its cheeks took on a vaguely purple tint. “You stabbed me!”
“You broke in,” I said slowly, in complete disbelief. Because I’d seen a lot of strange things in Brooklyn, but a dragon wasn’t one of them.
“I did no such thing!” The huge snout grimaced, showing an awful lot of teeth. But the voice was melodious, almost hypnotic, sliding like a drug into my veins. It soothed my racing pulse back to normal in spite of everything I could do to stop it. I needed the energy of anger to fight, but all of a sudden my body was contemplating having a snooze, and my muscles were going limp and noodle-y.
“I don’t usually argue with anyone capable of crushing the life out of me,” I said, fighting back a yawn. “But yeah, you did.”
“It’s my house!” A fold of skin that had been held flat against the creature’s back suddenly opened, spreading upward like translucent fan to frame its long snout. “What are you waiting for?” it demanded. “Get it out!”
I assumed it meant the knife, so I resumed tugging on it. “It would help it you’d let me up,” I said after a minute.
“Are you going to throw anything else at me?”
“Are you going to eat me?”
The eyes did the creepy sideways blink again. I was starting to wonder if that was the dragon equivalent of an eye roll. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dory! You know damn well I’m vegan.”
The foot raised and I slid out from between the gigantic toenails. They were black at the roots, shading to gray and then clear at the ends like the horns. Except for a few spots where flakes of bright red appeared. They looked suspiciously like nail polish, which was when I decided to stop thinking at all.
The knife finally slipped free, and the second it cleared the tough hide, a cold blue-white light swelled out from between the scales as if the huge body was cracking down fault lines. And then an explosion of light hit me like a fist, throwing me back a yard. I landed hard against the faded wallpaper, jarring a hanging mirror loose. It crashed against the floor, and the screeching from upstairs started up again.
“God, do I need a drink,” a voice said fervently.
My thoughts exactly.
I sat up as someone pushed through the kitchen door and headed for the liquor cabinet. I got to my hands and knees and peered around the jamb, only to see a tall, naked redhead standing in the lantern light. She was glaring at the empty liquor cabinet. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone teetotaler!”
“No,” I said cautiously, sizing this new shape up.
It looked like Claire, my old roommate. The illusion was perfect, down to the little details that spells usually overlook. The creature’s hair was a red fuzz ball, the way Claire’s always got in rainy weather, there was a familiar pattern of freckles over the nose, and the arms were crossed under the breast in an often-used expression of annoyance.
But there were discordant notes, too. This Claire had bruise dark circles under her eyes, which kept darting nervously around the kitchen, and a sickly pallor beneath her freckles. Her lips were white and pressed tightly together and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a while, like she was running on nerves.”
But the real clincher was that Claire wouldn’t show up in the middle of the night, unescorted, barefoot and wild-eyed. When I met her, she’d been working a bad paying job at a magical auction house and had needed a roommate for the extra cash. But that was before a real life fey prince turned up at one of the sales and swept her off her feet—and all the way to Faerie. She’d been there ever since, presumably living the happily ever after that the rest of us just dream about.
“It’s a damn good glamourie,” I said, wondering exactly how one evicted a dragon, even in human form, from one’s kitchen. “But for future reference, Claire didn’t make a habit of running around naked. Not even in her own house.”
“I was wearing clothes!” the creature said, snatching an apron from a drawer. It was the old fashioned type that was more like a dress, leaving her decent as long as she didn’t turn around. “I burst out of them whenever I change anymore. My dragon self has hit adolescence and it’s growing like a weed.”
I stared from the drawer with the aprons—I hadn’t known we had any—to the woman shrugging one on. “Dragon self?”
She pushed limp red strands off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m half dark fey, Dory. You know that!”
“Yeah, but . . . you never mentioned what kind!”
“I didn’t know until recently, and anyway, it’s not the kind of thing you just drop into conversation.” She located a box of aspirin in a drawer and peered at the label myopically. Those pretty green eyes had always been nearsighted, and I guess going scaly would make it a bitch to keep up with glasses.
I got slowly to my feet, my head spinning. “Claire?”
“Who were you expecting?” she demanded. “Attila the Hun?”
Her eyes focused on the cleaver I still held in one hand, which was leaking blood—non-human black—all over the kitchen tiles. Dragon’s blood was corrosive, which probably explained why half the blade was gone and the tiles looked like mice had been gnawing at them. I took what remained of the knife to the sink and rinsed it off, then put it back in the rack.
That seemed to reassure her, because she pulled something out from behind her legs and plopped it into a kitchen chair. It must have been behind her in the hall, because I hadn’t seen it before. I slowly approached the table, regarding this new problem cautiously.
The small tow-headed creature appeared to be human. He—at least, I assumed it was a he judging by the natty blue tunic he had on—looked to be around a year old. But he nonetheless gazed calmly back, remarkably composed considering what he had just witnessed.
“What is that?” I asked, as he drooled a little onto his tunic.
Claire dry swallowed the aspirin. “The heir to the throne of Faerie.”
“The heir to the throne of Faerie just spit up.”
“He does that a lot. He’s teething.”
I blinked. “Teething? Teething? He’s teething and you get spit?”
“Why? What did you expect?”
I waved my arms. “That!”
“That noise?”
“Yes! That horrible, screeching noise that goes on and on and—”
“That’s a baby?”
“A baby Duergar. Well, half anyway,” I amended. “The other half is Brownie, or so they said. I’m beginning to think it’s more like banshee.”
“You mean that little thing you picked up at the auction?” She located a box of Band Aids and slapped one on her toe.
And okay, the apron thing could have been a fluke, but there weren’t too many people who knew where I’d acquired my current affliction. The magical auction had been highly illegal and very hush hush. That wasn’t surprising considering that they were selling illegal hybrids of supernatural creatures, some quite dangerous. I hadn’t even known it was taking place until I accidently raided it.
As weird as it seemed, that actually was Claire.
The leaden skies made the battered old Victorian look even more dilapidated than usual. It had been built by a retiring sea captain back in the 1880s, when Flatbush was Brooklyn’s happening new suburb. It still sat on a decent-sized lot with old growth trees, but its glory days were over. The paint was peeling, the porch was sagging and the gingerbread trim was missing a number of pieces. It made the house look a bit like an old person with broken teeth. But it was home, and it was glad to see me.
After a moment, a frisson of welcome spread up my arm and the door opened. I hopped over a hole in the floor, sat a couple of takeout bags on the counter and lit an old fashioned hurricane lamp. On full power, the wards caused the electricity to go bonkers. And while it still worked okay for larger appliances, constantly blinking lights made me dizzy.
I snared a beer out of the fridge and stood at the counter drinking it, flipping through the day’s mail. Someone had thoughtfully left it on the table, maybe because it was mostly composed of bills. My one-time roommate Claire had inherited the house from her uncle, and when she went off to bigger and better things, she’d left it in my care. And it needed a lot of it.
Most importantly, it needed a new roof. There was a worrying stain on the ceiling of my bedroom that had started out roughly the shape of Rhode Island, but now looked more like North Carolina. Another few more days of rain and it was going to be Texas. And then it wouldn’t be anything at all because the battered old shingles were going to cave in on my head.
I filed the bills in the usual spot—the breadbox–and started to unpack the take out when a clap of thunder struck directly overhead. It sounded like a grenade going off, and was near enough to shake the house. I froze, my heart in my throat.
Oh, please, oh, please, I begged, listening with all my might.
For a long moment I didn’t hear anything, except the rumbling aftermath of the weather and my thudding pulse. And then a thin, tremulous wail filtered down from upstairs. My blood ran cold.
Within seconds, the cry had intensified to orchestra-like crescendos. A glass in the kitchen sink trembled and then shattered, along with what remained of my eardrums. I put my head down on the counter and thought about sobbing.
In my somewhat extended lifetime, I’d been through war, famine and disease. I was a strong woman. I was a warrior. But I’d never faced anything like this.
I really, really wanted to kill something, but there wasn’t anything handy.
There was nothing to do but pick up the shards of the tumbler and dump them in the trash. The horrible noise that was threatening every window in the house stopped for a second, then two, and I took a cautious breath—before it began again with renewed vigor. I put the beer back and went to the liquor cabinet for whiskey.
I was cursing my roommates, who had cleaned out all the liquor in my absence, when I heard the soft scrape of a footstep in the hall. It should have been impossible, even with my hearing, to detect anything over that din, but some desperate instinct brought it to my attention anyway. Maybe because it was so unusual.
There were a lot of creatures around the house these days, lumbering and stomping across the old wooden boards at all times of the day and night. But there was no one who just stepped. No one who was here by invitation, anyway.
I could feel the muscles bunching under my skin, ready to explode outward into motion. My breath started coming faster and a bead of sweat slid into my eye. It could just be the house settling, I told myself sternly as I reached for the cleaver. Don’t get excited.
Then the tiny sound came again, along with a squeaky protest from one of the boards in the hall. My mood lifted. Maybe I’d get to kill something, after all.
I crossed to the hall door and grasped the green glass knob, but didn’t turn it. Normally, the kitchen door was left open because the hinges screamed with protest whenever they were used. But someone had closed it and now I couldn’t open it again without letting whatever was out there know I was coming. I was going to have to wait for it to come closer.
I expected to be able to tell a lot about the intruder even without sight. The weight could be guessed from the heaviness of the tread, the height by the soft susurration of breath, possibly even the sex if he or she was wearing cologne. But when I extended my senses, all I received was the shock of contact as my humanness brushed up against something Other.
My hand jerked back from the knob, but I still felt it: a fluttering sensation cascading along my skin, a sort of electric prickle. It wasn’t painful, sharp or hot. It was like being caressed by fingers of water, a gentle, melting touch that soothed and reassured and calmed.
And made my skin crawl.
I didn’t want to be reassured when there was a danger in the house. I couldn’t afford to lose my edge. But I could feel it slipping away anyway, my heartbeat slowing, my breath coming easier, the sweat that had popped out on my arms a moment before cooling in the night air.
Even more worrying, the house itself wasn’t reacting. The wards usually relished doing nasty things to trespassers. But the kitchen remained dim and silent, the only movement the flickering flame inside the lantern.
Its light danced off a row of chef’s knives on the wall, some battered copper cookware hanging from a pot rack, and a broom with a solid wood handle in the corner. Any or all of them would have been useful against a large range of creatures, but probably not one who could so completely fool the house wards. And that went for anything I had on me, too.
I was contemplating sneaking out the back way and doing a Spiderman impression up to my room, where I had a cache of much nastier weapons. But then the shrieking stopped. It didn’t taper off, it just cut out between one breath and the next, like a hand had been clenched around a small neck. And suddenly I forgot about subtlety, tactics and strategy. I threw open the door and dove into the dark hallway, knife raised, a battle cry building in my throat.
And got slammed against a wall hard enough to rattle my ribs.
Rolling back to my feet, I threw a small table at my enemy, trying to buy myself a second to figure out what the hell I was fighting. But no such luck. I got a glimpse of huge, luminous eyes, with horizontal pupils like a goat’s, and then a ball of fire came out of nowhere, reducing the table to cinders and sending rippling shadows up the walls. I leapt forward, looking for a vulnerable spot, but a massive clawed foot covered in gleaming scales slammed down on me with the force of a jackhammer.
My back hit the floor with my neck wedged between two curved talons the length of daggers. My own knife had lodged in the ball of the paw pinning me to the boards, between a couple of overlapping scales, but I doubted it was more than a thorn prick to the enormous creature. I thrashed and fought to free my weapon, but only succeeded in driving it a little further into the thick hide.
And somewhere above my head, someone cursed. “Cut it out already!”
I paused at the very human-sounding voice, but I still couldn’t see. And then a thin ribbon of flame shot out of the darkness and lit a row of candles on the wall, all at once. It was a good trick, but I was in no position to admire it. I was too busy staring at the sight of a large dragon wedged into my narrow hallway.
It didn’t look very comfortable. Its small black wings were squashed against the ceiling, its huge legs were up around its neck and its elongated snout was sticking haphazardly out between them. The only part it appeared to be able to move was its foot, which was leaking a stream of black blood.
“That hurts like a bitch!” It bent its massive head a little closer to take a look at the damage.
I just stared.
An acre of pewter scales was broken by a ridge of gleaming amethyst down its back. Two horns the color of molten glass sat on its head, framing a tuft of absurd lavender hair. It matched the creature’s eyes, which were creepy as hell, but had irises the color of pansy petals.
A nictating membrane slid first across one great eye and then the other as it regarded its wounded foot. After a moment, it transferred that alien gaze to me, and the whorl of scales across its cheeks took on a vaguely purple tint. “You stabbed me!”
“You broke in,” I said slowly, in complete disbelief. Because I’d seen a lot of strange things in Brooklyn, but a dragon wasn’t one of them.
“I did no such thing!” The huge snout grimaced, showing an awful lot of teeth. But the voice was melodious, almost hypnotic, sliding like a drug into my veins. It soothed my racing pulse back to normal in spite of everything I could do to stop it. I needed the energy of anger to fight, but all of a sudden my body was contemplating having a snooze, and my muscles were going limp and noodle-y.
“I don’t usually argue with anyone capable of crushing the life out of me,” I said, fighting back a yawn. “But yeah, you did.”
“It’s my house!” A fold of skin that had been held flat against the creature’s back suddenly opened, spreading upward like translucent fan to frame its long snout. “What are you waiting for?” it demanded. “Get it out!”
I assumed it meant the knife, so I resumed tugging on it. “It would help it you’d let me up,” I said after a minute.
“Are you going to throw anything else at me?”
“Are you going to eat me?”
The eyes did the creepy sideways blink again. I was starting to wonder if that was the dragon equivalent of an eye roll. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dory! You know damn well I’m vegan.”
The foot raised and I slid out from between the gigantic toenails. They were black at the roots, shading to gray and then clear at the ends like the horns. Except for a few spots where flakes of bright red appeared. They looked suspiciously like nail polish, which was when I decided to stop thinking at all.
The knife finally slipped free, and the second it cleared the tough hide, a cold blue-white light swelled out from between the scales as if the huge body was cracking down fault lines. And then an explosion of light hit me like a fist, throwing me back a yard. I landed hard against the faded wallpaper, jarring a hanging mirror loose. It crashed against the floor, and the screeching from upstairs started up again.
“God, do I need a drink,” a voice said fervently.
My thoughts exactly.
I sat up as someone pushed through the kitchen door and headed for the liquor cabinet. I got to my hands and knees and peered around the jamb, only to see a tall, naked redhead standing in the lantern light. She was glaring at the empty liquor cabinet. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone teetotaler!”
“No,” I said cautiously, sizing this new shape up.
It looked like Claire, my old roommate. The illusion was perfect, down to the little details that spells usually overlook. The creature’s hair was a red fuzz ball, the way Claire’s always got in rainy weather, there was a familiar pattern of freckles over the nose, and the arms were crossed under the breast in an often-used expression of annoyance.
But there were discordant notes, too. This Claire had bruise dark circles under her eyes, which kept darting nervously around the kitchen, and a sickly pallor beneath her freckles. Her lips were white and pressed tightly together and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a while, like she was running on nerves.”
But the real clincher was that Claire wouldn’t show up in the middle of the night, unescorted, barefoot and wild-eyed. When I met her, she’d been working a bad paying job at a magical auction house and had needed a roommate for the extra cash. But that was before a real life fey prince turned up at one of the sales and swept her off her feet—and all the way to Faerie. She’d been there ever since, presumably living the happily ever after that the rest of us just dream about.
“It’s a damn good glamourie,” I said, wondering exactly how one evicted a dragon, even in human form, from one’s kitchen. “But for future reference, Claire didn’t make a habit of running around naked. Not even in her own house.”
“I was wearing clothes!” the creature said, snatching an apron from a drawer. It was the old fashioned type that was more like a dress, leaving her decent as long as she didn’t turn around. “I burst out of them whenever I change anymore. My dragon self has hit adolescence and it’s growing like a weed.”
I stared from the drawer with the aprons—I hadn’t known we had any—to the woman shrugging one on. “Dragon self?”
She pushed limp red strands off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m half dark fey, Dory. You know that!”
“Yeah, but . . . you never mentioned what kind!”
“I didn’t know until recently, and anyway, it’s not the kind of thing you just drop into conversation.” She located a box of aspirin in a drawer and peered at the label myopically. Those pretty green eyes had always been nearsighted, and I guess going scaly would make it a bitch to keep up with glasses.
I got slowly to my feet, my head spinning. “Claire?”
“Who were you expecting?” she demanded. “Attila the Hun?”
Her eyes focused on the cleaver I still held in one hand, which was leaking blood—non-human black—all over the kitchen tiles. Dragon’s blood was corrosive, which probably explained why half the blade was gone and the tiles looked like mice had been gnawing at them. I took what remained of the knife to the sink and rinsed it off, then put it back in the rack.
That seemed to reassure her, because she pulled something out from behind her legs and plopped it into a kitchen chair. It must have been behind her in the hall, because I hadn’t seen it before. I slowly approached the table, regarding this new problem cautiously.
The small tow-headed creature appeared to be human. He—at least, I assumed it was a he judging by the natty blue tunic he had on—looked to be around a year old. But he nonetheless gazed calmly back, remarkably composed considering what he had just witnessed.
“What is that?” I asked, as he drooled a little onto his tunic.
Claire dry swallowed the aspirin. “The heir to the throne of Faerie.”
“The heir to the throne of Faerie just spit up.”
“He does that a lot. He’s teething.”
I blinked. “Teething? Teething? He’s teething and you get spit?”
“Why? What did you expect?”
I waved my arms. “That!”
“That noise?”
“Yes! That horrible, screeching noise that goes on and on and—”
“That’s a baby?”
“A baby Duergar. Well, half anyway,” I amended. “The other half is Brownie, or so they said. I’m beginning to think it’s more like banshee.”
“You mean that little thing you picked up at the auction?” She located a box of Band Aids and slapped one on her toe.
And okay, the apron thing could have been a fluke, but there weren’t too many people who knew where I’d acquired my current affliction. The magical auction had been highly illegal and very hush hush. That wasn’t surprising considering that they were selling illegal hybrids of supernatural creatures, some quite dangerous. I hadn’t even known it was taking place until I accidently raided it.
As weird as it seemed, that actually was Claire.
“Yes,” I told her, my head swimming with questions. I hadn’t seen her in over a month. It seemed like she’d picked up a few new abilities while she’d been gone.
“But he already had teeth,” she objected, frowning into the empty fridge.
“Those were his baby teeth. I’ve been finding them all over the house. Now the big boy teeth are coming in and . . . Claire. I think I’m going crazy.”
“You’re not going crazy.”
“I just saw you morph into a dragon!”
“Well you shouldn’t have startled me!” She opened the breadbox and stared at the mass of paper inside. “Don’t you keep any food in the house?”
“I got take out.”
Her eyes latched onto the big white bags, which were spreading the smell of sesame chicken, veggie chow mein and fried rice around the kitchen. “It looks like you brought enough for three people,” she said hopefully.
“Yeah. I don’t know when we’ll get to eat it, though. What with all the commotion.”
Her eyes narrowed, and for a moment, she looked an awful lot like her alter ego. “Where’s this baby of yours?”
I grinned.