Burned, p.21
Burned, page 21
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” she said, following his gaze to her chest. If he’d been awestruck by me, he was even more awestruck by Beatrice.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry, Lady Beatrice.”
She smiled, cutting her eyes pointedly at the gate. “Should I get out and open that myself?”
“Invi—” He almost got out the entire word before deciding that whether we had my invitation with us or not, he wasn’t going to get in trouble for letting us in. At least not as much trouble as he might find himself in if he offended me. Stupid vampire groupies. You gotta love ’em. “Ah. Ahem.” He straightened and bowed so low, he missed hitting the door with his forehead by only a few centimeters. “Welcome. We are honored by the presence of your power.”
“Weird,” said Magbidion from the front passenger’s seat. We’d weighed leaving him close to the artificial locus point against being that far away from him at night and decided it was less of a risk to bring him along.
“What’s weird?” I asked.
“I half expected him to offer himself to you on the spot,” Mags said.
Beatrice spoke up. “Oh, he wouldn’t dare. Not in front of me. It’s presumptuous, and I gained a reputation for frowning on that sort of thing when I was with Gabriella, or he might have risked it anyway.”
“Mortals,” our driver scoffed. Tiko was an Oni, and limo service was just one of the many enterprises that the brothers at Triple-T had gotten into. Normally, he was horned and strangely colored, but tonight he appeared to be a middle-aged Asian man. I’d seen him stick a piece of paper with strange writing on it to his forehead to enact the transformation, but I had no idea how it worked on a mystical mechanics level.
Through the gates, the drive transitioned from asphalt to cobblestone, and the ride got bumpy.
“That’ll do wonders for my hairdo,” Beatrice complained.
“You weren’t getting lucky anyway,” I said with a smile. “Besides, it isn’t like there will be any pictures.”
“You don’t understand. It looks old, but it’s newly done. Someone, possibly Piotr, wants those of us who weren’t expecting it to look bad in front of our vampires.” Withdrawing a compact from her tiny green handbag, Beatrice inspected her hair as best she could when we rolled to a stop in the entry circle. A huge building, the Irons Club looked from without as if it were once a small civic center but had gotten a growth spurt designed by someone who would have been cutting-edge however long ago they’d built the place. I had no idea where to park, but Tiko seemed to know, so when a uniformed valet came to the door, Tiko waved him away. Before he could open my door, I’d already done it.
When I opened Beatrice’s door for her and offered my hand, she quirked a smile at me and let me help her from the limo. “Now everyone thinks we’re sleeping together,” she whispered in my ear in as she rose.
“Because I helped you out of the car?”
She nodded. “Welcome to the Lion’s Den, Master.” She composed herself, and I took her arm in mine. “These people read layers of intent and meaning into the smallest detail.”
“Fuck ’em.” I failed to suppress a sneer.
“Oh, they’d let you make them airtight and brag about it to all of their friends.” She plastered on a smile. “Don’t be surprised when we walk in the door.”
“What’s going to happen?” I did a double take. “Airtight?”
“If you don’t know, you don’t need to know.” Her tone, a mixture of pleasant surprise and condescension, let me know I’d passed one of those pop quizzes that ladies throw at vampires from time to time to see if we really are better than the other men.
“Tiko?” I said softly.
“I’ll keep an eye on your mage,” he said pleasantly. “I’ve got three brothers on telepathic speed dial if I need them, and the mouser I wasn’t supposed to notice is tailing us on that hot-shit motorcycle. Your mage will be fine.”
Magbidion closed his eyes, already asleep. The wear on him worried me. I didn’t have any other mage I could trust.
“Good.” Beatrice and I were ushered through the grandest of three glass double doors into a hall with a grand chandelier and a boatload of undead assholes and their dates. What got my attention was the full orchestra playing incidental music to an empty room down the end of one long hallway. They were in a small theater that appeared to have been built for just such a purpose, the volume controlled (for our sensitive vampiric ears) by a series of sliding glass panels.
Waiters and waitresses in various states and styles of dress carried platters of food and beverages about the checkered tile. Plenty of room for dancing was unoccupied in the middle of the hall under the chandelier, and tables and chairs had been artfully arranged around the edges. Each had a little placard denoting who was to sit where once the more formal portion got under way. Apparently, there was to be a speaker, your basic socialite verbal masturbation and ego stroke. All of which I had expected. What I hadn’t known was that when I walked in, everything would stop.
Everyone turned to face me. It was a High Society thing I’d seen before, reorienting one’s self to face the most powerful and/or influential person in the room. Up until that very moment, that person had never been me. It had always been Phil or Winter. Beatrice’s hand tightened around my biceps.
“Acknowledge them whenever and however you wish, Master,” Beatrice said.
The “Master” thing grated like hell, but I’d been warned about that, too, so I let it slide, knowing that she’d back off as soon as she could without appearing to disrespect me. Maybe that’s why I opted to “acknowledge” them all with a middle finger and my general disdain. I scanned the crowd in a 180, then flipped off the people behind me at the door just to make sure I got everybody.
They ate it up. My middle finger was met with applause, catcalls, wolf whistles, and bemused laughter like some bad-boy celebrity showing off at the Oscars. Everyone bowed, and I escorted Beatrice toward the Orchestra Hallway. Each glass pane was controlled by a volume knob set into a lacquered panel on the right side of the hallway.
“Is the music too loud, Lord Eric?” called a thin voice. Truth be told, I could barely hear it, my senses being what they are at night. “Or not loud enough?”
I’d expected a Peter Lorre–looking little sycophant and was surprised to find a very manly-looking guy in the kind of shape actors complain about having to work so hard to get into. He had a disarming smile, and I shook his hand without thinking about it. A lot of thralls seem not to know how to give a good handshake, letting their hand rest in mine like a dead fish. Manly Guy matched the firmness of my grip, smiled, and met my gaze.
“Forgive me for speaking out of turn, Lord Eric, but our music system is unique.”
“Just Eric,” I said. “And don’t read anything into that. I don’t like titles.”
I didn’t expect a thing when Beatrice laid him out. I don’t think I’d even seen her throw a punch before, but she opened with a forearm to the jaw, or was it an elbow? Before I could decide, he lay sprawled on the tile, blood dappling his dress shirt, trying his best to dodge a high heel to the crotch. Emphasis on the word “trying.” “Back off, Piotr!”
“You seem to have that covered,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I reached over and slowly turned the volume higher until, one by one, all the panes of glass between us and the orchestra stood open and I could hear the music. When I looked back, it was to see Piotr catching Bea’s leg.
I growled, and the room stopped again.
“I don’t know what you did, Handshake.” I rubbed my fingers together as if they felt oily. “Probably you shouldn’t have shaken hands with me or engaged me in conversation without Bea’s permission. I don’t know, because I don’t care about all the froufrou societal bullcrap you people get up to. But whatever it was, I can tell you this much: You knew, and you knew it would piss Beatrice off, and that’s why you did it.”
I focused my gaze, and a symbol, something like a V within a V, although they intersected, appeared plain as day over Piotr’s head. I didn’t know who belonged to that symbol, so I asked: “Where’s your vampire, Piotr?”
He let go of Beatrice’s leg. “Each Irons Club is managed by a thrall of Duke Gornsvalt. I—”
I shushed him. That name rang a bell. If I remembered correctly, he specialized in making blood wine and other beverages that could inebriate vampires. Lord Phillip had him do steaks once. Before I killed Phil, of course.
“Oh,” I said softly. “I like him.”
Beatrice paled. Piotr let a hint of smug grin creep onto his face and he looked like every bully you’ve ever met. He thought he’d won, and he had his victory speech all ready.
“I was going to destroy him,” I continued. “But not just now.” I looked around. “Is he here?”
An older gentleman got up from a table in the corner. “Yes, Eric.”
I crossed the room in my own time and shook Duke Gornsvalt’s hand. This was where Piotr had learned that handshake and the smile. It was pure good-old-boy network. I bet all the thralls he counted as friends were men, and any female thralls he had were for housework, bedroom work, or both. “Release Piotr from your thralldom,” I said.
“For what offense?” Duke Gornsvalt asked.
“Annoying my thrall and daring to touch her.” Arms spread, I gestured to the room as a whole. “That’s how you do things, isn’t it? That’s the vampire way? Right? You make me mad, and in order to prove I’m head leech, I have to come down on you with hellfire and brimstone and scorch the earth! And if”—I straightened Gornsvalt’s tie for effect, even though it wasn’t mussed—“if I don’t, then you stop respecting me.”
My pocket started vibrating, but I couldn’t remember why. My hand went out, and Beatrice took it. Handshake’s blood had spattered her bare arm, and I plucked the handkerchief out of Gornsvalt’s suit jacket to wipe it away. I spat with real saliva and realized my mistake as I made it. They gasped as one. My pocket stopped vibrating and chirped once.
“Impressed?” I laughed. “A parlor trick. I told my last vampiric girlfriend”—I mimed my apologies—“we’ll get back to the chewing-out part, but I’m getting old, and I have to tell these little stories when they occur to me, or I won’t remember. I told her once that there was no power she possessed that I couldn’t do better.”
Even Beatrice hadn’t seen this; her surprise aided the illusion. “Tabitha’s a Living Doll.” I held my hand out level, then waggled it from side to side, one side lower, then back up. My pocket vibrated again, but I still had no clue. “It’s cute, but she loses her vampiric powers, whereas I”—I tapped in to my strength and felt it flow, hoisted Duke Gornsvalt into the air with one hand, and slowly tucked the bloodstained handkerchief into his mouth—“don’t. That’s yours.”
With my spare hand I beckoned a waiter carrying a plate of appetizers, selected a small hors d’oeuvre, and bit into it. It was a stuffed mushroom, but the meat inside wasn’t meat, it was . . . I spat it out. “What the hell is that? Boca burger? That ain’t meat, gentlemen. It never was, nor will it ever be.”
I looked up at Gornsvalt as if I had forgotten him, and there was another chirp from my pocket. I needed to hold him up there long enough to make sure everyone saw it as a feat of supernatural strength, just in case anyone was putting two and two together and realizing that someone had poured Liquid Paper over the real problem and that their Emperor vampire, the one they all feared because he could go all über vamp and kill them, couldn’t do so. Well, at least not at night. Selling them on the idea that I had even more powers than they thought seemed like the best idea for keeping the wool pulled firmly over their beady little eyes.
“I . . .” Real problem. Plan. Phone. Shit!
I looked back up at Gornsvalt and couldn’t remember why he was there. I saw Beatrice and couldn’t recall why she was important. I knew she was . . . was . . .
“And to think you started without me,” called a musical voice from the entryway. I turned. There stood a vampire whose force of character could cut through even my bad memory. Ebon Winter wore a formal kimono in white, blue, and silver, his bleached white hair pulled back in a long pony-tail. “I called to ask you all to wait, but no one”—he looked right at me—“answered the phone. How rude.”
Was that a samurai sword? He drew it. Tapping in to my power as I was, I could just make out the blue tinge of enchantment on the blade.
“I think,” he said, slicing the air with his katana in a downward arc, “that I shall be quite wroth.”
27
GRETA
FIGHT, DEMON, FIGHT!
How is it that you only bleed hot pink?” I asked the bleeding doggie-headed demon. One wing torn, the other coated in her own gore flapping uselessly against a wall-mounted poster of Night of the Lepus. Yowling in unison with its injured mate, the pink-blooded one threw another ax at my head.
“Where do you keep getting those?” Evelyn asked as she snagged it out of the air and slammed the double-bladed ax home in the other doggie-headed demon with a loud kathwack.
“And can you throw them faster?” I pointed at Pink Blood’s mate. “Because my deputy needs a few more.”
A geyser of green blood erupted from the newest ax wound, and I wished someone were running around with us videotaping. True, I wouldn’t show up (probably Evelyn wouldn’t, either, but who knows with nukekubi), but I’d never fought demons who bled rainbow colors. Blood in all colors of the rainbow dripped from the multiple ax wounds, streaming down the demon’s lightly furred skin and dyeing the carpet in patches of color that did not mix and blend.
It had been a nice apartment before we started wrecking it. Very fifties-retro, which made me suspect the two lovebirds would really dig the Sci-Fi Drive-in Café at Disney World. I mean, seriously, Night of the Lepus? I like bad movies as much as the next psychopath, but . . .
“Why won’t you leave us alone?” Rainbow Blood screeched.
“I don’t know,” I said, sinking my claws into Pink Blood’s biceps. She hurled me against the wall, and I laughed at the crack of my own bones, the twist and tear of muscle and ligament. “Marx called me and I came.”
“Marx?” Rainbow Blood howled again. “Marx, you bitch! Marx!”
He turned for the door, heedless of the five axes sprouting from his back, torso, and shoulders. Evelyn backed away, unwilling to follow through.
“Kill it!” I shouted, and when she didn’t react, I added, “Bread and butter!”
Jumping over the broken sectional sofa, I rolled past Pink Blood and grabbed her mate by an ax lodged in his back. It popped loose, and I licked the yellow iridescent blood as it oozed from the wound, only to take an ax in my own back, chunking into my spine. The pain roared bright and hot, then dimmed like it ought to dim. Then . . . nothing.
Special though its color may have been, the demon’s blood tasted plain and ordinary. Still, there is pleasure in eating funny-colored ice cream, even if it tastes like vanilla. Life has many simple pleasures. Murder is my favorite.
“Where do you get these?” I pulled the ax from my back and decapitated Rainbow with it. His head rose ceiling-ward on a fountain right out of a Skittles commercial. “And how did he do that?”
Pink Blood screamed unintelligibly instead of answering. It may have been a “no.” Hard to say.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Kit Kat picked then to intervene. Dressed in full supernatural-suppression gear, she strode in, aghast. “This is how you resolve a domestic dispute?”
“Well, you brought a SWAT team!” I turned to Kit Kat, and Pink Blood grabbed my arm.
“Why?” the doggie demon screamed. “Our blood is a dye. We make clothes. We were only—” Her ax vanished when I tried to chop her with it.
“A clever defense mechanism.” I tried to hurl her across the room, but she was bigger than me, the mass more than I could overcome at such a strained angle.
Evelyn mouthed “Oh my God” and stepped back, her shoe slipping in the blood of many hues. She caught herself on the wall-mounted flatscreen.
Pink Blood pulled and wrenched at my left arm in an emotional attempt to pull it off. She did it wrong, so it only came loose at the elbow.
“That’s not how you do it!” A few drops of blood leaked from the wound, but not much. My free hand found my Glock, and I fired all seventeen rounds into Pinkie’s face. All the sound went away, replaced by the whine of ringing ears and damaged hearing. It’s hard to behead a demon one-handed, but you can do it if you get her in a headlock first. A muzzle helps. It makes for a better grip.
Pinkie’s headless corpse bled the color of her namesake in such quantities that I thought it might flood the floor. Gallons and gallons flowed out. Her lifeless claw held my dismembered forearm, so I pried it loose, turning to show Kit Kat as I touched the wounds together, skin, bones, and muscle reknitting in seconds.
“Why? You?” Katherine opened her mouth wide to make her ears pop, but she could hear again normally already, like I could. Too fast for a human but just right for a vampire . . . or a thrall. “I—”
“Spit it out, Kit Kat.” I knelt in the rainbow-colored blood, which hadn’t mixed with the other colors, tasting each color in turn and trying to imagine that each hue bore a minuscule variation in flavor. “I won’t hurt you. I’m the sheriff.” It had come off during the fight, but I found my old-timey sheriff’s star and pinned it back on my shirt.
“Every few months,” Kit Kat began carefully, “we get a call to break up a fight between those two. They almost always send a few good VCPD police officers to the hospital. But Captain Stacey would come in after the fight and calm them down and get them to shell out a large Fang fee and . . . I thought if I called you, I could avoid some banged-up cops.”
“And you did.” All the colors tasted the same. I dipped one finger into yellow, another into blue, and dribbled them together in my palm, but they still wouldn’t mix.
