Death's Mistress

Page 24

It would have been easier if he hadn’t been struggling like he was afraid he’d end up the same way as his pants. I kept getting kicked in the head, which did nothing for my concentration. And to make bad matters worse, the club doors banged open and more vamps poured out.
But instead of jumping us, they went for Cheung’s men. It looked like the boss had neglected to order Ray’s boys not to help him, and protecting their master is one of a vamp’s foremost priorities. Not that they were any match for the much more senior vamps, but they did manage to overwhelm one by sheer numbers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the one holding Ray.
I’d finally gotten the steering wheel unlocked, but I couldn’t start the damn engine and hold on to Ray at the same time. Then someone embedded a tire iron in the vamp’s head, sending him staggering backward. I started the car, and when the master launched himself at the windshield again, I ran him over.
Of course, that just pissed him off. I saw one of the other vamps run for a dark blue Mercedes coupe parked down the street. And Ray’s boys weren’t going to be able to delay them for long without getting shredded. “Buckle up,” I told Ray, and floored it.
I concentrated on putting some distance between us and the club, while he rooted around in the glove box. He threw a flashlight out the window, and did the same with a tire gauge. But a ballpoint pen he kept. I skidded around a corner onto Canal Street, and he started jabbing me in the leg with it. Hard.
“Give me that!” I tried to take it away from him, but he jerked it back and started waving it around. It took me a second to realize that he was making scribbling motions.
I got this weird idea and started looking for some paper, but there was none to be had. I did come up with an old map of the city, however, in a pocket behind the seat. I gave it to him to doodle on while I did my best to confuse our trail, hoping against hope that he’d manage to circle his missing piece’s location.
He stabbed at the paper with all the coordination of a two-year-old. He finally proffered his masterpiece when we stopped at a red light. The lines were wobbly and slanting, like a right-handed person trying to communicate with the left. But they were definitely words.
I snatched it out of his fingers and held it up to the windshield. I HATE YOU.
“You can write?” I stared at him incredulously. So much for expecting Mircea to give away trade secrets. “Then how about telling me where you are?”
Ray took the map back and painstakingly crafted another sentence around its margins. I DON’T KNOW!
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You’ve got to be able to see something! A street sign, the name of a shop, anything!”
IT’S DARK.
“What the hell do you mean, it’s dark? You’re a vampire! You see at night!”
NOT IN A DUFFEL BAG!
“A duffel with a hole in it,” I reminded him impatiently. “Look around!”
AND SEE WHAT? I’M IN A TRUNK!
I frowned. “A car trunk? Are you moving?”
NO.
“Give me sounds, then. Smells, anything!”
THERE’S NO NOISE. AND ALL I SMELL ARE YOUR DIRTY SOCKS.
Great. There weren’t too many places that would be totally silent to a vampire’s ears, even a somewhat-mangled vampire. So they were in an enclosed garage, probably underground. And Manhattan only had about a thousand of those.
“Try harder!” I ground out. “We have a week here, remember? Then you and I are both—”
The car behind us laid on the horn, and Raymond and I simultaneously flipped it off. A second later, the interior of the Impala was strobed with garish light. I glanced in my mirror and confirmed that, yes, we’d just given the finger to a policeman. At least we’re wearing our seat belts, I thought, and hit the gas.
The cop had gotten out of his car before I took off, giving me a few seconds while he scrambled back into his vehicle. I used it to grab the phone. “You know that assistance you mentioned? This would be a good time,” I said when, miracle of miracles, Mircea actually answered himself.
“Where are you?”
“Headed south on Mott. Cop on my tail.”
“The human police?”
“Yes!”
“And this constitutes an emergency?”
“It does if he draws attention to us,” I hissed, as a dark Mercedes coupe did a 180 and swerved into the street behind the cop.
I hate being right all the time, I thought, and floored it.
“I’ll arrange something,” Mircea said, his voice going crisp. “Remain on the line.”
The cop turned on the siren as I whipped onto Hester, and also took the turn on a dime, while no doubt radioing for backup. And in case I’d had any doubt about who was in the coupe, it stayed glued to the cop’s tail. Mircea finally came back on the phone to give me a complicated set of directions that had me totally lost in less than five minutes, but didn’t do the same to my pursuers.
“I’m hearing multiple sirens now,” I pointed out.
“Not for long.”
Mircea had barely finished speaking when a huge moving van rumbled out of an alley. I managed to squeak by on the sidewalk, sacrificing the front bumper to a fire hydrant, but the cop wasn’t so lucky. He stood on the brakes, judging by the sound, but still plowed straight into the side of it. The coupe rear-ended him and their combined force pushed the truck onto the sidewalk and took out a candy store.
“If I’d known you were that efficient, I’d have asked for help before,” I told Mircea.
“You don’t usually require it.” It was mild enough, but it sounded like a rebuke.
“I don’t usually get mugged by family, either!”
“Who?” Mircea asked sharply.
“Radu’s bright-eyed boy. You might have mentioned Louis-Cesare was involved.”
“I was not informed.” His voice suggested that someone was going to pay dearly for that little lapse.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I said tightly.
“Meaning?”
“That I don’t think it’s coincidence that three first-level masters from three different Senates all suddenly formed an intense desire to talk to—”
“Dorina!”
“—a certain person on the same night. There’s more here than you bothered to tell me.” Not like that was new.
“It should have been an easy errand. You didn’t need to know.”
“Oh, no. No, no. That’s not how I work. If I’m going to take someone’s freaking head, I need to know why! You want blind obedience, send one of your boys.” It suddenly occurred to me to wonder why he hadn’t.
“You do freelance assignments for many people,” Mircea said, before I could ask. “You were not as easily connected with me as one of my own stable.”
“I hate when you do that,” I told him.
“Do what?”
“Answer questions before I ask them. It makes it seem like our conversations are planned out four or five steps ahead, and you’re just waiting for me to catch up.”
“If that were the case, they would not end in arguments much of the time.”
“Most of those arguments are because of this kind of thing. Start trusting me with the truth, or use someone else.”
“I will explain the situation later, if you wish it.” Translation: it’s bad enough that I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. “Did Louis-Cesare mention what his interest was in your errand?”
“He wasn’t feeling chatty. But probably the same as yours. Whatever that is.”
He was silent for a moment. “I sincerely hope not,” he said quietly.
It really is amazing what they can do with their voices, I thought, as gooseflesh broke out over my arms. I couldn’t translate that particular tone, because I’d never heard it before. But it had sounded a lot like: I’d hate to have to kill a member of the family.
“Come again?”
“Pull over. My men will locate you and assist with the search.” Translation: I’ll have my loyal minions take over and find Louis-Cesare, because you might not like what I plan to do to him.
I stared at the phone for a moment. I owed Louis-Cesare a world of hurt, and I fully intended to deliver. But that wasn’t the same thing as throwing him to the lions. This was personal, and until somebody bothered to give me a good reason otherwise, it was going to remain that way.
“Sorry. I didn’t get that,” I said.
“Dorina! Pull off and wait for—”
“I’ll call you back,” I told him, then chucked the phone out the window so he couldn’t use it to track me.
It looked like we were on our own.
Chapter Thirteen
A quick check in the rearview mirror showed that the coupe was back on our tail, with a crumpled front bumper but no other obvious damage. It had also acquired a buddy, a black sedan. It sped past the accident, passed the coupe and was coming up fast.
Ray flapped a hand frantically at me and held up the map. HE’S AT THE CLUB. I RECOGNIZE THE CARPET.
“The club? But why would he go back—”
The sedan rammed us from behind, and it was a hell of a hit. We went spinning into an intersection, barely missed a motorcyclist and didn’t miss a streetlight. Fortunately, the Impala was from the era when cars were built like tanks. Even more fortunately, the light toppled onto the sedan as it tried to follow us onto Leonard Street, and put a mass of white cracks in the windshield. Things were starting to look up until the coupe screeched in behind us, and our front left wheel started going soft.
I didn’t know if we’d run over some glass or if the tire had just been crappy all along, but either way, we were screwed. A bullet whizzed through the air, like an exclamation point on that thought, and took out my driver’s-side mirror. And Ray stuck the map in front of my face again.
It was flapping in the breeze, and there wasn’t a lot of light. But even so I managed to see that he’d circled a street five or six blocks ahead. “Read the map,” I told him impatiently. “That’s a dead end.”