Midnight's Daughter

Page 20

“I’m asking you.”
“Why? Why ask me anything?” he demanded savagely. “I am merely tolerated for the moment because the Senate is desperate. Too many of their members have already been lost to the war, and others may be so before long. Now they need strength, but when the war ends . . . things will be as they were.”
I frowned. That didn’t sound like Mircea. Betray him and he’d cut your balls off and feed them to you, but I’d never seen him turn his back on an ally. I doubted very much that I was going to see it now. “When we get through this, I’ll talk to Mircea,” I began, wondering why I bothered.
I stopped because Louis-Cesare was going purple. “I do not need your pity!” He stepped closer, until his body was actually touching mine, but I didn’t call him on it. He’d been so controlled, so smugly superior, in the car; it was good to see some of the arrogance bleed away into a more honest emotion. Nobody else seemed to notice how much of it he carried around, but I knew anger. On most people it was a shallow, washed-out emotion, limp and tepid. On Louis-Cesare it was incandescent.
“What do you need?” It slipped out before I could catch it.
Time froze for a long, breathless minute. Then Louis-Cesare’s eyes flooded silver, melting into white-hot heat. I was so startled by the transformation that it took me a moment to realize that he didn’t look aroused; he looked livid.
“There is only one service you provide to my kind,” he said in a savage undertone. “When I am ready for it, I will let you know.”
It was like a punch to the stomach, a clean blow that takes the wind right out of you. I honestly had no idea what to say. Then an arm slipped around my neck, saving me the trouble by almost crushing my windpipe.
I couldn’t believe anyone had actually managed to sneak up on me; then I heard Marlowe’s voice and understood. The damn vamp moved as quietly as smoke—it was one of many things that made him so deadly. “Have more care, Louis-Cesare. Remember what you’re dealing with.”
Louis-Cesare shot him a purely vicious look. “Release her! This is a family discussion.”
“Family?” Marlowe didn’t bother to hide his disgust. “You’re beginning to sound like—”
I elbowed Marlowe painfully in the groin, then skipped back out of reach. “I don’t know what your deal is,” I told Louis-Cesare furiously, resisting the urge to rub my abused throat, “but you take it up with Radu. This was as much his idea as mine, and he thinks it’ll work. You want to tell your master he’s a fool, you go right ahead. Let me know how that goes, if you survive.”
Louis-Cesare had clamped a hand around Marlowe’s bicep, restraining the enraged vamp, but his eyes were on me. “We are not finished.”
Perverse bastard—he’d been the one walking away a moment before. “Oh, I really think we are,” I said, and splashed toward the garage.
I was halfway hoping he’d follow me, maybe give me an excuse to run over him. But when I drove out in that year’s Jaguar—so new the leather smell hadn’t even worn off yet—he was still standing in the rain, talking with an angry-looking Marlowe. I stopped by Radu, who was giving his battered assistant a lecture on keeping proper distance.
“Your son is a maniac,” I informed him.
’Du sighed. “What now?”
“He was raving about not being welcome in the family.”
Radu winced. “Not that again!”
“It isn’t true?”
“Of course not! We had to keep him at a distance initially, of course, but that’s all over with now.”
“What’s all over with?”
“Oh, that whole time-change thing,” Radu said vaguely, as if I should already know whatever the hell he was talking about.
“What time-change thing?”
“Oh, you know. Before, when that Gypsy cursed him.”
“Louis-Cesare is cursed?”
“Well, not now,” Radu said, as if he thought I might be a little slow. “In the other time stream. The one Mircea altered.”
“Wait a minute. Mircea altered time?”
“Really, Dory, if you’d keep up with the family, you’d know these things.”
“Humor me.”
“Originally, Louis-Cesare was cursed, not made,” Radu said with exaggerated patience. “Some Gypsy became annoyed with him about something and . . . I don’t remember the details. Anyway, after the time change, I ended up being the one who made him a vampire. But we had to keep everything else as close to the way it had been as possible or risk altering the present. And that included me not being there for Louis-Cesare, because of course I hadn’t been before, since I didn’t even know him.” Radu looked at me petulantly. “I explained all this to him, you know.”
I blinked. “As coherently as you just did for me?”
“Naturally! Not that it seemed to make a difference.”
“’Du,” I said slowly, “there’s the teeniest chance that he doesn’t believe you.”
In a positive fugue of gestures, Radu rolled his eyes, shook his head and sighed. “Never have children, Dory. They are no end of trouble.”
“I’m a dhampir,” I said tightly. “We can’t reproduce.”
“Well, that’s all right, then.” Radu waved it away.
“I’m going to spread some rumors about our destination in Vegas,” I said, changing the subject before I was tempted to strangle him and save Drac the trouble. “They’ll probably take a while to get around, but there’re no guarantees. Be careful on the way there. I’ll give you a few hours to get under way before I mention anything.”
“Kit has arranged an escort for us.” He glanced back to where the boys were talking. “Try not to bait Louis-Cesare, Dory. He is . . . somewhat confused at the moment.”
“That would make two of us.” Mircea was going to have some explaining to do, the next time I saw him.
“Try to understand, my dear. He doesn’t know where you fit in. You’re a dhampir, which rather puts you beyond the pale in his way of thinking, but you’re also Mircea’s daughter and therefore someone to whom he owes a degree of esteem. He doesn’t understand that you aren’t serious when you tease him. He interprets it as a lack of respect.”
“Then he’s right on the money,” I said, and floored it.
“I don’t think you understand my position,” I said, signaling the bartender for another drink. The guy was human, yet he didn’t so much as blink at the fact that I was talking to a three-foot-tall gnome with a foot-long nose, beady purple eyes and ears that were growing a forest of bushy white hair long enough to braid. It matched his eyebrows and the snowy mop on his head, but the real stunner was the beard. It was pure silver and almost as long as he was tall. I’d seen him tuck it into his belt before, to keep from tripping, but tonight it flowed free, like a river down his chest. It was an oddly beautiful feature on an otherwise unprepossessing body, and always made me smile.
Benny was a fairly standard Skogstroll, or forest troll, and this was Vegas, land of the strange. But I was still surprised at the total lack of interest everyone was showing. Things had changed a bit since I’d been here.
We weren’t in a demon bar tucked away on a backstreet, but in a poolside lounge at Caesars. I’d been told at his shop that I’d find Benny here, and sure enough, he’d been belting back margaritas for a while, judging by the bleary-eyed look he turned on me. “I get it, all right?” he said, holding up a gnarled hand to keep me from repeating myself. “You got a tough assignment and you need something with more kick than the law allows. But I’m telling you, I got nothing.”
“You always say that.” I wasn’t about to take no for an answer. I needed to restock, and it didn’t seem likely that the Senate was going to help me out. Especially since Mircea wanted Drac trapped, not dead, and none of the things I had in mind were the type you walked away from.
“Only this time, it ain’t no bargaining tactic. There’s this war happening, you know? My inventory was raided by the Senate—they said to confiscate contraband.” Benny accepted another drink from a waiter, whose eyes never quite managed to focus, and licked the rim. “And right after that, the damn black mages hit me for what was left. Don’t nobody understand the concept of paying for nothing no more.”
“Come on, Benny. I know you. You never have everything at the shop.”
“And now I ain’t got nothing nowhere else, neither.” He sighed and patted my hand. “You been a good customer, Dory, and you know me. I’ve always played straight with you, right? But it’s the times we’re living in. Word is, the Senate is vulnerable and its control is slipping. Who knows what’s coming? Nobody, that’s who. So they all want protection, don’t they? A little something extra in case things start to implode. Truth is, my inventory was getting pretty thin even before the raids. And now . . .” He shook his head. “I got nothing.”
A harassed-looking mother walked by the bar, little girl in tow with a sno-cone clutched tightly in one fist. The girl’s bright blue lips shaped a startled “oh” of astonishment as she caught sight of Benny, who dropped her a friendly wink. “Mommy! Look at the elf!”
“Don’t stare, Melissa! And don’t call people names!” I looked at Benny as the little girl was towed away, still protesting that she wanted to say hello to the “nice elf.” “I wouldn’t call an Occultus charm nothing, Benny,” I observed mildly. They were expensive items used to ensure that anyone who didn’t already know what someone looked like would see only a projected image. The exception was young children, whose brains hadn’t yet formed the preconceived ideas about the way the world ought to work that the charm exploited.
He shrugged, unapologetic. Benny was like most of his kind when it came to turning a buck. He’d sell his own mother—who had, after all, tried to eat him—if he thought he’d get a good price. Problem was, he didn’t think I had the funds for the no-doubt completely over-inflated prices he was getting these days. Most of the time, he’d have been right. But not today.