Touch the Dark

Page 16

"What have you been doing instead of checking things out around here?" Billy Joe looked guilty, a fact that did not keep him from trying to look down my towel. "Stop that." I had an epiphany. "Hang on. We're somewhere near Vegas, aren't we?"
"Yeah, about thirty miles out. This place looks like a ranch, 'cept there're no horses, no tourists and the ranch hands dress a little funny. 'Course, it don't matter, since all any humans ever see is a big, bare canyon with a lot of keep-out signs."
"Thirty miles?" Billy could draw energy from the stored reserves in his necklace for up to fifty. "Don't tell me that while I've been bespelled, moved halfway across the country, threatened and imprisoned, you've been at the casinos!"
"Now, Cassie darlin'…"
"I can't believe this!" I don't get angry with him often, since it's mostly a waste of time—he is the definition of incorrigible—but this was the last straw. "I was almost killed! Twice! If you don't care about that, think about what happens to your precious necklace if somebody guns me down or rips my throat open. Let me spell it out for you: it ends up in some old lady's jewelry box in Podunk, USA, a hundred miles from nowhere!"
Billy Joe looked chastened, but I doubted it was guilt over what might have happened to me. He is unable to stay away from his home base for too long or his power runs dry—which was why I knew he'd be along sooner or later. The farther from the source he gets, the faster his strength bottoms out. His nightmare is getting stuck in a rural, one-horse town with no honky-tonks, strip clubs or gambling dens within reach. For him, it would be the equivalent of Hell. With me he had a guaranteed urban environment, since it's hard to hide in a small town. He also had something even more important.
Over time, we'd developed a sort of symbiotic relationship. Billy Joe is one of those spirits who can absorb energy from a living donor, rather like a vamp. Vamps take life energy through blood, which in magical terms is the repository for the life force of a person. When they feed, they receive part of the donor's life, which substitutes for the one they lost when they crossed over, at least for a while. Some ghosts can do the same thing, and like vamps, they don't always ask first. But Billy Joe vastly prefers a willing donor, not to mention that he says the "hit" is much longer lasting from me for some reason. In return for my agreeing to give him additional energy from time to time, he had agreed to keep watch for signs of Tony's impending return. Right then, I felt cheated.
"If you aren't going to be any use, I should sell this ugly thing." I rubbed some steam off the mirror and took a look at the monstrosity around my neck. It was hand-wrought gold, heavy and intricate, with a mass of squirming vines and flowers around a central cabochon ruby. The junk dealer had assumed it was glass, since he wasn't used to seeing nonfaceted jewels and it had been encrusted with years of accumulated dirt. Even all cleaned up, it was, without doubt, one of the ugliest necklaces I'd ever seen. I usually wore it inside my clothes.
"I'll have you know, I won that off a countess!"
"And judging by all the pawn marks, it was real important to you, wasn't it?"
"I always redeemed it, didn't I?" Billy Joe was starting to sulk, so I decided to lay off. I needed him cooperative if I was going to find out anything.
"I don't want a fight. I'm not up for it tonight. I just need to know some stuff, like why the Senate grabbed me and…"
Billy Joe held up a hand. "Please, I know my job." He settled back on the tub and talked while I examined my knees. Raw-looking scrapes and bruises had flowered on both of them despite the height of my boots, promising stiffness by tomorrow. I knew I should feel lucky that I was alive to be an aching mess, but somehow that thought failed to cheer me up. Maybe because I didn't think I'd stay that way for long. "That vamp outside, Louis-César, is on loan from Europe. He's some kind of dueling champion. It's said that he's never lost a fight, and from what I hear he's been in hundreds."
"He can add another to the total after tonight." Not that it had looked like the guard was much of a challenge, but I guess it counted since he had decapitated the guy. "Did you know Tony bribed some lunatics to kill me right in front of the Senate?"
"That's nuts. Mircea'd kill him."
I brightened slightly. I hadn't thought of it that way. If Tony had been behind the second attempt on my life, he'd just made Mircea look bad, since nothing lowered your rep quicker in vamp circles than not to be able to control an underling. Even though I usually liked him, I'd always gotten the impression that Mircea would be a bad person to cross.
"We can only hope so."
"Yeah, well, it don't sound like Tony's style to me." I shrugged. In my opinion, Tony didn't have any style. "Anyway, when I learned Louis-César is second in the European Senate, I did some digging for you."
"Great. So tell me something I care about."
Billy Joe gave a long-suffering sigh. "All right. You're in the main headquarters of MAGIC, the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, better known as party central for things that go bump in the night."
"I know that." Actually, I think I had figured it out, at least subconsciously. I'd never been there before, but where else could a mage bust in on a Senate meeting and a vamp greet a were like an old buddy? I just hadn't had time to think about it, and it wasn't like I knew a lot about what passed for the supernatural UN. Tony wasn't interested in talking through problems. He was more the stake-'em-and-forget-'em type, a practice that worked on much more than vamps. It's one of the similarities among species that MAGIC hasn't chosen to highlight: nothing lives too well with a big piece of wood stuck through its heart.
"Well, maybe here's something you don't know. The Senate is leading on this one because it's a vamp who's causing the trouble, but everybody's upset. You know that Russian master Tony used to do business with, the guy running half the rackets in Moscow?"
"Rasputin?" The old adviser to Nicholas II, the last tsar of all the Russias, had been poisoned, shot, stabbed and drowned by some prince who thought he had too much influence over the royal family. He was right: the tsarina loved the unkempt, self-proclaimed monk because her son was a hemophiliac, and only Rasputin's hypnotic stare was able to heal him. In return, Rasputin got power, and a lot of his friends were appointed to important government jobs. The prince and the group of nobles he'd talked into helping him remove the new power in town had been real surprised that poison, stabbing and gunshot wounds hadn't seemed to faze Rasputin. It wasn't until he fell off a bridge and they hauled his apparently lifeless corpse out of the freezing water that they were satisfied. Historians had been arguing ever since about why it took him so long to die. The Russian mafia could have told them: it's hard to kill somebody who's already dead.
"Yeah, that's the one. Rasputin got annoyed 'cause the Senate seat he wanted went to Mei Ling. He doesn't stand a chance of getting onto the European Senate—most of those crazy sons of bitches make even him look soft—but he thought he was a shoo-in over here. Word is, he didn't take the rejection well. He disappeared for a while, then about six months ago showed up again and began attacking Senate members. He's killed four and wounded two others so bad, no one knows if they'll pull through, and now he's challenged the Consul to a duel to try and take over the whole shebang. She called in a favor from the Consul in Europe and brought this Louis-César over as her champion. But, of course, that didn't make Mei Ling happy."
"I bet." I'd met the Consul's second, a tiny Chinese American beauty who was all of four foot ten and weighed maybe eighty-five pounds, when I was seven. She'd left quite an impression. The second's position isn't like that of an American vice president. He or she isn't there to take over if the Consul is killed—the remaining Senate members will vote on a replacement unless a duel decides it, in which case it's winner take all. The title also doesn't imply that the holder is the second most powerful member on the Senate—it's possible, but it isn't a job requirement. Each Senate member has a specific function for that body, sort of like the presidential cabinet. Seconds are appointed for one reason and one only: they're intimidating. Whoever holds the office is also known as "the Enforcer," because he or she enforces the decrees of the Senate by whatever means are necessary. Those can include everything from diplomacy to violence, but Mei Ling was known to prefer the latter.
She'd made that clear the day she'd visited Tony's audience hall to drag off one of his vamps for questioning. Whatever the guy had done, he definitely didn't want to talk to the Senate about it. In fact, he was so opposed to the idea that he issued a challenge. Mei Ling was new to the position and didn't have much of a reputation; she was also only about 120 years old and looked like a China doll, so I guess he thought he could take her.
It amazes me how even old vamps sometimes forget that it isn't size but power that matters, and while that often correlates to age, it doesn't always. Some vamps many centuries older than Mei Ling will never have her strength, and I've seen hulking bruisers forced to their knees by the glance of a child. The transition to vampire doesn't make you gorgeous if you were plain, intelligent if you were stupid or powerful if you were weak: a loser in life is a loser vamp, spending his or her immortality serving someone else. It's one of the major drawbacks to the condition, something the movies never seem to highlight. But occasionally it does give someone who was overlooked as a mortal a chance to shine. That day I saw a tiny, fragile-looking flower literally rip a vamp into bloody shreds. I also saw how much pleasure she took in it, how her dark eyes glowed with a fierce joy at the fact that she could do this, that once again a man had underestimated her, and this time he would pay for it.