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"The authorities cleared me of intentional death," the woman said, Brice's dramatic come-hither lilt and low-cut blouse making my eye twitch as she indolently lounged on the couch across the low coffee table from me. She'd arrived first and was being careful, moving with an exaggerated slowness to hide her vampire-quick reflexes and threatening fangs, but it was that very wariness that had me on edge.
"I assumed I was asked to come to extend my apology in person," she finished mockingly, and the mousy man at the head of the table bristled.
"You can take your apology and cram it up your filthy, decaying hole of a-"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" I interrupted, lifting a hand before it got out of control. Again, I thought, stretching my arm to rub out the dull throb gained while separating them the first time. "Victor, the I.S. doesn't have the last word. Sit. Everyone take a breath. Have a drink."
Lip rising to show a spit-shiny fang, the onetime professor at Cincy's university pushed back into his chair, a glass of orange juice in his tight, undead grip. As the city's subrosa, mediating the minor power struggles of Cincy's vamps was occasionally part of my job-especially between the dead ones. Pike had wanted to bring them together with the hope of finding restitution, and when two vampires disagreed, it was best to bring the biggest guns you had. That would be me.
I eased deeper into the indulgent leather chair, eyeing them both in a wary annoyance as my old vampire scar began to tingle, the virus-laced bite responding to the pheromones both undead vampires were kicking out. Victor and Brice went silent, the former in frustration, the latter in calculation. If I was feeling it, the living vampires downstairs were, too, and I glanced across the room at Pike. Nodding, the living vampire unfolded his length to go turn the air exchanger to high. Below us, the rhythmic thump of a too-enthusiastic live band drifted up the wide, open stairway along with the intoxicating scent of pizza and too many vampires.
Piscary's on a Friday night, I thought as I glanced over the large room. By rights, the band should be up here with the more exuberant crowd to leave the sedate members to enjoy the calm, sipping on wine and the subliminal boost from the party, but Pike had recently begun to use the second floor as a semi-public space to mediate arguments. Kisten had done the same thing with a pool table and dance floor instead of a wet bar and a ring of chairs and couches around a low table. That Kisten's pool table was now in my sanctuary serving as a secondary spelling space would probably please him-even if the felt was burned and the slate cracked.
"Sasha's death was not accidental," Victor muttered, his eyes a dark pupil black, and I checked my phone for the time. Ivy was bringing in Constance, and they were late. "Brice lured Sasha into a situation where she had no control, and then she killed her knowing full well I didn't have a second scion who possessed enough stamina to sustain my needs."
It was a problem, and whereas an accidental death was not a punishable offense in the unwritten law of the undead, an outright culling of another's support system was. "That is what we are here to determine," I said, sneaking a glance at my phone again.
"Let me call down for another round of drinks," Pike said, and I winced. Yeah, let's add more alcohol to the mix, I thought, even as I acknowledged the logic behind it. Alcohol wouldn't slow them down or mellow them out, but it would remind them of what it was like to be living, and that might shift them into a more amenable frame of mind.
He really does know what he's doing, I mused as the heavily scarred man in his early thirties moved gracefully to the stairway to beckon a bartender halfway up. His black hair was wavy and short about his ears, and his summer tan was already beginning to fade. No beard, but a midnight stubble gave him an attractive, bad-boy cast. He was officially Constance's scion now that the undead vampire was no longer a mouse. I knew the arrangement was tasteless to both of them, for though the undead could survive on any living blood, they craved that of their living kin, and if it was taken from someone who loved them, it was almost enough to fill the hole the lack of a soul left. Hence the tradition of cultivating living vampiric scions to support their undead brethren.
And whereas it was obvious that Pike didn't love Constance, he did enjoy the boost of power that sipping on undead vampire left in his veins. Though powerful in their own right, living vampires had only a portion of their undead kin's strength and pull. After almost a month of sharing blood with the undead, Pike had again regained the sexual lure and charisma he'd had when I'd first met him.
I stifled a shudder, enjoying watching Pike move about the room as Victor prattled on.
Living vampires were my Achilles' heel. All the benefits of the undead, and only half the risk. Pike was clearly off-limits, not because he was out of my league but because I knew better. And yet as my gaze drifted back to him, I smiled, pleased to be able to call him my friend.
His slacks were black, and his matching lightweight shirt was classy and sharp. Soft-soled shoes made his steps silent and his limp hardly noticeable. The scars about his neck and arms, though, were mottled and obvious. They weren't the bedroom-fun kind, rather the kill-you variety, and he took no pains to hide them. In short, Pike had had a very hard life evading his older brothers' lethal intentions. Which made the fact that one of them, the worst, was currently sitting in a beanbag chair in the corner, the older man focused on a handheld game with the intensity of a ten-year-old. But then again, Brad was down to about a ten-year-old's level of intellect, despite the man's temples beginning to gray and the first lines showing about his eyes.
My smile faltered at the flash of guilt. I needed an Atlantean mirror to break the curse I'd put on him. That I'd thought it was a white curse at the time was the only thing keeping me out of Alcatraz's high-security wing. Now even that excuse was running thin, and the coven of moral and ethical standards was on my case. Again.
"Orange juice and a Bloody Mary," Pike said as he set the two drinks down, a soft shudder making his hands shake when he breathed in their mix of anger and smug satisfaction.
"That bitch of a woman stalked and lured my scion away." The rim of brown around Victor's pupils narrowed further as his eyes went entirely black. "I demand restitution. As the city master, Constance has a responsibility to see that I get restitution."
Pike eased to halt behind my chair, not in protection but to watch the open stairway.
"You poor, deluded excuse of an undead," Brice mocked. "I didn't lure Sasha away from you. She came to me. You are a disgrace. No wonder you can't maintain a family."
"Don't you dare talk about my family!" Victor held his orange juice with a white-knuckled grip.
Brice shook her head, but it was exactly her seemingly reasonable attitude that rubbed me wrong. Still, I smiled at her, stifling my unease at her too-long canines and her unreal grace. She was faster than me, too. "Poor Sasha," the undead woman said. "Victor had been neglecting her. She wanted more aggressive bedroom play and he couldn't provide."
"That's not true!" Victor's face went bloodless, tension pulling him to a dangerous stiffness. "I loved Sasha. Her virus levels weren't sufficient for what she wanted to give me. We were slowly increasing them. She knew that. I didn't want to hurt her. I loved her." Eyes narrowed, he focused on Brice stretching languorously in the chair like a lioness. "And you killed her twice. Before her time."
"Easy," I said, glancing at my phone again. Where the Turn are you, Ivy? Victor had undoubtably loved his scion-before he had died. Now all he remembered was having loved her. The undead clung to that memory as if it was their last vestige of humanity-which it was. Victor was right to be upset. It usually took half a lifetime to gain the skill to convince someone that they were loved, luring a new victim into risking death as their scion to keep an undead in their semi-alive state. With Sasha gone, Victor would likely perish before he figured it out. It was the undead's tricky forty-year ceiling come early. Most didn't survive it. Those who did were truly manipulative.
Like Brice, I thought when the woman set her Bloody Mary down and leaned forward to show her scar-decorated cleavage as Victor continued his derisive tirade. Brice had died in the sixties during the Turn, and now that Constance was again out in the open demonstrating her ineffectiveness, it seemed likely that Brice's slow plotting to make a bid for the city had shifted into overdrive.
Put simply, Constance wasn't a good city master vampire-even as a front. It was why the DC vamps had sent her here in the hope I'd off her in a fit of annoyance. It would have landed me in jail and out of their hair-and Constance in a permanent grave. I'd promised to protect the outclassed undead vampire from her kin if she'd be the front to my control of Cincinnati, but the diminutive Black vampire was erratic at the best of times.
Which was why Ivy and Pike were handling her enforcement duties. As much as Victor was in trouble, I was starting to suspect that we were the ones in danger. Brice obviously had her eye on taking over the city. Perhaps the DC vampires had put her up to it. They'd love to see me gone. I was doing a better job of overseeing their people than they could, probably because Ivy, Pike, and I didn't put the capricious demands on a vampire population that a master vampire did.
"Where is Constance?" Brice said, her curt voice cutting into Victor's latest accusation, and my attention snapped to her. "This needs to be settled."
"She's on her way." I forced my fist to ease even as I tensed. This entire fiasco was Brice's plan to get her and Constance in the same room. Maybe breaking the spell that had turned her into a mouse had been a mistake. The hidden threat was always more convincing than the visible one.
I gathered myself to rise and find a quiet corner to call Ivy . . . and then I blinked as Brice exhaled and every last thought I had seemed to melt.
Pike's knees buckled. He caught himself against my chair, his breath going shallow as he fought off the undead woman's sudden pull. All my exposed skin was tingling with a delicious sizzing sensation, and I froze as the memory of teeth sliding cleanly into me surfaced, a pang of desire going right to my groin. I forced my hand from my neck, embarrassed that I had put it there, one lone finger tracing a delicious path to my clavicle as if I was a vampire junky. Jenks would laugh his wings off if he were here.
"See?" Victor pointed at Brice as the undead woman stared, her gaze black in a hungry passion. "She's doing it again! What scion can resist that? I swear I'm going to pull your fangs out and give them to my niece for her sweet sixteen."
"I'm going downstairs," Brad said suddenly, his eyes pupil black as he tossed his handheld game aside and stood. The pheromones were hitting him hard. He was getting randy. The restaurant, too, was getting loud. Between Brice and Victor, there were too many vamp pheromones in here. The air system could not keep up.
My hands trembled, and I didn't dare take anything more than a shallow breath until I forced the memory of Ivy, and Kisten, and every undead vampire I'd ever run into from my thoughts. Pike, too, had gotten control of himself, and I felt a small flicker of victory even as Brad started for the stairs. Brice was good, but I'd fought better. She couldn't maintain her pheromone level, and the air was clearing already.
"You good here?" Pike said stiffly as he went after Brad. Having him up here hadn't been the best idea; leaving him downstairs was a worse one. The living vampire had no restraint, no memory-because of me.
I have to fix this, I thought, using my guilt to pull me out from the edge of Brice's ecstasy. "Nice try, Brice. Maybe in another fifty years," I said as I dropped my gaze to my phone, and the undead woman's expression became livid.
"Where are you?" I texted Ivy, one hand on my phone, the other touching the butt of my cherry-red splat gun. It fired spells, not bullets: a witch's ancient weapon made modern. Brice was clearly upset that she'd given me her best shot and that both Pike and I had brushed it away like the annoyance it was.
"She made me put on jewelry," came back immediately. "Be there soon."
Thank the Turn, I thought in relief as I set my phone on the table with a little click. Constance equated jewelry with being civilized. The vampire wore enough to bring down a camel. Quantity, not quality, was her motto.
But Pike had used Brad as an excuse to surround Brice, and the woman's eyes narrowed as she drummed her fingers once in a tight, bloodred-nail staccato.
"Relax." I set my weapon beside my phone in an unspoken threat. "Both of you. I will not tolerate Constance walking in here with you at each other's throats." Because a blood exchange between two undead vampires would kill them both, as the two slightly different viruses that animated them battled with each other. It was how I had lost Kisten, and a flicker of heartache took me. Damn you, Elyse, for dangling the spell before me to bring him back. It was a lie. It had to be a coven trick. Even Al didn't know the magic to recover the undead, even as a ghost.
"Constance is a puppet." Brice's expression held a mocking sureness. "Any justice you get from her will be at a witch's grace, Victor. How sad. Going to a witch for justice?"
