Jane. Good steak. I may have to marry you.”
He swallowed and turned back to the kitchen, but I heard him murmur, “It’d be like sleeping with a scorpion.” Which I thought was very funny, and almost told him so, but he was bringing me tea, and the steak was so good that I wanted to be nice. I ate the whole thing, plus the sautéed mushrooms and grilled zucchini he set on the side. Delicious. Ten minutes after I finished the meal, I was on my way, without ever seeing Flyboy Dan.
It was still an hour before sunset when I got to the clan home of the Master of the City of Seattle. The house—okay, it was a mansion, but my standards had changed the longer I worked in close proximity to vamps— now I called it a house and didn’t feel like an impostor when the driver pulled up out front. The clan home was a hundred years old, three stories, brick, stucco, and wood on an acre of land, lakefront. It had heavily landscaped grounds and a circular drive off Lake Washington Boulevard, and all the houses near it were mansions too. I had no idea about property values, but I was guessing two mil easy. I gathered my things and stopped, dragging my eyes back to the Seattle Clan Home. Something wasn’t— The lack jumped out at me. No security, no armed blood- servants patrolling. Not even a gardener on the grounds. The place looked deserted. My shoulders tightened as I got out, slung the blood-collecting bag over one shoulder, and closed the door. “You’re waiting, right?” I said to the taxi driver.
“You’re not a hit man, right?”
“Right. Just a bodyguard, applying for a job.”
“I’ll wait unless I hear gunfire. Then I’m outta here.”
“Fair enough. Thanks for the phone,” I said, tucking it in my pocket. He had brought me a new one—no bells or whistles, but at least in one piece and functioning—on the orders of Leo. Having learned my lesson, I had another in my back pocket.
I spun on a heel and walked to the front door. It was a double door, wavery panes of leaded glass in the doors and side lights. One door hung open.
A Walther was in my hand in an instant, the Benelli sliding from the back sheath. From inside, I smelled a familiar sickly-sweet scent, heard raspy breathing and an irregular moaning. Using a toe, I pushed open the door.
The foyer looked immaculate, twelve-foot-tall ceilings, walls a pale cream, wainscoting a muted beige, and the millwork at ceiling and floor in a yellow the color of twenty-four-karat gold in candlelight. I slid inside and to my left into the formal room. Hardwood floors, Oriental rugs, marble fireplace surrounded by massive millwork. Cloth upholstery on couches and chairs, which was weird. Vamps liked leather; the feel of skin against theirs appealed to their predatory instincts. But I saw no leather anywhere. And even more odd, the shutters were open. Sunlight poured into the front room.
I moved on to the left, into the music room/library. A baby grand piano stood in the middle of the room, and couches and bookshelves lined the walls. The lower floor of the house was set up in a circular pattern for formal entertaining. I kept on circling to my left, into the breakfast room that looked out over the water and toward the Seattle cityscape, through the kitchen—lots of copper and brass, even on the walls and ceiling—and into the dining room, which had a table that would seat twelve. I hadn’t seen anyone. No security cameras. Nothing. The sickly smells were all coming from upstairs.
I took the stairs to the second floor cautiously, the M4 pointed up, the handgun covering my backside. There were four bedrooms and ten sick blood-servants. Crap. There was no info anywhere on blood-servants getting sick. This was new, and not in a good way. The humans were sick like I had never seen anyone sick before, covered in pustules, many of them ruptured and seeping onto the bedding. The closest thing I could have guessed was smallpox. They were the source of the raspy breathing and moans.
I climbed the stairs to the third floor, which was empty, and then into the finished attic. The smell of rot about blew me away, and with Beast’s experience, I can take a lot of decomposition. The upper floor was an apartment, and on the floor lay a woman. She had died by multiple gunshots. She had been beheaded, the way one would kill a vamp or were, to make certain of death. I kept the Benelli on the doorway to the stairs and slid the handgun into its holster. Avoiding the body fluids, I dropped to one knee at her side and reached into her mouth, feeling for fangs. Nothing. Human teeth. So why the beheading?
In the corner, something moved in the air currents. A bright blue feather, downy, fluffy. I swiveled on my knee and studied the rest of the floor. There were a lot of blue feathers, everywhere. But no bird or boa to explain why.
I drew a steel blade and pulled on Beast’s vision to look at the woman. She still looked human. With the blade, I sliced down. Fast. Hard. And for an instant, I saw, not a woman, but a huge blue – and rosy-hued bird. “Crap,” I whispered. The woman was an Anzu—a Mercy Blade. The supernatural species lived under a blanket of glamours that could be disrupted momentarily by the proper application of a steel blade. They were fierce fighters. If she was dead, then the clan home had been physically attacked as well as the vamps made sick. There was no sign of them here; they were likely hiding in their lairs.
I went back to the second floor and asked permission of the sick humans who were conscious, and took their blood, promising to call for ambulances. Oddly, they weren’t panicked or worried, and even insisted that they were getting better, which sounded just plain weird, unless the disease affected their brains, like meningitis. The one I stuck last seemed the most lucid, and I asked, “What happened here? I thought your MOC had accepted a new master.”
“Our Mercy Blade said we must fight, not accept the fist at our throats. She said we would win with her fighting at our sides. It was a mistake.” Tears leaked from her eyes. “They killed her. They killed Mithrans, and then they . . . spent some time with us.”
I had a feeling that “spent some time with us” had been really, really bad. “Did any of your vamps survive the attack? Are they in their lairs?”
“Some died true-dead. Some didn’t,” she whispered. “We killed four of theirs, though they were old and powerful. But when we were overwhelmed, I told my masters to run. I haven’t seen them since then.”
After I obtained her blood, I washed my hands thoroughly in the hall bath. Even with gloves, I wasn’t taking chances. Like Ro, the humans had kept bleeding and I had to apply pressure bandages at the puncture sites.
Back downstairs, I found an Apple laptop and shoved it into my tote with the blood, grabbed up several cell phones, and added them in too. Maybe the call histories would tell us something. I also found a business card tacked to a corkboard near a rack of cell chargers. It was black, white, and red, with a stylized drawing of a neck with holes in it, bleeding fresh blood, like a blood-whore’s calling card. The name on the card was Blood-Call, the number and address local. It was the only thing on the board, which was odd, so I pocketed the card. On a desk, I found several other business cards, most of them of local businessmen: lawyers, accountants, a PR firm, people who might conceivably want a vamp’s business and money. I found another Blood-Call card, this one creased and folded as if it had been carried around for a while. I took all the cards.
Standing just inside the front door, breathing fresh air through the open crack, I dialed Leo’s number and told his
“You have any idea why these guys are still sick when their master gave in to the vamp we’re chasing?”
“Someone rebelled after the fact, and the new master is teaching them a lesson.” Which was totally something a vamp would do. Bruiser went on. “I’ll find Gee DiMercy and tell him about the Mercy Blade. You get out of there and back here. I’ll handle calling ambulances and alerting the authorities about the pla—the disease.”
I hung up and stepped outside, still thinking about the word he had almost used for a disease that had attacked vamps
The stench clung to me, so bad even the patient driver’s nose curled, so I tipped him two twenties when he dropped me off at the small, private airport in the boonies outside Seattle. The terminal was a single-story building with all the charm of a saltbox, but it lit up the early night like a beacon. This afternoon, I had passed through with a minimum of effort, even carrying the weapons, guessing that Leo’s money had greased enough palms to make that happen. But there had been three people in the terminal. Now, as I stepped inside, there was no one.
My hackles rose. The car that brought me, and was the fastest way outta here, drove off, tires abrading on
