Death's Rival

and I should have. Now that decision was back to bite Leo. Worse was the knowledge that I was even more involved in today’s fiasco.

“It’s my fault because the man I killed in my hotel room was the Enforcer of the master vamp who’s challenging and taking other vamps’ territory.”

Faint humor touched his features, his closed eyes crinkling slightly. “Why do you think that?”

“Leo’s enemy left me a letter on a dead man.”

“A? Z? Q?” the paramedic asked, and laughed at his own joke.

Bruiser’s brown eyes came open slowly, as if they had been glued together. There was pain in his gaze, but also intense concentration and focus. He lifted a finger and touched my hand. I almost jerked away from the contact, his flesh as cold as a vamp’s, but his fingers closed over mine. “When you first saw him in your hotel room, was his gun drawn?”

The question surprised me nearly as much as the gesture. “I don’t know.” I stared into his eyes, unable to block out his study of me. Unable to not remember. It had been months, and what I recalled about the man had been the initial lack of scent on his person. Unscented deodorant, no cologne, only gun oil and lubricants to mark him as armed, and later, the very, very faint taint of his master—which I could now identify as beerlike, hops and fermentation and the sweet smell of blood. I had been naked, asleep, when he entered the hotel suite, my body hidden behind the mounded bed linens. I had risen, whirling, grabbed the statue beside the bed, and thrown it as both a diversion and a weapon, diving for my Walther 380. His arm had been coming up. “He was turned to the side, right arm down and out of sight, looking at my weapons, going through my blades and stakes with his left hand, when I threw the statue at him. It’s all in the police reports. I didn’t lie about anything.”

“You shot first?”

I hadn’t actually seen the weapon until he fired. Spats of sound from an illegal suppressor, like books dropping flat from shoulder height. Then the sound of my weapons firing. The recoil in wrist and shoulder. The stench of gunfire and blood. “No. He shot first.” Which meant that my attacker had been already holding a drawn weapon. An odd tightness in my chest eased.

“Self-defense. Did he say anything?”

“No. He went unconscious fast, even though there wasn’t a lot of blood. I thought he was going to live until they told me that he . . . died. Later.”

“The letter the master Mithran left you. Where is it?”

I slipped my hand from his and pulled the envelope from my pocket. He chuckled, the laughter holding more pain than comedy. “Read it to me.”

I unfolded it and read the letter aloud. When I was done, he took the single page and stared at the words. I heard something stutter-thump-give-way, something from inside him. Bruiser’s hand fell to his stomach, the letter fluttering to the floor. The paramedic cursed and pushed me to the side. Bruiser didn’t take another breath, his chest sunken in and still. I pulled the new cell and speed-dialed a landline number I seldom called. I was shocked when Katie—who hated phones—answered with my name, “Jane Yellowrock.” There was rage in the words, but I didn’t think it was directed at me.

I said, “Leo’s primo is bleeding out. I need someone strong to feed him. Fast.”

“We have our own wounded. Leo is not alone to suffer assault tonight. We too are under attack,” she said, unintentionally repeating Bruiser’s words, from what felt like days ago, as he told vamp-warriors to get Leo to safety and to protect Katie. “My Alejandro and Estavan were injured as their carriage drove up. The little priestess is in a healing trance with them. The elder priestess is missing,” she spat. “The others are fighting and dying to ensure our safety. Who do you suggest I send to feed a human?”

Fury spurted through, me, hot and blazing at her callous disregard of any but another vamp, even a valuable human, like the primo. “I don’t care who you send,” I ground out, “but it better be fast, or so help me, by all I hold holy, I’ll stake and behead you myself, and rip out your fangs and mount them on my necklace.” My breath came hard and fast, as if I’d been running.

“Deo. You would too. And Leonardo would let you,” she hissed. “I will recall someone from the battlefield. He will be there in moments.” The cell connection ended and the ambulance started to move.

“Stop,” I said. When the paramedic ignored me, I swiveled on my heel and slid against the driver, shoving him. One handed, I opened the door and continued my momentum, pushing him off his seat and out onto the drive, even as I slid into the driver’s seat, hit the brakes, and threw the ambulance into park. I looked down, ascertained that I hadn’t run over the driver, and said, “If you’d been wearing your seat belt, this wouldn’t have happened.” I looked to the paramedic in back and started to tell him something, but the words died in my throat. He was doing CPR on Bruiser.

Time slowed into something spiked and thorny, as if each second, each compression to Bruiser’s chest, were a wound stabbed into my soul with a cold iron blade. Again and again. The medic was shouting. Something about getting to the hospital. The driver, also a paramedic, opened the back ambulance doors and jumped inside, black boots landing with twin thumps, two cops behind him. I turned off the ambulance. Opened the door. Threw the keys into the dark. Just before the paramedic body-slammed me.

The world tilted. Smoky air rushed at me as I fell from the ambulance, following the trajectory the driver had taken. The driveway hit my shoulder, hip, one booted foot. Men piled up on me. Pressing me down. Burying me. I couldn’t breathe. Didn’t really want to. I’d lost Rick. Now I was losing Bruiser.

My arms were yanked behind me. My face ground into the pavement. Cuffs ratcheted down on my wrists, cold and metallic. The weight began to shift off me, one body at a time. No one searched me. I was a girl, skinny and hysterical. Why would I have weapons? Or maybe they just didn’t care. Or more likely, they knew I couldn’t get to anything useful, even the gun in the spine holster. When the last man rolled to his knees, I got a breath, painful and short and heavy with smoke. I heard Koun speak. “Get out of my way or I will gut you where you stand. I am here to heal the human.”

I started laughing, coughing, abrading my face on the rough pavement. “He’ll do it too,” I said from the ground. “The blue tattoos are Celtic. Koun’s one of Leo Pellissier’s warriors. He’s about a thousand years old and he’s been fighting since he was in diapers.”

“My father placed my first knife on my belly the very hour I was born.”

“I stand corrected. Or I lie corrected. Let him heal Bruiser. He can save him. It’s why I stopped the ambulance.”

“Bruiser is what she calls the primo. She is in love with him and human women like pet names.”

“I’m not—” I stopped. In love with him? Human? Crap.

I heard Koun enter the ambulance and the doors shut. After that, my world was sounds and flashing lights and smoke and the distant pop of gunfire. There was a battle taking place in the distance. The rhythmic three- cracks of semiautomatic handguns, the overlapping thuts of machine-gun-style, fully automatic and illegal weapons, the boom of shotguns, the guttural shouts of orders and the screams of the wounded. Koun had come from the battle.

I realized that the humans around me didn’t seem concerned about the gunfire I had heard when I arrived. They didn’t even seem aware of the small war in the distance. It was vamp-magic, something new I hadn’t seen before. I smelled vamps on the wind, multiclans of them, only half of them recognizable by scent as Leo’s, the rest the beery scent of his enemy. I smelled vamp-blood and blood-servant blood, a lot of blood-servant blood.

The house, not far from where I lay, burned hot and fast, until the walls started to fall in, loud, roaring crashes, the screech of heated wood. The water from the trucks was now being turned primarily on the trees, the barn, and the outlying buildings to keep the flames from spreading. The house was a total loss, according to the firefighters around me, pulling hoses across me and stepping over me.

Sometime later, the paramedic I had left doing CPR on Bruiser squatted near me. “Sorry, ma’am. I thought you had lost it. Didn’t know you had called a fanghead to help him. I’ll see if I can get you released.” I grunted. Even later, another man straddled me, one boot to either side of my hips, and removed the cuffs from my wrists. My arms slithered down to my sides, boneless and bloodless and tingly, as circulation was restored. He helped me to stand, patted my shoulder, and walked off before I could get a good look at him. But I got a good whiff. I’d know him again.