Death's Rival

recommended, the cameras, sensors, and monitors tied into Katie’s security console hidden behind the doors of a seven-foot-tall, black-lacquered chest with gold-leaf dragons capering across its doors. I might be heartsick, but I still had a job to do.

The house was stylish and elegant and only slightly overdone, recently decorated in hundreds of shades of gold from palest yellow to darkest golden brown, with paintings and statues and objets d’art everywhere, each of them probably worth more than I make in a year. The Christian children’s schoolgirl inside me was always torn between cringing and staring when I came inside. “Where are the girls?”

“Katie canceled the clients for the night,” Troll said, “and sent the girls to a hotel on St. Charles Avenue.”

I lifted a hand to indicate I heard and took the twisty hallways the back way to the parlor, the place where the girls met with the customers before taking them upstairs for kinky games, which might include the transfer of blood, depending on whether the john was human or vamp. I passed the open doorway of Katie’s office and was struck silent and still by the contents of the small room. All the stuff that usually lay on the leather surface of the massive, dark wood desk had been shoved to the floor, and two people lay on the cleared top—Bruiser and a black-skinned woman. Both were mostly naked, but it wasn’t sex, not in any way I could ever think about sex, even with the nudity. It was something else entirely.

Bruiser lay on his back, spread-eagle, his skin death-pale and marbled blue, the veins appearing like waterways on a map. He was wearing socks. That’s all. Socks. He wasn’t breathing. The black vamp half sitting, half-curled on top of his hips was wearing a wildly patterned, full-circle skirt in shades of indigo, with a matching turban-thingy on her head. No shirt. Perky boobs with dark aureoles brushed Bruiser’s unmoving chest. Bethany Salazar y Medina, one of the vamp priestesses, had slit her wrists and they lay over his mouth, her blood dripping into him. Her fangs were buried in his throat. She was deep in a healing.

All by itself, my back hunched up and my eyes filled with tears. Grief, black and viscous as tar, cold as glacier ice, flowed through me. Over the pain rode a wave of lesser emotion; a spear of jealousy lanced through me, jealousy not my own, but my cat’s. Deep inside, Beast whispered, Mine! And wanted to growl. As soundless as possible, I moved on down the hallway, boots in the deep butter-colored carpet, though, if a herd of moose had charged through the house, I doubted the priestess would have known it. And Bruiser, well, he was dead.

I lifted a hand to Deon in the kitchen; the three-star chef from one of the Caribbean islands was loading a tray with sushi, and he waved back. There was sushi rice on his fingers, and despite my warring grief and jealousy, it made my mouth water. I wasn’t sure when I’d last eaten a real meal. It might be the steak in the Lear. Two days ago? My stomach rumbled. I was ashamed that I could feel hunger when Bruiser was in such danger.

In the shadows of the servant’s entrance to the parlor, I stood silently and studied the core of Leo’s gathered scions and blood-servants. There were five vamps in the room, five blood-servants, and seven humans in night camo. I knew them all. And one of them might be a traitor. I just had to figure out which one. When I got the chance. Currently, my money was on Sneak Cheek, who had pummeled a vamp after the battle, but what did I know? Maybe the vamp had tried to coerce a drink, or worse, mesmerize dinner for himself, and the marine had refused. Aggressively. I had done the same thing myself a time or two. Judgment without sufficient data is stupid, and I was withholding mine.

The parlor was too fancy to call a living room, and too bawdy to call a gathering room. Parlor fit, from the upholstery in shades of gold silk to the bigger-than-life artwork of a nude Katie herself, to the polar bear rug on the Italian marble floor. A real skin, according to Beast, who had wanted to hunt one ever since she first got a sniff of the bear’s white fur and a look at his huge white teeth. Polar bears are predators and prey, taking down seals for food and becoming food for killer whales and sharks. I didn’t know where Katie’s decorator had gotten the hide, but it wasn’t old. It still smelled faintly of modern taxidermy chemicals and oils. It was missing a foot as if a bigger predator had taken off a hunk and the bear had died.

The blood-servants and humans had pushed the furniture against the walls, and two cube-shaped, six-foot, tarnished silver cages took up the floor space, gleaming blackly in the light of a chandelier. Beast reared up and I fell back a step as terror slammed through me, intense and hot as a heated blade. Danger, she thought. Run! And I had an instant vision of steel mesh and a room beyond, gray and dim with night. Cage! Run! Fear spiraled through me, slamming my heart into my ribs. I could feel the cage beneath my paws, metal cold and unyielding. Feel the place in my hip, sore, where white-men-with-guns had shot me. Made me go to sleep. RUN!

I caught the doorway with both hands, forcing myself up from my Beast-mind, shoving away the memory, one we had never shared, tamping down the fear-stink, knowing that only an idiot entered a roomful of angry, tired, hungry vamps smelling like terror—like dinner. Idiots who wanted to come out on a slab, drained. I held my breath, forcing it out slowly, slowly. Took another. Beast retreated far into the dark, watching, claws working in and out, piercing my mind with pain. Big-cats purr when they are happy and they mutter a low growl when they are not happy. Beast was growling with each of my breaths, hyperalert, watchful. Worried.

The vamps would have heard the soft growl, except that the vamp in the cage closest started screaming. Derek was prodding the half-naked vamp with a long stick. On the end was a silver cross, and where the cross touched his skin, the vamp was burning. Smoke swirled up, contaminating the air like the stench of rotten meat on a hot grill. The prisoner carried the vamp disease, and it was heavy on the air with a ripe, sick stench.

The captive leaned as far from the cross stick as he could, his back only millimeters from the silver mesh; when he overbalanced, he fell into the cage walls, skin sizzling. His wail pierced the air, making my eardrums vibrate. The scream was nearly as earsplitting as a vamp’s death wail. The vamp in the other cage was whimpering, his black pupils so wide they almost obscured the scarlet sclera. It was Corpse, who showed his own silver burns, and he knew he was next. I smelled scorched flesh and vamp blood, and at Derek’s feet were vials of blood, labeled, dated, and timed. Someone had drawn the two vamps’ blood for testing. I doubted it had been done with their approval or cooperation.

Angel Tit, Martini, and Chi-Chi, three of Derek’s Vodka Boys, were watching the torture, faces in battle mode, unyielding and closed. Leo’s vamps were standing apart from one another, vamped out as well, staring, mesmerized by the caged vamps’ pain and fear. I could smell their arousal and bloodlust, hunting instincts quickened, even for the pain and blood of one of their own. The blood-servants were busy with handheld electronic devices, or looked bored, or stared at the portrait of Katie with rather more interest than the painting warranted, except that it was not in the line of sight of the cruelty.

“Your master’s name,” Derek said, his voice holding no inflection, no clue to his feelings. If I hadn’t been able to smell his anger and self-loathing, I’d never have known how he felt about the job he was doing. “Your master’s name.” When the vamp shook his head and whimpered, Derek jabbed him again. The smoke was reddish, as if suffused with aspirated blood.

“Where is the master of New Orleans? Where is Leo Pellissier?”

The vamp shook his head violently. “I don’t know. I saw him taken away. I don’t know where. I don’t know!” he screamed, when Derek touched him with the cross again.

“Ramondo Pitri,” Derek said, changing the subject of the interrogation, pulling the cross away. A layer of skin clung to it, crinkled with heat.

“The Enforcer,” the vamp shouted. “Pitri was my master’s Enforcer.” As if the admission had released a dam, he took a gasping breath, his ribs shivering oddly as they expanded, not a human breath at all, ribs moving snakelike. He kept speaking, the words gushing. “He was sent to reconnoiter and research Pellissier’s Enforcer, in preparation to initiate a legal blood-challenge to her as laid out in the Vampira Carta.”

I blinked. Stepped into the room. Leo’s scions turned as one to me, staring, still as death, still as vamps. A laugh wanted to titter up in my throat. I’d killed Ramondo Pitri. I’d killed a man and started a vamp war.

“Ramondo was trying to discover information,” he continued, “to find out why Jane Yellowrock was so special.”

“Shut up, Kleto. Shut up!” the other vamp whimpered. That gave us one name and one nickname, Kleto and Corpse. We were making progress.

Kleto ignored him. “He wanted to learn how Leo’s Enforcer made her way up the ranks so quickly, before he challenged the stranger to draw first blood.”

Katie stepped toward me, her blond hair falling forward in a wave that swished like silk as it moved. Her