I went back into the living room, leaving Eli inspecting his own weapons, his face like a thunderhead. Once the swinging shelving in the main room was in place, the weapons would be better hidden than when they had been kept in the small locked gun safe in my closet. Here, they were safe from children, not that any lived with me any longer. And that was a pain I had no intention of dealing with just now.
Saying nothing, but smelling Eli’s irritation, I went back to my room, let my hair down, and showered off before plopping down on the corner chair to read. It was boring stuff, the financial pages of a publicly held company. I was much more interested in the drugs Greyson Labs made, but I couldn’t make heads or tales of that part either. Having taken an emergency medical technician course after high school didn’t prepare me to understand the making of drugs I couldn’t even pronounce. To stay awake, I got out my gun cleaning supplies and started to clean my .380s and nine-mils. It quickly became read a paragraph, work on a gun, read a paragraph, work on a gun.
Even with the necessary chore, I was about to nod off in boredom when the Kid knocked on my bedroom door. I set the weapon to the side and called for him to come in. Alex pushed in the door, his left leg shaking uncontrollably, his eyes wide, and his scent full of the adrenaline of excitement—which smelled a lot better than the kind of adrenaline that comes from fear or shock. Instantly, I knew he had found something, and the breath I took felt icy as it scored through my lungs. “What?”
“A vamp owns Greyson Labs. And Blood-Call. And all the other interconnected companies.”
I got up and walked into the living room. “You might want to hear this,” I said to Eli. “Did you know your brother is a genius?”
“Yeah. The court system said so,” he said wryly.
“Spill it,” I said to the Kid.
“His name is Lucas Vazquez de Allyon. The dude is a twelve-hundred-year-old, suckhead creeper, who fell off his rocker, like, five hundred years ago. He’s seriously whacked.” When I looked confused about the rocker part, he added, “A perv. A freak. A crazy-ass crackhead. An old dude who—”
“Alex!” Eli said. It was a military-grade reprimand in two syllables.
Alex’s mouth slapped shut. I wondered what the Kid had wanted to say, and figured my cussing ban had been about to be abused. Instead, after a moment’s hesitation, the Kid said, “He owns the company Ramondo Pitri worked for, though Pitri was way down the line. And de Allyon is a violent, narcissistic pervert, even for a suckhead.” The Kid handed us each a sheaf of papers and, by unspoken agreement, we all went to the kitchen, Eli to make a pot of black glue he called coffee in an old percolator he’d found in the small butler’s pantry where the tea things were kept, and me to start a pot of water for tea.
Lucas de Allyon had been around a long time, making a place now and then in history. He had lived in Spain about the time that Leo had been turned, and became a conquistador in search of gold, sailing to the Americas. A vamp on a ship at sea. I wondered how many of the sailors made it alive to the new world. Once here, he seemed to have reverted to the practice of Naturaleza.
Vamps and their killing bloodlust were kept in check by adherence to the Vampira Carta, which governed everything in their lives from how to care for their young scions while they went through the curing process, to how to address the need for territory and hunting grounds. Vamps who believed in the Naturaleza refused to be bound by the constraints of the Carta; they hunted and drained humans and killed without remorse or pity. Lucas’s history was well documented. He had killed and enslaved hundreds, maybe thousands, of American Indians, putting them to work and to death as he saw fit. He had created himself a little kingdom and killed and drunk his way through his slaves: Choctaw, Cherokee, Natchez, and maybe even Mississippi Indian tribes.
I dropped the pages on the table, stood, and poured hot water over the tea leaves in a green ceramic pot. Moving by muscle memory and instinct, I got out a mug, Cool Whip, and sugar, and prepared a cup. Thinking. Remembering a painting of a Cherokee slave on the wall of an old vamp’s house. She had yellow eyes like mine, and had probably been a skinwalker like me, but she couldn’t have been trained, or she would have fought her way free of her slavery. She was dead now. Another of my kind I had found and lost without ever meeting her. I put my own failed hopes of finding another like me aside and carried my mug back to the table and pages Alex had prepared.
Not only had de Allyon enslaved the Cherokee. According to historians, he was also the first man to own African slaves on land in what was now South Carolina. He was bloodthirsty in every way an undead nonhuman could be. The accounts, even couched in terms acceptable by the Europeans of that time period, were gruesome. He supposedly died of a fever in October 1526, disappearing and reappearing in Charleston in the early sixteen hundreds. He stayed there for fifty years, and disappeared again. He later terrorized Boston for a few years before the tea party of 1773. De Allyon resurfaced in Atlanta during the Reconstruction Period after the Civil War, eventually buying old plantation land and setting up a sharecropper system that “employed” nearly a thousand freed slaves.
Quickly thereafter, Lucas claimed most of the state of Georgia as Blood Master of Atlanta—all the Southeastern territory, excluding Florida, that was not claimed by Amaury Pellissier, Leo’s uncle. Now, it was possible that Lucas wanted Leo’s territory and figured he was the undead man to take it.
I flipped through the pages. There was still no financial trail to prove that Lucas wanted Leo’s territory. No proof that he had taken over Seattle and Sedona and Boston. No proof that he had sent his vamps to attack Leo in Asheville weeks ago or again at his clan home last night. No clues to where he was staying, or if he was even in the state. No nothing, except that he was powerful and a lot older and more vicious than Leo. And might be dominant enough to take what he wanted. I flipped back to the file on Blood-Call. It had businesses in Sedona, Seattle, Asheville, and Boston, with one slated to open in New Orleans in the next few months. Of course Blood-Call was also open in New York, San Francisco, L.A., Vegas, and a few other places, so it could be a coincidence, in which case I’d look stupid taking the information to Leo. Except for the fact that de Allyon owned Blood-Call, and had been Ramondo Pitri’s up-line employer, there was nothing physical or financial or real that actually proved Lucas Vazquez de Allyon was the bad guy who had attacked Leo in Asheville or was making vamps sick and taking over their territories.
But my gut was saying our bad guy was de Allyon, and that Greyson Labs and Blood-Call were part of the attack on the vamps. Somehow. Even though all I had was a name from history, it was time to tell Leo.
I gathered up my laptop and retreated to my bedroom again. Copying and pasting, I prepared a report for Leo and Bruiser on Blood-Call, the lab, and de Allyon, making certain that they understood my concern was mostly conjecture at this point. With a single keystroke, I sent it off and then curled around the laptop to question myself and second-guess my research.
I must have fallen asleep because I woke before dusk to the smell of steak grilling and a dead laptop battery. Groggy, I freshened up and put on a clean bra and shirt. Having men in the house was going to seriously impact my comfort clothes. Before I left my room, I dialed Leo, but it was Bruiser who answered. “H-h-hello, Jane.” His voice was low and warm and breathy, with a faint English accent and nearly a purr of sound.
“Bruiser. You sound . . . odd. Do you feel okay?”
“I discover that I quite like the way I feel.”
“Uh-huh.” Bruiser had been partially healed by Koun, a vamp who claimed to be pure Celt, and who would, if true, be much older than Leo. Then he’d been brought back from the dead, or near enough as not to matter, by an infusion of the blood of Bethany Salazar y Medina, a vamp who was nearly two thousand years old. And Katie had said, “
Blood-servants were much faster and stronger than regular humans, because of the sips of vamp blood they regularly took in. They had better night vision, better hearing. I didn’t know what Bruiser was now, but I had a bad feeling about it. “Have you heard from Leo?”
“I have spoken with my master,” he said. “With your help, he escaped the Mithrans who held him for a time last night. But he was injured badly. I have sent the priestesses to his lair where he sleeps, to heal him, and his most loyal blood-servants, to feed him when he wakes and to complete his healing.” He paused, then added slowly, “He brought a Mithran with him when he escaped, and will be interrogating her soon. I am driving there. Leo requests your presence as well.”
Going to any vamp’s lair when he was injured and bleeding and had not been sent to earth to heal was not a smart move. I thought about the vamp Leo had captured. I didn’t want to be part of that, not again, with the silver and the questions and the stink of burning vamp-flesh, but I thought it was more likely he’d let her live if I was
