pace away. He considered Eli’s positioning, the placement of his feet, the relaxed posture. The two men, who had just been talking beer and sports, studied each other now like potential combatants, one trained by Uncle Sam to kill, the other still so full of vamp blood he was nearly healed in one day from wounds that would have incapacitated a human for weeks.
George turned his head to me, dismissing the soldier as if he posed no challenge. From the corner of my eye, I saw Eli’s mouth curl up in a smile. Without looking at him, I smiled too. It was one of those perfect agreement things that happens sometimes when two people understand each other on an instinctive level, on a snake-brain level. Eli and I had fought. We knew what moves we’d make and how fast. If it was needed. I saw his fingers curl in slightly.
I tucked the thumb of my free hand into my jeans at my waist, to indicate action wasn’t necessary. Yet. “I’ll do my job for Leo,” I said to George, “but not because of his forced blood-bond. I’ll do my job because I killed a man in Asheville. Because humans were killed there and here on my watch. You tell that blood-sucking fiend I said that.
“If there was a dinner invitation, it’s rescinded. Get out of my house. You know where the door is.” I stepped out of the way and gestured with the bottle at the door.
George’s mouth firmed, an obstinate gesture that said he was going to disagree. But he didn’t. He walked past me out the door and closed it behind him with a firm snap. That sound said something important, but I didn’t want to deal with it, not now. I followed and keyed the dead bolt, then went back to the living room. Eli and Alex hadn’t moved. I leaned against the wall and finished my beer, watching them.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked.
“Just ducky. But if your brother doesn’t feed me I may eat him.”
Eli laughed at the double entendre, but he went outside to the grill and came back in with four steaks. The Kid cleaned off a place and put away the unused dishes. We ate in silence at the kitchen table, companionable silence. I liked it. And I got the extra steak.
After dinner, while not-so-Stinky Alex cleaned up the dishes and griped about not having a dishwasher, Eli and I stayed at the table, going over the day’s intel. “There might be a correlation we haven’t considered, between the Blood-Call businesses and the cities where de Allyon has taken over,” Eli said, passing a printout to me.
“I’m listening.”
“De Allyon was making vamps sick. What better way than to have them drink from sick humans at Blood- Call?”
I remembered thinking at one time, in the last hectic days, that vamps were being made sick by drinking diseased blood, but that had seemed impossible unless a normal, natural plague had entered the human population. There had been no reports of horrific human illness in the media, and no way could that have been kept quiet.
There were also so many cities where Blood-Call was operating, cities that had no sign of sickness. The lack of plague and the specificity of attack had made me put the idea on the back burner. But then, there were the sick humans in Seattle who had claimed they were getting better. They weren’t Blood-Call employees, they were blood- servants who lived and worked at the Seattle Clan Home. Without explaining, I pulled my cell and dialed the Seattle Clan Home. When a woman answered, I said, “This is Jane Yellowrock. I was there a few days ago, and took some blood from some blood-servants who were left on the premises after the revolt staged by the Mercy Blade failed. Are they still alive? Did they get well?”
The woman said stiffly, “Yes and yes. And then our new master removed them. Don’t call again.” There was a click and the call ended.
I stared at the cell and smiled. “Of course he did.” I looked up at the brothers and said, “Alex, how certain are you about the money trail of the corporations that own Blood-Call?”
He was standing at the sink, drying his hands; he pushed a tiny laptop to the center of the table and opened it. It must have been sleeping because it opened to a company Web page instantly. Blood-Call’s graphics were red and black with two beautiful, scantily clad couples on the front. One partner of each couple was a vamp, and the other was being a meal. It was clear that sex was on the menu as well as blood. Eli scooted his chair closer to me and we both leaned in, studying the screen, arms almost touching.
“I’ve traced it back through several shell corporations to an offshore account,” Alex said. “The mailing address is a PO box on the main island. The shipping address is here.” He pointed to the screen. “I have a
“Why not?” I asked. “Someone has to come in from time to time and deal with the accounts.”
“Not offshore accounts. Not if they have the numbers and the passwords. Back in the day, someone had to show up in person and open an account. Now it can be done electronically and no one at the bank ever sees the client. I tried tracking the money back, but I couldn’t get through.”
He looked at his brother with a sly grin. “Offshore banks have better security than the Pentagon.” Eli raised his eyes without lifting his head, and Alex laughed at whatever he saw on his brother’s face. He looked back and forth between us, his expression changing to speculation. He grinned at his brother and went back to the dishes.
That speculative look suddenly made me aware that I was sitting close enough to feel Eli’s body heat, close enough to feel the fine hairs on his arm graze mine when he moved. My limbs went heavy. A slow warmth settled deep inside me. I felt Beast start to purr.
I kept my eyes on the screen as Eli sat back. When I could trust myself to speak casually, I stood and said, “I’m beat. I’m heading for bed.” Beast hacked deep inside and Alex looked over his shoulder again at his brother, then at me, and he grinned.
The phone rang, waking me before dawn. I knew without looking that it was Leo—I could feel him pulling on the blood-bond. I wanted to ignore the cell’s insistent ringing, but my hand went out all its own and I picked up the phone, hit the TALK button. “What?”
Bruiser said, “At sunset yesterday, Lucas Vazquez de Allyon, Blood Master of Atlanta, Sedona, Seattle, and Boston, claimed blood-feud with Leonard Eugène Zacharie Pellissier, Blood Master of the southeastern states, in direct contradiction of the Vampira Carta.” His tone was stiff and formal, and I knew that Leo was right there, listening, exerting all sorts of emotional overtones to the conversation.
For a moment, I froze, that electric stillness of remembered fear and pain, Leo’s fangs buried in my throat. Beast placed a paw on my mind, all claw and spiking demand.
I sucked in a breath that sounded of sorrow as much as remembered agony, and shoved down on my fear, letting Beast trap it beneath her claws as if it were her dinner. The memory of the feeding eased. Beast was right.
His voice even more unyielding, Bruiser said, “We believe that somehow he knows we discovered who he is, and this forced his hand.”
“A challenge follows the protocol of the Vampira Carta, all the rules and regulations set therein. A blood-feud is a much older contest, one from before the Carta was written, and it puts aside the Mithrans’ most important legal document. According to historical precedent, there are no established protocols for the feud. Because you killed his Enforcer, Ramondo Pitri, unprovoked, de Allyon can declare blood-feud, according to the old ways.”
It always came back to the man I had killed in Asheville. But I remembered what Aggie had said yesterday morning. “His Enforcer was in Asheville to check me out, to see why I had moved ahead of all of Leo’s people into the rank of Enforcer, cutting you out of the position too. He could have looked me over on the street, in a restaurant, anywhere. Yet he was in my room, his gun drawn, with an illegal suppressor on it. Seems to me he was
