Death's Rival

shook out my arms and rotated my head on my neck. I was tense—not healthy around vamps.

Wrassler opened the limo door and Eli was out like a flash, listening to security babble, moving fast through the night. A moment later, Wrassler assisted Leo and Grégoire out. George followed, and I was last, feeling totally off my game. Bruiser leaned in close and placed his lips at my ear, murmured, “This time, don’t play nice.”

My mouth curled up in the first real smile all day. His command was the exact opposite of the one he gave the last time we had attended an event at the Nunnery. “Are you telling me to do something really stupid, or really violent?”

“You are anything but stupid, Jane Yellowrock. Anything but. And you look dangerous and gorgeous and violent and deadly tonight.”

I knew it was absurd, and way too girlie for me, but I could I feel my nerves settle with his words. It was a description I could live with, even if the gorgeous part made no sense whatsoever.

Wrassler led the way, Leo behind him, and the rest of us followed like good little servants. Beast padded to the forefront of my mind and flooded me with her strength, speed, and night vision. The world went sharp and bright, full of greens and silvers and oddly tinted blues. The shadows lightened until I could see the men standing in them, Derek’s boys—one of whom might be a traitor. As we ascended the short steps, other cars began to arrive, the rest of Leo’s vamps and blood-servants showing up for the parley.

Inside, warm, dry air fought the sudden cool spell, dropping from overhead vents. The smell of vamp was muted but distinct, and it made my hackles rise. Beast peeled back her lips and showed me her teeth, hissing softly, eager and powerful. For this night, the Nunnery was neutral territory, where Leo might meet and parley with the invading master vamp.

The front half of the building was one huge open area with three-foot-thick brick walls, slate floor, and thirty- inch-diameter brick pillars holding up the second floor, which was fifteen feet overhead. As always, gas-flame sconces lit the area, flickering in the artificial breeze. The entry floor was used for entertaining, with a dining area to the right big enough to seat a hundred at the long table, which was pushed against the wall.

The last time I was here for a party, the air had been redolent of meat and spices. Tonight it just smelled empty, vampy, slightly moldy, and the chill that wafted off the old brick would have been uncomfortable except for Beast’s energy pulsing through me.

To the left of the entrance, where usually there was an area set up like a parlor with couches, chairs, tables, and a fireplace scaled to fit the warehouse, tonight there were two dozen chairs set up in two Vs, twelve facing twelve, with the apex chairs only six feet apart. The twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chairs were between them, set back, on the opposite ends of a square. One was the place for Sabina, the priestess. The other one was for . . . I had no idea.

Before I could ask, I smelled the priestess arrive, her scent the aroma of old blood and dried rose petals and wind from a desert, stripped of moisture. It caught on the air currents and filled the lower floor. Her nunlike white robes swishing, her hands held clasped at her waist, hidden in her voluminous sleeves, she stepped through the doorway and Leo moved to her. He bowed from the waist in an old-world gesture, like something he might have done to royalty in his youth hundreds of years ago.

When he was at the lowest point of his bow, Sabina said, “Tonight, I am not your outclan priestess, Leonard Eugène Zacharie Pellissier, Blood Master of New Orleans. I am the emissary of the Outclan Council of Mithrans.”

If Leo had been human, he would have started. As he was a vamp, he just did that still-as-death thing they do. I knew Leo had contacted the council, but I’d thought it would be a long time before they responded. Until last night, I hadn’t known that Sabina had a phone line or cell at the cemetery where she slept by day. Now she talked to the council? By his slight pause, I knew Leo had been factoring this new info into his plans for the evening, plans that included trickery and deceit. Things one did not do when the Outclan Council was involved. Only a heartbeat too slowly, he rose and smiled at her. I had no clue if all this was a good thing or a bad thing.

I slid my eyes to Bruiser, but he was watching Leo like a hawk, and then his gaze moved to the entrance, and his eyes widened. I felt de Allyon as much as saw him, his power firing into the room like a torch, like a dozen lasers, like a flashbang going off. His energies prickled against my skin and made the hair on the back of my neck want to curl up and hide. And then I smelled him, that odd, beery scent that seemed all wrong for vamps, the scent on the man I’d killed in my hotel room, the death of the Enforcer that had started all this. Crap. I knew what it was. It was the scent of a blood-drunk master vamp. A Naturaleza who had been drinking his fill of humans for centuries was going up against Leo, who had been drained to the point of insanity recently. I remembered the note he’d left on the dead body in the Learjet: “You killed my Enforcer, Ramondo Pitri. You will die with your Master, in a massacre such as you have never seen. This, at a time of my choosing.”

Except that it would be at a time of my choosing, not his. Some of the tension eased out of my body at the thought. My choosing. Not his.

Lucas Vazquez de Allyon was dressed in a tuxedo, the cummerbund and one of those little handkerchiefs in the color of old blood. His black beard was the same pointy Vandyke style he’d worn in the small pen-and-inks of him in the history book. He looked like a modern-day version of the devil. Satan in Armani. Death’s Rival in a ten- thousand-dollar suit that caressed his body like living hands.

As he stepped closer, the power in the room ratcheted up, my skin feeling parched and prickly. Now I wished I had broken down and asked Leo to translate the text in the book for me. This guy wasn’t just a master vamp. He was something more, something other. Arrogance and condescension oozed from every pore—assuming that vamps had pores. It occurred to me that drinking all that skinwalker blood so long ago might have done something to him. I looked at Leo, wondering what my blood had done to him, and if the old master would be able to tell. If so, then he would know that Katie had sipped a little too. So much to know; no time to discover anything useful. Without raising my head, I scanned the room and located the air vents, making certain that I stood well away from any that might take my scent to my enemy.

I remembered that Sabina had spoken inside my head, telling me that my enemy would know me by my scent. And he would if I got close enough, if he hadn’t forgotten what skinwalkers smelled like. I surely would not be that lucky.

Leo and Sabina stood their ground, letting the conquistador cross the room to them, his footsteps oddly hushed in the suddenly silent room, his people fanning out behind him. They were all vamps, all vamped out, showing the three-inch fangs and long talons of the old, old, old vamp. As they all entered, the sense of power grew; I could feel it pressing against me, hot and electric. I knew that Leo’s legal team had stipulated a maximum of twelve vamps, the rest blood-slaves and the new Enforcer. Somebody had come prepared to make a point or start a blood-feud in earnest. Maybe both.

De Allyon met Leo and Sabina in the center of the huge room, the beery stink of blood-drunk vamps, dried herbs, funeral flowers, dissipation, and the scent of sickness whooshing ahead of them. Our visitors had brought sick vamps with them, but none of the others seemed to notice. I found it odd that the vamps couldn’t smell the only disease that could kill them. I touched my mouthpiece for the first time tonight and informed the crew, including Bruiser, that some of our guests were less than healthy.

“Acknowledged,” Bruiser said into his mouthpiece. “Can you tell numbers? Which ones?”

“Not without getting a lot closer than I want,” I said. Which brought up an image of a big dog sticking his snout into a vamp’s crotch. Then of me doing the same thing. Bet that would liven up the proceedings. I curled my bottom lip in and bit down slightly to keep from grinning. The level of tension Bruiser had reduced with his compliment earlier decreased another notch, and my shoulders relaxed. I took a few steps back from the group clustered around Leo. Studying. Planning. Waiting.

De Allyon got in the first sally. “We are Lucas Vazquez de Allyon, Master of the Cities of Atlanta, Sedona, Boston, and Seattle. We present our heir, Hellene de Romanova, our secondo heir, Adam Jonas, and our Enforcer, Jude Talley.” The royal “we” was a bit much, and de Allyon did it unconsciously, as if he considered himself the king of, well, of America. Which was a scary thought.

Point to de Allyon.

His heir and spare were an odd couple, Hellene looking like the bust off an ancient Greek coin, from the shape of her nose to the light brown braids woven around her head, while Adam’s ethnicity was indeterminate. He looked Mediterranean European, as though he had been swarthy skinned when he was turned.