yours; I should have thought, but you don’t expect to meet two necromancers of such power in one lifetime.”
“Lucky you,” I said.
“I will leave you with a parting image, to inspire you to do exactly as I’ve asked.” He went back to the other room, and I didn’t want him to, because nothing he was about to do would be good.
He went to Requiem, as I’d known he would. He unstoppered the little vial of holy water. “I’m coming, damn it, you’ve made your point.”
“Oh, I’m not doing this to make my point, Anita. I’m doing this because I want to, and because it will hurt you, and because he is beautiful and I hate him for it.”
“Vittorio!”
He trickled the water along Requiem’s ribs. It smoked instantly, and Requiem’s spine bowed, a scream coming even through the tape.
Vittorio capped the vial. “I will wait on the rest. You have a half hour to arrive, Anita, or I will try a more tender piece of him.”
“I’m coming, you son of a bitch, I’m coming.”
“Temper, temper.”
“This isn’t mad, Vittorio, you haven’t seen me mad.”
“Nor you me, Anita, nor you me.” He pushed me out, closed the link down, and left me blinking in the sunlight, clinging to Edward’s arms.
“Who’s going in with you?” Bernardo asked.
“Cannibal is,” I said. I looked and found Rocco. He met my gaze, no flinching.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Speak Arabic for me, and then we eat these sons of bitches.”
A smile crossed his face, it was pleased and slightly Olaf-ish. I knew that smile, because there’s something about having an ability when you always have to be good that makes you wonder what it would feel like to be bad. I was about to give Cannibal the chance to be as bad as he wanted to be, as bad as he had the stomach to be. There was more than one way to skin a cat; well, there was more than one way to eat a vampire.
73
GRIMES DIDN’T LIKE me going in, and he sure as hell didn’t want Rocco to go in with me. Edward didn’t like me going in without him. But we had the arguments in the cars, so we could argue on the way and make the half-hour deadline.
“Lieutenant,” Rocco said, “I can say the spell that will banish the jinn, and Anita can’t.”
“I know her pronunciation isn’t good enough.”
“I speak Arabic,” Edward said.
“But you’re not a practitioner, and we need a little magic with the words,” Rocco said.
“What aren’t the two of you telling me?” Grimes asked.
We both fought not to look at each other, and it showed. “What are you planning to do in there?”
“The phrase you’re looking for, sir,” Edward said, “is plausible deniability.”
Grimes frowned at us. “Are you planning to do anything illegal?”
Again, we fought not to look at each other. “No, sir,” Rocco said, “everything will be perfectly legal.”
“Promise,” Grimes said.
“It’s legal,” I said.
“But I don’t want to know anyway, is that it?”
“What answer will get me in there with Sergeant Rocco?”
“Well, at least that’s honest. Max’s inner room at Trixie’s interferes with electronics.”
I didn’t ask how he knew that, just accepted it as true. It didn’t surprise me; as Vittorio said, the hooks in the ceiling for hanging people up had been in the ceiling when he got there. I was betting this was where Max did some of his dirty work.
“So you’re going in there with no way to call for help,” Grimes said.
“If we need to call for help, Lieutenant,” I said, “you won’t be able to get to us in time.”
He studied my face. “I think you mean that.”
“I do.”
“You seem calm.”
“I’ve got my goals.”
“Your objectives,” he said.
“If you like.”
“And they are?”
“Rescue my friend before he gets more hurt. Save all the civilians. Send the jinn back to where they belong. Rescue Max and his charming wife, their bodyguard, and any other weretigers who are good guys. Oh, and kill Vittorio before he can manifest enough power to make a nuclear explosion over Vegas look like the better idea.”
“Is he really capable of that much damage?”
“Think of an army of the things that killed your officers loosed on the city. Think of Vittorio able to broadcast his mind control over the populace.”
“You think he’s that good?”
“Not yet, and we have to keep it that way. I believe that we have to do everything within our power to make certain he dies today.”
“You might be interested to know, Marshal Blake, that the governor signed off on the stay of execution for the vampires at last night’s club.”
“That’s good, Lieutenant. I mean that; they don’t deserve to die.”
“Your report carried weight.”
I nodded, but was already looking up the street to the police cars, the barricades, and the next fight.
74
ROCCO AND I were standing outside Trixie’s with our hands clasped on our heads. We’d stripped down to T- shirts, pants, and boots for him, jogging shoes for me. A man who looked human but talked like Vittorio had his hand up his ass was saying, “Turn around, slowly, so we can see.”
We did what he said to do.
The man seemed to be listening to something in his head. He nodded, and walked forward. He patted us down, thoroughly, top to bottom. “You have no weapons, very good,” he said, but it was Vittorio’s inflections. “Now, come join us.”
“Let the customers go first, like you promised.”
“Oh, yes, I suppose I did.” The man was speaking, but it was really Vittorio using his body to do the talking. His ability to manipulate humans had grown more complex, more complete, in less than twenty-four hours. He had to die.
The man walked back through the doors. A few minutes later, people ran out. Dozens of them spilling out into the street into the arms of the waiting police, who hurried them to safety.
The man was in the door. He motioned toward it. “After you, Anita, and Sergeant Rocco, you said.”
“Yes.”
“Come on down,” he said, in a mock announcer voice.
“Let the man go, too,” I said.
“I said customers; he works behind the bar,” the man said, talking about himself in the third person. He even had the smile Vittorio had used in the dream. It was an unsettling echo on the stranger’s face, like a face on the
