“What is the meaning of this?” demanded the woman who steamed out one of the villa’s blue-framed back doors, all four of which were framed by solar lamps made to resemble antique street lights. The tendrils of her black chiffon gown batted the air behind her, making her resemble a pissed off Homecoming Queen candidate, one whose friends had voted for the other, uglier girl. Though her carefully groomed version of beauty could have landed her in any number of pageants, her psychic scent hit me between the eyes so hard I felt like I’d been drop-kicked into a garbage dump. As a Sensitive, I recognize vampires like hawks sight rabbits. But I’d never before felt so nauseated by the realization. What the hell kind of vamp
was
she?
Vayl turned to intercept her, placing the tiger-carved cane he always carried firmly on the gray rock between them to make sure she kept her distance. She stopped three feet from it, rearing back as if she’d hit an invisible wall. Her eyes, the liquid brown of a beagle pup, widened angrily as a how-dare-you look tried to settle on her face. But it fled almost immediately, as if she’d undergone a recent Botox treatment and couldn’t sustain any sort of facial feature that might leave evidence of emotion. I struggled not to stare. I had a job to do after all. But her scent, combined with the way she strafed Vayl with her eyes, made me want to give her a closer look.
I forced my gaze back to my target. He’d taken half a step forward. I smiled at him.
Come on, asshole. Make it easy for me
. He stopped.
“What are
you
doing here?” the woman snarled at Vayl.
For a second I thought he was going to ignore her completely. Then he said, “Where is your
Deyrar
?”
She drew herself up to her full height, which was maybe five-one, and said, “
I
am the
Deyrar
.”
Vayl and I don’t have a psychic link. But we’re tight enough to say a ton of words with one stricken look.
Are we screwed
? I asked him with raised eyebrows.
A valid question, Jasmine
, his narrowed gaze replied.
We must play this carefully. Obviously she was not expecting us. Which means she knows nothing about the deal
.
Well, shit
.
We’d been asked to come to Patras by the vampire who ran Vayl’s former Trust, a canny old sleaze named Hamon Eryx, who’d promised us safe passage in return for a shot at Edward Samos, aka The Raptor. Samos had either committed or attempted enough acts of terrorism in the last few years to raise him to the top of our department’s hit list.
We had made one great stride in identifying Samos’s vulnerabilities, and had been hatching a plan that would draw him into the open when Eryx had contacted Vayl with a thinly disguised plea for help. Samos had contacted him offering an alliance. This was not good news to Eryx, since he wasn’t interested in playing. And since he knew that those who refused Samos’s advances generally ended up dead, he’d asked Vayl to intervene. After some negotiations that ended with a contract signed in blood — no, I’m not kidding — Vayl got our boss, Pete’s, blessing and we were on our way to Greece.
Now the
Deyrar
had apparently been replaced, which meant our whole mission could be junk before it even came out of the box. Plus we were standing in the middle of a Vampere house-hold. Any minute now we could be surrounded by fifteen to twenty pissed off vamps and their human guardians, who would feel they had every right to kill us for trespassing.
As if he’d read my mind, an enormous man burst out of the door the new
Deyrar
had just exited. His appearance, yet even more distracting than that of his mistress, made me seriously consider smoking my target just so I could stand and stare. He went shirtless, though mid-April in Greece is pretty mild and the temperature currently hovered around sixty degrees. I supposed that said something about the man’s vanity. Maybe he wanted me to get a load of that sculpted bod and wonder how many hours he worked out a day. It wouldn’t have made a difference if he was a vamp. But he wasn’t. From what I could tell with my souped-up,
other
