Liam's blood had been nearly pure. He'd had no more choice in what he did than she had. Put the right scent on a trap, and even the wiliest animal loses all caution.
She looked up again, eyes totally unfocused. "Merlin," she whispered. "Arthur. Lancelot. The Once and Future King. Mallory. Tennyson. Is that the Summer Country you're talking about?"
Bloody hell! Now she was going cloudy on him. Next thing, she'd be chanting "The Lady of Shalott."
"Don't get any warm-puppy feelings about this: the legend of Arthur has to be about the most depressing tale ever told in the English language. It's an endless stream of people you like doing their damnedest to doom themselves and knowing it every step of the way.
"Besides, with Liam you're looking at the other side. Mordred. Nimue. The tangled dysfunctional family of Clan Orkney. Pain for the fun of it."
Pain for the fun of it, like what Liam had done to Mulvaney seven years ago. Well, that debt was paid, although Liam's nasty little cousin still wove his traps. Wait a minute . . . . Maybe Dougal had been after this girl.
She started to hum a tune from Camelot. Even allowing her the twenty-eight years, she wasn't old enough to remember that show. He was. It had made him sick.
"Do they still hold tournaments in the Summer Country? I hung out with the S.C.A. in college, even learned to fence a bit. We held medieval banquets and mock duels."
Brian had swallowed enough fantasy for one night. "They have dungeons in the Summer Country. They have slaves in the Summer Country. Camelot is dead. Arthur is dead. Law is dead. Power rules."
He wondered how much of this was slipping past the alcohol. Time to get crude. "Liam had power. He wanted a woman, either for himself or for his master. He saw you and wanted you and was about to take you. For life. For rape. A bed-slave to bear his children. You wouldn't get a vote. 'Women's Lib' never came to the Summer Country. A woman is either a sorceress or a slave. A bed-slave while she is young and fertile and pretty, a drudge in the kitchen or farmyard afterwards. Much the same is true for men, unless you have the Old Blood and the Power."
Brian stopped and realized he’d been ranting. Her mug was empty. He wanted a drink or two of his own, to settle his stomach. The next round was his. If she got too drunk, there were things he could do about it.
That waitress was what they wanted in the Summer Country: a sex toy with no brain. Where the hell was she? His glance scouted the corners of the room.
A slim woman, dark-haired and dark-skinned, stood at the bottom of the entry stair. A man who could have been her twin held her arm. The gray-clad pair scanned the smoky room like a pair of elegant cobras, their expensively understated dress warping the strip-club into a Parisian demi-monde cellar.
Damn! Fiona and Sean. Here. Now. Bloody, bloody hell!
Brian couldn't waste the time to figure out what that meant.
The redhead blinked fuzzily at him when he draped her coat over her shoulders and dragged her through the nearest exit. He turned and had a few words with the door, hoping the walls were stronger than they looked. They probably weren't.
Shouts echoed through the room behind them. Customers weren't allowed out back. Brian leaned a little harder on his control, and the girl finished shrugging her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. He slipped her gun out of her pocket before she could think about reaching for it.
He could make it work, if he had to, no matter what Fiona or Sean tried to say to the little grains of nitrocellulose.
He pulled her down the corridor past three curtains, dog-leg right, up a flight of stairs flanked by flaking cinder-block walls to a door with a crash-bar and one of those idiot red flags that said "Alarm Will Sound." He held another quick discussion with locks and electrons.
They pushed through, not into the storm but into another passageway with doors and stairs and exit signs. The place was a bloody fire-marshal’s nightmare. The door clicked shut without an alarm, and he told it to be a good boy and stay closed. Not that Fiona or Sean couldn't also talk to locks. It would just take them a little while.
A dull thud shook the floor from below, probably Sean or Fiona showing off. That did trigger the alarms--electronic horns rather than the metallic snarl that would have been the door. Brian hauled the girl up another flight of stairs and slammed the door open with his hip, dragging her out into freezing rain. He'd expected stairs down, but they were in an alley. The place must be built into a slope.
Another alarm cut in, a mechanical ringing clatter overhead. A sign under it said "Sprinkler Alarm." That meant fire. Must have been Sean: Fiona tended to more subtlety. She wasn't less dangerous, just quieter about it.
Rain, he thought.
Scent.
Fiona would follow him. She wouldn't pay much attention to the girl's smell: wrong circuitry. And Sean wouldn't notice her, either, being what he was. Liam had been the one who'd tracked her.
He looked for water--rain and slush and the running gutters --things to kill his scent. He had to get the girl home without a fight. She was a dead weight, a drunk, a distraction. She'd almost gotten him caught down there.
Mental chess. Fiona was such a devious little bitch, twisting Dougal's plot to her own ends. The bloody girl had been bait for a trap, Fiona’s own trap using Liam's hunt as cover.
He slowed down, the clamor of the alarms blocks behind them in the rainy darkness. Sirens wailed in the distance, stringing together the great braying horns of the fire-trucks as they plowed through intersections
