and there, like dark husks stained with cold spring rain. Bleak houses glared at the streets with barred windows. Mud stained the streets, churned by the current of horses, mules, oxen, and an occasional camel. Wagons creaked, engines growled, drivers barked curses at each other, animals brayed . . . And then you turned the corner and ran into a castle straight out of the Arabian Nights. Pure white and almost delicate, it all but floated in the middle of a huge lot, flanked by elegant minarets and wrapped by a wall with a textured parapet. Long fountains stretched toward its ornate doors, and Hindu gods, cast in bronze and copper, posed frozen in time above the water.
For a moment it took your breath away. And then you saw the vampires, smeared in purple and lime-green sunblock, patrolling those snow-white walls and the reality came back real fast. There was something so alien and foreign about the undead crawling over all that beauty. I wanted to pluck them off like fleas from a white cat.
I parked in the far lot and shut off the engine. A moment later Derek pulled his vehicle next to mine, parked, and stepped out. “Are we going in?”
“We are.”
“With him?” He nodded at Ascanio.
The kid bared his teeth. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
I turned to him. “Who is the primary enemy of the Pack?”
Ascanio hesitated. “The People?”
I nodded. “We have a very uneasy truce going. I have to go into the Casino to talk to Ghastek. He’s a Master of the Dead. Because I’m the Consort, I can’t go in there without a proper escort.” Now I was calling myself the Consort. Kill me, somebody.
“If Kate goes in by herself, the People could claim that she did something to break the truce,” Derek said. “Or something could happen to her. This way we’ll act as witnesses.”
“You have a choice: you can stay with the vehicles or you can come with us,” I said. “But if you decide to come, you follow Derek and you keep your mouth shut. You don’t flirt, you don’t crack jokes, you give the People absolutely no excuse to take any kind of offense. One wrong word, and we’re at war. Do I make myself clear?”
Ascanio nodded. “Yes, Consort.”
“Good.” I took a manila folder from the front seat of my Jeep and locked the car. “Put your badass faces on and follow me.”
We crossed the parking lot, with me leading the way and Derek and Ascanio behind, stone-faced and emanating a willingness to kill, in case any stray People got out of line. Two solemn sentries with curved yatagan swords guarded the Casino doors. We walked right past them, across the floor filled with slot machines jerry-rigged to work during magic and card tables to the back, to a small service room. A young woman in the Casino uniform of black pants and dark purple vest looked up at me from behind the desk.
“Kate Daniels,” I told her. “To see Ghastek.”
She nodded. “Please have a seat.”
I sat. The two boys remained standing, one on either side of my chair. The noise of the crowd floated through the door, a steady hum interrupted by periodic outbursts of laughter and shouts.
The side door opened and a blond man stepped out. “Good morning. I’m so sorry, but your escort will have to remain here.”
“That’s fine.” I rose.
“Please follow me.”
I followed him up the stairs and through the hallways, to a stairway. We went down, lower and lower, one floor, two, three. The air smelled of undead, a dry, revolting scent, laced with a tinge of foul magic.
We turned on the landing and another flight of stairs rolled down, ending in stone floor and a metal door. A vampire clung to the wall above it, like a steel-muscled gecko, its dull red eyes tracking our movement. Before the Shift, corporations installed cameras. Now the People installed vampires.
The blond man opened the door and led me into a narrow concrete tunnel, its ceiling punctuated by glowing warts of electric lights. The underbelly of the Casino was a maze of claustrophobic tunnels. Loose vampires weren’t great with direction. In the event the locks on their cells malfunctioned, the personnel of the stables would evacuate, and the loose vampires would wander through the tunnels, confused and contained, until the navigators secured them one by one.
The tunnels ended, opening into a huge chamber filled with cells, set back to back in twin rows angling toward the center of the room like spokes of a wheel. The side walls and the backs of the cells were stone and concrete, but the fronts consisted of thick metal grates, designed to slide upward. The stench of undeath hit me full force and I almost gagged. Vampires filled the cells, chained to the walls, pacing behind the metal bars, crouching in corners, their mad eyes glowing with insane hunger.
We reached the empty center of the room and turned down another row of cells. In front of us, a glass- covered balcony protruded from the wall. The tinted glass panels looked opaque from this angle, but I’d been in Ghastek’s office before. From the inside, the glass was crystal clear.
We walked through another door, up an access tunnel, and to a wooden door marked with Ghastek’s symbol: an arrow tipped with a circle. My guide stepped aside. I knocked.
“Enter,” Ghastek’s voice called out.
Oh goody. I pushed the door and it swung open soundlessly under the pressure of my fingertips.
A large room greeted me, looking more like a living room than the lair of a Master of the Dead. Shelves lined the back wall, filled to the bursting point with books of all colors and sizes. At the far wall a pair of medieval shackles hung on hooks, displayed like a priceless work of art. A crescent red sofa sat in the middle of the dark floor, facing the glass balcony that offered a floor-to-ceiling view of the stables. At the far end of the sofa sat Ghastek, dressed in tailored black trousers and a turtleneck. He was already thin, and the severe clothes made him seem almost gaunt. He was drinking a frothy espresso from a small brown cup. Two vampires sat on the floor by him, one on each side. The vampires clutched knitting needles, moving them with dizzying speed. A long swatch of knitted cloth, one blue, the other green, stretched from each of them.
Alrighty then. If this wasn’t a heartwarming Norman Rockwell painting, I didn’t know what was.
The needles clicked, chewing up the yarn. I could control several vampires at a time, but I couldn’t make even one knit, even if the needles were as thick as its fingers and I were moving them in slow motion. Ghastek had two running at once. I fought a shiver. He could send one of those bloodsuckers forward and stab me in the eye, and I wasn’t sure I’d be fast enough to stop it.
“Is this a bad time?” I asked. “I can come back if you and the twins are having a private moment.”
Ghastek’s gaze fastened on me. “Don’t be crude, Kate. Would you like a drink?”
To drink was stupid; not to drink would be an insult. But then I doubted Ghastek would go through the trouble of poisoning me. It wasn’t his style. “Water would be nice.”
The left vampire dropped its needles and scuttled into another room.
I shrugged off my cloak, folded it over the sofa’s armrest, and took a seat. “You can’t blame me for thinking you might get kinky. You have shackles on the wall.”
Ghastek’s eyes lit up. “Ah. Those are interesting, aren’t they? They’re from Nordlingen in Germany, late sixteenth century.”
“The Witch Trials?”
Ghastek nodded.
“Do you think you would have been burned at the stake in the sixteenth century?”
“No.”
“Because you’re not a woman?”
“Being a woman made little difference. Most witches burned in Iceland and Finland were men, for example. No, I wouldn’t have been burned, because I’m not poor.”
The undead returned and crouched by me, holding a glass of water with ice in its long claws. A narrow slice of lemon floated on the water. The vampire’s mouth hung open, the narrow sickles of its fangs stark white against the darkness of its maw. Service with a smile.
I took the water and sipped. “Thank you. So why the cuffs then?”
The undead returned to its knitting.
“People view us and our vampires as abominations,” Ghastek said. “They call the undead inhuman, not realizing the irony: only humans are capable of inhumanity. Four thousand years of technology, with magic shrinking to a mere trickle before the Shift, yet the world was just as evil then as it is now. It’s not vampires or werewolves
