I took in the place and the occupants. One big room on the lower level; lots of small tables and chairs. The seating was from various time periods and cultures: long couches in the Roman style; pillows, rugs, and hookahs in the Persian style; some odd seating that must have been African or maybe South American, the chairs low to the ground and carved from dark wood, dished like dough bowls. Weird.
Vamps in black tie and evening gowns were everywhere. Humans half-frozen in position looked to their masters for orders. From the loft overhead I smelled humans and blood. They had set the blood bar upstairs, with matching spiral wrought-iron staircases on either side and exotic, scantily dressed human blood-slaves at the bottom, like advertisements. The place reeked of vamps and blood and sex and sickness, but the sick stench was elusive, so I figured only a few vamps here had it. The vamps themselves couldn’t smell the disease, which was how it raced through them with such speed. Vamps shared a sick blood meal, and the partakers all became infected.
As the security detail tried to rush through the front doors and Eli reacted, I spotted Hieronymus against a wall on the lower level, sitting in a big peacock-style chair made of wood inlaid with green and blue mother-of-pearl and paua shells, delicate and beautiful.
I turned on Beast-speed and darted to him. Stopped fast, my boots sliding for the last few inches on the wood. “I’m Jane.” I flicked a business card into his lap. Behind me were grunts and thumps as thugs and their weapons hit the floor.
Big H stared at me with eyes that were bleeding slowly vampy. “You profane my presence with weapons and attacks upon my people?”
“You block the door and meet guests with guns?”
Hieronymus looked past me at the doorway while I studied him. He was paler than most vamps I’d met, and though his face was unlined, he had probably been older when he was turned than most—maybe forty human years. He wasn’t classically pretty, which was rare in a vamp, and, like in his photographs, his head was totally bald. The only hair I could see was a thin fringe of eyelashes, which hadn’t been present in the pictures I’d studied. He wore a tux, tie, cummerbund, and shirt all in black, and had an ancient copper chain around his neck, over the fancy clothes. Dangling from it, in the middle of his chest, was a sliver of corroded metal shaped vaguely like a toothpick, wrapped with copper wire. It was a peculiar fashion accessory—butt-ugly. It hadn’t been around his neck in any of the photos I’d seen of him.
The front door slammed shut and I heard something heavy fall. Keeping my host in sight, I risked a glance in that direction and saw Eli standing with his back to the closed and barricaded door, nunchacku in one fist, brass knuckles on the other, and blood on his face and thigh. “Any trouble?” I asked him, letting the words drawl.
“Negative.” He slammed his weapons into their hidey-holes and drew two handguns, holding them at his sides. He wasn’t even breathing hard. And only because I knew him fairly well could I tell he was having fun. Uncle Sam trained its killers well.
At his feet, five humans lay, all out cold, and I chuckled at the sight. Their weapons were in a pile in one corner. I shifted my attention back to Hieronymus. Big H sniffed the air once, taking in my scent. He cocked his head as if processing the signature and stared at me for a time that I could measure in my own heartbeats and that lasted way too long. He was doing that dead-as-a-marble-statue thing they do, where they don’t blink or breathe and you just know that in a fractured second they can be on you and drinking dinner. My chest started getting tight, my breath wanting to come too fast. Tension spread into the room like a wave of polluted water. I did not want to have to fight all the vamps in this building, but I could feel their bodies aligning toward me and their eyes boring into me as if picking which pulse points would be the most tasty.
I didn’t see his heir, Lotus, in the crowd behind him, but it looked like enough of his people had shown up that they could drain and kill us before I could fire off a single shot. Tension skittered up and down my spine like an army of fire ants, and I broke into a hot sweat that the vamps had to be able to smell. I worked at keeping my breathing slow and measured, but much more of this and my knees would be knocking. I decided to go with bravado. “Let’s start over. I’m—”
“Jane Yellowrock,” he said, reading my card as if he had never heard of me. “Have Stakes, Will Travel. Amusing. This is your motto?” He had an elusive European accent, the kind that likely started a thousand years ago and had undergone dozens of changes as languages transformed and evolved through the following centuries.
“My mission statement and company slogan. The weapons and the motto are for rogue vamps, Naturaleza vamps, and vamps targeted by the local ruling council as dangerous to their way of life and continued undead health. I’m not a vigilante. Much. I’m a licensed hunter. And as for the little display at the door, why hire me and my team if a few poorly trained human security toughs could take our weapons away? You want to hire the best? You’ve met us.”
Big H breathed out and leaned back, letting his body lounge against the pretty chair. I remembered to inhale. “You are impertinent,” he said. It wasn’t a question, and it was the truth, so I didn’t reply. I’d been called worse. “You are here with Leonard Pellissier’s acquiescence?”
“Not exactly. I work on retainer, under contract, like we’re proposing to do.”
“His Enforcer works on retainer?” It wasn’t exactly a question, more like a stunned recap.
“The Blood Master of New Orleans, Sedona, Boston, and Seattle, and all of the Southeast except Florida, needs more than one Enforcer. I’m his . . . part-timer.”
“It is not possible to bind more than one Enforcer,” he said.
Which was news to me. So I just raised my eyebrows, stared him down, let one corner of my mouth relax in what might charitably be called amusement, and waited. Never admit you’re wrong when silence lies that you’re right. Not that long ago, I’d have felt guilty about letting a falsehood persist. Now I just let it hang. And let my partner beat up humans. And didn’t even think about it. I was so going to hell.
“Leo released you to work for me.”
I let my smile rise. “Not only that. His laboratory in Texas came up with a cure for the vamp plague, so you won’t have to keep drinking down humans carrying the antibodies.” Big H sat up slowly, his hands resting on the inlaid chair arms. “I brought a supply with me,” I continued, “and will be giving out the cure to anyone who needs it. If we can come to an accommodation.” Which didn’t exactly say that I had permission to cure someone Leo was ticked off with, but I was going to hell already, so in for a penny, in for a gallon of blood.
Hieronymus’ eyes bled back to fully human. He lifted his fingers to his neck and stopped, then dropped the hand. As he did, I caught a whiff of the sick scent of the vamp plague. Big H had the disease. “You have this cure with you?”
“Not on my person, but it’s available to me. Leo is powerful enough to be . . .” I searched for a word and settled on “magnanimous.” Which didn’t actually make him magnanimous, but I didn’t say that. Skirting the truth with a vamp was scary business, because they could often smell a lie and they could always smell nervousness.