Beast pressed claws into my brain and flopped down in the forefront of my mind, her thick tail tip twitching slightly. She gave me the control I needed to withstand the coercion in his eyes. “Nope.”
Francis rushed the bars, vamp fast, appearing inches from me, growling, but without the pop of sound that most vamps make crossing a larger distance. I didn’t drop away, but it was a near thing. I felt Eli tense. “Feed me, woman,” Francis demanded.
“Tell me who’s in charge of the Naturaleza now that de Allyon is true-dead. Tell me where the monsters sleep. And tell me where the humans they’re feeding from are being kept. Be a good boy, and you might earn yourself a pint of human blood.” I let a smile start, showing my blunt human teeth.
“Give me a human to drink and I will tell you what I know,” he bargained.
I tossed the steak on top of the cage and the vamp followed its transfer with his entire body, a near backflip of motion that ended with two fingers pinching a corner of the baggie and letting the watery blood drain into his cupped palm. He slurped it while his other palm caught more. He made a face like it was nasty, and Beast agreed. Nasty water-blood of old dead cow, cold and tasteless. Vampire will hunt us and kill us for this.
“Maybe,” I said aloud, not caring that no one knew what I was talking about. “Talk.”
“I know nothing about humans except the ones I owned, and they are drained husks.”
I kept my anger off my face and forced down the spike of fury that followed his statement. Behind me, Eli had no such skills, and his anger swirled into the air. This undead dude was a true-dead man, just as soon as I could arrange it. Too angry to allow him any respite, I reached to take away the steak, but he grabbed the baggie through the silvered bars and yanked it, tearing it and releasing the blood in a wide splatter.
The caged vamp sucked on the tip of the steak and said, “I was going to gather more cattle, but you arrived, and now everything is changed.”
Go me, I thought. Nothing made my day like screwing up vamps’ plans. But I didn’t say it.
“But I know other things,” he said, his fingers getting a grip on the steak and squeezing it, forcing out the watery blood. He was hungry enough that he didn’t even care that the silver was touching his back where he lounged and blistering his skin through his tattered shirt. The metallic stink of poison and scorched meat filled the garage and made me want to sneeze. He bit off an edge of the steak and sucked, which was what I’d expected but was still icky.
“How about your master’s cattle? Ones still alive? Are they penned?” I asked.
“My mistress keeps her humans beneath the ground, in basements and darkness.” He looked at me slyly. “She owns many properties, and her cattle will be in one of them. She detests them, except those she has for dinner.” He sucked the gob of raw meat until it was dry and spat the husk to the floor before biting off another. Which was just ewww.
“Is her name Silandre?”
“No. But I know her. She is growing into a Naturaleza power to be reckoned with. You will give me a human to drink?” he asked.
“For that info? No,” I growled. “Starve.”
Beast stared out through my eyes, and the caged vamp paused, his mouth on the dried out gob of meat. “I have heard one other thing,” he said. “You should search for full circles. The great one is once more complete.”
Which made no sense to me, but the vamp smelled of truth, beneath the stink of whatever he was becoming. So maybe it was important and fitted into the picture somewhere, somehow.
Keeping my reaction off my face, I stood and left the garage, turning off the light as I went, Eli on my heels. “Food?” Francis shrieked. I shut the door as my answer.
“If our friend Francis gets free, he’ll come looking for you,” Eli said casually.
“Yeah. He will. He’s on the list, though, so it won’t be a loss.”
Eli snorted through his nose, a near-silent laugh.
“Have your brother do a search for circles. Crop circles, witch circles, even tribal circles. Maybe some local tribe had one in the past that’s been reactivated or something.”
“And maybe he can get a handle on this new female master he mentioned,” Eli said. “Could there be a new, secondary master of the city here? Maybe two different masters claiming one city? Hieronymus and de Allyon’s heir?” I shrugged, and Eli finished with, “I’ll get Alex to start a search on her too. We need a name.”
“Good. While he’s at it, get him to see if there’s any record about what happened here in Natchez while de Allyon was in charge. That info would go a long way toward helping us see what’s happening now. And see if he’s turned up anything on why these vamps are moving like insects. It creeps me out.”
“Just makes it easier to stomp ’em to death,” Eli said, “emotionally, and morally.”
He had a point.
We left the property, hearing only the soft purr of Eli’s SUV, and arrived at the Clan home of the Natchez MOC a little after five a.m. The house was an amazing structure, three stories of brick and sandstone. The windows were full of light that spilled out into the night, windows even in the roof, showing that under the eaves was more living space. Rounded towers were on either side at the front, topped by peaked roofs like parapets with flags flying from them. The house was surrounded by live oak trees with sinuous twisting limbs so heavy that they had lowered toward the ground and now seemed to dance across the grass like massive, frozen snakes. Moss hanging from the higher limbs moved in the night breeze. Cars were everywhere, parked on the grass and along the drive, a few vehicles I recognized from the first meeting in the converted warehouse.
Pulling on Beast’s night vision, I spotted humans in the dark, keeping watch, noting that security was better there than in town. Or perhaps the fact that Eli and I had taken the humans down so quickly had warped up the human servants’ awareness.
Eli pulled directly to the front door and stopped, the tires grinding on the white shells. Not asphalt made with white shells, which was common in the South, but loose white shells used like gravel. When we got out and walked to the front steps, the sound of the shells beneath my boots was like the sound of crunching brittle bones. We walked up the seven steps and stopped in front of the door. To the three well-armed humans standing there, I said in my best vampire fancy talk, “Jane Yellowrock and company, here to provide surcease from illness and pain for the Master of the City of Natchez and his scions.” Which I thought sounded spiffy.
One of the humans opened the door and two stepped aside. I walked in, knowing that Eli had come through the doorway on my heels, moving fast, and faced back at the opening until the door closed softly. Then he moved out to my left into the formal foyer, checking it out while I stood in the center of the magnificent circular space and took it all in. The scents hit me first: vamps, candle wax, smoke, leather, roses, and the faint smell of human blood that pervades every vamp dwelling.
I had been in Leo’s Clan home, and Grégoire’s, and Rosanne’s in Sedona, and others’, and they were all like something out of a magazine titled Cribs of the Disgustingly Rich and Fanged, but, frankly, I’d never seen or imagined anything like Big H’s house. The foyer was thirty feet wide, round, and three stories tall, with a three-tiered, humongous chandelier hanging down from forty feet overhead. A stairway curved around and around the walls, rising the full three stories, its handrail painted gold and shimmering in the light.