“He already knows where it is. He stole it after he killed Jókell.”
“Who?”
“The fey!”
“What fey?”
“The fey who brought the rune. And don’t say, ‘What rune?’ ”
Now I was the one glancing at the door. It was closed, and I’d slammed the one to the living room coming back in, but two doors and the width of a substantial suite didn’t mean much with vampire hearing. Ray started to say something else, but I shushed him, wrapped another towel around myself and hauled him out the window.
An elaborate wrought-iron fire escape overlooked a small alley between buildings. The wind had picked up enough to ruffle the tops of a couple ornamental trees below, and some traffic still flowed along Fifth Avenue. It should be enough to mask a low-voiced conversation.
I hoped.
I shut the window behind me and unzipped the top of the duffel. Anxious blue eyes swiveled up to me. “You want to start making some sense here, Ray?”
“It’s like this. Jókell was Blarestri—that’s one of the three main houses of the Light Fey.”
“I know what it is.”
“Yeah, well, not a lot of people do. Anyway, he was in what I guess you’d call their military, and he regularly pulled a shift guarding one of the main portals into our world.”
“Let me guess. He sometimes let a little something slip through.”
“A lot of somethings. We had a good thing going. He found people on his end who had stuff they’d rather not pay the duty on, and I took care of selling it on this side. Anyway, about a week ago, he calls and tells me he’s got a lead on something special. He told me to arrange a private sale, even told me who to contact—and that was some list! It made me nervous, because I don’t usually handle the big stuff, and these were not people I wanted to piss off. But the boss said to go ahead with it.”
“And something went wrong.”
“Everything! For starters, he wouldn’t bring me the rune until we’d already made the sale. I told him it didn’t work like that, but he said it did this time or no deal. I don’t like selling something I don’t got on hand, but the boss said to do it. And it went okay. He got the reserve he’d wanted and then some, and after the auction, I sent him a message and he said he’d be here in a couple hours.”
“But he didn’t show?”
“No, he came through the portal on schedule, but that’s the last thing that went right!”
“And this portal would be where?”
“At the club. It’s upstairs, in the manager’s old office—”
“At the—Are you crazy? You distribute from there! Everybody knows that!”
“Which is why it was perfect.” The little shit grinned at me. “You idiots were running around, checking my apartment—oh, yeah, I knew about that—and my warehouse and that tea shop I own, but nobody ever thought to look in the most obvious spot.”
“Because it’s stupid!”
“Stupid like a fox,” he said, and then frowned. “No, wait—”
“What. Happened?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, I’d called in a luduan to authenticate the piece before payment was made, and he was late. And I get nervous around those things.”
“Luduans?”
“Fey.” He made a face. “They don’t move enough or they move weird; I don’t know. Anyway, they give me the creeps. And so I tell Jókell to make himself comfortable, and I go down to get some refreshment, and I don’t hurry back, you know? I chat with some of the guys at the bar and remind Ken—that’s the DJ—that some of us like something besides techno occasionally—”
“Ray!”
“Right, right. So, after about fifteen minutes, I go back up with the tray. I push open the door, and I don’t see him, but I don’t panic because I figure even the fey have to use the john once in a while, right? And then something grabs my ankle, and I look down and it’s this bloody hand. And that’s when I found him, squashed between the desk and the wall. Or what was left of him.”
“And Elyas was there?”
“No, but I could smell him, so he must have just left.”
“And how do you know what Elyas smells like?”
“Maybe because he’d been down to the club that afternoon,” Ray said sarcastically. “He was trying to bribe me to give him the rune before the sale, and getting really pushy about it. I finally told him I didn’t have it, that it wouldn’t be delivered until after the sale, so he might as well go away.”
“You told him?”
“Well, I didn’t expect him to come down and murder the guy, did I?” Ray asked huffily. “Anyway, the fey are supposed to be hard to kill. And I guess maybe they are if you use magic. But this one had been gutted. He died a couple minutes later.”
“And the rune was missing.” I didn’t bother to make it a question.
“Damn straight. He had this gold thing around his neck when he arrived, fist-sized, with like a sunburst pattern. Kinda gaudy, but it looked expensive. But he said it was nothing, just a carrier for the rune. He showed it to me, and the rune fit inside in this little space. But when I went back up, it was gone.”
“The rune or the necklace?”
“Both.”
“Then that thing you said you ‘misplaced’—”
“Was the rune, yeah. I called Elyas as soon as I calmed down and told him that he either returned the damn thing or I’d finger him for killing a fey. And you know what they’re like about revenge.”
On a personal level. “But he refused?”
“No. I mean, he was pretty nasty about it, but he finally agreed. But it was almost morning by then, and I didn’t want him coming over when my boys were all asleep. So I told him to send it over tonight. But he didn’t show, and I couldn’t get him on the damn phone, and the boss was due in a couple hours! And I was freaking out, you know? The boss was flying in special to take the rune to Ming-de tonight, and I didn’t have it! I knew he’d kill me.”
“That sounds about right,” I agreed. That was the way the vampire hierarchy worked, even in the more legitimate families. Cause your master to lose face, and you were likely to lose yours, along with a lot of other body parts.
“Elyas never intended to show,” Ray said, getting worked up again. “He just wants me dead and conned that French guy into doing his dirty work!”
“Louis-Cesare. And you could have mentioned some of this earlier!” I pointed out.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine why I’d have trouble trusting the freak who decapitated me!”
“So what changed?”
“What changed is you told Louis-Cesare you want the rune. Well, you’re not going to get it from Elyas. He’s not going to give it up, and if it does its thing and makes him invincible, you can’t kill him. The only chance you got is to blackmail him. I can tell everyone what I saw if he don’t cough it up.”
“But you’d have to be alive for me to do that,” I said, seeing where this was going.
“Which I won’t be, once he gets his hands on me.”
I stared blankly at the trees. The leaves shook, the tops swaying in the freshening wind. The sky above was a troubled gray, dark clouds mounting, heralding another thunderstorm. It perfectly matched my mood.
On the one hand, if Ray was telling the truth and Elyas really had killed the fey, it opened up some interesting possibilities. He might be invulnerable, but his family and property weren’t. The fey could ruin him, making blackmail far from an empty threat. With a little luck, it might be possible to get the rune and Christine.
On the other hand, I had to convince Louis-Cesare to ignore Elyas’s offer and that wasn’t going to be easy. Christine was within his grasp; all he had to do was turn Ray in, and it was a sure thing. Blackmail, on the other hand, included risk: Ray might be lying and Elyas might dig in his heels, counting on the word of a Senate member to beat out that of a nightclub owner.
No. Louis-Cesare wasn’t going to take a chance like that. Not when he could walk upstairs and end this right now.
Get away, keep Ray alive and willing to talk. That was the plan. I glanced down at the deserted alley. The fire escape made getting out of here easy, except for one small problem. The rest of Ray was in a guest room somewhere, and I didn’t even know which one.