“Aw, fudge,” floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. “You’re a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?”
I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. “After five hundred years, you’ve read just about everything. Besides, he had hella world-building skills.”
“You’re five hundred?” A head with small, curved horns came into view. “No way.”
“Yep.” I followed the cat up the trembling staircase. Flakes of rust clung to my skin and ate into my palms as I hefted myself over a couple missing stairs and up another floor.
“Well, you don’t look a day over four,” I was told, as a ceramic lamp exploded on the railings right beside me.
One of the shards must have hit the cat, which sent up a mewl of distress. Suddenly, my objective’s entire head stuck out of the window, regardless of the danger. “Oh, no! Pooky!”
“Pooky?” I demanded, as a squat creature crawled out onto the window ledge and held out a pawlike appendage beseechingly.
“Come to Daddy,” it crooned, but the cat was having none of it. It hissed at both of us and tried to run between my legs, but I scooped it up, careful to keep those sharp, little claws out of my flesh.
“You have a cat?” I asked, one brow raised, as the fur ball in my arms spit and hissed.
“Why shouldn’t I?” The creature’s face wasn’t real expressive, but its voice was defensive.
“You’re a dog.”
“I’m a luduan!” it said huffily.
I looked it over. It would be maybe three feet tall in its stocking feet, if it had feet, which it didn’t, or was designed to walk standing up, which it wasn’t. The body covered in golden brown fur looked a lot like a dog’s, except for the too-large lionlike head with a curly brown mane. To further confuse the issue, it had a unicorn- type horn in the center of its forehead.
“Dog-ish,” I corrected.
“Give me my cat!” it demanded.
“Or what? You’ll smite me like a Balrog?”
The golden eyes narrowed. “I quote Tolkien because he puts it better. But I can still open a can of whup ass all over you.”
“You’re right,” I told him. “He does put it better.”
The creature used its horn to snag a radio by the handle, preparing to launch it at me. I dangled the kitty over the long drop. “Just try it.”
His face crumpled. “Oh, come on. Don’t do that. You’ll scare her!”
“Maybe we can work something out,” I offered.
He sighed in resignation. “I don’t have any money, okay? So you can tell whichever one of those sharks you’re working for that he’s wasting his time.”
“I don’t want money.”
“And you’re not getting a pound of flesh, either!”
“I’m not here to beat you up.”
The big head tilted. “Then why are you here?”
I pulled the cat back in. She didn’t look particularly scared to me. Maybe because the “body” down below had vanished like the cut- rate illusion it was. “I just want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About what happened at Ray’s place last night.”
He blinked those enormous eyes at me. “Come again?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I didn’t. That’s the kind of talk that could get my horn ground up.” He petted it nervously. “It’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac, you know? Not that it’s done me any good lately. Do you know how few lady luduans are in existence?”
“Not really.”
“Neither do I,” he said miserably. “I just know there’s none around here.”
“That’s a bitch. Now are you going to help me or not?”
“Not!”
“Here, kitty, kitty.”
“Cut that out!”
“Look, you can talk to me, or you can talk to Fin’s boys. They’re waiting downstairs. But I’m nicer.” He shot me a look. “Okay, that was a lie. But I can help you out.”
“How?”
“Tell me what you know, and I get you off the hook with Fin.” I couldn’t afford it, but if it helped Louis-Cesare, I didn’t think Mircea was going to quibble about the expense account.
He looked at me for a long moment, those lamp-lit eyes brighter than the streetlight across the road. “Touch the horn,” he finally said.
It was my turn to look wary. “Is this something kinky?”
“As if.” He sniffed. “You’re not my type.”
Thank God for small mercies. “If you poison me, I can’t help you with Fin,” I pointed out.
He yawned, showing a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. They matched the talons at the end of its paws. “Relax. All that was just good propaganda. Not that I don’t know a few tricks, mind you.”
“Like the flame of—”
“Shut up.”
I decided I didn’t have time to be cautious, hiked up to the third- floor landing and touched the horn. And no sooner had my finger brushed the tip than he rammed it into my skin. “Ouch!”
“Don’t be such a baby,” he told me, as my blood sank into the apparently porous bone. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he sat there, humming and making these weird faces. I let him get away with it for maybe a minute, and then I gave the kitty a little squeeze. The spoiled thing mewed, and his eyes shot open. “You’re a piece of work—you know that?” he demanded.
“I told you this had better not be kinky.”
“It isn’t!”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Like that’s hard,” he sneered. “And you may as well let Pooky go. I know you won’t drop her.”
“Wanna bet?”
He sighed. “Lady—or may I call you Dorina?”
“No!”
“Okay, Dorina, it’s like this. I’m a luduan. I taste your blood, and I know what kind of person you are, whether you’re lying to me, yadda yadda.” He waved a paw. “You know the score, or you wouldn’t be here. Don’t waste my time.”
I sighed and pulled a gun. “You’re right. I can’t kill an innocent creature just for sport. You, on the other hand…”
“Hey!” Those bright eyes narrowed. “No need to get nasty. Did I say we couldn’t do business?”
“Then what was all that about with the blood?”
“Establishing some guidelines. It saves time. Otherwise, people try to lie to me and it gives me a real headache”—he tapped the space above the horn with his paw—“right here.”
“So do we have a deal?”
“I don’t know. What exactly do you want to know?”
“Well, for starters, you could tell me who killed Jókell.”
The creature’s small ears went back, and its eyes widened before it started beckoning frantically with a paw. “Get in here!”
It could have been a trap, but I didn’t think so. He looked genuinely panicked. Before I could move, the horn snagged my jacket and dragged me inside. The door slammed shut behind me, and I found myself in a narrow hallway smelling of mildew, urine and spices.
I didn’t get a chance to look around, because I was dragged into an apartment before my eyes had even adjusted, and another door slammed shut behind me. “He’s dead? Are you sure? What happened?” The luduan’s tail was twitching excitedly back and forth as he prowled across the floor. He looked freaked.
“Yes, yes, and someone gutted him,” I said, looking around for a chair and not finding one.
“But he had protection!” The little thing looked genuinely upset.
“You mean Naudiz?”
“That thing!” He wrinkled up his features in what I guess was a scowl. “I wish I’d never heard of it!”
“That seems to be the consensus. So what happened?”
He sighed and sat back on his haunches, but that still left his head too low for his liking. “Sit down, can’t you?”
“Where?” The apartment was clearly set up for nonhuman use. The weak streetlight angling in through gaps in the blinds striped a nest of blankets on the floor, a large rawhide chew bone with one end gnawed off and a couple food dishes. I assumed these were for the cat, because a wash of junk-food wrappers had collected in the corners.