“Why I do I think when you said, we, just now, you weren’t including me, or any of the cops?” He was looking at me, and the joking, lecherous comments were gone. I was seeing a very intelligent pair of cop eyes.
I sighed and took a step toward the ladder. I’d said too much, way too much. Jean-Claude’s voice in my head, “You must say something to take the sting out of your words, ma petite. ”
Out loud, to Zerbrowski, I thought of something to say. “I’m tired Zerbrowski, please don’t tell Dolph that I think all the vamps in the church should be done in. I don’t mean it, not really.”
“I won’t tell anyone, especially not Dolph. He’d probably start with his new daughter-in-law, and wouldn’t that be a shit.”
I nodded. “But if we had hundreds of vamps go bad, all at once, I’m still who gets the call. I so don’t want to ever have to try to take on that many of them. I’m good, but not that good.”
“For a few hundred, even you’d need help,” he said. He let out a long breath. “I can see where the thought would piss you off, and make you tired. Hell, it makes me tired, and nervous.”
“I’ll try to find out how long this no-blood-oath policy has been in effect,” I said.
“And then what?”
I had my hands on the ladder. “I’ll deal with it.”
“Ma petite, you are being uncautious again.”
I whispered, “Get out of my head.”
“What does that mean, Anita? You’re a federal marshal, you can’t do the Lone Ranger shit anymore. You got a badge.”
I leaned my forehead on the ladder, got mud on my face, and jerked back. I told him as much of the truth as I could. “We’ll give Malcolm a choice, either he blood oaths everybody, or Jean-Claude does.”
Jean-Claude was suddenly louder than ever in my head. “Stop there, ma petite, I beg you, do not say it out loud.”
What I didn’t say out loud was that any vampire that didn’t want to take the ceremony was probably dead. I had Jean-Claude’s memory of it now, and I knew the blood oath was one of their most strenuously observed laws. I’d seen what could happen if the oath wasn’t strong enough, what would happen if it wasn’t there at all.
I was actually on the ladder, when Zerbrowski said, “And what if the vamps don’t want to take the oath?”
I stayed frozen on the ladder for a second, then lied, “I’m not sure. I’m hoping that it’s just Malcolm and not every church of their’s across the country that’s doing this. You’re talking about something that’s never been done before, Zerbrowski. As far as I know, no master vamp has ever just allowed vamps to breed like this without securing himself as their leader in more than just name. It’s never been done before. Vamps aren’t big on new ideas.”
“Are you talking about killing the ones that won’t take the oath?
Anita, they’ve got rights.”
“I know that, Zerbrowski, better than most.” I was cursing Malcolm, cursing him for the mess he’d started. Even if the murderers weren’t his people, it was only a matter of time. Vampires are not people, they don’t think like people. I realized that Malcolm was trying to do with the Church of Eternal Life what Richard had tried to do with the Thronnos Rokke Clan. Both of them were trying to treat the monsters like they were just people. They weren’t. God help us, but they weren’t.
Jean-Claude whispered, “We will need to send envoys to the church and see how bad it truly is.”
I didn’t answer, because I was pretty sure who one of the envoys would be. Me.
I started up the ladder, and only when Zerbrowski whistled did I remember what I was wearing under the skirt. “Blake, you have a very nice…”
“Don’t say it, Zerbrowski.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you say it, I’ll put you on the ground.”
“Ass,” he said.
“I warned you,” I said.
He laughed.
When we were both on solid ground, I footswept him into a convenient patch of mud. He cursed me, everyone laughed. He said, “I’ll tell Katie you were mean to me.”
“She’ll be on my side.” And she would be. In fact, I knew Katie Zerbrowski well enough to know that her husband wouldn’t tell her he’d told me I had a nice ass. She’d consider it rude.
Jean-Claude’s echo in my head was, but you do. I told him to shut up, too, and this time he listened. “Dawn is near, and I must rest. We will speak again when I wake.”
“Pleasant dreams,” I whispered.
“The dead do not dream, ma petite. ” And he was gone.
48
The security guy hadn’t liked stripping. I told him he could do it in privacy with just me and the nice officers watching, or he could do it on one of the stages. His choice. He’d looked like he didn’t believe me, but wasn’t willing to risk it. He was clean, no vamp bites. On the one hand, shit, because a master vamp is harder to catch, harder to keep, and harder to kill. On the other hand, great, because the list of vamps that could do this was pretty small. Or it was if I understood the deal between Malcolm and Jean-Claude. Okay, technically it had been a deal struck between Malcolm and Nikolaos, the old Master of the City. Having met her, hell, having killed her, I’d sympathized with vamps flocking to the church and not wanting to owe her a damn thing. But Jean-Claude had honored her treaty with the church, on a few conditions. One, no master-level vamps allowed in town without running it by Jean-Claude. So either Malcolm had reneged on the deal, or he didn’t know that he had someone that powerful in his community. Or neither Malcolm nor Jean-Claude had felt someone that powerful enter their territory. If that last were true, we were in deep, deep trouble, because that would raise the power level to something none of us would want to deal with.
Or had Jean-Claude approved a master for Malcolm without understanding that there would be no blood oath to keep control of it?
I had so many questions that my head hurt, and no way of getting them answered until Jean-Claude woke for the day. I drove back to St. Louis in dawn’s early light, happy I had sunglasses with me. Happy that I wasn’t driving directly east. The indirect brightness was bad enough.
The Circus was closer than my own house, so that’s where I went. I bunked there sometimes to have a date with Jean-Claude, but often just because it was closer to crash. My eyes were so tired they burned, and my body had that achiness that feels almost like you’re sick, but is just your body using up all its reserves to keep you awake and moving.
I pulled into the employee parking lot of Circus of the Damned at nearly 8:30 in the morning. There were three other cars in the lot.
One was Jason’s, and I didn’t know the others on sight. But it had to be people who didn’t just work here, but also lived here, and knew how to drive. That narrowed it down. I thought Meng Die drove, and maybe Faust, but I just wasn’t sure, and was too tired to care.
I walked across the parking lot in the fast growing light, and fought off an urge to hunch my shoulders. I used my key on the back door, and I pushed my way into the blessed dimness of a storage room.
I locked the door behind me, leaning against it for a second or two. Not long ago there hadn’t been a lock on the back door at all, you had to have someone let you in, but I’d had them put in a better door, reinforced steel, with a lock. Without the lock they’d had to keep someone in a little lookout up near the roof. The lookout would send someone down if the person at the door needed in. I said it seemed silly, since there was a lock on the outer doors in front. It just made it harder for the employees to get in, and besides there was a small window just before dawn when sometimes the lookout was empty, and that was often when I was trying to get inside. Banging on the door at dawn just got discouraging.
I made sure the door was secure behind me, then I wound my way through the boxes that were always there, to the big door that led to the stairs. The stairs went down, a long way down. I was tired enough that if there’d been an elevator I would have taken it. But there wasn’t. The stairs were actually part of the defenses of the Circus.