Even though I’d heard the kitchen door open, I didn’t turn my back to Tilly until she was gone, her door shut behind her.
Adam didn’t speak as I brought the skull cup into the kitchen and set it among the pumpkins with a clink. He put an arm across the top of my shoulders as we contemplated the delicate detail that made the gruesome object beautiful. The gems were deep blue, cabochon, and the size of a robin’s egg—sapphires, I assumed. But I wasn’t an expert; they could have been something else—gemified eyeballs, at any rate. They were a little smaller than the eyes that originally fit in the sockets. I supposed they had shrunk when Zee had changed them.
“I know where Bonarata has our vampires,” I told Adam. Wulfe had given me the clue when he’d asked me if I remembered Frost. “We need to go there tonight. Just you and me, I think. I don’t want to give Bonarata reason to declare a war—and I don’t want any of our wolves to accidentally pick up the Soul Taker.”
He pulled out a chair and I did the same. We spent the next ten minutes making plans. I was glad I hadn’t explained how anxious the Soul Taker was to kill me and gather every person tied to me. If I had, he might not have agreed to go alone with me tonight, and I had a strong feeling—a Coyote-urging-me kind of feeling—that we needed to do this now.
Adam had dressed before coming downstairs, so I left him penning a note to Jesse while I went up to put more appropriate clothes on. I didn’t know where the katana had ended up. Presumably one of the others had grabbed it—or it was still in Marsilia’s unused master bedroom.
I called Tad while I opened the safe.
“On my way,” Tad said. “Adam texted that you needed me.” He yawned.
I talked to him while I took down my chosen weapon. I considered bringing other weapons, too. In the end, I only added my usual concealed carry gun. If I needed more firepower, the walking stick would serve me as well as anything.
“I see,” Tad said. “I’ll be there in ten.”
Adam had come up while I’d been on the phone. He reached over my shoulder and took a rokushakubō from the safe. There are many varieties of bō, and Adam had two or three favorites—all of which he kept in the safe. This one was a little longer than he was tall (as the name suggested) and made of unvarnished hickory. About a foot from each end were three one-inch bands of steel.
He glanced at my weapon.
“It’s not polite to return a gift,” he said.
I looked down at the silk belt I held in my hands. “I don’t think it was a gift,” I told him. “I think he brought it here for safekeeping. Bonarata took it from him once, and he didn’t want to give him the opportunity to take it again.”
Any museum curator would have cringed at the way I wrapped it around my waist and tied it. But I didn’t think Wulfe would mind. It was a belt, after all.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” he asked.
“Benton City,” I said. “The vineyard where we killed Frost.”
15
Benton City was a small town ten miles on the other side of the Tri-Cities from where we lived. Most of the people who lived there worked in the Tri-Cities or out in the nuclear-cleanup complex of the Hanford Site. The rest of them grew fruit or made wine.
It was about three in the morning when Adam drove to the abandoned vineyard in the maze of hilly agricultural land surrounding the little town. The property was still covered with gray skeletons of grape vines that had been left to die. It was unusual that good grape-growing land had been left to lie fallow like this for so long.
But on the site of the burned-out winery, someone had recently built a very large house. The land around the house was ripped up and scored—obviously where someone was still working on proper landscaping—but the house itself looked finished.
Anyone could have been building a house, of course. But Adam had checked the county records and found that the land was owned by an Italian company. If I had any doubts that our vampires were there, the big black helicopter sitting on a pad beside the house eliminated them. The helicopter also meant Bonarata was there, but we’d known that was probable.
Adam drove on about a quarter of a mile and pulled into the property via a side road demarcating the line between the dead vines and live ones. The road was graveled and wide enough for a car and a half to drive on it, but there was cleared ground on either side of it.
The ground sloped—as good vineyards do—and we drove over a hump of land before we stopped. Adam parked out of sight of the house, next to one of the rows of dead grape vines, and we got out.
I heard a nighthawk cry and the distant sound of the interstate traffic. Coyotes exchanged a few barking yips—and when I replied, they showed up to check us out. An adult and three half-grown pups. One of the latter looked as though it wanted to investigate further, but the adult headed out for better hunting grounds, and the pups followed her.
“You’re still sure that the Soul Taker will come out and find us?” Adam asked.
I nodded and thumped my temple—not the side the pumpkin had hit—and said, “It knows we are here. It wants me. It will come.”
The only question was if the Harvester—the Soul Taker and Wulfe—would come alone.
We had been there for about twenty minutes when the helicopter engines roared to life. I looked at Adam, who shrugged. He didn’t know what the helicopter meant, either—except that the game was probably ready to begin.
“I love you,” I told him.
He smiled and set his steel-shod bō against his shoulder to get it out of the way so he could kiss me.
“Very touching,” said Bonarata, his accent both faintly British and Italian.
We’d hoped for Wulfe and the Soul Taker alone, but Adam had thought it unlikely.
Neither Adam nor I reacted to Bonarata’s presence, letting the kiss come to a natural conclusion a few seconds after Bonarata spoke. Then I stepped back and let Adam do the talking.
“You are trespassing on our territory without permission,” Adam said.
It wasn’t that Bonarata didn’t look dangerous; he just didn’t look like a monster. He was maybe four inches taller than Adam and had a boxer’s square build, a big man who looked like a brawler. His nose had been broken and badly set—probably when he’d still been human. The skin around his left eye had been split and scarred. Even in the hand-tailored suit that he wore, he looked like hired muscle.
He smiled at Adam, and the smile changed his face, giving it the kind of dangerous charm that had sent women after bad men for as long as there had been women and bad men.
“Ah, please forgive me. I was visiting my people. I had forgotten that I should have let you know that I was here.”
He knew that Adam could hear the lies he spoke. He didn’t care.
“Oh, you let us know,” I said. But I said it quietly enough that he could ignore me if he wanted to, and he didn’t pull his attention off Adam, who was smiling with white teeth.
“I wasn’t speaking of your visit,” Adam said gently. “Though I accept your apologies as meant; Marsilia can have whatever visitors she chooses. She is my ally and I accept her judgment. I was speaking of this—” Adam swept out a hand to indicate the vineyard and the house we couldn’t see but all knew was there. His other hand held the bō. “You should have put the property in someone else’s name if you didn’t want us to find it.”
“This?” Bonarata said, brows raising in mock surprise. “This is a gift for Marsilia. She complained to me that so many houses have been built around her seethe that they pose a risk to her people. When it is finished, I shall present her with the deed.”