Thomas sat down in a corner of the couch, and Justine pressed up close against him, careful to keep what little of her was exposed from touching his skin. I settled down across from them, leaning my elbows forward onto my knees.
I smiled at Justine and nodded to her. The floor and half-wall railing of the platform must have been made from sound-absorbing material. The roar of the club was much reduced up here. “Justine. You look like the Michelin Man’s wet dream.”
She laughed, pink touching her cheeks. “Well. The club has a look we try to maintain. How are you, Harry?”
“Half buzzed on this smoke, and floundering,” I said. “Thomas told me you had some information.”
Justine nodded seriously, and picked up a manila file folder from the couch beside her. “Word is out about a hunt for a renegade Warden,” she said. “There weren’t a lot of details, but I was able to turn up this.”
She slid the folder over to me, and I opened it. The first page was a printout of a Web site of some kind. “What the hell is Craigslist?”
“It’s a site on the Internet,” Justine said. “It’s sort of like a giant classified ads section, only you can get to it from anywhere in the world. People use it to advertise goods they want to buy or sell.”
“Goods,” Thomas put in, “and services. Help wanted, with veiled language for the less-legal things. A lot of shady deals happen there because it’s relatively easy to do so anonymously. Escorts, mercenaries, you name it.”
There was an ad printed on it:
WANTED FOR PERMANENT POSITION,
DONALD MORGAN, 5MIL FINDER’S FEE,
CONSIDERATIONS.
“Hell’s bells,” I cursed quietly.
I passed the page to Thomas. “A wanted poster,” he said.
I nodded. “And not dead or alive, either. They just want him dead.”
Every supernatural hitter on the bloody planet was going to be coming after Morgan. Not so much for the money, probably, as for the favors that the ad promised. They carry a hell of a lot more weight than cash in the world of the weird. The five million was just there to provide scope, a sense of scale for the favors that would come with it.
“Every button man in the world and his brother,” I muttered. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“Why would your people do that?” Justine asked.
“They wouldn’t,” I said.
Thomas frowned. “How do you know?”
“Because the Council solves things in-house,” I said. Which was true. They had their own assassin for jobs like this, when he was needed. I grimaced. “Besides, even if they did put out a hit, they sure as hell wouldn’t use the Internet to do it.”
Thomas nodded, fingers idly stroking Justine’s rubberized shoulder. “Then who did?”
“Who indeed,” I said. “Is there any way to find out who put this here? Or who this e-mail thingy belongs to?”
Justine shook her head. “Not with any confidence.”
“Then we’ll have to make contact ourselves,” Thomas said. “Maybe we can draw them out.”
I scratched my chin, thinking. “If they’ve got a lick of sense, they won’t show themselves to anyone who isn’t established in the field. But it’s worth a try.” I sighed. “I’ve got to move him.”
“Why?” Thomas asked.
I tapped the page with my finger. “When the hard cases start coming out of the woodwork, things are going to get messy, and old people live upstairs from me.”
Thomas frowned and nodded. “Where?”
I began to answer when the tempo of the beat suddenly changed below, and a wave of frenzied cries rolled up, deafening despite any soundproofing. A second after that, an odd frisson crawled across my nerves, and I felt my heart pound a little more quickly, and the earlier demands my body had been making returned in a rush.
Across from me, Justine shivered and her eyes slid almost completely closed. She took a deep breath, and her nipples tightened against the rubber cat suit. Her hips shifted in a small, unconscious movement, brushing against Thomas’s thigh.
My brother’s eyes flashed from light grey to cold, hard silver for a second, before he narrowed them and rose, carefully disentangling himself from Justine. He turned to face the dance floor, his shoulders tense.
I followed his example. “What is it?”
“Trouble,” he said, and looked over his shoulder at me. “Family’s come to visit.”
Chapter Nine
Thomas stared hard at the floor below, and then nodded once, as if in recognition. “Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice, “stay out of this.” in recognition. “Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice, “stay out of this.” “Stay out of what?” I asked.
He turned to look at me, his expression inhumanly remote. “It’s family business. It won’t involve you. The House has given orders that wizards are not to be molested without clearance. If you don’t get involved, I won’t have to worry about you.”
“What?” I said. “Thomas . . .”
“Just let me handle it,” he said, his voice hard.
I was going to answer him when the vampire entered the room.
It was one of those sensations you have trouble remembering afterward—like the last moments of the dream you have just before waking. You know that once you’re outside the dream, you’re going to forget—and you can’t believe you could lose something so significant, so undeniably tangible.
I turned to look the second she entered—just like everyone else in the room.
She wore white, of course. A white dress, a simple shift made of some kind of glistening silken fabric, which fell to the top of her thighs. She was at least six feet tall, more so in the partially transparent shoes she wore. Her skin was pale and perfect, her hair dark and shining with highlights that changed color in the beat of the strobe lighting of the club. Her face was perfect beauty that remained unmarred by the obvious arrogance in her expression, and her body could have been used on recruiting posters for wet dreams.
She descended to the dance floor and crossed to the stairways and catwalks with a predator’s easy motion, each stride making her hips roll and shoulders sway, somehow in time to the music, and far more graceful than the efforts of the sweating dancers, more sensual than the frantic lovers.
At the foot of the first stairway, she came to a young man in leather pants and the scraps of a shirt that looked like it had been torn to pieces by ardent admirers. Without hesitation, she pushed him up against the railing beside the stairway and pressed her body up against his.
She twined her arms slowly around his neck and kissed him. A kiss, and that was all—but apparently no one told the young man that. From his reaction, you’d have thought that she’d mounted him then and there. Her lips were sealed to his, their tongues lashing one another, for maybe a minute. Then she turned away with that same precise grace, and began walking up the stairs—slowly, so that every shift and change of muscle in her perfectly formed legs danced in mesmerizing ripples beneath her soft white skin.
The young man simply melted onto the floor, muscles twitching, his eyes closed. I didn’t think he was actually aware that she had left.
The woman had every eye in the building and she knew it.
It wasn’t an enormous event, the way she took the attention of everyone there. It wasn’t a single large simultaneous, significant motion when everyone turned to look. There was no sudden silence, no deepening stillness. That would have been bad enough.