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.
Her influence was a lot scarier than that.
It was simply a fact, like gravity, that everyone’s attention should be directed to her. Every person there, men and women alike, glanced up, or tracked her movement obliquely with their eyes, or paused for half a beat in their . . . conversations. For most of them it was an entirely unconscious act. They had no idea that their minds had already been ensnared.
And as I realized that, I realized that mine was in danger, too.
It was a real effort to close my eyes and remind myself of where I was. I could feel the succubus’s aura, like the silken brush of cobwebs against my eyelashes, something tingling and delicious and fluttering that swayed up my legs and through my groin on its way to my brain.
It was only a promise, a whisper to the flesh—but it was a goodwhisper. I had to make an effort to wall it away from my thoughts, until suddenly reason reasserted itself, and that fluttering haze froze and cracked and blew away under the chill wind of sensible fear.
When I opened my eyes, the woman was stalking toward us along that last catwalk, slithering nearer in her thin white dress as she mounted the last few stairs. She paused there, letting us look at her, knowing what effect she was having. Even on guard against it, I could feel the subtle sweetness of her presence calling out to me, whispering that I should relax and let my eyes run over her for a while.
She turned her cornflower blue eyes to me for a moment, and her mouth parted, spreading slowly into a smile that shrunk my pants about three sizes in as many seconds.
“Cousin Thomas,” she purred. “Still noble and starving, I see.”
“Madeline,” Thomas replied, a small smile showing white, perfect teeth. “Still undisciplined and blatant, I see.”
Madeline Raith’s mouth and eyes reacted in completely different ways to my half brother’s remark. Her smile widened into a beauty-pageant expression, wide and immobile, but her eyes narrowed and went completely white, the pale blue vanishing from her irises. She looked from Thomas to Justine.
“Lara’s little pet mortal,” Madeline said. “I wondered where you were running off to. Now I find you meeting with your old flame and . . .” Her eyes slid to me. “The enemy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Justine replied. Though her voice was calm, her cheeks were bright pink, her eyes dilated. “I came to go over the books, the way I do every week.”
“But this time you wore perfume,” Madeline said. “And a rather provocative ensemble, not that you don’t do it justice, darling. I find it”—her tongue touched her upper lip—“interesting.”
“Madeline,” Thomas said, in a tone of exaggerated patience, “please go away.”
“I have every right to be here,” she murmured. It didn’t seem right that she should be able to keep her voice so maddeningly soft and sensual over the beat of the club’s music. She turned to me and took a few steps my way, with her full attention on me.