Death's Mistress (35 page)

“It’s not me we have to worry about,” I said, thinking of a certain half dragon with a serious vampire phobia.

I really hoped she wasn’t hungry.

Forty-five minutes later, I pulled into my street. I was exhausted and cramped, and a bag or something had shifted when I had to stop for a red light suddenly, and it had been poking me in the back ever since. I wanted a drink or three and bed and I wanted them now.

Only that wasn’t looking too likely.

“Crap,” I said with feeling, almost standing on the brakes.

“What? What’s wrong now?” Ray demanded. His body was squashed in back between half a dozen suitcases, two garment bags, a trunk and five hatboxes, with the duffel on his lap.

“We have a welcoming committee.”

We were maybe a third of a block from the house, so I couldn’t see them very well. But someone was there, all right.
Make that a lot of someones
, I thought, as more shadows broke away from the house and drifted into the street, trying to get a look at us.

Ray’s body held his head up so it could see, and the tiny eyes almost bugged out. “
Shit
. It’s the master.”

“Cheung?” I’d almost forgotten about him. Too bad the reverse didn’t appear to be true.

“What are you waiting for?” Ray asked, starting to sound a little frantic. “Go, go, go!”

“I can’t go,” I snapped. “Your master has a dozen guys across the driveway.”

“I didn’t mean go
in
,” Ray said, like I might be slow. “I meant, get us out of here.”

“I can’t do that, either.”

“Why the hell not?”

“The wards have held so far, but there’s at least a couple hours to dawn.”

“Which is a good argument for not getting trapped in there!”

“There are already people trapped in there. And Cheung has to know that. His Hounds can smell them from here.”

“Life sucks,” Ray said callously.

“It’s going to suck more for you if he takes hostages.”

“You’d give me up?”

“In a nanosecond,” I said, switching gears.

“I thought we’d developed a bond here!”

I didn’t even bother to respond to that. “Get ready to run,” I told him, just as one of Cheung’s men got close enough to recognize me. And then decision time was over.

A dozen black streaks started our way, and I floored it, aiming for the driveway and the line of vamps stretched across it. I didn’t really think I’d make it through; playing red rover with a line of masters is not a good bet. But I didn’t need to get through. I just needed to get close enough to the wards to make it inside before they caught me.

A couple of the nearest vamps grabbed the passenger door, ripping it half off its hinges. Christine screamed, which didn’t help, and her heavy trunk tumbled out on top of them, which did. But the rest of Cheung’s boys figured out where I was going and surged that way, to bolster their buddies in the drive. So I swerved at the last minute and cut across the lawn, throwing up grass and mud in my wake, and fishtailed to a stop just inside the wards.

The two vamps who had grabbed hold of the passenger door hit the invisible shield around the house head-on as we passed safely through. They were still sliming their way down it, like juicy bugs on a windshield, when several more ran forward and grabbed the left bumper of the car. It had remained just outside the wards, providing them with a convenient handle to use to drag us backward.

I hit the gas, but after days of rain and an unexpected blizzard, the front lawn had turned into a mud field. I had zero traction. I did get the satisfaction of seeing Cheung’s men completely drenched in mud, but they were going to have the last laugh if they succeeded in dragging us back out.

Christine was scrabbling at her seat belt, trying to get it undone. I tossed the duffel onto the front steps and started helping her, while keeping my foot glued to the gas pedal. I was hoping the car would dig itself far enough into the muck to buy us a few seconds, but no dice. The vamps managed to get the whole rear end out just as the seat belt finally gave way

There was no time to exit gracefully. I grabbed Christine with one hand and Ray with the other, and dragged them over the hood. We jumped free even as the car was being yanked out from under us, and landed—of course—face-first in the sea of mud. But it was a sea of mud inside the wards, and that was all that mattered.

I got to my feet, dripping in muck. The beautiful dress was ruined, and I hadn’t even gotten to wear it anywhere. And somewhere along the line, I’d lost one of the shoes.

I was royally pissed, and that was before I saw the guy coming to talk to me in my mud- slimed finery. He was wearing a suit that would have made Mircea jealous. The fine black wool fit him like a dream, the burnt orange silk tie adding just the right amount of spice. It also matched the orange-and-black tiger tat leaping from his neck to his right cheek.

And the dressing gown of the very bedraggled figure he was leading by one arm.

“Radu!” I blinked. “What the hell?”

“Yes, yes, thank you! My point exactly,” he said, obviously livid.

“You said you’d be okay.”

“I would have been, if not for this madman!” he said, struggling uselessly against his captor’s hold. No introductions were made, but then, I didn’t really need any. Radu, despite appearances, is a second-level master. Pissing him off is a very bad idea—unless you happened to be a first-level.

“Mircea will kill you for this,” I said conversationally, as Cheung’s polished shoe tips stopped just outside the wards.

“Had he not interfered in my business, there would have been no need to inconvenience his brother.” The voice was a low, pleasant tenor without a trace of an accent. It didn’t match the looks, which were anything but bland: bronze skin, high cheekbones, dark, almond-shaped eyes and a hawklike nose with a proud tilt.

“Inconvenience? Is that what they call kidnapping these days?”

“You kidnapped my servant first,” he pointed out. “Return my property and I will return yours.”

“That sounds familiar,” I said, checking ’Du out.

His dressing gown was ripped along one seam, his hair—usually so sleek and shiny—was everywhere and he had somehow acquired a smear of mud on his nose. He looked pathetic and miserable. I smiled at him sympathetically.He smiled back.

“Ray’s the Senate’s property now,” I told Cheung. “If you want him back, you’ll have to petition them.”

“What?” Radu’s expression faded.

Cheung’s forehead acquired a slight wrinkle. “Perhaps you did not understand me.”

“I understood perfectly.” A drip of mud oozed down my temple, and I took a second to wipe it off.

“Then release my servant.”

“Or what?” I demanded. “I’m fair game. Ray’s fair game. But you can’t hurt ’Du, and you know it. It would break the truce, and even if it didn’t, Mircea
would
kill you. Slowly.”

“What are you talking about?” Radu demanded, his embroidered satin bed slippers slowly sinking into the lawn. “We’ve already been out here half the night! Give the man what he wants, Dory!”

“No can do,” I said while flipping through the key-chain for the front-door key I never used. “But don’t worry, ’Du. I’ll inform Mircea about this, next time I see him.”

“Next time you—” He broke off, staring at something over my shoulder. I turned to see Christine floundering around in the mud. Her delicate little slippers didn’t appear to have much traction, and every time she got up, she fell down again.

“Is that . . .
Christine
?” he asked, looking appalled.

She slowly got to her feet, hands spread out on either side of her, like a toddler learning to walk. “Lord Radu,” she said tremulously, before her foot slipped and she fell backward into a puddle. The resulting splash rained muck down on me and ’Du.

“Well, that explains it,” he muttered.

“You think I am bluffing,” Cheung said evenly.

I sighed. “You’re either bluffing, or you’re an idiot, and that’s not your reputation,” I said, finally locating the house key. “Hurt ’Du, and you’ll die for it. Let him go, and Mircea may let you off with some groveling. I don’t know.”

“I see I need to prove my sincerity.” Cheung didn’t move, but two of his boys ran up with sledgehammers—and started taking apart the Lamborghini.

Radu just stood there, mute in horror, as a beautiful piece of Italian engineering was quickly reduced to scrap. It didn’t take long. I opened the front door, hauled Ray’s mud-covered self inside and then went back for the duffel and Christine.

“This does not move you?” Cheung demanded, as one of his boys sent the steering wheel flying off into the night. Radu made a small whimpering sound.

“It’s ’Du’s car,” I told him, before shutting the door in his face.

The house might be repairing itself, but it wasn’t getting there in any hurry. There were still holes in the floor, the walls and the ceiling, giving a three- story atrium effect to the front hall. Moonlight cascaded down through the now much more open floor plan, flooding the old boards in a pale light that was strangely otherworldly.

It provided enough illumination to allow me to thread my way through the stacks of worm-eaten furniture in the vestibule. I didn’t topple a single piece over, even while dragging Ray. That was lucky, because something else otherworldly was in the hallway, flitting through the far end of the corridor, near the back door. I stopped dead.

Everything else looked normal. The house was dark, quiet, still. But that wasn’t surprising. Claire had to have given up on me a while ago and gone to bed. And while my roommates tended to be active at night, they weren’t exactly homebodies. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home to a mostly quiet house.

But not to one that smelled like a deep cave, dank and chill, with that curious sharp underbite that my brain had filed under “Oh, shit.”

Svarestri, although I couldn’t see them. Not that that meant a damn. I suddenly wondered if there was anyone left alive for Cheung to attack.

“Hey, can we—”

I clapped a hand over Ray’s big mouth and grabbed my new iron sword out of the duffel. It felt good in my hand—a cold, solid weight with some serious heft behind it. I just hoped the fey hadn’t come up with another way of fighting without actually being there. If they’d hurt Claire or the kids, I wanted something that could bleed.

Christine caught my arm. She didn’t say anything, but her face spoke volumes. “Stay here,” I told her softly. Normally, a three- hundred-year-old vamp would be an asset in a case like this, but I didn’t think she was going to frighten the fey by crying at them.

The dress was already ruined, so I wove a knife through the silk at the small of my back and tied another to my thigh with one of the stockings. I stuffed the duffel under a table in the foyer and left the rest of Ray on guard over it. Then I moved carefully into the hall, keeping close to the tattered walls.

The house must have prioritized wallpaper pretty low, because pieces of it still fluttered everywhere, brushing my cheeks as I slipped past. It was like being in a forest of slowly moving tree branches, heavy with moss. The dried paste on the back felt like scaly fingers brushing over my skin, and the constant movement gave my eyes too much to watch.

Not that they were doing so hot. Light cascaded down three stories, through the ruined roof. But it was dim antique silver—a combination of moonlight and the vague radiance from the street. The city had recently installed new, energy-efficient streetlights that saved money by not actually illuminating anything.

The situation wasn’t helped when a thin, cold rain began to fall. It sent odd, rippling shadows down the windows and across the squares of gray they cast on the floor. I felt my heart rate speed up, my skin prickling. The damned Svarestri were giving me a complex about the weather.

The white backing on the wallpaper glowed under the moonlight, waving across my vision like long silver blond hair. Everywhere I looked, I thought I saw fey for a split second. But I hadn’t. Because there was no mistaking when I finally did glimpse one. Something black twisted down through me at the sight, from head to feet, colder than the night air at the bottom of a ravine.

It was only a brief flicker in my peripheral vision, vague and indistinct. My shadow ghosted along at my heels as I slowly moved forward, but the fey cast none. Around him there was only a quivering nothing, like negative space.

Some kind of camouflage, I guessed, and it worked pretty well. I couldn’t seem to see him at all if I looked directly at him. He only showed up in the corner of my eye in glimpses, wavering in and out of the rain shadows and the strands of gently waving wallpaper.

The fey was joined by another and then another, the air around them practically sparkling with the ghostly light around their bodies. Until it flickered and went out, dimming down to the nothingness of the first. And whether it was a spell or that almost weightless gait they all seemed to have, my ears couldn’t pick up a thing. Not a footfall, not a single breath, nothing. Silence filled the old house like cold water, broken only by the soft sound of the rain.

A fourth intruder joined the growing crowd. And unless the fey were as ghostly as they appeared and could walk through walls, I knew how they were getting in. He’d come from the pantry, through the door that led out into the hall. They’d entered through the portal.

Pip had the big boy in the basement, but he’d littered other portals throughout the house for security and convenience. They didn’t go anywhere exotic; that one just let out into the backyard, by Claire’s old compost heap. We’d mostly been using it to take out the garbage.

But it looked like the fey had found a better use for it.

There were no wards guarding it because it didn’t exist when not in use. At least, that was the theory. Somehow, they had figured out it was there and had tinkered with the spell enough to get it to open from that end, giving them free access to the heart of the house.

What I couldn’t figure out was why the damned internal wards weren’t working. Pip hadn’t been content with just exterior wards. He’d added a bunch of nasty interior ones as well, which I’d seen in action on one memorable occasion. And Olga and I had recently placed another layer over the top of that.