Fury's Kiss (64 page)

“And it woulda been, if somebody hadn’t offed Marlowe’s guys. You heard him, all five ended up—”

“Dead, yeah. And that’s my point. Who killed them?”

“Whaddya mean, who killed them? The damned fey killed them. Or their mutants did. Those things were strong—and fast. Did you see—”

“Yes, I saw,” Ray said sharply. “I saw a bunch of…things…come through the portal. But Marlowe spoke to Dory just after that—like less than a minute after—telling her that he’d sent guys to the basement. So he must have sent them practically the second he saw anything come through.”

I nodded. “He told me he had people taking care of it.”

“But they didn’t take care of it. And a couple minutes later, he had Halcyon ask you to check on ’em, because the shield wasn’t back up and they hadn’t reported in.”

“Yeah.” I was starting to see where he was going with this.

“So the mutant things are back in the ballroom and then a few minutes later, they start showing up in the hall. But Marlowe’s boys are dead by then, because you and me, we’re already on the way to check on them. So again,
who killed them
?”

“It couldn’t have been Jonathan’s experiments,” I said slowly. “Marlowe’s boys should have been ahead of them.”

Ray nodded.

“Unless a portal opened down in the basement,” Zheng pointed out. “We wouldn’t have seen it, so we wouldn’t know.”

“Okay, say it happened that way,” Ray replied. “Say somebody figured Marlowe would be sending a group to fix the shield, and opened a portal down there before we even realized they could do that. That still leaves a bunch of other things unexplained.”

“Like what?”

“Like Slava’s.” He looked at me. “It’s been bugging me since our convo in the car. The bad guys, they got this perfect plan for getting into Central, right? But that requires us arresting a bunch of Slava’s guys and taking them back there. They got in so easy because they were
let
in, and they were let in
because they were expected
.”

“You’re wondering how the fey and their allies knew we’d be showing up at Slava’s,” I said, wondering why that hadn’t occurred to me.

Ray nodded. “They couldn’t just wait around, hoping you’d get there sooner or later. It was too elaborate a plan for doing on the fly. And anyway, Slava was known as a pimp, not some big-time conspirator. Why would they think Marlowe would go there at all?”

“He went there because of the yacht,” I said slowly, my headache getting worse. I was too tired for this, too tired to think. But Ray was right; something was…off. “Mircea saw it in my head, and then Marlowe tracked it down from the description he gave. And discovered that it belonged to Slava.”

“Yeah. So if it was in your head, who else could have known?”

“Whoever Marlowe told,” Zheng said.

Ray rolled his eyes. “Yeah, because we all know what a forthcoming guy he is, right?”

“Nobody was in the kitchen when he told me but us and Louis-Cesare’s cook,” I told Ray. “And I somehow can’t see Verrell being involved in the conspiracy.”

“Neither can I, but that still don’t explain how the bad guys
knew
.”

“You need to let Marlowe know there might still be a problem,” I said. “Some loose end somewhere.”

He nodded. “I’m going to if I can ever find him. He’s probably off interrogating the fey—”

Zheng nodded. “I heard they’re bringing in Jack for that. Should be fun.”

“—but, yeah, I think we got a problem. I mean, that attack itself was a little weird, too, if you think about it. Who shows up and attacks Central and just assumes they’re gonna find the password? What if the senior guy on duty gets offed by your crazed killing machines? What then?”

“We know what,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, we do. A total screwup. If they hadn’t overheard us using the password, and if Marlowe hadn’t failed to change it—”

“You heard him.” Zheng said. “He’d just changed it the day before. On a hunch.”

“—then they’d have been SOL. It seems a really slipshod way of doing anything.”

“Well, you know the Black Circle,” Zheng said, obviously losing interest. “Anyway, I’m gonna go turn these in. What about you?”

He was looking at me, but Ray answered. “I’m going to go find Marlowe. And some different shoes. These have been killing my feet all night.”

Zheng was still looking at me.

“I think I’ll hang out for a while,” I said, going for nonchalant.

It didn’t work.

He grinned. “That healer’s gonna have your ass, you go back again before morning.”

“Louis-Cesare will be fine,” Ray told me irritably. “Well, physically, anyway, I don’t know what you did to his head. I still don’t feel so good.”

Me, either. I had a headache that wouldn’t quit, and I was so tired it felt like I was drunk. Which is probably why Zheng took pity on me and led Ray away, still fussing.

I looked around. That doc had been a bastard, but he had a point. The makeshift clinic had spilled out from the box seats into the charred remains of the ballroom, and usable space was at a premium. And since Louis-Cesare was in a healing trance, I couldn’t do anything at the moment but sit at his side and be in the way.

I thought maybe I’d go do something useful, and get a little sleep—if I could find a bed that was still intact. Or a couch. Or a chaise. Or considering how I felt right now, any flat surface that wasn’t covered in rubble and broken glass would—

Some sixth sense had my thoughts breaking off, had me turning. And that was all the warning I got before something slammed into me with an almost audible
whummmp
, knocking me off my feet and sending me sliding.

Into a horribly familiar scene.

Suddenly, the atrium’s half-destroyed walls were replaced by gleaming skyscrapers, the steaming piles of rubble became water lapping against the sides of boats, and the haze of smoke and dust in the air turned into silvery moonlight flooding over—

No.

No! I jumped to my feet and whirled around, hoping I was hallucinating. And maybe I was.

Because somehow I was back in my head once more.

And worse, I was back at that fucking pier.

This time there was no Louis-Cesare, no Radu, no Mircea. There wasn’t even a mysterious assailant trying to gut me. But there was a group of men standing on the bloody concrete, with flashlights in the hands that weren’t holding smoking guns.

Or not, I thought, staring. Because one of them wasn’t a man. Which might explain why I was suddenly looking at a memory that didn’t seem familiar.

And hearing a mental voice that wasn’t mine.

“Hurry up,” the idiot in the dark overcoat said urgently. He was looking around, gun in hand, tensed as if for a fight. And no wonder.

Black scorch marks marred the concrete, and burnt gunpowder hung in the air like a cloud. Even muffled gunshots are far from silent and this wasn’t exactly remote. The fools had probably woken half of Manhattan.

It was typical of the “Black Circle,” Lawrence thought viciously. A bunch of the biggest stoners and losers he’d ever encountered, too strung out on magic to remember the simplest of instructions, and too incompetent to carry them out if they did
.
He gave the man the response he deserved—none—and knelt by the girl.

She was lying on her side, bloody and crumpled, and for a moment he thought they’d fucked up everything. His fangs dropped, sensing their blood, their fear, the heartbeats that sped up as they watched him. The decision was instantaneous. If they had killed her, they died.

But then he saw it, a faint, ever-so-gentle aspiration, and he unclenched the hand he couldn’t remember closing. He pushed her over onto her back and checked out the damage. Two bullet wounds, a few too many contusions—damn it, he’d told them to avoid the head! But she would live. Long enough to do the job, anyway.

It was about time something went right.

It had been the perfect plan—his plan—calculated down to the last detail. Others had played their part—Geminus had come up with the idea for the weapons, the damned Black Circle had put him into contact with the man who could bring the idea to life, the fey had provided the army to use them. But he had been the one to stitch it all together, the one to watch Kit like a hawk, the one to steer the investigation away from their activities for what felt like forever.

He who was poised to pull off the greatest coup in vampire history.

But the sheer moronic incompetence that surrounded him was threatening to bring it all down. Geminus managing to get himself killed after two millennia of avoiding it, just when the lazy son of a bitch was actually useful for something. Then Varus suddenly gaining a conscience and Mircea—devil take him—being put in charge of the Senate’s smuggling investigation instead of Kit.

Mircea, whose family Lawrence didn’t know and over whose actions he had no influence. Mircea, whose skills with the mind rivaled his own, and whose secrets were closed to him. Mircea, who had charmed away the best investigators from a dozen families and formed them into a unit that was closing the noose tighter every damned day…

Sometimes Lawrence thought it was a wonder he was still sane.

The only thing that kept him going was the thought of what he was going to do to his allies once this was all over. He felt his face crack into a smile, felt the men tense and shift uncomfortably. And then he slid into the girl’s mind as smoothly as a fish into water.

The easy pathways and uncomplicated patterns of the human brain opened up before him, like an unfolding flower. Such a relief after the twisty, dark paths of the vampire mind, where barriers were everywhere and hidden traps could suddenly lunge out and grab you, threatening to shred your consciousness if you weren’t nimble enough to get away.

Like Varus, who had proven impossible to read. Or Mircea, who had almost trapped him the one and only
time he’d ventured into that quagmire of a brain. He thought it fitting that the freak Mircea had sired and inexplicably continued to shield was Lawrence’s way out of the mess her bastard of a father had made. All Lawrence had to do was to plant a few memories, adjust a few others and—

What the hell?

Lawrence stopped abruptly, gazing in disbelief at the…thing
…
at the center of her mind. If “mind” was even the right word. But all of the others—“maze” and “jungle” and “labyrinth”—that he’d used to describe some of the more unusual minds he’d encountered fell completely short. It was a gigantic snarl of impossible patterns and massive barriers and odd dark places and strange duplicated synapses and…

And it was like nothing he’d ever encountered.

It wasn’t human. It wasn’t even vampire. He didn’t know what the hell it was, or how she functioned with it at all. It was…insane, he thought, horrified.

And then jumped at the feel of a hand on his physical arm.

He pulled back abruptly, the jumbled-up mess retreating, to be replaced by another mess, in the form of one of his allies’ faces. “Are you almost done?” the idiot asked, looking anxious.

Lawrence reminded himself that he couldn’t kill him. Not yet. “If I was done, I would have said so,” he hissed instead.

“It’s just…you’re needed at the third site. Jonathan’s having trouble with one of the masters.”

Lawrence glared at the man, furious. “I instructed him to wait for me!”

The man shook his head, and glanced at his partner. “Jonathan doesn’t take instruction well. Not from anybody. He does what he wants.”

“Then he’s a fool, and he can die as one. Danieli has mental gifts. He’ll resist the compulsion.”

“He is resisting. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You gotta get over there or this is all going south—tonight.”

“As it will if I leave the woman’s memories intact!”

The man’s partner, who was slightly more intelligent, if no more capable, uttered an expletive. “What is taking so long? You said she wouldn’t be a problem.”

“She isn’t.”

“Then what—”

“Her father,” Lawrence said viciously. Of course it had been Mircea; of course it had. Cobbling together some form of bastardized consciousness for his pet. Why, Lawrence couldn’t even begin to imagine. The man gave him the fucking creeps sometimes.

“That vamp isn’t here,” the partner said sharply, challenging him.

And causing Lawrence to have to clench a fist to keep
from dropping the SOB, then and there. “He’s done something,” he said shortly. “Something I’ve never seen before. I don’t know what it is, or how to counter it.”

“You’re saying you can’t manipulate her memories?”

“I’m saying I can’t do it right now, in some hatchet job
on a pier!” Lawrence retorted, shoving damp hair out of his eyes.

Half of it was salt water, the other half blood splatter from the girl mixed with his own, because this had to look real. Ten to one, Mircea would be extracting her memories, and he would recognize a wholesale implantation. So Lawrence had had to take a few bullets, after already taking a portal to one of the nastier hell dimensions. And now he learned it might have all been for nothing?

God, he wanted to kill something.

“But she has to remember the ship, or they won’t go to Slava’s!” Idiot #1 said. “And that you died, or Marlowe will change the passwords and then we’ll really be screwed—”

“We’re going to be screwed anyway if you don’t come on,” Idiot #2 said, a phone to his ear. “Jonathan says now.”

“Jonathan can—” Lawrence cut himself off. Soon. Very damned soon, he’d deal with Jonathan and the rest of them. He would deal with them slowly. He stood up. “Take her.”

“Take her? Take her where? If she’s no use to us, we gotta clean the scene. We gotta—”

Lawrence shoved the man’s hand away, the one he’d raised with the gun in it. “We need her!”