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“Do not provoke me, Dorina.” The voice was harsh, but not entirely steady. So, he wasn’t as unmoved as he’d like to appear. It wasn’t much of a victory, but at the moment, I’d take what I could get.
“Don’t provoke you?” I stared at his lips. I couldn’t help it; we were close enough to kiss. Do it, my pulse was beating. Do it, do it, do it. “Why, are you really that easy?”
Louis-Cesare flinched as if I’d slapped him. His expression changed, and for a split second he actually looked stricken. No, I thought. No, no, no. I felt like I’d twisted a knife in my own gut, when I should have felt triumphant. What the hell?
Louis-Cesare abruptly pulled away. He ran a hand through his hair and stared at me while I tried to get my breathing under control. When he finally spoke, it was nothing I’d expected to hear. “Why did you say that Lord Dracula will come to us?”
I searched around the carpet by my feet and found my joint. I took another much-needed drag before answering. My pulse was pounding hard enough that I could barely hear, but Louis-Cesare already had himself back under control. His sweater had recovered from our little tussle without anything so déclassé as a wrinkle; other than for slightly mussed hair, he looked like nothing had happened.
Damn vampire.
God, he could kiss, though.
“Because three people put him away last time, but only two are family,” I managed to say evenly.
“Then, logically, he should go after—”
“I wasn’t finished. His warped idea of logic only makes sense if you know his history. Radu betrayed him half a millennium ago, leading a Turkish army to force him off his throne. He spent years in exile, plotting revenge. By the time he got back, Radu had joined the life-challenged segment of the family—he’d picked up a bad case of syphilis and Mircea brought him over because at that time there was no cure. But was that good enough for Drac? Hell no.”
I stubbed out joint number one after using it to light number two. I was going to need to score some weed in ’Frisco at the rate things were going. It wouldn’t be as good as Claire’s stuff, but hopefully she’d be back tending her highly illegal herb patch soon. “The only reason he didn’t take Radu out immediately was that an assassin in the pay of some local nobles got in a lucky shot. Unfortunately, Daddy chose to bring Drac over instead of leaving him to die. And as soon as he rose, he started in on Radu as if nothing had changed. He wasn’t strong enough to kill him, being
only a baby vamp, but he didn’t let that stop him from hiring others to attempt it.”
“But that did not succeed.” Louis-Cesare looked like he had forgotten to whom he was speaking for a minute, and actually seemed to be listening.
“Nope. But Drac doesn’t get over things. Didn’t as a human, doesn’t now.”
“Yet he did give up eventually. Radu is quite well today—”
“Because of luck,” I said flatly. “I don’t know what you were told, but Drac never did stop his games. He was finally locked away because it came out that he was the one who set a mob on Radu in Paris, leading to a very nasty imprisonment for your sire that almost got him killed.”
“I know.” Something about the way he said it made me glance up sharply, but there was nothing in his expression to tell me anything. I wondered exactly when he and Radu had met, and under what circumstances. It was possible, I decided, that Louis-Cesare might know more about Uncle’s stint behind bars than I did. But I knew better than to ask.
Most of the older vamps carry a lot of baggage. Humans are amazingly adaptable, able to reinvent themselves when times change, but vamps have a harder time shrugging off the centuries. Some cope by keeping their function constant over the long haul: Mircea is the Senate’s chief diplomat, for example, and has been for some time. The world might change, but people’s basic natures don’t, so their lives have a sense of continuity. Others, like Radu, drift along in some kind of denial, trying to recapture a past in which they felt at home. And some, like Drac, never stop trying to make the world over in their image. I really didn’t care which category Louis-Cesare fit. His baggage was his problem; I had enough of my own.
“And then, when Drac escaped a little over a century ago, what do you think was the first thing he did?” I continued. “Went straight back on the hunt as if nothing had changed. We were able to catch him again by using Radu as bait.”
“No.” Louis-Cesare sounded adamant. “I will not allow my old master to be subjected to that level of risk—”
“Radu is perfectly safe, at least for the moment. He isn’t Drac’s chief target anymore. Don’t misunderstand—I’m certain he’ll get around to him in time—but his isn’t the first name on the list.”
Shrewd eyes that were, thankfully, back to blue, met mine. “And who does have that honor?”
I watched my smoke being pulled into odd patterns by the plane’s air-conditioning. “You’re looking at her.”
Chapter Five
The Electric Hedgehog is a punk cybercafe run by a couple of British guys Kristie knows in a backstreet near the Bay. It’s a funky little place where you can log online, get a body piercing and buy some weed under the table, all at the same time. One-stop shopping; I like that.
Believe it or not, I hadn’t come just for the weed. I also needed a safe place to meet the rest of the team and Kristie had suggested the Hedgehog’s back room. It was a testament to the very different attitudes and styles of its two owners. While the front was all black walls and neon graffiti, the back was hippie coffeehouse chic, with vintage shag carpeting and Che Guevara posters.
I passed the time sipping some really nasty chai, which was the most appetizing thing on the menu, and watching the colors cast by the iridescent bead curtain separating the rooms. Louis-Cesare preferred to pace back and forth like a big cat in a cage. We were the only ones in the back at the moment, which wasn’t surprising as the coffeehouse didn’t usually rev up until nightfall. Since it was currently seven a.m. ’Frisco time, there weren’t too many people interested in bad coffee and worse poetry. After tasting the former and reading samples of the latter that the proprietors had scribbled on the walls, I decided to be long gone by nightfall.
“This is the most irresponsible—”
“Would you calm down?” He didn’t seem to be the patient type. “They’ll be here. And quit pacing. You’re making me dizzy.”
“And that could not possibly be the result of the enormous amount of marijuana you have smoked in the past eight hours, or the half bottle of tequila you called breakfast.”
