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“What do you need?” It slipped out before I could catch it.
Time froze for a long, breathless minute. Then Louis-Cesare’s eyes flooded silver, melting into white-hot heat. I was so startled by the transformation that it took me a moment to realize that he didn’t look aroused; he looked livid.
“There is only one service you provide to my kind,” he said in a savage undertone. “When I am ready for it, I will let you know.”
It was like a punch to the stomach, a clean blow that takes the wind right out of you. I honestly had no idea what to say. Then an arm slipped around my neck, saving me the trouble by almost crushing my windpipe.
I couldn’t believe anyone had actually managed to sneak up on me; then I heard Marlowe’s voice and understood. The damn vamp moved as quietly as smoke—it was one of many things that made him so deadly. “Have more care, Louis-Cesare. Remember what you’re dealing with.”
Louis-Cesare shot him a purely vicious look. “Release her! This is a family discussion.”
“Family?” Marlowe didn’t bother to hide his disgust. “You’re beginning to sound like—”
I elbowed Marlowe painfully in the groin, then skipped back out of reach. “I don’t know what your deal is,” I told Louis-Cesare furiously, resisting the urge to rub my abused throat, “but you take it up with Radu. This was as much his idea as mine, and he thinks it’ll work. You want to tell your master he’s a fool, you go right ahead. Let me know how that goes, if you survive.”
Louis-Cesare had clamped a hand around Marlowe’s bicep, restraining the enraged vamp, but his eyes were on me. “We are not finished.”
Perverse bastard—he’d been the one walking away a moment before. “Oh, I really think we are,” I said, and splashed toward the garage.
I was halfway hoping he’d follow me, maybe give me an excuse to run over him. But when I drove out in that year’s Jaguar—so new the leather smell hadn’t even worn off yet—he was still standing in the rain, talking with an angry-looking Marlowe. I stopped by Radu, who was giving his battered assistant a lecture on keeping proper distance.
“Your son is a maniac,” I informed him.
’Du sighed. “What now?”
“He was raving about not being welcome in the family.”
Radu winced. “Not that again!”
“It isn’t true?”
“Of course not! We had to keep him at a distance initially, of course, but that’s all over with now.”
“What’s all over with?”
“Oh, that whole time-change thing,” Radu said vaguely, as if I should already know whatever the hell he was talking about.
“What time-change thing?”
“Oh, you know. Before, when that Gypsy cursed him.”
“Louis-Cesare is cursed?”
“Well, not now,” Radu said, as if he thought I might be a little slow. “In the other time stream. The one Mircea altered.”
“Wait a minute. Mircea altered time?”
“Really, Dory, if you’d keep up with the family, you’d know these things.”
“Humor me.”
“Originally, Louis-Cesare was cursed, not made,” Radu said with exaggerated patience. “Some Gypsy became annoyed with him about something and… I don’t remember the details. Anyway, after the time change, I ended up being the one who made him a vampire. But we had to keep everything else as close to the way it had been as possible or risk altering the present. And that included me not being there for Louis-Cesare, because of course I hadn’t been before, since I didn’t even know him.” Radu looked at me petulantly. “I explained all this to him, you know.”
I blinked. “As coherently as you just did for me?”
“Naturally! Not that it seemed to make a difference.”
“’Du,” I said slowly, “there’s the teeniest chance that he doesn’t believe you.”
