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Louis-Cesare shot me a pained look. “Vampire hearing!”
“Human adrenaline!” I shouted back, just as loud. “Where?”
He swallowed and faced the inevitable. “We have to report this.”
I nodded and shifted gears. For the first time in my life, I was actually relieved to be headed to vamp central.
CHAPTER 19
It was an hour later and Elyas was still dead. We were back at the mansion, and things were starting to get a little creepy. Not so much because of the dead body, but because of the ones that remained alive. So to speak.
Exhibit number one was in the hall outside the study. The vamp must have been young enough not to have much power of his own, because without his master’s to aid him, he was little more than an automaton. He had a broom in one hand and a dust pan in the other, and he’d been sweeping the same patch of already-gleaming floor over and over for the last ten minutes.
I had this crazy vision of him standing there, sweeping and sweeping, until he dried up entirely and began to crumble. Until he became dust himself. If his arms go last, he could sweep himself up….
“How long does it take to find a freaking bullet?” The crabby voice jolted me out of an exhausted haze.
Ray was exhibit number two in the creepy undead department. He, Christine and I were in the sitting room next to the study, waiting until the big shots decided we were needed. I’d taken the opportunity to dig the bullet out of Ray’s skull before the wound healed over. But so far, I wasn’t having much luck.
“I’m working on it,” I told him. I had him in my lap, catty-cornered on a towel. But if he strained, he could manage to glare up at me. He’d been straining a lot.
“Well, work faster. I’m getting a migraine here.”
“It’s not my fault. The knife blade’s too wide. I can’t get it far enough in.”
“Then use something else!”
“I don’t have anything else,” I said, yanking it out of his skull. Christine suddenly jumped up and fled the room. “What’s wrong with her?”
Ray gave an eye roll. “Who cares? I got an emergency here. You don’t find that damn thing, and I’m gonna have to go to a bokor. And I hate those things.”
He was referring to the legal sort of necromancer. They worked for the vamps instead of against them, smoothing out damage to vampire flesh the way a cook would knead bread dough. “What’s wrong with going to a bokor?”
“They’re nothing but hacks. And don’t believe those ads they run, either.”
“What ads?”
“You know, in the backs of all the papers.”
“Guess I must have missed them.”
“The ones that promise to make things bigger.”
“What things?”
“You know. Things. The one I tried charged me a fortune, and all he did was make it lumpy.”
“Oh.” I’d seen Mr. Lumpy; Ray should have sued.
Christine came back a minute later with a sewing basket over her arm and proffered a knitting needle. “Will this help?”
“Couldn’t hurt.” Our fingers brushed as she passed it over, and she jerked back like she’d been burned. “I’m not going to bite you,” I told her impatiently.
“I’m sorry.” Her eyelashes fluttered, and one hand went to her hair, nervously. She seemed horrified to learn that it was still down, and quickly pinned it back into a chignon. The hairstyle left the bones of her face bare, but they could take it. “I… I have never before met a dhampir.”
“Lucky you,” Ray muttered.
“How do you know what I am?” I demanded.
