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But he just shook his head. “This is more dangerous than you can handle, dhampir.”
“I can handle a lot.”
“And that goes for your people, as well.” He smiled at me gently. “Tell them to leave it to us.”
“Who is us?” I yelled—at no one. Because he was suddenly airborne again, his massive wings beating the night hard enough to knock me down. And by the time I got back to my—very shaky—feet, he was gone.
Leaving me with a dead vamp, a bunch of bruises and no answers.
Chapter Twenty-four
“Okay, very funny. Now let me in!”
Nothing. I might as well have been talking to the brick wall instead of the speaker set into it. And it did not make me happy.
It was raining, Verrell’s omelet was long gone, and I had a dead vampire in my trunk. And considering that the damned Senate were the ones who had wanted him so freaking bad, the least they could do was open the door. I pushed the button again, a long, sustained buzz that I really hoped gave somebody in there a headache, but the result was the same.
Great.
I got out, leaving my car blocking the entrance to the garage, and skirted the building. The East Coast Office of the North American Vampire Senate, Central Manhattan Branch, aka Central, was located in a mansion built around the turn of the century by some robber baron with more cash than taste. Improvements had been made in the years since, but most of them had involved privacy. Which was why, despite the glass inserts in the ornate mahogany doors, I saw only my own face staring back at me: pale, bruised skin, mascara that had run everywhere, and rain dripping off the end of my nose.
It was spotting my new leather jacket.
Goddamn it.
I should have left the jacket in my car, but I’d needed it for modesty’s sake, since Marlowe’s magical fabric hadn’t proven so magical after all. Of course, it might have been fine if it hadn’t started raining halfway through the long hike back to Slava’s. Which I’d chosen over explaining to a cabbie why I was wandering around Manhattan looking like a war victim.
So in addition to being bruised and bloody and barefoot, I was close to indecent by the time I slogged ten blocks in a downpour.
And found Slava’s all but deserted.
The guests had fled, Æsubrand had taken off immediately after I had, and Marlowe and his senior vamps had taken off after him. The younger ops had been left to pacify the human authorities, who were out in force by the time I returned, and to chisel out the ice cubes upstairs, who were being carted away for interrogation on the off chance that they knew anything. And to deal with me.
Only they hadn’t seemed to know how to deal with me. They hadn’t said anything as one of them brought my car around, and another gave me his phone—because mine was in my purse and my purse was God-knew-where—probably so the boss could call and cuss me out later. And then a third handed me a couple of trash bags, because Marlowe wanted a delivery.
Oh yes, he did.
I’d stared at the vamp and he’d had the grace to look embarrassed, because we both knew what this was. Okay, yes, some top-notch necromancers, like the kind the Senate had on call, could occasionally extract information from a recently dead vamp brain. But “recent” did not equal the hour and a half Slava had been out of commission by the time I dragged him back. The necromancers who had prowled the battlefields in the bad old days, searching for important corpses to brain-loot, had known they had only minutes at best. And those corpses hadn’t been frozen, broken into chunks and half vaporized.
So, yeah, I was going with the revenge theory. But I’d taken the damned bags anyway, because I doubted I’d get paid for tonight—and I was so getting paid for tonight—if I didn’t. And because it was SOP to clean up your own mess, especially when it involved a bunch of vamp parts littering a popular tourist area. And now all I wanted was to drop them off and have this nightmare of an evening finally be over.
Only I couldn’t if nobody ever let me in.
I pulled out my phone and stabbed in Marlowe’s number, even though it was already programmed, just for the satisfaction. But I may as well have saved myself the trouble. I wiped the rain off the phone’s little face and the mystery was solved: no bars.
I shook it, even though that never helps.
It didn’t this time, either.
“You’re going to make me do it, aren’t you?” I demanded.
Apparently, it was.
I gave in and performed the traditional dance to the cell phone gods, holding it up, turning it around, doing the hokey pokey and restraining a strong impulse to smash it against the wall. And nada. Unless you want to count a sad little blip, which I assumed was the electronic version of the finger.
I shoved the useless thing back into my pocket and looked up at the discreet camera hidden inside some elaborate stonework, knowing that someone was getting a belly laugh at my expense. I didn’t bother to scowl back. The problem with being five feet two, dimpled and female is that no matter what your reputation, most people are going to underestimate you.
Even people who ought to know better.
