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“Dory—”
“It’s okay.”
“But the room—”
“It’s fine.”
“And your clothes—”
“I’ll get them later.”
“Later?” She frowned, watching me climb into the bed that I never should have left, earthquake be damned. “What are you going to do now?”
“Go back to sleep,” I told her, dragging a pillow over my face.
And a moment later I heard her gently shut the door.
Chapter Five
Of course, I didn’t really get any sleep. That would have been a little hard with a largish hole in the wall letting in the sounds of bass thumping out of a car radio, a neighbor mowing his lawn and a bunch of lilting fey voices laughing to each other as they chased my underwear. And somebody screaming bloody murder.
The pillow stayed over my face for a few minutes, anyway, because I really didn’t want to know. But I finally faced reality. If I didn’t go down soon, someone would come up, and I preferred to deal with whatever this was properly dressed.
I chose black—tank top, jeans, boots. Because that was what the cataclysm had left me and because it seemed appropriate. And then I had a drink, or two, from the bottle stashed under my bed, because this was going to be no kind of fun.
That had been a given from the moment I saw a certain curly-haired vamp climbing out of the back of the limo. The others might be explained away as family on a visit, although that was hardly a regular occurrence. But Kit Marlowe was the dreaded spymaster for the North American Vampire Senate, and he didn’t pay social calls.
So I knew this was going to suck even before I found a smoking vampire in the hallway.
He wasn’t Marlowe, or one of the other illustrious types who, by the sound of things, were camped out in the kitchen. He was about a foot too short, for one thing, and completely lacking in sartorial splendor for another. And the overlarge nose and pointed face were a bit too ratlike.
And then there was the smoke, which wasn’t coming from a cigarette.
He caught sight of me heading down the stairs and immediately turned around and showed me his rear. “Is my ass on fire?”
“Good morning to you, too.”
“Screw that and look at my butt!”
“Do I have to?”
“Damn it, yes! I’m dying here!”
I checked out the part in question, because today was already shot to hell, and found it covered by a scorched pair of khakis. They looked a little weird, and I finally figured out why. The scorching was coming from the inside.
I grinned. It wasn’t the worst predicament I’d seen him in. The vampire’s name was Ray, and he’d been a slimy nightclub owner when I met him—and soon thereafter beheaded him—on the order of the Senate, who didn’t care if he watered the drinks but did care very much about the illegal weapons he was smuggling in from Faerie. That should have been all she wrote, but one of the items he’d recently brought in happened to be the talisman now decorating the chubby body of Claire’s young son.
It was why she was visiting. The talisman had been stolen from the royal house Claire was shortly to join, and she’d come chasing it—because it gave its wearer almost complete invincibility. And although we’d finally managed to get it back, for a while, Ray had been that owner. Only it looked like whatever residual help he’d gotten had wor
n off.
“Your butt’s on fire,” I agreed, and had an evil blue gaze aimed at me from over his shoulder.
“Well, don’t just stand there! Do something!”
I edged around him and went into the kitchen, where, sure enough, four master vampires were hanging out, trying to pretend they belonged. That was despite the fact that one of them was wearing Claire’s terry-cloth bathrobe, which was knee-length and roomy on her, but which hit him midthigh and showed a distractingly large wedge of chest. It didn’t matter, since only one of them had a hope in hell of blending in anyway, and Louis-Cesare wasn’t that guy.
Neither was the vamp he was glaring at for some reason. Kit Marlowe had the aforementioned curly brown hair, a pretentious little goatee and an attitude problem. He was currently leaning against the sink, arms crossed, face stuck in a snarl that showed a tiny bit of fang. That might have had something to do with the fact that he was visiting a dhampir, a creature he ranked slightly below rodentia. Or because the window he’d parked himself in front of was streaming sunlight onto the back of his head, slowly roasting his brains.
