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“Why didn’t I just pay them?” It was a falsetto, which would normally have been annoying, but he looked seriously pissed. The small ferret face was pinched and scowling. And the shock of dark hair was quivering with indignation. “Same reason we were living in a damned fleabag. Cheung, that son of a bitch!”
“Cheung?”
“Senator Cheung? My old master Cheung? Bastard ex-pirate who’s still a goddamned pirate Cheung?”
“Okay.”
“He wiped me out!”
“And by ‘wiped out,’ you mean . . .”
“Every damned cent! Every bank account I had was also in his name, so he could check up on me, you know?”
I nodded. Until recently, Ray had been a seedy nightclub owner under Cheung’s manicured thumb. But a series of unfortunate events had resulted in Ray losing first his head and then his master, when Cheung gifted him to me as a bad joke. Because Ray was obviously about to die and, as a dhampir, I couldn’t have vampire children anyway.
But Ray had the survival skills of a cockroach in nuclear winter, having had plenty of practice. The bastard son of a Dutch sailor from the bad old days when raping the locals was considered a friendly greeting, and an Indonesian woman who died young, Ray had considered it a good day if he managed to find something to eat—and he often didn’t. And then he became a vampire and stayed short and scrawny forever.
But also plucky, scrappy, and luckier than he thought he was, which was how he’d ended up in possession of Aiden’s magic rune for a short time. It had given him some protection; plus, while beheading is no joke even for a vamp, it isn’t usually enough to seal the deal. So, long story short, Ray got his noggin sewn back on, Aiden got his rune, and I ended up with a “child” I didn’t want and had no way of holding on to without a blood bond I couldn’t do.
Not that holding on to him was really the problem. Getting rid of him was more like it, because Ray didn’t seem to want to go. An
d now he was moving in?
“You’re not moving in,” I told him, while he slapped at one of his children’s smoking backsides.
The door opened and Olga looked in.
Ray gave a little shriek, but her bulk blocked out most of the light. And, anyway, he was a master, if a very weak one. He could handle a small exposure to daylight, especially indoors.
Unlike his boys.
“You okay?” she asked, as I threw a coat over a guy’s badly blistered thigh.
“Yeah. Could you bring the little pot of green salve from the kitchen?” I asked. “It’s in Claire’s medicine cabinet.”
Olga nodded, and started to leave. “And the vodka,” Ray called after her.
She stopped and looked at me.
“No vodka.”
“I need a drink! You don’t know what kind of day—”
“We don’t have vodka.”
“Whiskey?”
Olga inclined her head graciously and left. Damned troll hospitality. “You’re not drinking all the whiskey, and you’re not moving in,” I told him, grabbing another limp body.
“Why you gotta be like that?” Ray said. “I never even asked.”
“You just showed up with all your stuff!”
“Maybe I’m visiting.”
I sent him a look. “For how long?”
“You know. A couple weeks—”
