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There was a slight pause. “He’ll be mad.”
“He’s already mad.”
“At me.”
I looked up to find Marco practically shaking in his boots. His face was pale and his eyes were almost bugging out of his head. He looked terrified.
At that moment, I didn’t like Mircea very much.
The phone rang.
Marco held it out to me and I took it. “What?”
“I thought you might wish to know that Raphael is in the infirmary.”
I stopped walking. “Why?”
“The doctors tell me that he is dying.” Mircea said something else, but I didn’t hear him. I’d already dropped the phone and the pizza and was running for the stairs.
I don’t remember how I got to the lobby and couldn’t tell you the name of the person who gave me directions. I skidded into a table on the way and almost fell but managed to clutch it with both hands and hang on. Cursing, I started to take off again and ran into a solid wall of vampire.
Alphonse, Tony’s onetime head henchman, set me back on my feet. As usual, his seven-foot-plus body was clad in a bespoke suit. This one was dark tan with a cranberry stripe, and he had a ruby the size of a quail’s egg for a tie tack. More rubies glinted from a couple of finger rings and from the wrist of his longtime girlfriend, Sal. He had the suits cut loose to conceal the half ton of weaponry he carried but didn’t need. Between him and Sal, they could have taken out a platoon.
Sal was all in red to match the rubies, from the skintight sheath designed to draw attention to her ample curves and away from her missing eye—lost long ago in a saloon brawl with another “hostess”—to her anger-darkened cheeks. “I wish someone had done this to him, so I could gut them,” she said by way of greeting.
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yeah.” Sal wiped an arm across her face, smearing her mascara. I stared; I’d never seen her look this rattled. She noticed and smiled grimly. “You kinda get attached to someone when you know him for a century and a half.”
“He’s not bad, for a pretty-boy painter,” Alphonse agreed. “You been in there?” He jerked a thumb at the set of ornate doors down the hall.
“No. I just found out—”
“So did we. Fucking idiots didn’t tell nobody he was here, and he was too weak to do it himself. We’re getting him transferred to a private room.”
“How . . . how is he? Mircea said something—”
“Bad,” he said flatly.
“If you want to see him, you better do it now,” Sal added bleakly.
I ran.
Casanova had said that they’d had to cancel the conventions, but I’d assumed it was because they needed the space. They did, but not only for rooms. The Murano glass chandeliers of the main ballroom, which usually looked down on fashion shows and business luncheons, now lit up row after row of cots. I could see them dimly through the glass insets in the main doors but not reach them. Because the ballroom had another new feature—a pair of armed guards.
They were vampires, but they weren’t part of Casanova’s security force. I knew all of them by now and they knew me, whereas neither of these guys made any attempt to move out of the way. “Human visitors are not allowed,” one of them said without bothering to look at me.
“I’ll take my chances,” I told him, but he didn’t budge. “My friend is in there.” Not a word, not even a glance. “He’s dying!”
Nothing.
“She’s with me,” Marco said, coming out of nowhere.
“No humans,” the guard repeated in the same abrupt way, but at least Marco got eye contact. “Senate’s orders.”
“There have been problems?” Marco asked sharply.
The vamp shrugged. “Indiscriminate feeding. Some of the injured were out of their heads. The nurses say they have it under control, but the Senate doesn’t want any incidents. That means no human visitors.”
