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Tami wasn’t most people.
On the surface, she was a delicate beauty with café au lait skin, bright hazel eyes, and, currently, a head of Cleopatra braids. She looked like she should be walking a runway somewhere instead of trying to corral the crazy I lived with. But she was fully capable of taking on the job, and of enforcing exactly what she said.
Because Tami was a null witch.
It was a relatively rare ability that allowed her to pull magic off of anybody who had it, meaning pretty much anyone within these walls. That would include my new witch bodyguards, courtesy of the covens, and the lone Circle mage, who we’d all agreed to tolerate because he was mostly okay and it kept Jonas off my back. Even the vampires, who didn’t do magic, were nonetheless magical creatures.
I didn’t know what would happen if Tami decided to try her talents on one of them, but I doubted he’d enjoy the experience.
The new vamp handed me a phone, which didn’t help, because Augustine had gotten his voice back and was using it to scream. That started some of the kids crying, because they had no idea what was going on, and they were somewhat sensitive at the moment. And that brought Rhea running from somewhere inside the sprawling suite, which took up an entire floor in one of the towers at Dante’s, the casino I currently called home.
I put a finger in my ear, and tried to hear what Mircea was saying, only he wasn’t saying anything. It was someone else’s voice, but I couldn’t tell whose. “—until four o’clock. I can pencil you . . . a call . . . if you’d like.”
“What?” I said.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, which was probably space for a silent sigh, because Mircea’s people would never utter such a thing out loud. They were far too polite. Well, except for the ones he’d sent me, probably because they were less diplomatic and therefore less useful in his former profession.
But Mircea was no longer the chief diplomat of the North American Vampire Senate. He was the Enforcer now, of the newly combined übersenate that had recently been made from select members of the world’s six vampire governments. They’d come together to fight the war and had appointed him their general, something that had entirely changed his view of his family members’ usefulness.
After all, we didn’t intend to negotiate with the gods.
“Tell him he can’t keep taking my guards,” I yelled, because the noise level in here had just gone up again, thanks to everybody pouring back in from the foyer. “I need the people I have. They’re trained how to handle this place—”
“—dinner, although there is a . . . tomorrow, after—”
“What? Hold on,” I yelled, and pushed my way through the crowd. I went back out to the foyer, but several vamps were still there, jumping around and trying to grab the floating packages, so I reversed course. Through the living room, across a large open space with a couple of half-moon couches, where some of the older girls had been having a lesson, judging by all the books and papers scattered about, and into the butler’s pantry next to the formal dining room, which was currently empty. Thank God!
“Are you there?” a polite voice asked.
It sounded like Mircea’s new personal assistant, who’d been brought on to help with all the extra work connected with the war, only they didn’t call him that. They called him some weird military name out of another time. “Are you Batman?” I asked, and forgot not to yell.
“Gerald, Lady,” I was informed, in a pained-sounding voice. “Please call me Gerald.”
“You know,” I told him, “if I had a job that allowed me to go by Batman, I don’t think I’d ever use any other name.”
The sigh actually got through that time.
“Do you wish me to pencil you in for tomorrow?” he asked. “Otherwise, I’m afraid the first available appointment is—”
“I don’t want an appointment. I just want to talk to Mircea.”
“I understand, but the master is—”
“Busy, yes, I know. Taking all my bodyguards for colonels or whatever in his new army. Look, he sent them to me because he said he didn’t need them. I get that times have changed, but you can’t expect Joe Vampire to handle things around here. We just had an incident with another new arrival that could have been bad—very bad—over nothing. Literally nothing! I can’t—”
Marco came in. He was still dragging the gun-happy vamp, but almost absently, like he’d forgotten that he had the guy’s throat in one catcher’s mitt–sized paw. “What. The. Hell?” he demanded.
“I’m trying to get through to Mircea now,” I told him.
“Not that.”
“Then what?”
Tami came in, her arms full of firepower, her face thunderous.
Well, shit.
“She wants our guns,” Marco said accusingly. “She said you authorized it.”
