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“You can’t be a vampire. You can’t be alive.”
“Why didn’t you behead me when I died?” He studied my face. “You didn’t want to upset my siblings. How touching.”
“If you’d been alive as a vampire all this time, you would have reached out to Rodina and Ru. You wouldn’t have let them mourn you like this.”
“If I had been my own master when I first rose, I would have contacted them, but Deimos found me and claimed me for his own.”
“I’m dreaming like I was dreaming in the car.”
He lowered his voice then. “Dream manipulation was one of the first vampire skills I acquired that weren’t standard.”
“If this is true and I’m not dreaming, then how did you become a vampire? I watched you bleed out, there were no vampire bites on you that I saw. You would have had to be bitten twice more before you died for a chance to rise from the grave.”
“The Mother of All Darkness bit us all with her original body and its ancient strain of vampirism. It’s very different from your modern watered-down strain.”
“The Mother of All Darkness lost her original body longer ago than you’ve been alive.”
“She put it into hiding like the Traveller has, and like the Lover of Death did, before you found it and destroyed it. As long as the body exists they can hop right back into it, which is what she did when she bit the three of us.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Perhaps I should use my vampire wiles on you and sink my new fangs into your tender flesh.”
“You haven’t been undead that long yet, Rodrigo, you don’t have the juice to use vampire wiles on me.”
“Trappolino says you fell easily to his vampire gaze. Your protection is much less now with your marks to Jean-Claude broken.”
“He’s almost as old as the Mother of All Darkness was, and you aren’t him either.”
“We shall see what I am, Anita, won’t we?” He turned and looked farther down the wall that I was chained to. I heard a door open, but I couldn’t see it. Apparently part of this wall was recessed and had a door in it. A man walked toward us. He was tall with thick black curly hair cut short and a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. The latter was a little too long to be fashionable, but the rest of him looked modern and well-groomed in a black suit, his charcoal-gray shirt buttoned up to a black-and-silver diagonally striped tie. His black dress shoes gleamed with polish.
“Anita Blake, meet Deimos, son of Ares, God of War, and the next king of all the vampires in the world.”
38
I’d had alot of vampires walk toward me over the years, and this one was supposed to turn into a real-life fire-breathing dragon, so it was something of a letdown that he looked so human. He was handsome in a very masculine way, but he was my first ever dragon vampire, come on. I expected a little pizzazz. He didn’t even have a good sexy menacing walk like Rodrigo. He was dressed like a male model, but he walked in like a bull about to destroy a china shop. His fists were at his sides, chest out, shoulders back, letting everyone know that he was the biggest, baddest thing in the room. Sometimes the men who do that can back it up, but short of stepping into a professional fight, that much posturing usually meant just the opposite. He swaggered into the room, but it felt more like he was whistling in the dark past the graveyard.
I glanced at Rodrigo as if he could give me a clue, as if we were friends, which we weren’t. He smiled at me, but it left his black eyes empty as a shark’s. Sociopaths aren’t great at picking up emotional social cues.
Deimos’s English was great, but his accent was thick enough that I had to concentrate to understand him, though I appreciated him speaking English so I didn’t have to learn ancient Greek or whatever his original language was. “Anita, it is good to finally see youface-to-face, though I do wish that you were wearing a dress instead of those mannish clothes.” Okay, maybe I wasn’t that happy about him speaking English. At least if he’d spoken his original language I wouldn’t have understood that he’d started our conversation off by insulting my clothing.
“If you wanted me to dress for a formal kidnapping you should have said so in the invitation. Unless otherwise specified, most kidnappings in America are casual only.”
He frowned. I hoped I hadn’t exceeded his modern English, because I was kind of proud of the level of snark.
There was a sound in the room that made me turn toward Rodrigo. He seemed to be choking or trying not to choke. I started to ask him if he was all right, automatically, then I remembered I didn’t like him, and then I realized that Rodrigo was trying not to laugh out loud.
“Are you making fun of me?” Deimos asked.
“You started it,” I said, and I realized I wasn’t afraid at all. I should have been, Rodrigo on his own was part of my nightmares, but it was like I just couldn’t find any fear. I felt empty and light, as if Jean-Claude’s marks being gone had taken more of me away than just him.
Rodrigo had turned away from us and moved a little farther into the shadowed room. He was breathing heavily, as if swallowing the laughter had cost him.
“You came to us dressed like a warrior; it is unbecoming in a woman,” Deimos said.
I looked back at the vampire in his stylish suit, then at Rodrigo, who was wearing a nearly identical outfit to me—black and tactical as if he were one of our security people. “I’m a U.S. Marshal with the Preternatural Branch; I was dressed for work when you had me kidnapped.”
“I will not want my wife to work in law enforcement,” he said.
