Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(104)

The vampire disappeared just seconds after I noticed his presence.

Shane didn’t yell for help. He opened the front door and gestured; I got out and walked up toward him.

“Take it slow,” he advised me. “Think of it as visiting the Founder’s office. He’s just about as ready to kill you if you put a foot wrong.”

I’d defied the hell out of Amelie already, I thought, but Shane didn’t necessarily need to know that. I walked up to the door and…stopped, because the house had a barrier. Most Morganville houses didn’t, unless they were really old or Founder Houses, but this one was different.

And it was strong.

“Come in,” Shane said, but that didn’t change anything. I was a vampire, and I wasn’t getting inside until the house resident altered the rules.

Enrique Ramos appeared in the hall behind my friend, and stared at me for a moment before he said, “Yeah, come on in.”

I passed a pile of black clothing, a mask, a leather jacket, and paused to look at them. There was also a motorcycle helmet. “Yours?”

“Sure,” he said, and threw me a cold smile. “Everybody saw me in them at the rally.”

“Then you’re not Captain Obvious,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Too obvious.”

And I was right; he was probably one of three or four decoys out there, playing the captain, leading the vampires around on goose chases. This was his house, and a good place to hold a neutral headquarters, since it had been in his family a long time; his mother had moved to a new place and left it to her son, and he’d made it a kind of secured, fortified meeting place.

The war council of Captain Obvious was in session at the dinner table in the kitchen, and as Enrique and Shane walked me in, I realized just how much trouble we were in. There were several of Morganville’s most prominent businessmen at the table, including the owner of the bank, but that wasn’t the issue.

There was a vampire sitting at the Captain Obvious table. Naomi. A blood sister to Amelie, she was a pretty, delicate-seeming vampire who looked all of twenty, if that; she had a gentle manner and sweet smile, and it concealed depths that I hadn’t understood for a long time. She wasn’t just ambitious; she was calculating, backstabbing, and determined to win.

“I thought you were dead,” I told her. I’d been informed she’d been killed by the draug, in the final battle; there’d been a whisper that it wasn’t the draug who’d done it, but Amelie, by proxy, getting rid of a credible rival for leader of Morganville.

Naomi lifted her shoulders in a very French sort of shrug. “I have been before,” she said in that lovely, silvery voice, and laughed a little. “As you know, Michael, I am hard to keep that way.” She sent me a smile that invited me to share the joke, but I didn’t smile back. For all her graces and kind manners, there was an ice-cold core to her that most didn’t ever see. “Sit and be welcome.”

“You’re not Captain Obvious,” I said, and stared at each of the human men at the table in turn. Then I turned to the woman seated across from her. “You are.”

Hannah Moses nodded. Her scarred face was still and quiet, her dark eyes watchful. “I knew you’d be impossible to fool about this. Sit down, Michael.”


I didn’t want to sit down at the Captain Obvious table. I was still angry, yeah, but I was also more than a little bit shocked, and betrayed. Hannah had been a friend. An ally. She’d protected all of us, at one time or another; she was a solid, real person, with a solid set of values.

That made it so, so much worse.

But anyway, I sat, because the alternative was to go full throttle, and I wasn’t quite there. Not yet. Shane kept standing, leaning against the wall, arms folded. He was watching Enrique, who was doing the same thing; bodyguards, I guessed, facing off in silence and ready for the other to make a move. There was muttering among the business leaders, and at least one of them got up to leave the room in protest.

“Sit down, Mr. Farmer,” I said without looking at him. “We’re going to have a conversation about your son and where he gets his funny ideas.”

Roy Farmer’s dad got an odd look on his face and sank back in his seat. “Is my son alive?”

“Yep,” Shane said, with false cheer. I wouldn’t have been quite so quick to reassure him. “Hope you don’t mind the fix-up on his car. Oh, and his arm.”

“You bloodsucking parasite son of a—”

I moved, then, slamming my palm on the table hard enough to leave a crack in the wood. “I didn’t kill him,” I said. “Shut up and take it as a gift.”

He did, looking white around the mouth. Then I looked at Hannah. “You put us in the crosshairs. You put Eve in the crosshairs,” I said to Hannah. “Why would you do that?”

“Why did you have to put her in the middle?” she asked me, in a frighteningly reasonable tone. “You know that the vampires won’t let her stay there for long; they’ll have her killed before they let humans gain power in this town through her status as a legal consort. You knew that when you married her. By putting pressure on her from the human side, we were hoping we could save her life and make her leave you. Get you to understand how dangerous this is for her, and for you. We don’t hate you, Michael. But you’re in the way.”