Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(107)

“Four. Yeah. Four of your sisters. Two I recognize. We’re friends. Of sorts.”

Nausea rose in me like a tsunami. My balance failed and I slipped to the side, retching, but nothing came up, and at least I didn’t taste blood. My pentagram magics were still working. When I could stand again, I gulped breaths.

I was reaching the end of what I could do in this form. It was half-shift or die. But I needed to finish what I had started. I walked back into the cage. Pulled the small vamp-killer. And placed the eight-inch blade at Adan’s waist. Moving Beast-fast, I stepped behind the witch-vamp. Grabbed him in a sleeper hold. Stood upright, carrying his weight up with me, putting my back into the move.

Adan gasped, a sound that was instantly strangled off. His taloned hands gripped my arm. Feet kicked my shins.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I said, “but I will.”

With the vamp not needing to breathe and not dependent on a heart-rate, the headlock wasn’t a deadly move, but it did hold him in place. He tucked his chin and saw the blade at his liver. Or whatever vampish organ was on the right side at the rib cage. His eyes darted around the room and down at the geode. His body slumped. He hadn’t bathed in a long time, and though vamps usually smelled like herbs and blood, he smelled of rot and bad breath and desperation.

“I have the arcenciel. Your buddies Louis and Le Batard are being disabled. We don’t have long to chat. If I ease off the pressure on your windpipe and let you talk, will you promise to be a good little boy and not try to get away? Because, you know, circling back to that whole ‘I don’t want to kill you, but I will’ thing.”

Adan nodded, the pressure of his jaw on my forearm jerky.

“Your conversational gambits are between two words. Yes and no. Anything else and I’ll cut you off. Literally. Understood?” I poked gently at his side with the point of the blade. I smelled the stink of vamp and silver instantly. Adan’s starvation had left him no immunity against the metal.

Adan nodded again.

I was getting good at this interrogating stuff. I eased off his neck and said, “Are you here and working with them of your own free will?”

“No.”

“Have you been working at optimum speed?”

“No.”

“Are you here because the vamps have someone you care about hostage?”

“Yes.”

“If I set you free, will they kill him or her?”

“Yes.”

“So you want to stay here and work?”

“Yes.”

I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I needed to get Adan to stop working on the storm magic, and to do that I had to save his whoever. “Is the hostage on the ship in the waters offshore?”

“No.”

“In Europe?”

“No.”

A frisson of excitement sluiced through me. “Here in New Orleans?”

“Yes.”

I realized the last word was nearly sobbed. “You just earned yourself some new words. How many hostages are we talking? Do you know where they are?”

“Two. Yes.” A pale pinkish tear trickled down his cheek.

What was it with people crying lately? “If I can save them, will you stop the magic?”

“Yes. If you will pledge on your honor to save them I will end the working now.”

Honor. That was a weighty word among vamps. It came with repercussions. The way he had phrased it meant that I couldn’t fail. If I failed, my own life would be forfeit. “Provided you give me accurate locations, and they’re on land, and not among a nest of hungry vamps, and not already dead when I get there.”

“And you will feed me.”

“I will take you, in shackles, to Leo Pellissier, and the Master of the City of New Orleans will provide food.”

“You bargain like a Mithran, but you are not.” Adan drew in a long slow breath, the air whistling against the pressure of my arm on his trachea. “Oh. Oh, yes,” he said.

I knew he hadn’t just been hanging in my arms. He had been drawing conclusions and sniffing with each breath.

“You are Jane Yellowrock. Leo’s Enforcer.”

“Got it in one.”

“I have not been fed. I will not have my usual control. Which was impeccable.”

“We’re not finished bargaining. I want to know everything about Ka Nvista. Everything you know. Every story she told, every single thing.”

Adan thrashed and I eased up more on the pressure. “She was my blood-servant,” he whispered. “Was my primo before I was stripped of my power and placed in this cage. I will tell you what you desire to hear.”

I wasn’t sure that he had agreed to tell me the truth, but I said, “Done,” before I thought it through.

“Done,” he agreed. “I lift my hands, say one phrase, and the storm will begin to diminish. It will begin to follow normal weather patterns and not the artificially created one of my making.”

“Go for it.” Adan didn’t respond and I figured he didn’t understand the modern cant. “Make it happen,” I revised.

Adan extended one taloned hand in front of us. “Et tempestate mortis.”

I waited, watching the magics on the cage, over the twins, across the ceiling to Sabina’s chair, still empty. It took what would have been a dozen breaths in real time, before I saw a flicker. An almost insubstantial alteration in the flow of magics happening outside of bubbled time.