Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(68)

“Do you remember the last time I replaced a body part?” Edmund went on. “You offered a much less fine drink.”

“We were on a battlefield,” Leo said, his voice regaining something akin to the mellifluous tones it usually carried. “Scotch doesn’t travel well, not in saddlebags in summer.”

“Rotgut,” Edmund said. “Swill.”

“’Twas all we had, mon amie,” Leo said, his laughter containing a faint wheeze of pain and grief over Grégoiré’s kidnapping. Leo looked at me. “Save him.” I nodded.

“Let’s flip you over, sire, so the priestesses can heal your back. Removing that blade was unwise, whoever did it. Blades should be removed from bodies—even Mithran bodies—in the presence of a skilled surgeon or a master with particularly potent blood. Even a master can bleed out if the placement was especially skilled.”

“What if the blade was silvered?” a voice asked from the corner of the room.

Edmund looked up at that. Sipped, while surveying the onlookers. Perhaps he was remembering his own brush with silvered death only a day or so past. “In that case, yank it out and bleed yourself inside the wound. Feed the Mithran. And pray.”

If anyone thought the order to pray was odd, no one said so. In fact, a tiny vamp at the edge of the bed dropped to her knees and started praying to a handful of beads. It wasn’t a prayer like I remembered from the Christian children’s home where I grew up, and it was full of stuff about Mary. I figured it was Catholic and I had been wrong about her praying to the beads themselves. Another person dropped and started praying too, also with beads, this one talking to Allah.

Vamps. Praying. This was crazy. Except that their sire and master was injured, and his death would set into motion perilous changes. If Leo fell, with his city in chaos, and the EVs arrived, all of Leo’s people were in danger of a second and true-death. I secured my weapon and escaped to the elevator and down, to find another madhouse where the NOPD bomb squad was defusing and removing bombs in the ballroom. The cops escorted me back into the elevator and instructed me to go up a level and out the front door.

Unfortunately, a crime scene investigation was taking place there. Two dead and drained gang members—kids—lay on the floor and the security system just happened to have gone out during this battle, so there was no internal surveillance of the fight or the deaths. The cops seemed to find that suspiciously convenient and wanted to talk to everyone present. Including me. And while Eli, who was sitting in a folding chair in the security room, had proof of our whereabouts on his thumb drive, taken from Adrianna’s prison, he didn’t volunteer that just yet. He wanted to upload the video first before turning over the drive to the cops, so we were stuck. Sitting. Waiting.

Alex, who had followed everything on video, called and talked to his brother about the fights he was reviewing on the security feed. Skinwalker hearing allowed me to hear it all. Alex had video of the ballroom brawl, or most of it, and he had the battle in Leo’s office. “Le Batard and four other vamps came in through the secret side-gate entrance,” he said.

Dread swarmed through me like hornets. I hadn’t secured the gate after I entered. Nor had Eli. We had been keeping our exit open, but in hindsight that had been stupid. Very stupid.

“Grégoire fought, but Le Batard threw some kind of spell at him and Grégoire fell. That was when the sword-fighting vamps rushed Leo, five to one, and cut him to pieces. When Leo fell, they took Grégoire and retreated.”

“Ask him if he can follow their vehicle,” I said.

“Working on it now, Jane,” Alex said.

“Have I told you recently that you do a great job?” I asked the Kid.

“Words are nice, but I’d rather have a car.”

Eli snorted and ended the call.

We sat in the security office near the front door, unmoving, silent. I was thinking through the last hours, tying the events from now into events from months and months past. Tried to make sense of it all. Le Batard wanted Grégoire. Everything else was a feint? No, that left out the revenants and the ship at the dock and the invisible ship in the lake and the attempt to free Adrianna, and the bombs in the ballroom. Vamps never had just one goal for anything they did, thinking far ahead on the chessboards of their games. They always had multiple goals. Le Batard would take what he could from each attack. Yeah. That.

Dawn was approaching when a minor vamp walked up to me and handed me a box. It was plain, white, no tape, no bow, so it wasn’t a present. “From your primo, Edmund Hartley. With his compliments. He said to tell you that disturbing the priestesses was not necessary. His exact words were, ‘Brawn and bullets beat magic.’”

I let a corner of my mouth curl up, wondering if he had shot Adrianna to get the bracelet off her. Not asking, but still curious. I opened the box and inside was a gold snake, the one from Adriana’s arm. And she had put up a fight getting it removed, if the blood on it was an indication. I sniffed the blood. The crazy woman’s, all right. I rubbed my fingers over the gold, which was slick and shiny and slightly warm to the touch.

“Legs?”

I looked up. “Oh. Hey, Wrassler. ’Sup.”

“I’ve been standing here for a good thirty seconds, talking to you.”

Eli was watching me with narrowed eyes. Not concerned, exactly, but piercingly interested.