Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(71)
Right now, it was being charged by the magical storm outside. I didn’t touch it. Not this time.
Alex knocked softly on the door. I grunted and he stepped inside. “Two hours ago, two humans were allowed ashore from a cruise ship that may or may not have had vampires as other passengers. Their reason for being allowed on U.S. soil was stated as being ‘to deal with government and public officials and appropriate paperwork.’”
I closed the box and put it back on the shelf. Slid my hand away from the hedge of thorns that protected it. Alex said, “Brandon and Brian were at the dock as Leo’s lawyer and interpreters when they heard that Grégoire had been taken. They left the docks midnegotiation. An international incident seems to be brewing between what might have been European blood-servants, representatives of the Master of the City, and the U.S. government. The mayor’s spokesperson is making a political commotion and squawking to the media about the MOC walking out of negotiations.”
“Did Leo call the Roberes off?”
“No. That was unilateral.”
“So, not Leo’s decision.”
“True. It’s still a problem.”
“But not an Enforcer job at this point in time.”
“No. But Grégoire and Brian and Brandon all are missing.”
I remembered the painting in Leo’s office, Katie in bed with a man, a woman peering in through the window as the last piece fell into place. I knew who all three players from that painting were. “Katie was having sex with the king, the emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus himself,” I muttered.
“What?”
I shook my head, as if to shake up the things rattling around inside it. “I’ll be right back.” I went through the side door, across the porch, and back into the rain as I dropped to the ground. By now I had been so wet for so long that I didn’t even notice it except for the cold. That was pretty miserable, and I shivered. I passed my boulders and stopped at the fountain. It was a huge marble tulip full of rainwater to the petaled rim, with a miniature naked woman sitting atop, the sculpture finely detailed. It no longer splashed, because I had turned off the water, but the statue was of Katie, naked, complete with fangs. She rose from the middle of the fountain bowl, a small, carved stone perfection, a masterwork.
This house had been Katie’s before she lent it to me and then gave it to me as payment for a service. I used her teapots to make tea. Sat on her furniture. I never liked her, but I had never worried that she was a threat. Bedbug crazy, yes. Dangerous, no. I turned from the fountain, raced up the shattered boulders in the former rock garden, and leaped for the brick fence, less than twelve feet from the top of the rock pile. I got a toehold on a small irregularity and shoved up. Now that I didn’t have to hide what I was, I vaulted over and landed on the far side, splashing down.
I trotted to Katie’s back door and banged.
Troll, Katie’s primo blood-servant, opened the door, almost as if he had been expecting me. He looked pale in the predawn light, as if he had been fed on too often and too deeply. He was wearing a T-shirt under a hoodie and thick jogging pants against the growing cold. He was huge, all muscle and toughness, and the winter clothes were tight on his torso, loose on his lower legs and arms, layered for the weather. “Little Janie,” he said.
“Troll. The Enforcer of the Master of the City of New Orleans and the greater Southeast USA needs to see the paintings of Katie.”
His face didn’t change but his scent did. A faint, barely-there alteration. It gained the taint of despair. I thought he might refuse me, but the title of Enforcer obligated him to back away. Only Katie herself could refuse me.
It was nearly dawn, in the middle of an unusual and epic storm. Katie’s Ladies was empty of clients, the girls in their rooms doing whatever working girls who catered to vamps did in their off hours. I walked through the house. Troll followed me, and together we stopped at each painting of Katie, studying them all, one by one.
The house was elegant if slightly overdone, decorated in hundreds of shades of gold from palest yellow to darkest golden brown. There were paintings and statues and objects d’art everywhere, a lot of them of Katie. I ended up where I had intended, in the parlor, gold silk fabrics and the bigger-than-life artwork of a nude Katie hanging on the wall. I had first seen the painting when two vamps were tortured in this room, in silver cages. One was Callan. The vamp from the ballroom.
That horrible night, I had kept my eyes on the portrait of Katie to keep from having to watch the cruelty. That made me a coward in my own eyes, but my cowardice was something to think about another time. Or maybe never.
Now I studied the oversized portrait in detail, deliberately.
Katie was naked as a jaybird, standing on a mussed tapestry of some kind, in a field, with a brook nearby and lots of trees. The painting was done in daylight, with shadows falling as they would have in sunshine, which meant it was painted before Katie was turned. In the distant background was a building. Not a castle, more like a fancy palace. Behind Katie was a pedestal, and on the pedestal were two crowns, one resting at an angle over the other. But the brushstrokes and the colors of the pedestal were different from the cracked and shiny patina of the rest of the portrait.
I reached out and touched them, comparing the textures of the paints. The pedestal and crowns had been added later. I felt Troll moving closer, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I said, “I don’t remember this painting when I upgraded the house’s security system, soon after I got to New Orleans.”