Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(26)

I pulled his head up and peeled the woven place mat off it. It left a checkerboard pattern on his cheek, which did nothing to hide the pallor and the under-eye bruising. I watched him for a moment, then went and got a dishrag and filled it with ice.

“Sit up,” I told him. I was rewarded by a slitted eye glaring at me from under a snarled mass of hair, but no horizontal movement.

“What are you doing?” Claire asked.

“He’s not sick.” I pulled him up again and slapped the compress over his eyes. He mewled with protest until the cold started to work. Then he groaned in appreciation and flopped his head back down.

“He’s hungover?” Claire asked, looking faintly appalled.

“Considering that he drained most of a bottle of your uncle’s home brew last night? I’d say it’s a safe bet.”

I squatted down beside his chair. “Hurts, doesn’t it?” I got a faint nod. “Are you going to stay out of my stash from now on?” A more vigorous nod. And then another groan. I decided he’d been punished enough.

“Have you seen my cell phone?” I asked Claire, staring at the empty recharger in my usual morning haze. I always envied the types who could roll out of bed and be bright-eyed and sharp within seconds. It took me a good hour, and that was with the help of large amounts of caffeine.

“No. Why?”

“Since it’ll be a few days before any backup can arrive from Faerie, I thought I’d call Mircea. Get some protection down here.”

Claire glanced up from the stove, brow furrowing. “What kind of protection?”

“The Senate’s running short-staffed these days, but they should be able to spare a few masters—”

“You mean vampires.” Her voice was flat.

“It’s the Senate. What else?”

Her expression tipped over into a full-fledged frown. “I thought about what you said last night, about what Aiden would bring in ransom. I think the fewer people who know he’s here, the better.”

“I’m a little more concerned about the people who already know he’s here,” I said sardonically. “The house wards should stop the riffraff.”

“They won’t have to if nobody knows he’s here in the first place.”

“I’ll tell Mircea to be discreet.”

“I’d prefer to let fey deal with fey.”

“Olga’s boys are resistant to most magic, including the fey variety,” I told her, while rifling through the bread box. “And God knows they’re strong enough. But there’re only two of them, and they aren’t exactly deep thinkers. And whatever else I can say aboutsubrand, he’s not stupid.”

“Neither am I. And I know better than to trust a vampire!” I couldn’t blame her for being wary. Claire had been kidnapped by Vlad on his recent rampage. She had every reason to mistrust the breed.

“They’re not all the same,” I admitted uncomfortably. Louis-Cesare, for example, seemed determined to mess with my head, constantly challenging my preconceptions about what a vampire was and how one behaved. It was only one of many ways the guy was a pain in the ass.

“You can say that when your job is killing them?” Claire demanded.

“My job is hunting revenants—” She looked confused. “Vampires who had something go wrong with the Change.”

“Wouldn’t they just”—she waved a spatula—“stay dead, then?”

“Most do. But once in a while one will survive physically, but mentally . . . Let’s just say he’s not all there. And a revenant will attack anything—human or vampire—that gets in his way. And since he’s insane, there’s no reasoning with him. He has to be put down.”

“And you’ve never killed any vampires other than these revenants?” she asked, skeptically.

“I take commissions occasionally to hunt down vamps who have violated Senate law in some way. But I don’t go around killing random vampires.” I wouldn’t have lasted long if I had, no matter who daddy was.

“I don’t see much difference,” Claire said, scowling.

I thought about Mircea’s expression if he knew he’d just been lumped together with Vleck and a bunch of slavering beasts with little more brains than an animal. “You probably shouldn’t mention that view around any vamps you meet,” I said drily.

“I’m not going to be meeting any.” It sounded final.

“You ought to reconsider,” I told her seriously. “It’s easy to distrust something that views you as food, but right now—”

“I don’t want those things near my son, okay? I’m sick of guards I can’t trust!”

“They’ll be master-level vampires on loan from the Senate. They’re not going to do any snacking.”

“I know they’re not, because they’re not going to be here.” She saw my expression and sighed. “Think about it, Dory. What could they have done last night, other than get carved to pieces?”

“I think you might be surprised.”

“Well, I don’t. I’ve seen what a fey warrior can do.”

“And I’ve seen a master vampire in action.”

She shot me an exasperated look. “Ifsubrand could get through the wards, he’d have done it, rather than resort to creating those things.”