Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(3)

“I’m tired, I’m hungry and I have a head in a bag,” I warned him. “Do not f*ck with me.”

He slapped me, hard enough to rock my head back, so I nailed his hand to the wall with a knife. He pulled it out, the slice through his palm healing instantly, and lunged. And ended up dangling off the floor like an errant puppy.

“Best behavior?” someone asked. I looked up to see the pleasant goateed face, curly dark hair and gleaming brown eyes of Senator Kit Marlowe. His agreeable expression didn’t stop him from squeezing the guy’s neck hard enough to make his eyes pop.

Since Marlowe hates me only marginally less than, say, bubonic plague, the smile made me nervous. I suspected that was why he did it, but it worked every time. I shrugged. “I didn’t stick it in his heart.”

“Perhaps you should have,” he said mildly, and opened his hand. The vamp hit the floor, jumped to his feet and went for me again in a blur of speed. So I grabbed him by the neck and punched his head through the pretty brocaded wallpaper.

“Bring her in, Mikhail,” someone called from off to the right.

Mikhail must have been the one with his head in the plaster, because nobody moved. I released him and he pulled out, pale eyes glittering with hate. I smiled. It’s always so much easier when the vamps I deal with despise me. It’s the ones who profess anything else that confuse the hell out of me. Mikhail and I understood each other; he’d kill me if he got the chance, and I’d make sure he never did. Easy.

“I’ll take her,” Marlowe said, while Mikhail stared at him.

“My lord. She attacked me!”

“If you are foolish enough to assault Lord Mircea’s daughter while he is on the premises, then you deserve what you get,” Marlowe told him shortly.

I raised an eyebrow. “While he’s on the premises?” I repeated.

That disturbing grin widened.

I followed him through the open doorway. We passed through a sitting room and into an office with more of the same, decor-wise: hand-carved moldings, a soaring ceiling and a mural of fat cherubs that gazed down on visitors with smug superiority.

There was also a desk. It was a massive old mahogany masterpiece with carved this and original that, but it didn’t draw the eye nearly as much as the man seated behind it. Unlike Vleck, Senator Mircea Basarab knew how to rock the tall, dark and handsome thing, and tonight he’d gone all out in full white-tie regalia. He gleamed, from the top of his burnished head to the toes of his perfectly shined shoes.

“All you need is a red-lined cape,” I told him sourly, dropping my duffel bag onto the desk. It squelched a little. He winced.

“Your word is really quite good enough, Dorina,” he informed me, as I fished out the remains. “I do not require a physical specimen unless I wish to question him.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” Vleck was dripping onto the nice marble floor, so I set him on the desk. But that didn’t work either. He rolled and Marlowe had to jump to rescue some papers before they were ruined. I glanced around, but there were no handy baskets. So I stuck him onto the dagger-shaped memo holder. There was still some dripping, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere.

I looked up to find two unhappy vamps looking at me. “Okay,” I said, “it’s all the same to me. I just want my check.”

Mircea took out a leather-covered checkbook and started writing, while Marlowe regarded Vleck thoughtfully. “I’ve always wondered, how do you get out?”

“What?”

“Of the club or the house or what have you.” He waved a hand. “As soon as a master-level vampire dies, every one of his children knows it. Even if they are old enough and powerful enough to have been emancipated, they feel it here”—he tapped his chest—“like a blow. Yet you regularly kill such vampires and escape the premises without your own head ending up on a pike. So I ask again, how do you get out?”

“I walk.”

He frowned. “I am serious. I would like to know.”

“I’m sure you would,” I said sarcastically, as Mircea tore off the check. Marlowe ran the Senate’s intelligence organization, and he’d probably vastly prefer to keep matters like Vleck in the hands of his own deadly little hit squad. But he couldn’t afford to risk them in wartime on nonessential missions.

The conflict between the Silver Circle of light mages and their dark counterpart had been going on for a while now, and just to confuse the hell out of everyone, the vamps had decided to ally with the light. But it stretched their manpower, and they seemed to have more trouble taking care of the Vlecks of this world than I did.

I intended to keep it that way. This was the best money I’d made in years.

“Every vampire in that nightclub knew the moment their master died, yet you simply walked out,” he said resentfully, refusing to let it go.

I put on my innocent face, which seems to annoy him about as much as those damn smiles do me. “Yeah. I guess I got lucky.”

“You do it every time!”

“Really lucky,” I amended, trying to take the check.

But Mircea held on to the other end.

“Have you by any chance seen Louis-Cesare recently?”

“Why?”

He sighed. “Why can you never answer a simple question?”

“Maybe because you never ask any. And what would the darling of the European Senate want with me?”