Midnight's Daughter(2)

I paused only long enough to grimace at my reflection, which looked almost as bad as I felt. I needed makeup to conceal the dark circles that were currently almost as black as my eye color, and washing my greasy brown hair for the first time in a week wouldn’t hurt, either. No chance of doing the femme fatale thing tonight, but that was okay by me. I get cranky without a full eight hours a night of beauty sleep, and since I’d had maybe that much in the past week, I was feeling surly. I picked up a length of lead pipe and added it to the collection under my coat. There were plenty of other ways to get information.

An hour later, I was sitting on a pile of corpses, frowning. The bar where I’d found two of Michael’s stable feasting on a half-dead teenager was now a wreck of shattered tables and broken glass. I shifted to avoid the pool of multicolored blood seeping from the bodies under me and stared into the darkness outside. Kyle, it seemed, had not been lying about everything. As one of the boys had helpfully explained after I introduced his head to the bar top a few dozen times, Michael did have Claire. And if Kyle hadn’t lied about that, there was the teeniest chance he hadn’t lied at all. But I’d still have to see it to believe it.

I tossed a handkerchief at the dazed boy leaning on the body of one of his recent attackers. He looked at it blankly. “For your neck,” I explained. Vampires didn’t have to bite to feed—in fact, it was against the rules, since it left hard-to-explain corpses behind if they got carried away. But no one had been paying much attention to the law lately. Usually, that was the way I liked it, but it did leave me with a dilemma now.

Normally the mages would be willing to help a witch in a jam, especially a powerful null like Claire. If for no other reason, she was a useful tool they didn’t want to lose to the magical black market. The Silver Circle, the so-called white-magic users, would doubtless have sent some of their thugs after Michael in more-normal times, but I doubted they could spare any at the moment. There was a war on, and they were allied with the Senate against an array of forces that were scary enough to make anyone blanch. Not to mention that they hated my guts. If I wanted Claire back, I was going to have to manage it myself.

“What—” The boy stopped, swallowed and tried again. “What were those… things?”

I got up, moved around the bar and reached for the top shelf. What the hell, I was going to torch the place anyway. “You want a drink?”

He tried to get to his feet, but was too weak and collapsed again. “No,” he said dully. “Just tell me.”

I threw back a double of Tanqueray and slid the rest of the bottle into one of the deep pockets in my black denim coat. I ignored his question and walked back around the bar. My sense of smell can usually tell a human from anything else from across a room, but the state of the bar was interfering. Dust and smoke hung in the air, and rivers of blood and bile, and whatever fluid several of the odder demon races used as fuel, ran underfoot. I was pretty sure I knew what I was dealing with, but wanted to be certain.

I kicked the head of a Varos demon out of the way and crouched in front of the boy, sniffing cautiously. A gout of blood—green, so not his—had splattered in the direct center of his chest. It stank to high heaven and explained my confusion. I took the unused handkerchief from him and wiped it off. Even after all he’d been through, he didn’t look afraid. Being five feet two and dimpled has long been one of my chief assets.

“You were here for a while, right?” I asked. It was a stupid question—he had six sets of bite marks on his skinny nude body, and none of them looked to be the same size. Vamps have to know one another pretty well to do group feedings, since it’s considered an intimate act, so he’d probably been lying around as the free bar snack for a few hours at least. But I wanted to start slow to give him a chance to gather whatever was left of his wits, since there was a chance he’d heard something useful. The two vamps I’d found had told me that there had been a third, who left a half hour or so before I arrived, and that he was one of Michael’s lower-level masters. That didn’t mean he knew any more than they did, but he could hardly know less.

“I don’t get it,” the boy told me shakily. “You killed them. You killed all of them. Why couldn’t I do that?”

“Because you aren’t dhampir.” The voice that answered for me was pitched low, from near the shattered door, but it carried. I knew that voice in a thousand moods and tones, from the chill whipcrack of anger to the warm caress of pride, although the latter had never been directed at me. I tensed but didn’t bother to look up. Wonderful. Just what I needed to make my day complete.

The boy was staring at the newcomer with relief. Sure, I thought sourly, I do the work, but you save the worshipful looks for the handsome devil with the charming smile. Just don’t forget that he could rip your throat out with a single gnash of those pearly white teeth. For all the charisma and expensive tailoring, he’s a predator.

One even more dangerous than me.

I busied myself pouring some of the expensive alcohol in my pocket over the clean portion of the handkerchief and pressed it ruthlessly to the worst of the boy’s wounds. He screamed, but neither of us paid any attention. We were used to it.

“He’ll need medical attention,” the voice said as the dark-haired vamp who owned it crossed the room carefully to avoid messing up his two-thousand-dollar suit and Ferragamo loafers. He smelled of good brandy, nicotine and fresh pine. I’ve never really gotten that last one, but it’s always there. Maybe it’s some terribly costly cologne, mixed at an Italian perfumer’s shop for his exclusive use, or possibly it’s just my imagination. A memory of home, maybe.