Dark Queen (Jane Yellowrock #12)

“Immobile? Hunched over, sniffing the air like somebody’s brought in Hot-N-Now Krispy Kremes? ’Bout three minutes.”

I explained the problem to Wrassler. “And if a law enforcement officer, say Rick LaFleur, dies here, on land that isn’t technically U.S. territory, but technically belongs to Leo, then Leo also has to act as judge and jury and I have to be executioner. And we’ll be right back where we were before Leo made peace—sorta—with the were coalition. We could have a war.”

“So you think the weres are here to sabotage the duel?”

“Maybe?” I pulled my cell and texted Alex: Werecats and werewolves in HQ. Check status. To Wrassler I asked, “Where are they now?”

Wrassler limped to the doorway on his prosthetic leg and called to the woman at the small room to the right of the entrance, a room that held a compact version of HQ’s communication and security control system. “Location of the weres?” he asked.

“On the elevator,” a woman’s voice said. “Hell. It’s going down. Should be going up to the library. No weapons on the scanner or pat-down. Dogs and cats in same elevator. Guided, guarded by Tequila Antifreeze.” She cursed foully. “Elevator cam shows Antifreeze is out cold.”

To access any of the floors, the elevator required a palm print, but the print could be made under duress. I met Wrassler’s eyes. “SOD,” we both said at the same time. Side by side, we whirled for the stairs.

“SOD’s guards?” I asked.

“Two. Human. You can move faster than I can,” Wrassler said. “Go! I’ll get a team to meet you there.”

I pulled on Beast-speed and raced down the steps, my feet barely touching every third or fourth tread, my hands shoving me off the landings and pulling me around tight corners. If they killed the Son of Darkness we could be in trouble. Besides, that was my job.

Slowing on sub-four, I let Beast into the front of my brain. She took over my footsteps and my body movements, making me silent. Stealthily, I moved to the bottom of the hidden stairs, in the shadows of sub-five. The lowest basement at vamp HQ had a claylike floor, poor lighting, and a distinct scent that combined stale walls, damp, mold, the herbal and funeral-flower-sweet stench of vamps, a hint of something tart, and the particular stink of the Son of Darkness. The elevator was to my right on the far end of the basement space and the SOD hung to my immediate left, shackled to the wall by silver. The bag of bones and goo was Leo’s ace in the hole to any act of war by the Europeans. They had tried to get him back several times, but taking him by magic or dragging the heartless—literally—and broken thing up five flights of stairs while fighting a pitched battle had proven impossible.

The SOD had gone by many names in his life; the most recent was Joses Santana, preceded by Joses son of Judas, and before that, Yosace Bar-Ioudas. He was one of two sons of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Jesus. Joses and his brother were the fathers of all fangheads. His blood was so strong that he had survived poisoning by a rainbow dragon, silver poisoning, and the removal of his heart. I was particularly proud of the heart removal as that had been my coup, but I should have broken my word and taken his head, because he was still a threat and a danger to us all.

I could hear people talking just ahead and below, and no more blood scent than usual. No battle. No danger. At the moment there was no threat of the SOD getting away and no humans or vamps to protect, so I eased up and pressed against the wall in the shadows to evaluate everything. Why were they here? What did they want? And why were they all together? I was downwind from the group. The stench of SOD and various were-creatures was overpowering, rushing up the stairs.

Two guards lay on the clay floor, bound and gagged, mad as heck, but not out cold. Over them was chained Joses Santana. The SOD had begun to heal, even without a heart, and looked human rather than like a sack of broken bones and slime. His legs and arms were in the right places, his joints aligned the correct way, and his eyes seemed to be focusing on the group in front of him, though his mouth hung open at an angle and his dry triangle of a tongue protruded to one side between oversized fangs. He was a little more hairy than once before, but that was likely just an oddity of his healing. Or of the werewolf who bit him from time to time. Life in vamp HQ was weird.

The mixed were-group stood in a small semicircle facing the vamp prisoner, but slightly to my left, in front of me. Asad, the African werelion, and his wife, Nantale, in human form, were in the forefront of the grouping. Were-creatures mostly corresponded with the body-weight-to-mass ratio, making Asad a huge man and his lion a midsized-to-smaller cat. He was black skinned, with coarse hair in shades of black streaked with lighter brown, and he wore white robes in the Arabian style. Asad looked human enough until you saw his eyes, a lion-gold with a predatory gleam. The man was a war chief for his human tribe, the Fulani, and his wife, Nantale, looked like a Nubian goddess, even without the cloth of gold and all the beaten gold jewelry she had worn when I saw her last. She was tall and muscular with broad shoulders and long legs.

The other werecat was my personal pain in the butt. Tall and thin, his muscles were well defined, his ebony skin stretched over a frame without an ounce of fat. Beautiful, he had the sculpted features of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus with full lips and tip-tilted eyes blacker than a moonless night. Like Asad, he was dressed in the flowing white outer robe of an Arabian prince, and beneath it, he wore black that vanished into the shadows, regal garb, which . . . I stopped. Dang it all. Kemmie was wearing an emblem sewn on his robes, a lizard eating his tail. I hadn’t seen that emblem in months, and hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but the tail-biting lizard looked like something that had been stitched into the clothing worn by the blood-servants of Jack Shoffru, one of Leo’s sworn enemies, now dead. Some of Shoffru’s people had survived, and the living and the dead had been wearing a similar emblem embroidered on their inner shirts. Had someone taken over Shoffru’s clan, suborned Kem, and come back for Leo? Was this happenstance or a declaration of war?

There were three werewolves, four if I counted my wolf. And I did. Brute stood in front of the SOD as if guarding him, fangs bared at the grouping, growling low, a sound that shivered up through the clay floor and the walls like the vibration of a generator. He had seriously huge teeth, and at over three hundred pounds, the white werewolf was big enough to take on Asad and maybe live to tell about it. He’d put on weight in the time I’d known him, but even bulked up he couldn’t defeat the whole crew. I could envision the werewolves bearbaiting Brute while the cats tore the SOD to pieces. Or stole him off the wall.

Unless Brute timewalked.

The wolves were in human form, and I spared a glance to take them in. Two white, one black, all of them young, hip, dangerous. There had once been half a dozen small packs in the Mountain States. Then a new guy had emerged, taken over, and united the packs from several states into the Bighorns, making a megapack. The social structures of were-creatures were nothing like human social structures, and werewolf packs were the most abnormal of the weird and strange, having no wolf females. Werewolves were temperamental, and without a strong pack leader, they fought. A lot.

On the floor behind the wolves was Tequila Antifreeze, putting a hand to his skull. Someone had knocked him down. He’d been injured the last time he followed orders. I didn’t want him—or anyone—hurt like that again. For now, they hadn’t killed Antifreeze.

Beast stared at the bad guys. Beast is best ambush hunter.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. I thought, trying to decide who to take out first.