I smiled some more.
And then stopped, because it appeared to be freaking her out.
She disappeared into the kitchen, after looking back at me once over her shoulder, and I opened the dining room door and slipped inside.
I tossed Ray the damned duck. “You’ve got to get out of here!”
“That’s what we’re trying to do! My boys need to feed—”
“So go!”
“Like that?” He gestured at the oily-haired, scruffy-jawed, smelly bunch who were currently congregated in the far corner of the room, staring at me. Because dhampir.
I sighed.
“They didn’t eat all day yesterday,” Ray told me. “And they’re not strong like me. They can’t go for days with no food, okay?”
And, sure enough, they had the twitchy, pasty-faced look of vamps in need of a meal.
Shit. Claire was going to love the idea of a bunch of hungry vampires around her kid. Not that they were anywhere close to losing control; they weren’t babies. But try telling her that.
Only I didn’t intend to tell her that.
I hadn’t talked to Claire yesterday because I’d planned to have them gone by now. They’d been out of it last night, trying to heal, and might as well have been the logs they’d resembled, all rolled up in their blankets, safe from the sun. Today, I’d planned to smuggle them out at first dark, only today had mostly been spent recovering.
And it wasn’t like I could just rent them a cheap hotel room. A random maid opening the drapes at the wrong time could cook them to a crisp. The only hotel safe enough was the Club, a super-expensive vamp-owned chain for traveling masters, which I couldn’t have afforded even if the local one hadn’t recently burned down.
“Look,” Ray began.
“Shhh!”
I poked my head out the door and then hopped into the hall to take a quick look upstairs. The coast was clear. But knowing this place, it wouldn’t stay that way.
I waved at Ray and mouthed, Come on!
They came on. Up the stairs on silent vamp feet and across to my room. Olga came out of hers in time to get flashed by the lineup, who reared back against the wall, clutching their towels and looking spooked. Guess they’d been too out of it yesterday to remember her.
She looked at them; they looked at her; she looked at me.
And then slowly took a step back inside her room and shut the door.
The vamps sprinted past, towels flying, and disappeared into mine.
I stayed behind with Ray to gather up armloads of their crap and run after them. It took three trips, but we got it all. Even the goddamned duck.
I closed my door and stayed pressed against it, looking at them. There were a lot. More than I recalled. Ten, twelve, fifteen.
What the hell?
“You can use my bathroom,” I said. “To get cleaned up. Then go out the window.”
I nodded at the big windows framing the bed, and when they turned to look at them, I pulled Ray back out the door.
“Fifteen?”
“I know, okay?”
“You’re too weak to support fifteen!”
“Not when I was with Cheung. I got a boost from him, remember? But I lost that along with my head, so—”
“So now you’re trying to support fifteen vamps on your own?” No wonder they needed to feed. Ray likely couldn’t give them any help at all.
“What else am I gonna do?” he demanded. “I’m responsible for them, like you’re responsible for me—”
“I am not your master!”
“See, this is why we have problems. You’ve never fully committed to this relationship.”
“Ray! I’m a dhampir.”
“You’re a senator. The boys are thrilled to be part of your family. Thrilled!”
I opened the door again.
They did not look thrilled.
“Bathe!” I told them, and they jumped, and then stampeded for the bathroom.
I closed the door again.
“They can’t stay here,” I said. “We’re going to have to work something out.”
“I had something worked out. Then somebody just hadda be a hero. Well, I hope you’re happy. Curly’s in the wind, his theatre’s trashed and, even if he does show up again—”
“Wait. What?”
“—he won’t want anything to do with the two of us—”
“Curly isn’t dead?”
“—Nobody is gonna want anything to do with the two of us if what happened to Curly gets around. We’re gonna be known as the people you need protecting from.”
“What happened to Curly?”
“You were there!”
I clapped a hand over his mouth and towed him to the stairs, and then up to my office. It was in what had been the attic, and was pretty well insulated, especially when I closed the trapdoor. And then turned around to see Ray peeling something nasty off his shoulder.
“What is going on? Why do you look like that?”
“Oh, Ray. I’m so glad you’re all right.” It was a falsetto and nothing like my voice. “I was so concerned—”
“I was concerned!”
He looked at me.
“I would have been concerned—”
“Sure, when you remembered I existed.”
“I remembered! It’s been a hard few days, all right?”
“Tell me about it. My old master rips me off, my new master denies me, and that’s after I almost end up buried alive!”
“What?”
He nodded vigorously. “The damned portal sucked in half the street.”
“Half the street?”
“Okay, maybe not half. But three other buildings collapsed when it pulled the ground out from under ’em. There’s supposed to be controls on a portal, you know? So it don’t go crazy? Only something must have happened, because Curly’s was set on full-bore ‘let’s swallow the world’ mode and almost did!”
I thought of the grenade Dorina had thrown at whatever control they’d had down there.
Yeah, that would do it.
Although where she’d even gotten the thing I couldn’t imagine. What kind of security guard carries grenades? Even for dark mage smugglers, that seemed a little extreme.
“—looking like a sinkhole had opened up underneath it,” Ray was saying. “With the damned roof sitting curbside! It probably woulda been gone altogether, but the Circle showed up and shut it down. They’re still pawing through the wreckage—”
He paused to look around for somewhere to stash the nasty thing from his shoulder, but didn’t find anything. “You got a trash can?”
I shoved an ashtray at him, and he coiled whatever it was into it. “The audience got out okay,” he added. “Being smart enough to run like hell. But those of us still inside when that wave hit—”
He shuddered.
And, suddenly, I did feel bad, because I had barely thought of him. Not that I didn’t have about a thousand other things to think about, but still. Ray could have died.
“I could have died!” he told me, flopping down into my desk chair. “I was trying to swim out when that portal sucked the floor out from under me. I got pulled two, maybe three stories down, and couldn’t see shit, ’cause there was water and mud and furniture and who knows what else being dragged down on top of me!”
I reached over and touched his arm. “That must have been terrifying.”
“Yeah, well.” He looked slightly mollified. “You know. Anyway, I finally found a staircase—completely full of mud—and just burrowed my way up. And stepped into freaking air again, and man, you shoulda seen it.”
“Seen what?” I sat down on the visitor’s chair I kept for clients, back when I had clients, and scooted it around the desk.
Ray looked pleased to have an audience.
“The main auditorium held together pretty well, I guess ’cause the floors underneath were getting chomped on, while it was just kinda sinking. Anyway, it looked like some big, dark underground cave, full of broken shit and puddles and waterfalls pouring down everywhere. It was crazy!”