I glanced over my shoulder, to see him looking around, as if wondering where to put his muddy coat. “Just leave it in the bathroom.” I nodded at the adjoining room. “And that’s not an answer.”
Marlowe went grumbling off, and I went back to trying to decide what might work as a substitute. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Because, sure, there was plenty to draw from, but Marlowe had the same issue I did, only not to the same degree. I could wear Mircea’s shirts as dresses because he was six feet tall in his socks.
Marlowe wasn’t.
“How bad are your trousers?” I asked, as Marlowe came out of the bathroom wearing nothing else. Because I guess his shirt had gotten muddy, too. I sized him up.
The coats and shirts would probably fit okay—he was built well enough under the scowl—but the pants weren’t just gonna draw up on their own. He was definitely too short. “You’re too short,” I told him, while he continued trying to clean them, this time with a washcloth.
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do about that?”
“I don’t know, but that’s not gonna work.” It really wasn’t. The mud had splattered everywhere when we hit down, and some of the flakes had already dried into little cement nodules. A good dry cleaner might be able to salvage the outfit, but not in time for Marlowe to return to his guests.
I went to the phone.
Burbles picked up, and he was happy to help. No, he was thrilled. He’d never had a request in his entire, long life that pleased him so much, oh my God.
“Great.” I put a hand over the phone, and looked at Marlowe. “What size are you?”
“What?”
“Stop trying to clean those things. They aren’t cleanable. Just tell me your size.”
“I don’t know my size.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know your size? You don’t buy pants?”
“Of course not. I have staff for that.”
“You have staff for buying pants?”
“Trousers.” He looked pained. “Pants are underwear.”
“Thought that was knickers.”
“Those are for women! And yes, my staff buys my clothes!”
I sighed again. I do that a lot around Marlowe. “Then take the damn pants—okay, trousers—off and tell me the size.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I’m not wearing anything underneath!”
I was about to respond to that the way it deserved, when Burbles offered a compromise. “Okay,” I told him, and looked back at Grumpy. “How tall are you?”
“Five eleven.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Fine. Five ten.”
“Is pride worth tripping over your feet all night?”
“All right! I’m five eight—and a half.”
“He’s five eight,” I told Burbles.
“And a half!”
“You’re not fifteen going on sixteen. Halves don’t count.”
“They’ll be too short!”
“Then give me the damned size!”
“Fine!”
Marlowe stomped back to the bathroom, and I stood there in muddy sweats, getting cold from the air-conditioning. “Hang on,” I told Burbles, and put the phone down on his effusions of joy.
Mircea’s wardrobe of the gods yielded a long dress shirt, which I thought might do. I stripped off the sweats and was looking around for something to wipe off with, because I’d somehow gotten mud down my back. But even I draw the line at using Armani for a towel.
“Hey, Marlowe, can you throw me—”
I stopped, because I’d just come back into the bedroom, and noticed that we had a visitor. Which would have been okay, because I was still in a bra and panties, and I wear less to the beach. And because most vamps don’t care about such things anyway.
You notice I said “most.”
“Throw you what?” Grumpy came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and his trousers in his hand. Which he didn’t toss to me because he was currently getting tossed himself, back through the bathroom door hard enough to crack tile.
For some reason, I felt a stupid grin break out over my face.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” I said, a little bashfully.
To no one, because the party had already moved to the next room.
I walked over to the phone. “Just take your best guess,” I told Burbles, and hung up.
I was still barefoot, and now there was shattered tile all over the rug, not to mention glass from a newly destroyed bathroom mirror. So I didn’t get too close. Just climbed onto the bed to peer through the doorway, at what was amounting to the butt kicking of the century.
Marlowe was trying to talk his way out of it, I guess in preference to getting into a dustup with another senator, only that wasn’t working so well.
And we kind of needed him alive for the war.
So I threw the comforter over the shattered tile, jumped down, and grabbed Louis-Cesare the next time he had his back to the door.
“Let me go!”
“Are you going to kill Kit?”
“Yes!”
“Well, see, that’s a problem.”
“You crazy son of a bitch!” That was a bloody, naked Marlowe, who was currently sprawled in the tub, but still talking. Which was great and all, but holding an enraged Louis-Cesare was not easy. Any second now— Yep, that’s what I’d thought.
He tore away from the door, with me jumping onto his back to preserve my feet, and proceeded to pummel Marlowe some more. Who got his feet up in time to send Louis-Cesare staggering back into the sink, which was less than fun for me since I hit the broken mirror. The remaining glass cascaded everywhere, along with several good-sized pieces that I normally would have used as knives against my opponent, except my opponent was my boyfriend— Ex-boyfriend.
No matter how hot he looked while beating up Marlowe.
Cut it out, I told myself, and find some way to stop this!
But taking somebody down the nonlethal way wasn’t really my thing, and I guess it wasn’t Marlowe’s, either, who opted for the better part of valor. He snatched down the shower curtain and flung it over us, buying himself a second to tear out of the bathroom. He went for the window and he wasn’t slow, but Louis-Cesare caught him and threw him at the bedroom door. And then lunged after him and down a hall.
Which is how we ended up crashing a very genteel party, filled with refined guests, trays of delicate hors d’oeuvres, discreet servants, and light musical accompaniment. And a bloody, naked master vampire, running for his life. And being chased by another, this one fully clothed, but being ridden by a bra-and-panties-wearing wild woman trying to slow him down.
It wasn’t working.
But Marlowe was fast, and didn’t seem to have any compunction about trampling his appalled-looking guests. So the pale half-moons ahead of us made it to the hall before we did, partly because a couple servants took one for the team and jumped Louis-Cesare. Who flung them off with a curse and dove after the boss.
“Would you l-listen?” I yelled, as Marlowe, the idiot, took a right at the foyer, instead of heading for the front door and the parking lot. He might have outrun us in a car, with the emphasis on “might,” but there was no chance now. So it was up to me.
“This isn’t w-what it l-looks like!” I yelled, as Louis-Cesare tore up a set of stairs I hadn’t noticed before, and burst through a door. “We were just t-trying to—”
I cut off, in favor of holding on and not taking any wooden shrapnel to the eye as he plowed through several more doors without bothering to open them first.
And then we were out, into something vaguely familiar— Oh, right.
Elyas’ ballroom.
The guy who owned the apartment above Mircea’s had been a senator, too, from the European court. I say “had” because he’d recently shuffled off this mortal coil in favor of—well, from what I’d heard of him, something considerably warmer. I didn’t know, since I’d never met the guy, the coil shuffling having happened before I arrived.
And it looked like history was repeating itself, only not for Marlowe.
Because my uncle Radu was seated on a chair, in the middle of the huge, now-mostly-empty ballroom, with a gun to his head and a stake at his heart.
Chapter Forty-one