“Mircea will kill you for this,” I said conversationally, as Cheung’s polished shoe tips stopped just outside the wards.
“Had he not interfered in my business, there would have been no need to inconvenience his brother.” The voice was a low, pleasant tenor without a trace of an accent. It didn’t match the looks, which were anything but bland: bronze skin, high cheekbones, dark, almond-shaped eyes and a hawklike nose with a proud tilt.
“Inconvenience? Is that what they call kidnapping these days?”
“You kidnapped my servant first,” he pointed out. “Return my property and I will return yours.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said, checking ’Du out.
His dressing gown was ripped along one seam, his hair—usually so sleek and shiny—was everywhere and he had somehow acquired a smear of mud on his nose. He looked pathetic and miserable. I smiled at him sympathetically.He smiled back.
“Ray’s the Senate’s property now,” I told Cheung. “If you want him back, you’ll have to petition them.”
“What?” Radu’s expression faded.
Cheung’s forehead acquired a slight wrinkle. “Perhaps you did not understand me.”
“I understood perfectly.” A drip of mud oozed down my temple, and I took a second to wipe it off.
“Then release my servant.”
“Or what?” I demanded. “I’m fair game. Ray’s fair game. But you can’t hurt ’Du, and you know it. It would break the truce, and even if it didn’t, Mircea would kill you. Slowly.”
“What are you talking about?” Radu demanded, his embroidered satin bed slippers slowly sinking into the lawn. “We’ve already been out here half the night! Give the man what he wants, Dory!”
“No can do,” I said while flipping through the key-chain for the front-door key I never used. “But don’t worry, ’Du. I’ll inform Mircea about this, next time I see him.”
“Next time you—” He broke off, staring at something over my shoulder. I turned to see Christine floundering around in the mud. Her delicate little slippers didn’t appear to have much traction, and every time she got up, she fell down again.
“Is that . . . Christine?” he asked, looking appalled.
She slowly got to her feet, hands spread out on either side of her, like a toddler learning to walk. “Lord Radu,” she said tremulously, before her foot slipped and she fell backward into a puddle. The resulting splash rained muck down on me and ’Du.
“Well, that explains it,” he muttered.
“You think I am bluffing,” Cheung said evenly.
I sighed. “You’re either bluffing, or you’re an idiot, and that’s not your reputation,” I said, finally locating the house key. “Hurt ’Du, and you’ll die for it. Let him go, and Mircea may let you off with some groveling. I don’t know.”
“I see I need to prove my sincerity.” Cheung didn’t move, but two of his boys ran up with sledgehammers—and started taking apart the Lamborghini.
Radu just stood there, mute in horror, as a beautiful piece of Italian engineering was quickly reduced to scrap. It didn’t take long. I opened the front door, hauled Ray’s mud-covered self inside and then went back for the duffel and Christine.
“This does not move you?” Cheung demanded, as one of his boys sent the steering wheel flying off into the night. Radu made a small whimpering sound.
“It’s ’Du’s car,” I told him, before shutting the door in his face.
The house might be repairing itself, but it wasn’t getting there in any hurry. There were still holes in the floor, the walls and the ceiling, giving a three-story atrium effect to the front hall. Moonlight cascaded down through the now much more open floor plan, flooding the old boards in a pale light that was strangely otherworldly.
It provided enough illumination to allow me to thread my way through the stacks of worm-eaten furniture in the vestibule. I didn’t topple a single piece over, even while dragging Ray. That was lucky, because something else otherworldly was in the hallway, flitting through the far end of the corridor, near the back door. I stopped dead.
Everything else looked normal. The house was dark, quiet, still. But that wasn’t surprising. Claire had to have given up on me a while ago and gone to bed. And while my roommates tended to be active at night, they weren’t exactly homebodies. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home to a mostly quiet house.
But not to one that smelled like a deep cave, dank and chill, with that curious sharp underbite that my brain had filed under “Oh, shit.”
Svarestri, although I couldn’t see them. Not that that meant a damn. I suddenly wondered if there was anyone left alive for Cheung to attack.
“Hey, can we—”