Death's Rival

Corpse stared at me, ignoring Derek, his body posture doing the whole “I’ll never talk, no matter what you do to me” thing, all without him saying a word.

 

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Derek said softly. “I have all the intel on ol’ Ramondo’s made-man past on the streets of New York. So gut this piece of crap. We don’t need him.” Which was just the opposite of what Derek had said earlier. I took that to mean that we were back to playing good cop, bad cop, but with versatile roles.

 

“No. We’ll give him an opportunity to talk,” I said. “Who knows? His boss might want him alive and come to save him, which would give us the chance to take him. We need a place to hold you, Corpse.” I looked at Grégoire. “And we need him and any of the others who are still breathing—even it’s only when they chat over dinner—alive. Or undead. Whatever.” My voice wandered to a halt as the fury in my blood drained away. Exhaustion tugged at me, a heavy weight.

 

“I have silver cages,” Grégoire said. “Two of them.” He smiled, and it was an eerie expression on the boyish, beautiful face. Terrifying. It made me not want to know what had been done to him when he was newly sane after being turned.

 

“Bring everyone still alive and your cages to Katie’s,” I said softly. “We’ll talk with them there.” I knew what I was saying. What I was condoning. I shivered that I could consider the torture of anyone, even a vampire. I wasn’t sure what I was becoming, but was sure I didn’t like me much.

 

*

 

I entered Katie’s Ladies, one of the oldest still-operating whorehouses in New Orleans, through the front door. I was one of the last to arrive from Leo’s and was greeted by Troll, a tall, bald, burly blood-servant with a voice like a hill of gravel being massaged by a shovel. His real name was Tom, but I’d called him Troll the first time I met him and it had stuck. “Jane. You’re late to the party.” His eyes and tone said he didn’t approve of the festivities, or maybe just the guests, but because he was a blood-servant, his opinion wouldn’t have been sought.

 

“Yeah. I had to deal with cops and fire trucks before I could get away from Leo’s.”

 

He leaned to me and sniffed. Blood-servants’ sense of smell was better than that of humans, and his crinkled his nose. “You stink. How’s the clan home?”

 

I smiled at the insult, but it fell off my face fast. “Gone.”

 

Troll grunted and there was remorse in the tone. “I liked that old house. What about people?”

 

“We lost two of Leo’s vamps, both from Clan Bouvier, Louise D’Argent and Peter Schansky. I didn’t know either one, but from their injuries, they were ambushed, immobilized, drained, and then cut to pieces.” I looked away. It had been bad—a slaughter. Whoever had killed them had wanted to leave a message, and it had been up to me to take their heads so that they didn’t rise as a revenant at sunset. That didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was bad. “We also lost two humans—their blood-servants. I had to deal with informing their clan masters.”

 

“Sorry, Jane.” Troll patted my shoulder. It should have felt awkward, but it didn’t.

 

“Any word on Leo’s location?” I asked.

 

He shook his head. “They’re in the parlor. It isn’t pretty,” he warned.

 

“Yeah. Big surprise.” I squared my shoulders and went on through the house, Troll following me. A thick Oriental rug muffled our footsteps in the entry, and I automatically checked out the security upgrades I had recommended, the cameras, sensors, and monitors tied into Katie’s security console hidden behind the doors of a seven-foot-tall, black-lacquered chest with gold-leaf dragons capering across its doors. I might be heartsick, but I still had a job to do.

 

The house was stylish and elegant and only slightly overdone, recently decorated in hundreds of shades of gold from palest yellow to darkest golden brown, with paintings and statues and objets d’art everywhere, each of them probably worth more than I make in a year. The Christian children’s schoolgirl inside me was always torn between cringing and staring when I came inside. “Where are the girls?”

 

“Katie canceled the clients for the night,” Troll said, “and sent the girls to a hotel on St. Charles Avenue.”

 

I lifted a hand to indicate I heard and took the twisty hallways the back way to the parlor, the place where the girls met with the customers before taking them upstairs for kinky games, which might include the transfer of blood, depending on whether the john was human or vamp. I passed the open doorway of Katie’s office and was struck silent and still by the contents of the small room. All the stuff that usually lay on the leather surface of the massive, dark wood desk had been shoved to the floor, and two people lay on the cleared top—Bruiser and a black-skinned woman. Both were mostly naked, but it wasn’t sex, not in any way I could ever think about sex, even with the nudity. It was something else entirely.

 

Bruiser lay on his back, spread-eagle, his skin death-pale and marbled blue, the veins appearing like waterways on a map. He was wearing socks. That’s all. Socks. He wasn’t breathing. The black vamp half sitting, half-curled on top of his hips was wearing a wildly patterned, full-circle skirt in shades of indigo, with a matching turban-thingy on her head. No shirt. Perky boobs with dark aureoles brushed Bruiser’s unmoving chest. Bethany Salazar y Medina, one of the vamp priestesses, had slit her wrists and they lay over his mouth, her blood dripping into him. Her fangs were buried in his throat. She was deep in a healing.

 

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