“Christie. Callan,” I said.
Callan roused enough to lift his head from Christie’s shoulder and I could see the tiny pinpricks on her throat that marked the constricted vamp bite marks. “You’re my new master’s Enforcer,” he stated, his accent Southern, maybe a mill-town accent from the piedmont of South Carolina. He climbed slowly from the bed, moving like a feral animal, all smooth muscle and grace. Callan stood in front of me and slung the hair back from his face, holding my gaze, letting me look my fill. He was pretty. Dang pretty. And he knew it. Like a lot of vamps, he’d been turned for his looks, no doubt about that. He had a boxer’s shoulders, a cyclist’s thighs, and a painter’s long, slender fingers, with an angel’s face on top. But something about him made me think he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier—maybe the fact that he was posing. He held the pose a moment longer and then dropped slowly to one knee, like an old-fashioned bow, but with a dancer’s sense of balance. He bent forward, curling his spine so his hands and his hair fell forward to the floor, exposing his back, which was a swimmer’s back, tapering to a tiny waist.
“Get up,” I said. Before he could rise, I asked, “How did your former master infect you with the disease?” I expected him to say that he had dated a sick human at Blood-Call.
Callan stood, his shoulders back, a sculptor’s model on display. I held in an exasperated sigh. “My former master fed me a woman. He feeds her to lots of us.”
“One woman?” I said, not sure I heard correctly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
My amusement vanished. A Typhoid Mary? A human with a disease that infects vamps? A prisoner, kept to be fed upon? Like a slave? I thought I had it all figured out, that sick humans were being passed around. I wasn’t sure how a single sick human connected. Not sure at all.
“Against her will?”
“She’s his prisoner. We all were.”
“Crap.” So what now? I’d have to kill de Allyon and rescue all the vamps and the blood-servants? I didn’t say it, but I could feel the need burrowing under my skin. Saving people, fighting for people, is what skinwalkers do, when we aren’t torturing them. “Is she here in Louisiana?”
“No. She is in Atlanta, in my mas—my former master’s lair.”
“So how did de Allyon infect all the vamps in Sedona, Seattle, and other places? Does he fly her around?”
“Lady, I got no idea how he did his thing. It ain’t like I was up high in the pecking order or nothing. But I will say that he never let that woman out of his compound. Like not never.”
I felt my hope deflate. “Is de Allyon in Louisiana?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where?”
“No. Somewhere north, and maybe west. In a little town on a river. I’m not good with directions.”
The comment was so unexpected I almost laughed. Was the guy really dumber than a box of rocks, or was he dissembling, somehow hiding his true mind even from whichever old master vamp had fed him to heal him? That would have made Callan the best spy in history. Nope. He was no spy; Callan smelled of truth. And Callan was intellectually challenged—pretty, but dumb. Nearly every place in the state was north and west of New Orleans. “How did de Allyon know about me? How did he know I was Leo’s Enforcer?”
Callan shrugged. “I don’t know. Somebody tells him things.”
“Yeah. I was afraid of that.” A few more questions convinced me that I had discovered everything that Callan knew. Which was sad in all sorts of ways. Leo had a mole, a dissenter, a spy in his camp. I wanted it to be someone who recently joined the ranks, but it had to be someone who was in Asheville with the parley there, which limited the number of people involved. I had to study the Kid’s deep background search info on the Vodka Boys and the Tequila Boys. I had to unearth the mole. Unfortunately, Callan would be no help at all.
*
It was nine a.m. when I got back to the freebie house. I’d stayed and eaten breakfast with Deon. My meal had consisted of eggs Benedict, Caribbean-style, with spices and peppers and some really melty, gooey, fabulous Hollandaise sauce. Totally delicious and totally sinful. Eli would have turned up his nose at the fats. I scraped my plate clean.
Back at my house, I found a postal box on the front porch, filled with the CS canisters. They were plain metal canisters, like spray paint cans, but with a lever system on top to lock them on, so they could spray until empty or be stopped at will by the wielder. “Cool,” I said, and packed them away.
Sitting on the couch, I booted up my laptop and opened the file containing the English translation of the Vampira Carta. I scrolled down to the part about the Blood Challenge between masters and checked the footnotes for other info. There were four codicils to the challenge and three histories, none of which were in English. It looked like Latin, probably from a millennia ago. “Crap,” I muttered.
“Anything I can help you with?” Eli asked.
Instantly, I remembered his predawn comment about how I looked in bed. I was pretty sure I blushed and didn’t raise my head for him to see. “Not unless you speak Latin from the tenth century.”
“Free dick dot come.”
I lifted my eyes. “I beg your pardon?”