Koun shrugged his massive shoulders. “If need be, I will take her. She has the signing of the paperwork and contracts?”
“Yes,” Bruiser said, and I instantly wanted to get a look at the paperwork a blood-servant wannabe-scion signed just in case they got injured on the job. Talk about your worker’s comp. “Sabina,” he said, “you will need to be with me in Leo’s lair.”
My ears perked up. I wanted to see Leo’s lair. But I also wanted to see what Koun did to heal Nettie. I wished I had a body for each soul, so I could be in two places at once. Deep inside, Beast snorted with amusement.
“Hildebert, according to Jane, it appears that the wolves bit some of the servants gathered in the formal room. We’ll need to deal with the more serious injuries first. Then, when everyone is stable, we’ll see if Bethany and Sabina are able to help them. Perhaps we can keep most of them from being infected by the were-contagion.”
Hildebert said something guttural, but cussing is a universal language. I got the point.
“I called Gee. He can heal them of the bites if he gets the message in time.”
Bruiser looked at me strangely and I got the feeling that he hadn’t known that. “Jane, you will be with Sabina and me. When Evangelina drops the spell, you deal with Leo’s opponent. Sabina will assist with Leo.”
“And you?” I asked.
“I’ll figure that out when Leo is stable.” Bruiser turned his attention to Evangelina. “Can you get us in place without setting off the stasis spells?”
“Jane can take you and the priestess in. I’ll get the guys in.”
Bruiser asked me, “Is there a stasis spell around the security console? I need to see the status monitor and make a few adjustments.”
“No,” I said, sounding grumpy. “Just follow in my trail. If I move left or right as if to avoid something, even if you can’t see anything, don’t deviate. The spell covers every bit of blood splatter, and there’s a lot of it.” Bruiser and Sabina close on my trail, I stepped across the threshold and led the way across the Anzu heraldic device to the security closet. “From here on back I don’t see any spells of any kind.”
Bruiser opened the door to the console and a moment later, he said, “Splendid. No one changed the passwords.” He clacked around on some keys and scanned a series of screens. “You were right, Jane. Tyler’s password is listed. He let them in.” Bruiser backed out of the narrow space, and indicated the hallway.
“We’ll take the stairs down and I’ll call you when we’re in place,” he said to Evangelina, who was still in the foyer, standing in front of Leo’s huge warriors.
I hadn’t known there were stairs down, but considering the artificial hill this place was built on, it made sense. I followed them, Sabina’s skirts swishing as she moved. I had noticed once before that her feet never made a sound, but her starched skirts did. It was weird, but all vamps were eerie. The old blood smell floated back from her as we walked, making my stomach turn on the greasy burgers and boudin balls.
There were bloody prints and smears all over the kitchen, most leading outside through a delivery door. The stairs were behind the kitchen, in a narrow nook between a walk-in refrigerator and a butcher shop-sized cutting board. The only indication that something was there besides wall was a small entry keypad. Bruiser pressed seven keys, placed his open hand on the wall, and pushed. The wall opened inward soundlessly, the stink of decomposing blood whooshing out, to reveal a dark hallway. When Bruiser stepped in, the overhead light came on, a motion detector at work, and revealed a steeply descending, switchback stairway, a metal handrail on one side and slick painted wall on the other.
Leo had made use of the interior space of the hillock under his house; the center of the mound had been hollowed out and reinforced. I spotted three security cameras and laser motion detectors. Not that they had done him any good, but it was hard to design a security plan for any eventuality. And I figured werewolf attack hadn’t been high on the designers’ minds.
We started down, Bruiser’s and my boots clomping echoes off the bright walls. Blood, smelling of wolves and Leo, had dripped all over the stairs, smeared with paw and boot prints, all dry.
The door to Leo’s lair was at the bottom, where Bruiser entered more numbers on another keypad. The door opened with a gust of air, a rotten blood and wet dog scent whooshing out along with a dull red light, to reveal the room. Leo’s home-base lair was a small apartment consisting of a sitting area and a king-sized, four-poster, pewter bed with a headboard of curlicues and fleur-de-lis. And a lot of blood. The sheets and pillowcases were drenched in it. The rugs below were sloppy wet with it. And Leo was in the middle of it all, half lying on the mattress, his position changed from the first time I’d seen him. His bare right foot rested on a rug, his left on the mattress, and he was leaning back against a mound of bloody pillows wearing black pants and a once-white shirt. His face and body were slack, his skin so white he looked like a mannequin, waxy with death. His eyes were closed. And his chest was still, breathless, with that vamp undead-death thing.
My silver-tipped stake was at his feet, bloody and well-used.
Hedge of thorns encircled the bed, casting a reddish light over everything, giving Leo the only color he had, making the blood appear even more vibrant and deadly. But unlike the spell that protected my boulder garden, this one hadn’t burned the rugs or walls and stopped short of the ceiling. And it seemed to provide an additional purpose than simply a last-ditch bolt-hole activated by the primary’s blood. This one was a trap. Caught in the hedge, held a foot off the floor, was Girrard DiMercy.
CHAPTER 23