He shrugged, his frame moving under my hands as I wrapped his chest. The mellow blue, lavender, and pink energies swirled over my skin. In Beast-vision, I saw them crawl over my hands and up my arms. Beast pressed her paw onto me and her retractile claws punched deeply, pulling me out of his glamour. I growled and pinched him, hard. “Stop that.”
He flinched away with that mesmeric laughter burbling in his voice. “Forgive me, senorita.” He covered my hands with his. “I cannot help myself in the presence of such beauty.”
“Cut the crap, Zorro, or I’ll leave you here to bleed.” The energies receded. His glamour might have worked if not for Beast and for the fact that I knew I wasn’t a beauty. Interesting, maybe. Not beautiful. And then I realized that my jacket was unzipped. He’d unzipped my jacket ... I held out one zippered side and said, “You unzipped my riding leathers. Just how much were you unable to help yourself in the presence of my beauty?”
“I would never take advantage, senorita. Well, not much. I peeked, I admit,” he said, his tone roguish and teasing.
I wanted to belt him one, but it seemed ungracious to punish a guy after he’d saved my life. Just for looking. Nothing was unbuttoned or unsnapped or missing. I touched my gold nugget necklace, finding it hanging around my neck just like it was supposed to be. But painful abrasions marred my nape, in the shape of wolf fangs, where Fire Truck had tried to rip out my throat and gotten the silver necklace instead.
“You are lovely all over,” Gee whispered. He lifted a hand and smoothed a strand of hair back from my face. “We could have such delightful times together.”
“Not gonna happen. What are you? You aren’t anything I’ve ever smelled before.”
He breathed out his disappointment. The energies of the spell he wove withdrew as he stood, picking his shirt off the ground and using it to button away all that luscious skin. The glamour faded further when he had himself covered. “Nor I you, though you smell of times long gone and beings long dead.”
“You’re Leo’s persona non grata, yes?” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Fine. Why were you in the ceiling, watching, and why did you help me when things got hairy? And for that matter why did you wait so freaking long to help me?”
“I was watching to see if Leo would really come to the place he was invited. To see if old loves and old enemies might have lost their hold over him. The enemies have not, it seems. I must wait to determine about the loves.”
It clicked into place. Leo had been invited here, alone, to meet Zorro—something he had left out of my orders and explanations and maps and addresses—and Zorro had also invited the weres. As if he was doing an intervention, or something. “Go on.”
“I am Girrard DiMercy,” he shrugged, “once Leo’s misericorde, the blood-servant who brought peace to the clans’ long-chained scions when they did not wake from devoveo.”
“Peace ...” I added that to the foreign word misericorde, a picture forming. The word was the name of a weapon, the mercy stroke or mercy blade, a long knife used in medieval times to deliver the death stroke to a knight who had received mortal wounds but would lie dying, in great pain, for a long time. But a mercy blade in conjunction with the devoveo was something new to me.
When first turned, vamps went into a state of prolonged insanity, forcing them to be restrained and imprisoned for years, sometimes decades, until they regained their sanity and self-awareness. It was a mental state from which some did not ever return. “You killed the long-chained,” I breathed.
He nodded once, the gesture formal as a bow. “When the decade of devoveo, or sometimes two, had passed for a Mithran scion to regain sanity, the Master of the City would summon me, sending me to the scion-lair of the master whose child would never recover. I would seduce the master to drink of my sweet blood. It has been said”—he splayed a hand over his chest—“to be as intoxicating as the finest wine. And they would sleep while I performed the onerous duty and put the scion out of his misery.”
Gee lifted his swords and began to reweapon. That was the first moment I noticed my own were missing. A hot flush of anger and fear shot through me, a painful jolt. And then I saw my weapons lined up neatly on the grass, the blades shining and clean, the shotgun and handguns beside them, even the stakes from my hair that I’d never had time to draw.
Stiffly, I stood and reclawed, putting the blades into their respective sheaths and loops, the stakes into my hair. Several were missing; I wasn’t surprised. Beside the weapons was a card. The light was too dim to read, but it felt like a business card, and I tucked it into a pocket. I pulled the Benelli’s harness over my jacket, pain lancing up and out from my partially healed elbow. As we both worked, Gee talked.
“Before the last vampire war in 1915, the Master of the City, Amaury Pellissier, who was Leo’s uncle in the human flesh, called me to bring peace to Leo’s daughter. The girl had not found herself; she had raved for over twenty years. But Leo met me at his scion-lair. He resisted the taste of my blood, resisted the seduction that would have made the loss of his child easier to bear, and he fought me.” A trace of surprise flowed beneath the words. “No one had ever fought me before. Begged, yes. Pleaded or raged, yes. But never fought.
“Leo refused the proper dueling tools of swords or pistols, and attacked me with his bare hands.” Gee shook his head in wonder. “He wounded me. Rather badly.” He cocked his head at me and I felt his magics questing out; I wondered briefly what he looked like beneath the spell that covered him. “Would you care to see my scars?” he asked as if he had read my mind.
“No.” I said dryly. I was beginning to sense Gee’s magic was all about sex, compulsion, and glamour—in opposition to the job he’d described, which was all about death.
“Pity. I was forced to leave for a time to heal.”