His lips twisted hard, too fast for me to read the expression shuttered within. My own eyes were emotionless, my face carefully blank.
“They thanked Iveries for the gift. They all knew what he had done to secure my Lady Mother’s willing participation. But not one of them mentioned, or cared, or perhaps even knew, where Jacqueline was being held or if she would be freed.” Bruiser laced his hands on the table, his body language protective, controlled.
“Midway through, a vampire and woman came into the hidey-hole where my Lady Mother had left me. Before I could scream, the vampire clamped a hand over my mouth and set his teeth at my throat. It was Leo.” Bruiser studied his hands as if he’d never seen them.
“Leo was one of my mother’s lovers, her favorite. He was already powerful, old enough to be a clan master, though he was second in his clan, scion to his own uncle and blood-master, the Master of the City, Amaury Pellissier, in the next room.
“Leo and the woman with him had been working to bring an end to the vampire war, and had followed a werewolf, hoping to discover where Jacqueline was being kept. He discovered she was hidden in Saint Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. He couldn’t enter a place with so many religious icons, so he gave me a gun and sent me with the woman to find her.”
Bruiser released a faint sigh. “We found the little room in the bowels of the church. We fought and I killed the werewolves watching my sister. We brought her to safety, but it was too late. At some point in the parley between vampire factions, my mother must have given up hope of survival. She imbibed a large amount of medical colloidal silver—with brandy, to hide the flavor of the vampire toxin. Before they realized what she had done, she had poisoned most of the blood-masters in the city.” Bruiser smiled, a cold, hard flex of lips with no humor in it.
“When they realized what she had done, they strapped her down to the table where they had come to speak peace, and set her afire. Alive. And when she screamed out the name of Iveries as her cohort, though he was not, they strapped him down with her. The fire spread, and the resultant conflagration burned more than a city block of Storyville’s best houses. It was the beginning of the end of the district set aside for legalized prostitution,” he said wryly, “and the end of the vampire war of the nineteen hundreds.”
I had sat through his recital, awful as it was, but I had no idea why he was telling me all this. So I said, “Um. I’m sorry. That’s awful—”
Bruiser held up a hand, stopping me, and said, “My mother’s sacrifice put an end to the violence. The heirs took over, reinstituting the Vampire Council, which the previous clan masters had disbanded. Now that Leo was clan master, he sent Gee DiMercy away for having earlier attempted to give the mercy stroke to his daughter. And the werewolves who were complicit in the war and guilty of the rape of my sister were punished in accordance with were-law. The remaining wolves were exiled.” He smiled sadly. “They swore vengeance on me and mine for the death of Henri Molyneux.”
Henri was Roul’s grandfather. Okay. Now it was starting to make sense. That was the problem with vamps. They lived centuries, and everything that happened today had roots in things that happened decades, centuries, or even millennia before. “Your sister. Was she bitten?”
“By the werewolf who raped her? Yes, but she survived, unturned. I never learned how.”
I thought about Gee’s comment that he had kept me from getting the werewolf “taint.” Had Gee helped Bruiser’s sister avoid the taint? “And the woman who helped you free her?”
“Magnolia Sweets.”
Leo’s prime blood-servant of the time. “And Leo and you killed Henri?”
“A small cadre of wolves had bitten a number of women, hoping to turn them so they might have mates. The penalty for attempting to turn a human is death, as stated by were-law, but there was no one to perform that justice in the United States. We carried out the penalty prescribed by were-law on the offenders, four wolves,” he said. “Henri, as alpha, was guilty by default.”
Which meant that on the surface the new MOC had punished the weres guilty of biting humans. But the reality of that justice was wrapped up in vengeance for the attack on Jacqueline. Gotcha. Vamp politics were often bloody.
“There were some deaths from wolf attacks in and around the city before Leo exiled the weres, and all the women they attempted to turn died. My sister lived into her mid-eighties, and died with her sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren at her side.” Bruiser made a little tossing motion again, indicating an inconsequential addition. “A very few wolves remained, causing trouble, and refused to abandon their hunting territories until the next full moon, but they were handled.”
“So that’s why Leo is willing to open diplomatic discussions with the African weres and not the werewolves.”
“The most current reason. There are older ones.”
There always are. “And Gee?”
“Gee left. And Magnolia Sweets went with him. Her abandonment and betrayal was more than Leo could bear. He was truly inconsolable with her loss. He appointed me his first blood-servant, though I was only twelve at the time, untrained, and not suitable for Leo’s other needs.”
I interpreted “other needs” to be sexual in nature. “And now Gee and wolves both come home at a time when the vamps are in disarray following another war and coup attempt, and the appearance of were-kind on the world stage. The timing is significant.”
“Not a war,” he said. “Not a coup. A war goes on a long time, between recognized opponents. A coup d’état means a change of leadership, usually by violence, which didn’t happen. It was a ... corporate reorganization.” He seemed happy with the phrase, but most corporate reorganizations don’t leave a lot of heads lying around or blood splattered walls. “And with predators, timing is always significant.”