Leo had just offered me to Kemmy-boy as a bedmate. I glared at Leo, remembering his Dark Right of Kings, which he employed to sleep with any vamp or blood-servant he wanted. Not me. I wasn’t a blood-servant or blood-slave he could order around. I wasn’t his to use or to give away. And he wasn’t going to pimp me out. Not gonna happen.
“My Rogue Hunter is, indeed, not prey,” Leo said smoothly. “As to what she is, I think, and my shamans think, that she herself does not know.”
It might have been nice to know that one, I thought. And then I smelled blood. Strange and pungent. The odor filled my scent receptors, big-cat and human, intermixed and prickly. I looked at Kemnebi’s wrist. There were claw marks across the inside of his wrist. Big-cat claw marks, bleeding. And I had no idea how I had given them to him. I glanced at my hands. Human. Perfectly human.
Kemnebi lifted his wrist and sniffed it, his eyes widening further. The woman beside him was staring at me, her lips parted in shock, her nose wrinkled back like a cat. Scenting me. “I do not like the way this woman smells,” Kemmy said.
He is dangerous. He is my enemy, Beast spat at me. But I kept it inside, silent and contained. I didn’t answer his comment with the insulting rejoinder on the tip of my tongue, “You stink too, dude.” It would have been a childish insult, on top of drawing his blood.
On the periphery of my vision I caught movement, a slight shift of darkness, and glanced that way, to see Bruiser. He had deliberately moved to attract my attention in the room of immobile bloodsuckers. His hand made a “move along” gesture toward the woman last in line, like an usher in a movie house. I shoved down Beast’s volatile reactions to Kemmy and held out a hand to Safia. I said something inane before moving away and to the safety of wallflower status, my mind whirling, figuring things out.
Leo had wanted me in the reception line to see how Kemnebi would react to me. Bruiser had known and not warned me. Leo had planned to offer me as a sex toy to the were-cat. Knowing Leo, he might have just been curious how Kem would react, but if the were-cat had agreed, Leo would have expected me to follow through just on his say-so. Bruiser had known and not warned me. Leo was an ass with the worldview of a feudal lord of the fourteenth century and felt that people were his to do with and give away as he pleased. Bruiser was an ass of a different sort, and I intended to see that his nickname was a description of his skin tone. Soon.
I spent the next two hours avoiding the prime blood-servant, doing my job. I made sure there was plenty of food and drink for the humans. I ordered coffee brewed as a secondary choice to the alcohol being served. I assisted in finding chairs and bringing them in from the rooms off the hallway when the vamps wanted to sit and chat with one another. I kept two vamps from coming to blows over protocol, which I didn’t understand anyway, offering to knock heads together and stake them, in order of importance, and let them choose who died first. They behaved thereafter. I went back and forth to the security room, checking the monitors and getting firsthand views of anything untoward. All the while, I took security reports on the earpiece of the headset, which was making my job much easier.
I touched the mouthpiece and said, “The green security guy. Update.”
“Still contained in his room,” Angel’s Tit said, satisfied.
I made another circuit of the ballroom. When Sabina stepped in front of me—make that, appeared like a magician’s trick and I nearly fell over her—I kept in the girlie scream but it was a near miss. We hadn’t spoken in weeks, and now I was the target of her attention, twice, which didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling at all. She reached up and cut off my mike with one hand, her other a band around my nape, pulling me down to her. Her flesh was cold and hard as marble, and as always she smelled of old blood, like an ancient crime scene.
Her mouth at my ear, she said, “I have smelled such creatures before. When the Eldest Son of Darkness visited, a century ago, he failed to rise one night. Leo sent for me, and together we entered his lair. The premises stank of blood and violence, of injury and pain; his holy lifeblood, and the blood of another was splattered against the walls. Though it was inconceivable for a single being to defeat a Son in battle, even by day, the lair scented of two combatants only. His attacker was an African cat, perhaps a lion. Or a leopard. Leo told no one. Now, you have allowed such a beast into this domain. If there is death, let it rest upon you.”
She released my neck and I jerked away from her threat, or her curse, whichever it was. She was gone; the place where she had stood and held me was vacant, filled only with swirling air and the reek of old blood. Real old blood. The stench curdled in my nasal passages. I didn’t know when the priestess had last fed, but she needed another dose. Cold prickles raced across my skin, as much a reaction to her words as to her touch and her strength. I hadn’t gone for a weapon. Hadn’t even tried. Not normal. Not good.
I shook like a cat after a dunking in a winter-cold stream and blinked away my fear. I could deal with my reactions to the priestess later, since I had lived through the experience. I touched my neck, missing the silver collar the wolf Fire Truck had broken in the fight where I first met Gee. For a moment I thought I smelled the peculiar pine and floral scent of him. My pulse pounded beneath my fingertips and I sucked a deep draught of air. Turned left and right, searching. The scent was gone. Had never been there at all.