I tensed and whirled, facing away from the stage, grabbing the ends of stakes in my hair, searching with eyes and nose and band-blasted ears. Katie of Katie’s Ladies was in the crowd behind me. Watching me. I stepped her way and stopped. Taking her in. Dropping my hands from the stakes. This was a totally different Katie from the mad, zombielike, flesh-eating monster.
Her fangs were snapped back into the roof of her mouth. Her blond hair was clean and brushed, falling like a thick, solid sheet of gold around her as she undulated to the beat. She was wearing a short, teal silk sheath, so tight there was no question that she was naked beneath it. And she was sane, not vamped out, not a nutso killing machine. Her eyes glittered, holding mine, her irises a grayish hazel as she swiveled up beside me, giving that caramel liqueur, sex-on-a-stick laugh. My Beast purred. She liked the sound, she always had, and she liked Katie, in a predator-fascination kinda way. The way a big-cat reacted to cobras, staring and entranced.
Katie’s skin was flawless, pale as alabaster, but with a faint blood blush on her cheeks, indicating that she had fed well and recently. She danced her way around the men from the bar, who had found me, whooped, whistling as she matched her moves to mine. I watched her, leery of this woman, this vamp-predator-woman, being here.
I caught a whiff of Gee. And I understood. Gee had, as he said, found and fed Katie, restoring her to sanity far faster than she would have without his blood. What the heck is that guy? I nodded to the bar and mouthed over the pulsing music, “Buy you a drink?”
She mouthed back, “I’d rather drink from you.” She did a full body slither, snakelike, ending up with her chest inches from me. Power sparkled off her, electric and cutting, scalding and icy. The three men hooted and hollered.
I had stopped dancing and I shook my head, no. “Bar.”
Katie pouted, her mouth making a little moue and, vamp-fast, moved off the dance floor. I followed Beast-fast, not caring that the men saw my speed.
At the bar, I took the stool Katie indicated, noticing the couple who stood and stepped away, looking confused, their drinks still in front of our confiscated seats. Stifling a sigh, I handed them their drinks and a ten for their trouble, said, “Thanks,” as if they had given up their seats voluntarily, and waved to Bascomb. The noise level was marginally lower here and when he came over I could hear his comment, “Missed you around here, Janie. Good to see you dancing. Miss Katie, a pleasure to see you here tonight. Your usual gin martini?”
The drink sounded perfectly hideous to Beast, but Katie cooed a yes. I asked for a Coke, something sugared and caffeinated. With a vamp—recently insane—near, I might need the kick.
We were silent until our drinks came, and Katie tasted hers, which was bluish green and smelled toxic, delivered in a stemmed glass with an onion on a toothpick in the liquid. She nodded to Bascomb, who moved away for another customer. I cut to the chase. “You drank from Gee DiMercy.”
“I did.” Katie looked at me from under her lashes, flirtatious. “You can smell him on me?” I nodded and she said, “With the taste of his blood on my tongue, I began to awaken, as if from a long sleep filled with dark dreams. And for a delicious, delirious moment I remembered.” She closed her eyes as an expression resembling ecstasy claimed her face. “I remembered the power. So very much power. Until Leo drank my power away, my magic was great enough that I might have taken the entire city, might have drunk from every throat I encountered.” She opened her eyes, and in them I could see her emotions as easily I might a human’s. She was grieving, in pain, and though she was sane, there was something frantic, something ecstatic and manic in her eyes that held me still and ready inside, prepared to ward off an attack.
Her fingers fluttered up her throat and down, across her chest and down to her décolletage, resting on the V of her low neckline. “I might have grown fat and content on the blood of this city, not starved as I am, as we always are.” I started to ask what she meant when her face hardened. “But Leo drank from me, drained me, and took it all away.”
I tried to understand what had happened, but my knowledge of vamp physiology and culture was based on killing the crazy ones, and my experience with the sane ones was still limited. Before I could put it into some kind of order, Katie said, “I wish to hire you to kill Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City. How much money will you require?”
I put my Coke on the counter, too surprised to hold the icy glass without spilling it. Cripes, she was serious. “Um, Katie, I work for the council, for Leo. He pays me.”
Katie said something in French and slammed her martini glass on the bar. The stem broke. Gin, bluish and harsh smelling, splashed over the counter. Her power spat over me like burning sleet, and out across the room. Even the humans flinched, as the air went suddenly arid and electric. The band stopped playing midsong and stood on the small stage, holding their instruments awkwardly. “I hired you. I!” she said in English, her words ringing into the silent room. “You belong to me.”
Belong to . . . My first instinct to quiet her vanished, and I spoke in a low rush of whispered words. “I don’t belong to anybody. You hired me to do a job, which I did. And then Leo extended my contract. I’m not a hired killer, Katie.”
“Of course you are. It is what you do, what you are. It is what all vampire hunters are, murderers of my kind.”
Deep inside, Beast growled, exposing killing teeth. She murmured, Jane is killer. Killer only. I ignored her. Beast and I’d had this conversation before. I disagreed with her opinion, but there are times for internal debates, and when faced with an unhappy vamp wasn’t one.