The Senate’s jet sat on the runway, looking pure and innocent under a brilliant blue sky. It gleamed a blinding white, like someone had recently washed it. A fuel truck was rumbling away as we watched, so it was all gassed up and ready to go. It gave me the creeps.
“Are you coming?” Louis-Cesare was impatient, and I couldn’t really blame him. I’d been standing behind an empty luggage van for almost twenty minutes, waiting for the refueling to finish, trying to tell myself that it was perfectly okay to go ahead. But the base of my spine wasn’t having it. The tingle that had initially made me stop and wait on the humans to exit the area had now become a full-fledged shudder. There was something wrong with the airplane.
I stared at it, ignoring the look on Louis-Cesare’s face. It said that he frankly couldn’t care less whether I liked it, and was about to go without me. Since wrestling him to the ground was the only way to keep him from doing so, and that hadn’t been working so well lately, I was resigned to dealing with whatever or whoever was waiting for us. But I didn’t have to like it.
Not that I thought Drac would kill us, even if he was waiting inside. He enjoyed cat-and-mouse games, and he’d only begun to play. He’d want me to pay for those long years he’d spent in captivity, something a quick death wouldn’t begin to cover in his estimation. In the old days, he’d had people impaled on blunt, well-oiled stakes, ensuring that it took them a couple of days to die, and that was when he wasn’t even all that annoyed. I was pretty sure he had something much more inventive planned for me. But then, that was the problem with maniacs: you could never be entirely certain what they’d do. Maybe he was in a hurry to get to Radu and would mow us down at the first opportunity. I didn’t think it likely, but I wasn’t willing to risk my life on it.
“We discussed this,” Louis-Cesare reminded me, more calmly than I would have expected. “We must contact Lord Mircea and inquire what he wishes to do.”
I didn’t give a damn what Mircea wanted. My hand stayed on Louis-Cesare’s arm, just above the elbow, where I’d instinctively gripped him when he started to leave. “I think there’s a problem with the plane.”
He tried to shrug off my hand, but I held on. “You are being ridiculous! That is the only secure line to the Senate available to us.”
Actually, it wasn’t. We could drive out to MAGIC, the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, and speak to Marlowe in person. Mircea probably wasn’t there, but I wasn’t nearly as concerned about keeping Daddy informed as Louis-Cesare seemed to be. Keeping my head firmly attached to my shoulders was more on my mind at the moment, and for that, I needed backup. Marlowe could provide it, and although he’d doubtless give me a hard time first, it was nothing to what I could expect from Drac. But Louis-Cesare didn’t want to leave the area where Dracula’s men had been sighted to drive all the way to the isolated canyon near Vegas where MAGIC was located.
“I’m telling you, getting anywhere near that plane is a bad idea. They knew we were meeting at the Hog. Kristie could have told them we were getting there by plane, and that thing is hard to miss.”
His lip curled back slightly from his teeth. It made him look more like the predator he was instead of Mr. January. “You’re afraid.”
I shrugged. “Call it what you want, but I didn’t last five hundred years by being stupid. You go in there and you aren’t coming out.”
“And this would bother you?”
“Not especially,” I admitted, “except that I could use help stealing a car.”
“For the last time, we are not driving to Las Vegas! It would take all day.”
“Not the way I drive.”
Louis-Cesare pulled away from me in an abrupt movement that almost left me lying on the concrete. I guess he was tired of arguing. He stepped out of the narrow strip of shade cast by the luggage van and flinched when the sunlight fell directly on him. “Stay here if you are concerned. This will not take long.”