He entered, keeping well away from Leo, and knelt at Katie’s desk. Using a small key, he unlocked a file cabinet cleverly tucked against the wall, in a shadow. Papers rustled, the silence charged with something volatile, explosive. Indigo disappeared. Smart girl. I wasn’t so wise, however. I stuck around to see what happened to the hornet’s nest I was currently kicking. A moment later Troll withdrew an expandable file and stood behind the desk, the folder in both hands, indecisive. Okay, scared to death. I could smell his fear.
I got up from the spot where Leo had placed me, which suddenly bothered me a lot more than it had, took the folder, and centered it on the desktop. I opened it. “Which ones?” I asked. Troll reached around me and tapped a tab about midway back. I couldn’t read the tab’s print; it might have been French. I withdrew the papers and opened them, scanning the first five sheets of legal mumbo jumbo, not understanding what I saw even though it was in English, but using the time to think. Leo was old. Real old. Maybe even feudal-times old. Back when honor meant something. I held the pages out to Leo. “What does she want?”
I thought I heard Troll smother a laugh, but it could have been a cough. If Leo was an honorable man, he’d read the pages and follow the directions in them. If not, then he wasn’t honorable. Of course, the fact that he wasn’t a man at all might complicate things.
Leo went still, that marble-statue stillness, not breathing, not blinking, not anything. It’s eerie and unsettling to watch, and it probably foreshadows danger of a very messy and bloody variety, but then, my understanding of sane vamps was still limited, and I had three stakes in my bun and a nice selection of crosses on my person. Leo went on not moving. The silence went from unsettling to unnatural, to eerie, creepy, and then scary. His pheromones were pure rage. Behind me, Troll’s breathing was unsteady; his heart beat too fast. The chemical composition of his sweat was bitter; Beast recognized the smell as death terrors. Finally, Leo pulled in a sharp breath. I nearly jumped. Beast flexed her claws. Troll stopped breathing altogether.
Leo slid across the room in a predatory slither, his eyes bled totally black with contained fury. He took the papers and read. Flipped pages. Read some more. He raised his eyes and looked from me to Tom and back again. “Katie has placed her holdings into Tom’s hands.” When he spoke, his words were precise, his voice neutral, so lacking in emotion it might have been an electronic, digitized voice—except for that vaguely European accent that would make starlets swoon.
“All of her accounts, properties, and assets are under his control, including this house and its employees. All business and employment checks are to be written and signed by him and cosigned by me. All have this legal proviso.” He switched his gaze to Tom. “You knew this?” Tom nodded, the motion of his head jerky. “And yet you chose not to inform me. Why is that?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“He needed you,” I said. “He needed your protection from the rogue for the girls, he needed your goodwill for Katie, and he needed your intercession with the vamp council. And he was grateful that you called the gathering and put her to earth.”
Tom swallowed noisily under Leo’s gaze. But the master of New Orleans slowly turned his eyes to me. “What do you know of gatherings and of one of us being put to earth?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t about to answer that one. He’d smell a lie. He wouldn’t believe the truth. Or he would believe it and think how handy it would be to have a skinwalker as a blood-slave. I wasn’t eager to fight him. Not now. If I had to go stake-to-fang with the blood-master of New Orleans, then I wanted my chain-mail collar, studded clothes, and plenty of prep time.
“So,” I said. “Back to the question that started all this. What are you doing making off with one of Katie’s girls? Is she a date, does she get paid for her services, or are you pulling the dark right of kings on her? Because in my opinion, that’s not gonna work for much longer.”
Suddenly, Leo seemed to find me amusing. He chuckled, handed Tom the legal papers, and took the seat I had vacated on the leather couch. He rested his arms across the back cushions, looking expansive, a lord in his domain. “And why should my rights change?”
“Simple. The courts in the United States are already looking at citizenship laws, slavery issues, and interpretation of legal statutes in light of a being with an expanded life span. Eventually, the ‘rights of a master’ ”—I made little quotation marks in the air with my fingers, just in case he missed the sarcasm in my voice—“will come under scrutiny. And they’ll be thrown out, as will the dark right of kings. No doubt about it.” Leo was looking at me, totally focused and unblinking, his mouth smiling, his eyes a deadly snake stare.
Snake poisons do not affect Beast, she reminded me, unconcerned.
“It seems smart for you to start adapting how you do business,” I continued, “altering things from the way you vamps did them a thousand years ago. Good-faith moves, to make any future court take notice that you’ve been changing with the times.”