Ten minutes later the door to Mallucé's inner sanctum burst open. The shaven-headed messenger stumbled out, his face ashen, his shirt covered with blood.
He was followed by two Unseelie Rhino-boys who jammed guns into our sides and marched us through the doorway and into the vampire's lair. Nausea flooded my stomach and I gripped my purse tightly with both hands so I wouldn't inadvertently touch either of our ugly escorts.
The chamber beyond the steel-belted door was so sumptuously decorated in velveteens, satins, gauzes, and brocades, and so busily furnished in Neo-Victorian that it was difficult at first to locate our host in the clutter. It didn't help that his attire matched his surroundings, the very height of Romantic Goth.
I spotted him at last. Motionless on a low-backed, richly embellished chaise scattered with gilt pillows and tasseled throws, Mallucé was wearing stiff, textured brown-and-black-striped trousers and fine-tooled Italian slippers. His eggshell linen shirt dripped lace at his wrists and throat, and blood at his jabot. He wore a brocade-and-velvet vest of amber, russet, crimson, and gold, and as I watched, he withdrew a snowy handkerchief from a pocket in the inner lining and gently dabbed blood from his chin, then licked a few remaining drops from his lips. Muscular and graceful as a cat, he was pale and smooth as a marble bust. Dead yellow eyes lent a feral cast to his sharply chiseled, too-white face. Long blond hair pulled back in an old-fashioned, amber-beaded queue emphasized his abnormally rigid pallor.
The vampire separated sinuously from the settee and rose, holding an incongruously modern laptop. With a graceful flick of his fingers, he snapped the chrome case shut, tossed it carelessly on a velvet-draped table, then glided to a halt in front of us.
As he stood there in all his undead stillness, face-to-face with the carnal maleness and disturbing vitality of Jericho Barrens, I was startled to realize that, although I was deep in the belly of a vampire's lair, surrounded by his worshipers and monster minions—if pressed to decide which of the men before me was more dangerous—it wouldn't have been Mallucé. Eyes narrowed, I looked back and forth between them. Something nagged at me, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It was a thing that I would stupidly fail to put my finger on until it was too late. Before long, I would understand that nothing had been what it seemed that night, and the reason Barrens had faced-off so coolly with the bloodsucking Master was because he'd gone in with the quiet assurance that, no matter what happened, he would walk out alive, and not because he had Mallucé by the proverbial fiscal balls.
"What did you do with my money?" the vampire inquired, his silken voice unmatched by the steel in his strange citron eyes.
Barrons laughed, teeth flashing white in his dark face. "Think of it as an insurance policy. I'll return it when we're through, Johnstone."
The vampire's lips drew back, revealing long, sharp, pointed fangs. There was still blood on them. An expression of utter, mindless rage flashed over his icy face. "The name's Mallucé, asshole," he hissed.
Score one for Barrons, I thought. J. J. Jr. still hated his name. Losing control of an immense fortune didn't seem to bother him nearly as much as merely being addressed by the name with which he'd been christened.
Barrons flicked a contemptuous gaze over the vampire, from frothy, bloody jabot to pointy-toed, silk-trimmed leather slippers. "Mallucé asshole," he repeated. "And here I thought your last name was 'fashion nightmare.' "
Mallucé's inhuman yellow eyes narrowed. "Do you have a death wish, human?" He'd recovered quickly, his face was blank again, his voice once more controlled, so light and melodic it was nearly a verbal caress.
Barrons laughed again. "Might. Doubt you'll be helping me with it, though. What do you know about the Sinsar Dubh, Jr.?"
Mallucé flinched, almost imperceptibly, but it was there. If I hadn't been watching him so closely, I wouldn't have caught it. Twice now he'd betrayed an emotion, a thing I was willing to bet he rarely did. With a glance at his guards, then to the door, he said, "Out. Except you." He pointed at Barrons.
Barrons wrapped an arm around my shoulder and I instantly shivered, just as I had last night when he'd touched me. The man packed a seriously weird physical punch.
"She stays with me," Barrons said.
Mallucé gave me a deprecating once-over. Slowly, very slowly, his lips curved. The smile didn't work with those chilling, dead, animal-eyes of his. "Someone certainly took that passe Rolling Stones song to heart, didn't they?" he murmured.
Everyone's a fashion critic. I knew which song he meant: "She's a Rainbow." Whenever I listened to it on my iPod, I would close my eyes and spin around, pretending I was in a sun-dappled clearing, with my arms spread wide and my head thrown back, while colors of every hue sprayed from my fingertips like brilliant little airbrush guns, painting trees, birds, bees, and flowers, even the sun in the sky, glorious shades. I loved that song. When I didn't answer him—Barrons and I might have reached an agreement about how he would and wouldn't refer to me, but I was still under orders to keep my mouth shut—Mallucé turned to his bodyguards, who hadn't moved an inch, and hissed, "I said out."
The two Unseelie looked at each other, then one spoke in a gravelly voice, "But O Great Undead One—"
"You've got to be kidding me, Jr.," Barrons muttered, shaking his head. "Couldn't you come up with something a little more original?"
"Now." When Mallucé bared his fangs at them, the Rhino-boy bodyguards left. But they didn't look at all happy about it.