The vampire drew himself up. “Do you doubt my Master’s honor?”
“No,” Adam said. “But I won’t trust the self-control of vampires I don’t know when presented with prey that looks like this.” He waved a hand at Harris, who raised a good-looking eyebrow.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “This is really what I look like. I don’t have enough magic to keep up glamour.”
When things might get dangerous and I might need every ounce of power I’ve got, the goblin pilot didn’t say. Probably the vampires wouldn’t hear the unspoken message—and if they did, likely they’d understand the reasoning behind it.
Harris frowned suddenly at Adam. “And you have no room to talk.”
“Yes,” Elizaveta said venomously. “We are all beautiful here. Can we get going? Or do I need to get the makeup mirror out of my purse so you two can admire yourselves a little longer?” She looked at the vampire. “I hope there are sufficient bathrooms in the suite. I don’t like to share”—she glanced at Adam, laughter in her eyes—“bathrooms.”
Bonarata’s minion nodded, but he wasn’t really paying attention to Elizaveta, which was a mistake he might regret. It didn’t do to forget that she was a power who could make even the Gray Lords of the fae back down. Instead of paying attention to someone who could make him wish she was only killing him, he was staring at Harris’s copilot, who had been doing a pretty good job of being unnoticeable.
“That one is a werewolf,” he said abruptly, as if he’d just figured it out.
Harris frowned irritably. “I was told that this involved vampires. I have five people who can fly this bird from the US to Europe, excluding me. Four of them are humans, so I brought the werewolf. He doesn’t belong to Hauptman’s pack. I cleared it with Hauptman.” He turned his frown to Adam.
“I was told a pilot and copilot were acceptable,” said Adam coolly. “What race or species they belonged to was not specified.”
The vampire was doing its mind-out-of-body thing again. When he came back, the vampire’s body language changed entirely, and the beast who lived in Adam’s heart suddenly took notice. Adam didn’t know who was looking out of the head minion’s eyes, though he had a good guess. One thing Adam knew was that it certainly wasn’t the vampire he’d just been talking to.
“Are you Charles Cornick?” the vampire asked the man standing just behind Harris.
The werewolf’s jaw dropped. “Oh, hell no, sir,” he said in a shaky voice, his shoulder bumping into Harris’s.
He might as well have screamed “I’m a victim” to the biggest predator in Europe. Adam could see the urge to attack slide into the bodies of all the vampires in the area—including Marsilia and Stefan.
Adam pinched his nose and closed his eyes briefly as the weight of responsibility fell on his shoulders. He had to keep all of these people safe—and they were going to be doing their best to get themselves killed. Some of them because he had asked it of them. The only shining thread in this whole mess was that Mercy had managed to extract herself: Bonarata did not have Mercy.
Harris’s copilot continued to babble, the smell of his panic filling the air. “Have you ever seen Charles? He’s about twenty feet tall, and he’s Native American. Do I look Native American to you?”
“Leave him alone, Bonarata,” said Adam. “He’s not your food. He is . . .” Adam surveyed the trembling wolf without affection, but sighed. “He is under my protection.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t one of yours,” the vampire observed.
“He doesn’t belong to my pack,” Adam said. “But for the purposes of this trip, he put his neck on the line for me. That means he is mine to protect.”
Bonarata’s puppet turned to Adam. “My apologies,” Bonarata said through his puppet’s mouth. “But you pricked my temper, because I am most disappointed. I was sure you’d bring the boogeyman of the werewolves. I’ve been looking forward to meeting him.”
“I did ask,” said Adam coolly. “But the Marrok forbade it. Charles is very good at ending people . . . monsters, let’s say, and the Marrok apparently thinks that bringing him here, where there are so many monsters to be slain, would be a bad idea. Maybe he believes that. Maybe he believes this is my problem, not his—and he doesn’t want to risk losing Charles. Or maybe he is reluctant to deal with the headache of the power vacuum that your death at Charles’s hands would leave in Europe. It would be nearly as large a mess as the death of Jean Chastel, the Beast of Gévaudan, left.”
“Charles didn’t kill the Beast,” said Bonarata. The vampire’s voice wasn’t as certain as it would have been if he knew what he said was a fact.
Adam shrugged. “I wasn’t there when Chastel died.”
Charles had been, though, and rumor persisted in laying the old villain’s death at Charles’s feet—as if Charles’s reputation needed any help from killings he hadn’t performed. Whether it had been at Charles’s hand or not wasn’t the point. Adam was just reminding Bonarata that even powerful old monsters could die.
“Master,” said a soft voice. It belonged to the vampire who had been on the crew that had taken Mercy. “You asked me to remind you when you were close to harming one of your own.”
Bonarata, still possessing his minion, nodded. “Grazie, Ignatio. Hauptman, I look forward to meeting you and yours in person. My people will escort you to my home.” Then the vampire staggered, dropped to his knees, and shivered in a fit very like a grand mal seizure.
Ignatio—and Adam stored his name for future reference—waved, and a couple of the vampires picked up their fallen companion.
Ignatio bowed. “If you would be so kind as to follow me?”
As they moved toward the waiting vehicles just off the runway, Adam walked behind Ignatio and to his right. “Your scent was on my wife’s car seat along with her blood,” he murmured, though everyone in their group would hear him. Quiet, he had found, could be a lot more menacing than loud.
The wolf wanted to kill him, but Adam understood about being a soldier and taking orders. Still . . .
Adam said, “I will remember.”
“Pack remembers,” Honey added.
6
Mercy
So from now on, the timing between my part of the story and Adam’s gets tricky, and you’ll have to pay attention. This chapter begins late afternoon, the day after Adam and his people land in Milan. I’m asleep with my face plastered against the top of a metal table. Being sophisticated like this just comes naturally to me—what can I say?
I WOKE UP. MY CHEEK WAS HALF-GLUED TO THE TABLETOP from drying sweat and (probably) drool. But I didn’t pry it loose because there was a werewolf watching me, and I was still caught up in dreams that had me riding a troll over the Cable Bridge, jousting with the Golem of Prague while the drowned ghosts of a thousand werewolves climbed up the side of the bridge asking for jelly beans.
I needed a moment before I could deal with the real live werewolf. The troll I got, and the golem, of course, but I couldn’t figure out why the wolves wanted jelly beans.
“I know you are awake, Mercedes Hauptman,” growled a soft tenor voice with the seductively thick vowels that the Slavic languages are famous for. Czech was different from the Russian accents that I was more familiar with, throatier and deeper. Not so much less musical as bassier musical.
I sighed, sat up, and rolled my head, then my shoulders to ease my muscles. “Now I’ll never find out why it was jelly beans,” I said.
“Jelly beans?” he asked.
I drew a deep breath. “Just a dream,” I told him, and took a good look at Libor of Prague, the Alpha who had some sort of secret grudge against the Marrok.
He smelled of werewolf, of butter and yeast and wheat and eggs. And a little of the same fruit filling I’d eaten in the pastries he’d fed me earlier. The smell was sweet and rich: like jelly beans.